Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

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Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in the burgeoning field of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. Topics that are bibliographic, pedagogic, that concern the social field of poetry, and reflect on the history of poetry studies are valued as well. This series focuses both on individual poets and texts and on larger movements, poetic institutions, and questions about poetic authority, social identifications, and aesthetics. Language and the Renewal of Society in Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson: The American Cratylus By Carla Billitteri Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth By Jed Rasula The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism By Chris Green Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry: Berrigan, Antin, Silliman, and Hejinian By David W. Huntsperger Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer By Lara Vetter

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Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

H.D., Loy, and Toomer Lara Vetter

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Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse

MODERNIST WRITINGS AND RELIGIO -SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE

Copyright © Lara Vetter, 2010. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62122–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vetter, Lara Elizabeth, 1968– Modernist writings and religio-scientific discourse : H.D., Loy, and Toomer / Lara Vetter. p. cm. — (Modern and contemporary poetry and poetics) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–62122–0 (alk. paper) 1. American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature)—United States. 3. Human body in literature. 4. Spirituality in literature. 5. Science in literature. 6. Feminism in literature. 7. H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 1886–1961—Criticism and interpretation. 8. Loy, Mina—Criticism and interpretation. 9. Toomer, Jean, 1894–1967—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS228.M63V47 2010 810.9⬘112—dc22

2009032114

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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But here a wild-hyacinth stalk is snapped: the purple buds—half ripe— —H.D., “Pursuit” Here! coffin that slowly passes. I give you my sprig of lilac. —Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last at the Dooryard Bloom’d”

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In memory of Rebecca K. Vetter

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Acknowledgments

ix

Chapter 1 Introduction

1

Chapter 2 “[T]he electric incitement of Eros”: Electromagnetism, Sexuality, and Modernism

31

Chapter 3 Seeking “a sort of clairvoyant material plane”: Spirituality and the Moving Body

67

Chapter 4 Negotiating the Racialized Body: Theories of Spiritual Evolution and the “American Race”

111

Coda: Speculations

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Notes

163

Works Cited

187

Index

207

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Contents

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A

dalaide Morris has suggested that H.D. was motivated not by an “ethos of the market” but by “the spirit of the gift” (121), and I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to many individuals and institutions without whose gifts this book would not exist. First, I would like to thank Rachel Blau DuPlessis for her unwavering support of this project. For her incisive reading of the manuscript, her invaluable suggestions, and her enthusiasm, I am deeply appreciative. Also unflagging in his support has been Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, who carefully read the entire manuscript. I have benefited greatly from his extensive knowledge of the field. Over a decade of conversations about H.D. with Annette Debo have served as an indispensable resource. Truly an expert on the topic of H.D.’s religious views, Jane Augustine generously shared with me her unpublished research. Martha Nell Smith and Randy Malamud continue to be important mentors to me, as scholars and teachers of poetics and modernism. Several have read portions of this book at various stages, and I would like to acknowledge their feedback and encouragement: Elizabeth Arnold, Kimberly Banks, Virginia Blanton, Annette Debo, J. Michael Duvall, Laurie Ellinghausen, Jim Hansen, Rob Hurd, Katie King, Marilee Lindemann, Daniella Mallinick, Jennifer Phegley, Michael Pritchett, Jeffrey RydbergCox, Susan Schreibman, Martha Nell Smith, George H. Williams, and the many participants of a seminar at the Modernist Studies Association in 2006, including Dee Morris and Miranda Hickman, both of whom responded to my second chapter in ways that shaped its development. Jim Hansen has read most of the manuscript, and his comments have been extraordinarily insightful. As I was completing the book, Amanda Dykema was of immense help by being an adept, persistent, and patient research assistant. The editors and staff at Palgrave Macmillan—Brigitte Shull and Julia Cohen, and editorial assistants Lee Norton and Samantha Hasey—have made this process nearly effortless. 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Acknowledgments

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Acknowledgments

Grants from a number of institutions have been instrumental in the completion of this project, and I would like to acknowledge the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s Department of English, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Center for Humanities, Technologies, and Science for funding travel to archives and for a semester-long sabbatical. Funding from previous institutions, the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Maryland, also supported my research at earlier stages. The curators and staff at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University have been knowledgeable and helpful on my many visits, and I would also like to thank the librarians at the Library of Congress and the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston. The families and estates of H.D., Mina Loy, and Jean Toomer kindly granted me permission to quote from published and unpublished writings. Specifically, for permission to cite unpublished material—all of which is held by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in the Yale Collection of American Literature—I am exceedingly grateful to Roger L. Conover, for the Estate of Mina Loy; to Declan Spring of New Directions Press, for the H.D. Estate; and to Nancy Kuhl and the Yale Committee on Literary Property, for the Jean Toomer Estate. For permission to reprint published writing, acknowledgment is made to the following: for lines from “Aphorisms on Futurism” (Camera Work, 1914), “Gertrude Stein” (Transatlantic Review, 1924), Insel (© Black Sparrow Press, 1991), The Last Lunar Baedeker (© Jargon Society, 1982), and The Lost Lunar Baedeker (© Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), by permission of Roger L. Conover, for the Estate of Mina Loy; for lines from Analyzing Freud (© New Directions, 2002), Collected Poems, 1912–1944 (New Directions, 1983), Majic Ring (© The Schaffner Family Foundation, UP of Florida, 2009), Nights (© New Directions, 1986), Notes on Thought and Vision, and The Wise Sappho (© Peter Owen, 1988), “Responsibilities” (© Perdita Schaffner, 1988), Paint It Today (© New York UP, 1992), Palimpsest (Southern Illinois UP, 1968), The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton (© UP of Florida, 2007), Trilogy (© Norman Holmes Pearson, 1973), by permission of Declan Spring, for the H.D. Estate; and for lines from Cane (© Norton, 1988), The Complete Poems of Jean Toomer (© U of North Carolina P, 1988), A Jean Toomer Reader (© Oxford UP, 1993), The Letters of Jean Toomer 1919–1924 (© U of Tennessee P, 2006), Selected Essays and Literary Criticism (© U of Tennessee P, 1996), and The Wayward and the Seeking (© Howard UP, 1980) by permission of the Yale Committee on Literary Property, for the Jean Toomer Estate. A portion of the fourth chapter appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature (© Indiana University Press, 2007). 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Finally, this book would not have come to exist without the support of my family and friends. In particular, from a very early age, my mother Rebecca K. Vetter fostered in me a love of reading, and my father Fred Vetter taught me to think critically. My greatest debt of gratitude is reserved for Kirk Melnikoff, whose love and encouragement always inspire me.

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Acknowledgments

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“Hypnosis Wheel,” Cover, Psychical Research Review III.5 (Nov. 1917)

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Flame passes under us and sparks that unknot the flesh, sorrow, splitting bone from bone, splendour athwart our eyes and rifts in the splendour, sparks and scattered light. —H.D. “The Shrine”

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Introduction

. . . our minds are winged, though our feet are clay. —H.D.1

I

n 1924, naturalist J. Arthur Thomson eagerly announced that “the scientific picture of things as they are becomes more and more congruent with our conception of God, and may even enhance it. The modern scientific picture has given the material universe a new unity. . . . The world is one; fundamentally homogeneous; a universe, not a multiverse” (57). For Thomson and many others, the explosive theorizing of Albert Einstein and the discovery of radium by Marie Curie injected an air of mystery, ineffability, and abstraction into scientific ways of seeing the world, overturning the nineteenth-century mechanistic, deterministic “old” physics and inviting religious interpretations of science. Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse contends that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries see the emergence of a discursive nexus of religion and science—in both orthodox and heterodox writings by scientists, theologians, and lay figures, and in literary and extraliterary writing. Moreover, this religio-scientific discourse, I argue, is deployed by modernist writers in ways that attempt to negotiate what has recently been called a “modernist crisis of embodiment” (McCabe, “Delight” 430), an apt term to describe an era in which the human body was increasingly seen as vulnerable to penetration—by everything from radio waves to medical instruments. Given that women writers and writers of color experienced that crisis particularly acutely, as these groups historically have been denied control over their own bodies, I focus specifically on the works of modernists H.D., Mina Loy, and Jean Toomer.

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CHAPTER 1

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Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse

The epigraph for this book is taken from a poem in H.D.’s first volume, Sea Garden, fittingly titled (for this project) “The Shrine.” “Light” and “spark” carry both scientific and religious connotations, their meanings “scattered” across disciplines—the electric discharge that ignites a fire, the vital spark of life that animates the body, the waves that illuminate the material world, the absence of literal and moral darkness, the light of God. These lines juxtapose, as the poems of Sea Garden so often do, a profound violence to the body with an evocation of ecstatic beauty. Even as the body is under siege—disintegrating beneath the skin, a facade of wholeness revealed as illusory—the diffuse, shattered, “scattered light” illumines “splendour athwart our eyes” (Collected 9). This book aims to show that writings by H.D., Toomer, and Loy reveal anxiety about the body’s integrity, and that they frequently express that anxiety in a language that merges science and religion. This introductory chapter serves several “scattered” purposes. Its most substantive section documents the intersection of religious and scientific discourse, and treats in more depth the ways in which notions of the body were shifting at the turn of the twentieth century. The introduction also introduces the three writers central to this study, discusses issues of methodology, and offers overviews of the chapters to come. *

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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cultural anxieties surrounding religious authority—and new scientific theorizing that called into question that authority—manifested in complex and often bizarre ways: in quasi-scientific explanations of divine intervention, in spiritual theses of biological and social evolution, in scientific speculations on the susceptibility to religious fervor among so-called third-sexed individuals, in isolationist communes in which agricultural breeding practices applied to humans became paths to salvation, to name but a few. With the breakdown of the “old” physics and the emergence of Einsteinian quantum mechanics, popular scientific discourse became laden with imaginative, spiritualized terms. Historian of science Robert J. Richards has argued that “[p]rior to Darwin’s Origin, a biological scientist did not need to segregate his religious beliefs from his scientific” (“Biology” 32). Darwin’s work ushers in an era in which the split between the two realms is perhaps at its most extreme.2 However, with the discoveries of Marie Curie, and the theories of Max Planck and Albert Einstein—which destabilized notions of science that had become rigidly mechanistic—a space reopened for cross-disciplinary theorizing about the nature of the cosmos. Many respected early twentieth-century physicists 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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and social scientists publicly espoused the ways in which their theories proved the existence of God and the afterlife, and spiritual leaders invoked scientific metaphors and hypotheses in building and bolstering the tenets of their religions. As one early twentieth-century scientist writes of religion and science, “At no time in the history of the two movements were they nearer converging than the present” (Cotton xlvi). Scientific writing of the time exploited religious metaphors, even in terms of hierarchies of knowledge; Michael Whitworth points out that a “religious model,” the church, governed the dissemination of information to the mass public: “[W]henever the term ‘layman’ is invoked in descriptions of popular science writing, it implies that there is a corresponding scientific ‘clergy’ ” (27). Modernist writers were well-versed in this trend, reading about it in journals and little magazines such as The Fortnightly Review, The English Review, Athenaeum, The New Age, and The New Freewoman. Ecstatic over the “new” physics, one contributor to The Fortnightly Review in the 1920s lauds the “dematerialis[ation]” of science: “Science . . . has made wonderful advances towards the religious standpoint” (E. Owen 876). If traditional religion could no longer be relied upon with any certitude, some mused, would science take its place? In her memoir The Heart to Artemis, Bryher wonders if science will usurp the role of art in Western culture, just as religion had been usurped in years past (203–204). Echoing the founder of eugenics, Francis Galton, Julian Huxley argued in 1936 that “eugenics will inevitably become part of the religion of the future, or of whatever complex of sentiments may in the future take the place of organized religion” (qtd. in Childs 4).3 Moreover, technological innovation of the early twentieth century was unprecedented. By the turn of the century, telephony and telegraphy had dramatically transformed notions of spatial and temporal distance. Electricity was put to broad use, lighting houses and boulevards, and executing criminals. Panic over what so many saw as the end of religion led to attempts at reconciling the two areas of knowledge, which began to be viewed as complementary modes of seeking truth; discoveries in physics and chemistry, widely covered in the mainstream press, offered an avenue for such a reconciliation. In 1900, Max Planck proposed the notion of quantum, breaking the supposedly indivisible atom into pieces, just two years after Marie Curie announced the discovery of radium. Einstein’s special theory of relativity appeared in 1905, his general theory in 1916, suggesting the alinear and asynchronous nature of time and opening up the possibility of time travel.4 To the public, these breakthroughs sounded very much like science fiction come to life. This era in science was one of enormous transition, in which competing and conflicting scientific paradigms coexisted. Victorian-era vitalist theories of human evolution held 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Introduction

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Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse

sway until well into the twentieth century, even while modernists advocated “social energetics.”5 Likewise, the theory of ether as the stuff of the universe was supported vehemently by noted scientists such as Sir Oliver Lodge, even though an 1897 experiment had failed to prove its existence.6 Michel Serres has noted the inherent discursive connection between the realms of science and religion: “The rapprochement of scientific discovery and religious conversion is drastically and mutually illuminating” (82). In the modernist milieu, the line between religious and scientific knowledge was not always drawn so clearly as it is now; in fact, with turn-of-thecentury discoveries that seemed to defy the Newtonian paradigm, that line was murkier than it had been in the nineteenth century, and many scientists assumed God to be the architect of all scientific processes. One 1929 textbook describes a theory of “a dynamic universe constituted of energies,” “a reality which could be called spiritual or even purposive” (Conger 29). A geologist remarks two years later that “[t]he history of evolution leads to the inference that its motive forces behave not like a well-designed machine but like a consistent personality” (Mather 9). Likewise, astronomer Heber Curtis observes, “Somewhat to his surprise, the modern scientist finds that he has gradually and without prevision reached a point where he is permitting himself, even demanding, beliefs and theories which involve the transcendental and the infinite” (53). Another geologist, Joseph Le Conte, argues in 1888 that “the phenomena of Nature are naught else than objectified modes of divine thought . . . different forms of one omnipresent divine energy” (Evolution and Its Relation 282). For Le Conte, “Science is the systematic knowledge of these divine thoughts and ways—a rational system of natural theology” (282). Noted London sociology professor Leonard Hobhouse surmises in 1913 that science and religion cannot maintain separate domains since “a metaphysical analysis would always be able to reinterpret the entire scientific scheme on its own lines” (xviii). Einstein himself wrote extensively on spiritual matters. Even before Einstein’s theories ushered in the era of “new” physics, though, the reaction against Newtonian physics had already begun. In 1875, two nineteenth-century physicists, Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait, published anonymously a widely read treatise entitled The Unseen Universe that puts forth an argument, based in physics, for immortality, “to endeavour to show that the presumed incompatibility of Science and Religion does not exist” (iii). Their tome alternates passages from the Bible with scientific instruction on the nature of matter, energy, and thermodynamics, noting that “[i]t is only within the last thirty or forty years that there has gradually dawned upon the minds of scientific men the conviction that there is something besides matter or stuff in the physical universe, which has at least as 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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much claim as matter to recognition as an objective reality” (70). Andrew White, president of Cornell University and historian of science, foresees in 1894 the end of the “warfare” between theology and science, predicting that “Science . . . will go hand in hand with Religion” (xii). After relativity theory, it seemed clear that positivism and materialism—the bane of many religious thinkers—were no longer viable. In his late career, physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, best known for his contributions to the development of the radio, became concerned primarily with the spiritual ramifications of his experiments in telecommunication. In 1925, he argues in Ether and Reality that the invisible substance once thought to fill outer space, ether, is “the primary instrument of Mind, the vehicle of Soul, the habitation of Spirit. Truly it may be called the living garment of God,” though by then he had already aired his beliefs in journals and magazines, including that periodical popular among the modernists, the Fortnightly Review (170). Based on lectures he delivered between 1916 and 1918, one highly influential science writer, Samuel Alexander, published a hefty two-volume “proof” of God grounded in new conceptions of space and time.7 In the conclusion of the work, he contends that “[t]he universe, though it can be expressed without remainder in terms of Space and Time, is not merely spatio-temporal. It exhibits materiality and life and mind. It compels us to forecast the next empirical quality or deity” (353). His argument rests upon a biological metaphor: the “universe of Space-Time with all its finites of lower order is God’s body” (358). In his 1931 collection of essays by scientists on religion provocatively entitled Has Science Discovered God? Edward Cotton explains that scientists have religion to thank for resisting mechanistic science: Leaders of religion nobly resisted the trend of science to make the universe a machine controlled by a set of mechanical laws. And this idea of the universe as a mechanism set going in some mysterious fashion began to lose ground early in the present century. . . . Some of them began to see the universe as a mathematical design. But there can be no mathematical design without a designer. (xlv) The argument for religious explanations of scientific discoveries is made not just by scientists but by religious figures as well, however. Emboldened by ever expanding conceptions of the universe, Yale University Professor of Divinity Charles Allen Dinsmore makes a similar argument when he lectures to students at the University of North Carolina in 1922: “The vastness of the material universe has given us a glimpse of the greatness of our God. We can no longer think of him as an Emperor enthroned above his universe. He is the indwelling spirit—a Being present in every point of his 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse

creation” (18). Many religious scholars, including Dinsmore, appropriated the scientific method for use in theological study. Arguing that the modern day “prophets” of the Holy Ghost are scientists, Dinsmore recommends that theology should learn “the purpose, the spirit, and the method” from science (iii, 12). Joseph Donat defines theology in 1914 as “the science of faith . . . the science that gathers the revealed truths from their sources, endeavours to grasp and to defend them, and to deduce new truths from them” (377–78). Even as early as 1874, a book by the Reverend E. F. Burr utilizes the scientific method to “prove” theism. The embrace of scientific thought by religious leaders was not confined to the orthodox; heterodox spiritual leaders adopted scientific rhetoric as well. As Mark Morrisson has observed, while “[o]ccult writings often derided mechanistic science and rationality, and many scholars have seen the occult revival as a response to the scientific materialism of the nineteenth century and the waning of institutionalized Christianity,” “it would be wholly inaccurate to see the occult revival as simply anti-scientific” (20). In actuality, many occult writers embraced “new” science, ardently appropriating mathematic and scientific discourse: “Occultism hails with joy the discoveries of modern science, as they invariably corroborate what occult science has long taught,” one Rosicrucian proclaims in 1922 (Heindel 99). Examples abound. Infamous magician Aleister Crowley’s oft-repeated motto was “Our method is science, / Our aim is religion.” Filled with charts, figures, and graphs, mathematician and theosophist Charles Hinton’s 1904 book The Fourth Dimension uses the laws of geometry to argue for the existence of a parallel universe, a “higher world.” Madame Blavatsky’s The Key to Theosophy refers to her movement as more a science than a religion, devoted to uncovering nature’s secret truths (1, 39); The Secret Doctrine dabbles in astronomy, evolutionary theory, racial science, numerology, and chemistry.8 A disciple of spiritual guru Georges Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky used “new” physics to demonstrate his own mystical version of the universe; while Gurdjieff and Ouspensky recruited followers among the modernists in Europe, one such convert, Alfred Orage, editor of the little magazine New Age, infiltrated the American artistic and literary salons.9 Ouspensky promulgated a view of the split between science, religion, philosophy, and art—“four ways that lead to the Unknown”—as merely illusory, all in fact born in esotericism: “These ways diverged long ago. . . . They are for ever being broken up, for ever being divided. . . . Obviously, the more they are broke up and separated from one another, the farther they depart from truth” (A New Model 31–32). Ouspensky’s widely read 1920 Tertium Organum exclaimed that “science must come to mysticism” and reject rational and deterministic explanations: “[S]cience having admitted the possibility of the expansion of mathematics beyond the limits of the sensuously perceived 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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world . . . must thereby recognize the expansion of the real world far beyond the limits of any ‘infinite sphere’ or of our logic, i.e., must recognize the reality of ‘the world of many dimensions’ ” (255–56). In fact, pseudoscientists and heterodox spiritual leaders alike embraced the concept of an intersection of religion and science. As one “psychophysician” observes in 1874, “Life’s pendulum is forever vibrating between the physical and the spiritual” (Babbitt 33). At the turn of the twentieth century, an M.D., John Bunyan Campbell, enthuses that the “new” science is increasingly spiritual: “All science and all religions have been progressing . . . and now spirit, the opposite of matter, has been discovered, and found to have life in itself. . . . And it is evident that vital spirit is increasing in the atmosphere and fast triumphing over matter, and all things are becoming more and more spiritual” (iv). His lengthy volume on “spirit vitapathy” concludes with a poem outlining the importance of both science and religion to medicine, for if “[r]eligion prophesies” then “[s]cience fulfills”: Religion and science joined at last, All differences now reconciled In full wedded union, is held fast In harmony and love undefiled. (406, 311) “Religion and science must get together,” declares another religious thinker of the 1920s (Dawson 38). For many pseudoscientists, conjoining religion and science facilitates a notion of the universe that dissolves the borders between soul and body, humanity and deity. For Johannes Heiniger, a fin de siècle doctor and reverend, “[t]he physical organism is the soul made visible” (11). Likewise, another minister, Arthur Jay Green, avers that “[w]hile man is commonly considered a physical being he is in reality, a mental or a spiritual being” (20). Thus, he concludes in the early 1930s, “Mind, therefore, could be defined as that invisible Spirit found in every living human being” (21). Using a technological metaphor, Green describes a worldview in which the thoughts of this Spirit-Mind travel like radio waves, uniting all: “[T]he medium among men’s minds is omnipresent. . . . [M]essages are sent through some kind of universal medium. . . . Many scientists are of the opinion that this universal medium is actually the Mind of God” (26). A 1898 mystical thinker argues that science has proven the validity of religion, for the natural world is itself a Bible: “[S]cience has established in the minds of candid men and women the fact that the great book of nature is the true revelation to man. . . . It is the voice of the Creator—the cause—speaking to the created—the effect” (W. H. Williams 3). 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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The rhetoric of the new anti-mechanistic chemistry and physics is evident in many of these texts. Christian Scientist Annie Bill argues in the 1920s and 1930s that the truth of her religious sect was corroborated by contemporaneous advancements in science. She isolates Einstein in particular as vital to her own theorizing: “The scientific evolution of the Christian Science Church in this period, demonstrably proves that the Einstein Theory of Relativity, built upon a mathematical basis, brings out, when interpreted on the metaphysical basis of Life, the most vivid present types of essential facts of existence which only await a wider mental recognition to be recognized in practical experience” (Rediscovery 18). For Christian Scientists, the material universe is a fiction, the only reality being spiritual, so for Bill the atom is not a building block of matter but a “mental energy unit,” its neutrons and electrons “receptive thoughts sweeping around it” (Atom 6, 7). More importantly, its structure is replicated in government and in metaphysics: “Physicists will find upon an unbiased examination that the plan and order of their atomic world coincides with the plan and order demonstrated in a parallel example of self-government and higher development in the field of applied metaphysics” (7). “This design,” Bill continues, “demonstrates the universe, including man, to be evolved by moral and spiritual forces derived from the one universal Mind, God, and operating in the order symbolized by the atom of so-called electrical energy” (14). In 1928, self-described “psycho-physio-kinesiologist” Frank Dorchester echoes Bill’s excitement about the possibilities of the newly divisible, energetic atom, which for him proves God’s existence: “The affinity of the atom is a phase of the Universal Energy. . . . [T]he original energy is the Universal energy, the Universal energy rules the Universe, is the Universe. Man is a miniature Universe, hence the likeness to God, a replica of the Creator” (18). Also elated about the “new” physics is Edmond Székely, a “cosmotherapist,” who promotes “natural” health practices “synthesized around the conception of radiations, cosmic, solar, terrestrial and human” (78). The 1938 introduction to his cosmological quasi-medical text remarks that “[i]t has remained for Professor Székely to give scientific formulation to that ‘eternal ocean of cosmic radiations’ whereby solar systems and atoms are reciprocally related and the cells of man’s body and the thoughts of his brain vibrate in tune with the furthest stars” (80). Twentieth-century popular psychologist Gerald Heard locates the difficulty among “elder physicists” to accept Einstein’s theories “in abandoning the last underlying anthropomorphic materialism” (283). “The mysteries of the quantum are not to be conceived by any who still think in terms of material images,” he argues in 1929: “As the ground under our feet, to the eye of science, is dissolved, so too the vault of heaven is opened” (282). 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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I do not wish to suggest—though some of the more enthusiastic modernist-era writers cited would have it so—that this is the only time in history that science and religion found common ground. Antoine Faivre has traced the beginnings of theosophy to the late Middle Ages and beginning of the Renaissance, when scientists and philosophers took a pronounced interest in esotericism (xv). But there is little doubt that religio-scientific discourse experiences a fervent revival at the turn of the twentieth century, and that this era’s incarnation of religio-scientific discourse is more mainstream and accessible than that of the occult tradition, at least historically. Indeed, the language of religion and science mingled in the popular discourse of the turn of the twentieth century, and its traces are found throughout modernist writing and writing about art. In one account of modernism, “[s]piritual phrases permeated the language of nonbelievers, so that references to the fourth dimension, to the various planes of existence, and even to simple repetition take on larger contexts” (Crunden xvi). Theosophy itself emerges from the underground with Madame Blavatsky’s extremely influential movement, and modern artists Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Paul Gauguin, Constantin Brancusi, Robert Delauney, Arnold Schoenberg, and Paul Klee claimed allegiance with theosophy at some point in their careers. Kandinsky’s language in his 1911 manifesto Concerning the Spiritual in Art echoes that of prominent early twentieth-century scientists and religious figures when he lambasts “[t]he nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game” and lauds the fact that, increasingly, there are “men who put no trust in the methods of materialistic science” (2, 13). Kandinsky characterizes his tendency toward abstraction as both a rejection of the scientifically realistic object and a desire to make art serve a spiritual purpose. The notion of an interrelationship between science, religion, and art was endorsed by figures as different as P. D. Ouspensky and Albert Einstein; the latter compared modern science to a great painting or musical composition.10 Similarly, James Jeans, a mathematician and science popularizer whose work H.D. owned, compares God to an artist: “Modern scientific theory compels us to think of the creator as working outside time and space, which are parts of his creation, just as the artist is outside his canvas” (248–49). Sexologist Havelock Ellis argued that mysticism and science derive from “the same root in natural human activity,” and that each is an art form (Dance 182–83). Alleging that “science is poetry,” early twentieth-century science journalist John Langdon-Davies analogized creativity in the sciences with that among artists: “[T]he urge to discover a scientific fact or to perfect a scientific theory is precisely the same as the urge to write a poem. . . . [T]he pleasure to be derived from understanding someone else’s theory is precisely 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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the same as the pleasure to be derived from reading someone else’s poem” (206). Modernists were exposed to theories of the interrelationship of arts, sciences, and religion through the words of contributors to their favorite little magazines, newspapers, and journals, such as the Fortnightly Review, the New Freewoman, the English Review, the Athenaeum, and many others.11 One contributor to the Fortnightly Review, R. E. Priestley, remarks the enormous popularity of science in the 1930s: “Every day the world is inundated with popular articles . . . on the discoveries of the moment” (205). Another 1930s contributor attributes this revived interest in science among popular audiences to Einsteinian physics and the “dethron[ing]” of Newton (Bell 285). Priestley notes further that religious concerns are at the root of this fascination: One thing with which the people of the present generation are very much concerned is the attempt to reconcile science with religion. . . . [T]hinking people are anxiously endeavoring to reconcile religion and the new knowledge placed at their disposal. It is this desire to find a plan and purpose in life and behind it, that is largely responsible for ranking popular expositions of natural science among the “best-sellers” of the day. (208) Or, as G. K. Chesterton notes in 1931, “Religion has returned” (450). In these nonacademic forums, spiritual language permeated the discourse on politics, the arts, physics, and even suffragism.12 These periodicals, moreover, debated the implications of “new” physics on spirituality. As early as 1907, one contributor to the Fortnightly Review notes that “[l]ong-valued theories of material science are being exploded in the laboratories” (Balsillie 515). Indeed, not only is psychology becoming known as a “spiritual science,” a contributor to the New Freewoman avers over a decade later, but “new” physics has opened the door to a study of mental telepathy and psychical research (E. Owen 873–76). Nested between articles on international politics, medical discoveries, economics, and religious philosophy, the Fortnightly Review printed quite serious pieces on the validity of spiritualism in the early twentieth century. Two 1909 articles by Pall Mall Gazette editor W. T. Stead, printed in the Fortnightly Review, for instance, defend the practice of contacting the dead, comparing psychical research to ongoing exploration of the Arctic and Antarctic, and proposing the establishment of a Bureau for Communication, an organization to be collaboratively run by Stead and a spirit named Julia from the “other side” to test and record, under rigorous scientific conditions, spiritualist experiences. In fact, like the Fortnightly Review and the New Freewoman, many of the periodicals read by the moderns were interdisciplinary in nature; thus, they 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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were privy to news on a great variety of subjects, ranging from science, the arts, economics, and politics. In 1906, for instance, the Fortnightly Review ran articles by Havelock Ellis, Symbolist and occultist Maurice Maeterlinck, James Frazier, and H. G. Wells, alongside articles evaluating the soundness of Sir Oliver Lodge’s theories of the universe, analyzing the readiness of the British military, and critiquing modern poetic techniques, among others. The issue of the Fortnightly Review that aired Ezra Pound’s manifesto on Vorticism featured as well articles on the Congo, spiritualism, and pacifism and war, as well as excerpts from Tolstoy’s writings. Topics in the New Freewoman, and, to a lesser extent, the Egoist, ranged freely from gender and sexuality to philosophy to art to politics to spirituality. The popular Athenaeum (or The Athenaeum Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Music, and Drama) disseminated notes and “Gossip” in each of the disciplines identified in its full title, and reviewed new creative literature alongside scientific publications, as well as books that fell somewhere in between; a favorable review of a new book on spiritualism, The Earthen Vessel, appeared in the January 14, 1921, issue.13 The October 1919 English Review contained poetry by Nancy Cunard, an article on socialism, an article on Gaudier by Ford Madox Ford, a piece on race relations, an essay on economics, and an analysis of the relationship between war and science. Alfred Orage’s Gurdjieffian New Age, another favorite vehicle of Pound’s, focused primarily on political and literary contributions, but also occasionally ran articles on scientific religion, physics, eugenics, and evolution; volume 7.1, in fact, was dubbed a “Special Science Supplement.” Writers and artists were immersed in a multidisciplinary world of ideas, and they accessed these ideas through nonacademic, extraliterary channels. The modernists themselves contributed pieces to these periodicals that demonstrated their wide-ranging interests in developments in science. In the early modernist period, art was often construed as scientific and economical.14 In 1913, in the New Freewoman, Rebecca West compares the makers of “Imagisme” to a “scientific management” team: “a little band who desire the poet to be disciplined and efficient at his job as the stevedore” (86). Later that same year, Ezra Pound and Dora Marsden discuss the scientific nature of the artist in the same venue. The lead article of the ninth issue of the journal was Pound’s “The Serious Artist,” which draws an analogy between the role of the artist and that of the scientist: “The arts, literature, poesy, are a science, just as chemistry is a science” and “the serious artist is scientific,” for “the arts give us our best data for determining what sort of creature man is” (161, 163, 162). And just as there can be a “negligent physician or a sloppy, inaccurate scientist,” “[b]ad art is inaccurate art. . . . It is art that makes false reports” (163, 162). Marsden responds favorably, adding that “[t]he difference between science and art is not a difference of method, but 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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of subject matter. Art is the scientific spirit applied to soul, observing, collating, noting” (“Views” 166). In the next month, she returns to the analogy with a more extensive, more rigorous treatment in “The Art of the Future”: “If science is the knowledge gained by applying to non-vital phenomena, the method of accurate description as opposed to that of imaginative interpretation, art is the product of the same method applied to vital (and mainly humanly vital) phenomena” (181). The artist, she argues, must adopt the sincerity and efficiency of the scientist and the craftsman: “If progress is to be made in Art, as it has been made in science, artists will have to put off their agnosticism and the vague waving of hands as to what the business is, and come to their tasks with as much sense of purpose as the carpenter who lays down a floor or puts in window-frames” (182). Elsewhere, Pound compares poetic rhythm to electrical “voltage,” the poet to “a sort of steamgauge, voltameter, a set of pipes for thermometric and barometric divination” (qtd. in Golston 110, 128). If science of the twentieth century can be said to be engaged primarily with the questions of subjectivism—the role that the observer plays in producing reality—and interactionism—the extent to which conventional notions of causality and linearity might be called into question—then some parallels between “new” physics and “high” modernist aesthetics can be deduced quite readily, in the latter’s deployment of unreliable narrators and personae, disjunctive and unstable narratives, asynchronous representations of time, abstraction as a mode of representation, and so forth.15 Imagism and Vorticism in particular might be viewed through this lens as illustrative of a cleaner, more scientific, even technological, approach to art. Furthermore, if, according to Bruce Clarke, naturalism’s “empiricist and deterministic literary scientism” was drawn from “mid-nineteenth-century observational methods in biology and clinical medicine,” modernism emerges at the intersection of the materialist, deterministic science of the Victorian era and the “new” physics—“an immaterial and energic scientism patterned after the force fields and energy transformations of late-nineteenth-century electromagnetic and atomic physics” (5). Thus, “[t]ranscendentalist and spiritualist trends in early modernism attempted to recover the theologized or energyinfused cosmos apparently revalidated by innovations such as wireless transmission and radioactivity” (Clarke 5). Like the scientists and theologians of the period, modernists saw unique opportunities for the progress of their own discipline within reports of scientific and technological discoveries. A move away from materialism and determinism allowed the possibility of a strange alliance between the arts, the sciences, and the realm of the spiritual. Critical narratives of modernism have not taken into account the extent to which turn-of-the-twentieth-century religio-scientific discourse informs 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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and underlies modernist writing. Moreover, perhaps because modernist writers described themselves as writing outside the bounds of popular culture and as impervious to history, scholars of modernism have been slow to approach their objects of study through cultural and material history. While it is a commonplace that modernist writers were particularly interested in the occult and other heterodox forms of spiritual belief, very few have explored this trend in depth. Likewise, it is only in the last decade that a number of modernist literary scholars have become interested in science in the period, though books by Cecelia Tichi and Lisa Steinman in the 1980s offered a solid foundation on which to build.16 As I have been arguing, modernists were not oblivious, in fact, to fin-de-siècle scientific discoveries; rather, they read avidly the popular press accounts of theoretical and applied physics and were exposed to the “immense upsurge in popular scientific writing in the period following the proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity” (Whitworth 20).17 The figure of Einstein loomed large in the modernist imaginary, whether he was decried as “villain” (in Wyndham Lewis’ diatribe Time and the Western Man) or as American “folk hero” and adopted “native son.”18 While this focus may not be a surprising one given the extraordinary developments in scientific research at the beginning of the century and the extent to which the early twentieth-century media publicized these developments, it is actually a quite significant shift away from older critical narratives about modernism that express what Sara Danius has called an “antitechnological bias” within modernist study, present despite the fact that the “era coincides with the historical period that saw the emergence of, among other things, phonography, chromophotography, cinematography, radiography, telephony, electricity, and technologies of speed” (2). Recent scholarship, however, exposes the remarkable degree to which modernist writers utilized scientific and technologic metaphors and incorporated techno-scientific modes of perception and expression into their writings. In fact, as Tichi puts it, “the technological revolution is a revolution not only of science and technology but of language, of fiction, and ultimately of poetry” (16). As the fourth chapter of this book addresses notions of an “American race,” it is worth noting that, though the modernist interest in, and engagement with, scientific and technological discoveries was a transatlantic phenomenon, technological prowess—a sign of the practical implementation of science—was viewed as particularly American, while theoretical science received little attention in the U.S. press until Einstein’s arrival, as Steinman, Tichi, and Seltzer have demonstrated. Thus, Americans were more likely to associate technology with democracy, free will, and capitalism, evidence of the U.S. success and spirit of progress in the world marketplace.19 According to Steinman, American poets such as Marianne Moore, William Carlos 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Williams, and Wallace Stevens readily put to use technological metaphors in their rationales for the importance of literature; by utilizing technological and scientific rhetoric, they were granted a favorable position of authority from which to speak to an American populace enamored with technological progress.20 The view on the other side of the Atlantic—where pragmatism had less of a foothold—was apparently more conflicted; Daniel Albright contends that while some British and American expatriates—primarily Lewis, Pound, and Eliot—virulently maligned Einstein and his universe in their theoretical writing, their creative output—verse and fiction—increasingly betrayed a distinctly Einsteinian aesthetic. The three writers examined in this book were arguably all transatlantic figures, though to varying degrees. Toomer was American but spent time abroad in Gurdjieff’s compound; Loy was British but moved to America and claimed American citizenship; and H.D. was American-born but spent most of her adult life in Europe, attaining British citizenship upon her marriage to Aldington, then repatriating in her late career. Their exposure to developments in science and technology— and responses to those developments—would have been wide-ranging. To my mind, the area of religion and popular and heterodox spirituality in modernist writing remains as remarkably under-explored as that of science—important notable exceptions being books by Daniel Cottom, Timothy Materer, Louis Martz, Leon Surette, Helen Sword, and Demetres Tryphonopoulos, all of which assert the significance of this neglected topic. As Robert Crunden laments, “religion remains the forgotten topic”: “Even the most devoted and long-winded biographers have been known to neglect the role of spiritualism, the occult, hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, and the rest in writing up their subjects, or else passed by such things with scarcely a nod. This neglect misleads” (339, xvi). This dearth is particularly surprising given what has always been assumed to be the Symbolist legacy to modernist experimental poetry, which stressed the spiritual and transcendental qualities of the poem. Mentions of Eliot’s conversion, studies of Yeats’ experiments in occultism and automatic writing, and work on Pound’s engagement with occult writings comprise the majority of scholarship in the area, with books on spiritualism routinely noting the scientific tenor of much writing within the movement. Because of Yeats and Pound, a few works on theosophy have appeared, but there seems to be an assumption that studies of theosophy should cover the topic entirely, and one of the goals of this work is to offer a more inclusive understanding of the multiplicity of these heterodox metaphysical movements.21 There is no doubt that Blavatsky’s theosophical writings in particular were enormously influential in this period, but most who read her adapted her ideas to their own, filtered through a multitude of other religious and esoteric lenses. Lines of influence are myriad and entangled, 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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impossible to trace conclusively, as theosophists read spiritualist and other occult writings, spiritualists read occultists, and many read common texts, reenvisioning them in ways that at once diverge and intersect. The various texts brought together in this book are dynamically interrelated, products of different understandings of shared sources and of each another. Books exploring a discursive intersection of the realms of science and religion in modernist writing are almost nonexistent, despite Jacob Korg’s observation over a decade ago that both English and American poets were “bringing their conflicting ideological implications into an intellectual environment that still echoed the science and religion controversy of the nineteenth century” (3). Just as religious leaders were becoming more accepting of notions of scientific reality, scientists were beginning to take “religious approaches to science in general and to experiment in particular,” as they were more and more willing to interrogate the “fictitious” nature of scientific ideas (5–6). There are a few scholars, however, who have begun to explore this territory, evidence that interest in this topic may be growing. Patricia Thurschwell’s compelling 2001 study has made this claim about writers of the Edwardian period: “During the 1880s and 1890s various discourses—occult, literary, scientific, psychological, and technological—converge to inaugurate shifting models of the permeability and suggestibility of the individual’s mind and body” (2). While Thurschwell’s thesis concerns the origins of psychoanalysis, her observation about a convergence of discourse in regard to notions of the mind and body serves as an important foundation for my own work. More recently, in the area of history rather than literature, Mark Morrisson’s 2007 monograph notes a fascinating convergence of the discourses of radioactivity and alchemy in relating “a story of how science and occultism were entwined” (8). Of his work, Morrisson remarks that “[i]nvestigating why the latest in cutting-edge science was cast in terms of a discredited earlier knowledge, one seemingly reduced to the status of a pre-Enlightenment occult relic, offers fascinating insights into the boundaries between science, religion, and other areas of culture at the beginning of the twentieth century” (5). Finally, Michael Golston’s 2008 account of the “science” of “Rhythmics,” as understood by Pound and Yeats (and, to a lesser extent, Williams), likewise recognizes the intersection of these two kinds of discourse. *

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It is my further contention in this book that this often uneasy confluence of two disparate realms of discourse occurred, not coincidentally, at a time of rapid industrial and technological progress that evoked conceptions of the human body as newly vulnerable, with a particular “awareness of corporeal 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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fragility” (to borrow Cassandra Laity’s description) (425). As noted above, this was a time, in Susan McCabe’s words, of a “modernist crisis of embodiment” (“Delight” 430). Exposed to everything from medical instruments to radio waves, the body was no longer understood to be a closed system and was increasingly viewed, and experienced, as malleable and penetrable. As Tim Armstrong has demonstrated, the body by the late nineteenth century was newly subject to invasion by a range of technological devices; the era of modernism, he observes, was in fact “characterized by the desire to intervene in the body” (6). No longer perceived as subject to finite natural laws, the fluid and uncontainable modern body created seepage across borders previously thought inviolate—between self and other, male and female, human and machine, body and soul. The ways in which scientific and technological developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries formed and transformed perceptions of the body are the subject of the work of not only Armstrong but Mark Seltzer, Sara Danius, and Michael Budd as well. Seltzer and Armstrong’s works—focused on literary naturalism and modernism, respectively— document carefully and compellingly the extent to which conceptual notions of the body shift significantly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in response to innovations in technology and science. For Seltzer, the technological revolution in America initiated the “ ‘discovery’ that bodies and persons are things that can be made” (3). Similarly, Armstrong contends that in this era “the body is re-energized, re-formed, subject to new modes of production, representation, and commodification” due to a “revolution of perception of the body” (2). Essential for my own work, Armstrong discusses the movement toward regulation of the body as a response to its newly perceived malleable nature and argues that “[m]odernist texts have a particular fascination with the limits of the body” (4). Danius’s work is important on this topic as well, in its elucidation of the ways in which the body’s sensory perceptions changed in response to “technological devices . . . capable of storing, transmitting, and reproducing sense data” and of the impact of this shift on the moderns: “[T]he more abstract the world of observation becomes, the more corporeal is the notion of the perceiver” (3, 193). A common assumption in these studies, however, seems to be that the shift is one from a spiritual conception of the body to a wholly scientific one. Michael Budd’s book on physical culture, for instance, reinforces Armstrong’s thesis that conceptions of the body had become thoroughly medicalized by the twentieth century by tracing a shift in the nineteenth century from the body as religious to the body as scientific, and thus subject to control. Early in the nineteenth century, he argues, the body is viewed as “a form upon which a spiritual structure was imposed,” but “[t]he secularized 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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body that emerged after mid-century was connected to changing cultural practices and the development of a new medico-scientific paradigm” (12, 14). As invaluable as the work of these scholars is to this book, however, my own research does not entirely support the notion that the body has become thoroughly secularized and medicalized by the twentieth century. Throughout the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, as will be explored in depth in the chapters that follow, there is a substantive body of extraliterary writing on the body conceived in terms at once religious and scientific from a diverse array of figures. In these writings, for instance, the body’s electricity is viewed as a divine spark, the link through the ether to the heavens, as will be seen in chapter 2. Chapter 3 offers evidence that individual morality and spiritual well-being are seen as tied inextricably to the health and condition of the body. Chapter 4 makes clear how evolutionary theory focused on the physical body becomes extrapolated across nearly every imaginable discipline, including sociology, psychology, economics, and religion. This “crisis of embodiment,” not surprisingly, resulted in an acute collective anxiety about control over one’s body. I argue that authors of this period expressed that anxiety in their writing, and that the peculiarly modern, post-Einsteinian, spiritual understanding of science appealed to modernist writers as a way of negotiating the demands on, and threats to, the radically unstable body and their perceived lack of control over that body. In other words, religio-scientific discourse emerges in writing about the unruly body, which becomes the site of contradiction and paradox. Religious mysticism has a long tradition of advocating a passive body and mind, an absolute subjugation to deity, while science is very much an active arena. The tension inherent in an intersection of these two realms of discourse is transparent in the literary and extraliterary texts examined here. The range of responses among modernist figures to this crisis of body is broad. Some, such as Italian Futurist F. T. Marinetti, celebrated what they saw as the revolutionary potential of a malleable body that could traverse the line between the physical and the metaphysical. Imagining an actual physical evolution of the body toward the technological, Marinetti’s Futurist body is both flesh and metal, spirit and machine; in one of his many manifestos of the 1910s, he announces that “we must prepare for the imminent, inevitable identification of man with motor, facilitating and perfecting a constant interchange of intuition, rhythm, instinct, and metallic discipline” (99).22 But many feared the body’s rapidly disappearing boundaries, its subjugation to forces seemingly beyond human control. Note, for instance, the focus on the individual will in the Vorticist manifesto; “Will and consciousness are our VORTEX” are the closing words of the first issue 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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of Blast (158). Even Marinetti balances his exaltation of the body-machine with the promise of ultimate will and power, thus lessening the threat to the self: “On the day when man will be able to externalize his will and make it into a huge invisible arm, Dream and Desire . . . will master and reign over space and time” (99). The will, in fact, becomes a powerful bodily appendage. This fear about control over the body is, not surprisingly, particularly fraught for women writers and writers of color, the focus of the book. While passivity and lack of control may have been the more familiar condition for members of these groups, it was a condition against which Toomer, Loy, and H.D. struggled. *

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H.D., Mina Loy, and Jean Toomer have, despite many mutual friends and acquaintances, only tenuous biographical ties. H.D. never met Loy or Toomer, and her relationship to Loy can only be described as a minor rivalry.23 Loy and Toomer never met either, though they were both associated with Mabel Dodge Luhan’s New Mexico salon. Luhan and Loy were close friends, while Luhan, fascinated for a time with Toomer, contributed a substantial amount of money to Gurdjieff at Toomer’s request. All three writers, however, were early innovators of high modernist free verse poetry, H.D. and Loy among the earliest in the English language; Toomer’s Imagist-inspired poems are scattered throughout Cane. The three attained prominence in the literary world early in their lives, and it is by that early work that they are perhaps best known. In the early years of modernism, H.D. was one of the founders of Imagism, Loy was the infamous writer of scandalously sexually explicit vers libre, and Toomer wrote one of the foundational texts of the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance. Though all three continued to write for decades after their early successes, only H.D. maintained any degree of fame in her late career, and so all three writers have been “recovered” by literary scholars of the past few decades. The most important commonality between these three for the purposes of this book, though, is that all three were engaged with various heterodox religious belief systems. While interest in the occult and spiritualism was at a peak during the modernist period—“Everyone ‘dabbled’ in the occult,” Leon Surette has observed of this era (36)—these three writers were not simply erstwhile followers of a fad but held a sustained interest in a variety of metaphysical systems. Toomer’s commitment to the cult of Georges Gurdjieff, and later to Quakerism and a host of other beliefs (including scientology), is often blamed for his failure to write another critical success after Cane and for his turn to nonfiction, rather than creative, writing in his 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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later years. Loy was not only a lifelong Christian Scientist, but she studied avidly Eastern religion as well as Judaism, her father’s religion. Spending her childhood in Moravian and Quaker churches, H.D. participated in spiritualism, astrology, and a number of occult practices. H.D. and Toomer in particular wrote voluminously about their spiritual experiences, and attempted to publish many of these manuscripts. For all three, written records of their more philosophical and metaphysical writing survive them, and these writings form the basis of this book. Given that the most famous modernist associated with heterodox religious beliefs, W. B. Yeats, was involved in theosophy, it is interesting that neither Toomer, Loy, nor H.D. ever joined any of its formalized and hierarchized societies of adepts and initiates. Theosophy’s highly structured and secretive approach to spiritual truth may well have been one reason for their lack of sustained interest. The occult influence on Toomer, for instance, seems to be chiefly based in the writings of Gurdjieff, who undoubtedly read theosophical texts but also the source texts of theosophy (among others) and created his own unique system, inflecting Eastern “wisdom” with Western physical culture. Toomer’s astral experience, described in chapter 3, resonates in certain ways with a theosophical notion of augoeides, a term for the nonmaterial, luminous body; however, the swirl of movement that I argue characterizes Toomer’s spiritual experience, as well as the tension between movement and stasis inherent in it, are not to be found in theosophical sources such as Mead’s The Doctrine of the Subtle Body. Similarly, though H.D. was certainly exposed to the ideas of theosophists, her interests took many avenues. She owned scores of books on astronomy and astrology, spiritualism, magic, Tarot, mysticism, angels, the Kabbalah, fortune telling, Nostradamus, and the ancient religions of China, India, Greece, Egypt, Rome, and Native America, and her wide-ranging reading included many of Blavatsky’s source texts, such as the Bhagavad Gita, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, ancient Greek Hermetic texts, and various writings on Gnosticism. This is not, of course, to say that these writers did not read or come into contact with theosophical concepts. Most modernists, in fact, did. According to one of his many autobiographies, Toomer read at least two books by the Celtic mystic and theosopher George William Russell (known as Æ), and H.D.’s extensive library included Mabel Collins’s “self-help” book entitled Light on the Path and, according to Jane Augustine, several volumes by “Christian theosophists” Harriette and Homer Curtiss (Augustine 3). Collins’s book is a very basic discussion of being an initiate, rather than an elaboration of quasi-scientific theories, and the Curtisses read theosophy through a hybrid lens of popular psychology, astrology, numerology, and 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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(most importantly) Christianity (all interests of H.D.’s in the 1940s), but rarely science, and over the years their books draw on, and then increasingly depart from, Blavatsky’s work, which is less scientific in tone than the texts of some of her followers, despite her frequent reference to occult’s scientific verifiability.24 Augustine has argued persuasively that traces of the Curtisses’s ideas can be seen in the goddess figures of Trilogy and Helen in Egypt, and H.D. surely read with interest about the coming of the new age of woman, the Aquarian Age, rising at the close of the masculinist Piscean Era—an event noted by the Curtisses and scores of other occultists of the modernist era. But the major religio-scientific source relevant to the scene in the one late text I explore in this book, I would argue, is certainly astronomer Camille Flammarion’s spiritualist tomes such as Lumen, which H.D. read intensively during her spiritualist period, for the historical and geographical course of her astral experience (described in chapter 3) mimics that of Lumen’s journeys.25 In the end, then, I would conclude that theosophy is but one of a vast array of metaphysical systems these modernist writers studied. The lifelong occult interests of these three writers are unlike those of Yeats in that they do not derive exclusively or even primarily from a theosophical understanding of the universe but are drawn from a much wider swath of religio-scientific texts. Each of the metaphysical systems Loy, Toomer, and H.D. studied are engaged, to some extent, with “new” science. Christian Scientists made pointed scientific claims about the nature of reality and of the process of evolution; Gurdjieff and his disciples frequently invoked physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics in their theory of consciousness; and spiritualists and psychic researchers strove to record scientifically their experiences. Like other modernists, H.D., Loy, and Toomer were also well aware of the paradigm-shaking discoveries in turn-of-the-century physics and chemistry, and they referenced them in their verse and prose writings. Loy’s poem in tribute to Gertrude Stein, printed in Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic Review, dubs her “Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary” who can “extract / a radium of the word” (“Gertrude” 305). Stein’s writing, for Loy, is a gesture toward our collective unconscious; it offers contact with “the very pulse of duration,” “[t]he core of a ‘Being,’ ” “[t]he everything, the everywhere,” “the radiophonic exchange of the universe” (305, 427). Loy’s “The Oil in the Machine?” demonstrates the interweaving of humankind with science and technology.26 In this prose poem, “man[’s]” quest for scientific progress is a quest for self, driven by spiritual desire: Man invented the machine in order to discover himself .... 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Self, then, becomes a kind of cyborg, a body-machine infused—or lubricated, in this metaphor—with the spirit. Humankind, here, are . . . spasimal engineers whose every re-act-ion of grace is a explosion in consciousness. Despite the “oil” in the body-machine, its actions are convulsive and explosive, “spasimal,” reacting automatonically rather than acting, its broken manner emphasized by the literally disintegrating word “re-act-ion.” While Loy’s poem makes light of both the self-indulgent and the religious nature of the pursuit— And what the hell could we make of the sort of pulpy materials—the Padre Eterno made engines out of —the poem demonstrates the ways in which humanity’s view of science is imbricated with religion. In Loy’s papers are notes that confirm that she saw connections between “new” science and religion, and that she herself had had a kind of spiritual experience: “There is a growing expectation that science will eventually confirm the intuitions of the founders of religion, I feel that in this event, my momentary experience of extended consciousness will prove to be accurate” (Mina Loy Papers, f. 187). Another fragment recalls a mathematics professor explaining to her how the complexity of numbers and calculations had “forc[ed] him to believe in God” (Mina Loy Papers, f. 183). Toomer’s childhood reminiscences frequently cite scientific interests; he was, apparently, fairly obsessed with electricity. In one of his many autobiographical texts, “Earth-Being,” he notes his awe at a friend’s father’s workshop in a description that transforms a scientific site into a transcendent and otherworldly space: I always went in with a sense of thrill and wonder. I wanted to see and touch everything: the fascinating materials, the machines and implements. It was a place of magic. The words “science” and “inventor” of course meant nothing to me. This was a fairyland. . . . Thus I became saturate with impressions of materials which are peculiar to the modern scientific age. (II.50–51)27 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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It is the oil in the machine to which the mystics referred as the Holy Soul—-—-—-—- (Mina Loy Papers, f. 168)

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In another autobiographical text, “From Exile into Being,” he muses about the shared goals of disparate realms of knowledge: “art, science, and religion, all three, are or should be agents of the force of growth” (40).28 Notes written in 1936 remark that “[t]he most advanced science of today is shaking hands with metaphysics” (Jean Toomer Papers, f. 579). In a book of adages, “Remember and Return,” he lavishes praise on Einstein and Marie Curie (244).29 Daughter of a Moravian mother and a scientist father, H.D. is perhaps uniquely situated to think about the world in terms of religio-scientific discourse.30 Her narrator of the middle section of Palimpsest, Raymonde, has an epiphanic moment in which she realizes the applications of Einsteinian temporality on her own theory of palimpsestic history and memory: There was an oracle—there was the answer . . . East and west. The seen and the only just not-seen . . . Space was infinite if one’s room were small enough. . . . The telephone kept jangling from another sphere. . . . It went on and on. It cut across the past that was (Einstein was right) the future. The past (she knew) was the future. . . . The present and the actual past and the future were (Einstein was right) one. (165–66) In this passage, Raymonde uses an oracular truth about time and space to validate Einstein’s relativity theory, or at least her understanding of it. The palimpsest of history, in which identical (usually) traumatic episodes are repeated by different characters in different times, implies a modern notion of time, nonlinear and asynchronous. Two decades later, H.D.’s narrator in Majic Ring, Delia, uses a technological metaphor to articulate her theory of how we think about the past. In trying to explain an unexpected time-travel experience, she speculates that her experiences “may have been random projections from that great store-house where we are told, all the past is rolled and neatly filed and edited, like endless store-rooms of film, waiting for the suitable moment to be projected and to be re-projected” (137). Here a notion of a cosmic, collective unconscious, containing humankind’s memories, is depicted as a collection of film reels. It is important to note, though, that these writers frequently expressed some reticence about developments in science and technology. Toomer, for instance, frequently extolled the virtues of natural landscapes, arguing that “we of this mechanized era are more divorced from Nature, more alienated from our society, more separated from our own deeper beings, than were the people of earlier periods” (“From Exile into Being” 3). His unpublished play “Man’s Home Companion” sharply indicts society for the place of technology in everyday lives when it depicts a man dancing with a robot surrogate for his 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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absent working wife (Jean Toomer Papers; f. 934). The stunning technological innovations apparent during World War I horrified them all. H.D.’s review of W. B. Yeats’ Responsibilities and Other Poems (1916) condemns not only the “world calamity” of war but the masculinist avant-garde’s prewar adulation of its machinery as well: “The guns they praised, the beauty of the machines they loved, are no more as a god set apart for worship but a devil over whom neither they nor we have any more control” (“Responsibilities” 53). Likewise, Loy’s manifesto “International Psycho-Democracy” recoils from that war, for her “the cataclysmic factor in social evolution,” the chief threat to the very progress of humankind (Last 277). Even so, they were nonetheless deeply influenced by scientific and technological advancements. In fact, this ambivalence about science, I would argue, is one of the catalysts for their interest in a less materialist version of scientific belief. *

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The first part of my term religio-scientific may be, admittedly, problematic. Potentially, terms such as esoteric, otherworldly, metaphysical, paranormal, spiritual, mystical, spiritualist, supernatural, magic, psychical, or occult (to name but a few) could have taken the place of religion in describing this hybrid discursive terrain. These terms messily overlap, no one in agreement on the borders between them. There are instances when they can be used interchangeably, and instances when doing so elides key differences between them. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to find a single term, though, that encompasses all of these, which binds together the diversity of humanity’s otherworldly beliefs about realities that defy the rational and the material. Certainly, many of the practices of modernist figures—in particular, of the three considered here—are not to be found in traditional Christianity, though many modernists found no contradiction between the basic tenets of Christianity and various heterodox belief systems. The term religion typically entails structure, order, and some degree of mainstream acceptance, which is, in the end, why I chose it. Religion, etymologically, is that which binds. By religion, of course, I do not necessarily mean “orthodox” or “organized” or “Western” religion, though neither do I exclude those possibilities. But using one of the alternatives above would imply a kind of marginality that would be gravely misleading and would work against one of the major premises of the book. Religio-scientific discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not a fringe phenomenon, I argue, even if some of the writing cited in this book resonates in just that way a century later. As is clear above, Christian pastors, Eastern mystics, medical doctors, and noted scientists are among those speaking this language and thinking within 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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these parameters, even if more marginal figures share their vision. Moreover, many of these otherworldly beliefs were systematized—sometimes to the same extent as were mainstream, orthodox religions—and most are theistic, so the term spiritual does not quite capture these facets. In the end, then, I choose to make use of the term religion in an expanded sense, and of the term spiritual, at times, as well—since all three of the literary writers discussed here, and most of the extraliterary writers, tend to interchange the two—and invite my readers’ lenience. As a cursory perusal of the shelves of books on religion at the library will readily show, the term religion is not, in fact, formalized and is, moreover, far from uncontested. Some philosophers of religion have stressed emotion, some belief, some ritual and practice, some myth. Many definitions are diametrically opposed: for German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, religion is dependence on a higher being, for instance, while for Hegel, religion is the ultimate independent state. Paraphrasing Dutch phenomenologist Gerardus van der Leeuw, religious historian Kimerer LaMothe offers a definition that perhaps comes closest to one that resonates with this study: “Religion as an expression of power appears in the forms of lines, traces of what can be imagined as vertical planes, intersecting at the horizon, connecting humans to what must always lie beyond the horizon, inaccessible to both their experience and their rational reflection upon it” (163). Like other scholars interested in science and religion of the period, my approach to literary modernism is through the lens of cultural history, which has not been the most traveled path. Modernism, and particularly literary modernism, has traditionally been conceived as an elite movement located outside of the stream of everyday life, elementally and consciously opposed, in fact, to mass culture. In this Adornian interpretation, modernism is grounded in its opposition to modernity. This critical narrative of what Andreas Huyssen has so famously dubbed a “great divide” has meant that, for an extended period, the study of modernism had been restricted to formalist or Frankfurt-School aesthetics. This enduring attachment to a modernism/mass culture divide carries with it an underlying conservative agenda, for, as Huyssen notes, the term mass culture since the nineteenth century is a gendered one: “[M]ass culture appears as monolithic, engulfing, totalitarian, and on the side of regression and the feminine . . . and modernism appears as progressive, dynamic, and indicative of male superiority in culture” (58). Building upon Huyssen’s thesis, Rita Felski observes two seemingly contradictory constructions of the feminine in modern texts: one associates a romanticized vision of woman with tradition and nature, while the other feminizes modernity and mass culture (2–4). In both cases, however, canonical modernism positions itself oppositionally, that which bears 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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the taint of neither the Romantic or decadent nineteenth century nor the rapidly commercialized and industrialized twentieth century. Thus, this construction of the modernist artist as the lone gifted individual at war against a lowbrow mass culture of feminized, sometimes racialized or sexualized, “others” persists, and in doing so it bolsters a modernist literary canon defined against, and thus largely devoid of, the writings of women and minorities. In recent years, however, modernist scholarship that interrogates this conventional view has emerged, as more scholars argue not so much that this long-standing narrative is entirely erroneous—certainly, many modernists conceived of their own projects in just these terms—but that it is woefully incomplete. As Anne Herrmann avers, “Modernism cannot be understood as simply the withdrawal from the sphere of a common culture in which the public no longer plays a significant part” (166). This recent surge of work on modernism and mass culture is central to my own thinking about the extent to which modernist writers were engaged with popular scientific and religious thought. Though my focus is on modernist writers, my extraliterary sources range from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. In a passage describing his boyhood in Washington, D.C., Toomer’s autobiographical “Earth-Being” illustrates the extent to which these writers were born into a late nineteenth-century world at once natural and manmade, opposing aspects of a universe equally fascinating to a child: “Copper sheets were as marvelous to me as the petals of flowers; the smell of electricity was as thrilling as the smell of earth after a spring shower” (51). “Copper sheets” parallel “flowers” in his adolescent imagination, and the scent of technological innovation mirrors that of rainfall. As H.D.’s lover and lifelong companion, Bryher, notes in her memoir Heart to Artemis, the modernists were very much the children of the previous century: “We were all exiles. We remain so today. . . . We were the last group to grow up under the formidable discipline of the nineteenth century whose effect, however much we resent it, cannot be entirely eradicated from our systems” (203). For many contemporary scholars on modernism (from Bradbury and McFarlane to those of the present) as well as for modernists themselves, the dawn of the twentieth century is often posited as a point of rupture, a definitive and irreparable break from everything that had come before it. What is ignored in this narrative of fracture, however, is that there is some degree of continuity between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that the early twentieth century simultaneously represses and expresses many elements of nineteenth-century history, culture, and thought. Despite undeniable breakthroughs in science and innovations in art, the origins of modernism and modernity are, in part, to be located within the nineteenth century; the writers of modernism 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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perceived, and in fact strove to enact, a kind of paradigm shift from one century to the next, but they were, after all, still children of the previous century. The scientific revolution associated with Einstein validated the ideas of nineteenth-century religio-scientific thinkers rebelling largely against Darwinian theory, so the seeds of “new” science are visible before 1900. Thus, in compiling cultural history, this book does not envision the modernist period in a vacuum but rather draws on a motley array of literary and extraliterary writing at the point of transition, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—poetry, novels, nonfiction prose, contributions to literary and popular periodicals, scientific and medical manuals, heterodox religious tracts, avant-garde manifestos, sexological studies, to name but a few. If my extraliterary sources are diverse, the same could be said for my literary ones. Many familiar works of these three writers are addressed here. But this book—perhaps more than any other on Loy or Toomer—relies heavily on archival texts as yet unpublished and thus largely unavailable to the reading public. Though they are known chiefly as poets and fiction writers, all three of these writers wrote extensively in nonfiction prose, both autobiographical and philosophical. Toomer, H.D., and Loy wrote numerous autobiographical novels, most of which remain on the shelves of the Beinecke Library at Yale University. While H.D.’s aesthetic manifesto Notes on Thought and Vision was published posthumously, only one of Toomer’s many philosophical works has been printed, and only scattered instances of Loy’s voluminous notes and a few short manifestos have gone to press. Toomer sought for decades, unsuccessfully, to publish this kind of work; H.D. tried but failed to publish a number of her more spiritual novels; and Loy’s unpublished typescripts reveal, in many cases, careful corrections and revisions, suggesting that she conceived of a potential future audience. For so many writers of the period, there is a wealth of unpublished material, arguably as important as the published texts in assessing the era, even, I would argue, in the case of notes and ephemera. Though Daniel Ferrer depicts his “deciphering” of Joyce’s private notebooks as “necessarily contingent, parasitical, and highly precarious,” for instance, he notes that even the most private notes of the author “can serve as a quarry for the edification of several different works” (203, 205). Collections of notes demand interpretation not only as individual parts but as a whole in and of themselves as well: “Mere cohabitation in this limbo of the work alters the nature of these fragments, however diverse” (206). In addition to the more polished works found in the archives of all three writers, H.D.’s drafts, Loy’s notes, and Toomer’s philosophical works that were never fleshed out beyond the stage of outlines are often central to this study, as I maintain that they constitute valid objects 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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of study to the literary scholar interested in illuminating their published works and in reconstructing a broader vision of modernism’s political and cultural investments. These works are, at once, creative and philosophical. Partitioning them off from the published, more obviously “literary” texts, I would argue, creates a false binary. Furthermore, autobiographical elements permeate both the literary and the extraliterary output of these writers to the extent that autobiography cannot and should not be viewed entirely apart from their creative oeuvres. *

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Each chapter that follows considers a particular instance of religio-scientific discourse, pairing a different combination of the three writers that are the focus of this book. Chapter 2, “ ‘[T]he electric incitement of Eros’: Electromagnetism, Sexuality, and Modernism,” focuses on the entangled discourses of religion and heterodoxy, sexuality and gender, and technology and popular science that converged around the marvel of electromagnetism. Centered around key historical movements and practices as diverse as sexology, spiritualism, Mesmerism, and science, this chapter explores the rhetoric of electromagnetism in the work of Mina Loy and H.D., in the context of other literary, religious, and scientific writings of the period. The fixation in the early twentieth century with notions of bodies as machines overlapped with several centuries’ worth of experiments with the body’s electricity and with electrocution—electricity from within and without the body—experiments often public that fascinated popular audiences and readers. This chapter is particularly concerned with the ways in which modernists relied on the discourse of electromagnetism in their writings about sexuality, a discourse embedded historically in other discourses: medical, sexological, spiritualist, aesthetic. Both H.D. and Loy employ the rhetoric of electricity in erotic passages, drawing on centuries of associations between heterosexual sex and electromagnetism’s bipolar qualities and attraction/repulsion matrix. The flow of electricity creates a polarization, positive and negative energies that invade the body, moving in and out and around it. While Loy’s nonfiction prose embraces an Eastern notion of channeling electromagnetic waves through her body, H.D.’s prose exhibits more ambivalence, as she actively attempts to block these waves from penetrating the bodies of her characters, depicting electromagnetic currents as circulating around, rather than within, the body. In my reading, moreover, Loy relies on the complementarity of negative and positive charges to reinforce a heterocentric view of sexuality, even when electrical metaphors are used to relay the threat of danger. In contrast, 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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I contend that H.D. resists this heterocentricism, breaking down electromagnetism’s binary logic and reimagining its polarities to accommodate lesbian configurations of sexuality and depicting heterosexual scenes in the language of electrocution. The third chapter, “Seeking ‘a sort of clairvoyant material plane’: Spirituality and the Moving Body,” examines nonfiction prose by Jean Toomer and a novel by H.D. within the context of turn-of-the-century conceptions of dance and performance, emerging theories of biology, and religious movements whose practices revolved around dance and bodily motion. Toomer’s involvement with the cult of Georges Gurdjieff, which focused on learning practiced routines of dance and movement in order to achieve higher levels of introspection, led to a series of autobiographical writings contemplating the physical body as a vehicle for spiritual growth. Likewise, H.D.’s novel about spiritualist encounters during World War II, Majic Ring, includes an extended set of chapters in which her protagonist performs a series of poses and movements (modeled, as were Gurdjieff’s, on Eastern dances) that transform her body into a receptor of ancient historical and spiritual wisdom. These texts are read alongside notions of performance, heterodox spiritual writings, and theories of physiology and biology from the period, examining the tension between body and mind—the material and the abstract. In the writings of both authors, practiced routines of dance and movement transform the body into a vehicle for spiritual enlightenment, though H.D. is, again, more reticent about giving over her body to mystical experiences. In both sets of writings, their bodies alternate between movement and stillness, and herein lies the possibility for a marked ambivalence; the passivity required to channel a vision is periodically broken up by episodes of motion. But while Toomer ultimately accepts Gurdjieff’s methods—even long after they had parted ways—H.D.’s narrator struggles with the passive stance required to channel a vision. Though she had flirted early in her career with models of authorship based in spiritualist mediumship, I argue here that H.D.’s writing in her later period depicts more reticence about embracing passive models of aesthetic production. The final chapter, “Negotiating the Racialized Body: Theories of Spiritual Evolution and the ‘American Race,’ ” takes up notions of evolutionary biology and spiritual evolution held by Loy (whose father was a Hungarian Jew) and Toomer (who was of mixed race). Both—counter to eugenics movements of the time—theorize the mixed race individual as both superior and uniquely American. Theories of spiritual evolution afford them each a philosophical position that denies the materiality of the body—and therefore asserts the fictiveness of race as a category—thus evading the thorny issue of control 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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over their bodies at a time in which race supremely mattered. Both, in other words, attempt to escape what they see as the trap of biology in the physical world by positing only a spiritual universe. For them, life is about the struggle to cast off the physical world. Both writers expressed ambivalence about their racial status for most of their adult lives. Toomer, rather famously, proclaimed himself the product of about a dozen “races,” and I argue that part of his attraction to the cult of Georges Gurdjieff was based in its views of a universal race and its idealist concept of the universe. A lifelong follower of Christian Science, Loy was deeply attracted to its underpinnings, also philosophically idealist in its insistence upon the primacy of spiritual reality and its denial of material reality. Equally important to understanding her position on race, I contend, is her embrace of the idea of the “Cosmopolitan Jew,” a human so highly evolved as to be immune to “ailments” ranging from physical disease to nationalism. From vastly different spiritual orientations, both Loy and Toomer settle upon American identity—grounded in romanticized views of its “melting-pot” ideology—as a model of evolutionary perfection, and both write poems in their late careers in homage to this ideal. Ultimately, however, I argue that Toomer expresses the most reluctance about giving up the body altogether to an idealist worldview. While both feel some degree of tension between individualism and communalism, as each strives to maintain some sense of a unique self even while adhering to a theory of communal, spiritual consciousness, it is Toomer whose writings show battling desires to both worship the physical body and rid himself of it.

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Introduction

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“[T]he electric incitement of Eros”: Electromagnetism, Sexuality, and Modernism

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athaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-mark” (1843) opens with the observation that “the comparatively recent discovery of electricity . . . seemed to open paths into the region of miracle” (764). In fact, as one historian has observed, “During the mid-nineteenth century no force in nature was more intriguing to the popular mind than electricity. . . . [S]cientists and occultists alike invoked its name to explain otherwise mysterious occurrences” (R. Moore 29). This is the era, after all, in which the traveling shows of electrical spectacles of previous centuries had given way to public experiments conducted by scientists such as Andrew Ure on the corpses of executed criminals, creating the illusion of a living, breathing man by using electrical charges to animate the body’s limbs, lungs, and facial muscles (Morus 128). And this research was not confined to the human body; in fact, “[e]verything from geological structures to vegetables was available for electrification” (Morus 130). Moreover, theorizing about electricity was not restricted to orthodox science; the popular imagination seized on this magical force as the link between science and the heavens. As one late nineteenth-century pseudoscientist—a self-described “Doctor of Magnetics”—professes grandly in 1874, “Electricity . . . is one of the principles that sweeps the world onward through space, and bears on its wings the starry orbs, many of which are millions of times as large as the world itself. Ascend now to the still finer Vital Aura, the direct handmaid of the soul. . . . From this rise to the spirit itself, to the human spirit, then

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CHAPTER 2

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the angelic, archangelic, and finally to the Infinite Spirit, the Primate and Ultimate of all power in the Universe!” (Babbitt 11). This fascination—spurred by ubiquitous electric lighting, sensational accounts of electrocutions, and rapid technological innovations in communications—lingers well into the twentieth century. At the World’s Fair of 1900, in fact, “electricity became the focal point of the whole exposition” (Garelick 68). “The Electricity Fairy triumphs at the Exposition,” one witness enthused: “[S]he is born in heaven like true kings. . . . [E]lectricity cures everything. It is progress, the poetry of the poor and the rich; it brings illumination. . . . [I]t is the scourge and the religion of 1900” (qtd. in Garelick 69). As I have argued in the first chapter, too little critical attention has been paid to the ways in which modernist writers engage with scientific thought. This has been especially true of the science of electromagnetism, the most important exception being found in the work of Tim Armstrong, whose writing on the topic has focused primarily on electrocution and on electrical medical devices designed to regulate and penetrate the human body.1 In fact, electricity and electromagnetism very much occupy the minds of the modernist era, which both contemplate its real-world power and plumb its metaphorical possibilities. For William Carlos Williams, electricity is an apt trope that serves to align the imagination with science rather than religion: “[T]he imagination is an actual force comparable to electricity or steam, it is not a plaything but a power that has been used from the first to raise the understanding of—it is, not necessary to resort to mysticism—In fact it is this which has kept back the knowledge I seek –“ (519). But more often than not electromagnetism is invoked to represent a fusion of the physical and the metaphysical, as in dance guru Emile Jacques-Dalcroze’s assertion that “[r]hythm is a force analogous to electricity and the great chemical and physical elements,—and energy, an agent—radio-active, radio-creative. . . . It directs us to the unplumbed depths of our being” (qtd. in Golston 34). One religio-scientific strain that runs through many writings of the period is that of an anticipated emergence of a new electric sixth sense, with decidedly paranormal overtones.2 Italian Futurist F. T. Marinetti imagined a kind of proto-cyber-artist utilizing electromagnetism to create supersensual experiences: in the new century’s Italy, he announces in the early 1910s, “[e]yes and other human organs are no longer simple sensory receptors, but true accumulators of electric energy” (114). Similarly, Sir Oliver Lodge’s 1909 The Ether of Space—the first chapter of which was printed in the same journal that published Pound’s Vorticist manifesto, the Fortnightly Review—argues in the same progressivist vein that humans of the technological age “are growing a new sense . . . analogous to artificial teeth or mechanical limbs” (27). A few years later, Lodge—a scientist turned spiritualist 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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following the death of his son in World War I —describes this new ability as one that allows its possessor to sense the ether, “the home of spiritual existence, the realm of awe-inspiring and the supernal” (Ether and Reality 173). Like the “doctor of magnetics” cited above, Lodge views the electromagnetized ether as possessing religious significance: “It is the primary instrument of Mind, the vehicle of Soul . . . the living garment of God” (Ether and Reality 170).3 Likewise, Dora Marsden, on the pages of The New Freewoman, compares electricity to the human soul: The soul is not a thought, and has nothing to do with thought. It is a “thing” as electricity running along a wire is a thing, with movements, consciousness, repulsions, attractions, making excursions and returning to its shell through the apertures for entry and exit it has made; a thing which forages, dissipates or grows, by means we can learn if we keep watch. (“Views” [1.9] 165–66) Beliefs in the role of electricity as vital force (its most famous depiction in Shelley’s Frankenstein), as the vehicle of otherworldly communication in spiritualism, and as the “ether” that surrounds us endure to such an extent in the modernist milieu that electromagnetism appears in the writings of both H.D. and Mina Loy as a mystical conduit between heaven and earth channeled via an artist-medium. Their theories of spiritual and artistic transmission marry models from spiritualism, mysticism, and prophecy, to everyday, mass culture associations with technological innovation in telecommunication.4 H.D. and Loy—along with other literary figures, such as D. H. Lawrence, and extraliterary figures, such as Marie Stopes—also expose the erotic subtext of these traditions, movements, and practices, exploiting electromagnetism’s potential as metaphor in descriptions of sexual attraction. Marsden’s analogy of the soul to electricity at once confirms electricity’s materiality and suggests its metaphorical potential; electricity is both material object and transcendental subject. It has agency, consciousness; it moves, sets off on “excursions” and “forages,” attracts and repels, creates paths of current. Electromagnetism is a hybrid phenomenon, in the sense of Bruno Latour’s concept of hybridity, crossing “the divide that separates exact knowledge and the exercise of power,” nature and culture (3). It is entwined in multiple discourses, including pseudoscience and the occult, religion and magic, sexology and gender. But it also has a realness to it, a scientifically observable and verifiable existence apart from its social and discursive manifestations. It is, like Latour’s quasi-objects, “real, quite real,” of nonhuman origin, but also narrated, historical, and cultural “because [it] attach[es] us to one another, because [it] circulate[s] in our hands and 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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define[s] our social bond by [its] very circulation” (89). These hybrid quasiobjects—at once real and mediated—upset modern notions of the order of things in their disruption of scientific categorization. Particularly disruptive is a quasi-object like electromagnetism, circulating within a multiplicity of discourses in a new post-Einsteinian era of ineffability that broke radically with nineteenth-century deterministic science and in a time in which the body is seen as vulnerable to penetration. Into the twentieth century, it carries with it traces of the past, or, in Michel Serres’ words, it is “polychronic, multitemporal, and reveals a time that is gathered together, with multiple pleats” (60). It is my contention that a conception of electromagnetism that is at once scientific and spiritual is registered in modernist writing about sexualized bodies, which emanate and absorb electromagnetic force, and that a profound ambivalence about electromagnetism’s penetrative power is conveyed in descriptions of the body. For H.D., the language of electromagnetism may well have come through spiritualism, the practice through which, Susan Stanford Friedman remarks, “the polarities of science and religion could be integrated” (Psyche 188). Though her participation in séances began during World War II, H.D. is clearly versed before the war with spiritualist ideas, which relied to a great extent on electromagnetic terminology and concepts as well as popular scientific thought about electricity.5 Though there is no material evidence that Loy attended séances, her biographer notes that some of the Futurists, particularly Giovanni Papini (with whom Loy had an affair), were “immersed” in spiritualism (Burke 112). Loy’s engagement with the language of spiritualism probably derives, as well, from her readings in Christian Science, a religion heavily influenced by spiritualism despite its founder’s insistence that it was not, for Mary Baker Eddy drew on the writings of John Bovee Dods, who left the ministry to explore “electrical psychology” and was among the first “to suggest electricity as an alternative explanation for those things attributed by spiritualists to unseen intelligent agents” (R. Moore 29). The approach for both writers is a hybrid one, exploiting electromagnetism’s entwined associations with science, sexuality, and spirituality. However, while most writers of the period—including D. H. Lawrence, whose work will serve in this chapter as a counterexample—deploy the metaphor of electromagnetism to create celebratory, heteronormative depictions of eroticism in ways that reflect nineteenth-century mechanistic and deterministic understandings of science, some of H.D.’s and Loy’s writings complicate this more typical model. In explicit critiques of heterosexual relationships, electricity in these texts carries with it the threat of electrocution, magnetism the risk of absorptive entrapment. In depictions of lesbian sexuality, H.D. pushes the limits of scientific plausibility further, ultimately 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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rejecting a heterosexualized notion of electromagnetism in favor of older, more fluid models that reemerged in the chaotic scientific era following Einstein’s explosive theorizing—models that Adalaide Morris has observed tend toward “more inclusive and elastic laws” (153). Moreover, for both Loy and H.D. the metaphor operates both sexually and textually, for aesthetics is at the center of electromagnetic discourse in their narratives. What is at stake here is the tension between body and mind—the material and the ethereal—that underlies much modernist writing. For Loy, H.D., and others, the body is penetrated by electromagnetism—it absorbs and emits its power—linking inside to outside, body to world, self to other. And it is in the breaching of these boundaries that spiritual and aesthetic enlightenment comes, a prospect fraught with both promise and danger. The first half of this chapter traces the intricate and overlaying genealogies of electromagnetism—imbricated in the discourses of science, sexuality, and heterodox forms of religion—demonstrating how attempts by scientists to delegitimate nonscientific claims about electricity and magnetism were not always successful, even well into the modernist period. In the second half, I explore how modernist writers draw on these genealogies to explore electromagnetism’s metaphorical possibilities in writing about erotics and aesthetics. Genealogies of Electromagnetism ELECTRICITY, n. The power that causes all natural phenomena not known to be caused by something else. —Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary The discourse of electromagnetism has not been confined to the realm of science. Prior to the Enlightenment era, electromagnetism was embedded in a range of discourses, including spirituality and sexuality. Historian Ernest Benz notes the longevity of these connections: “Electrical and magnetic phenomena have been associated with ideas of the soul, with divine judgment, and with psychic matters, from the beginnings of recorded history and probably before” (vii). Remarking the ancient connection between love and magnetism, he writes, “the magnet has always been a symbol of God, a symbol of the enigmatic attraction of divine love that binds men filled with divine grace to Christ and to one another” (20). These associations were known to modernist readers and writers. At the turn of the twentieth century, science historian Park Benjamin tells his readers, “The folk-lore of almost every nation has its legends recounting the drawing of fire from heaven” (565). So potent was the belief in electricity’s occult power that, despite advancements in scientific knowledge and research, Benjamin can still be found anxiously 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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defending electricity’s scientific basis against those who persist in attributing its power to the supernatural realm. In the 1895 preface to A History of Electricity, Benjamin protests emphatically, “Electricity is not now occult, it is not mystic, it is not magic, its working are no more wonderful than are the rise and fall of the tides” (4). The word electricity is derived from the Greek Elektor, meaning “children of the sun” and denoting the reflected light of the gods, not because of its link to lightning but because, in ancient times, electricity was associated exclusively with brightly colored metals, like amber, that had magnetic properties. In ancient Egypt and Greece, magnetic stones were thought to contain “souls which had fallen from heaven” (Mottelay 1, 17; W. Moore 171). The ancient Greeks and Syrians formed cults of worship around the phenomenon of electricity,6 and in biblical times, Benjamin continues, The thunderstorm became the symbol of divine wrath. Its tremendous effects offered the only realization of the majesty of the divine presence. The law is given amid the thunders and lightnings of Sinai. The voice of God is the thunder and he “directeth his lightnings to the ends of the earth.” (563) Paul Mottelay, who in 1922 published what is still cited as the most comprehensive history of electromagnetism to date, notes the extent to which Madame Blavatsky’s texts cite the occultic, primarily Egyptian, history of electricity, a force she refers to expansively as the Hermes-fire, the lightning of Cybele, the nerve-aura and the fluid of the magnetists, the od of Reichenbach, the fire-globe, or meteor-cat of Babinet, the physic force of Sergeant Cox and Mr. Crookes, the atmospheric magnetism of some naturalists, galvanism, and finally, electricity, which are but various names for many different manifestations or effects of the same all-pervading causes—the Greek Archeus. (qtd. in Mottelay 12–13)7 Several historians note the ancient interrelationship between eros, electricity, and the divine. Mottelay relates that the word magnet means “loving toward iron” in Sanskrit, “loving stone” in French and Spanish, and that the ancient Greeks circa 450 AD believed that “the magnet reconciles husbands to their wives” (15, 27). This notion reemerges in the early modern era, as Renaissance scientist William Gilbert asserts that magnets could act as love potions to reunite married couples and bring them to “coition” (Verschuur 21, 24). Benjamin’s discussion of magnetism and love revolves around a pair 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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of statues in ancient Greece, the god of war in iron with the goddess of love in magnetized metal: he observes, “in the love of the magnet and the iron a new metaphor is given to the world which even the greatest of its poets has not disdained to use” (93–94). By the eighteenth century, Benz recounts, electricity was quite seriously posited as the “vital fluid” or “life force,” an idea widely held by scientists and laypersons alike; thus, we have Frankenstein, for instance, utilizing electric charges in Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic (ix). And by the nineteenth century, Alison Winter reports, Europeans were especially receptive to Mesmerism’s appeal to the power of electromagnetism precisely because electricity was already readily accepted as that which animates the human body and connects bodies to one another: “It was commonly claimed that communication consisted in the transfer of vital fluids between two bodies, that people’s minds and souls touched each other (immaterially) in mysterious ways” (119). Eighteenth-century German theologian Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, according to Benz, produced what was perhaps the most elaborate theory of the religious significance of electricity as vital force. In his interpretation of Genesis, he reasons that since the sun was not created until the fourth day, electrical fire must be the life-animating light of day one. Moving to the prophetic words of Ezekiel about the human body glowing with fire, he alleges, “I do infer from sacred Scripture itself, especially in the first chapter of Ezekiel, that the nature of the soul is analogous to electrical phenomena” (qtd. in Benz 51). On judgment day, in Oetinger’s formulation, electricity is withheld from those who are not Christian, depriving their bodies of life (87–88). Similarly, Oetinger’s contemporary, Procopius Divisch, reads Zechariah’s “Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet” to mean that the victims of the plague are engulfed in electrical flames (71). In his insistence upon the human body as constitutive of the animating force of God—particularly in remarks such as, “God is fire, my soul is fire, nature is fire” (67)—Oetinger flirts with the line between creator and creation, Benz remarks, a position more in line with Eastern rather than Western mysticism (52). Once again, eros and attraction emerge from the margins. Benz argues that these eighteenth-century theologians might be considered the first psychoanalysts in their observation that the “ ‘sensuous soul’ . . . nourished by the ‘electrical fire’ is like the unconscious nourished by libido” (xii). Freud’s term for life force is, of course, primarily sexual, and Benz’ language invites this comparison. For Oetinger, relying heavily on his reading of Emanuel Swedenborg, the heavens and the earth coexist within a magnetic bond (71). The relationship is certainly physical, arguably carnal: Oetinger claims, “With magnets, the following seems to pertain: when their substance 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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attracts something from outside of them or repels it, there exists an internally unnoticeable antagonism of two opposed forces, which devour each other” (qtd. in Benz 70). Interestingly, the enduring metaphor in all of these instances is feeding: the soul is “nourished,” spiritual men are “filled” with grace, and forces “devour each other.” Electricity, via magnetism, binds the universe, its occupants, and its gods within a system based on hunger, lack, and, finally, desire. These alternative genealogies of electricity and magnetism can differ strikingly from the ways in which electromagnetism began to be theorized in scientific discourse in the Enlightenment era. Though extra-scientific beliefs about electromagnetism clearly linger beyond that era, it is during this period that scientists began to claim electromagnetism as a purely scientific phenomenon, severing it (“purifying it,” as Bruno Latour might say) from its cultural associations. As Latour observes, the birth of modernity marks an attempt to divorce nature, society, and religion from one another, ignoring the complex interrelationships between them. In The Order of Things, Foucault theorizes a significant shift—an epistemological “discontinuity”— from the Renaissance to the classical era in thinking about representation and identity. After the close of the sixteenth century, he suggests, a scientific paradigm based on “resemblance”—based in similarities, iterations, analogies, and sympathies—begins to give way to one of rational order, measurement, and “difference”: “what has become important is no longer resemblances but identities and differences” (50). The Renaissance quest for knowledge was fundamentally an effort to recognize and interpret endless chains of associations between everything in the natural, and supernatural, world, finding truth in signs of resemblance between features of “the theatre of life or the mirror of nature” (17). By the middle of the seventeenth century it is not enough to see the resemblance; one must prove it scientifically: “The primary instrument of knowledge becomes the analysis of resemblances, not their mere recognition. . . . [T]he mind’s essential activity in knowing is no longer the connecting of things but their discrimination” (Gutting 147). Thus, resemblance is gradually relegated to the realm of imagination and intuition; while it may still inform scientific methodology, it does so from the unacknowledged margins (Foucault 71). Order is to be understood as a system of binaries in the classical episteme. Electromagnetism is viewed as a unitary field among Renaissance-era scientists, but by the late seventeenth century scientists are guided by their “intent on making attractions compatible with their mechanical universe,” and by the eighteenth century, the focus has become electricity’s bipolar nature (Heilbron 159). Though scientists had long observed the magnet’s divergent reactions to different stimuli, it is Benjamin Franklin and William 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Watson in the middle of the eighteenth century who first, independently, split electricity into two oppositional forces called “positive” and “negative.” Just as Foucault observed of this period of transition, Benjamin Franklin uses a system of resemblance to illustrate a model of difference, analogizing the sensory to the electrical system, in his first published work: “One cannot miss the analogy between the animating pain, the inseparable, equal, compensating pleasure, and the inert rock, on the one hand, and negative electricity, positive electricity, and the neutral state, on the other” (qtd. in Heilbron 190). So dualistic in their thinking, scientists of the period argued strenuously that what we know as electricity is in fact two entirely different “fluids,” acting in opposition, countering the older history of electricity on which Mesmer draws, one that hypothesized electromagnetism as an atmospheric “ether,” a unitary field of energy uniting everything and everyone. As historian J. L Heilbron observes of the eighteenth-century study of electricity, “The chief moral of this history may be that when confronted with a choice between a qualitative model deemed intelligible and an exact description lacking clear physical foundations, the leading physicists of the Enlightenment preferred exactness” (240). Precision, classification, and identification are the chief goals of this era’s approach. By the mid-nineteenth century, the public eighteenth-century electrical spectacles, demonstrations, and parlor tricks that delighted audiences as diverse as the participants of country fairs and the scientists at the Royal Society of London had largely given way to an increasing desecularization of electrical phenomena in both England and America. Though midnineteenth century Londoners retained some venues in which they could be entertained by electromagnetic phenomena, this tradition was fading as the realm of science was becoming increasingly bifurcated between those who studied in the laboratory and those who employed its principles in pursuit of spiritual goals.8 Spiritualism and its predecessor Mesmerism emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a bridge between erotic, spiritual, and scientific conceptions of the phenomenon. Benz points out that the work of eighteenth-century theologians who theorized electricity, most notably Athanasius Kircher, directly influenced Franz Mesmer’s theory of magnetism.9 Mesmer merely removed the theological language and implications of these theories to create his own version of a universe mysteriously bound together with animating electrical fluid (6–7, 13). Mesmerism exploited both popular beliefs about electricity’s mystical or paranormal role as the binding force of an etheric universe as well as new descriptions by Enlightenment-era scientists of its bipolar properties. Mesmer’s ideas undoubtedly derive from an eighteenth-century notion of electricity, as illustrated by a remark by Joseph Priestley that theorizes 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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electricity as a ubiquitous and powerful presence: “The electric fluid is no local, or occasional agent in the theatre of the world. Late discoveries show that its presence and effects are every where, and that it acts a principal part in the grandest and most interesting scenes of nature” (xiv). In the American spiritualist periodical Banner of Light, one self-described medium attempts to illustrate this universalistic concept to a lay audience in 1900: [T]here is, instead of each man being a unit, individualized, and cut off from all other men, an indication that you are interrelated to each other; that there is a connection binding each and all together; some subtle, invisible medium, shall we call it, over which thought vibrations may be transmitted in much the same fashion that the vibrations of the sun and stars are transmitted across the inter-stellar ether, and affecting by these vibrations not only the mass of earth, but every particle pertaining thereto. (Morse 1) As everyone and everything is connected in this electric ether, influencing or healing one another is simply a matter of harnessing the electromagnetic flow between people and objects; this is the role of the “Mesmerizer,” who is uniquely adept at controlling the ether around him. Mesmerism held that a patient, often female, suffering from physical, mental, or even moral illness could be cured by the hands of a male Mesmerizer, who magically manipulated her electrical fluid in order to adjust her electrical polarities, using either physical magnets or an invisible polarized magnetic force emanating from his two hands, one emitting a negative charge and the other a positive one.10 In the British Spiritual Telegraph, one self-described doctor and Mesmerist explains: “[M]an, when he is in vigorous health, is able to give out magneto-electric currents from all parts of his body, and deriving magnetic energy from the earth on which he resides, he is able, for a time, to electrify oxygen” (Ashburner 52–53). Though Mesmer was notably secretive about his power to heal—imparting knowledge of the practice only to select initiates—and formal institutions of science were skeptical of his methods, the process looked scientific enough to the average observer, who could watch the effects of the Mesmeric trance on the objects of his touch. Initially, sessions with Mesmer were private; as his popularity grew, however, he began to hold more public group healings, in which multiple patients gathered around a tub of “magnetized” water, grasping iron rods, while Mesmer circulated among them, directing doses of energy through the touch of his hands (Gauld 5). Eventually, Mesmerizers began to perform on stage as entertainers, inducing subjects into hypnotic trances in front of live audiences.

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Mesmer’s sessions were fraught with sexual impropriety; the private sessions between the male Mesmerizer and the young female subject evinced numerous tales of rape and seduction, a threat enhanced by the fact that the Mesmeric seizure, or “crisis” as it was known, looked very much like an orgasm, and that individuals nearing “crisis” were immediately taken to another room for a private audience with the Mesmerizer “to be stroked, hypnotized, or otherwise guided through the crisis into a state of quiescence” (Buranelli 127). A commissioned special report of 1786 condemned broadly the practice of Mesmerism because of its erotic component; the report’s description of the Mesmeric “crisis” clearly illustrates its parallel to orgasm: When this kind of crisis is coming on, the face reddens and the eyes become ardent—this is a sign from nature that desire is present. . . . Now the crisis continues and the eye is troubled. This is an unequivocal sign of a total disorder of the senses. . . . When this sign occurs, the pupils become moist and breathing becomes shallow and uneven. Then convulsions occur, with sudden and short movements of the arms and legs or the whole body. With lively and sensitive women, a convulsion often occurs as the final degree and the termination of the sweetest emotions. This state is followed by a languor, a weakness, and a sort of sleep of the senses which is the rest needed after a strong agitation. (qtd. in Crabtree 93) Or, as one practitioner boasted, “It is exactly like the basic act of reproduction, exception that here the emitting organ is the brain” (qtd. in Crabtree 196). Protesting, perhaps too much, that the Mesmerizer’s actions are not sexual, this experimenter illustrates just the opposite in his depiction of the male Mesmerizer’s practice: It is necessary . . . that a fire run through you, that a kind of erection (which is not erotic) happens that allows an emission of the brain to depart from your being. Your hand must conduct this animated essence, this living magnet, to the chosen surface, and it must immediately establish the spiritual report and attraction proper to it. (qtd. in Crabtree 196) Women in a Mesmeric trance, Mesmerism’s detractors argued, were subject to “prolonged touch, communicated heat, and deep gazes” and worse; one skeptic questions the intimate nature of Mesmerist contact: Ordinarily the magnetizer has the knees of the woman gripped between his own; the knees and all the parts below are therefore in contact. The

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The fact that hypnotized women could withstand without reaction any amount of torture while in a magnetic trance—Winter reports such abuses as pouring acid onto the skin, thrusting knives under fingernails, even electric shocks administered to arms (3)—fueled the public imagination with regard to what kinds of sexual liberties could be available to the Mesmerizer. In Mesmerism, then, the linkage between sexuality and electrical or magnetic phenomena found a more direct expression; Mesmer’s version of electromagnetic theology opened up electricity’s latent erotic possibilities without the intrusion of religious strictures. Some nineteenth-century writers noted the “striking similarity between the states attributed to religious ecstatics over the centuries and those of magnetic somnambulists,” which, as we have seen, mimicked sexual arousal and orgasm (Crabtree 178). As Mesmerism evolved over the course of the century, it became increasingly desecularized, realigning itself with spirituality and prophecy, an avenue that promoted for the first time the power of the hypnotized subject, a forerunner of spiritualism’s medium. Nineteenthcentury religious figures, from Protestants to Swedenborgians, adopted and adapted Mesmerism’s tenets and practices to their own ends. One evangelist, for instance, argued that God used electricity and magnetism to regulate nature, pointing to the model of the powerful Mesmerizer’s incapacitation of the passive subject as a model of God’s relationship to humankind (Winter 254–55, 257). By the late nineteenth century, electromagnetic machines were readily available for purchase, permitting one to heal oneself without the intervention of a human Mesmerizer, thus mechanizing the process. It is clear that, by the mid to late nineteenth century, spiritualism was borrowing from Mesmerism a quasi-scientific vocabulary contingent upon the language and logic of electricity and polarity. Originating modestly in a series of unexplained knockings, or “rappings,” in an upstate New York household in 1848, spiritualism evolved quickly into the practice of holding séances, overseen by a gifted medium with an aptitude for contacting the dead from the spirit realm and channeling their communications to living relatives in attendance. Fueled by rabid attention from the press, as well as evangelistic performances by itinerant mediums, the movement spread rapidly throughout the Northeast, then the Americas, and into Western and Eastern Europe in only a few years. Estimates of the numbers of its devoted membership vary widely—from several thousand to several million at its peak, depending upon the source—but by all accounts it was not a minor 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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hand is applied to the diaphragm area and sometimes lower, over the ovaries. So touch is being applied to many areas at once, and in the vicinity of some of the most sensitive parts of the body. (qtd. in Crabtree 92)

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movement but a major force in nineteenth-century culture, comprised of thousands of membership circles involved not only in holding séances but in reporting their successes and advocating their beliefs within the dozens of spiritualist periodicals published and distributed mid-century. Declining in the United States after a brief revival in the 1890s, spiritualism’s popularity continued unabated in Great Britain throughout the modernist period, enjoying a surge after the Great War as people flocked to mediums to contact family members lost in the war, and boasting almost a quarter of a million English devotees in the 1930s (Nelson 155, 161).11 What makes spiritualism an especially modern, if not modernist, phenomenon, perhaps, is its focus on science. Like Mesmerism, spiritualism wedded a paranormal philosophy with scientific language. On the pages of their various publications, spiritualists argued vigorously for the scientific validity of their observations, and the overriding and rather timely concentration on its scientific, rather than religious, aspects probably helps account for its widespread and diverse following, among Christians and nontheists alike. Unlike the mystical experience, which takes place entirely within the body of the mystic, a séance is public, with many present who can observe and assess empirically the evidence presented, evidence that might include visual, aural, even olfactory stimuli; actual materializations of spirits or a supernatural substance known as ectoplasm; or specific communications from the departed containing information so private as to be unknown to the medium who delivers it. Spiritualism is scientifically verifiable, asserts one commentator in the inaugural 1888 issue of well-known British medium Emma Hardinge Britten’s The Two Worlds: “[T]he spirits of the so-called dead can and do produce . . . sounds and movements by which telegraphic messages can be spelled out and test facts rendered to prove that the operators, though invisible, are the living and active spirits of those the world has believed to be sleeping in the grave” (Britain 1). The widely circulated Banner of Light in the United States regularly featured articles offering scientific “proof” of spiritualism via its basis in electromagnetism; a five-part series in 1899 entitled “The Bearing of Electrical Conditions on Active and Passive States” is one such attempt at garnering legitimacy for the movement, citing experiments in wireless telegraphy that “demonstrate the analogy subsisting between man’s nervous system and discontinuous electric radio conductors” and research into sleep states that prove negative charges fuel the magnetic, receptive state of the trance (Vitae, I; II-IV). As the series concludes, “hypnotic, neuropathic, mesmeric, mediumistic and magical phenomena, are all electro-magnetic. The subjective phenomena of consciousness, sensation and volition . . . pertain to the interaction of the positive and negative energies inherent in our electro-magnetic nervous vitality” (V). In one 1869 spiritualist 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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publication, the spirit of Washington Irving reports his meeting in the afterlife with Benjamin Franklin, who demonstrated with an electrical apparatus the machinations of spiritual telecommunication (Horn 46–49). H.D. herself compares the spiritualist séance to a telegraph or “some spiritual device that was to me no more mysterious than the working of a telephone” (“H.D.” 199). Like Mesmeric interventions, séances could be sexually charged events. Rachel Connor has remarked the ways in which “the séance constituted a site of desire,” projecting as it does the varied desires and fantasies of the participants on the medium (124). The language of mediumship, historian Alex Owen contends, “oozed sexuality. Mediums surrendered and were then entered, seized, possessed by another” (Darkened 218). Owen argues further that “physical intimacy was a legitimate aspect of spiritualist practice” (218). Contact between participants was necessary to effect a successful spirit communication, and when possessed a medium could be touched by those present to verify the reality of the spirit’s presence (Connor 122). Moreover, participants understood well the need of spirit manifestations for physical human contact, even erotic contact, and female mediums thought to be possessed had tacit license to act in a manner not in accord with expectations of feminine behavior and propriety; the spirit controlling the medium’s body, not the medium herself, is the responsible party (Owen 221). Appropriating the language of Mesmerism as well as some of its practices, spiritualists often wrote of their experiences in electromagnetic terms and retained as well Mesmer’s system of balancing positive and negative—or male and female—energies (Braude 23). The spiritualist séance, led by a feminine medium, required a balance of positive (or masculine) charges and negative (or feminine) energies around the table. Emma Britten explains that both positive and negative energies are crucial to the success of the séance, with those positively charged people acting as “magnetizers,” the negatively charged as “mediums,” such that the “combined magnetisms of the circle” form a “battery” (“Spiritual Gifts.—No. 1” 330; “Spiritual Gifts.—No. 3” 354). The circle, she directs, must be carefully balanced, with no positive or negative being so strong as to neutralize the electric current between the living and those on the other side (“Path” VI 508). Stressing the scientific nature of the séance, one spiritualist goes so far as to suggest, “The floors of the circle room should be intersected with plateaux of glass to prevent the escape of the magnetic fluid. The air should often be purified with streams of ozone; the walls surrounded with graceful forms of art and well selected colours” (“Art Magic” 465).12 Counter to the crude physical apparatuses utilized by Mesmerists, the effect of the spiritualist séance is the creation of this virtual “battery,” in the words of another late nineteenth-century 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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spiritualist: “Some one or more individuals, charged with an excess of electro vital force, have given off such exhalations as formed a ready and spontaneous battery for attracting spirits desirous of communicating with earth” (“Origin” 21). A circle of alternating masculine and feminine charges grants communal access to the heavens. Spiritualism’s feminized medium, however, was not entirely grounded within an essentialist construction of gender, and this bending of gendered boundaries would have held attraction for many modernist women writers. Though the movement followed Mesmerism by requiring a balance of positive and negative valances, spiritualism’s conception of gender was looser, more diffuse. In Mesmer’s system, the Mesmerizer is invariably male, or positive and active, and the subject often female, or negative and receptive; positive energy is transmitted to the passive negative presence of the female, who is cured by the actions of the man. In spiritualism, however, there is arguably a powerful “reversal” as the feminized medium, in her powers of receptivity, paradoxically serves in the “active role of penetrating the minds of her audience” (Basham 127). The role of the medium, then, encapsulates well the precarious tension between active and passive roles, between commanding a spirit to enter the body and ceding control of that body. Furthermore, the spiritualist medium, while feminine, is not necessarily female; nearly half of them, in fact, were not (R. Moore 105). Spiritualist philosophy holds that feminine men and masculine women can act as negative and positive poles, respectively; thus, in order to initiate and maintain the transmission of electrical current necessary for spirit contact, the circle of the séance is comprised of alternating negative and positive individuals, but not necessarily alternating women and men (Braude 23). Nonetheless, in the popular parlance, this notion of women as negative, and men positive, poles of force is mirrored in a larger historical shift described by Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex in conceiving of gender on the model of difference rather than similitude or resemblance, and it is not held only by those writing before the turn of the twentieth century or those dabbling in spiritualism. Jean Toomer’s unpublished poem, “Also Persuaded,” bemoans the era of the “modern woman” in its attempted erasure of sexual difference: “men and women, / Lacking the deep polarity and its effects . . . / Might just as well be cardboard mankins” [sic] (Jean Toomer Papers, f. 1304). In fact, this logic so saturated modernist era thinking on gender that Dora Marsden feels compelled in 1913 to devote space in the New Freewoman to protest it: A great deal of pseudo scientific nonsense has been uttered upon this question of “positive” and “negative.” It has been held to be a biological difference inhering in the different genders of the human male 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Marsden, who elsewhere discredited the “sex pathologists, German and other,” argued that women’s “negativeness” is not inherent at all but acquired through socialization (“Views” [1.9] 166). The scientific ideas of spiritualists, however, were not necessarily logically sound, as they had seemingly little trouble adapting the rigidity of nineteenth-century models to new twentieth-century paradigms that critiqued these models.13 Spiritualists were undaunted when the theory of ether—that “perfect, frictionless fluid” (de Tunzelmann, Treatise 72)—is revived in late nineteenth-century work in telecommunications that had begun to threaten the dualistic view of electricity that dominated scientific discourse in earlier years. Both James Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz, inventors of the radio, used ether to explain how light and sound travel. In language that sounds much like that of eighteenth-century scientists, Maxwell explains that “[t]here is an ethereal medium pervading all bodies and modified only in degree by their presence. The parts of this medium are capable of being set in motion by electric currents and magnets” (453). By the twentieth century, as I have argued in the previous chapter, a major shift had occurred, and religious movements—orthodox and heterodox alike— saw the Einsteinian era as more conducive to spiritual explanations of scientific phenomena, with even respected scientists arguing for “an all-pervading universal mind, or omnipresent intelligence, forming an entity even more fundamental than the all-pervading ether” to explain how electromagnetism worked (de Tunzelmann, Treatise 454). If everyone is connected via an electromagnetic conduit, the reasoning goes, then telepathic communication should be possible, between people as well as between supernatural entities. Thus, for spiritualists, “the ether may transmit, be a medium for the conveyance of soul-vibrations,” the space in which electrical conduits between medium and spirit flow (Bradford).14 Modernist writers, then, witnessed a resurgence of alternative pseudoscientific movements that had developed alongside, and counter to, Enlightenment science, movements that drew on long-held notions of electromagnetism’s significance as at once magical, erotic, and paranormal. Most descriptions of ether at the turn of the twentieth century were based in pre-Enlightenment models of resemblance, drawing “proof ” of its existence from models in nature and analogizing various scientific systems to one another. In a chapter tellingly subtitled, “What Magnetism is like, and its analogies with Life,” physicist and spiritualist Sir Oliver Lodge wrote numerous monographs on ether, arguing that because etheric magnets 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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form a closed loop, “it is rather like Life,” since energy drives reproduction (Ether and Reality 113). Similarly, to spiritualist Charles Dawbarn, in an etheric system the human ego can be mapped to the machinations of the atom: “And as intelligence, matter and energy are all there is to God, atom or man, we recognized Ego as personified in every atom.” Perhaps more striking, however, is the analogy he draws in 1900 between heterosexual relationships and cellular organization in order to illustrate the interconnectedness of all things: The scientist tells us a tale of this cell life more interesting than the most popular novel, which always uses love as its key note to attract the reader. One of these cells is a young gentlemen [sic]. Here is another cell which—by nature if not by art—is posing as a young lady. Each cell contains protoplasm and a nucleus. It is a case of legal matrimony without any church blessing on the ceremony. In 1875 Oscar Hertwig watched the honeymoon, and his observations are now confirmed and accepted as facts. Sexuality, once again, emerges in the history of electricity in the consummation of molecular bonds. In Dawbarn’s description, we are linked together in the universe just as atoms are bound, by oppositional forces that are irresistibly attracted to one another. Likewise, in Lodge’s personification of the magnet’s attraction to iron, the two are cast as a couple who, long kept apart, enjoy a reunion and, again, consummation: “[T]he two opposite charges have got close together, they have as it were re-united, they are mutually satisfied” (Ether and Reality 108). It recalls one nineteenth-century account of the history of electricity by William Whewell—the man who coined the term “scientist”—who dubbed the “drawing of a spark from the human body” an “electrical kiss” (13). Though Einstein’s quantum physics critiqued the nineteenth-century model of the molecule, spiritualists adapt this rigid paradigm for their own purposes. Like spiritualists, however, turn-of-the-century sexologists tended to maintain a system of difference expressed as positive (or male/masculine) and negative (or female/feminine) polarities that are drawn to one another like magnets, bolstering an argument for heteronormativity. Attraction occurs naturally between opposites, this line of reasoning runs. The logic of gendered opposites lends support to the nineteenth-century conception of the “invert” as well, the mannish woman or effeminate man attracted to a member of her or his own sex, and leads Havelock Ellis and others to mistrust fundamentally the concept of bisexuality, which disrupts the binary logic of inversion.15 Despite the various sexologists’ coining of multiple 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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terms, and multiple categories, of identity for those not attracted to the opposite sex, each “intermediate” type is invariably defined according to their degree of maleness or femaleness, so closely are the notions of masculinity and femininity tied to sexual desire.16 Though Ellis and Symonds’ Sexual Inversion calls on examples of same-sex desire in ancient Greece, as Gilbert Herdt points out, the ancient Greek conception of sexuality was far less rigid, more “pansexual” perhaps, and Ellis concedes that there is little correlation to be found between the two eras (Herdt 14; Ellis and Symonds 24). The scientifically minded Ellis—who printed a book on electricity in his scientific publication series17—contends that, with few exceptions, true “inverts” take on the characteristics of the opposite sex and desire those of the same sex. Ellis and Symonds describe the female invert—who “ought to have been a man”—as “cold,” and “unattractive” (except to the “neurotic” and “feminine type” of man), with muscles so firm that “an inverted woman may give an unfeminine impression to the sense of touch”; she demonstrates “nothing of that sexual shyness and engaging air of weakness and dependence which are an invitation to men” and finds herself “an enthusiastic admirer of feminine beauty” (96–98). Thus, in both heterosexuality and “inversion,” attraction occurs between opposites; difference, in fact, engenders attraction. To Ellis’ mind, so strong is the need for “a certain sexual opposition” that inverts are more likely to seek out those “of different race or color” to compensate for “the longing for something which the lover himself does not possess” (Studies 288).18 So it is perhaps not surprisingly that some sexologists spoke of sexuality in electromagnetic terms. While Otto Weininger’s influential Sex and Character (1903) initially denies the rigidity of other sexologists’ categories of gender and sexuality, he nonetheless formulates a theory of sexuality that is not remarkably unlike Ellis’ in its adherence to dualistic logic. Drawing on the scientific language of gravitation, chemistry, electromagnetism, and genetics, Weininger argues that “[s]exual attraction is nearly always, as in the case of gravitation, reciprocal” in that “every male type has its female counterpart with regard to sexual affinity” (27, 28). Simply put, he writes, “Like poles repel, unlike attract” (28). His rhetorical stance is strikingly similar to that of William Gilbert, a Renaissance-era pioneer in the study of electromagnetism: “Opposite poles attract opposite poles. But now, if in the same way you present N. to N. or S. to S., one stone repels the other. . . . [W]hen rightly arranged, the parts attract each other, i.e., both stones, the weaker and the stronger, come together and with all their might tend to union” (115, 117). It is as simplistic as eighteenth-century scientist Joseph Priestley’s description of magnetism: “Bodies positively and negatively electrical, when in contact, will unite to one another; as will magnets, when they are laid 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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with their opposite poles to one another” (501). Believing, like Freud, that people are inherently bisexual, Weininger admits a continuum of masculinity and femininity, which allows for the possibility of attraction that is not heterosexual, and this is, to his mind, consistent with electromagnetic theory, for “[l]ike the variations in the magnetism of the earth, these sexual oscillations are either regular or irregular” (54). Ultimately, however, it is a continuum that idealizes the poles: “For true sexual union it is necessary that there come together a complete male (M) and a complete female (F), even though in different cases the M and F are distributed between the two individuals in different proportions.” (29). As Roy Porter and Lesley Hall note, essential maleness is positive, essential femaleness negative (164). Sexual desire is ensnared in a scientific equation of essential maleness and femaleness, positive and negative. For Weininger, this biological feature is an inevitability, a “definite law,” as empirically valid as the laws that govern electromagnetism: “When we speak of the lines of force between the opposite poles of magnets we are dealing with a force no more natural than that which irresistibly attracts the spermatozoon and the egg-cell” (39, 40). Though separated by centuries, for Gilbert and Weininger alike the natural law of attraction and repulsion carries moral implications. In the second half of his book, Weininger goes on to use this “law” to argue strenuously for eugenics, reasoning that the most truly male and truly female individuals will produce the healthiest children. Chapter 13, entitled “Judaism,” is a rant against Africans, Asians, and particularly Jews, who are to his mind effeminate and thus, like women, negative and “devoid of a soul.” For Gilbert, “nature observes strictly the laws it has imposed upon bodies. . . . And nature will not suffer an unjust and inequitable peace, or agreement, but makes war and employs force to make bodies acquiesce fairly and justly” (116–17). His language foreshadows Weininger’s discomfort with difference when he notes that “the poles are readiest to spurn and drive away what is presented to them amiss, and what is inconformable and foreign” (117). As rigid and deterministic as models of sexology may seem, however, sexologists drew on alternative genealogies of electromagnetism as well. Many sexologists, including Ellis, were deeply concerned about religion and spirituality, in its orthodox and heterodox forms, interests that intersect with their theorizing of sexuality. Krafft-Ebing, in fact, became keenly interested in the study of sexuality in relation to Mesmerism, and he experimented with using hypnotism to “cure” a lesbian patient of her “perversion” (Hauser 211). Ellis writes extensively about science, religion, and art in society and the interrelationship between them, dubbing the strict division between religion and science characteristic of the twentieth century “absurd” (Dance 188). 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Both science and mysticism, he argues, are after all in pursuit of the “control of Nature” (184). “And what of that curious craving for religion which so often went hand in hand with inversion?” Radclyffe Hall’s protagonist asks in The Well of Loneliness, a novel published in 1928 with commentary by Ellis (405). This supposed link, between same-sex desire and spirituality, is remarked by many in the sexological field, as they sought biological explanations for an apparent affinity among so-called inverts for religion and mysticism. In Krafft-Ebing’s most famous work, Psychopathia Sexualis, he speculates about connections between religion and sexuality, noting that “[t]he cause of religious insanity is often to be found in sexual aberration,” and that “[r]eligion as well as sexual love is mystical and transcendental,” both “metaphysical processes which give unlimited scope to imagination” (8–9). On a more sympathetic note, Ellis and Symonds’ Sexual Inversion includes mention of a “Dr. K,” who contends that lesbian desire is elementally and uniquely spiritual: “While the feeling, doubtless, has a sexual basis, it is in many cases not recognised, and the love, though intense, is purely spiritual in character, and is placed upon a high plane” (289). These musings have as much to do with the feminization of alternative spiritualities as they do alternative sexualities. Magnus Hirschfeld links the feminine with mysticism: “The feminine impress, in the case of homosexual men, is in general best indicated by the presence of greater sensitiveness and receptivity, also by the dominance of the emotional life . . . by a tendency to mysticism, and by various inclinations and habits feminine in the good or less good sense of the word” (qtd. in Carpenter, Intermediate 162). Weininger associates women with mysticism, but with damning conclusions: The current opinion that woman is religious is equally erroneous. Female mysticism, when it is anything more than mere superstition, is either thinly veiled sexuality . . . as in numerous spiritualists and theosophists, or it is a mere passive and unconscious acceptance of man’s religious views which are clung to the more firmly because of woman’s natural disinclination for them. The lover is readily transformed into a Saviour; very readily . . . the Saviour becomes the lover. All the great women visionaries known to history were hysterical. (276–77) Recently, historian Joy Dixon has traced the “alternative, even oppositional, narrative” of the occult and mysticism that underlies the history of sexology, investigating the ways in which turn-of-the-century “sexological and psychoanalytic claims regarding gender and sexuality” were filtered through spiritual and occultic paradigms, even while these religious influences were denied (410, 411). According to Dixon, the Theosophical 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Society preceded many sexologists in studying explorations between samesex desire and spirituality, and its founder Madame Blavatsky plumbed intersections between sex, science, and mysticism in her writings (414–15). Theosophists theorized that the “Higher Self ” was bisexual, “a ‘divine hermaphrodite’ ” (422). Ellis himself, Dixon reminds us, asserted that a mystical experience, a kind of religious conversion, propelled him toward his study of sexuality (412). It should be noted that Dixon mentions briefly the American Edward Carpenter as well, who published numerous modernist-era books on the intersection of sexuality and mysticism, advocating a far more radical, less dualistic, stance on same-sex attraction than most European sexologists. In widely read publications, Carpenter equated physical, sexual pleasure with the mystical experience, and in writing about the so-called “intermediate” sex, he begins to dismantle the binary logic of sexological thinking: “It is beginning to be recognised that the sexes do not or should not normally form two groups hopelessly isolated in habit and feeling from each other, but that they rather represent the two poles of one group—which is the human race” (Intermediate 17). Carpenter, in fact, elevates those who are not heterosexual to a more important role in the intellectual, political, and artistic life of society: [A]s the ordinary love has a special function in the propagation of the race, so the other has its special function in social and heroic work, and in the generation—not of the bodily children—but of those children of the mind, the philosophical conceptions and ideals which transform our lives and those of society. (Intermediate 70) Carpenter’s beliefs about the mystical nature of sexual union attracted many, and this notion is echoed in the writings of both H.D. and Loy. Blissfully ignoring his sympathy with the “intermediate sex,” conservative bestselling modernist-era author Marie Stopes quotes Carpenter liberally throughout her well-known Married Love on his belief in the mystical aspects of sexual relations: in her typically lush prose, she heterosexualizes his observations, exclaiming that “the glow of half swooning rapture in which the mystic’s whole being melts and floats in the light of the divine force is paralleled in the rapture of lovers” (109). Loy’s “History of Religion and Eros” echoes many of Carpenter’s beliefs about the sacredness of sexual expression, particularly when he remarks the “intoxicating . . . penetrating” beauty of sexual love, “emotional and spiritual” (Love’s 17). H.D.’s childhood religion, Moravianism, also makes the sexual act a sacrament.19 The ancient notion of hieros gamos, or ritualized copulation between humans representing deities, 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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is treated at length in G. R. S. Mead’s theosophical writings, such as The Wedding-Song of Wisdom, and it appealed to Ezra Pound.20 Just as H.D.’s aesthetic manifesto Notes on Thought and Vision stresses equally the development of the physical, intellectual, and spiritual aspects of the body, Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age equates the sexual with the mystical experience, since both share the goal of “union and non-differentiation” (27). In this, both texts rely on a tradition of erotic psychophysiological experience associated with mysticism and evoked by an absolute submission of the body to the spirit. Medieval historians, for instance, have shown that for thirteenth-century women mystics, “the symbolism of courtly love mingles with the metaphysical expression of union with God, thanks to their profane as well as religious culture,” and that the tradition of eroticism in mysticism can be traced back earlier (Brunn and Epiney-Burgard xxv). Examples of the language of eros abound in mystical literature. One tenth-century male mystic describes the ecstatic experience in terms of physical love: “And now give yourself to me that I may allay my hunger with you, that I kiss and clasp your unutterable glory . . . that I be filled” (Symeon 302). Sixteenthcentury Saint Maria Maddalena dé Pazzi wrote of stripping the clothes from Jesus to look at him naked: “For me You shall be naked, O my Jesus. . . . I want your naked, naked humanhood” (287); she was apparently known to strip off her own clothing, an experience by no means unique to her but reported by many mystics experiencing “the same intense fervour of divine love” (Thurston 211). In a discussion of the mystic’s “marriage” of soul to God, twentieth-century religious historian Evelyn Underhill cites the “daring” depiction offered by Richard of St. Victor, who speaks of the stages of “betrothal” and “marriage” in patently carnal terms: before marriage, with a “burning desire,” the soul “thirsts for the Beloved,” and after their marriage, which “could not be a barren ecstasy,” the soul is “caught up to such unspeakable delight” (139–40). So prevalent is the notion of the soul’s marriage to God that many mystics report “the spontaneous appearance of a miraculous ring upon the finger of certain virgins . . . preceded by an ecstasy in which the soul thus favoured believes herself to have gone through some form of mystic espousal with Christ” (Thurston 130). Well into the early modern era, religious ecstasy retains an erotic component; Phyllis Mack describes the “intensely physical,” orgasmic quality of the experience of the seventeenth-century female prophet: “she felt her body to be flooded by a divine essence that she experienced variously as a loss of control . . . or as the mystic’s rush of energy streaming from inside the self” (8). The mystical experience is appropriated as well by spiritualists and Mesmerists, who used electromagnetism to explain the mystic’s detachment of body from soul; in a practice he dubs “magnetic spiritism,” historian Adam Crabtree cites 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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one practitioner, in 1823, who sees “striking similarity between the states attributed to religious ecstatics over the centuries and those of magnetic somnambulists” (178). In drawing on an older tradition that defies scientific norms, Carpenter, though, is a clear exception in the realm of sexology, for nearly all other sexologists adhere to heteronormative notions of sexuality’s oppositional logic. Indeed, it may well have been his radical breakdown of the binary logic of inversion that caused his The Intermediate Sex to be rejected by the British medical establishment, which had begun to regard highly the books of Ellis and others.21 We see this more accepted rhetoric on the pages of periodicals of the time as well as popular nonfiction. Marie Stopes concurs with both theories of ether and the logic of opposition governing many sexologists’ theories of sexuality. In her Married Love, she observes, As I see them, the man and the woman are each organs, parts, of the other. And in the strictest scientific, as well as in a mystical, sense they together are a single unit, an individual entity. There is a physiological as well as a spiritual truth in the words “they twain shall be one flesh.” (161) Electromagnetic attraction serves as an apt metaphor for this idealized notion of sexual intercourse: [O]ne might compare two human beings to two bodies charged with electricity of different potentials. Isolated from each other the electric forces within them are invisible, but if they come into the right juxtaposition the force is transmuted, and a spark, a glow of burning light arises between them. Such is love. (7–8) Moreover, an electric “spark” ignites during intercourse and produces life, in the form of a child (110). Self-described doctor A. A. Lindsay, however, sees electromagnetism as more than a metaphor for sexual attraction; electromagnetism actually creates sexual attraction. In his 1916 quasi-scientific, popular publication on science and sexuality, The Chemistry, Electricity and Psychology of Love, the discourse of electricity and magnetism lends explanatory power to theories of love, sex, and marriage, drawing undoubtedly on both the writings of the sexologists as well as ancient associations between electricity and sexuality. So certain is he that these associations are common knowledge, he explains that “it is not necessary for me to supply all the evidence upon the subject” (3). Here electromagnetism, and the attraction of opposites, is invoked 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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to explain lust between a man and woman. Lindsay narrates the tale of a man driving through unfamiliar countryside who stops at a farmhouse to fill his depleted water tank. At the very instance that he draws a bucket from the cistern, the farmer’s daughter slips from the roof above him, and, like iron to a magnet, falls neatly into a sexual embrace; he thinks he is in love. The logic of opposition is at work here, for he instantly feels that “she, whose little right foot is in my right coat pocket and whose left foot is in my left coat pocket, with her arms around my neck, is the rest of myself” (4). This portrait of the couple, held together physically by the force of magnetic power, recalls Park Benjamin’s description of the two statues of ancient Greece suspended and held into place by the magnetic attraction between the metals that comprised them, evidence to many historians of electricity that the Greeks had some understanding of the machinations of electromagnetism. The polarity established between attraction and attracted in these two statues, or in the man and the farmer’s daughter, is not, then, unlike the configuration of sexuality constructed by turn-of-the-century sexologists in its focus on opposites, positive and negative. Indeed, Lindsay warns his followers that love is merely an electrical phenomenon—lust—to which we humans falsely ascribe emotion: In the midst of the flame and frenzy of cells electrically and chemically calling for their opposite polarity and their chemical affinity, a pair of alleged lovers may not like to be informed that they are sensing that which is experienced between particles or parcels of matter and under a law of the most ordinary things in the universe. (13) Lust is purely a matter of opposites attracting, for Lindsay dryly describes the state as when “two human bodies of unlike vibration in their chemistry and electricity act upon each other” (9). It is because one is active and the other passive, in this mechanized view, that love based in sexual attraction rarely lasts; one (a personified “iron”) is merely a receiver of the other (the electrified “steel”), and when the electric charge has worn down, the steel and iron part ways. Bodies—positive and negatively charged alike—are defenseless before the overwhelming power of electrochemical forces, which flood and then recede. The Erotics and Aesthetics of Electromagnetism It has become commonplace among the unthinking, or those who think badly, to assume an opposition of hostility between mysticism and science. If “science” is, as we have some reason to believe, 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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D. H. Lawrence relies so heavily on electromagnetic metaphors—electricity, magnetism, lightning—in his writings about spiritualized heterosexual attraction and desire that he serves as a useful, albeit brief, example to read with and against writings by H.D. and Mina Loy. The sexual body, for Lawrence, emanates and receives electrical and magnetic forces. In a passage illustrative of the most typical use of this metaphor, Siegmund of The Trespasser, upon physical contact with Helena, “would feel a peculiar jerking in his pulse, very much like electricity, when he held her hand” (155). Heterosexual attraction is cast as electromagnetic attraction. In an early scene in “The Captain’s Doll,” Hepburn is drawn to Hannele “like a piece of iron returning to a magnet,” positioning himself across from her—as with Siegmund and Helena, hands together—in the manner of a Mesmerist to his patient: “Give me your hands, and let me feel that we are together,” he demands (The Fox 83). In fact, Lawrence betrays a spiritualist understanding of gender and electricity when he writes in Studies in American Fiction that the “breath of life” is the strange current of interchange that flows between men and men, and men and women, and men and things. A constant current of interflow, a constant vibrating interchange. . . . And this interflow, this electric vibration is polarized. There is a positive and a negative polarity. This is a law of life. (124) Though he allows here—as do spiritualists—for some fluidity in the gendered assignment of positive and negative attributes, the oppositional and heteronormative logic of the metaphor is apparent as he analogizes “male and female” to “master and servant” in the same passage, adding that the master-servant relationship is, “like love,” “a polarized flow” (124). It is in The Rainbow and its sequel Women in Love, however, that electromagnetism is used as metaphor for heterosexual attraction most extensively.22 The Rainbow’s Will Brangwen is “in an electric state of passion” with Anna; with Jennie, Brangwen’s desire receives similar treatment from Lawrence, who describes “his whole body electric with a subtle, powerful, reducing force” (108, 214). Brangwen’s daughter Ursula’s sexual response to her lover, Anton, is likewise depicted. As she felt the “electric fire of the silk under his hands upon her limbs,” “[s]he vibrated like a jet of electric, firm 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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an art, if “mysticism” also is an art, the opposition can scarcely be radical since they must both spring from the same root in natural human activity. —Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life (182–83)

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She traced with her hands the line of his loins and thighs, at the back, and a living fire ran through her, from him, darkly. It was a dark flood of electric passion she released from him, drew into herself. She had established a rich new circuit, a new current of passional electric energy, between the two of them, released from the darkest poles of the body and established in perfect circuit. It was a dark fire of electricity that rushed from him to her, and flooded them both with rich peace, satisfaction. (396) Here positive and negative polarities unite to create a complete “circuit” of electrical passion.23 It is, however, Gerald Crich whose presence is most frequently described in sexualized electromagnetic terms, and it is perhaps not a coincidence that, under his control, his family’s coal mining company erects an electrical plant. In scenes with “Pussum,” for instance, he is “able to give off a sort of electric power,” and he “could feel the electric connection between him and her” (117, 128). For Gudrun, her desire for him is “an electric vibration in her veins” (178–79). In a passage that echoes one by H.D. discussed below, Gudrun lies “cast upon him, stranded, lifted up against him, melting and melting under his kisses, melting into his limbs and bones, as if he were soft iron becoming surcharged with her electric life” (415). Iron is “surcharged” with electricity, as the two magnetically merge. As in Studies in American Fiction, gender in this novel is seen as polarized like a magnet, for Gerald’s mother is portrayed as “consumed in a fierce tension of opposition, like the negative pole of a magnet” (289). Indeed, Gerald and Gudrun are described as “separate, like opposite poles of one fierce energy” (490). In none of these passages do these characters express fright or trepidation over an electromagnetic penetration of their bodies. In an unpublished and unfinished essay on modern literature, Mina Loy expresses grave reservations about D. H. Lawrence’s writing about sexuality, and in particular his “interminable procession—of ladies ‘possessed’ in floods of delight—the instantaneous beautification of the female by the (always) condescending male.” Though Lawrence “has come nearest to defining the psychic experiences of passion,” she writes, he fails utterly in depicting his impossibly idealized sex scenes, which contain stereotypical female and male characters and which eroticize a woman’s virginity.24 However, her discussion of what she dubbed “the electric incitement of Eros” in her unpublished manifesto, “The History of Religion and Eros,” is not unlike Lawrence’s use of the discourse of electromagnetism in its heteronormative bias, though she 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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fluid in response” (442). In Women in Love, a sexual encounter between Birkin and Ursula is described in electromagnetic terms:

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(unlike Lawrence) displays some reticence about the body’s passivity. Loy’s part as “token heterosexual” in the inner circle of Natalie Barney’s legendary salon is affectionately documented in her close friend Djuna Barnes’ comic rendition of the group in Ladies Almanack. As the outspoken and heterosexually promiscuous “Patience Scalpel,” Loy is spoofed as the one who “could not understand Women and their Ways” though she had “tried all means, Mathematical, Poetical, Statistical and Reasonable” to make sense of it (11, 12). Significantly, it is their sexual sameness that disturbs her: Patience wonders, “Do they not have Organs as exactly alike as two Peas?” (11). Opposites are requisite for sexual interaction. Like Patience, Loy is not content to rest with the convenience of the metaphor but attempts to theorize it scientifically, to demonstrate its validity. Her manifesto describes electrical systems guiding and directing the universe and its inhabitants, the universe in fact spawned by an electric “powerhouse” endowed with intelligence and creativity (1–2, 15).25 Loy and H.D. alike play at the edges of the history of mysticism, drawing from a suppressed genealogy of eroticism within religious and scientific discourse alike to create a model of pleasurable and generative “intercourse” between otherworld and world, between artists and their audiences. They imagine the role of artist as that of the medium, that feminine presence able to foster communication between the divine realm and the mortal. In her aesthetic manifesto, Notes on Thought and Vision, H.D. envisions the artist as spiritualist medium, sending and receiving messages via the mystical conduit of electromagnetism. A collection of observations and pronouncements regarding the progressive stages of artistic development and consciousness, the mystical nature of art’s genesis, and the role of the somatic, the body, in artistic creation, Notes puts forth a portrait of an artist as intermediary between worlds, a mystic and poet-prophet who acts as a kind of radio receiver and transmitter of divine knowledge and enlightenment: “Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought, could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across the world of dead, murky thought” (27). Written in 1919, it is in this early period of H.D.’s writing that we see her engage without reservation with notions of the body’s penetration by electromagnetic waves. Loy, too, asserts that the energy of the electromagnetic universe can be channeled by “that latent faculty of the mind for reception of a transcendent form of radio transmission” (“History” 3–5). For both, electromagnetism is the connective and transmissional medium that binds the heavens and the earth. According to Loy, if one realizes that life itself is “a Deific Electricity,” one can channel this higher intelligence via the mystical experience practiced for centuries by Eastern religious figures (4). As Daniel Albright contends 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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about some of the work of “high” modernists, “what matters is the telepathic stream, uniting writer and reader in a state of electrical immediacy. The words are only the ether through which the wave of feeling passes, urgently, spontaneously” (19). Spirituality itself is electric in nature, Loy explains elsewhere in an unpublished note: “Spiritual Force = must be cognised as abstract until it is tangibly revealed through concrete discoveries (as electricity -)” (Mina Loy Papers, f. 187). Painstakingly described, the mystical experience is achieved in the “ego-laboratory” when the mystic learns to “concentrat[e] the various electric currents of mind and body to an [sic] unique current,” thereby exposing the body—its biological “atomic structure”—to the “INTELLIGENTIAL ETHER” and “transmut[ing]” the mind into a radio receptor that conducts the “flow” of the “current of the conveyance” upward via “that other magnet” that runs counter to the earth’s gravity—“a gravitation upward –––– a sublime buoyancy” (History 4–6, 9). Essentially, the physical body, then, is merely a point of contact in the material realm, “the ‘island in the air’ to which the Electro life is anchored,” as she writes elsewhere in notes toward a novel (Mina Loy Papers, f. 191). Significantly, Loy locates agency in the mystic, who can learn to control and master the ways in which electromagnetism penetrates and infuses the body. Borrowing from the séance’s circle of alternating currents—positive/masculine and negative/feminine presences uniting to create the energy that evokes the dead—Loy insists upon the scientific validity of this experience, describing the mystic’s manipulation of religio-electric current: “The eastern attitude to prayer, the joined palms, the soles of the feet pressed flatly together, precluding the ego-electricity from running off into the ground . . . circling and recircling. . . . The fingers tapered to point upward serving as antennae” (8–9). As in Lawrence’s depictions noted above, it is the joining of hands that creates a complete electrical circuit. But, again, Loy’s theorizing shies away from a position of the body’s absolute subjection to the powers of electromagnetism; her mystic permits electrical waves to penetrate the body, carefully directing their flow. Ultimately, this experience leads to “ECSTASY,” or “Eros-Bliss,” a state not merely spiritual or intellectual but physical, sexual, as well (7, 16). The second half of her treatise relates how religion and sex, once firmly connected, became excised from one another to the detriment of human evolution and progress: “Connective likeness of mystic electrics to the electric charge of Eros was either suppressed or forgotten” (18). Before the schism, she asserts, this connection was integrated into our spiritual wisdom: “A true mystic genius would never have snubbed the Creator with derogation of ‘the Flesh’—for also our desires, not of our own contriving, are from the Creator broadcast to us” (15). Sex is integral to the “lightning impressions” 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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channeled to us from a higher universal order; in fact, “the electric incitement of Eros” catalyzes the conduction process (12, 15). As she writes elsewhere in notes, “Love is the transmission of power—sets up electric current through people” (Mina Loy Papers, f. 187). An “electric release,” “Eros recharges the electric battery of the nervous system” and closes the circle of electric conduction (“History” 18). Mystical orgasm is the “Electric love release” in one of Loy’s unpublished poems: it “[c]ontains no negative—/ it contains all-pleasantnesses,” just as “sweets” are an infant’s “orgasm” (Mina Loy Papers, f. 133). Perhaps because the heterosexual Loy’s cosmology is so firmly invested in the validity of electrical science, her writings foster a rhetoric of opposition, in which positive and negative charges produce a perfect circle of conductivity. This commitment to post-Enlightenment science is reflected in a notion of sexuality that is, fundamentally, reliant upon binary logic. Having established an electrical foundation, “The History of Religion and Eros” moves easily into a valorization of heterosexuality, as perfection is reached with a union of opposites, a notion granted religious authority: “ ‘They twain shall be one flesh’ described the sense of a tangible bond, a vibrational coidentity of perfectly married people, as if the Eros union bequeathed to them a continuous reciprocal radiation that distance does not disrupt” (15–16). Continuing the argument, she again quotes the Bible: “ ‘Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder,’ undeniably confirms the derivation of Eros from the divine abstraction, delimiting the self in the peace of participation, of being no longer contactless in a mysterious universe” (15–16). Love that flows in an electrical current between the heavens and the material realm is virtually the same as love between a man and a woman. Unlike Lawrence, however, Loy does not always idealize heterosexual unions, and in her autobiographical novel Insel—a novel at once an experiment in, and a parody of, Surrealism—she takes on the sexual and textual politics of the electromagnetic trope. Set in 1930s Paris, Insel fictionalizes her brief friendship with, and patronage of, the German Surrealist painter Richard Oelze, but beneath this surface narrative Loy employs the metaphor of magnetism to depict both the parasitic nature of the male-female bond and the psychologically perilous process of creating art. Loy was ever the reluctant artist—she reportedly refused to be labeled a poet or writer or painter (Conover 9)—and her narrator, Mrs. Jones, struggles with Insel’s magnetic Strahlen, the magical rays of his personality that penetrate her body, simultaneously healing it of its pain and impelling her to experience with him a world of suicidal insanity. As Insel’s editor, Elizabeth Arnold, argues, “Although she is repeatedly tempted to join Insel on his flights into the ‘increate,’ lured by her glimpses of beauty in the perfect peace of 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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his vision of the absolute, she is ultimately repelled by the way this vision turns one away from life rather than toward it” (180). To the extent that the misanthropic and misogynist Insel represents art—Surrealist art at that, notoriously misogynist and linked, in its practice of automatic writing and alternative states of consciousness, to spiritualism—the novel dramatizes the modernist writer’s plight, who must navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of chaos and form in her life and in her writing. Early on, Mrs. Jones explains to Insel that she wants to “begin a universe all over again, forget all form I am familiar with, evoking a chaos from which I could draw forth incipient form, that at last the female brain may achieve an act of creation” (37). Chaos here is necessary to form, but it is seductively difficult to escape. On first meeting, Insel’s eyes light up with “tiny fireworks,” and he makes a date with Loy’s artist’s model like “a magnet picking up a pin” (19–20). In describing him as “one of those magically animated corpses described by William Seabrook,” she evokes the threat of electrocution, foreshadowing what is to come (51). While not overtly eroticized—the characters merely dance around a physical relationship—the powerful electromagnetic attraction between them is interestingly described in ways not unlike the typical heteronormative depictions of Lawrence, and their relationship is dependent upon their opposite genders. During their “veritable séances,” Insel’s “innate mediumistic quality” draws Jones in against her will: “In sitting so close to Insel at the small terrace table all the filaments of what has been called the astral body, that network of vibrational force, were being drawn out of me towards a terrific magnet” (47, 56). In a manner Jones describes as “subvoluntary,” her body cannot resist his: Urged to cross the frontier of his individuality, I got in the way of that faintly electric current he emitted. His magnetic pull steadily on the increase, the repulsion proportionately defined, threw me into a vibrational quandary, until as if it were imperative for me to make a connection with the emissive agency of my accidental clairvoyance, with a supernormal acumen he inspired, I located the one point of contact: the temple. . . . There was one manifestation of how in Insel’s vicinity pieces of bodies would seem to break off as astral fractions and on occasion hang, visually suspended in the air. Quite apparently to my subconscious the bit of my skull encaving the fragile area flew off me, crashed onto his and stuck there. On the spur of this subvoluntary cohesion to the telepathic center—I definitely penetrated (into) his mediumistic world. (65–66) Loy’s language is rife with electromagnetic and spiritualist terms: séances, mediumistic, electric current, magnetic pull, repulsion, point of contact. 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Terrifying and sublime, contact with Insel’s rays always results in the body’s suspension and dismemberment, creating a Surrealist tableaux. Jones gradually realizes that their magnetic bond is transforming her into Insel, merging their consciousnesses, to the detriment of both her own artistic identity as well as any sense of psychological stability. The momentary flash of experience of embodying a Surrealist painting becomes the norm, as she feels herself beginning to disintegrate against her will, her body no longer responding to her mind, making even simple tasks such as walking difficult, and her mind suffering from inexplicable time lapses. This “bisectional automatism” made her feel “at the mercy of an imperfect instrument. The antennae of the contact with the world in some way crippled for their function seemed— like the umbilical cord in abnormal birth—to be wound round my brain” (151, 154). Here the magnetic chaos of the Surrealist world has so enveloped her, so infiltrated her body, that she lacks control over it, much as a woman trapped in a Surrealist painting. This is a profoundly gendered response, for she has rejected Insel’s painting of a diseased woman made of pus (132–33). From this point in the novel, Jones fights her way back to control, ultimately turning the tables on Insel by using her experience in his mind as fodder for her own writing. Having made great progress on her book, she imagines, on telling him goodbye, mocking him with her success: “I have absorbed all your Strahlen. Now what are you going to do?” (178).26 H.D.’s use of the electromagnetic metaphor differs strikingly from that of Lawrence or Loy in that it is not bound to an Enlightenment-era rhetoric of opposition, though she shares with Loy a degree of ambivalence about electromagnetism’s power and a suspicion about heterosexuality. Electromagnetic references in H.D.’s writings are not restricted to heterosexual situations or to an ideology of heteronormativity; rather, she either employs these metaphors conventionally by way of critiquing heterosexuality or to subvert the logic of electromagnetic polarity entirely.27 Moreover, after 1919 her depictions of electromagnetism are fraught with reticence about its capacity for infiltrating the body, as its waves either circulate around, rather than within, her characters’ bodies, or they enter with deadly force. In her novels Paint It To-day and Nights, written in the early 1920s and early 1930s respectively, electromagnetism appears chiefly in two contexts: in depictions of eroticism and orgasm, and in discussions of modernist aesthetics. For H.D., electricity serves as a metaphor that is at once sexual and textual: “Your fingers are full of the most terrific electricity,” a “frightened” and excited David confides to his lover, the writer Natalia, in Nights (86). A series of nighttime sexual encounters, this novel is set in the bed of the protagonist, Natalia, who is conducting a kind of scientific and literary experiment, recording faithfully in 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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her notebook detailed descriptions of twelve such encounters immediately after her lover has departed her room and describing visions evoked by these encounters. Nights is H.D.’s most frankly sexual novel and in one chapter depicts an electrically charged scene of masturbation culminating in orgasm: [A]s the radium gathered electric current under her left knee, she knew her high-powered deity was waiting. . . . She was sexless, being one chord, drawn out, waiting the high-powered rush of the electric fervour. It crept up the left side, she held it, timed it, let it gather momentum, let it gather force; it escaped her above the hip-bone, spread, slightly weakened, up the backbone; at the nape, it broke, distilled radium into the head. . . . She wanted the electric power to run on through her, then out, unimpeded by her mind. (51) Invoking at once “radium” and “deity,” orgasm is figured as an embodiment of divinity, catalyzed by a radioactive element vital to the development of the “new” science. Moreover, in this passage H.D. critiques the logic of opposition, seeming to draw instead from an older, etheric model of electricity, reformulating the laws of science to her own ends, for the passage above is not about the perfect union of opposites, man and woman, positive and negative. It is, rather, about masturbation, here imagined as an escape from gendered categorization: “She was sexless,” she writes, “being one chord”; she is without sex, without gender.28 In recounting the scene to David later, Natalia explains, “I wanted to get out of my body” (64). Natalia’s alternate name, Neith, is derived from an androgynous Egyptian goddess, and Nights, like several of her other autobiographical novels, documents how deeply unsatisfying and painful traditional heterosexual couplings can be. In bed with David, Natalia “lies negative to his positive, dim ray” (102). In fact, heterosexual relationships, like that between David and Natalia, are lethal in this novel. In an age in which electrocutions (intentional and accidental) were the topic of intense interest and debate, H.D.’s Natalia “could not explain that it was a thing between them, the wire he was, the wire she was, the positive and negative”; she knows that it is dangerous (86).29 The magnetic David—his “iron hand . . . lined with magnetism,” “a sort of conductor for some force”—threatens a state of electrocution: “She felt herself go cold, static; electrocuted, dead corpse” (71, 73). In this novel, an electromagnetism that is bipolar is deadly. Another depiction of electrical eroticism infuses a scene from Paint It To-day between two lesbian characters whose gender is immaterial to the 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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sexual attraction and tension; Midget and Althea are depicted as “girls or boys,” a phrase amended in the original manuscript, which read “girls and boys” (emphasis mine).30 In her treatment of electrical phenomena, H.D. invokes electricity’s mystical power while rejecting the positive/negative, or male/female, binary it creates, that binary reflected in spiritualist discourse. In one scene, like Dido and Aeneas, Midget and Althea move together through a sexualized storm in a fantastical, otherworldly setting. Lightning flashes all around them: “All the power of the wood seemed to circle between these two alert and vivid bodies, like two shafts attracting the two opposite currents of the electric forces of the forest” (84). Wrapping her ambiguously gendered lesbian characters—“girls or boys”—in positive and negative charges, H.D. reconceptualizes electricity through figurations of lesbianism and bisexuality that disrupt the model of gendered and sexual polarities. The electrical currents, and the assignment of positive and negative value, “circle” between the two, never residing in one or the other, never violating their bodies, rendering two characters of the same sex but indeterminate genders. In its invocation of erotic, aesthetic, spiritual force, electromagnetism in and of itself, then, is not necessarily negative for H.D.; however, certain deployments of it—ones that rely upon intractable and polarized categories, ones that require the penetration of the body by its rays, as in Nights—are suspect. Natalia drowns at the end of Nights, in a spectacular defiance of scientific reasoning. As her fictional editor observes, “for all her erotic experiments, she could not make an equation that answered, two parallel lines meet” until the tracks of her ice skates converge at a hole in the ice (4). We might see in her descriptions of sexual desire and electrical currents that play with, and often resist, gendered polarities an implicit repudiation of the essentialist theories of sexologists like her erstwhile friend Havelock Ellis. But a kind of diffuse, fluid construction of electrical power can represent an eroticism that escapes gender and an aesthetic that transcends, according to the fictional Prologue to Nights, “[r]ealism of the dust-onthe-commode school” (26). This lengthy prologue is penned by the editor of Night’s fictional publisher, John Helforth, whose name appears on the title page of the novel. This device affords H.D. the opportunity to comment upon—to condemn, to praise, to poke fun at, to theorize—her own literary output from behind the mask of a character much unlike herself and through a writer, at least in part, autobiographically conceived.31 Furthermore, the two parts of the novel—authored by an editor who is also a hack writer of popular scientific texts, and an artist whose texts are inspired by visions recorded according to a scientific scheme—stress both the divide and the union of science, spirituality, and art. 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Her battery was surcharged. She was presenting truth, or what she saw as truth, in other words, not as a photographer, a journalist, or even a portrait-painter or a dramatist, but in some other medium. She seemed to work actually in radium or electricity. Is that, I ask you, the medium for a novel? (22) But after “mature consideration,” he finds himself “shocked” at her “blatant lightning-realism . . . the realism of white lightning,” “realism” because what she writes is “too terribly, too blazingly true” (26, 21–22). This is not Richard Aldington’s “shock of illumination” (270) that results from the successful Imagist poem, not a mere spark, but rather a radiating flow of energy akin to a radioactive substance. Helforth’s description consists of an array of scientific terms related to electromagnetism—battery, surcharged, radium, electricity, shocked—that are found as well in spiritualist discourse, an association made evident with what is surely not an accidental pun on medium, and these terms point to a methodology that at once stresses science and promises to transcend metaphysically the empiricism of a photographer or journalist. Moreover, Helforth’s discussion of a “lightning-realism” school of modernism positions Natalia as a spiritualist medium: “She becomes merely an automatic recorder of the social life around her,” he writes, “or she becomes the thing that is really irreconcilable, a sort of scientific lyricist” (23–24; emphasis mine). And he refers not only to her form but her content, which despite its focus on sex eschews vulgarity or eroticism in favor of a more ethereal, cerebral “truth.” Natalia herself, in thinking through the artistic process, refers to recording her experience of the “white sheet-lightning of her aura” and the need to “express herself in luminous electrons” (56, 87). In writing and in sex, electricity is inspiring but also potentially dangerous. On the third night, preparing to write, she lets “the aura of radiant life spe[e]d through her” as her mind gathers images, palimpsest-like in free association, for her work; a series of mystical visions yields at last a text to be automatically recorded. But she wonders if “she was not so much healed as shocked back, re-vivified, for fresh suffering. Would she die sometime in some such shock-aura of pure light?” (53). The language of electrocution used to describe her heterosexual union with David—“cold, static” (73)—sounds remarkably like that she used to describe Imagism in later years. She is working in this period toward a writing that is electric in a more positive sense, for these phrases, linking lightning and aesthetics, resonate with words describing H.D.’s writing 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Helforth initially does not know what to make of Natalia’s experimental mode of artistic expression. He frames his observations in scientific terms:

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by members of her circle. In a letter to H.D., Robert Herring remarks her “electric psychic magnificence” and in another praises two novellas written around the same time as Nights as “electricity,” while Marianne Moore refers to H.D.’s nature imagery as “electric.”32 Just as it serves as the central metaphor for the artistic process in Notes, electromagnetism appears in Paint It To-day, in which she declares, “A work of art is the materialization of the electric force of the artist, electric force plus the directing impetus of the intellect” (61). In language that sounds not dissimilar to that of spiritualists or Mesmerists, H.D. describes a cosmological system in which we are all immersed in a kind of electromagnetic ether, though she is careful to place the artist here in a position that oscillates between active and passive, as opposed to the passive artist of Notes on Thought and Vision constructed on the model of mediumship. We are pulled, she continues in Paint It To-day, in several directions by magnetic forces we fail to understand adequately: “We measure, or should measure, our capacity for life . . . not by our power of attracting but by our power or possibilities of being attracted. The two, though, no doubt, like positive and negative electricities, are interdependent on one another” (61). Just as one late nineteenth-century electrical scientist notes, the “presence of an electrified body was sufficient to excite, by induction, an unelectrified body” (qtd. in W. Moore 183), electricity’s attractive power incites connections between multiple bodies. This attraction would of course become a fatal one by the 1930s when she writes Nights. H.D., though, is talking not just about human, and spiritual, relationships but about art as well. Because sculpture contains the “electric impulse . . . materialized in definite form,” she imagines that “[w]e should be able, more easily, to fall in love with a statue than with any other work of art” (61). Interestingly, H.D.’s formulation of an eroticized and spiritualized aesthetic theory is not gendered, at least not in an obvious way. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the feminine had become aligned with paranormal power—in spiritualist accounts of mediums, in narratives of female mystics, and even in biological explanations of menstruation. As Diana Basham has argued, references to “electrical fluid” are to be interpreted as meaning menstrual blood (vii). This connection persists into the twentieth century in Havelock Ellis’ textbook on sexuality when he relates scientific studies that show “that the source of menstrual periodicity is electrical” (Psychology 34). Margaret Fuller, in her Woman in the Nineteenth Century, likewise attributed the correlation between women and spiritual power to a biochemical anomaly in the female sex. In a discourse that weds women and science, Fuller theorized a woman infused with electromagnetism: “The electrical, the magnetic element in woman has not been fairly brought out at 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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any period. Everything might be expected from it; she has far more of it than man” (qtd. in Basham 45). Furthermore, this “magnetic element” held the most potential for creative women, women artists and writers, for it endowed them with the gift of vision. Fuller warns the woman artist-prophet, however, that this excess of electromagnetism will make them “very commonly unhappy,” as their exceptional abilities “frighten those around them,” and she looks forward to an era when “the electrical fluid will be found to invigorate and embellish, not destroy life” (qtd. in Basham 45–46). If H.D. is drawing on this tradition, she is embedding it in a critique of the more scientifically inclined Helforth. Recognizing its aesthetic possibilities, Joseph Priestley, eighteenth-century scientist and historian of electricity, compares the study of electricity to an experience of the “sublime,” for it is “the cleanest, and the most elegant, that the compass of philosophy exhibits” (ii, xii). H.D. modernizes the analogy of electrical science to art, just as Lawrence had called electricity “the creative mystery, itself, in the creative world” (Studies 135). Poetry, according to Helforth, “solves its own problem. There, emotion, no matter how true, how brutally realistic, can be translated into another symbol, a sort of hieroglyph of rhythm and metre and poetical image” (21). While poetry focuses on the static, impregnable object, electric prose is dynamic and malleable. From the 1920s until her late career, H.D. chafed against the restrictions of Imagism, and in the 1920s and 1930s her modernist experiments in prose constitute for her “electric” writing, I would argue, a movement away from the solid, static, “pure crystalline” or “clear-cut crystal” writing of Imagism and toward writing that is more dynamic and animated, perhaps related to her growing interest in the technology of film.33 Electromagnetism—its fluidity, its scientific, spiritual, and occultic resonances, its paradoxical modernity—offers H.D. an apt metaphor for imagining new aesthetic forms and artistic processes, as well as a sexual positionality that resists heteronormativity. In imagining electromagnetism as a conduit of sexual and textual energy, H.D. proposes a model of modernist prose that mirrors the paradox of modernism itself: it is at once modern—of its time—and entangled in tradition and history.

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Seeking “a sort of clairvoyant material plane”: Spirituality and the Moving Body

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n Kay Boyle’s 1934 novel, My Next Bride, her young, penniless American protagonist, Victoria, goes to work for a Paris commune led by a shady but charismatic dancer, Sorrel. As Victoria enters the “colony,” she finds a mad performance in progress—“an endless weave of movement, a turning and leaping of many bodies”—led by the Christlike Sorrel, dressed in a robe and sandals and sporting long white tresses (39, 36). This is not simply a dance class, not merely a portrayal of a “back-to-nature” leftist commune, for Boyle saturates her descriptions of the man and the scene with religious language. Sorrel wears an exaltation which gave him the look of a divine. He might have been a preacher exhorting his people . . . and so might this place have been the temple to which he drew them, wilfully [sic] blind to their shortcomings, wilfully [sic] deaf to what they spoke in sin. . . . [T]hey cast about behind in chaos for the grace and fervour to subdue their unexpected limbs. (40–41) The dancers are depicted as a “congregation” who “danced like people drunk or dazed” (42). The Russian sisters Victoria befriends share a “virgin infatuation for his sainthood” and for “the majesty of his presence,” and Sorrel’s mistress, Matilde, admonishes Victoria “as a Mother Superior instructing a novice,” “When you come here it’s just as serious as taking the veil” (63, 81, 53). However much Sorrel protests that, though people come to him 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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CHAPTER 3

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seeking god, “I don’t know anything about the poor fellow,” he clearly exploits their spiritual thirst (69). Boyle’s portrait is bitterly satiric, based in her own experiences with the commune of Raymond Duncan—brother of the revolutionary dancer Isadora Duncan—whom she met at tea with Gertrude Stein. Known to wear his trademark sandals, Stein had employed him as a dance instructor years before (Mellen 14; Roatcap 27). In the novel, Boyle stresses at once his mock religious presence and the rhetorical suavity that ensured his financial success: “Sorrel rose like a meteor in the night, swung his fine skirts over the oratorical heavens, his face exalted by the fervour, the divinity of living with the gift of the dance, the gift of painting, the gift of the gab done up and ready there within him” (249). In fact, what Sorrel was running was a cult, a word that even Duncan himself used to describe his own enterprise (Mellen 122). Matilde tells Victoria, for instance, that new “disciples” must burn their clothing “so the past will be destroyed” (80). His followers live in hunger, poverty, and squalor, the communally raised children forced to work alongside the adults, while Sorrel enjoys fine clothing, extravagant meals, and a new Chrysler. When she became disillusioned with Duncan and tried to leave, Boyle, in fact, had to kidnap her own daughter in an elaborate plot concocted with her friend Robert McAlmon, for Duncan’s mistress claimed the child as the property of the commune (Mellen 130–31). As Sorrel explains his right to the minors, “They do not belong to this or that woman. . . . I have no children of my own, but I say these are my children because I have opened my house and my heart to them” (254). Boyle’s autobiographical contributions to Being Geniuses Together remark both the utter ruthlessness of the Duncan siblings—who, for purely financial gain, merely performed love for one another—and the deception Duncan perpetrated on his admiring public, claiming that the goods sold by the commune were carefully handcrafted by himself and his colonists when in fact they were cheaply purchased elsewhere (McAlmon and Boyle 331–32).1 Boyle’s novel is not the subject of this chapter, but what is particularly interesting about her depiction of Duncan’s cult is the rather explicit connection drawn between dance and spirituality. The body—the moving body—plays a central role in Sorrel’s endeavors. In the scene above, Boyle emphasizes the body’s motion: “Sorrel was leading the others in the dance, taking them down the length of it from act to act in the physical image of how a man who labours must, in deference to his muscle and bone, strike or fell or sow” (39). In the background hang the posters he paints, which echo the scene in the foreground with their “bodies of men with sinews and dark-burned limbs planting the earth or hewing trees or breaking fallow ground” (39–40). The references to farming connect Sorrel to his 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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mid-western American roots—disrupting his uneasy transnational identity—but these descriptions also link the moving body, the art of dance, and the spiritual wisdom he purports to embody. In a 1959 interview with the New Yorker, Raymond Duncan stressed the significance of movement in scientific terms: “Einstein said that nothing is faster than light. He was quite wrong. Movement is transmitted more rapidly than light because light is movement. . . . Man speaks silently to himself and calls it mind, but there is no mind. There is only movement” (qtd. in Roatcap 41). Movement here grants physicality primacy over the intellect, reducing all of existence to the body in motion, an oversimplified iteration of what scientists had been arguing for the previous century. Boyle may well have been aware of a plethora of other similar movements contemporaneous to Raymond Duncan’s that linked bodily performance with spiritual transcendence, such as Jaques-Dalcroze’s eurhythmics, François Delsarte’s “System of Expression,” Rudolf von Laban’s “Mastery of Movement” program, Rudolf Steiner’s eurythmy, and Georges Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man.2 To varying degrees, these programs promised their European and American audiences that by following prescribed regiments of movement—dances, movements, poses— they would be afforded unique experiences of spiritual enlightenment. As I and others have argued, the modernist period is marked by a particular interest in the body. Not only is the body beginning to be seen as more fluid and penetrable by medical and technological instruments, but there is widespread concern that the stresses of urban, modern life were taking a toll on the health of the body. Exercise and dance were increasingly prescribed as heal-alls of the body, mind, and spirit. Moreover, mind and body—and by extension, soul and body—were seen to be inextricably linked, so that the body’s movement was viewed as both in control of, and controlled by, the mind and soul. This chapter takes as its topic the trend in theories of movement and the spiritual popular in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, considering not only texts issuing from these organized systems of dance but also those produced by doctors, heterodox and orthodox religious figures, kinesiologists, dance instructors, and other turn-of-the-century writers. Bringing together such a diverse range of fields, I argue for links between the physical culture movement and emerging psychologically and religiously based theories of the mind (and, by extension for so many, the soul) as a crucial subtext for thinking about theories of dance and movement in this time period. In his work on the physical culture movement, Michael Budd has argued that the mid-1800s sees a significant shift in how the body is viewed, that a religious model is replaced with a scientific one (xi): “The secularized body that emerged after mid-century 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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was connected to changing cultural practices and the development of a new medico-scientific paradigm” (14). Contrary to Budd’s conclusion, it is my contention that with the desecularization of science at the turn of the twentieth century, discussed in chapter 1, comes a fusion of religious and scientific theorizing of the body in motion. Religious notions of the body persist well into the twentieth century. Anna Snaith has observed that “[m]odernism is often discussed in terms of movement: the increased speed brought about by new technologies and new modes of transport; the endlessly circulating networks of international capitalism; the global migrations of peoples” (206). Movement and motion seem integral to the modernist zeitgeist. Modernist writers like Boyle, Jean Toomer, and H.D. lived and worked in this milieu, and Boyle and Toomer had direct experience with some of those figures who exploited connections between movement and spirituality. Toomer, in fact, spent a significant portion of his adult life (roughly, from 1924 to the mid- to late 1930s) in service to Gurdjieff, whose orchestrated dance movements were meant to induce in his disciples a kind of self-understanding that would lead inevitably to spiritual enlightenment. At Gurdjieff’s compound, Toomer performed faithfully Gurdjieff’s choreographed sets, producing several autobiographical texts in response to his experiences there. Once trained, Toomer led American Gurdjieffian groups, engaged in fundraising activities for the cause, and even briefly experimented with starting his own commune. Though H.D. was not a member of any of these groups, she nonetheless writes of spiritual experiences induced by a remarkably similar set of performances. Her spiritualist novel Majic Ring depicts her protagonist acting out a series of poses for her lover that enact portraits of an array of ancient figures, rhythmic movements that evoke a mediumistic state offering access to spiritual knowledge. While Boyle’s portrait is satiric—Sorrel is more interested in exploiting this trend than in participating in it—Toomer and H.D.’s texts betray a seriousness of belief, and it is these latter two writers that are the focus of this chapter. As discussed in the previous chapter, this is again a theorizing of modernist art founded in part on the model of the spiritualist medium. As cited previously, H.D. wrote in her manifesto, Notes on Thought and Vision, “Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought, could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across the world of dead, murky thought” (27). Mina Loy, too, in her own manifesto, claimed that the universe can be channeled by “that latent faculty of the mind for reception of a transcendent form of radio transmission” (“The History of Religion and Eros” 3–5). The “healthy” body is a receiver of spiritual wisdom in the form of 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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“radio transmission.” In this chapter, though, it is the body’s movement— not the passivity of the medium, the mystic, or the saint—that is key to its receptivity. By executing Gurdjieff ’s dance steps, Toomer’s body is transformed into a vehicle for a profound self-understanding that leads ineluctably to a new understanding of the universe. By performing the roles of ancient figures in a series of tableaux vivants, H.D.’s protagonist becomes these figures, is launched into a journey through time and across the globe, and finds the key to interpreting the voice of the divine. Traditionally, spiritual experiences are enabled by adopting a passive state, a complete subjection of willpower to a deity, a thorny problem for a writer; as Helen Sword has argued, “For poets throughout the Western literary tradition the adoption of a prophetic, visionary stance has offered a standard means to poetic authority. . . . Paradoxically, however, prophetic poetry also implies supreme self-effacement, for to claim divine inspiration . . . is to admit to the suppression of one’s own individual voice” (Engendering 1). This early twentieth-century trend tying visionary experiences to movement rather than passivity, then, has the potential to radically counter centuries of religious tradition. But movement alone is insufficient. Of particular interest in the context of this chapter is how texts about dance and movement by Toomer and H.D. address an underlying, particularly modernist, tension surrounding the body and control of the body. As dance historian Ann Daly has observed, “Americans around the last turn of the century were interested in fathoming the depths of the bodily container, and were conflicted about the release or control of its inner forces” (4). But this is a tension particularly acute for women (as Sword points out [Engendering 2]) and people of color, who, historically, have lacked control over their bodies. Central to the spiritual experiences related in the writings of Toomer and especially H.D. is a fluctuation between controlled movements and momentary suspensions of agency in the artist’s body—the ebb and flow of rhythm—as they struggle to maintain and cede control. Cessations in the dance—pauses, interruptions, rests—punctuate their performances. The passivity of these moments of stillness disturbs H.D.’s narrator in particular, as she senses a loss of control in these periods. Not surprisingly, modernist-era extraliterary writing about movement and spirituality also reflects what can only be termed an obsession with issues of control over the body. The first part of this chapter surveys this extraliterary writing; the remainder looks at H.D. and Jean Toomer—whom Georgia O’Keefe painted as dancing trees in her Birth and Pine Trees—in terms of their own notions of the spirituality of dance and movement, and the deep-seated ambivalence about free will these notions evoke. 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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The Spirituality and Science of Movement

There is of course a long tradition of spiritual dance, dating from ancient periods of human history,4 but by the turn of the past century the discourse of science had once again entrenched itself within religious thinking about dance. The growth of cities in the early twentieth century triggered concerns over the health of the body, and not just because of the pollution and garbage that inevitably proliferated in urban environments. The chief concern expressed in extraliterary texts of the period—written from a wide variety of perspectives—is the body’s lack of mobility in the new age. As the chair of UCLA’s Physical Education Department wrote of the “impact of modern life” just after World War II, “The ever-increasing mechanization of common tasks and ease of transportation have lessened the ordinary physical activity to the point that the natural demands of the human body for strenuous movement are not being met in a majority of instances” (C. Young v). In response, physical education manuals flourished in this period—addressing such topics as kinesiology, body mechanics, and proper exercise—but scientists and doctors were not the only speakers on the subject. As the science of physical education was relatively new, a space was opened up in which a range of fringe religious figures, marriage therapists, dance instructors, and others felt licensed to identify and remedy the problem. One rabbi, Morris Lichtenstein, fretted in 1925 that “[o]ur era, more than any previous age in history, is stricken with worry, depression and nervousness. The onslaught of the times, the rush, the struggle, the competition has drained man’s vitality, has blocked the reservoir of health within him” (Jewish Science 106–7). Or, as a New Thought guru put it bluntly in 1921, “the stupidity of mankind has reached a pass where we must either call a halt or choose another path” (Flower 12). Ettie Rout’s 1925 sex manual, Sex and Exercise, decried a woman’s anatomical design, which “limits freedom of movement to the lower half of the trunk,” as one chief cause of frigidity within marriage (v). Rout agreed with many medical professionals—in opposition to conservative religious leaders who argued that dance was unhealthy and immodest—that modern life was the culprit, and the solution was dance. For Rout, a woman suffered “under civilisation, to develop the abdominal and pelvic muscles. . . . For the primitive woman, the native dances suffice; for the civilised woman, the only really efficient system of exercise is one based on the movements of the native dance” (12). Moreover, she argues, because literature and the visual arts have replaced dance as the chief form of artistic expression, modern

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bodies are suffering from stasis (30–31). Pushing the argument from the biological to the spiritual realm, Jaques-Dalcroze likewise advocates native dances,5 and Rudolf Steiner contends in 1919 that “the art of the dance needs in many cases to return to the ritual dance of ancient times,” one of his followers remarking that it is only in “folk dance, in which the tribal soul lives out its being,” that a higher consciousness can be reached through the body’s movement (Steiner, Introduction 4; Spock 1). Havelock Ellis discusses the importance of ancient ritual dance to the contemporary moment in the second chapter of his The Dance of Life: “If we are indifferent to the art of dancing, we have failed to understand, not merely the supreme manifestation of physical life, but also the supreme symbol of spiritual life” (34). Indeed, the lines between science and religion are blurred in these discussions of the body in the modern age. A physical education professor at Wellesley declared in the opening to her 1950 textbook on kinesiology that “[t]he student of kinesiology, like the student of anatomy and physiology, can only stand in reverent wonder at the intricate mechanism of the body, and in the words of the psalmist exclaim to his creator, ‘I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made’ (Psalm 139: 14)” (Wells 1). Late nineteenth-century “Doctor of Magnetics” Edwin Babbitt observes that dancing can facilitate an “interchange of magnetisms,” which harmonize body with soul (97). The fluidity of even the categories of study is apparent in Frank Dorchester’s 1928 coinage of a term for his own approach to the body’s movement, “psycho-physio-kinesiology.” Arguing that body, mind, and spirit are all affected by movement, Dorchester hypothesizes a human body divinely comprised of pure kinetic energy: “Man is a miniature Universe, hence the likeness to God, a replica of the Creator” (18). W. H. Williams, a Mason and self-proclaimed spiritual leader, writes an 1898 exercise and gymnastics manual from a religious perspective that advocates bodily movement as a pathway to god. In a chapter on controlling one’s breath, he stresses the ubiquity of movement: I had previously regarded [breathing] in a mere physiological sense, as a method of obtaining air of oxygen, but now I see that motion is involved. How strange that I had never thought of this before. All structures originate in motion, and the motion determines the configuration of the structure. Motion underlies the entire physiology of the organic function and senses. (48) With each breath, he realizes, “every atom in my body partakes of that motion. My body is a chemical laboratory, and motion antedates all chemical effect, and chemical effect antedates the mental. This opens a new world to me” (49). 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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It is this motion that grants him access to the divine “inner temple . . . where spirit atoms are formed—the house or clothing of the soul that is to accompany it in spirit life,” an experience that ends in astral projection (73, 75). “Motion, by the velocity of its waves or vibrations, determines everything,” he concludes, for “[w]e can see, hear, taste, smell and feel only vibration or motion. Even our consciousness is only vibration or motion” (110, 111). This extraliterary writing on movement draws from a popular scientific understanding about the nature of the universe and its bodies. For some, such as “vitapathic” physician John Bunyan Campbell, writing in 1891, science has proven that “whatever acts or does anything is spirit, and whatever is inert and helpless is matter” (42). But for most, everything—material or otherwise—is wholly comprised of pure energy, pure motion: “[S]cientists are fast concluding that they are one in reality, and that one is motion” (Fitch 280). Gerald Heard, a popular psychologist Toomer greatly esteemed, echoes this sentiment in 1929: “It is already an objective fact that matter is no more than motion” (263). A decade later, self-described “cosmotherapist” Edmond Székely stresses the extent to which the stable reality we assume is a fiction: “Matter itself is but a form of motion. . . . Matter is whirling motion. . . . In all this room there is nothing motionless, all is movement. . . . We must say that things move instead of that things exist. Only motion exists; all other appearances are the manifestations of the eternal never-ending motion” (95). This truism applies to everything in the universe, according to an 1898 massage and electrotherapy manual: “Physical science has now ascertained that the phenomena with which it deals are only different modes of a common energy. Heat, light, electricity, magnetism, etc., are but different modes of motion produced under different conditions. . . . All phenomena, however apparently different, are reducible into forms of motion” (Dowse 3). “All phenomena” includes, of course, the human body: “ ‘Every atom of the human body moves,’ in invisible yet appointed order” (Blundell 19). These scientific declarations are often couched in religious language. As one reverend-cum-“dyniopath” describes the body in 1924, “the most wonderful machine—MAN—must . . . be put in motion by a motive power, and this is the mind and spirit of life. . . . Mind is embodied spirit or soul, or the immaterial vital part of an animated being or organized life” (Heiniger 10). Similarly, a World War II-era engineer explains, “Spirit manifests through matter and to create matter, spirit needed a vehicle or instrument which was created out of its own primal substance so of necessity had to be a vibration or a force” (Fear 151). In a 1901 textbook advertising her physical education program, Mrs. Excell Lynn teaches her students that “All matter is vibratory. The source of all matter is LIFE. The source of all manifestation is vibration. The source of vibration is God” (Lynn 1.1). 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Bodies, then, are seen as semipermeable containers of powerful energy; the exterior of the body may appear stable, but its fragile skin masks, in this formulation, a swirl of uncontrollable movement. Not surprisingly, these pseudoscientific theorists place great emphasis on how to exert willpower over the unruly material body, many promising their students and disciples proven methods for using the mind and soul to control the body and its functions. One occultist in 1902, for instance, makes plain this fear of the body when he promises his followers that his goal “is to make the organs of the body serve him instead of leaving him at the mercy of his organs” (Olston vi). But this notion is not just found on the fringes of medical science or orthodox religion. Nineteenth-century physician Dr. John W. F. Blundell asserts that the mind exercises its will over the helpless body: “To these common laws of motion the vital phenomena are undoubtedly subservient; a cognisance of their demands upon the active being in its mundane capacity is made known through the mind, by its perception, and directed by the exercise of its will. The latter controls the machine by means of nerves” (19). In 1904, Johannes Heiniger, a pastor and doctor, conceives of a body that contains a veritable battle between the mind’s will and the soul for control over the body, causing illness and disease: “The motion of spirit is harmony. We, that is our will-powers, make the motion of matter discordant to spirit by hatred, anger and violence of thought; but there is a constant effort of the spirit to vibrate us back again to healthful composure” (26). The implicit philosophical assumption underlying much of this extraliterary writing—particularly writing of a more religio-scientific cast—is an inextricable connection between mind, body, and soul, such that the body’s movement has a significant impact on both mind and spirit, and the mind and spirit can control or direct the body. It is this assertion that underlies Toomer and H.D.’s texts as well: that the motion of the body can make it a vehicle for spiritual enlightenment. It is a notion of a mind/body link that is found in Eastern religious thought, so trendy among modernists and theosophists, as well as the very American Christian Science. For most of these writers, there is an easy and assumed slippage from “mind” to “soul.” Invigorated by popular understandings of the new psychotherapy, religio-scientific thinkers of this period find in terms like subconscious or unconscious confirmation of nonmaterialist theories of mind and thus evidence of the existence of a soul. Dr. John D. Quackenbos avers, in 1916, “In recognizing a double nature, conscious and subconscious, in the human unit—double in its manifestations and responsibilities, single in substance as soul and spirit—psychology is in agreement with Scripture” (8). As another enthuses in 1909, “Man, we are learning, is not a body possessing a soul, but a soul possessing a body” (Dearmer 21). Many writing at this intersection 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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of science and religion, in fact, created their own maps of the mind, drawing on new psychology to coin such terms as “Super-conscious” (the spirit or soul, according to both Arthur Jay Green, founder of the “Church of Advanced Truth,” and George Butler, an early twentieth-century physician) and “undermind” (a better term for subconscious, according to Percy Dearmer, who opposes it to the spiritual “overmind”).6 Control circulates between the mind, soul, and body, as mind or soul direct the body, but the body also influences the mind or soul: Green avers in 1933 that “[i]t is true that the mind affects the body. . . . [I]t is also true that to a certain extent at least the body affects the mind” (Green 20). Echoing this notion is Alfred T. Schofield, M.D., in 1908, who advises medical students that “the wise physician must grasp the underlying unity of the spiritual and material, and recognise that if the body may and does influence diseases of the soul, so does the mind influence states and diseases of the body” (21). Psycho-physio-kinesiologist Dorchester puts it simply: “As we are Psychic-Physical beings, I believe that as the mind may and does assist body, so body assists mind in just co-operation” because mental and physical energy are the same (19, 24). Thus, mental, spiritual, and physical well-being are inextricably linked, with movement being key to the latter. “A healthy soul can live only in a healthy body,” F. G. Welch, late nineteenth-century professor of physical culture at Yale, warns his readers, observing further that “[r]ecklessness in bodily habits tends to recklessness in moral character” (167, 164).7 With one early twentieth-century pseudoscientist who argues for “biological morality,” Julie and Annie Thomas, two sisters who ran an institute for women’s “psycho-physical culture” at the turn of the century, are in staunch agreement: “you cannot get healthy morals and healthy brains to grow in unhealthy bodies” (Hulme 2; Thomas and Thomas 4). Getting the body in shape allows you to “feel your kinship to your Creator, that you are of divine, of kingly birth, so God-like is the strength and glory of such life” (16–17). One doctor of psychology in 1907 alleges that mind and soul are one, and that healing can only occur at the level of the soul: “While we deal with man as if he were body we will not improve his body. That is, unless we use some mode through which we impress his soul to change his body, healing will not take place” (Lindsay, New 17). Negative thought, in many of these textbooks and treatises, causes a diseased body. One of Rudolf Steiner’s devotees argues, for instance, that “health is also closely bound with happiness. . . . [I]t is thoughts in the mind that make sick or well” (Gardner 7). In a 1921 text illustrating exercises to heal one’s spirit, A New Thought advocate remarks likewise: “The human body is a machine that is designed to be always in perfect running-order. . . . If, for any reason whatever, GLADNESS, or JOY OF LIFE, is absent in you, 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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your human machine is wrong” (Flower 5). Like many others, his manual advocates using the mind to control the energy flow through the body. In a 1902 exercise manual written almost entirely on pages mimicking a prescription pad, a doctor from Atlanta assures his readers that it is “the harmonious action of the mind” that “insures health” (Parks 7). In similar language, theologian Eli Beers states in 1914 that “inharmonious mental states are a very prolific cause of disease, and produce a deleterious effect on all the functions of the body” (n.p.). In 1902, Charles Ransom Bales goes so far as to suggest to medical professionals that a doctor is an “executioner” if he utters negative words in earshot of a patient (46). In much of this writing, there are serious ramifications if efforts are not made to bring these warring forces—mind, body, soul—into accord. In promoting his theory of dance and spirituality in 1913, Rudolf Steiner observes that “much that is unhygienic today in the outside world is caused by the fact that there is so little harmony between what the physical body has to do to adjust to the external world and what the etheric body, through its own inner mobility, demands from the physical body” (Introduction 20). Similarly, Welch argues that “More than half the misunderstandings which ripen into angry discussions, and quarrels, and war—personal and national—may be traced to the distorted impressions made upon sickly minds in unhealthy bodies” (142). Many theorize a collective mind and soul for humanity, so that the health of one body has an impact on all human bodies. One occult physician, Yacki Raizizun, explains in 1924 that “minds are not distant and separate, but are united by one Universal Mind (God), of which each individual unit is an organized part. Man’s mind and the Great Universal Mind is one. We are all living in a great sea of vibrating mind” (31). For Arthur Green, one thought in one mind “goes into this Cosmic Mind and sets in motion a Universal Law”: “As there is but one Spirit and but one Universal Soul . . . there is likewise, but ONE BODY of the Universe” (22, 56). Notions of collective identity raise the stakes considerably for learning to control an unruly body comprised not of matter but of pure energy constantly in motion, and many of these self-help manuals that advocate bodily movement focus their instruction on learning to harness the body through the mind’s willpower. Arguing that “[w]e are the makers and directors of our own destiny according to the thoughts we harbor in consciousness,” Raizizun sees the subconscious mind as a passive “obedient servant” to the conscious mind, which can be trained to regulate even the body’s functions and organs (22, 31). Likewise, Green analogizes the subconscious mind to a radio, passively broadcasting and receiving, mediating between the physical and the spiritual, taking direction from the conscious (167, 55, 61, 25). His model of consciousness, very loosely based in popular psychology, imagines 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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the physical and spiritual warring for control of the subconscious, and he promises his followers that learning to control the body will afford them power that goes far beyond the material world: “[W]hen you control Mind, you control everything” (104). Quackenbos proposes a slightly different model, with similar aims and claims, hypothesizing a battle between the soul and the flesh that can be halted by a stimulation of “spiritual energy which overwhelms the antagonism of the will” (17). He assures his readers that “[t]he spiritual self may be incited to assert control that is practically boundless within the limitations of physical possibility and moral right, over the flesh,—organs of body and faculties of mind” (6–7). Anxiety over the body’s lawlessness is markedly evident, as the language of warfare permeates so much of this writing. In one text written in 1920 by an Emmanuel Movement8 devotee, in his conceptualization, the unconscious mind “would like to usurp its place and gain dominion over our speech and actions” (Donald Johnston 38). In all of these texts, the will must be reprimanded, reconditioned, redirected. The ultimate goal, for Lynn’s method of physical education, is “to have our wills concur with the Divine will; and in order that God’s will and ours should be one, our thought must have concurrent vibration with God’s thought” (9.1). In Lynn’s physical culture program for girls, the healthy body becomes a “perfect womb for the growth of the soul” (1.3). This perceived connection between body and soul—and the notion that the body’s movement creates a receptive “womb” for the divine—is central to the theories of many dance and performance gurus in the early twentieth century. For it was not just exercise but dance that was stressed as a vehicle at once therapeutic and spiritually enlightening. As Hillel Schwartz has argued, “By the thirties, dancers . . . had proposed a kinaesthetic that valued motion as much for its operative as for its expressive properties. If genuine movements reflected the inner passions, struggles and joys of being human, integrated and centered rhythmic movements could in turn recreate the human being” (80). Building on these popular notions of the mind/body connection and the spiritual and psychological benefits of mobility, leaders of religious movements devoted to dance and movement emerged in Europe and the States in the early twentieth century. The list of such figures ranges from the fairly conventional to the more emphatically religious-minded to cult leaders like Raymond Duncan and Jean Toomer’s mentor, Georges Gurdjieff. The most mainstream of them is perhaps Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. Dalcroze created his system of movement in reaction against what he saw as rigid programs of gymnastics fashionable in the mid to late nineteenth century (such as the Swedish Ling method, which Toomer studied), because he objected to the narrow emphasis on physical 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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It must . . . be possible for the individual’s motor powers . . . to be placed in immediate contact with the cerebral and the emotional faculties, for soul and body to be in mutual and intimate communion, the soul idealising and purifying the body, while the body endows the soul with the strengthening realities of its own energy. (Eurhythmics, Art vii) Developing and directing willpower in order to harmonize the body and the mind lie at the center of his method: “Rhythmic gymnastics attempts to set up relations between instinctive bodily rhythms and those created by the senses or by the will” (Eurhythmics, Art 5). The end result, he pronounces grandly, is that people so trained will “contribute not only to their own happiness but also to the happiness of the various peoples and races and to the general progress of mankind” (Eurhythmics, Art 47).9 François Delsarte died without publishing his method of performance and elocution, but Delsarte System of Expression, written by his student, the actress Genevieve Stebbins, was wildly popular at the turn of the century, rapidly running through several printings after its initial publication in 1885. The book represents a highly hybrid theory of movement, the culmination of collaborations between Delsarte, his American acting student Steele MacKaye, and Stebbins, whose most significant contribution was to illumine the ramifications of Delsarte’s method for dance, where it had its greatest impact.10 Delsarte himself positions the arts in the realm of the spiritual: “Art is divine in its principles, divine in its essence, divine in its action, divine in its end” (Stebbins xx). Art enables a vision of the heavens (“art is the telescope of a supernatural world,” he exclaims), and yet it is also very much a science: “The pursuit of the art which I exercise has led me, naturally, into the domain of science; and, thanks to the deductions of a rigorous logic, I have been forced to the conclusion that there is between them identify of scientific methods” (xxv, xlvii). Stebbins’s book carefully maps each part of the body to the soul, maintaining Delsarte’s own theory of the body: “To each spiritual function responds a function of the body. To each grand function of the body corresponds a spiritual act” (lvii). Each gesture, each movement of the body, corresponds to a particular expression of the spirit. Quoting the nineteenth-century mystic Swedenborg—“Powers have no potency but by action of the body”—Stebbins teaches her readers, “there must be a union of two forms—one spiritual, the other material; the spiritual form being the life-power or energy, and the material form being the 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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well-being, or, in his words, “impeccable muscular virtuosity” (Eurhythmics, Art vii). For Dalcroze, writing in 1930, movements should be designed to strengthen not just body but mind and soul as well:

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one which appears to the senses. The latter is the form by which life-power or energy is brought into action” (34, 33). Delsarte, too, is concerned about properly directing the individual will, and he reports in an address to the Philotechnic Society of Paris that it was a desire not to produce more “servile copyists of a master without doctrine” that impelled him to develop his system in the first place (Stebbins xxxii). At the end of her book, Stebbins comments on this theme by selecting and arranging lines from Nathaniel Parker Willis’s 1882 poem “Parrhasius.” The original poem recounts the apocryphal story by Seneca of the famous Athenian painter, Parrhasius, who was so consumed with capturing verisimilitude in his portrait of Prometheus Bound that he bought and tortured a slave to stand in as model for the besieged mythical figure. Willis’s 172-line poem denounces the artist’s ambition, but Stebbins’s 18-line version elides the brutality and graphic violence, as well as the plot of the narrative poem. Her adaptation, set in the darkness of night, simply juxtaposes two images, representing slavery and freedom: “an unsold captive . . . chain’d to a pillar” and an artist working by the “golden light” emanating from the window of his room (252). Performance master Rudolf von Laban, like the Duncan siblings, participated in the “back-to-nature” eukinetics movement in Monte Verita, Ascona, Switzerland, where magician Aleister Crowley also operated for a time. Affiliated with Crowley, as well as the Nazi party some time later, Laban’s method was influential with American avant-garde expressionist dancers. Interested in the history of dance, Laban links dance and spirituality. “In dancing, or movement-thinking,” he observes, “man first became aware of a certain order in his higher aspirations towards spiritual life” (18). But, he argues, the “scientific age of industrial man” has eradicated humanity’s ability to connect movement to the soul (19–20). Laban, too, used popular scientific understandings of the nature of the universe to bolster his aesthetic and spiritual theories: “Science tells us that motion is an essential of existence. . . . Motion becomes movement in living beings, who possess an inner urge to use time and the changes that occur in time for their own purposes” (99). Rudolf Steiner is yet another early twentieth-century figure committed to reconciling science and religion in the dawn of Einsteinian theory: one of his followers explains that “Steiner’s door opens possibilities of insight into the nature of man and universe that satisfy equally the scientific, the artistic, and the religious longings for a fuller experience of reality” (Gardner 12). A dramatist, play reviewer, and literary magazine editor, Steiner broke with the Theosophical Society in 1913 to pursue his own branch of theosophy he dubbed anthroposophy, a “spiritual science,” traveling extensively 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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in Europe and America over the course of two decades, delivering thousands of speeches and dance recitals. In ways that resonate strongly with Gurdjieff’s philosophy (discussed at more length below), and with American transcendentalism, anthroposophy holds that knowledge of the self leads to knowledge of the divine, making it a philosophy especially pertinent to this chapter. According to Steiner in 1923, “in man’s self-knowledge arises a sun which illuminates something beyond the incidental individual personality of the beholder,” which leads to “the opening up of a new sense” (Mysticism 105, 106). Access to a kind of collective unconsciousness is achieved as “our own limited individuality takes its place spiritually in the great interconnection of the world” (Mysticism 115). The scientific aspects of this theory cannot be overlooked, as Steiner is vigilant in footnoting “proof” for his theories and offering afterwords that defend his “scientific” theses. Steiner insists that “Anthroposophy in the first instance, wants to be a knowledge of the spiritual world, a kind of knowledge which can indeed be placed at the side of what we today have in such a magnificent way, as science,” and that a follower of anthroposophy “must have utilized the strict and earnest methods which natural science today practises [sic]” (qtd. in Anderson 35). The only full-length treatment of Steiner’s drama, by Adrian Anderson, puts forth the proposition that Steiner’s philosophy derived originally from his love of mathematics, as it deals with “precise facts, or realities, that have no physical existence and yet they are discovered by the human mind” (1). “This realization,” Anderson relates, “opened his mind to the idea that other equally precise and objective facts could perhaps be discovered by the enquiring human mind concerning spiritual realities, if appropriately trained” (1). For Steiner, it is by engaging in the movements of eurythmic dance that one can achieve a “supersensible” state of being—contact with one’s very soul. “Man is a microcosm,” he preaches to a 1922 audience, “and if this microcosm is used as an artistic medium, it can lend expression to mysteries that pervade the entire cosmos” (Introduction 41). One’s anatomy and biological processes, for Steiner, are inextricably linked to one’s spirit, and the performative arts, as Anderson notes, “offer a valuable method for the instruction in spiritual themes, and artistic experience provides valuable assistance in attaining to spirituality” (x). To preface a 1919 recital for Stuttgart factory laborers, Steiner announces, “you will see here an art of movement that lets the soul-spiritual element shine directly into the movements of the human limbs, letting the eurythmist feel himself as a soul-and-spiritual being” (Introduction 7–8). At another recital three years later, he explains, “The cosmos can tell us its most intimate secrets through these human movements; through them the soul can most purely, most profoundly, most intimately 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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reveal itself” (Introduction 53). On the stage or “soul space,” according to Steiner disciple Marjorie Spock, the dancer experiences a transcendence of the material world: “Though the scene in which an audience sees him moving is, of course, physical, the eurythmist has actually crossed a border and entered a creative spiritual realm: the world of life, whose movement he is now to render visible” (Spock 4, 2). In the terms used in dance theory, the dance is not just expressive but operative; it effects change in the dancer and often the audience. Through his beliefs about the body’s connection to the soul, his interests in performance, spirituality, and the arts intersect nicely, as he hypothesizes the moving human body as a larynx, rendering the body a “moving sculpture” that embodies “speech that has become visible” (Introduction 44, 3). There is much of interest here for the literary scholar, for consonants and vowels, zodiacal signs and seasons, dramatic and lyric poetry all find expression in the eurythmic performance.11 According to Steiner in 1920, eurythmy offers “an immediate experience for which the artistic medium is man himself, and in which the impression is of man himself ” (Introduction 32). Eurythmic dance-speech grants the performer’s audience a glimpse of humanity’s divinity: “In the movements that are intimately related to his etheric body and that become visible speech when he does eurythmy, he reveals what the gods wanted him to be: not an earthly man but a wholly divine man who has a dwelling place in the human form” (Introduction 71). There were others interested in altered states and dance at the turn of the last century, even if they did not launch sustained programs or movements. The so-called Madame Madeleine of Munich performed dance while apparently hypnotized (Marx). Artaud compared theater to alchemy. Indeed, the capacity of dance to provoke heightened levels of consciousness attracted many occultists, including the infamous magician Aleister Crowley, who experimented with religious dance rites in the early 1910s after witnessing dervishes dance in North Africa (Brown 17). One evening, Crowley recited poetry while his protégé, Victor Neuberg, danced in an effort to summon Mars; having achieved spirit possession through his body’s ritual movements, he then acted as spiritualist medium through which Crowley’s friends could ask questions of the Roman god (6). Encouraged by this apparent success, in 1910 Crowley staged what he called the Rites of Eleusis for an audience of about a hundred, again featuring Neuberg’s ecstatic dance, though the performance had less to do with its title and more to do with Crowley’s desire to initiate the audience into his own religion, Crowleyanity (10, 12). According to drama historian J. F. Brown, Crowley gave specific direction to his actors in terms of their movements on stage since “[a]ccording to the 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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theory of ceremonial magic, the body assumes a certain position or forms a particular configuration in order to become a focus of psychic energy, a conductor of magical power” (14). From the respected physician to the religious zealot, the renowned performance master to the cult leader, a belief in the psychological and spiritual properties of dance and movement prevailed at the turn of the twentieth century. Toomer, Movement, and Mastering the Self One can create nothing of lasting value without self-knowledge. —Émile Jaques-Dalcroze Out of self-knowledge is born knowledge of the world. —Rudolf Steiner Life is mystery in motion. Life is circulating mystery. —Jean Toomer12 In a composition book of autobiographical notes dated 1936, Jean Toomer cites a 1925 potboiler by Hugh Walpole entitled Portrait of a Man with Red Hair: A Romantic Macabre. Toomer’s reference is to a passage about how Americans, due to the legacy of the Puritans, fail to experience life deeply and sensually. As Toomer records, Walpole’s American protagonist, Charles Harkness, reflects, “He had his passions and his desires, but his Puritan descent kept him always at one remove from experience” (13).13 In the novel, Harkness indeed learns to feel in ways he had not when he travels to a small town in England, for there he encounters both a beautiful young woman and an aged psychopath, experiencing for the first time the anguished pangs of love and the cruel blade of the sadist’s knife. Harkness also engages in a Druidic dance, a communal drunken orgy of ecstatic celebration following an annual three-day festival. When he joins the dancing villagers in a procession through the town, he is aware only of fragments of jumbled sensory impressions: He was never to be sure whether or no [sic] he had intended to join in the dance. He was not aware of more than the colour, the lights, the rhythm of the tune. . . . [H]e was carried along. . . . There was . . . a flinging from all sides of eager bodies into the fray. . . . [E]veryone was pressed close together. . . . [E]veryone was in the highest humour, shouting, laughing, singing, ringing their bells, and blowing their whistles. . . . [H]e had no 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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other impression for the moment but of a vast expanse of heaving, leaping, corduroy waistcoat, of a hard brass button in his eye, and of himself clutching with both hands to a shiny trouser that must hold himself from falling. . . . A kind of divine frenzy united them all. . . . Details for a time eluded him. . . . He was happy, ecstatically happy. (78–79, 82–83) Like performances theorized by Dalcroze, Delsarte, Steiner, and Gurdjieff, this dance has not only expressive qualities but operative ones. The villagers’ movements not only express their inner joy but also generate a shared spiritual experience. At least for a time, the dance effects real change in the community: “Now was the moment when all enmities were truly forgotten, when love was declared without fear, when lips sought lips and hands clasped hands, and heaven opened and all the human souls marched in” (84). In this bizarre gothic novel about sadism, power and control are the dominant themes of the plot itself and of the conversations between characters, and epiphanic moments for Harkness come when he relinquishes control of his body. He is “ecstatically happy” when he is “carried along” in the “divine frenzy” of the dance, and at the novel’s climax it is not until he and his friends are held in captivity by the evil sadist, Crispin, that they realize the truth about their desires, fears, and loves. Just before he is led to the torture room, Harkness exclaims, “I’ve danced the town, I’ve climbed rocks, I’ve dared the devil, I’ve fallen in love, and I know at last that there’s such a hunger for beauty in my soul that it must go on and on and on. . . . I’m alive. I never can die any more!” (239). Lacking control, he discovers himself. As Crispin begins to carve Harkness’s physical body, Harkness’s “real soul seemed to slip away. . . . His soul was free and Crispin’s was imprisoned” (253). He surrenders his “egotism” and joins “the common life of man”: “Beauty belonged to all men in common, and it was through beauty that they came to God, but each man found beauty in his own way, and, having found it, joined his portion of it to the common stock” (262). By ceding freedom, he regains it: “Harkness moved a free man as he had never been in all his life as yet. He was his own master, and God’s servant too” (262). Toomer’s early play Natalie Mann also includes two scenes of dancing, between Nathan and Etty. Unlike in Cane’s “Avey,” “Theater,” “Box Seat,” and “Bona and Paul,” dance in this play is not merely a sexual or romantic activity.14 In the first dance scene of Natalie Mann, the stage directions describe the scene in terms of both religion and free will, highlighting the tension between individualism and communal experience: after the orchestra stops, “The dance becomes a spontaneous embodiment of the struggle of two souls, against external barriers, for freedom and integrity” (Wayward 276). As Lizabeth Rand reads these scenes, “The dancers—man and woman—have 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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struggled for individual freedom, yet a spiritual and intuitive connection” (62). In the final act of the play, the dance begins conventionally but continues on, again, after the orchestra stops, independent of the music or the surroundings: “As if from some indefinite region, a music is evoked, an interpretive music, symbolic of the dance and triumph of souls. Beginning as a medley of national, racial folk-tunes, it spirals into a music that is individual and triumphant” (324). The dance builds in intensity until it terminates in Nathan Merilh’s sudden collapse, an abandonment of consciousness and control: “At the very crest of creation, something inside of Merilh gives way” (324). These dances follow the religious tradition of ecstatic spiritual experience of oneness with the deity; control over the body and the individual ego must be ceded in order for an individual to merge with the divine.15 But here the passive prostration of the saint is not the only mode of achieving religious ecstasy; the rhythm of the processional, the movements of the body in the dance, can initiate a spiritual experience as well. As Darwin Turner comments about the play, “Dance is not merely a rhythmic expression of the soul; it becomes the medium through which the soul releases itself from social restrictions” (12). What distinguishes Toomer’s and Walpole’s texts, though, is that the dancers of Natalie Mann struggle to maintain the spontaneity of the movements and their sense of individuality, seeking free will for their souls, while Harkness allows himself to be “carried along.” This illustrates nicely the paradox of theories of movement at the turn of the last century. The active body can generate the passivity of the soul necessary to receiving divine enlightenment. Countering orthodox Christian tradition, this is a practice that harkens back to the Bacchanalia of the ancient Greeks, and to ritualized folk dances recommended by Dalcroze, Ettie Rout, and so many others and, in fact, invoked by Toomer’s stage directions. But an acute anxiety about the moving body and about the subjection of the will to the divine that can ensue from its rhythms manifests itself in Toomer’s practice of Gurdjieffian precepts and, even more so, in H.D.’s encounters with trance dance. Toomer’s numerous autobiographical writings betray an obsession with the body and its movements in his early years, even before his mentor introduced him to religious dance, though it is important to note that his reflections come after he met Gurdjieff, inspired by his method of seeking self-knowledge through movement. In one of these works, “Book X,” Toomer explores this period of his life at some length, explaining his fixation on the body in terms of what would become lifelong goals: “The desire for body improvement is the physical division of the desire for self-improvement” (61).16 Mastery of the body will yield mental and spiritual benefit. In high school and in his brief tenure at various colleges (where he majored for a 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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time in physical education), Toomer engaged in military drills, German and Swedish gymnastics, wrestling, “aesthetic dancing,” and other forms of physical exercise, as well as a self-initiated stint with Bernarr Macfadden’s then fashionable physical culture program for young men. “This was my phase of Body,” Toomer writes in “Book X,” “a cult of body” (120, 202). Most of these activities promised results that went far behind a wellconditioned body. The Ling system of gymnastics Toomer followed stressed the growth of the mental faculties and, like so many texts devoted to the science of movement in this period, an improved degree of control over the body often expressed in the language of slavery and servitude: “In the Swedish system . . . pupils are compelled by the type of work done to keep their minds concentrated upon it, thus establishing the type of mental control that renders the body a servant to the brain” (Gour v). Macfadden’s program, too, predicted mental and moral benefits. Failure to develop the body will lead only to the decay of civilization, he goes so far as to prophesy: “physical indolence is the torpor that precedes the collapse of moribund nations, and heralds a moral night that knows no morning” (Macfadden and Oswald 144). What Toomer wanted was perhaps what most teenagers want, some sense of control over his growing body; Mark Whalan argues persuasively that bodybuilding’s focus on reshaping the body granted Toomer a conception of his body “as a malleable entity” (12). Macfadden’s stringent program of exercise and diet certainly facilitated just that sense of control: “I had built up a certain strength of will over my body. I could make it do things. The bodies of the other boys simply moved of themselves. . . . [T]he will was there to be called upon and to serve me in the future in unexpected ways” (“Book X” 65). While I would not disagree with the many Toomer scholars who allege that Toomer’s aim was to control his own sexuality, I would argue that there is more to his engagement with exercise than an effort to curb his masturbatory habits.17 Toomer relates, for instance, expanded intellectual capacity and ability to concentrate as a consequence of his rigid physical regimen: “Having strengthened my muscles I was now sharpening my wits, spurred to the contest by a surplus body-energy which charged my emotions and invigorated my mind” (“Book X” 63, verso). But, perhaps more importantly to a budding artist, his obsession with the physical body and its movements leads him to a kind of aesthetic awakening: “With something of the artist’s sensibility I was growing to respond to the human figure as nature’s most amazing work of art” (63, verso). Elsewhere in his writings, his record of his experience with gymnastics stresses again a novel sense of control as well as an aesthetic that transcended the body: “There was an art in it, something that appealed to the emotions as well as to the body, an experience of beauty 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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as well as an experience of the human body acting through conscious control” (Jean Toomer Papers, f. 953). Toomer’s discussion of this phase of the “cult of the body,” however, is sometimes fraught with ambivalence over issues of power and will. This tension is registered in “Book X” when he describes his response to military drills: Side by side with that of me which is individualistic and alone, there is an aspect that has always liked to participate in directed movements. . . . And side by side with my democratic feelings there has existed a feeling for a hierarchy of leadership terminating in, or rather, stemming down from an absolute ruler. I want the family to have a head. I want a community to be governed—self-governed if possible but governed in any case. I want a state to have its king. I want life to have its god. (41)18 Here Toomer both wants control and to be controlled, to have power and to subjugate himself. He wants the experience of the singularity of his own ego, but he wants a structure of hierarchy surrounding, governing, and sheltering him. As will be evident in the discussion of race in the next chapter, Toomer is more than capable of holding simultaneously dual, often dueling, impulses as he ruminates incessantly about the nature of the physical body. While he typically reports positive effects on mind and soul from rigorous physical regimens, he at times expresses just the opposite. In “Book X,” he recounts his amazement at a physical breakdown that hones his spiritual sense: “Baffling phenomena, they had a mysterious element in them as though planetary or astral forces were producing neuro-chemical changes throughout my entire system. As my vitality decreased my sensibility increased and my consciousness became so clear, so clairvoyant almost, that it was rather painful and quite startling to me” (234). Both Mark Whalan and Matthew Guterl persuasively link Toomer’s obsession with bodybuilding to concern about his racial identity. Whalan contends that “[s]ensitive to the ways in which bodies become racially marked, [Toomer] considered how programs of disciplining and training the body might disrupt such inscription” (172). Likewise, Guterl, following Michael Budd’s argument that the physical culture movement attracted many who saw it as a way to intercede in their biological destiny through willpower and hard work, remarks that “for Jean Toomer—in contrast, for instance, to the eugenicist Madison Grant—building a better American meant creating the perfect body for the new and emergent perfect race, and not the careful supervision of the purity of some patently aristocratic and uniformly white Pharaonic class” (177). It seems clear to me that Toomer’s 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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anxiety about his body is entangled with his struggle over racial identity, and more specifically about contemporaneous notions of the beautiful but weak and sickly “tragic mulatto.” However, I see his “cult of body” as complicated by other factors as well, for Toomer’s writings emphasize the mental, moral, and spiritual benefits of physical movement. Throughout his various autobiographical writings, for instance, Toomer consistently conjoins his early experiences of physicality with Georges Gurdjieff’s program of religious dance.19 Recalling, for instance, the military drilling of his teenage years, Toomer writes, again in “Book X,” This was the beginning of a sense and joy in coordinated movements that developed in a straight though discontinuous line through Swedish gymnastics to the Gurdjieff exercises and dances. In purpose and aim no two things could be more different than the drills of the U.S. army and the monastic exercises taught by Gurdjieff. The former conditions men to slaughter each other; the latter, springing from a profound knowledge of the human body and psyche, reconditions men so that, by working free of fixed, mechanical, habitual movements they may have new experiences. . . . Yet, different though they were and are, it remains true that my response to drilling was the base of my response to the coordinations and definite executions of the Gurdjieff movements. (“Book X” 41–42) While Toomer notes the tremendous irony of connecting the two, he nonetheless admits the extraordinary appeal of “coordinated movements” that attracted him throughout his life, until his declining health drove him to consider a quieter, more submissive Quaker stance. Gurdjieff’s claims about the spiritual nature of movement are much more explicitly made than those made about Ling’s gymnastics or Macfadden’s exercise system. In fact, many of Gurdjieff’s notions of dance resonate with those of the theosophically minded Steiner, and it is likely that there are mutual influences.20 According to drama historian Mel Gordon, “The purpose of [Gurdjieff’s] sacred dances was to communicate viscerally an occult knowledge that could only manifest itself in physical terms,” a transmission that reportedly altered the psychological states of the audience (38). Like most quasi-scientific thinking about movement in this period, documented above, Gurdjieff’s philosophy, as recounted in a series of lectures between 1918 and 1924, rests on a belief in a universe perpetually in motion: “Everything in the world is material and—in accordance with universal law—everything is in motion and is constantly being transformed” (Gurdjieff 209). The route to spiritual growth and enlightenment is not that of the traditional Christian saint: “Passive man serves involution; and active man, evolution” (198). Action 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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takes the form of dance and of the manual labor he demanded at his compound in France. Gurdjieff tells his followers that “our aim is a harmonious development of man,” a reference to what he views as humanity’s tripartite composition: mind, body, feeling (183). While dance is expressive of emotion—“dances and movements are a means of combining the mind and the feeling with movements of the body and manifesting them together”—it also conveys spiritual truths—“[c]ertain movements carry a proof in them, a definite knowledge, or religious and philosophical ideas” (183). Gurdjieff’s philosophy concerns itself in particular with the issue of control over the body. Gurdjieff apologist Paul Beekman Taylor—who, as a child, lived with Toomer for a time—stresses control in his description of Gurdjieff’s aims: Gurdjieff “wanted people to regain control over their relations with both their inner selves and their environment, control he felt had been progressively lost and which was in particular peril in the mechanistic structure of life in the 20th century” (8). Through prescribed dances, one embarks upon a journey of self-discovery that yields the knowledge of one’s definitive lack of agency: “As a man gets to know himself, he continually finds new areas of his mechanicalness—let us call it automatism—domains where his will, his ‘I wish,’ has no power” (Gurdjieff 50). The average human being is utterly devoid of will, mere “automata, put into action by external forces like machines or clockwork toys”: “Everything possesses him, everything rules him. He does not possess, does not rule anything” (71, 72). Though human beings believe they have free will, this is a fiction: “It is an illusion that our movements are voluntary; in reality they are automatic. Our thoughts and feelings are equally automatic” (157). The body is repeatedly referred to as a “machine” in Gurdjieff’s writings (and, not coincidentally, in Toomer’s21), and, again, a passive mystical experience will not grant enlightenment, for he believes that you must be active so that you can “observe the machine when it is working” (80). Achieving that enlightenment will allow an individual to evolve into a higher being, one with power: “Will is a sign of a being of a very high order of existence as compared with the being of an ordinary man” (71). Gurdjieff argues that self-awareness yields spiritual enlightenment. One of the means by which true self-awareness can be achieved is through strategies of what he terms “self-observation” and “nonidentification,” in which individuals learn to distinguish and sever their astral and physical bodies. The process of self-observation entails examining one’s own physical body as a kind of foreign object of study; when the “true self” has reached the point of utter defamiliarization and detachment, nonidentification has been achieved. In one of the exercises, ritualized dances are interrupted randomly with “Stop!” commands designed to provoke self-observation, so that there is a shift from movement to stillness in the performance, a paradox in 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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which the passive stance is the more active one. In a frozen pose, the dancers observe their bodies in radically defamiliarized postures and thus become aware of ways to break from what Gurdjieff sees as automatized modes of embodiment: “[A] man looks at himself from new points of view, sees and observes himself anew. In this posture, not customary for him, he can think anew, feel anew, and know himself anew” (157). Reeducating our bodies has an impact on other facets of our being: Every man has a definite number of intellectual and emotional postures, just as he has a definite number of moving postures; and his moving, intellectual and emotional postures are all interconnected. Thus, a man can never get away from his own repertory of intellectual and emotional postures unless his moving postures are changed. (156) For Toomer, Gurdjieff’s methods of self-observation and nonidentification must have resonated strongly with F. Matthias Alexander’s theory of the body, which Toomer had studied previous to his involvement with Gurdjieff. Alexander, whose work was (and is) influential among actors, argues in the early 1920s that humankind’s evolutionary progress has been stunted by a failure to develop beyond purely instinctive and subconscious— automatic— modes of embodiment: “[M]an’s continued dependence upon . . . this subconscious guidance and control has resulted, either directly or indirectly, in the gradual development of imperfections and defects in the use of the human organism” (3). Alexander is not a fringe figure; pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, in fact, penned the introduction to his book. But his conclusions are not dissimilar from those of many of the people discussed in this chapter who did not enjoy such status: “man should acquire a new way of directing and controlling the mechanisms of the psycho-physical organism as a whole” (9). Like Gurdjieff, Alexander recommended focused concentration on individual body parts, movements, and gestures as a way of learning new ways to understand and direct the physical self. Toomer wrote and rewrote his revelatory experience of seeing Gurdjieff’s dancers for the first time. Like most religious dance, the performance began methodically but gradually gained in intensity until it reached the point of an ecstatic frenzy, a subjugation of will to the rhythm of the movements. Consistently in these various descriptions, he emphasizes both the physical and spiritual nature of the performance, attracted to its promise of selfmastery: These [exercises] seemed to take hold of the body and literally re-create it. To see them being done made me want to do them. Nor was their 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Even the music accompanying the dance “awakened memories of a sacred world I may once have dwelt in, but from which I had long been exiled. . . . It called all who had become lost to return, to resurrect and remember the part they were to play in the grand procession of the conscious universe” (“From Exile into Being” I.106). He was convinced of the validity and power of Gurdjieff’s holistic method, and within a year (the year after Cane was published) he had joined his commune in Fontainebleau: “This, I was sure, was a religious training, a discipline, an invitation to conscious experiment, a flexible and complete system, a way of life to which I could dedicate body, mind, and soul” (“From Exile into Being” I.107). Manual labor was another form of bodily movement designed to promote the processes of self-observation and nonidentification, and Toomer was met with a rigorous system of work when he arrived at Prieure.22 While the “stop” command was used on workers and dancers alike, Toomer recounts other benefits of labor, of being “brought face to face with body, and through it, with ourselves”: “out came its habits, limitations, its faults and aptitudes, its inclinations and disinclinations, a will of its own” (“From Exile into Being” III.362). The idea was for individuals to work well beyond their capabilities, so that their actions and movements began to be less automatized as they grew too tired to control their bodies (“From Exile into Being” I.113). Gurdjieff shifted the type of work constantly, so that new habits could not become engrained (“From Exile into Being” III.364–65). Toomer theorizes that intensive physical work pulls the blood away from the mind, giving it “a holiday from verbal thinking,” and cleanses it: “The total result is a recharged body-mind: a body purified, energized, strengthened, a mind able, lucid, with greatly increased power to grasp and to comprehend. Freed from many a constricting habit, you are ready for new experience. You feel and in some measure actually are a new man” (“From Exile into Being” I.116–17). When Toomer sets up his own commune in Portage, Wisconsin, in the 1930s, he attempts to institute a similar structure of coordinating mental and physical activity, relating that “[i]t was a clean healthy life, this combination of psychological effort and outdoor exercise. Without exception each one was showing the results. . . . Bodies were becoming organs of sensing and sensations, structures for locomotion and physical doing, instruments of contact with other bodies and the general features of the world we live in” (“Portage Potential” 59–60). 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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appeal limited to the physical. To me they were strangely beautiful, and, in a way I could not explain, profound. No mere manual motions, these. They involved the whole man, I felt sure, and were means in the service of an essentially religious aim. (Selected 107)

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Seeing Gurdjieff’s dancers for the first time inspires new thinking about the nature of the universe, Toomer writes in another autobiographical text, “Second River,” in language that echoes popular scientific thought of the period and relies on teleological religious ideas about becoming one with the divine: “To say that the universe is Being and Becoming is to state that a Thing and its Motion constitute the universe. And this indeed is what I hold. Creation then is that point at which Motion, as distinguished from the Thing, begins. Return is that point at which Motion ends in identity with the Thing. This cycle is the universe in time. Time begins with Motion, and ends with it” (17).23 Here is an active universe in flux, constantly in motion, but this is not a chaotic world. Rather, this universe has direction and meaning, in its focus on a “[r]eturn” to origins. Interestingly, it is in America that we find concentrated the most movement in the universe. “[T]here is in America a comparatively greater amount of general activity,” he observes. Remarking that America has more “plasticity” than European nations, Toomer asserts, “[e]xperiences, experiments, and new results can come about with more frequency than they can in countries whose social forms are more rigid and encrusted. . . . [T]here is something moving, the possibility of movement,— and just this has its value” (“America and Problems”). As Toomer begins to construct his own system of thought in the 1930s—an adaptation of the Gurdjieffian philosophy that he dubbed “Psychologic”—his view of the universe parallels his view of the permeable human body, a structure composed of an overwhelming jumble of continual, unending movements: Every system in our body is a system of circulation. Every system in our emotions and mind is likewise a circulatory chain. Blood flows. Air is taken in and expelled. Nerves relay messages. Impressions race in and around. Matters are communicated with electric rapidity from body to mind to feelings and back again. Emotions move and speed around and in and out. Ideas and words and images associate and spin. Life flows in and out of us. (“Psychologic”)24 Our bodies and our universe are integrated in constant movement, and yet all of this movement makes humans feel helpless: “[M]y life is made up of two flowings. One, the flowing within myself. Two, the flowing of factors and forces in . . . the external world. . . . I can control neither, and both are one” (Wayward 21). For, despite all of this motion within our bodies, he laments, “Yet are we congested and stagnant” (“Psychologic”). Like Gurdjieff, Toomer sees the average person as profoundly passive, an automatonic being enveloped in a chaotic stream of motion without any capacity for control over the 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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pandemonium. Free will is an illusion, Toomer contends, using (as he often does) slavery as a metaphor for our bondage to determinism and automatism: “This is what is called free will in ordinary man; he is ruled—now by the mind, now by the feelings, now by the body. . . . Real free will can only be where one ‘I’ rules, when man has a master for his team. But an ordinary man has no master” (“America 1924”). In one of his many 1930s texts on his “psychologic” philosophy, “Remember and Return,” Toomer expresses keen frustration over this problem of movement and free will: “Why am I—who am a field of force implanted in greater fields of force—forceless? . . . The electro-dynamic view of man describes the force we are and theoretically should have for use, but fails to explain why in actual fact we do not have that force to use” (19). But fault lies with humanity, and in language contemporary readers undoubtedly find startling from a person of African descent, Toomer seemingly dismisses abolitionist efforts to free the body when it is the bondage of mind and soul that deserve our focus: “We seek to master the environment and forget to try to master ourselves. . . . We demand outer freedom, while neglecting the efforts required for inner freedom. Hence we never really obtain either. . . . (In consequence . . . we find ourselves in slavery, both external and internal.)” (“Psychologic Papers” 5).25 The point of a spiritual program such as Gurdjieff’s or Toomer’s “Psychologic” is self-mastery, to find within oneself a higher spiritual or astral consciousness that can exert control over the physical body: “The inherent nature of the higher body is to control the lower body” (Jean Toomer Papers, f. 961). Toomer argues that by freeing the mind and soul, the body’s problems (and here he would include race, as will be discussed at greater length in the next chapter) will disappear. His poem “Faint Drift” uses short, heavily stressed lines to locate the only hope for spiritual survival in regaining the free will lost by humanity’s “fall” into physical form: And, where life would be Despair, A faint drift of Will Seeks to lift My dead weight to birth. (Jean Toomer Papers, f. 1272) So humankind is faced with a decision to seek the kind of self-knowledge requisite to a spiritual awakening, for that is the path to breaking the servitude: “All men may be regarded as of two classes: those who believe that the body is the principal and therefore live to serve it; and those who believe that the body is the agent and therefore make it serve them” (“Remember and Return” 366). The key to attaining this agency is through movement. 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Again following Gurdjieff, Toomer sees the true higher self as an active self, since a passive self is no more than an automaton. In Toomer’s “From Exile into Being”—a hybrid text that is part autobiography, part spiritual self-help manual—he describes a spiritual experience that revealed to him a vision of an astral existence, free of the physical body. We live in a situation of abject “exile” in our physical bodies, he argues, alienated from our true spiritual selves. The true self (the “I” or “Being”), he teaches his readers, is an active self: “ ‘I’ tends to go to the scene of greatest activity. If ‘I’ is, as it were, passive, it goes where it is drawn. But if, on the other hand, ‘I’ is active, it can go where it wills, can be the initiator of thinking, feeling, moving” (I.65). Toomer’s worldview explicitly counters a religious tradition of passivity before the divine, as he advocates what he terms an “athletic” approach to life: “To my mind it is an athletic whole attitude—in contrast to the limited passive attitudes instilled by certain religious creeds” (“Book X” 8). Like that of Delia Alton in H.D.’s Majic Ring, discussed below, Toomer’s spiritual experience, as illustrated at length in Part II of “From Exile into Being,” is paradoxically one of passivity and activity: “I was in a motion that seemed motionless” (II.116). The movement of his physical body has apparently become projected on to his soul, as he feels within his body “an authentic action utterly different from any I had hitherto known. . . . I seemed to become malleable and flowing. My very substance was in motion” (A Jean Toomer Reader 34). Embracing what so many in the early twentieth century found so terrifying, and what H.D.’s Alton resists, Toomer exalts here in the experience of his penetrable body as diffuse, dissolving into that of a higher being. The curious metaphor he uses is that of reproduction, for he depicts himself in a femininized position before the deity, a “seed” or “pod” fertilized by a higher power: “All within was wondrously fertile” (A Jean Toomer Reader 35). As in the mystic tradition discussed in the previous chapter, this movement “within” is described in almost orgasmic terms, though here the focus is unremittingly on constant motion: “The motion . . . seemed literally to grow, to become increasingly complex. It became, as it were, a field of motions, waves of moving. . . . The motions unfolded, gathered, spread, interweaving, sometimes spiraling” (A Jean Toomer Reader 36). In another paradox, again very much in the tradition of religious mysticism, he assumes will by submitting to the will of the divine, a claim reminiscent of so much extraliterary writing of the period dedicated to harmonizing one’s will with that of god’s: “I recognized—A master is at the controls. My master has come and I have met him. And in that moment my will became his will; and I felt—Thy will be done. Thy wonderful will!” (A Jean Toomer Reader 34). 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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As Toomer ages and becomes ill, and his body becomes less capable of activity, he increasingly begins to stress the necessity of “inner-activity” rather than external bodily movement, a shift that I would argue is not unrelated to his embrace of the quietism of the Quakers. It may also stem, in part, from his reading of popular psychologist Gerald Heard’s notion of the development of the human psyche. Heard theorizes in 1929 that the natural course of human evolution passed from a physical to a mental phase: “All are in the process of becoming, first, men of action, and then men of reflection, if not of thought” (83). If, as George Hutchinson has argued, Toomer retreats into mysticism because it is “beyond words” (231), the quintessence of Quaker mysticism is also beyond the body. Motion is still the key to enlightenment, but the movement is situated within the mind and soul. If in the early 1930s he had argued for an “athletic” worldview, by the mid to late 1930s, that emphasis on physical activity has lessened: “Thus we do not counsel, as some schools do, ‘Make your body passive.’ Nor do we advise as some other schools do, ‘Make your body active.’ We say, ‘Make yourself inner-active—and the body will tend to make itself adjust to your needs’ ” (“As the World Revolves”). Inner-activity, however, is still activity, and it has the same effects: “As long as I am inner-active, all is well. My inner tone gives tone to the body. My inner glow gives glow to the body. My inner circulation causes physical circulation. My inner strength gives strength to my instrument” (“As the World Revolves”). His late poetry reflects this shift away from materialism, toward a more mystical understanding. In “Drift,” he writes that “The moving of bodies is nothing. / The moving of feelings is everything” (Jean Toomer Papers, f. 1270). In an alternate version, “Let Us Go,” he accentuates the moving of spirit within rather than the external physical body, the poem becoming more fluid, more enjambed, as he reaches his climax: The moving of body is nothing. The moving of mind is ignorance. The moving of time is illusion. The moving of self is everything, and grand is the moving of whole human beings. (Jean Toomer Papers, f. 1282) In “Motion and Rest,” one senses his acquiescence to the process of aging even while he continues to desire his body’s movement: Intent and thrilled I have watched birds fly and come to rest. 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Even while Toomer’s body slowed and declined, movement remained his metaphor for spiritual and self-awareness. Toomer wrote one poem specifically about dance, “The Lost Dancer,” in the late 1920s when he was still invested in Gurdjieff: Spatial depths of being survive The birth to death recurrences Of feet dancing on earth of sand; Vibrations of the dance survive The sand; the sand, elect, survives The dancer. He can find no source Of magic adequate to bind The sand upon his feet, his feet Upon his dance, his dance upon The diamond body of his being. (Collected 39) Written in stringently regular tetrameter (broken only by the final ninesyllable line), the poem itself is a dance, using enjambment throughout to create a spiraling movement, constantly spinning objective nouns away from their verbs and prepositional phrases on to successive lines. This effect of the poem circling back upon itself is underscored by the palindromic quality of the penultimate line. The spiral, in fact, recurs in Toomer’s writing, which includes references to the mystical music spiraling out of the folk tunes accompanying Nathan’s dance in Natalie Mann and to the spiraling motion of the deity engulfing him during his spiritual experience (discussed above). Hillel Schwartz describes the spiral of dance in this period in spiritual terms, as “a model of motion . . . at whose radiant center was a mystical solar plexus and at whose physical axis was the preternaturally flexible spine, bound link by vertebral link to the earth as to the heavens” (75). In this sense, Toomer’s thinking is very much in line with contemporaneous dance theory.26 Robert Jones characterizes the poem as expressing Toomer’s lifelong quest “to harmonize his fragmented personality and restore union between himself and society” (133). Fragmentation is an apt metaphor, for the feet and the earth beneath them, the dance and its spiritual reverberations, cannot adhere. The helix of the formal structure of the poem is strictly controlled, its repeated separation of noun from verb registering a profound sense of alienation and dislocation, and the regularized, mechanical form creating a 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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So would I move. So would I come to rest. . . . So would I come to rest, so should we Come to rest at quiet time. (Collected 96)

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feeling of entrapment of the dancer’s body. And yet, despite the dancer’s inability “to bind” these elements, “survive” is the short poem’s most frequently occurring verb. Despite a lack of control over the body and its movements, “depths of being survive.” The final word, the trochaic “being,” breaks up the rigidity of the verse form and asserts the dancer’s survival. Nicely containing the tension between movement and stillness, this poem about dance paradoxically relies on the verb “survive” rather than on verbs of action. Its poetic form twists in a spiral, but its dancer does not move. H.D., Trance Dance, and (Self-)Possession [M]y trance frightens them, breaks the dance . . . —H.D. [S]tillness, no less than movement, is activity. . . . T. S. Eliot puts it paradoxically: “In the stillness, there the dance is.” —Rudolph Steiner disciple, Marjorie Spock 27 Toomer’s long poem, “The Blue Meridian,” is typically cited for its conceptualizing of a new “American race,” and the next chapter addresses this theme. The poem also, however, features religious dance, composed in rhythms at least one critic has termed incantatory (H. Jones 338). Indeed, the poem swirls with movement from its opening to its closing: “It must spiral on!” (Collected 50). American Indians of the Southwest dance for five days “To resurrect—/ To project into this conscious world / An example of the organic” (54, 71). The repetitive structure of the poem, and the songlike arrangement of lines and stanzas, create a rhythm designed to invoke a great spirit, the “Radiant Incorporeal,” who “dances the dance of the Blue Meridian / And dervishes with the seven regions of America, and all the world ” (74). In H.D.’s Majic Ring, a divine spirit—Rhea, earth goddess, who reappear as “Our Lady” in Trilogy—is also invoked by dance. Composed in London in the midst of World War II, and edited significantly in the decade following the war, H.D.’s spiritualist autobiographical novel Majic Ring depicts her protagonist, Delia Alton, acting out a series of tableaux vivants and dance steps for Delia’s lover, Gareth, that enact portraits of an array of ancient figures from across the globe. During the performance, Delia gradually drifts into the trancelike state of a medium. She shifts from acting the part of an American Indian girl, to channeling that girl, to becoming that girl. Her body, as she describes it, becomes a kind of “radio 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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receiver” of a vision that carries her across several continents and thousands of years, guiding her from an American Indian girl to an ancient Greek goddess, an experience that ultimately grants her the occult wisdom she seeks in wartime. In depicting a mixture of poses and dance—by oscillating between passages of stillness and movement—the protagonist of H.D.’s novel both invokes the passive state of the mystic or medium to attain an otherworldly experience, and counters the vulnerability of such a state with an active model of engagement with the supernatural. Thus, she attempts to resist what Rachel Connor has recently called, in discussing this scene, the “double bind of mediumship” (127).28 As noted in chapter 1, one key religio-scientific model for a spiritual experience that involves travel through time and space was the 1872 novel Lumen by astronomer and spiritualist Camille Flammarion, an author H.D. read at the onset of her 1940s experiments with spiritualist séances. Flammarion’s profession as astronomer undoubtedly appealed to H.D., whose father was a professor of astronomy; Louis Silverstein, in fact, reports that H.D. first encounters Flammarion as early as 1910 and that her father was dismissive of his work.29 Of all of the books at the spiritualist library H.D. frequented in the 1940s, however, she was most attracted to Flammarion’s decidedly scientific approach. Delia appears in another autobiographical novel of this period, The Sword Went Out to Sea—a text that mentions Flammarion’s work several times—setting aside more questionable sources in favor of his, “the most scientific of these volumes” (129). Noteworthy for anticipating Einstein’s notions of the relative nature of time—“the notion of time is essentially relative,” Flammarion avers (13)—Lumen combines scientific explanation with a fanciful tale of the afterlife. Spending his afterlife soaring through the universe, Lumen realizes that viewing Earth from different vantage points and distances permits a vision of life on the planet from different eras, “reversing, so to speak, the flow of time” (24). Earth from the distance of 72 light-years away, for instance, is an Earth 72 years in the past. He attempts to explain this phenomenon in scientific terms: “When we examine the surface of a heavenly object with a telescope, we see not the actual surface as it is at the time of our observation, but the surface as it was when the light was emitted from it” (21). Moreover, just as H.D.’s protagonist travels backward in time, Lumen watches the history of civilization on Earth in reverse, beginning with the French Revolution—“the history of France from its very beginning, unrolling before me in an order inverse to the succession of events” (42)—passing through ancient Greece and Rome, to prehistoric times, to the moment of the planet’s formation. Again, Lumen explains the possibility of time travel in the terms of physics: “[A]ll that is needed is to recede from the earth with a velocity greater than 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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that of light” (57). Moreover, in “H.D. by Delia Alton,” H.D. cites another text by Flammarion, Death and Its Mystery, as explaining “the mystery of the appearance of a stranger or a near-stranger, at a time and in a place where he could not possibly have been” (202). In addition to work by Flammarion, and the many extraliterary texts on dance and movement discussed in the first part of this chapter, another quite different but equally relevant context for this scene in H.D.’s novel may well be Isadora Duncan’s writings on the philosophy of dance. Both Carrie Preston and Felicia McCarren have argued persuasively for Duncan’s largely unacknowledged importance to understanding modernism. Significantly for this chapter, McCarren positions Duncan’s writing at the intersection of science and spirituality and, ultimately, high art: “Isadora’s rhetoric links the nineteenth-century science of the human motor to high modernism” (69). Dressed in simple ancient Greek clothing, Isadora Duncan revolutionized dance in the early twentieth century by focusing on natural, expressive movements. H.D.’s library contained Duncan’s autobiography, and the two shared an intense interest in ancient Greece, H.D. mining ancient Greece for her poetry and prose throughout her career, and Duncan drawing on figures on Grecian urns to create her dances. Both traveled to Greece and claimed to have visionary experiences there. For Duncan, dance is a spiritual act; it is, in fact, an expression of the spiritual: “It is a prayer. . . . Each movement reaches in long undulations to the heavens and becomes a part of the eternal rhythm of the spheres” (57). “The dancer of the future,” she asserts in this 1903 essay, “will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body” (62). Dance scholar Ann Daly remarks that “Duncan proposed dancing as the connective tissue between mind and body,” bringing together “body and soul into one entity” (27, 32). Mark Franko contends, likewise, that Duncan’s “[e]xpressivity . . . is inseparable from an idealist perspective in which the body acts as a ‘medium’ giving the spectator access to an extra-corporeal self of which the body’s movement furnishes traces. . . . Her body becomes interchangeable with her soul, her presence with her absence” (1, 14). Simply put, for her audience, “her body was a means to an elsewhere” (Franko 1). Duncan’s body is a vehicle for the audience’s transcendence of the physical world and access to a spiritual realm. This is an era of a revival of interest in all things Greek. Not only H.D. and the Duncan siblings, but many dance practitioners were influenced by ancient Greek interpretative dance, including Dalcroze, Delsarte, Gurdjieff, and Laban. Laban recommends to dancers, for instance, that, “[t]he most natural way to move is the style of harmonious movement which was 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Civilization can reach no stage so perfect that it will turn gratefully back to Greece and to Rome to contemplate those noble conceptions of the best in the life of the mind and of the body that the ancients have dowered to us for all time. . . . [W]e are turning back to these same great races for our strongest and truest ideals of physical manhood. (13–14) Macfadden echoes nineteenth-century Yale professor F. G. Welch on the supremacy of the ancient Greek “race”: “Gymnasiums and physical culture gave to Greece the finest race of men the world ever saw” (Welch 167). Despite the “crystalline” nature of the poems of Sea Garden (alluded to in the previous chapter), the Greek speakers in H.D.’s early poems struggle against stasis and stagnation, petitioning the gods for energy and force. Unlike Toomer, H.D. did not formally participate in any of the physical culture or dance programs in the early twentieth century. She was well aware, though, of the ancient Greek tradition of religious dance, performed to invoke the presence of various deities. Her 1931 “Choros Translations” from Euripides’s Bacchae dramatizes in verse the part of the play in which the dancing women, carried away in a religious trance, gather to rip apart the body of the King Pentheus, who has outlawed their worship of Dionysus. H.D. gives voice to the invocation of the dancers, as “they beat / ecstatic dance-beat”: crown yourself with oak leaf and dance, dance, dance ecstatic. . . . lift high the sacred narthex, and dance until the earth dance; the earth must dance when Bromios conducts his sacred high priests . . . driven mad, mad, 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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common in ancient Grecian and Roman cultures” (92). Ancient Greece is foundational for many physical culture advocates as well. In 1906, Bernarr Macfadden views the ancient Greek and Romans as perfect specimens of physical masculinity:

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What distinguishes The Bacchae from other plays of the period, argues historian James Miller, is that it actually summons the presence of a deity: “The leader of the cosmic chorus is not merely invoked in this dark perplexing play. He appears on stage, in his own theatre” (32). More so than her poems of the 1910s, the Greek translations of the 1920s, or the postWorld War II epic poems, the verses of Red Roses for Bronze (1931)—the book in which “Choros Translations” appears—are incantatory in their rhythms, designed to summon a god, an effect achieved by relying on repetition of single words or short phrases; employing extensively one-word and two-word lines; using internal and end rhyme widely; and utilizing long, unbroken stanzas.30 We can track this effect visually in the passage from “Choros Translations” cited above, in the lines that expand and contract in a regular pattern and in the repetition of “dance until the earth dance; / the earth must dance” and of the echoing short lines “dance” and “mad.” “Choros Sequence” and “The Mysteries” are other illustrative examples. Typically, the repetitive nature of the poems of Red Roses for Bronze is considered the volume’s shortcoming, and the poems have received little critical attention.31 Helen Sword, for instance, observes that, The short, strung-out, repetitive verses of “Red Roses for Bronze” are echoed again and again in poems throughout the volume, as H.D. finally abandons the exquisite linguistic precision that first brought her fame as an Imagist. The problem is that she fails to replace such disciplined technique with a redeeming sense of confidence. . . . H.D.’s repetitions are “mechanical” only in the negative sense of seeming automatic and robotic, demonstrating no real imaginative control over her material. (Engendering 143) While I would not necessarily place these poems at the apex of H.D.’s canon, I would nonetheless argue that H.D.’s experimentation with verse in this volume is indicative of an attempt to model poetry on incantation rather than of a loss of control over her aesthetic. At the dawn of the 1930s, H.D. is working in poetic rhythms, perhaps theurgical, designed to invoke the spirit world. To put it in the terms of dance and performance theory, her poems are not merely expressive; they are operative, summoning deities more than a decade before she begins to hold the séances to call forth the voices of the dead that she depicts in Majic Ring. 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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you are wind in a stark tree, you are the stark tree unbent, you are a strung bow, you are an arrow. (443) Moreover, this mutable body is multiply gendered, able to transform itself into “priest” and “priestess,” “man and woman,” a trait the speaker of the poem, the poet, shares (440, 442).33 The poet is compared disparagingly to the luminous, eternal dancer. The god of creation grants the dancer, not the poet, the power to compose verse: “you are my stylus, / you write in the air with this foot, / with that foot” (445). While the dancer generates, through “the rhythm you make,” language embodied (“the poem, / writ in the air”), the speaker is “sitting, sullen and silent” (442, 445). By the end of the poem, though, the poet imagines a kind of “sister[hood]” between herself and the dancer, an ecstatic and liberating union of word and body: “let us be wild and free, / let us retain integrity, / intensity” (447, 446). This prayer’s emphasis on being “wild and free” is significant in thinking about the scene of trance dance in Majic Ring, which dramatizes the extent to which religious dance necessitates the dancer’s abject submission. The poem also anticipates the novel in its stress on the fluctuating rhythms of the dance, the dichotomy of movement and stillness: the poet entreats the dancer to “move delicate strength, / pause” (447). Majic Ring fictionalizes a series of séances in which H.D. and Bryher participated during World War II, and a scene of a trance dance is cast as a flashback, relaying a paranormal experience they had shared during a 1920 expedition to Greece, just one of the visionary episodes from that trip. In the scene, with her lover Gareth as audience, Delia begins playfully with static poses. As in “The Dancer,” Delia’s body can perform either gender. As she moves from a pose that she recalls as either Persephone (the daughter of Rhea, who will appear to Delia later in the vision), a boy priest, or a huntsman, to that of a tree, she becomes more serious and, significantly, statuelike, her eyes “like glass-eyes in a masque or statue’s face” (110), an image that recalls her earlier poem, “Trance”: I stare till my eyes are a statue’s eyes, 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Composed in the 1930s, H.D.’s poem specifically devoted to dance, “The Dancer,” is in part inspired by Isadora Duncan.32 In the poem, the dancer’s body is endlessly malleable, curving and twisting itself into a myriad of forms:

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set in, my eye-balls are glass, my limbs marble, my face fixed in its marble mask. (Collected 244) The dance has begun to engender a trance. In this tree pose, she shifts from thinking “This seems to be a tree” to “Why . . . I am a tree,” as she moves from the static poses to a more dynamic posture: “It was not so much a dance as a moving pose, a symbol. My feet were rooted to that faded carpet, but my arms were free” (109). From that point, her feet begin to beat an incantatory rhythm—“a steady, rather forceful rhythm”—on the carpet beneath her, as a “slow, rhythmic dance” has begun (110, 109).34 Here H.D. writes, “then ‘I let it go,’ ” signaling Delia’s submission (109). Delia describes herself as no longer posing as a tree in her room; rather she has become a tree in a room that has transmuted into a forest: “I’m in the woods now” (111). As Ann Daly and other dance scholars have argued about Mark Johnson’s theory of embodiment, “the world is not divined objectively but is grasped imaginatively, by means of, among other things, metaphors generated by embodied experience” (5). Here Delia’s movement through space effects a new understanding of that space, which, in her vision, transforms her room into a forest, a plain, an island, a mountain. Delia then begins to channel, successively, a series of different transnational, transcultural identities of both genders as she traverses the globe from east to further and further west, traveling backward in time: an American Indian medicine man gathering herbs; two singing American Indian girls, the latter of which she dubs Echo; a Mexican woman in California during the age of the conquistadors, also singing; a young girl of the Pacific Rim; a Japanese geisha; an Asian Indian boy who is “Greek really” (131) of pre-Hellenic times; and, finally, Rhea, the Greek goddess of the earth. She explains, “I had managed to re-construct or re-invoke entire entities,” describing her body as possessed by the “[t]he iron-filings or the atoms or the electrons” of each “personality” (131). The rhythm of the dance—the alternation of motion and stillness that characterizes H.D.’s performance—evokes her trance state. In his 1900 essay “The Symbolism of Poetry,” W. B. Yeats writes in 1900 about the capacity of rhythm to induce such a state: “The purpose of rhythm . . . is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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is unfolded in symbols” (273).35 As important to rhythm as presence is absence, as essential as movement is the pause; the activity of motion is paired with the passivity of stillness. Steiner follower Marjorie Spock, however, devotes a great deal of space in her book on eurythmy to the active qualities of the pause, deeming it, in fact, “that outward coming-to-rest which is the liveliest moment in a rhythm” (19). Quoting T. S. Eliot’s famous line about stillness, she contends that “stillness, no less than movement, is activity” (6). For Spock, it is the pause that propels the motion, just as motion paradoxically drives the pause: For in [the pause], motion is withdrawn from space into consciousness. And motion must not be allowed to stagnate there, but rather receive an inner quickening and potentizing. It is as though a path that would otherwise come to a dead end makes a living loop in the traverser’s consciousness to return to the place where it started, and, having arrived there, makes another loop and again reverses its direction. (19–20) She compares the circulating rhythm to the tide: “Out of it is born transformation: the fulling tide becomes the emptying; upward lifting, the downward falling; backward widening, forward narrowing, and vice versa” (20). Spock’s theorizing of the pause resists a model of spiritual experience that requires subjugation of the will to the divine, and Delia’s episode is concerned with this very problem. In dance, performance scholar Mark Franko argues, “expression induces ‘loss of body’ which, like ecstasy, promotes a vacancy” (2). This “vacancy” can produce a pressing dilemma for women and people of color who particularly fear surrendering agency. Though Helen Sword has called Majic Ring, with Trilogy, one of H.D.’s “self-confidently prophetic works,” I would argue that this text, even more so than Toomer’s writing, reveals a deep ambivalence about negotiating control over the body in a passive state (Engendering 133). As discussed in the previous chapter, H.D.’s novel Nights theorized the mediumistic experience as central to her main character’s own modernist prose writing project, an experience produced through the sexual body. The novel consists of a series of nighttime sexual encounters and is set in the bed of the protagonist, Natalia, who is conducting a kind of scientific and literary experiment, recording faithfully in her notebook detailed descriptions of twelve such encounters immediately after her lover has departed her room and describing visions evoked by these encounters. Having sex evokes paranormal visions that generate writing of what she describes as a “lightning-realism” school of modernism, in which she is “an automatic recorder of the social life around her” (21, 23). The novel positions its narrator, who later commits suicide, 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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as a passive vehicle. As a writer, she is an “automatic recorder”; as a sexual partner, she feels suffocated, even, at one point, an electrocuted corpse. In the tableaux vivants scene in the later novel, Majic Ring, however, the dancing protagonist is not entirely passive. The trance dance experience as a whole oscillates between active and passive states.36 Delia is in the passive stance of the medium, subject to the gaze and desires of her audience and to the will of the various personalities that possess her. At one point, she ruminates, “This was me speaking, this was Delia but it was Delia speaking as another; another had taken her, entered her and controlled her” (113). Against her will, at several points, these spirit bodies sing, laugh, and speak using Delia’s vocal chords and mouth, at one point singing in Spanish, a language she does not know. She is not entirely comfortable when the “Spirit” goes beyond channeling through the mind and begins to control her body: “Though I gave myself gladly and willingly to this tableau vivant,” she writes, “I was not prepared for the entity or the Spirit to manifest other than as a living silent picture” (113). She repeatedly uses the word “possessed” to describe the process; possession is a term used in spiritualist discourse, but it also denotes ownership and complete control. When one of the figures who “possesses” her begins to sing, Delia, frightened, grabs her throat to see if her head is still on her body (113). Delia’s struggle between subjugating herself to the divine world and maintaining a critical distance is found in ancient Greek dance: “A tension between intellectual detachment and imaginative participation has complicated Western visions of the cosmic dance ever since the Greeks tried to perceive its shifting configurations from a still point outside the cosmos and its internal stillness from the shifting viewpoints of the dancers” (Miller 5). As with Duncan’s dance, body in Majic Ring is linked inextricably to spirit. But Delia is profoundly ambivalent about this union, refusing to idealize it. She resists by reasserting her own agency, protesting that “[t]hough I was ‘possessed,’ I in turn possessed the mood, was aware of my surroundings; this was no trance state” (114). She attempts to speak in the gaps when the spirit does not, exchanging information with Gareth about what is happening to her. Occupying her own thoughts even while occupied by another, she experiences this as a doubling effect on her identity (“I have as it were, ‘doubled’ the rôle”), a phenomenon she dubs “the mirror-mind,” a metaphor reinforced by the mirror in the bedroom where she dances (126, 135). She struggles with issues of control by reminding herself at several points where she is in material reality, that the forest is actually a bedroom, that Gareth is still there watching her, that she can still see herself in the tilted mirror in the corner of the room. “Here I am,” she consoles herself, peering into the mirror (134). She retreats into a conclusion that this is “jest,” acting, a mere 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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“play within a play” (130).37 To borrow from a descriptor she has applied to Gareth, Delia tries to attain “[a] sort of clairvoyant material plane,” in which she can “sort of” maintain her identity in the “material” world while ceding it in the ethereal realm (52). Finally, she decides that the two roles—hers and Gareth’s—are too complicated to resolve as simply passive or active: “We have been a sort of receiving station, I, the positive receiving agent that gave off the sounds as a gramophone record repeats songs and words from operas and plays. But I am not the whole machine. Gareth’s intense psychic quality is concealed, she is like the inner springs and wheels, or the careful wrapping around the live-wire” (135). As Carrie Preston has argued of Isadora Duncan, Delia’s dance for Gareth “creates a duality whereby the individual is both ‘the one who commands and the one who obeys’ ” (27). By sharing her mediumistic experience with Gareth, she destabilizes the threat of absolute possession. In dancing, Delia further defends against the threat of passivity by moving through space. If she has lost control of her voice, she retains control of her limbs. Her very movements, in fact, can render her audience passive. She insists, “I was the actors, the whole of the dramatis personae, Gareth was the audience” (108). Indeed, at one point she projects her own statue-like state on to her audience: “The eyes did not change, they were not flooded out with black pupil but remained fixed, like blue-glass eyes in the face of a statue” (131). Moreover, she asserts her freedom through her sexuality. As in Nights, the erotic body is again the vehicle for mediumistic experience. As Rachel Connor notes, H.D.’s protagonist undresses and performs her poses and dance in a darkened bedroom for her female lover, Gareth, who requests that she leave off her housecoat and wear nothing but her slip, “a ‘Greek thing’ ” (Connor 125; H.D. 106). About the covert erotics of spiritualism, as noted in the previous chapter, Alex Owen observes that “the very vocabulary of trance mediumship oozed sexuality. Mediums surrendered and were then entered, seized, possessed by another” (Darkened 218). While Connor has argued that “the seance constituted a site of desire,” an interplay of the medium’s presence and the desires of her audience projected on to her seemingly passive body, Owen proposes that it was more precisely characterized as “a complex interchange of desire” that licensed unorthodox sexual liberties in the medium and played out fantasies of interchangeable “positions of desire” between medium and audience (Connor 124; Owen 222, emphasis mine). Unlike in Nights, however, desire in Majic Ring circulates between the performing medium and the spectator, so that active and passive roles are constantly in flux. As Delia shifts back and forth between being possessed and reclaiming her body, Gareth alternates between passive audience to Delia’s performance (in a similar statue-like trance state) and active participant, 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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responding to Delia’s questions and offering her own interpretation.38 Furthermore, as in “The Dancer,” sexuality and gender in the trance dance episode are constructed outside of heteronormative bounds. This lesbian couple’s play with gender—Delia’s assumption of male and female identities, Gareth’s male name—offers a radical critique of the traditional séance, which (as discussed in the previous chapter) depended upon a balance of masculine and feminine energies.39 And, as Connor observes, Delia’s active performance potentially disrupts the audience’s objectifying gaze (128). Ultimately in the novel, this dance engenders access to divine wisdom. In this scene, it is both the active dance and the passive poses, the shift from static to dynamic movement, that evoke a trancelike state, and the state deepens as the visionary experience progresses through a series of channeled personalities. Here, the action of the body paradoxically engenders the transcendence of the body, a passive state in which she is “possessed” by one voice after another. This is not merely an expressive dance in the classical sense, which conveys to an audience the inward spiritual or psychological state of a dancer, but rather the opposite, an operative one, in which the dance itself initiates, rather than imitates, the spiritual experience. Delia’s statue-like trance gaze becomes Gareth’s; the audience attains the same transcendence as the dancer. What results from the dance in this novel is yet another mystical experience that grants Delia a key that at once helps her decipher messages she received in other séances and offers her and her readers a model of literary interpretation. The dance does not “translate” the spiritual experience into a form that can be observed but rather creates the conditions under which translation can occur. Physical movement translates into spiritual or astral movement, and ultimately a movement toward a new hermeneutic, a method of interpretation that she describes as recovering pieces of “scattered shards” of a “clay vessel” (121). A companion novel to Majic Ring, The Sword Went Out to Sea, (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton, covers some of the same ground biographically, though the trance dance episode does not recur here. Delia, however, is engaged in séances in both novels and, not surprisingly, some of the same concerns over bodily control are registered in the later novel as well. As Delia and Gareth join her medium, Ben Manisi, and his mother at weekly sessions, Delia feels that she “seemed, for the most part, to be pulled sideways. . . . The Manisis and Gareth alike, went straight into another world when we left the table. I felt there should be some margin in between, in which to re-adjust and to recover” (10). In Sword, in fact, Delia becomes addicted to séances, carrying them out surreptitiously when alone and comparing them to a drug: “I felt completely lost without it” (21). Rebellious against a model of the séance in which the medium and participants are to remain passive and 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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focused, awaiting the emergence and entrance of the spirits, in both novels Delia is constantly active, taking notes in the darkness of the séance room in Sword. In alluding to the war, the abiding metaphor of Sword is theatrical performance rather than dance, but the effect on her psyche of a loss of control is similar, as Delia feels, “I was watching the tragedy, but . . . I was in the tragedy. I was no longer outside things, watching. I was inside. . . . I no longer mattered. What I did and thought was not important. . . . I had merged my personality in the great drama. I had lost myself” (85–86). There is dancing within the play, however, but in this more pessimistic novel the dance is as often associated with anguish and madness as it is freedom. While she imagines her ego as divided between a rigid American Puritan and a mad “dancing girl,” she also refers to being swept away in a “waltz” of “desolation” (101, 104). There is a precursor for the trance dance scene in Majic Ring. In 1920, the same year as their trip to Greece, H.D. and Bryher traveled to northern California, original home of Isadora Duncan, who drew inspiration from its forests and coastline. In the woods and ocean near Monterey, they posed for each other nude, in the mode of Greek statuary. In the late 1920s, prints of some of these photographs were integrated into collages layering photos with cutouts of ancient Greek statues and urns in “The H.D. Scrapbook,” which I have argued elsewhere is very much about the theme of performance.40 The still photographs, however, are just that: “living statues” based on Greek sculpture, perhaps of a kind advocated by Delsarte’s prodigy Genevieve Stebbins, and wildly popular at the turn of the twentieth century.41 “Living statues,” according to dance historian Ann Daly, “were much the same as tableaux vivants, only they moved, and their models were exclusively classical Greek sculptures” (125). Women in statue-posing “melted seamlessly from one statue pose to the next” (125). Unlike Annie Brigman’s naturalistic photographs of nude women, who curved their bodies to blend into the trees42 —unlike Isadora Duncan’s dances that simulated the rhythmic waves and flow of nature—these photographs of H.D. and Bryher accentuate the sheer contrast between the body and nature, the living, growing, shifting environment that offers a backdrop. But the photographs, at the same time, do not emulate frozen statues precisely; rather they faintly suggest movement, residing in a liminal space between posed static images and candid action snapshots. The ivory starkness of their bodies against a darker backdrop suggests a marble statue, but posed bodies are caught mid-movement—the tentative gesture of an arm raised, a head bowed, a leg raised to step into the water. Mark Franko theorizes that Stebbins wished to resist expressive modes of performance by imitating “statuesque figures to evoke states of inconclusive receptivity” (11). Isadora Duncan, he claims, solves Stebbins’s 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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problem of expressivity with motion—by initiating operative modes of dance: “Duncan staged herself as a subject of expression, not an expressive subject” (11). Clearly, in the 1920s, H.D. and Bryher were contending with the same problem, shooting photographs of bodies that appeared statuesque but, on closer examination, hinted at living movement—still, but not without agency. A shift in Majic Ring to emphasis on the dynamic, away from static modes of representation, is concurrent with her move toward “electric” prose, discussed in the previous chapter. It is, again, tempting to speculate that these shifts are linked to her movement away from Imagism and toward her involvement in film in the late 1920s and early 1930s, itself a medium of oscillation between stasis and movement, with its series of static stills and the illusory movement of those stills made possible by the projector.

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Spirituality and the Moving Body

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Negotiating the Racialized Body: Theories of Spiritual Evolution and the “American Race”

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he speaker of Jean Toomer’s long poem “The Blue Meridian” compares the condition of being trapped in the body to being condemned to “a prison system all of wardens” (Collected 59). In his autobiographical work “From Exile into Being,” Toomer pleads for “[a]n end of bondage to the body. An end of the cravings and prejudices that arise when people believe that they and others are their bodies. An end of imprisonment in the little self” (A Jean Toomer Reader 42). A profound mystical experience detailed in that work—in which Toomer claims to become astrally detached from his physical body for several days and to exist in an awareness of cosmic reality— ends with a tragic descent, a return to being “a man in prison . . . body-bound” (II.51). Startlingly, Toomer pushes the metaphor further in another autobiographical work, “Second River,” by invoking slavery: “Release a man from jail and the man remains caged within himself. Set him free from chattel and wage slavery and he is still imprisoned in himself by inward factors that limit consciousness, paralyze the deep right forces, and bind the spirit.”1 It is one of the contentions of this chapter that in their writings both Mina Loy and Jean Toomer conceptualize the body—specifically, the racialized body2—as a kind of trap or jail from which the individual must escape. It is ultimately a psychological prison, however, that uses racial categories to sustain its seductive but illusory existence. Reality, each theorizes, is in essence spiritual, not physical; the physical universe is illusory, masking a true spiritual universe in which race does not exist. The aim, as Toomer writes in one of his philosophical works, “As the World Revolves,” is “[t]o break the prison” by perceiving 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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CHAPTER 4

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“the more obvious features of the outer building in which we are trapped.” Breaking the “prison” of falsely believing in the material world urges forward human evolution, for in eschewing their bodies individuals may be united in a kind of collective higher consciousness. For them, life is about the struggle to cast off the physical world. Both Loy and Toomer experienced difficulties in their later years—Toomer was painfully ill for several decades before his death, and Loy fretted over losing her beauty, going so far as to invent a torturous apparatus designed to straighten a spine stricken with osteoporosis. Anxieties about their physical bodies, then, may have stemmed in part from the aging process. But it is clear that race is central to their fears about the physical body, as both return obsessively to the issues of evolution and racial identity in their writings, many of which remain unpublished. Loy’s father was a Hungarian Jew, her mother an anti-Semitic Protestant; Toomer, rather famously, variously proclaimed himself the product of nearly a dozen races: “From hearsay and report I gather that there are the following strains in my blood; English, Spanish, Dutch, Negro, Indian, French, German, Scotch, Welsh. I doubt that there are less, probably there are more” (“Member of Man” 3). Both espoused idealist philosophies consistent with notions of spiritual evolution—Loy, through the lenses of Christian Science and Henri Bergson; Toomer, by exposure to the theories of Georges Gurdjieff, of popular historian and psychologist Gerald Heard, of psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke, and of an array of other thinkers on evolution and race. To escape the body’s “prison,” for each, requires both an act of individual will—an exertion of control over one’s own body—and a social agenda of eugenics—an attempt at control over future bodies. It is not, however, a form of eugenics intended to purify the Anglo-Saxon “race” but rather a eugenics of “hybrid vigor,” which advocates the mixing of races.3 They imagine in hybridization a vehicle for exposing the artificiality of racial identity, positing difference as biological but not inevitable, since any notion of the biological is illusory, a mask for an essential spiritual identity. Race, in fact, represents one of the chief impediments to evolutionary progress; crossbreeding between those of different races produces a unique level of selfawareness in the consciousness of what Loy termed “mongrel” offspring, selfknowledge that lays bare the fictional nature of race as a category. Finally, it is in the “melting pot” of America that each finds an acceleration of the evolutionary process. For Loy, the rapidly evolving America is a miracle: incomparable to the tortoise history of your ancestors. . . . (Last 227)4 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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In its hybridization and “accelerated life-tempo,” she depicts America as the catalyst for evolutionary transformation from physical life to immaterial, energetic existence (“History” 16). For Toomer, the unprecedented mixing of races in America is leading to a new evolutionarily superior race, “The New American,” which combines the best elements of every major race category (African, Caucasian, and Asiatic, to Toomer’s mind) into a being with a heightened spiritual sense. Because “interbreeding has taken place among the peoples of America sufficiently to have given a biological meaning to the term ‘melting pot,’ ” Toomer argues, “[i]n America we have a new body.”5 In that their writings strive to articulate enmeshed issues of racial, national, and aesthetic identity, they might be seen as participating in a kind of nativist project that theorizes American identity along racial lines. This chapter suggests, however, that while their theorizing of race is certainly not unproblematic, their admiration for the mixed genetic makeup of the United States, and their contention that race is an illusory category of identity manifest only in a lower evolutionary stage in human development, set them apart from many of their contemporaries.6 For all of their similarities, however, it is imperative to note that the theories of Loy and Toomer cannot be precisely reconciled; nor are they entirely consistent on the topic throughout their writings, and nor can all of their writings be viewed through this lens. As many scholars have pointed out, Loy’s commitment to an antiracist stance was not unwavering. She dubbed herself a “mongrel,” an ambivalent status that evoked in her pride as well as anxiety. Loy’s Jewish ancestry and her interest in race and ethnicity have recently begun to be topics of discussion among scholars of her work, who are at odds over whether Loy should be viewed as a eugenicist—subject to the biases of her day—or a radical progressive on the subject of race, who locates in Judaism a positionality that disrupts hegemonic notions of identity.7 Worse still, Toomer has (often rightly) been seen by critics as profoundly racist and self-loathing, at times denying his African heritage outright or burying it within a myriad of ethnic identifications.8 My aim here is not to defend or condemn them for their racial views but to plumb the depths of their conflicted responses in the contexts of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century notions of “spiritual evolution”—which held that humans, having completed biological evolution, were beginning to evolve spiritually—and of the crisis of the body. Beyond these inconsistencies, moreover, the paradox inherent in their idealist conceptions of the world as one collective, communal consciousness creates insurmountable problems for each, not uncommon for others of that era.9 The convoluted words of one 1913 contributor to that mouthpiece of egoism, Dora Marsden’s The New Freewoman, demonstrate the 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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difficulty of maintaining a sense of individualism in a cosmopolitan world: “[T]he Individual could not exist apart from the race. . . . The race is composed of individuals; individuals constitute the race. . . . [T]heir needs are mutual. . . . We shall have a new race when each individual realizes the Self, but it will still be a race” (Leisenring 34–35). Daylanne English has argued compellingly that “[e]ugenic ideology was ‘salient’ for so many modern thinkers across political and racial lines because, unlike more general discourses of race, it eased the conflict between individual and collective forms of identity” (2). However, giving up absolutely the notion of a physical body entails ceding control over that body, a precarious prospect for both writers, and this anxiety manifests in Toomer’s and Loy’s writings in an implicit, sometimes explicit, tension between individualism and communalism or collectivism, as each strives to maintain some sense of a unique self even while adhering to a theory of communal, spiritual consciousness. They fear being engulfed in a collective soul even as they desire it. Ultimately, however, it is my contention that Loy’s writings exhibit far less reticence than Toomer’s about privileging the spiritual over the physical body, an observation perhaps not surprising given his dedication to physical culture, as discussed in the previous chapter. While Loy’s philosophical and creative work reveals little ambivalence about effacing the body—inscribed with racial or ethnic markings, visible and imagined—Toomer’s writings demonstrate an acute struggle between a desire to cast off his physical self and a need to maintain it. In fact, the glaring inconsistencies, contradictions, and paradoxes in his many and varied discussions of race and the body, I argue, are related in significant ways to this struggle. This results, for him, in a figuration of a physical body that is separate and distinct from the spiritual entity that resides within but, importantly, above it. Race, Eugenics, and Theories of Spiritual Evolution If man could be impelled to project all that he is, we should be a race of gods. —John D. Quackenbos, M.D. [T]he human is an unstable combination of the animal and the divine. —The Reverend Marshall Dawson10 In the first half of the twentieth century, at the height of lynchings and “separate-but-equal” laws guided by a “one drop of blood” mentality, America’s “melting pot”—and particularly its center of immigration, New 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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York, “the muck of crossroads”—was the obsessive focus of most eugenicists, for they feared that “American blood” was being “diluted and discolored by indiscriminate mingling with poorer blood” (Baker 259; Kellogg 282). “America,” remarks one bestselling eugenicist in 1922, “is simply ‘hell bent’ on taking a brief biological joy-ride” (Wiggam 173). About “miscegenation,” philosopher and journalist Brownell Baker warns in 1926, “If the peoples of the world are to be re-shaken and re-fused, like the brisk ingredients of a ‘chocolate malted milk’ in a power driven mixing machine, there will be preliminary destructions and decadences of a vast extent” (259). Throughout the United States came similar arguments from those disturbed not only by the possibility of whites and African Americans producing “diluted and discolored” offspring but by the mixing of immigrants of what Matthew Jacobson has termed “probationary whiteness” with those so-called “native” Americans of Anglo-Saxon heritage. One landmark eugenicist publication in 1916—Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race—summed up the paranoia about the impending extinction of the “white race”: “Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type. The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew” (qtd. in Jacobson 81). As many Americans—including Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge—fretted over the immigration of “hordes of unclean wastrels” (Freeman 265) flooding the nation’s borders, and many British feared for the strength of their empire in the wake of a perceived disproportionate fecundity of the working class, eugenicists deployed and misapplied the rhetoric of Darwin to argue for a cleansing of bloodlines.11 As noted above, Toomer and Loy were indeed eugenicists, but not advocates of distilling and maintaining racial purity. In an oft-quoted passage of Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” she echoes the disturbing Galton-esque language of the day when she avers that “[e]very woman of superior intelligence should realize her race-responsibility by producing children in adequate proportion to the unfit or degenerate members of her sex” (Lost 155). Toomer’s “Race Problems and Modern Society,” a 1929 essay originally published in a collection by the aforementioned Baker, poses the question of “how to bring about a selective fusion of the racial and cultural factors of America, in order that the best possible stock and culture be produced” (Selected 74). Racial consciousness and conflict, he argues in this essay, comprise critical barriers to America’s progress, emphasizing a eugenics not based in race but “on the basis of biological fitness” and, like Loy, “on the basis of intelligence, 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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character, and ability” (74). Daylanne English contends that “[e]ugenics emerged as a central national ideology . . . most of all because it so effectively addressed that crisis of modern American subjectivity” (14). If race was the most common element identified for eugenic experimentation, an array of other factors might be considered: class, “superior intelligence,” “biological fitness,” and so forth. Widely viewed as the application of human intelligence to evolution—a means by which humans might use their will to affect their collective destiny—eugenics was perhaps the inevitable byproduct of the postDarwinian flood of writings on evolution in the West. Popular discourse on spiritual evolution filled the presses in the United States and Britain, as many scientists, intellectuals, and religious thinkers of the post-Darwinian era sought to reconcile their religious beliefs with scientific discoveries by theorizing a force “multi-potential, super-organic, even super-cosmic” directing evolutionary progress, the hand of divine intervention (Noble vii). One lay thinker took the extreme position in 1885 that “Evolution and Atheism . . . are incompatible with one another. . . . [T]he doctrine of Evolution furnishes the most conclusive proofs of the existence of a Supreme Uncaused Being, distinct from the Universe and the Author of it” (Derr 23). In fact, he argues further, evolution “holds out to the soul the promise of a never-ending development” while creationism, “[i]n assuming that the world is a direct act of creation . . . affirms that a barrier has been set to our progress, and that we will ultimately reach the bounds of the attainable” (57). Historian of science Peter Bowler has argued that Darwin’s more radical propositions had little impact on evolutionary thought until well into the twentieth century, as most scientists continued to adhere to a teleological view of human development. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many assumed that physiological evolution was complete—“[t]here can be no doubt that human evolution has halted,” writes one Princeton University biology professor in 1922 (Conklin 60)—leaving humanity free to evolve culturally, intellectually, socially, and/or spiritually. Doctor of medicine and spiritualist researcher Gustave Geley, for instance, argues in 1921 that evolution is not biological but phenomenological and psychological: “Evolution is the acquisition of consciousness,” and the goal of evolution is the “perfect fusion” between the subconscious and the conscious mind (275, 282). Often, interestingly, notions of control over the body arise, the idea being that as evolution shifts to the nonphysical arena, humans gain freedom from their biologically predetermined proclivities and destinies. One World War II-era biophysicist holds that the goal of evolution is “a morally perfect being” free of “physiological bondage” (Lecomte 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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du Noüy 225). Similarly, Gerald Heard, who influenced Toomer’s thought, writes about the current phase of “psycho-physical evolution” that “we are ourselves at the crisis of that revolution which changes man from a physique dominating a psyche to a psyche dominating a physique” and that our bodies will regress as our minds progress (288, 279). Evolution is moving, he attempts to demonstrate, toward a universe in which we have “superconsciousness.” Many, however, specifically averred that the next and final evolutionary stage would be spiritual, that “organic evolution, completed in man, was immediately transferred to a higher plane,” including noted late nineteenthcentury geologist Joseph Le Conte: “As the material evolution of Nature found its goal, its completion, its significance in man, so must man enter immediately upon a higher spiritual evolution to find its goal and completion and its significance in the ideal man—the divine man” (Evolution and Its Relation 329; Evolution: Its Nature 330). Another psychologist Toomer read, Richard Maurice Bucke, concurs in 1905 that humanity is evolving toward “cosmic consciousness,” citing Walt Whitman, one of Toomer’s favorite poets, as an example of an individual more highly spiritually evolved than most, describing him (with Jesus Christ and the Buddha) as “the greatest spiritual force yet produced by the race” (58). On this point, many scientific and religious thinkers agree; the Reverend Marshall Dawson states succinctly in 1923: “Human progress ceased long since as an automatic mechanical process, if it ever was that. It is now linked to man’s quest for God” (41). The argument can be found on the fringe of orthodoxy as well, as one self-described “cosmotherapist” links a vegetarian diet to spiritual evolutionary progress in 1938, arguing that plants “are accumulators of the cosmic forces and radiations and are the generative source of cerebral energies,” and that eating only plants will propel evolution forward until humanity is “as perfect as possible on our planet” (Székely 81, 90). Theosophist H. P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine elaborates her theory of “anthropogenesis,” an evolutionary scheme of seven so-called root-races that begins and culminates in a spiritual phase. It is from the third, or “Lemurian,” race that humans emerge and from the fifth that Aryans evolve, a sub-race of which is Anglo-Saxons;12 the appearance of the sixth and seventh root-races move us toward a purely spiritual existence. “The whole order of nature evinces a progressive march towards a higher life,” Blavatsky contends (277). This new evolutionary phase will usher in a heightened sense, both spiritual and physical, enabling a new vision of reality. One early twentieth-century physician explains that due to natural evolutionary progression, “[t]he age in which we live is characterized . . . by a phenomenal quickening of the spiritual consciousness and a corresponding development of spiritual faculty” 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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there is around us a vast unseen world, unseen by most of us. . . . There are within man faculties which, if developed, will enable him to perceive this world, so that it will become possible for him to explore and study it precisely as man has explored and studied that part of the world which is within the reach of all. These faculties are the heritage of the whole human race; they will unfold within every one of us as our evolution progresses. (9) Heard devotes a chapter of his book on human evolution to the ways in which our sense of sight has developed significantly since the prehistoric age of “savages” into a vehicle of cosmic vision: “Sight itself is keener than we can even at present use. New categories permit the awareness of new experience” (262). Eventually, he foresees, our physical organs of sensory information will become unnecessary: “We can conceive a mind untroubled by senses” (283). Philosopher Viggo Cavling, in 1924, asserts the existence of two parallel worlds, material and immaterial: “[A] perishable physical world is gradually creating, by a process of refinement, a spiritual—i.e. non-material—replica of itself” (61). Humans, he explains, have been gradually evolving into spiritual beings, a prelude to shedding their physical bodies: “In order to attain this result the physical world has by gradual evolution created a series of apparatus (brains and nerve systems) capable of transmuting physical into spiritual values. The process of evolution is now at the present stage where the transformers are made and beginning to work” (61). In this formulation, humans are closer to spiritualized machines than they are organic matter. Ultimately, the bond between worlds will be broken, as the physical world is on the brink of extinction: “The spiritual world which is to take the place of the physical world is thus now in its first stage of formation. . . . In time to come, the spiritual world will break away from the bio-physical world and enter on an independent existence as spirit alone” (61–62). In Cavling’s “idealist theory of evolution,” the dualistic universe in which we now abide will become one spiritual world. This disappearing divide between worlds—between body and soul—is echoed in the writings of many other spiritual evolutionists, religious and scientific. Arthur Jay Green, founder of the “Church of Advanced Truth,” teaches his followers in the 1930s that we have a spiritual body within a physical one, and when the physical form is rendered useless, and is no longer a fit vehicle through which the 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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(Quackenbos n.p.). Anthropologist A. G. Pape avows in the early 1920s that

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Likewise, World War II-era engineer Ralph Gordon Fear puts forth his theory that our bodies are mere shells to contain our spiritual essences, useful during the evolutionary period but to be cast off when we have reached “a state of higher spiritual consciousness”: “[M]an is Spirit manifesting in a material body, and that through acquiring wisdom and spiritual understanding, man eventually will rise to heights where there will be no sickness, unhappiness or evil to mar the lives of mankind” (166, viii). For these thinkers, an idealist notion of spiritual evolution necessarily entails dissolution of the traditional Western partitioning of body and soul, as only the soul has substance, the disposable body figured as either a transitory stage or a mere fiction. As one minister surmises in 1907, “If everything proceeds from this spiritual Source, then everything, Matter as well as Energy, must be spiritual in its origin and essence” (Walker 185). Moreover, for Blavatsky, “Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious” (Secret 272). Many imagined a spiritual reality in which all souls merged together into a unitary communal consciousness. To the mind of that same minister, “there must be a Divine Consciousness—an all-comprehending Mind—that unites all objects and all finite minds, as well as all finite minds to each other” (195). To another evolutionist thinker in 1930, we abide in a transcendental world in which “[e]ach living thing is constantly in touch of some kind with the whole universe” (Lighthall 197). Cavling prophesizes that this utopian union is already coming to pass in the material universe, where technological innovations in mass communication have created conditions by which “the entire population of the globe is gradually being fused into a community of mind”: “The sands of individualism are running out, and the future belongs to those who are able to work together without narrow egoism and misplaced ideals of liberty” (137; 123). When “the spiritualisation of our earth is complete,” he envisions, humanity will enjoy “the production of an entirely new form of existence, a supermind, the Collective Mind, comprising in itself the best there is of mind on earth, a world emancipated from physical being, and purely spiritual in character” (134, 147). Not surprisingly—and this will be true in the writings of both Loy and Toomer—a tension often arises, then, about how to conceptualize individualism, and maintain individuality, in a time when “[m]en will become more alike” (Cavling 150). One evolutionist, for instance, argues in 1930 that 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Spirit can function, and the Soul through learning its earthly lessons has evolved to the point where it is ready for the higher and better life, another body is ready into which the Spirit may enter and continue its journey throughout the countless eons of time. (135)

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while “[t]he disconnection of individuals is an illusion,” “the individual is an organ, a member of its community body, a kind of cell of its multicellular whole” (Lighthall 50). For the Reverend Arthur Jay Green, moreover, the notion of a unified communal mind evokes fears about the merging of minds conceived of as unequal. If, the mind has a “steady influx of fresh contributions” from all of humanity—to borrow a phrase from Cavling (151)—then filtering those “contributions” is an impossibility. Green frets that “we are not only born with certain inherited tendencies, but that also during our entire lives we are subject, more or less, to the race consciousness of millions of people whose untrained, negative, destructive thoughts have gone down into the Universal Sub-conscious” (115). With anxiety over maintaining individuality comes tension over control of the physical body. Whether by will of god or will of the individual, spiritual evolution was not thought to be subject to accident or chance; rather, evolution was to be viewed teleologically, with a purpose, and not, as Darwin had posited, as a series of random mutations and adaptations. To become “a race of gods,” one physician avows, “the spirits of men” must be “co-operative elements in the cosmic evolution,” participating in their own development (Quackenbos 9). Also arguing for an evolution toward achieving “God-like . . . character,” Ralph Fear stresses that humans will actually gain willpower: “As we unfold spiritually we are given more power over our own destiny, and greater power to affect the destiny of others” (180). Dr. A. A. Lindsay not only argues for the notion of a spiritual universal mind— “Universal Mind is the sum total of the individual expressions of mind” (New 125)—but he writes extensively about how, through hypnosis, one can direct the soul, which controls the body. For Lindsay, mind is “soul, spirit— God,” so our very cells are inherently divine, and heredity is entirely mental and cosmic, not biological (128). According to historian Bruce Campbell, Blavatsky also sees the evolutionary process as centered around human and moral development: “The Secret Doctrine is a treatise on individual human destiny, one that places moral problems of individual development against the backdrop of cosmic evolution and, in fact, makes the development of the inner man the heart and reason of evolution” (45). In The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky invokes the Indian term for the illusion of individualized physical existence to argue that beings in spiritual rather than physical form will have more willpower: “[T]he pure spiritual element being left untrammelled and more free, they are less influenced by maya than man can ever be” (275). A spiritually evolved race, to Richard Bucke’s mind, is a fundamentally different race: “[A] Cosmic Conscious race will not be the race which exists to-day” (318). Significantly for the contentions of this chapter, some evolutionists situate the United States as the center of evolutionary development 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Among the old, worn-out nations of southern Europe there is more rest, for automatism prevails; in America, on the other hand, the newest country in the world, there is a constant flux of creative processes, and endless unrest and spiritual mutation. . . . The creative power acts rather after the fashion of the nervously energetic American business man, keen and enthusiastic, working with intense concentration on some new understanding, only to leave it as soon as it becomes a going concern, and devote his energies to something else. (89) To Cavling it is almost a commonplace to make this assumption, and he surprisingly links the rapid evolutionary rate to cultural rather than technological advancements, an idea common to Loy: “There is growing up in that country a literature and a philosophy which show us the bright sides of life” (190). Many religious thinkers concur. As the editor of The New Age Magazine puts it in 1909, America’s “polyglot, variegated, superimposed population” is yielding a “New Race” wearing a “New Garment of the Soul” (Fairfield 752, 753). Blavatsky concludes the second volume of The Secret Doctrine with the promise that the penultimate phase of human evolution, a spiritual phase, is imminent: “Occult philosophy teaches that even now, under our very eyes, the new Race and Races are preparing to be formed, and that it is in America that the transformation will take place, and has already silently commenced” (444). Her reasoning for this proposition is not unlike Loy’s or Toomer’s, for it is racial mixing that has initiated the onset of spiritual evolution: “Pure Anglo-Saxons hardly three hundred years ago, the Americans of the United States have already become a nation apart, and, owing to a strong admixture of various nationalities and inter-marriage, almost a race sui generis . . . strongly separated from all other now existing races” (444). Blavatsky’s claim about America as home of a new race permeated a wide variety of occult communities, whose writings frequently make mention of this “fact,” for decades to come. In 1924, Grace Morey, a Rosicrucian, echoes Blavatsky when she writes that America is the site of the completion of one race and the rise of another (2), and in the 1940s prolific author and self-proclaimed mystic Manly Palmer Hall observes that “in a comparatively short time many racial streams have met and mingled, and a new race has been born, the American race” (44). 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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toward spiritual existence, the home of the new race. This is a notion found in both Loy’s and Toomer’s writings. Cavling, for instance, observes that “[i]t is from America—of course, one might almost say—that the new spirit comes” (190):

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Our person is a covered entrance to infinity Choked with the tatters of tradition —Loy, “O Hell” Perhaps because it seems such an embarrassment, Loy’s commitment to the American religious sect Christian Science has received little attention from critics to date, but it is the idealist philosophy behind Christian Science, I argue, that provides the theoretical basis for her meditations on race and evolution.13 More specifically, it is my contention that to understand fully her rather complicated perspective on race and ethnicity one must consider not only her writings on Judaism but her lifelong affiliation with Christian Science as well. As argued above, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries see a rise in post-Darwinian theories of spiritual evolution, which held that human beings, having achieved the highest possible level of physical evolution, were beginning to evolve spiritually, and Mary Baker Eddy’s writings on Christian Science evidence this interest. Moreover, I argue that Loy models her notions of biological and spiritual evolution on one akin to that of the widely held notion of the “Cosmopolitan Jew”—a human so highly evolved as to be immune to “ailments” ranging from physical disease to nationalism.14 There are important implications of these beliefs for reading Loy’s published and unpublished writings. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis has argued, a “valorize[d],” “mongrelized aesthetic” becomes Loy’s own version of modernism (159). Cristanne Miller cites 1920 as the point at which, for Loy, “religion and the relation of aesthetics to the spirit become central issues of her thought and art” (160). But her thought is not just religious but scientific as well. In fact, Loy’s hybrid notion of evolution rests upon premises that she derives in part from Christian Science teachings (and probably those of its schismatic descendents), from Bergson’s writings, from readings in Eastern mysticism, and from popular evolutionary theory of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: that the physical, biological, natural world is illusory; that existence is essentially spiritual; and that evolutionary progress takes place as individuals remove the mask of materiality, recognize the fictiveness of the physical realm, and move collectively toward a higher cosmic consciousness—a fictiveness that is especially apparent to those of mixed race. Keenly interested in science, Loy followed many of her contemporaries in ascribing spiritual implications to discoveries such as radium (comparing, in verse, Gertrude Stein to Marie Curie) and to quantum physics, which appeared to break

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down the mechanistic and deterministic models associated with Newton and Darwin. Christian Science seemed to Loy a philosophy that successfully wedded the scientific and the spiritual, and she was not alone. To the progressive thinker at the beginning of the century, Christian Science was seen not as an odd religious sect but as a trendy spiritual philosophy, a kind of self-help movement and a substitute for psychoanalysis.15 Loy’s biographer, Carolyn Burke, notes the intense but transitory interest in Christian Science among the transatlantic literati of the early twentieth century, particularly Jews like Gertrude and Leo Stein, who attended Christian Science services in Florence (131). Despite the anti-Semitic beliefs of its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science’s denial of both the holy trinity and Christ’s divinity created an opening for secular Jews seeking a nonorthodox spiritual, intellectual, and psychological experience, and the popularity of Christian Science for secular Jews abroad was matched by the attraction to its teachings for Jews in the United States.16 As another Christian Scientist leader avers, in a typological reading, “The remarkable coincidence apparent in the history of the ancient people of Israel and that of the modern adherents of the Christian Science movement is not accidental” (Bill, Climax 6–7). According to historian John Appel, one Jewish Christian Scientist claimed that “the Christian Science textbook is the long desired link between the Old and the New Testaments of the Bible” (112). In fact, a Society of Jewish Science was established in the United States in large part to stem what many rabbis saw as an alarming flow of American Jews to Christian Science, as reportedly tens of thousands of Jews converted to Christian Science in the first part of the century.17 In response to this phenomenon, in 1919 one rabbi argued strenuously that “[t]o live as American Jews . . . we must correlate Judaism with Americanism, recognizing that while we may ‘pray in the past as Jews, we work and aspire in the present as Americans’ ” (Umansky 31). One of Jewish Science’s founders, Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein, concurred, as he is chiefly concerned with the “American Jew,” who has “caught the spirit of his environment, he has grown pragmatic,—in his idealism, not less than in his materialism” ( Judaism 8). A movement whose beliefs were influenced by Christian Science, theories of psychology, and New Thought, Jewish Science holds that Jews could simultaneously maintain their faith and practice a Jewish version of Christian Science, a savvy stance that exploited the popularity of an American religion to draw its own back to Judaism. When Burke observes that the young Mina Loy saw Christian Science as “the one spiritual practice that promised to bridge the gaps between mind and body, Judaism and Christianity,” her thinking is clearly in line with many others of the day (131). 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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For Loy, ultimately, Christian Science was “so easy to understand intellectually” (Mina Loy Papers, f. 191). As historian Jean McDonald argues, Christian Science’s more devout followers attest to the power of its philosophical vision of spirituality; this was a religion devoted to the quest for knowledge of the universe, not faith (McDonald 105–6; Bednarowski 28). Indeed, Loy scholar Richard Cook notes that idealism in its various incarnations consistently appealed to her: “For her, Christian Science seems part of a continuum of idealisms including Futurism and Bergsonianism” (458). As a book of purported scriptural authority, Eddy’s Science and Health is written in the form of a philosophical treatise, not as a collection of narratives, histories, or parables. Christian Science’s monist universe, in which the material world is illusory and the spiritual realm the only true reality, had ready appeal to those at the turn of the century, like Loy, seeking Eastern and mystical sources of spiritual guidance, and Eddy’s debt to the American transcendentalists and Swedenborgians, well documented by Christian Scientist Robert Peel, made the sect an easy fit for American writers and other artists. While Eddy’s chief influence may have been Hegel, it is a version of Hegel as filtered through nineteenth-century American mystics and spiritualists like Phineas Quimby that underlies her theology.18 Lichtenstein’s manual of Jewish Science likewise argues for a monist universe in which there is “no inherent demarcation between the invisible and the visible, or between spirit and matter”: “We do not perceive this world as a dual realm, but as essentially one in its nature and its form” ( Jewish Science 17). Loy’s unpublished notes and nonfiction prose attest to connections between Loy’s theological and philosophical musings, Eddy’s Science and Health, and the treatises of some of Christian Science’s schismatic offshoots, as well as sources in Eastern religion.19 Central to Eddy’s theology is the notion that the material world lacks substance, that the only reality is spiritual, and in her writings Loy concurs, citing parallels with Eastern thought: “The orient claimed the Power Universe to be Reality = the conrete [sic] to be Illusion The Occidental threw this claim in reverse, mistaking for sole Reality, Our World, which is only one aspect among an infinity of aspects Creative Power may assume” (Mina Loy Papers, f. 191). Just as Eddy argues that “[Christian] Science reverses the testimony of the physical senses,” Loy finds in error the Western assertion that the material world exists (14). Loy asserts, as Eddy does, through the logic of paradox (or “truth by inversion,” as Eddy writes repeatedly) that, contrary to common sense, the visible world is an illusion, that what seems impossible is in actuality the only possibility; the semblance of material reality is merely a “radio-television broadcast in three dimensions, issuant from the Deific designer” (“History” 9). As Loy’s manifesto “The History of Religion and Eros” contends, the mystic’s vision is to understand “the impossible to blossom forth 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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as the POSSIBLE” (7).20 Eddy strenuously rejects Eastern mysticism, as well as a host of other probable sources of her theology, but Loy grasps, and readily makes use of, its compatibility with Christian Science thought. As noted above, post-Darwinian theories of evolution were enormously popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Christian Science’s account of evolution combined then trendy Eastern mystical notions of consciousness with a quintessentially American focus on progress. For Eddy, evolutionary stages beyond the current one promise changes bizarrely specific: farmers’ crops will no longer be affected by the weather, for instance, and sex will no longer be required to produce offspring (19, 274). Many of Christian Science’s schismatic sects, like that of Annie C. Bill, a devout and influential member of the British wing of Christian Science, shared with Loy this preoccupation with human spiritual evolution.21 In such publications as The Method of Creative Evolution—the title of which borrows shamelessly from one of Bill’s certain but uncredited influences, Henri Bergson’s 1911 Creative Evolution—Bill devises a highly formalized universe of individuals striving toward what she sees as “harmonial,” collective consciousness in a seven-stage process. Invoking tension between individualism and communalism, Bill’s book comes complete with crudely drawn illustrations demonstrating evolutionary progress: a “sea of collectivity” made up of individual waves, for instance, and a pyramidal structure of dispersed individual minds at its base becoming more and more conjoined as they near its apex; the end result of such a communion is nothing less than “world regeneration, peace, and never-ending progress” (2).22 Rabbi Lichtenstein’s Jewish Science model is also Bergsonian in its insistence that “God’s creativeness is an ever-flowing and everlasting stream, renewing daily the universe that He called into existence.” For Lichtenstein, “God did not create the world once and for all, and then cease from His labors; He is constantly creating it, He is unceasingly unfolding it, constantly expressing Himself in continuous creation” (Jewish Science 17–18). Though Loy’s notions of evolution are not so structured, the gist of Bill’s Christian-Science-inspired evolutionary sweep bears striking resemblance to that described in some of Loy’s documents on the subject. In Loy’s cosmology, the modern human exists “on the contemporary stage of evolution in the concrete world”; collectively recognizing the illusory nature of this “concrete world” will facilitate a significant evolutionary shift toward a mode of existence beyond materiality: “The ‘man of flesh’ phrase in evolution is giving way to the ‘man of electric electronic vitality’ ” (“History” 11, 16).23 “[W]hat, in infinitude,” she asks in her undated poem “Evolution,” will be our contour, our density, 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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our potency

How, she asks, can we imagine “our density, / our potency”—the shape and substance—of our ethereal, “electronic,” non-“flesh[ly]” selves? As with Bill, a tension exists between individualist and communal notions of identity in Loy’s “Aphorisms on Futurism”—“LOVE of others is an appreciation of oneself. MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy”—and notes such as this one: “The individual has no identity without communion with other—the interplay of individuals bestows identity” (“Aphorisms” 13; Mina Loy Papers; f. 191). Though she becomes a white supremacist in her later years, the younger Bill, significantly, links Jews to the progress of spiritual evolution in several self-published pamphlets. In one such text printed in 1927, The Climax of the Ages, Bill argues that white British and Americans must combine forces with Jews in order for “a collective change from a material to a mental basis of existence” to come to pass: “The time has come when it is imperative that the relation of the Jews to their lost brethren, identified as the Anglo-Saxon race, must be generally recognized and acknowledged. . . . For this pioneer ‘peculiar people,’ Israel, was not founded to establish a political domination, but to unfold the true order and system of conscious evolution” (5–6). For Bill, who argued strenuously against anti-Semitism, the cosmic collectivity of mind she endorses and sees as imminent can only be possible if Jews are brought back into the fold: “Their ‘racial entity’ represents the outward visible expression of an irresistible mental power unceasingly operating to impel reunion with their brethren, the lost tribes” ( Jew 4–5). Consistent with religious and scientific thinkers cited above, spiritual evolution for Loy, Bill, and Eddy is not mechanistic in its “unfolding”; people are not passive bystanders to a ruthless Darwinian system of mutation and survival, their bodies not absolutely subject to its principles. Modern humanity, in fact, has a responsibility to forward evolution, and it is in this assertion of free will that we can locate Loy’s command in “Aphorisms on Futurism” to “Live in the Future. . . . Leap into it” (13).25 It is the task of humans themselves to facilitate progress—through “conscious effort”—by discovering and disseminating the secrets of the machinations of the universe, the illusory nature of the body and the reality of spiritual existence, for, as Bill argues, “As long as the method of evolution remains shrouded in mystery, there can be no direct effort by man toward a higher development” (Method 25, 7). Elsewhere, she urges a forwarding of evolution in order to gain collective control over our

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bodies: “By organizing human civilization in mental and moral accord with Mind’s atomic plank, the kingdom of heaven can be realized in the present ‘generation.’ Life, when demonstrated in accordance with the universal design of Mind, gives to man dominion over his body, maintaining it in harmonious relation with the perceptible universe (Atom 37).26 The idea that evolution might be had at the will of the people is of course Bergsonian as well: in Creative Evolution, he pronounces consciousness “essentially free,” rejecting what he terms “radical finalism” (a determinist system that holds that the course of our lives is already mapped out for us) in favor of a theory that acknowledges evolution as biological but attributes to individual psychology, human willpower, some limited ability to provoke evolutionary change (294, 45, 96–97). The randomness and indifference of the Darwinian model is discarded in favor of a limited human agency: “[W]e are, to a certain extent, what we do, and . . . we are creating ourselves continually” (9).27 In much writing on the topic, concomitant with notions of spiritual or phenomenological evolution is a focus on its essentially “vibrational” or “rhythmic” nature, language that links evolutionary theory to spiritualism. In one popular 1925 tract on evolution, the universe is described as a “rhythmic whole,” and life as “cosmic adaptation—to the energy structure of the cosmos” (Boodin 39, 73); Bill stresses the “rhythmic nature” of evolution, while Bergson refers to the “rhythmic pulsation” of creative evolution. Of the imminence of evolutionary transformation, Loy observes, “Comparing the rudimentary organisms of initial life in this planet, described by the scientist, to the complexity of human beings today, I see everywhere an evidence, even in our apparent frivolities that the trend of our evolution is toward constant increase of that vibrational gamut until the spiritual power of the universe is no longer secretive to any of us” (Mina Loy Papers, f. 187). For Loy, evolution is expressed in the “eternal vacillations” and oscillations between poles of a “vibratory zone of consciousness”: Between these illuminations life in its eternal vacillations become body and soul. (Mina Loy Papers, f. 191; f. 141) Like Eddy’s, Loy’s philosophy is Hegelian in its dialectical interplay and progression; boundaries between seeming opposites collapse and merge, propelling consciousness forward on an evolutionary wave; it is a model of dialectical progress, infused with spiritual significance.28 Theories of evolution that stressed human intervention led inevitably to theories of eugenics, an attempt to direct evolution by conscious breeding practices, not coincidentally in a time of increased anxieties in the United States

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around the mass influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Asia. “It is wrong,” declared one physician in 1929, “for two divergent races to mix and form a mongrel or half-breed race,” advocating an end to all immigration of “persons not of the white race” (Rice 318, 307). Jews occupied a liminal and fundamentally unstable position in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury, pre–World War II-era eugenicist discourse. As one historian notes, early twentieth-century Americans “faced a basic question: whether Jews, long depicted as a ‘dark’ and different people, were a distinct or a white race?” (Gold 180). On the one hand, the Jewish figure was very often depicted as just the kind of immigrant America and Britain should bar. One writer, for instance, compares Jewish people to “swarms of pestilential flies”; prominent eugenicist Charles Davenport declares them an “intermediate” race, somewhere between “the slovenly Servians and Greeks and the tidy Swedes, Germans, and Bohemians” and wishes he could rid America entirely of their presence (Freeman 265; qtd. in Kevles 46–74; Paul 105). As Rachel Blau DuPlessis describes Loy’s milieu of the “New Jew,” the presence of Jewish immigrants in New York at the turn of the century incited a flood of racist tracts consumed with the threat they were imagined to represent, of “mongrelizing the white race, polluting it, stunting it, weakening its hegemony, destroying it” (138). It is a phenomenon by no means exclusively American, for as Bryan Cheyette observes of British attitudes toward Jewish immigration—attitudes of which Loy and her Hungarian Jewish immigrant father would have been well aware—“the accommodation of pre-modern Jews from the ‘East’ within the borders of the nation-states of the ‘West’ was . . . represented as threatening the very foundations of . . . the ‘English nation’ ” (9). Paradoxically, however, Jews were just as often held up as the paragon of evolutionary progress in the eugenicist imagination. Not only were Jews seen as uniquely pure in their bloodline—since, it was argued, they consistently favored marrying other Jews—but their persistence as a group over time illustrated to many the veracity of Darwin’s survival of the fittest; as Jewish historian Klaus Hödl observes, “In the context of eugenics, Jews were frequently regarded as a hardy race. Due to persecutions and pogroms they allegedly had undergone a process of selection that eliminated the ‘weak’ members of their community” (31). The “Jewish race” was positioned time and again as the “most continuously and stringently selected of any race” (Saleeby 316). Some scientists held up the example of Jews to justify eugenic practices: “The principle of keeping the race pure is nowhere better illustrated than in the history of the Jewish people. . . . There is no better argument for the universal practice of the principles of eugenics than the marvelous success of the Jewish race” (Rice 13). So pervasive was this belief that some Jews espoused it as well: “The Jewish type is indestructible,” 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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one nineteenth-century Jewish commentator remarked proudly (qtd. in Jacobson 184).29 For some, this evolutionary superiority of Jews accounted for what they viewed as the “Jewish cosmopolitan,” or transnational, blood; wandering so long in exile, Jewish bodies were thought to possess an uncanny, almost magical resistance to diseases that threatened to devastate other groups, absorbing and adapting effortlessly to any climate. Jews were once thought to be immune to tuberculosis, for instance, and to sexually transmitted diseases, “because of centuries of exposure” (Hödl 25; Gilman 126). Cosmopolitanism was also a source of eugenicist anxiety, for most held concerns over racial identity and national identity in tandem. In the early and mid-twentieth century, cosmopolitanism in the United States evoked fears of a rootless, opportunistic population indifferent to the appeals of patriotism and nationalism, and much of this anxiety focalized around the figure of the “Cosmopolitan Jew.” As Walter Benn Michaels has argued, “nativism made anti-Semitism an element of American cultural citizenship” even while the perceived rejection of (American) national identity among Jews in favor of familial and racial ties was viewed suspiciously (20–21). Moreover, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tracts, the presence of Jews in the United States disturbed the increasing polarization of racial identity into black and white categories; Jews were portrayed alternately and inconsistently as white or black, as Asian or African, as members of a racial or religious group. In the cultural imaginary, “Cosmopolitan Jews”—bereft of a homeland— crossed national borders at will and held no commitments to nationalist causes, and this view persisted for decades into the twentieth century. The father of eugenics, Francis Galton, remarked to a colleague in 1884 that “It strikes me that the Jews are specialised for a parasitical existence upon other nations, and that there is need of evidence that they are capable of fulfilling the varied duties of a civilised nation by themselves” (qtd. in Pearson 2:209). And as late as 1941, doubts about Jewish national—and racial—commitments linger in an article in the Atlantic Monthly alleging that “the Jew had become European ‘only in residence; by nature he did not become an Occidental’ ” (Jacobson 187). The malleable, indefinable nature of the “Cosmopolitan Jew” signified a radical lack of fixity, an instability of identity that—in the wake of the Civil War, massive immigration, the Spanish-American War, and World War I—seemed to threaten national cohesion. As one scholar notes of fin de siècle literature, “The indeterminacy of the semitic representations . . . meant that ‘the Jew’ can be constructed to represent both sides of a political or social or ideological divide” (Cheyette 9). The term “mongrel” itself—deployed so often and self-mockingly by Loy herself—connoted not only mixed heritage but a general inability to assimilate into the culture of American politics as well.30 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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In line with the popular model of the “Cosmopolitan Jew,” Loy also locates Jews at the forefront of the evolutionary cycle, but her focus is not merely on physical features but on intellectual and spiritual development as well. As she writes in her unpublished autobiographical novel “Goy Israels” about her “mongrel” heritage—a 1930s text, according to Burke—Jews are the “necessary intellectual bridge to the mystic dimension.” In fact, for Loy, an elite intellectual vanguard is necessarily Jewish, and she points to both Jesus Christ and Sigmund Freud as key examples of “evolutionally” influential Jewish figures (Mina Loy Papers, f. 189).31 Loy’s Christ is Jewish first and foremost, Christian only secondarily; he stands in a unique position bridging Judaism and Christianity, the earth and the heavens, the “visible” and the “invisible universe” (Mina Loy Papers, f. 189).32 As the offspring of Jewish and non-Jewish parentage, Loy’s protagonists of her autobiographical novels position themselves as uniquely susceptible to evolutionary progress, and in Loy’s notes on Judaism she thus comes to endorse crossbreeding between races as a means of asserting control over evolution, a kind of eugenics that advocates racial impurity. In “Goy Israels,” Loy’s autobiographical persona, Goy, is figured as an ideal, a “mongrel” of Jewish and British parentage. As a mixture of two races, she is not just perfect intellectually and spiritually but physically as well; she even goes so far as to admire the shape of her lip, a flawless “amalgam” of her parents’ lips, her Jewish father’s too short, her British mother’s too long (132).33 Loy’s model is fundamentally dyadic in origin, monist in the ideal; the character of Goy oscillates between what she terms the “Oriental” Jew and the “Occidental” Brit, embodied in the characters of her parents, absorbing the best characteristics, and “racial memories,” of each. What makes the hybrid “mongrel” superior to those of pure genetic strain is the duality of her ancestry, composing as it does two competing strains of racial memory that, in effect, cancel each other out, and ultimately, per Loy’s evolutionary scheme, expose the fictionality of race as a category. Her uneasy convergence of racial strains echoes the eugenicist refrain of the “disharmonies” produced by crossbreeding divergent races: for instance, Holmes remarks the “inharmonious combinations” evoked by “mingling of very distinct races” in 1936; Hirsch warns of the “inharmonious tendencies” within “the soul of the crossbred” in 1926; and Davenport decries the “disharmony” in “mulattos” in 1928 (Holmes 351; Hirsch 401; qtd. in Paul 112). Counter to eugenicists’ correlation of disharmony and degeneracy, however, Loy’s disharmony is productive, propelling evolution forward. In a fragment entitled “Race Memory,” Loy argues that people of multiple ancestry possess a unique vision: “the genius of mixed race has inevitably a roundness of understanding of humanity at large than one who has a specialized race memory” (Mina Loy Papers, f. 191). Whereas a fundamental dissonance 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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between different strains opens up a space for an outsider’s vision—a kind of biologically determined “double consciousness”—a purity in genetic origin enforces a constricted, unitary perspective, as Loy writes in another of her autobiographical novels, “The Child and the Parent,” which Burke dates tentatively in the late 1920s: “For, being by nature an evolutional phonograph record, the child reincarnates not only the biological stages, but also the sequence of ideas peculiar to its race” (25). The metaphor casts popular notions of racial memory within an image of an invention evocative of American technological prowess and progress. In bringing Christian Science notions of reality to bear on popular evolutionary theory and eugenics, Loy seems to have found a way to conceptualize her own identity as (partly) Jewish by positing biology and race as aspects of a lower evolutionary stage. If the goal of Christian Scientists is to accept the immateriality of the biological realm, and if two distinct genetic strains create a disharmony that exposes the artifice of physical existence, then Loy’s “mongrel” is in a unique position to progress beyond a biological, to a spiritual, plane of existence. Interestingly, the racial memory of the “Cosmopolitan Jew” at the turn of the twentieth century was often conceived of as stronger and more persistent than that of other racial groups. James Watson notes, for instance, that Faulkner’s “New Orleans” vignettes portray Jews as having a “racial memory [that] transcends a single time or place or condition”: of all his characters, “only the Wealthy Jew is ‘what he used to be’ . . . for ‘the blood is old, but strong.’ ” Because “[n]o soil nor any time is foreign to him,” Faulkner’s “Wealthy Jew” contains “all the pain and passion and sorrows of the human race” (223). So, for Loy, the Jewish “mongrel” would have, simultaneously, a much more entrenched set of racial memories to contest and, being evolutionarily superior, exceptional access to the collective unconscious. Racial memory, in the end, is to be loathed and cast off; in various works she portrays it as “tatters,” “rubbish,” and “excrements.” In her 1920 poem “O Hell,” Loy proclaims that “Our person is a covered entrance to infinity / Choked with the tatters of tradition” (Lost 71).34 Echoing the technological metaphor above, Loy again analogizes racial memory to a phonograph in another poem, “Brain”:35 radio pulp stacked with myriad microscopic recordings drumming on Time trivia of the past . . 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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too fast

you sabotage my choice of selections. . . . Here, “[a]utomatic” racial memory is an agent of “sabotage,” circumscribing our choices and our actions, and her characteristic alliterative style (in the repetition of “s” sounds throughout) emphasizes the continual nature of the disruption of free will, an effect strengthened by her replacement of “untiringly” with “ceaselessly” at one point in the composition of the poem. In earlier versions of the poem, the lines are compressed into just two stanzas, but this later version creates a “ceaseless,” “[a]utomatic,” frustratingly slow rhythm in its alternating line length and more expansive spacing. Significantly, the trap of the innate racial memory is not an inevitability for Loy; what comes more naturally for her, a “mongrel,” is available to others of purer ancestry through an act of will, and this she borrows as well from popular evolutionary tracts as well as Christian Science writings and the anti-deterministic views of Bergson. In Loy’s thinking, if “mongrels” are the leaders of evolution, all have the power to overcome biologic ties to racial consciousness by force of will, to free themselves of “the mechanical re-actions of the subconsciousness, that rubbish heap of race-tradition” (“Aphorisms” 15). Deploying once more a technological metaphor, Loy imagines pushing beyond the biological phase of evolution into a spiritual one. In “O Hell,” Loy expresses the same desire, in another metaphor of abjection, to overcome “excrement[al]” racial memory when she pleads in its opening lines To clear the drifts of spring Of our forebear’s excrements And bury the subconscious archives. . . . (Lost 71) An awareness of one’s genetic programming is always available to the individual in Loy’s musings: “If every scion of every race has a racial memory, it also has anticipation that is not conceived in the present,” she insists in “Goy Israels.” The human, “having that in itself to serve as it’s [sic] own antidote,” can realize the distance between materiality and the intellect: “actuality is only a screen between our self and it’s [sic] realisation” (118). Consistent with Christian Science notions of the body, Loy argues that if one fully comprehends the illusory nature of the physical, a break with genetic, biological automatism—and racial identity and memory—is possible. Her 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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formulation seems paradoxical, for race is conceived as genetic but genetics are part of the material world that does not exist. Racial difference, which she tends to conflate with national or ethnic difference here and elsewhere, poses an obstacle in her version of evolution because it masks the truth of our collectively shared awareness of essential sameness. Ultimately, Loy’s “Cosmopolitan Jew” becomes an ideal mirror for her own transatlantic position. It is the United States, the British-born Loy’s adopted homeland, that she sees as the nation propelling evolution forward, and it is America’s intellectualism, like the Jew’s intellectualism, that inspires her verse: America is a miracle: . . . . . . a flash of lightning, a stroke of genius. (Last 227) In her manifesto, “History of Religion and Eros,” America is, again, depicted as the catalyst for the evolutionary transformation from physical life to purely spiritual existence, the site of a “constant increase of that vibrational gamut” (16). Technological prowess—a sign of the practical implementation of science—was viewed in the early century as particularly American, and Americans were more likely to associate technology with democracy and free will, evidence of the U.S. success and spirit of progress in the world marketplace. As Lisa Steinman argues, “The idea that modern science might overcome social alienation was tied . . . to the belief that relativity theory rescued humanity from a deterministic world and thereby restored the central role of free will and the human imagination” (65). Having proven itself exceptional, and having absorbed the lessons of the technological era, the United States, in Loy’s view, is uniquely positioned to evolve beyond that material reality for which it was so revered. Moreover, American was home to the highest turn-of-the-century concentration of “mongrels.” America’s melting pot contains the ultimate embodiment of difference, a kind of performance of racial, ethnic, national diversity that through its sheer excess reveals the fictive nature of its difference. For Loy, then, this fast-paced and ethnically diverse nation is, naturally, the birthplace of modern poetry and the inevitable site of radical modern literature: It was inevitable that the renaissance of poetry should proceed out of America, where latterly a thousand languages have been born, and each one, for purposes of communication at least, English—English enriched and variegated with the grammatical structure and voice-inflection of many races. . . . This composite language is a very living language, it grows 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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In this 1925 essay on “Modern Poetry,” Loy theorizes a utopian America as a “melting-pot” of individual racial strains and modern American literature as the perfect, impure blend of individual talents and consciousnesses to enable evolutionary progress. While Britain’s English is self-consciously pure, hybridized American English has absorbed that of “many races,” yielding “a thousand languages.” A mongrel language, she suggests, offers the same path to spiritual self-knowledge that the mongrel subject possesses; thus, through a mongrelized, modern art, a realm beyond racial and national identity is possible. “[L]oosened in the melting-pot,” American English is bolder, more experimental, and dynamic; by contrast, the profound stasis of British English offers little in the way of evolutionary potential. This argument had been made by other Americans—Whitman and Howells and others—but for Loy it is the very future of human evolution that is at stake. Loy’s America, with its seeming exploding population of Jews and other immigrants, becomes idealized precisely because it resists national and racial identification, its cosmopolitanism; America’s nationhood, then, is constituted not by its unique and binding characteristics but precisely by its lack of such ethnic uniformity. “[A] new unity in the making”: Toomer’s American Body I am, body and soul, Negroid. —Toomer, letter to Claude A. Barnett I am not a Negro. —Toomer, letter to Nancy Cunard Dear Jesus, do not chain me to myself. —Kabnis, in Toomer’s Cane36 Loy’s analogizing of the brain to an “evolutional phonograph,” automatically recording and playing racial memory, finds an echo in Georges Gurdjieff’s writings on the technological nature of the human organism. “Man is born,” he tells a New York audience in 1924, with a mechanism adapted from receiving many kinds of impressions. The perception of some of these impressions begins before birth. . . . The

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as you speak. . . . Out of the welter of this unclassifiable speech, while professors of Harvard and Oxford labored to preserve ‘God’s English,’ the muse of modern literature arose, and her tongue had been loosened in the melting-pot. (Lost 158–59)

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construction of these receiving apparatuses is the same, recalling the clean wax discs from which phonograph records are made. On these rolls and reels all the impressions received are noted down, from the first day of life and even before. . . . On these rolls it is preserved unchanged. What we call memory is a very imperfect adaptation by means of which we can keep on record only a small part of our store of impressions. . . . All the internal psychic life of man is nothing but an unfolding, before the mental vision, of these rolls with their records of impressions. All the peculiarities of a man’s world conception and the characteristic features of his individuality depend on the order in which these records come and upon the quality of the rolls existing in him. (73–74) Like Loy’s “[a]utomatic disc-server” that “ceaselessly” “sabotage[s]” our “selections,” Gurdjieff’s conception of our phonograph-like brain suggests that we mechanically replay what has been preset in our minds rather than make conscious choices about our lives, which are “nothing but an unfolding” of “records of impression” (73–74, 138–39). Paradoxically, our uniqueness as individuals relies not on an exertion of free will but on a machinelike “receiving apparatus” that accumulates, stores, and disseminates data. Also like Loy, Gurdjieff’s point is that humanity needs to break out of this kind of pre“record[ed]” thinking. Though Gurdjieff, in this passage, does not explicitly address race, he does argue that at least part of that phonograph record exists before birth. Elsewhere, characteristically, he ties this phenomenon to the body and its movement: “Every race, every nation, every epoch, every country, every class and every profession has its own limited number of postures from which it can never depart and which represents the particular style of the given epoch, race or profession” (156). While the body may inherit traces of racial memory, however, “[h]eredity is not important for the soul” (191). In his autobiographical writing of the mid-1930s, Toomer is troubled by the existence, and persistence, of racial memory: “We speak of racial memory and have reason to be [sic] believe that it exists and persists in our subconscious as a deposit of experiences which antedate by centuries the life of the given individual” (“Unidentified Autobiography”). The metaphor of the phonograph appears in a number of Toomer’s writings as well, including his aforementioned unpublished poem “Also Persuaded,” in which he compares automatonic men and women to “cardboard mankins [sic] / With a phonograph inside them” (Jean Toomer Papers, f. 1304).37 In his partially completed dissertation on the nature of race and racial strife in America, “The Crock of Problems,” probably written in the late 1920s or early 1930s, Toomer borrows this image from Gurdjieff, but revises it slightly to downplay the importance of racial memory: “The . . . idea . . . that the individual 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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at birth is comparatively empty or blank, is sometimes expressed by likening the just born infant to a blank tablet or to a phonographic roll upon which practically nothing has as yet been inscribed” (35).38 Before birth, the “phonographic roll” is not in fact “blank,” since “practically nothing” is not nothing but, rather, something, however slight. This unstable position is so typical in Toomer’s oeuvre, which, taken as a whole, is anything but consistent on notions of racial memory, eugenics, evolutionary theory, and a host of other topics related to race. In his 1936 “The Blue Meridian,” Toomer returns to the metaphor in a passage he had added to the earlier version of this poem, “Brown River, Smile.” Noting that on the “many records” of his phonograph he listens to “sacred and profane extremes”—ranging from Gregorian chants to the popular soundings of Duke Ellington and Eddy Duchin—he rhapsodizes that, magically, mystically, at . . . some rare times I hear myself, the unrecorded, Sing the flow of I, The notes and language not of this experience . . . (Collected 67–68) Here again he alters Gurdjieff’s conception of the mind. While he clearly wishes to retain the notion of an individuality—“the flow of I”—expressed in the “unfolding” of the phonograph record, he views it as transcendent of “this experience.” His celebratory lines do not embrace the negative tone of his mentor’s message. Toomer’s anxiety over the issue of free will—and, by extension, control over the body—made explicit in Gurdjieff’s teachings, I would argue, is responsible for these subtle, sometimes contradictory adaptations of Gurdjieffian philosophy. As he revises this poem after its publication—restoring mystical and Gurdjieffian-inspired language not appropriate in its venue, The New American Caravan—he replaces the phrase “many records” with “one long record” containing multitudes, a further shift, Whitman-esque39 in its conception, designed to heal a frustrated sense of lack of unified self and to assert the possibility of having conscious purpose, much as we saw in the above discussion of “The Lost Dancer.” Undeniably, the issue of race rests at the center of Toomer’s philosophical and spiritual explorations. The positive reviews of Cane may have elated Toomer, but, as a man who had apparently moved in and out of different racial groups with relative ease, his reception as a “New Negro” artist shook his sense of self and left him with a feeling of helplessness and entrapment within a racially marked body. This accounts, undoubtedly, for his exclamation of frustration in “Book X” that “my looks have determined my life and my life has determined my looks” (third preface). Toomer’s complex, 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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often contradictory, views of race—and in particular his own racial status— have been the topic of most scholarship on his work to date. The tone of existing criticism on Toomer ranges from laudatory—celebrating his progressive stance against erroneous “one-drop” notions of racial purity—to incensed—decrying his monumental betrayal of African Americans in his many statements denying his “Negro” heritage. Both of these views have merit, and it is not my intention to attempt to resolve the matter but rather to focus attention on the ways in which evolutionary theory informs the debate. As an advocate of belonging to the “American race,” rather than a race determined by skin color and descent, Toomer does adopt a radical position in rejecting the idea that anyone has “pure blood” or that so-called “African blood” was inferior to that of other racial groups, but this stance also conveniently allows him to evade living life as an African American, subject to the restrictions and prejudices accompanying that designation, a position particularly problematic for the writer who helps to usher in the Harlem Renaissance with a brilliant work of high modernism. The story of Toomer’s perspective on race resists a coherent and consistent explanation, to say the least.40 His numerous autobiographies strive to establish a stable narrative, but the broader textual evidence of his career problematizes that attempt. Certainly, before Cane is printed, he is more interested in the “Negro problem” of the day and more willing to accept the “Negro” label. As Charles Scruggs has pointed out, Toomer makes “his most militant public statements about racial matters in the United States” in The New York Call in 1919 and 1920, addressing both racial violence and anti-Semitism (“My Chosen” 105). In a 1922 letter to Sherwood Anderson, Toomer writes with great empathy about the profound inferiority internalized by African Americans, who, in the face of overwhelming disenfranchisement, prejudice, and threat of bodily harm, feel they must choose between assimilation and isolationism (Letters 105–7). But while he admits his African heritage, he also faults Anderson for “limit[ing]” his view of Toomer to “Negro” in a letter to Waldo Frank that Mark Whalan dates early January 1923: “[a]s an approach, as a constant element (part of a larger whole) of interest, Negro is good. But to try to tie me to one of my parts is surely to loose [sic] me” (Letters 113). In these words, we see a preview of what is to come, evidenced in “The Lost Dancer” and other work, a Toomer deeply concerned with the discursive fragmentation of his body, the severing of body parts, and this fear is echoed when he alludes, in one of his autobiographical works, to his troubled mindset in the Cane era of the early 1920s: “Spiritually I was plunged into the fundamental problems of this era; and the plunge, though invaluable as a means to the expansion of my consciousness, and my conscious individualization, sort of dislocated my parts” (“On Being an American” 43).41 The much discussed correspondence 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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around the advertising and framing of Cane reveals a Toomer who does not so much want to disavow the category of “Negro” identity as to complicate it. His indignant anger over both Liveright’s and Frank’s emphasis on his African descent in the blurbs and preface of the book is puzzlingly counterbalanced by a letter to Claude A. Barnett of the Associated Negro Press in 1923 that declares “I am, body and soul, Negroid. My style, my esthetic, is nothing more nor less than my attempt to fashion my substance into works of art. For it, I am indebted to my inherent gifts. . . . I see no reason why my style and finish could not have come from an American with Negro blood in his veins. The pure fact is that they have” (Letters 160).42 Moreover, while it has become a commonplace that Toomer abandoned entirely his concern for race and his identification with African Americans within a decade of Cane’s publication,43 archival evidence in his correspondence files demonstrates that this desertion was not absolute. In the mid1930s, for instance, Toomer adds his name to a list of people seeking the acquittal of Haitian writer Jacques Roumain, who was imprisoned for helping the “Scottsboro Boys,” and he writes passionately to Langston Hughes that everyone should help the unfairly accused young men, who have been “caught in a machine.” In 1935, he contributes money to the Negro Peoples Theatre, and in 1951 he writes to the Race Relations subcommittee of the Quaker American Friends Service Committee that, having lived in both racial worlds, he understands prejudice on both sides. His ambivalence is seen perhaps most clearly in his letter in the early 1940s to the Department of Vital Records in Washington, D.C., requesting his parents’ records, questioning specifically which racial category they used.44 This is an odd demand given that a decade earlier he stated flatly to several people, including Josephine Beardsley and Suzanne La Follette, that he was not a “Negro,” even going so far as to have a friend write a document attesting to that fact. In that same year, 1930, he had clarified his racial status for a surprisingly sympathetic James Weldon Johnson by disavowing every race based on ethnicity in favor of a definition of race based in nationality: “I do not see things in terms of Negro, AngloSaxon, Jewish, and so on. As for me personally, I see myself an American, simply an American” (A Jean Toomer Reader 106). Reminiscent of Countee Cullen’s infamous lines of self-description (“I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET” [qtd. in Sperry]), Toomer’s protest is concerned primarily with his art, for which he likewise refuses racial designation: “My poems are not Negro poems, nor are they Anglo-Saxon or white or English poems. My prose, likewise” (106). Quoting from his book of adages, Essentials, “I am of no particular race,” he writes the New York Public Library one year later.45 If there are consistent statements about race throughout Toomer’s career, they are that the various races are not of pure descent and that “Negro blood” 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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is not inherently inferior.46 In an early 1920s essay, “The Negro Emergent,” in a time when Toomer seems most comfortable with his African heritage, he makes the argument that, due to the legacy of slavery, the “Negro” has two “bloods . . . in him,” he is of “Negro and white stock” (Selected 48). Indeed, Toomer seems consumed with the notion of blood throughout his writings on race—he refers, in the same essay, to the spiritual “anemia” of the “New Negro”—a contradictory and telling stance for a man claiming to be committed to divorcing himself from his own body. Significantly, he fails to call into question the now disproven notion that blood could be different; rather, he asserts that the different bloods of the various races could mingle and coexist in one body with no detrimental effect. His own body contains, he remarks in his short autobiography “On Being an American,” “the result of all the bloods in it,” and “whatever defects it has are . . . the result of all” (9). In a 1922 letter to the Double Dealer’s editor, he jokes that he has at least seven different “race bloods” in his body and “they get along, if you will believe me, quite amicably!” (Letters 40). In “On Being an American,” he extrapolates this notion of the African American’s mixture of bloods to theorize that virtually everyone in the world is of mixed race: “In point of fact all of the main races are mixed races—and so mixed that no one can unravel them in all of their blended complexity” (5–6). More pointedly, he contends that “[a]s a matter of organic fact there are within the white group also racial strains from every race on earth” (6).47 This sentiment is repeated in many of his writings on race; in “The American Race,” for instance, he reiterates, “We often speak as if there were only white races, black, red and brown races here. But, in point of fact, there is black blood in the so-called white race, there is white blood in the so-called black race, there is red blood in both white and black races, there are white and black bloods in the so-called red race” (1). In fact, though he advocates a eugenical program of hybrid vigor to accelerate the evolutionary process, he contends that this process of what he terms “interbreeding” is a natural one, that “[b]iology tends towards intermixture”: “Biology does not demand that we reproduce in terms of stocks and sub-races. Biology does demand that we reproduce the human race” (“America and Problems”). Adopting a form of romantic racialism based in the essentialist rhetoric of blood, he asserts about the African American population in Washington, D.C., around whom he was raised that “[w]hatever Negro blood they had was an asset” (“On Being an American” 17). In “A Fiction and Some Facts,” an angry late-1930s pamphlet, Toomer is evasive about his heritage but claims that I have never subscribed to the false belief that one blood is intrinsically inferior or superior to another. . . . If Negro blood is among the bloods 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Somehow “[b]lood is blood,” and yet a notion of different bloods for different races is preserved. In a later autobiographical piece, “Incredible Journey,” he echoes these ideas when he proclaims that “[t]he blood in Caucasians, Africans, Indians, Asiatics, all is human blood, none superior, none inferior.”48 In his 1928 essay “Race Problems and Modern Society,” Toomer notes that the very notion of race is so murky that scientists admit that they do not understand it: “It will be well to note here that no serious student of race claims to know what race really is; nor do we know. . . . Scientific opinion is in doubt as to what race is” (Selected 63). The problem, he asserts over and over again, is not a biological one but a social one; the problem is not that we have different “race bloods” but that we are “race-conscious”: “The clinging to race—and not to race at that, but to our ideas and feelings about something we have lables [sic] for but know practically nothing about” (“Psychologic”). Humanity thinks about race in terms of the body and not in terms of the psyche or the soul. In his undated poem “People,” he laments that To those fixed on white, White is white, To those fixed on black, It is the same, And red is red, Yellow, yellow—(Collected 80) Color is a characteristic of the body, though, and the body is not the self: “The strange thing is that / These people never see themselves” (80). “This is a curious blindness,” he observes, “For those not color-blind.”49 At various points, then, he advocates membership in either an “American race” or, more expansively, a “universal race.” As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has argued, “Toomer . . . became less concerned with representing the race and thereby ‘liberating’ it—an impossibility—than with inventing an entirely new discourse, an almost mythic discourse” (210). While the commonly accepted notion of these two categories is that the latter superseded the former in 1936 when Toomer decided not to write about race anymore, I would argue that in fact the categories coexist in his writings and there is, again, no linear narrative to be traced in his thought. Though we have a mixture of bloods in our veins, Toomer contends in “Member of Man,” these strains 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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that make me what I am, then the Negro blood, along with others, shares in producing whatever virtues I may have, and also shares in producing whatever vices I may have. Blood is blood. (4–5)

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have intermingled, “blended to form one blood, a new unity”: “The bodies of all men are of mixed blood, though the ingredients and combinations vary” (5, 3). So when he argues that “[i]n the case of Americans, there is undoubtedly a new unity in the making,” he builds the case partly on scientific reasoning (5). Espousing spiritual evolutionist rhetoric, he continues that “we are preparing, on the biological and subconscious levels, to lead the way towards the re-union of all races in the parent human race” (7). On the one hand, he claims that “[b]y heredity, birth, and social experience I was but one thing—an American” (“Book X” 90). But despite the biological terms he sets, he also wants to imagine Americans as “a new people, a people not to be defined in terms of ‘descent’ ” (“Member of Man” 6). The confusion here is revealing, as Toomer struggles to define race as something beyond biology even while it remains stubbornly tied to notions of blood. In “The Americans,” nature is the author of this new race: “[T]he meeting and mingling of different races or strains or stocks gives rise to a new people or race. Nature takes racial elements which have existed in other forms, and, by combining them, produces an independent new racial form.” In “A Fiction and Some Facts,” he argues similarly that “biologically and racially I am an American,” suggesting again that racial identification is based in blood, a seemingly magical compound of the bloods of all major racial groups (6). In a short essay entitled “The American Race,” he tries to elucidate this phenomenon deploying the language of chemistry: [W]hen different elements come together in chemico-biological blednings [sic], a new substence [sic] is produced, a new substance with a new form. Water, though composed of two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen, is not hydrogen and oxygen; it is water, a new substance with a new form produced by the bleding [sic] of hydrogen and oxygen. So the bledning [sic] of different races, taking place in the geographical setting of the American continent, has given rise to a new race which is uniquely itself. (1)50 Passages in “Incredible Journey” and in “The Americans” use the same analogy to water. Unlike Loy, Toomer balks at rejecting Western scientific notions of race altogether. As Loy attempts to draw on Eastern understandings of science to reconcile her position, Toomer continues, problematically, to yoke notions of blood to issues of identity. This construction of the “New American” with blended blood dominates his 1920s writing on race. Despite his sporadic but palpable anger at America in his writings—typically directed at the nation’s materialism and its lack of spirituality51—Toomer maintains a utopian view of the country’s 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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evolutionary future, similar to Loy’s. Like Loy, Toomer is excited that “interbreeding has taken place among the peoples of America sufficiently to have given a biological meaning to the term ‘melting pot’ ” because this evidence of “interbreeding” means that the nation is rapidly evolving humankind toward a higher existence; we are moving, he argues, “from a phase which was primarily characterized by differentiation, into a phase which is primarily characterized by intermixture” (“America and Problems”). The “melting pot,” however, is not his favorite metaphor of America’s “intermixture.” Rather, he regards the country in terms of a particularly bodily metaphor, as a giant stomach that digests “food,” transmuting it into “a blood unique to itself,” “eating” the races and producing one “American race” (“The Americans”). “In America,” he proclaims, “we have a new body” (“The Americans”).52 As an American of mixed race, Toomer depicts himself as the first “conscious” member of this race that in fact comprises everyone since “[w]ith the exception of remote peoples such as the bushmen and Eskimos, there are present in America all of the main varieties of man” (“Outline”; “America and Problems”). In his correspondence and nonfiction prose, from the late 1920s through the 1930s, Toomer reiterates his commitment to the notion of an American race and his identification with this new category. In “The American Race,” he states, “There is a new race in this country. We may call it the American race.” In “The Americans,” he revises the opening of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution to argue paradoxically that blood but not descent determines “biological . . . actuality”: “We, the people born and existing in this country, of whatever descent, of whatever blood-blendings, are a new racial form, a new people, distinct from the elements and strains which before existed in other forms, distinct from those other forms. This is the biological or racial actuality of America.” He reiterates this language in his press release following his marriage to Marjorie Latimer in 1931, and in letters to James Weldon Johnson, Nancy Cunard, and a German publisher who wishes to translate Cane.53 As late as the 1940s, Toomer is still writing about this “process that was and still is moulding [sic] a new people in America”: “The day will come when these new people, fully formed, will become conscious of who and what they are in the present, and cease attaching so much importance to descent, about which relatively little is known anyway” (“Incredible Journey”). But, again, Toomer is not consistent, as he conflates the notion of the “American race” with one of a “universal” human race. “What I really mean by the American race,” he explains, “is the human race” (“The American Race”). In “On Being an American,” he attempts to flesh out this idea when he clarifies that this “new type of man . . . arising in this country” is one in which “the divisions mended, the differences reconciled” (36). Not 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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only will the universal man make the United States “a united people” but it would have global ramifications, as “we would in truth be once again members of a united human race” (36). He writes to Samuel Raymond in 1944 that “my people are all people, my class all classes, my nation all nations.”54 A microcosm for the world at large, America becomes, then, not a geographical or national region but wholly a site of racial intermixture that produces a new race. In fact, in “The Possibilities of Human Growth,” nationality is one element of identity to be outgrown so that humankind can “move towards universal man.” In his autobiographical “Earth-Being,” Toomer attempts to negotiate the line between heredity and destiny when he asserts that his body “is, of course, of definite parents and of a specific region; yet, as men view these things, it is of no locale, no nation, no stock or race; it is of me, and of earth, the entire earth, and of nothing less than mankind” (I.1). The physical body must be transcended, a conceptual notion of identity superseding it. In recounting his mystical experience in “From Exile into Being,” in which his spiritual body becomes severed for a few days from his physical body, he reports possessing a revolutionary power of vision that performs this just perceptual transcendence; looking out his window, “I saw an earth-being, not an American or a New Yorker or a foreigner. I saw an earth-being, not a white or a colored man” (A Jean Toomer Reader 59). But even though he claims to be “of the universe,” and “not of Washington or of New York, not of Chicago, the North, the South, America, Europe, the Eastern, the Western, the Northern or the Southern Worlds,” his body reemerges as central to his “universal” identity: “to judge from the responses I get—I have the appearance of a sort of universal man” (“Earth-Being” I.2, I.14; emphasis mine). The conflation of American and universal identity is central to his long, Whitman-esque poem of 1936, “The Blue Meridian,” his most comprehensive statement on race that exists in verse, and though the lines of an earlier, shorter version, “Brown River, Smile,” are more focused on America as a geopolitical entity, it nonetheless contains the same tension. In the first three stanzas, “The Blue Meridian” at once announces its focus on the United States in its opening line—“It is a new America”— and invokes the language of universality, as the speaker calls for evolutionary growth: A million million men, or twelve men, Must crash the barrier to the next higher form. Beyond plants are animals, Beyond animals is man, Beyond man is the universe. (Collected 50)

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The speaker is, at once, “Level with my countrymen, / Right-angled to the universe” (55). Even while the poem details a story of the founding of America—of its “white” European, “red” American Indian, and “black” Africans—its goal is the creation of “the man of blue or purple” who, in absorbing all of these blood lines, transmutes them into a new one (72). Though the speaker refers to “the new people,” “[a] race called the Americans,” he also pleads with Americans to “fix, as their center of gravity, / As their compelling ideal / The symbol of Universal Man –“ (72, 63).55 In an incantatory grouping of stanzas, the poem calls on all of humanity to rid themselves of all categories of identity and become instead members of a universal race: Unlock the races. . . . I am, we are, simply of the human race. .... Uncase the nations. . . . We are of the human nation. .... Uncase the regions. . . . We are of Earth. .... Unlock the classes. . . . I am, we are, simply of the human class. (64–65) The discourse of biology is not absent in this poem. As in Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Toomer analogizes the blood pulsing in human veins to the Mississippi River—“[m]ain artery of earth in the western world”—flowing through the veins of the United States: “The blood of earth and the blood of man / Course swifter and rejoice when we spiritualize” (50–51). Body becomes nation in the spiritual crucible of this poem, and an all-encompassing universal body is the evolutionary goal, as the speaker imagines that we will “blend our bodies to one flesh . . . blend this body to mankind” (55). A nursing mother is the metaphor for humanity’s tenacious hold on racial categories of identity, and he calls for the mother to “Cut the binds of apron-strings, / That young gods may dance” (65–66). Near the close of the poem, he inexplicably invokes the supposedly transcendent “New American’s” hereditary lineage, restoring the role of blood to an abstract notion of identity: And we are the old people, witnesses That behind us there extends An unbroken chain of ancestors, Ourselves linked with all who ever lived, Joined with all future generations; Of millions of fathers through as many years We are the breathing receptacles. (72) 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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“Biologically I belong to the whole of mankind,” Toomer declares in “Incredible Journey,” citing the importance of heredity even while advocating the concept of the transcendent “universal” man: “Diversity will still exist no doubt, and will be welcome, for it will exist under the covering of spiritual unity.” For Toomer, as for Loy, the discourse of racial science becomes conjoined with notions of spirituality. In two letters to literary journals in the 1920s, he equates spiritual and racial destiny, positioning himself as a paragon of that “reunion of all races”: “I have striven for a spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermingling. Without denying a single element in me, with no desire to subdue, one to the other, I have sought to let them function as complements. I have tried to let them live in harmony” (A Jean Toomer Reader 15–16).56 In this formulation, an individual who is infused with multiple racial strains is particularly positioned to be spiritually enlightened, or at least this is the project at hand. In his essay “World America,” he furthers the metaphor, hypothesizing that racial categorization is the reason “why the circulation of our physical and spiritual bloods is sluggish, why we are unable to spiritualize more of our experiences, why often we feel semi-paralyzed and unable to function” (8). Oddly, this analogy carries over from the realm of biology to that of sociology when he writes about living, at various times, among different racial groups: “While I lived in it, each group became mine—which means that in a spiritual sense the total world of America has become mine” (“Book X,” third preface). The religious sphere does not just transcend matters of biology and sociology; spirituality is the vehicle through which this racial transformation comes about. Toomer’s profound, always vacillating, views of race and his own racial identity are entangled with his ambivalence about his body, and I would contend that we can begin to understand that phenomenon by studying his views of evolution and the connection between body and soul implied by theories of psychic and spiritual evolution. If Mina Loy draws on Christian Science philosophy in constructing a reality in which she can abandon the racialized body, Toomer certainly does not. In fact, he pointedly decries Christian Science in Natalie Mann as well as other unpublished writings.57 Given how neatly some of their views dovetail, this may seem surprising, but Toomer, unlike Loy and Stein, was never drawn to an organized religious sect dominated by female leadership. This may well be connected to his veritable obsession with his body discussed in the previous chapter, for, as one occult psychologist observes in 1902, “[t]he Christian Scientist denies having any real body. Any one . . . will realize that this is a harmful thought. . . . The body should not be despised or denied. . . . one should take delight in it, keeping alive the desire to be strong and active, and comely as well” (Olston 378). 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Toomer’s notions of the universe, rather, derive from a wide range of sources, not only his readings in the works of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel, but also in such unorthodox theories as Gurdjieff’s promise of a superhuman existence not bound to this universe and Gerald Heard’s emphasis on the role of the psyche, rather than the body, in human evolution.58 As scholars familiar with his unpublished writings will attest, Toomer writes about the topic of race, in some form, throughout much of his lifetime. To say that his virtual obsession with race entirely drove his investigations into evolutionary theory may be an overstatement; after all, it was in his college years that he first encountered the ideas of Darwin, Spencer, and Haeckel, a time when most are exposed to new ideas that challenge and upset previously held assumptions. But the two interests are clearly, and I would say unquestionably, linked. If deterministic theories of biological evolution were so devastating as to threaten his mental well-being,59 ideas about psychic and spiritual evolution—which shifted the discourse of evolution away from the body and its racial destiny—promised an escape from the implications of heredity science. The discovery of evolutionary theory, however disturbing, is the beginning, he writes in “Book X,” of his “spiritual revolution” (217). Stephanie Hawkins has argued persuasively for the influence of theories of evolution, and of science more broadly, on Toomer’s thinking about race: “Certainly the most formative experience of Toomer’s literary career and the later confluence of science and mysticism that characterize ‘The Blue Meridian’ and his psychological writings of the 1930s was his encounter with evolutionary theory” (154). Citing “his advocacy of deliberate racial blending . . . as a means to transcend the boundaries of race ideology and fulfill evolutionary progress toward human perfection,” Hawkins claims that “Toomer’s entire literary career can be understood as an attempt to come to terms with, if not to escape, his imprisonment in a racialized body” (150, 149). She concludes that “[b]y identifying struggle and resistance as the central tenets of his aesthetic, Toomer made Darwinian evolutionary logic the basis for his unique modernism” (159). My reading is largely complementary. Hawkins is particularly convincing when she demonstrates how Darwinian and Spencerian theories of evolution—especially in relationship to their notions of the struggle for existence—are adopted and adapted by Toomer in his voluminous 1930s philosophical works entitled “Psychologic” and “Psychologic Papers,” composed during a phase in which he is trying to divorce and distinguish himself from Gurdjieff. My interest here, however, lies more in how theories of psychic and spiritual evolution, including those of Gurdjieff and of Gerald Heard, inform the ways in which Toomer thought about the role of the physical body, the extent to which he had control over 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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that body, and his negotiation of the existence of free will within a framework of universalist subjectivity. Moreover, I disagree with scholars who strive to trace a consistent, logical pattern to Toomer’s thought about race and science that encompasses or explains the entirety of his career. As should be clear in this book, I find any such attempt at a coherent narrative doomed to failure; Toomer is deeply conflicted about race and about his body, and his work over several decades is riddled with contradictions and paradoxes, tensions and anxieties. Toomer’s autobiographical texts recount his exposure to scientific—to his mind, atheistic—theorists such as Darwin, Haeckel, Lamarck, and Spencer during his college days, and from that point he begins to search for alternative evolutionary theories that were less deterministic and more focused on the mind and soul. As Toomer’s thinking developed in the mid-1930s beyond his Gurdjieff years, he begins to hypothesize that evolution has become arrested in the biological stage and that psychological and spiritual stages are both possible and imminent. “Arrestation means fixation within the limits of the first stage,” he explains in the critically neglected philosophical work that contains what is perhaps his most sustained and fully developed statement on evolution, “As the World Revolves.” In “Psychologic,” he outlines four evolutionary stages, only the first of which has most of humankind experienced: body, emotion, mind, and whole psyche. This notion holds well into the Quaker years, for he writes to Charlemae Rollins on September 1, 1944, that “[t]he basic condition is this: that men the world over, whatever their color or nation or class, are not growing and developing as men should grow, are not living as men should live. The entire human race at present (except for a few) is blocked in its development.” This is true, he asserts in several texts, because humanity is obsessed with the physical body, its appearance and its materialist desires: “Mankind is arrested. He is locked within the limitations of my-body and not-my-body, what is mine, what is yours, possession and dispossession, conflicts for physical ‘advantage,’ national war and racial clashes” (“As the World Revolves”). At least in part, he blames this state of evolutionary stagnation on deterministic scientists who focus only on the body and not on the soul, and in particular he expresses concern about the notions that “[l]ife is protoplasm” and that “there is no design, no plan, no purpose in life” (Jean Toomer Papers; f. 822). He laments in “Psychologic” that we are mired in a “body-stage of evolution.” For Toomer, evolution not only applies to the mind and spirit, but it is also purposive, subject to human intervention through a eugenical program based in hybrid vigor (as illustrated in his notion of developing this “New American race”) and concentrated individual efforts to develop psychologically and spiritually. The consequences of ignoring our purpose may be dire: 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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“Our arrestation is plain counter-or even anti-evolutionary. Evolution would have us move on from the plane of survival-body-preservation to the plane of improvement-self-development” (“As the World Revolves”). He hopes, in his “Psychologic Papers,” that because humankind is entering a technological age, in which machines can perform much of our labor, they will be able to direct their focus upward, away from the body. “Man’s task is to move on,” he asserts in “As the World Revolves”: “His task is to develop.” This problematic fixation on the body held by scientists is mirrored in the everyday world, according to Toomer. In “World America,” he argues that we have racial strife in the world because “we come to be fixed on our bodies,” an obsession he traces to the Puritans: “Puritanism has, ironically enough, make [sic] us over-concerned with just the things it would have had us forget, namely, sex and most of the so-called vulgar features of our bodies” (8). In “Book X,” he offers this diagnosis a name, “bipedism”: “A man afflicted with bipedism sees only himself, and of himself he sees chiefly his legs, his sex organs and his belly. . . . A man developed to humanism sees all that a biped sees and in addition he sees others, and of himself and others he sees chiefly their human attributes, the most important of which is the spiritual mind” (third preface). He remains concerned with “bipedism” in the late 1930s; in a letter to a psychical researcher at Duke University, he expresses frustration that so many “remain, as I call it, body-bound” and that we resist spiritual evolutionary development: “Why do we insist upon being limited by our present functioning equipment? Why do we cling to the body? Why do we resist, resent, and even fight against being liberated from what amounts to slavery?” He calls on scientists to prove the validity of his theories so that humankind will accept what he takes to be the fact of purposive evolution.60 In that same year, in a short essay entitled “Lines Written in Response to People Bowed Down by a Sense of Oppression Because of the Events of the World,” he links “bipedism” to the stunning violence of World War II: “Body-bound views of men and life must be overcome, else we will seek for the power in our muscles.” In his essay “World America,” he blames our obsession with race for this fixation: “Another undesirable result of our over-concern with racial matters is this: that we come to be fixed on our bodies” (8). Toomer, then, wants to redefine evolution, to broaden its scope, in ways that many scientists were. “We are beings at the human stage of cosmic evolution,” he declares in “From Exile into Being” (II.22).61 The human race is experiencing not biological but spiritual evolution: “With men, long after the body-minds have stopped growing, we can and should continue our spiritual growth, the development of our sheer consciousness, the growth of our power to apprehend and realize reality” (“Men Are”). We know the validity of this assertion, he writes in “From Exile into Being,” because biological evolution is 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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no longer necessary: “In human life, the struggle to survive should be superseded by the struggle to develop. Physical survival, insofar as men can assure it, should by now be assured to every human being on earth” (I.35). In a set of 1937 lecture notes, Toomer traces a history of science from the Medieval period to Darwin that has turned the body into an object of study and has remained obsessed with it: “[H]aving to do with the body—that is where most people in the western world stop. Their ideas of evolution are limited solely to the idea of the evolution of the physical organism. This is a partial conception. It is a partial view. For the whole, complete view we must add the eastern or Hindoo idea that there is also a spiritual evolution or an evolution of the spiritual or human essence or ego” (Jean Toomer Papers; f. 970). In these notes, science has failed because it has reckoned only with the body, not with the mind or soul: “No theory of heredity or of environment that I know anything about has successfully accounted for the variations of the interiors of people.” “There is something separatable [sic] from our bodies,” he continues: “And it is this which is evolving, growing, which has this career in the universe, which does not begin with physical birth or end with material death.” Toomer furthermore expounds a view of evolution that centers its purpose around human needs and desires: “I believe that the purpose of life on this earth is that the souls who pass through this planetary existence may gain the kind of development they need” (“Book X”).62 The “highest evolutionary aim,” he insists, is a moral one: “the evolution of the human spirit to become conscious and responsible” (“As the World Revolves”). “[T]he will to develop is inherent in the nature of the man,” he asserts, and what drives evolution is individual desire to grow toward communal ideals, easier perhaps for the mixed race individual who is already conscious of universality but available to all (“As the World Revolves”). Using Lamarckian theory—which held that traits acquired from adaptation to the environment could be inherited—Toomer argues in “As the World Revolves” that desire for growth can be passed along to successive generations. Since nature is taking care of biological evolution, “there is every need to release our energies from absorption with this level, and to concentrate them on becoming psycho-generative.” Lamarckian theory grants evolution the potential to progress rapidly, since mutation can become permanent in just one generation. Moreover, human beings on a consciously driven evolutionary pathway should not just strive to be “psycho-generative” but spiritually enlightened. Toomer borrows from Lamarck the idea that animals will develop new organs in response to environmental change in order to envision humans developing “in response to spiritual necessities” (“As the World Revolves”).63 If nature regards us as “biological actualities,” he explains in the “Psychologic 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Papers,” then “[t]o God we are spiritual beings. He, so they tell me, wants us to develop and perfect ourselves.” In “From Exile into Being,” he states succinctly the connection between evolution and God: “Human beings were created in order that they might grow. They grow in order that they may become able to promote their further development. They develop in order that they may make themselves conscious agents of their Creator” (II.124). And years later, in the mid-1940s, a time when he is moving away from Gurdjieffian rhetoric and toward a Quaker-inspired mysticism, his view of our evolutionary purpose is retained: “We are living to transmute. We are living to transform. We are living to overcome and transcend and be born again. We are living to mutate” (“He Who Grows”). Toomer’s attempts in this period to secure speaking engagements and workshops to run entail promises to potential audiences that he can offer them a personal experience of spiritual evolution: “I would suggest that our central theme be concerned with man’s development and transformation, particularly the growth of the spiritual faculties and the increase of consciousness.”64 Though Toomer cites Gerald Heard sporadically in his philosophical writings, his influence on Toomer has not received any attention to date, but Heard’s theory of human psychological (and, by explicit extension, spiritual) evolution bears a strong resemblance to Toomer’s writings on “psychologic,” a recipe for heightening spiritual consciousness through individually driven purposive evolutionary development. Heard’s 1929 The Ascent of Humanity delineates a history of consciousness that moves from a prehistoric state before humans had subjectivity, to today’s era of individuality, to a future culminating stage of “super-consciousness” and pronounced spiritual vision. Like Toomer and Loy, Heard detects a recent “unprecedented acceleration” in evolutionary progress (217). At present, Heard argues, humanity has evolved intellectually and emotionally but without a harmonic balance between the two; when this balance is achieved, the final stage of “superconsciousness” can be attained: “[A]fter the phase of intensification which we recognize as individuality, there may be a recovery on an incomparably grander scale of that general consciousness in which the individual becomes immortal, because enlarged out of his separateness, and the community (217). And like Toomer, Heard distinguishes the physical brain from the more transcendent mind: “We can now see mental evolution as something concomitant with, perhaps dependent for its expression but not dependent for its existence on, the evolution of brain” (288). For Heard, the endpoint for humans in the process of evolution—the stage of “super-consciousness”—is the attainment of a form of cosmic, communal or collective consciousness: “intellectually, man is emerging on to a common mind” (263). Currently, humanity exists in a liminal state, being 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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caught up in the “swift transition between the complete insensitiveness of the absolute individual and the new collective being” (11). More poetically, he declares at the end of his tome, “Obviously there is ahead of us a condition (into which we are already moving) wherein we shall discover, by the change of evolution and as that evolution changes and accelerates in us, that the sharp focus of the night-lamp of individuality, which has lit us through the darkness of our separation, vanishes as the comprehensive light of dawn breaks over us and we see ourselves united in the sunrise” (324). This utopian view of cosmic union—and suspicion of individualism—is shared by Toomer in many of his autobiographical and philosophical writings of the 1930s, and his view of “universal man” participates as well in this proposition about destiny of humanity. In “From Exile into Being,” Toomer instructs his audience that “[a]ll men, as beings, are kin. Our task is not to make it so, but to try to realize that it is so. Men as bodies are separate. . . . Men as beings are joined” (A Jean Toomer Reader 74). “[W]e are dismembered into little separated selves,” he writes, utilizing violent imagery to emphasize the importance of his message: “The split is within us; therefore it is between us” (I.4). In his “psychologic” work “Co-opposition,” he blames nature for giving humans separate bodies: “Nature confines us, men and worms alike, to separatism.”65 Interestingly, he argues that evolution works against itself by deepening an organism’s sense of individualism as it develops: “the natural or evolutionary increase of consciousness is accompanied by an increase of egotism, of fear of pain, of fear and pain—that is, by an increase of separatism. The more highly evolved the consciousness, the more the creature is ‘me’ ” (“Co-opposition”). Here he undoubtedly borrows from, and builds upon, Heard’s idea that individualism is a middle phase of evolution, bracketed by “group consciousness” and a communal “super-consciousness.” Whereas Heard seems undaunted about the notion of an “escape from individuality” because “individuality can be seen to be only limitation” (285), Toomer’s writings on communal consciousness not surprisingly reveal an acute anxiety about the loss of individualism and individual agency. Even while he embraces the notion of global connectedness and cosmic unity, he struggles to maintain a sense of uniqueness as an individual. In “As the World Revolves,” he envisions, paradoxically, a future stage at which humans will “go beyond both individualism and collectivism (which are but the opposite side of the same coin) and achieve true individualization and the cooperation of individuals.” While we all strive to achieve status as “the universal man,” he defines this category as building upon, rather than eliminating the traits of, “the provincial man”: “He becomes a citizen of the world without ceasing to be an individual, a member” (“As the World Revolves”). In a book proposal sent to the editor of the John Day Company in 1939, he 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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similarly argues that “[w]e fail to realize the unity of men because each of us fails to realize his individual unity.”66 Retaining a sense of individuality preserves the possibility of free will, and Toomer’s writings take the position that evolutionary progress grants us free will, the power to escape our bodily prisons: “One must develop in order to attain freedom” (“Co-opposition”). His discussion of psychical and spiritual evolution entails the notion that individuals not only possess the power to direct their own evolutionary growth and development but also are taxed with the obligation to do so for the good of humanity as a whole. “God wills that we grow,” he alleges in his undated short essay “Men Are Made to Grow.” Much of his writing of the 1930s and 1940s—even his continuing efforts to write his autobiography, which construct himself as exemplar—would be characterized today within the “self-help” genre, designed to enable individuals to expand their consciousness and propel the human race forward, to “press up the Scale of Being beyond the point where Nature seems to stop her work on us” (“From Exile into Being” I.81). The purpose of his final autobiographical effort, “Second River,” is to “show that it is possible for us to change radically and profoundly, to change not only thoughts and behavior but consciousness itself, so that we attain a state of being and living of a different order and far in advance of anything we ordinarily mean when we speak of human progress, improvement, development.”67 Similarly, in “From Exile into Being,” he states in the Foreword that, no mere autobiography, “[t]his book is concerned with the development of human beings beyond these present people, with the possibility of attaining a Being and a Consciousness considerably beyond the limitations we habitually impose on ourselves” (1). “Man, by exercise of consciousness can develop consciousness,” he continues: “Man, by ideal, by aim, by exercise of will and knowledge, can advance himself many stations beyond the body-mind product of Nature and of ordinary human society” (I.81). This notion of purposive, self-directed spiritual evolution is surely adapted, in part, from Gurdjieff’s cosmological thinking. Toomer adopts Gurdjieff’s notion of the unenlightened self as automaton, discussed in the previous chapter. In an essay entitled “America 1924,” Toomer bewails the fact that “ordinary man” lacks free will: “he is ruled—now by the mind, now by the feelings, now by the body. . . . Free will is reality. It may exist; but we, as we are, cannot have it.” Moreover, he takes from Gurdjieff a conception of the relationship between the body and the mind or soul. As one of Gurdjieff’s disciples points out, the guru “showed that the evolution of man . . . is the result of individual inner growth; that such an inner opening . . . requires a direct and precise knowledge of changes in the quality of each man’s inner consciousness: a knowledge which had been preserved in places he had visited, but can only be acquired with an experienced guide 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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through prolonged self-study and ‘work on oneself’ ” (vi). Just as Gurdjieff advocates manual labor and physical movement as vehicles for spiritual growth, Toomer avows that exerting the will on the body, the “outer man,” will transform the soul, the “inner man”: “Conscious effort brought to bear on outer man will allow the feeding, the energization and the release of inner man” (“As the World Revolves”).68 The goal for Toomer, then, is self-mastery; in particular, it is mastery of the body. In the “Psychologic Papers,” he advises giving the body what it “demands” so that it will be satisfied and not interfere with the more important “work” of inner growth. While we fret over freedom from physical bondage, we neglect to address the psychological and spiritual “slavery” that binds us: “We demand outer freedom, while neglecting the efforts required for inner freedom. Hence we never really obtain either, for a man must first be free within himself in order to be free within the world.” Freedom is to be sought within, for the “inner world” is “the realm of volition and self-change,” while the “outer world” is “the realm of determinism.” This exercise in self-control cannot be ignored, for “[f ]reedom comes from mastery, not from revolt” (“Remember and Return” 140). After Toomer joins a Quaker congregation, self-mastery becomes either a joint project between himself and his deity, or, as Robert Jones notes (117), the work of deity alone. In one late devotional poem, “Conquer This,” Toomer prays for help: “Aid me, O power, / To master body-mind” (Jean Toomer Papers, f. 1304). In “Two Parts,” Toomer explains that “Oblation is a part, the other—/ Control of self is upon the man” (Jean Toomer Papers, f. 1304). But, in “Thine,” he cedes all control of the body to God: I step aside, I yield this body to the use foreseen when it was born and trained; Take over, Lord, Command, that it may do thy will. (Jean Toomer Papers, f. 1304) If Loy seems at times willing to surrender absolutely possession of a physical body in favor of a spiritual, ethereal existence, Toomer is, characteristically, torn, his writings punctuated both with affirmations of the body’s importance and with calls for the need to abandon its “prison.” From Gurdjieff, Toomer had imbibed the notion of the importance of balance in three realms: body, emotion, and mind. A lecture typescript on the Great Depression exalts in the sensuality of the body: “He who is able to have vivid mental experiences must have also the ability to have vivid physical experiences. . . . Only he who can experience really physically can become a 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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saint” (“How We Can”). “Poor America!” he exclaims. “It is a country that was born with a religion but no body (Puritanism).” Likewise, “As the World Revolves” imagines a future world in which “we become superb bodies with large souls and deep minds.” In many texts, what dominates his writing about the body is the desire to be rid of it; in others, he devises a dualistic notion of a detachment from a physical body that nonetheless exists. As a species, he suggests in “Second River,” “we can extricate ourselves from involvement in the ego, from attachment to the body.”69 In “Values and Fictions,” a 1925 treatise dedicated to Gurdjieff, he illustrates how the body is a conceptual and perceptual reality only, that even the “empty husk” of it has no meaningful material existence: I realized that the form I assume my body to be, arises, say, from my eyes alone. I realized that it would have a different form to different eyes. I realized that I had no notion of what it looks like in reality. I realized that I had no means of perceiving it as it really is. With these realizations, the assumption of body form, the image of this form, and all similar fancies concerning it, dissolved, and to me my body became formless. I realized myself to be quite without such a form, and, since that was the only form I knew or could perceive or imagine, even the conception of form as related to my body was void of meaning, and the empty husk vanished. (142) By interrogating our empirical ways of seeing, Toomer is able to imagine a body without form, a body that ceases to be.70 For Toomer, of course, there are ramifications for thinking about race. In a letter to Waldo Frank probably dated 1923, Toomer envisions an evolutionary future in which racial problems are solved by abdicating the body: “the Negro is in solution, in the process of solution. As an entity, the race is loosing [sic] its body, and its soul is approaching a common soul” (A Jean Toomer Reader 24). In many of his philosophical texts, he cites a favorite quotation by Albert Einstein—that we measure the value of a person by the extent to which “he has attained to liberation from the self”—to bolster a worldview in which the physical body can be disentangled from the mind or soul.71 In “Psychologic,” Toomer promotes the Gurdjieffian techniques of self-observation and nonidentification (described in the previous chapter) to effect a “[r]enunciation” of the body: “Pull back from the body. Push it away.” By working to separate one’s sense of the self from one’s body, the goal of nonidentification, freedom from the needs of the body can result: “The attempt to non-identify is the attempt to realize that I have a body, in contra-distinction to the old 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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assumption that I am this body” (Jean Toomer Papers, f. 966). In self-observation, nonidentification is achieved when the “true self” is able to defamiliarize utterly the body so that it becomes a foreign object of study. In this formulation, the body is not entirely eliminated, just relegated to the margins, and the concept of personal identity is realigned such that the body is no longer implicated in it: “I was inescapably myself. My body was inescapably my body” (“On Being an American” 23). Thus, in much of his writing, Toomer shies away from the imagined idealist solution he flirts with and Loy adopts, the utter abandonment of the body, to theorize a form of dualism, a higher self—the soul—that is connected to but transcends a lower self— the body.72 Many, perhaps most, Toomer scholars—including Robert Jones, Rudolph Byrd, and Nellie McKay—agree that “Toomer’s desire for a unified self was the most pronounced organizing principle of his life” (McKay x). On the whole, I am sympathetic with this reading. However, the predominance of this dualist theory in his autobiographical writings of the 1930s and early 1940s suggests that Toomer was, at least for a time, accepting of a divided self because it permitted the mind and soul an absolute estrangement from the physical body. A truly unified self would entail an embrace of the body, which Toomer plainly finds disturbing and deeply problematic. For Toomer, in the highly evolutionarily developed individual, the higher self, in effect, occupies and possesses the lower self and, ideally, controls it. “I am not my body,” he reiterates in “From Exile into Being,” “but, while it lives, I am in it” (II.166). “I am in body,” he writes in his short essay “Conquer This,” “I am not body.” The lower self is an “empty husk,” or, in the “Psychologic Papers,” a “receptacle,” a “machine,” a “bundle of matter”: “We are matter and force, body and spirit, receptacle and resource, shell and kernel, parts and a whole, actual organisms and potential souls.” Again, he considers the implications in terms of racial matters, as he writes passionately in “Psychologic” that the body is an empty signifier: “Are you white? Nonsense. You are not that. . . . Your body is white. Nor is this accurate. Your body has a white skin. Nor is this accurate. The skin of your body has white coloring. This is fact.” In various autobiographical texts of the 1930s and 1940s, Toomer describes four mystical experiences in which he felt a radical dissociation of his self or soul from his physical being. In these passages, he constructs the body as if it were a foreign entity, a practice that leads to some awkward constructions in his prose. This phenomenon, though, begins early, as we see in a few existential lines of despair he composes during the spiritual and physical breakdown that followed the publication of Cane: “Body is a name. What a word is, I do not know. It is clear that I know nothing at all of this body” (“From Exile into Being” I.109). The first such experience 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Negotiating the Racialized Body

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was a kind of “rapt communion” with nature, which occurred when he was a young boy in Washington D.C. (“Earth-Being” III.59). The second transpired at college: “It was as if I and my body had separated so that we were two people, one myself, the other a second person, yet not a second person, because this second person also was myself” (“Book X” 104). Also at college, the third ensued from his exposure to evolutionary theorists: “I saw my body stretched on the bed. . . . [T]his detached part of me observed the tragedy of the rest of myself with the most admirable scientific objectivity. . . . I watched my body still on the bed. . . . I was aware of my body’s movements and slyly noted that whatever the havoc wrought in my inner world my body, not harmed at all, was just the same as ever” (“Book X” 248–49). But the most radical alienation from the body—a profound sense of nonidentification, to couch it in Gurdjieff’s terms—occurs in the mystical experience that gets the most attention, taking up hundreds of pages of the lengthy “From Exile into Being,” an episode in the late 1920s that lasted several days. Standing on a train platform, Toomer is suddenly “born above the body,” as a swirling force, a presence, envelops him and severs his astral body from the physical “husk” that contains it. In the ensuing depiction of the next few days, pronouns referencing the body shift from “he” to the objective, distanced “it,” and the possessive pronoun “my” disappears as “Body” takes on a life of its own: “A train drew up. Body and I got on. . . . We came to the house. Body got out the key, opened the door, and we entered” (A Jean Toomer Reader 48, 50). Significantly, this divorce from the physical body represented in “From Exile into Being” enables a new vision of race: “People were people, stripped of the labels and classifications they foist on each other, stripped too of the ratings they give each other. I saw an earth-being, not an American or a New Yorker or a foreigner. I saw an earth-being, not a white or a colored man. I saw an earth-being, not a street-cleaner or taxi-driver or a salesman” (A Jean Toomer Reader 59). Here the higher self sees beyond the physical traits to commonality rather than difference; its vision pierces the physical shell to uncover the inner beauty of humanity: “I tried to see with something more than the physical eye . . . and discerned something of the individual character of the person who inhabited the physical frame. . . . Each feature of each face—the nose, the jaw, the brow—was a perfect masterpiece, perfectly modeled and articulated with the others to comprise just that face as a unique face” (A Jean Toomer Reader 60). His conclusion is that all ills of the world—“[r]acial prejudice, segregation on account of color, sex, occupation, these and many other aberrations, indeed all forms of man’s inhumanity to man”—stem from the fact that “people are body-bound, and would cease to exist were we to become body-free through birth above the body into 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Being” (II. 64). This new vision beyond the racialized body is invoked in his 1937 book of adages, “Remember and Return,” as Toomer portrays a view of humanity in which the only difference between individuals is not based in race, or any other traditional category of identity, but rather in the level of conscious, purposive evolutionary development attained: “If one views man and his life psychologically, the chief differences between men are seen as differences of level of development. Such practice cuts through all existing classifications of people according to race, class, nation, religion, etc., and penetrates to people-as-they-really-are in inner nature” (176). Reentering his body as suddenly as he left it in “From Exile into Being,” Toomer recounts his despair, and he remains disappointed for decades that he has become, once again, “body-bound.” A poem in “Second River” captures this disappointment: My feet have left the earth, They have found as yet No pavements on the arch of heaven. . . . (52)73 This suspension in a liminal state between body and soul mirrors nicely his vexed sense of himself as racially ambiguous. The narrator of Toomer’s Gurdjieffian novel “The Angel Begori” laments that “[t]he body will be no longer fearful but sheerly wonderful to me only when I am able to enter it and to leave it at will” (6, verso). That sense of control, of free will, always eluded him.

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Negotiating the Racialized Body

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To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration. —Michel Foucault1

W

hy religio-scientific discourse at the turn of the twentieth century? How does it address a newly malleable body? Why the modernist skepticism about the materiality of our world? Why the attraction to this mode of discourse for writers of the period? Louis Martz suggests that it is a disaster like war that evokes such reactions: “[P]rophetic writing is born out of disaster or the threat of disasters, out of the human need to believe in more than destruction. And in our century the genre of prophetic writing has again come alive. It was first created out of the ashes of World War I” (Many 5). Helen Sword echoes this sentiment about catastrophe and modernism when she links the epoch’s “spiritual disenchantment” to occult and spiritualist writing: “[I]t was, no doubt, modernism’s very emphasis on irony and spiritual disenchantment that triggered, in turn, a compensatory longing for otherworldly insight and spiritual fulfillment” (Engendering 2). There seems little doubt that the myriad historical and cultural forces typically cast as contexts for the emergence of avant-garde and modernist art and literature—industrial and technological revolutions, progressive social reform movements, world wars and decolonization, labor unrest, racial strife, mass waves of immigration into America from Europe and Asia, the rise of psychoanalysis, and so forth—can be tied as well to the convergence of religious and scientific discourse and to shifting notions of embodiment. At the nexus of unprecedented societal and cultural changes—in “the flux of the passing moments”—modernism rests on a crisis of subjectivity, a critical reimagining of subject/object relations in which a subject can become an object of study and an object can be imbued with subjectivity. 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Coda: Speculations

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“New” physics makes these claims as well about subjects and objects, and religious thought that exploits “new” physics attempts to palliate the anxiety that stems from the dismantling of such a foundational binary by proposing a moral science, of a kind. In turn, “new” science offers to religion authority and validation, proof for its convictions. If religion has too long denied the importance of body—as Loy alleges in “The History of Religion and Eros” and elsewhere—science restores the centrality of body, albeit a complex body that resists categorization and defies solidity. Religio-scientific discourse at the turn of the twentieth century at once proposes explanation and resists it, for it draws on the authority of the scientific method while theorizing the incontrovertible existence and endurance of that which cannot be explained. This is, perhaps, why it attracts the artist. A science that allows for the possibility of the ineffable is a natural fit for the writer of the early twentieth century, an age not only of scientific and technological innovation but of rapid professionalization of authorship. “[O]ccultism,” one recent scholar asserts, “can assist poetry in defamiliarizing the modern world and thus critiquing its pretensions to rational systemization” (Devon Johnston 2). Principles of relativity, of nonlinear time, of uncertainty, of radioactive force and power, of the effects of the observer on the observed—all appeal to the creative imagination and all resonate with facets of modernist aesthetics. Studies of spiritualism and art of this period by Helen Sword and Daniel Cottom point out some of these shared concerns when they observe that inherent in both is an anxiety about language’s ability to communicate meaning. Spiritualism’s attention to language—to its material and immaterial qualities, its successes and failures to communicate—is reflected in modernism’s employment of fragmentation and disjunctive temporality, its confrontation with the relationship between subject and object. Indeed, Cottom’s description of spiritualism’s “appropriation” of language resonates with accounts of modernism’s fracture of the realist literature of the previous century: “Language then would seem more theatrical than instrumental, more creative than instructive, more potential than referential. . . . Spiritualist practices made the workings of language look like spontaneous ritual rather than systematic reason, symbolic exchange rather than progressive understanding” (110). “Like modernism itself,” Sword argues further, “[spiritualism] provides a fluid often self-contradictory ideological space in which conservative beliefs can coexist with radical, even iconoclastic, thought and action” (Ghostwriting 9). Loy, Toomer, and H.D. at once adopt and struggle against a spiritualist and mystical model, which grants religious authority at the expense of bodily agency. Jacob Korg notes of religious ritual in twentieth-century poetry that “[a]lterity is an essential element of the ritual; one becomes real only if one loses one’s identity and becomes another” (4). In the language of mystical religion, 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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as with spiritualism, vanishing—dissolving entirely one’s sense of self—is a positive, desirable goal, for it means that the mystic has abnegated the illusion of a coherent, unitary subject position and joined the divine community of the cosmos. In H.D.’s Nights, John Helforth describes Natalia Saunderson as a mystical instrument of pure art: “She was nothing. A sort of pencil” (14). After repeatedly trying, and failing, to reach ecstasy throughout the narrative of Nights, Natalia’s suicide at the end of the novel might be read as her final achievement, the death of the ego, and her text a kind of rebirth into the artistic community. Or it might be interpreted as the demise of female authorship. It is just this diffuse model of subjectivity, with pliable and shifting borders, that is so seductive and so terrifying to all three of these writers. Feminist scholars have argued that mediumship and mysticism, not despite but because of their passivity, afforded women opportunities to be articulate and authoritative on topics outside the bounds of propriety.2 For women and minority writers in particular then—who remained at the turn of the twentieth century restricted, in various ways, legally, socially, and politically—a paradigm of dispersed textual authority might have seemed liberating in its critique of the traditional Western model of creativity invested in notions of solitary (white, male) genius but stifling as well in its ultimate abdication of bodily agency. Disentangling the politics of such a stance is a complicated endeavor. Slavoj Žižek portrays the most recent fin de siècle much as I have depicted the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, as a time in which “today’s science has outgrown mechanistic materialism, and points towards a new spiritual holistic stance . . . focused on spontaneously emerging order and co-operation” (216, 225). He condemns the shift toward ontological concerns among scientists for its openness to political appropriations from any position—left, right, or center. Ultimately, it seems to me, this kind of critique holds when applied to the religio-scientific literary and extraliterary writings featured here. Passive models of authorship and theories of hybrid vigor, for instance, are at once progressive and regressive. While H.D. may imagine a world without national borders in her trance dance, traversing borders of time and space in search of a singular embodiment of divinity, she also ultimately dissolves Indian and Arab identities into an ur-Greek-ness. While Loy may rail against a religious dogmatism that elevates Western belief over Eastern mysticism and denigrates the body, she also upholds a heteronormative bias in her use of electromagnetic metaphors in discussing these topics. Toomer can be, in the same utterance, both radically antiracist and profoundly racist. This study must close, then, on a statement of ambiguity and uncertainty. Jean Toomer, Mina Loy, and H.D. wrestle with but do not resolve the question of modernist embodiment. They embrace and resist the various religio-scientific models they encounter and imagine. 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Coda

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1

Introduction

1. The epigraph is taken from H.D.’s World War II-era poem “R. A. F.” (Collected 489). 2. Interestingly, this is true despite the fact that Darwin’s work does contain theological statements. See Gillespie, as well as Chapter 3 of Richards’s Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. 3. Galton had argued in 1909 that eugenics had “strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future” (qtd. in Childs 3). 4. For a more detailed recounting of the history of science of this period, see Morrisson’s introduction. 5. Vitalism is a theory that posits an immaterial or nonbiological life force within living beings. See Clarke, on vitalism at the turn of the century, especially 27–29. 6. The notion of ether, championed until his death by physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, was particularly difficult to discredit. Even after the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1897 appeared to have disproved it, Bertrand Russell, in fact, imagines that ether may in fact return to scientific legitimacy (Schleifer 17). Ether is discussed at more length in the next chapter. 7. Steinman remarks that Alexander is one of the most widely read of the scientific popularizers of the early twentieth century (67). 8. Widely popular, theosophy offers an excellent instance of an occult system that exploits the language of science. Faivre’s book on esotericism is considered to be the most important historical work on theosophy. See Morrisson, Chapter 2, for a discussion of theosophy and alchemy in the modernist period. Surette’s book explores the impact of theosophy on Eliot, Pound, and Yeats, and Tryphonopoulos discusses theosophy in relation to Pound’s The Cantos. 9. See Crunden, Chapters 12 and 13, for a discussion of how many modernists were exposed to, and engaged with, the philosophies and teachings of these three. 10. Daniel Cottom discusses Einstein’s analogy in his introduction (xlviii).

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Notes

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Notes

11. In arguing that modernists were engaged with “popular” discourse on science and religion, I invoke Michael Whitworth’s first definition of “popularization”: “[P]opularization is an ambiguous concept, describing a movement which could be sideways, between disciplines of equivalent status, but which could also be downwards, from the elite to the mass of the people” (27). “Popular” discourse in this sense, then, might be usefully defined as nonacademic discourse on a subject, regardless of whether it appears in small press little magazines or massmarket periodicals distributed to wide audiences. While many of the modernists’ favorite periodicals were aimed at a reasonably educated audience, they did not print articles by scientists aimed at other scientists; rather, some articles printed on the topics were “popularized” and simplified to target lay audiences, while others contained discussions of science from religious (heterodox and orthodox) and philosophical perspectives that contained very little “accurate” scientific information. 12. In the inaugural issue of Dora Marsden’s New Freewoman, Francis Grierson couches her premises in pseudoscientific, spiritualist language as she argues for the women’s movement as not political but spiritual. The “active thought vibrations” of women are essential to the growth of the movement: “Not until women are taught how to exert a psychic influence and radiate a psychic thought-power, will the old order be permanently changed” (10). 13. See Whitworth, Chapter 1, for a more extended discussion of popular science in modernist-era journals, including the Athenaeum, the Fortnightly Review, and others. 14. See Steinman, 45–46, on the mechanical metaphors of Imagism, and Tichi, 91–96, on Vorticism’s “poetry of efficiency” and “verbal economy” (92). See also an article by Quema, who reads Pound’s theorizing of the relationship between poetry and science: “The Modernist striving towards objectivity also combines with the frequent use of scientific metaphors and comparisons” (111). See Hickman’s The Geometry of Modernism, on the ways in which geometry generated scientific models of art in late modernism by H.D., Pound, and Yeats. 15. In this vein, see also Schleifer, whose book addresses the ways in which conceptions of time, sequence, and order as reimagined by early twentieth-century physicists impact modernist formal aesthetics. 16. Virtually every scholar who writes on science and modernism laments the lack of scholarship in the field. In 2001, Whitworth remarks that “the physical science of the period has very rarely been considered in any detail in its relation to literature” (vii). It is interesting to note, however, that Danius observes that this reluctance has been solely on the part of literary critics; critics of other art forms—music, visual arts, dance, and so on—have been more willing to examine the impact of science and technology on modernism (2). 17. See Tichi for a discussion of the extent to which technology dominated popular magazines in America at the turn of the century, where it was thoroughly integrated into everyday life and domesticated in its entrance into the private sphere of kitchens and laundry rooms; American magazines like Cosmopolitan, Harper’s, Collier’s, the Saturday Evening Post, and so on, “brought images of 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

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technological values and accomplishments into middle-class American living rooms weekly and monthly” (19). See Albright, especially 9–13, for an account of the English avant-garde’s vilification of the Jewish Einstein; Albright suggests that the anti-Semitism of Lewis, Pound, and Eliot contributed to their negative view of Einstein’s anarchic universe, which lacked a notion of masculine force to which they ascribed, even as they were influenced by it. See Steinman, Chapter 3, for Einstein’s reception in America and his impact on American modernist poets; her phrase “native son” appears on p. 60. Steinman notes the extraordinary extent to which Einsteinian physics is covered in the American press from 1919 to 1922 (60). Steinman argues that free will and democracy were associated with technology in early twentieth-century American popular press accounts (7). Seltzer discusses American capitalism throughout his study. As Clarke notes, “That which falls away from the merit of science retains some of the glamor of science as it enters into its social formations” (26). He contends that as science as an ideology begins to exert explanatory power over arenas outside of its purview, it retains some of its prestige and claims to validity; like Steinman, he sees this operating in literature of the modernist period: “As modernist literature followed other arts into abstraction, it came increasingly to resemble a professional form of technical cipher, to model its ‘seriousness’ on the hard languages of mathematized sciences” (5). Surette, in fact, intentionally uses the terms occult and theosophy interchangeably in his study (26). On Marinetti’s view of the body, see, especially, articles by Poggi and Foster. In her typically dry tone, Loy wrote of H.D. in a 1925 essay in the little magazine Charm that she “has written at least two perfect poems: one about a swan” (Lost 160). In the early 1920s, H.D. sought gossip about Loy from both Bryher and Marianne Moore; Bryher commented on Loy’s “wild” nature but concluded “she is not as awful as most of the bunch are,” while Moore responded with a review of Loy’s performance in the Provincetown’s production of Alfred Kreymborg’s Lima Beans and included a couple of rather catty remarks by Robert McAlmon about Loy’s purported beauty (Bryher, Letter; Moore, Selected 140). The several volumes of Curtiss books H.D. owned—ranging from before World War I to the World War II—are eclectic. While the initial books, such as The Voice of Isis, quote occasionally from Blavatsky, with whom they apparently studied, the later books are far less tied to formal theosophy, as the couple gradually evolve their own esoteric system aimed at a specifically American audience. Discussed at greater length in the third chapter, H.D.’s library included Lumen, and several references to Flammarion in her 1940s novel The Sword Went Out to Sea indicate that her autobiographically based protagonist, Delia, had read his work carefully at a spiritualist library she visited. Loy’s unpublished notes and drafts cited in this book are located with the Mina Loy Papers at the Beinecke Library. In drawing on her unpublished materials, I have attempted to reproduce her typography and spelling as much as possible, 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Notes

27.

28. 29. 30.

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to capture resonances of the style of avant-garde manifestos, to reveal the draft state of the writing, and to preserve puns that occasionally result from misspellings. Normalizing these aspects of her writing runs two risks; it may not only camouflage the “draft” status of the many notes and scraps but also mask her play with language and her inconsistent British-American spelling. See Armstrong for a transcription of the entire poem (115). While he neglects the religious language, Armstrong adeptly describes this poem as “a critique of Futurism’s machine culture,” arguing that Loy views “the body-machine coupling as fetishism”: “Rather than the machine serving as the desirable replacement for the body, it is a reductive version of the body, while the body is a machine which fails to perform” (114–15). Armstrong is perhaps the best reader of Loy on technology. Quotations from “Earth-Being” are from the second typescript draft (f. 383–87). Whenever possible, passages by Toomer are taken from either Cane, The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer, A Jean Toomer Reader, The Letters of Jean Toomer 1919– 1924, Selected Essays and Literary Criticism, or The Wayward and the Seeking. If the passage does not appear in one of these sources, I quote from the Jean Toomer Papers at the Beinecke Library, and I do not correct errors. When manuscripts and typescripts are paginated consecutively, I provide page numbers. When quoting from the typescript of “From Exile into Being,” I am using the fifth version (f. 428–39). Passages from this book of adages are taken from the typescript version (f. 848–57). I am indebted to books on H.D. and science by Adalaide Morris and Miranda Hickman, to Helen Sword’s writings on H.D. and spiritualism, and to Susan Friedman and Rachel DuPlessis’s early work on her interest in both science and religion.

2

Electromagnetism, Sexuality, and Modernism

1. See Gilmore for a discussion of the metaphor of electricity in nineteenth-century American Romanticism. 2. While the very early twentieth century experiences a surge of interest in expanded sensory perception, Laura Otis, in Chapter 6, locates the origin of the “tendency to see a communications device as a continuation of one’s own nervous system” (9) in the late nineteenth century, when spiritualists appropriated the word telegraphy in coining the term telepathy (182). In her first chapter, she studies a parallel among nineteenth-century physiologists, who modeled their understanding of the nervous system on electrical and magnetic metaphors. Thus, the concept is birthed at once within the scientific and the paranormal community. 3. It is too simplistic to say that ether and electricity are exactly synonymous here; however, Lodge’s use of the term is derived from an earlier history of electrical phenomena that holds that electricity and magnetism are the forces that bind the molecules of the universe together. This binding electromagnetic field, in this sense, comprises the ether.

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4. The idea of establishing and sustaining relationships via electromagnetism has another, less ethereal, source as well. In his study of technology in nineteenthand twentieth-century American culture, Michael Carroll explores the extent to which the telephone has always been viewed as a means of creating “psychological neighborhoods” and of maintaining romantic relationships in particular: “Strangely enough telephony was already sexualized and hypermediated before it was electrified” (14, 17). In fact, Carroll reports, Alexander Graham Bell said in a deposition on patent that “he had bought a device in Boston that had long been known as a ‘lovers’ telegraph” (17). 5. H.D.’s active involvement in séances has been well documented in Friedman’s early study of H.D.’s occultism and her relationship with Freud, Psyche Reborn, and more recently in Sword, Engendering Inspiration and Ghostwriting Modernism. 6. For a discussion contemporaneous to modernism, see Mottelay and Benjamin’s first chapter for a full recounting of the worship of the magnet in ancient Greece and Syria, including the origins of the word electricity. 7. Originally an ancient Greek anatomical term, archeus also carries with it an association with the vital principle, or that which brings forth the spark of animate life. See Mottelay for a discussion of Blavatsky and electricity (12–13). 8. See Heilbron, especially pp. 159–83, for a discussion of public displays and quasi-scientific experiments conducted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the Royal Society reportedly hired a man to produce “flashy experiments” with electricity to entertain them, and some scientists tested various levels of electricity on children and animals, and themselves. See Morus, Chapter 3, for a discussion of the short-lived nineteenth-century phenomenon of London’s electrical science galleries, which combined entertainment with instruction. 9. Though Mesmerism begins with Mesmer’s experiments into hypnosis, it is by no means an entirely European phenomenon. See Crabtree, Chapter 11, for a discussion of the American contribution to the evolution of Mesmerism. 10. Not only gender but issues of class, nation, and ethnicity played into the power dynamic between Mesmerizer and subject. See Alison Winter’s study of Mesmerism in Britain for a discussion of class differences between participants, as well as the propensity of the upper class to experiment with their domestic help (4, 57). One practitioner, for instance, declared that he especially preferred working with Irish immigrants as it most approached experimenting with animals (Winter 61–62). Furthermore, Mesmerism was seen as exotic and foreign to the English, who inherited it from the French well after Mesmer was exiled to France by the Austrians; that the “charismatic French” were endowed with such power over the “susceptible English” was scandalous to some (Winter 23). 11. There is apparently no reliable accounting of the numbers of spiritualists. Nelson reports 40,000 in New York alone by 1853, and a worldwide membership of one to two million by 1854, according to both supporters and detractors (10, 24). Brandon claims that there were 11 million believers by 1854, which is probably excessive (37). R. Moore comments that it outlasted other scientific movements, like Mesmerism and phrenology, by several decades (14–15). 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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Notes

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

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Hazelgrove, in Chapter 1, offers evidence that spiritualism was just as popular between the world wars as it was in the Victorian period. Ozone is the Mesmerist/spiritualist term for oxygen “electrified” by a Mesmerist. It is spiritualism’s claim to scientific validity that leaves it most vulnerable to attack, and anti-spiritualist publications sought to discredit spiritualists’ understanding of electromagnetism. One 1853 pamphlet dismisses spiritualism and Mesmerism as movements exploiting the lack of real understanding of electricity and magnetism, finding it “amusing to see with what pedantic gravity these latter philomaths descant upon electricity and magnetism, contorting and butchering their established laws” (Page 20–21). To the claim that a circle must be composed of alternating positive and negative persons, the Rev. Mattison, in the same year, points out that “[i]t is impossible for two persons to be one positive, and the other negative, unless they are separated by a non-conductor” (54). Of course, much of the anti-spiritualist propaganda issued from the religious community, and their understanding of science is often as deficient as that of those they opposed. See Thurschwell on the collapse of distance and the creation of intimacy inherent in the spiritualist experience. In the second volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Ellis writes, “Most of the bisexuals prefer their own sex. It is curiously rare to find a person, whether man or woman, who by choice exercises relationships with both sexes and prefers the opposite sex. This would seem to indicate that the bisexual may really be inverts” (278). See Hekma for a thorough history of the notion of “third-sexed” individuals. Electricity in Modern Life by G. W. de Tunzelmann, published by Walter Scott company in England and distributed by Scribner’s in the United States. According to his biographer, Ellis sent this volume to his father to prove the sincerity of his commitment to the series; see Grosskurth for an account of this series (114–17). To his credit, Ellis is attempting to argue against what he sees as a pitfall in thinking about gender in terms of resemblance—that a woman is an undeveloped form of man. If woman is essentially different from man, she can be judged in her own right. Conceiving of the two sexes as idealized opposites means that “we shall always find the sexes compensatory,” and thus women and men are equally valued (Man 476). One of the problems with this logic, as I have argued, is that women’s “negative” role is consistently cast as inferior. The Moravianism of its leader, Count Zinzendorf, emphasized the centrality of sexuality, which was considered a sacrament signifying a mystical marriage with God, and insisted upon the actual physicality, the literal incarnation, of Jesus and Mary, whose penis and uterus and breasts, respectively, were the topic of song and discussion during religious events (Atwood 26). On hieros gamos and Ezra Pound, see Tryphonopoulos on The Cantos (142–48) and Oderman on “Terra Italica” (68–69). Surette briefly discusses the concept in relation to modernism more broadly (15–16, 216–17). 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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21. See Porter and Hall for an account of the reception of this book (162–63). 22. As Susan Tuck has observed of Women in Love, “Lawrence uses electricity as a metaphor throughout the novel to describe sexual attraction” (14). Andrew Harrison has argued that Lawrence’s use of electricity in this novel is the result of his reading of Italian Futurist writing. Both Harrison and Tuck contend that relationships like Gudrun’s and Gerald’s, which are described in electrical terms, are destructive. If Lawrence is indeed using the metaphor to criticize this relationship, however, it does not appear to be the critique of heterosexuality that H.D. makes, as discussed below. 23. Alternately, Doherty argues that in Women in Love attraction and repulsion between Birkin and Ursula are guided by the law of gravity. 24. These passages are taken from an unpublished essay on modern literature in Loy’s papers at the Beinecke Library (f. 190). Unfortunately, only pages 8–14 of this manuscript survive. 25. Though the manifesto has never been published, Loy apparently spent a significant amount of time and effort preparing this text, producing a typescript of the manuscript, and then correcting it. References to the text cite the typescript version. 26. Andrew Gaedtke’s recent article on Insel argues that modernism’s interest in insanity is connected to its cultural anxieties over new technologies that were seen as transmitting thoughts between individuals helpless to prevent their transference. While my reading focuses specifically on how sexuality is encoded within the electromagnetic metaphor, Gaedtke’s analysis of the evolving and invasive doctor-patient relationship, “the influencing machine,” and the etiology of paranoia is similar to mine in that we both argue ultimately that Insel employs electromagnetic terminology to express early twentieth-century anxiety about technology’s intervention in the body. 27. In that the texts by H.D. I consider below are autobiographical novels, my assertion here is very much in line with the thesis of Georgia Johnston’s recent book, which contends that modernist autobiography is premised around “a critique of dominant sexual discourses” and that lesbian modernist autobiography, more specifically, aims to “rewrite early twentieth-century scientific assumptions about human sexuality and sexual identity” (1). Johnston’s chapter on H.D. does not address the same texts as I do; rather, she organizes her work around H.D.’s responses to Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud. 28. In this reading of the line “She was sexless,” I am at odds with the one offered by Friedman, who remarks that “Orgasm, which Natalie experiences through masturbation, is an onanistic, ‘sexless’ eroticism” (Penelope’s 274). Where Friedman reads “sexless” as meaning lacking eroticism, I read “sexless” as lacking gender. I would argue that when Natalia experiences the masturbatory episode, in the scene quoted above, her language is infused with eroticism; it is only in the retelling of the scene to her lover, who has disappointed her by ejaculating prematurely, that she recasts the scene as mechanistic. Here I align my reading with that of Hickman, who notes that “Natalia’s strongest fervor is achieved when she is alone, when David has left her, when she excites herself” (“Sparse” 343). 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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29. On electrocution in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing, see Armstrong. 30. H.D.’s unpublished works are found in the H.D. Papers at the Beinecke Library. As with the papers of Loy and Toomer, no attempt is made to correct errors. 31. My focus on John Helforth’s assessment of Natalia’s book in Nights diverges from the conventional one, which views the bifurcation of the book as an illustration of “the disintegration of identity into incompatible male and female parts in which the female is driven to suicide” (Friedman, Penelope’s 217). Critics tend to quote Helforth’s initial hesitations about Natalia’s text and ignore his praise; Hickman’s article is the sole exception (333). Hickman focuses on geometry rather than electricity. Likewise, Suzanne Young’s article on the novel does not focus on electricity, and she neglects the spiritualized facets of H.D.’s scientific language. 32. Herring’s first remark is in a letter dated January 13, [1931?]; his second, which refers to Kora and Ka and Mira Mare, is in a letter tentatively dated 1934. Moore’s comment is from a letter dated October 26, 1924 (210). Friedman notes that Helforth’s evaluation of Natalia’s work echoes reviews of H.D.’s writing (Penelope’s 271). 33. The reference to “clear-cut crystal” is from a line in a letter quoted in Guest (269); the reference to “pure crystalline” is from a letter to Bryher quoted in Friedman (Penelope’s 38).

3 Spirituality and the Moving Body 1. Boyle worked as a salesperson for Duncan’s shop, and her knowing participation in the fraud no doubt made her particularly sensitive to this point. Roatcap’s oddly laudatory biography of Duncan relates that many of the tapestries sold had been woven by starving Albanian women and children he employed “under the guise of helping the Albanian victims of the Turkish-Balkan War” (18). His plot was to sell the tapestries in London for a tremendous profit, the proceeds of which would fund an operation to produce bread more cheaply than relief agencies could, thus profiting twice off the poverty-stricken war refugees. 2. As Sorrel is suspected by some to be “Arab,” it is even possible that Boyle may have had Gurdjieff in mind as well as Duncan, for Gurdjieff was famously ambiguous about his Eastern origins (36). 3. This line from Duncan was taken from an interview with the New Yorker in 1959 (qtd. in Roatcap 41). 4. Historian James Miller explains, “Precisely when the dance was first regarded as an image of divine and social harmony we may never know, but according to Plato it was certainly regarded as such by the ancient Egyptians long before the Greeks invented the idea of the cosmos and resolved to prove the reality of cosmic order. . . . The association of ritual dancing with divine might and celestial motion is literally as old as the pyramids” (5–6). 5. See Chapter 15 of Eurhythmics, Art and Education. For a discussion of the racial politics of Dalcroze’s discussion of folk dance, see Golston (29–34). Elevating

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7.

8. 9.

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the “rhythmical and musical abilities of the ‘European races,’ ” over those of the “savage races,” Dalcroze “envisions a system of ethnically based eurhythmic training centers, where the members of each race can develop their own ‘natural’ rhythms” (Golston 33). Demetres Tryphonopoulos has suggested to me that these terms from early psychological theory may be mapped to theosophist G. R. S. Mead’s “three levels of being,” which Tryphonopoulos describes in his book as “the purely physical or hylic or ‘gross’ body; the ‘spirituous body,’ the subtle soul-vehicle in its inferior aspect which envelops the hylic body; and the augoeides, the perfected subtle body” (171). On Mead’s conception of augoeides and Ezra Pound, see also Oderman (73). This quotation recalls the Greek saying attributed to Thales, “A healthy mind in a healthy body.” I am indebted to Demetres Tryphonopoulos for this insight. Given the predilection of some physical culture enthusiasts for ancient Greece (noted in the discussion of Toomer below), and that Welch speaks about the Greek gymnasium as an ideal, it seems likely that his paraphrase is not coincidental (167). Originating in an Episcopal church in Boston, the Emmanuel Movement was an early twentieth-century religious system of healing based in psychotherapy. Dalcroze movements were widely known and practiced by a lay audience for a time in the modernist period. D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love features eurhythmic exercises in a scene in which Gudrun asks if she might “do Dalcroze” while Ursula sings (231). The “pulsing and fluttering rhythm” of Gudrun’s feet, however, transmutes the simple exercises into a “frenz[ied],” hieratic, “rapt trance,” “a strange palpitating dance” (231, 233). See Kinkead-Weekes for a reading of this performance; he observes that this scene proves that “Lawrence has also some awareness of significant movements in Contemporary Dance” (68). See Ruyter’s article “The Delsarte Heritage” for an extended discussion of which parts of the theory were contributed by each of the three figures associated with the system. Ruyter’s “The Intellectual World of Genevieve Stebbins” documents that in addition to her knowledge of Delsarte’s spiritually inflected system of movement, Stebbins was also well-versed in theories of physical culture and scientific literature on movement in the period. See Spock’s Eurythmy for the most thorough explanations of how various sounds and rhythms, consonants and vowels, colors and tones are expressed eurythmically. The first epigraph is taken from Dalcroze’s The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze (32); the second from Steiner’s Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age (115); and the third from Toomer’s pencilled note in the margins of page 4 of the typescript of his novel “The Angel Begori.” This sentiment finds echoes in Waldo Frank’s Our America, which Toomer greatly admired but (because of his falling out with Frank) probably would not have cited at this point in this life. Frank finds Puritan asceticism devoid of real spiritual content: “[Puritan New England] denied life in its sweet tangents of desire, in order to have the power it desired” (150). 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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14. Cane’s narrator writes of his dances with Avey, “I had already noticed that love can start on a dance floor” (45). John, in “Theater,” does experience a kind of transcendence when he watches Dorris dance, but the episode is circumscribed by his erotic interest in her; as Janet Whyde contends, “while her body evokes the physical freedom of passion and desire, she remains a slave to John’s interpretation of her” (48). In “Box Seat,” Dan remembers Muriel dancing in sexual terms: “Her buttocks rocked. She pulled up her dress and showed her pink drawers” (67). In “Bona and Paul,” their dance “takes blood from their minds and packs it, tingling, in the torsos of their swaying bodies” (79). Toomer makes this connection between sexuality and dance in his own life when he refers to “those who once upon a time had said what a fine dancer and what a sweet lover I was” (qtd. in Somerville 142). 15. Interestingly, Walpole had included a similar dance scene culminating in a loss of ego in an earlier book, Maradick at Forty, in which the title character gets caught up in the town processional and suddenly feels that “he, as Maradick, did not exist”: “it had not been Maradick at all, or, at any rate, some strange, curious Maradick whose existence until to-night had never been expected” (52, 53). In Portrait, it is Maradick, appearing briefly at the opening of the novel, who recommends to Harkness participation in the village dance. 16. Passages from “Book X” are taken from the second typescript draft, unless otherwise indicated (f. 358–69). 17. See, for instance, Kerman and Eldridge (50), Byrd (7), Guterl (177–78), and Whalan (177–78). As Whalan points out, Bernarr Macfadden believed that masturbation caused emasculation (177). Matthew Guterl sums up this position: “An exhausting exercise regimen and a healthy diet, Toomer believed, would give him much-needed control over his body and his sexuality” (176). He argues further that Toomer’s interest in his body suggested homoeroticism (177–78), though the most provocative discussion of Toomer’s homoeroticism is in Somerville, Chapter 5. 18. Matthrew Guterl has termed Toomer’s love of military drilling a “fascination with the fascist aesthetics of physical culture” (172), and Michael Budd has pointed out that Mussolini was a “great admirer” of Bernarr Macfadden (125). Given Toomer’s sporadic but impassioned comments against the axis powers during the late 1930s and early 1940s, however, it would be very difficult to push this observation too far. I read this comment, rather, in terms of an intellectual, religious, and masculinist elitism Toomer consistently espouses throughout the 1930s as he formulates the notion of the “New American,” a topic for the next chapter. 19. See, for instance, “From Exile into Being,” “Incredible Journey,” and the “Gurdjieff Notes” in the Jean Toomer Papers at the Beinecke Library. 20. Both, for instance, associated particular movements and gestures with letters of the alphabet. Like Stebbins’s Delsartean system, parts of the human body and its gestures are mapped to mental or spiritual concepts. There are overlaps between Dalcroze and Gurdjieff as well, since Dalcroze-trained choreographer Jeanne von Salzmann was later part of Gurdjieff ’s entourage, and one reviewer 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

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of a 1923 performance of the Gurdrjieff dancers alleged plagiarism of Dalcroze’s Eastern-inflected routines (Gordon 41). About the machine metaphor, Guterl draws on an early essay by Toomer to assert that “[t]he erasure of the primitive, the vital, and the racially natural was not, however, necessarily a bad thing—not necessarily something to resist or fight against. In the end, the metaphors of mechanization, efficiency, and streamlining would, Toomer suggested, lay the groundwork for the emergence of ‘the new American.’ ” (181). Whalan, likewise, argues for Toomer’s embrace of the machine metaphor for the artist, who can transform and direct energy (186). These statements, to me, seem an incomplete reading in that Toomer’s use of the machine metaphor later in life often mirrors Gurdjieff’s. Both argue that while it may be a reality that human beings are automatonic, it is a reality to be challenged by elevation to a higher level of being, a more natural level in fact. See Toomer’s unpublished play “Man’s Home Companion” for a distinctly dystopic view of a future in which machines are more fully integrated into human life even as humans have become more machinelike (Jean Toomer Papers; f. 934). In his 1923 The Dance of Life, Havelock Ellis observes “All human work, under natural conditions, is a kind of dance. In a large and learned book, supported by an immense amount of evidence, Karl Bücher has argued that work differs from the dance, not in kind, but only in degree, since they are both essentially rhythmic” (58). It is interesting to note the shift in Toomer’s consciousness about work, from its representation as a kind of servitude inflicted on African American men in Cane to its role in spiritual development on Gurdjieff’s compound. This passage from “Second River” is taken from the second typescript (f. 556). Passages from “Psychologic” are taken from holograph notes (f. 755–63). Passages from the “Psychologic Papers” are derived from the typescript version (f. 796–816). It may also derive from Gerald Heard’s evolutionary philosophy, which Toomer read and admired and is discussed at more length in the next chapter. Heard remarks “Evolution is now conceived not as a straight line but as a spiral.” (18). Arguing that “all growth tends to be spiral,” Heard explains that it is “because so much of the energy for advance has . . . to be drawn from the violence of reaction” (7). So there is an oscillating or vibrational effect of the spiral form, which builds, contains, and expels energy. The source of the first quotation is “Cassandra” (Collected 170); the second quotation is from Spock’s Eurythmy (6). Hickman attributes to Vorticism H.D.’s resistance to what Hickman terms the “passivity of mystical epistemology” (Geometry 12). Silverstein’s online chronology of H.D.’s life can be found at http://www.imagists.org/hd/hdchron.html. See Golston, Chapters 3 and 4, for a fascinating discussion of W. B. Yeats’s belief in poetic rhythm’s ability to induce trance states that facilitate contact with the realm of the divine. According to Golston, Yeats believed that “[i]n 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

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poetry, rhythm is the main drive of visionary experiences, which occur when the reader intuits the ghostly presence of archaic meters pulsing beneath the modern cadences of ‘everyday’ speech” (148). The sole exception is the title poem, which has provoked some interest because of H.D.’s eroticizing of a younger black man. In Collected Poems, Louis Martz argues that the poem was inspired by Annie Ahlers, who performed with the Vienna State Opera (and committed suicide) while H.D. was in analysis with Freud in that city (614n15); however, he later refutes this, identifying the source as Isadora Duncan’s “Roses from the South” (Many 90). Louis Silverstein’s online chronology of H.D.’s life (http://www. imagists.org/hd/hdchron.html) speculates that H.D. saw Duncan perform as early as 1907 and was aware of her connection to the Greeks. Susan Friedman links the poem to a 1930 essay by lay psychoanalyst Ella Freeman Sharpe, whose theory that a dancer transforms her body into a “magical phallus” played a part in H.D.’s sessions with Freud (Analyzing 121–22). Interestingly, in that essay Sharpe also talks about dance in terms of control: “Dancing is a magical control of the parents by becoming the father” (129). As Matthew Kibble suggests, Sharpe may have appealed to H.D. because of her “ ‘mystical’ tendencies” and her openness to alternative sexualities (52–53). Though this poem is typically overlooked in favor of its companion poems, “The Master” and “The Poet” (dedicated to Freud and D. H. Lawrence, respectively), when it is discussed the theme of bisexuality or hermaphroditism has been noted. See, for instance, McCabe (Cinematic 150) and Zaccaria (68). A precise description of the dance is not given. It may or may not have been the Greek dances popular in this period. As her medium, the Asian Indian Ben Manisi, has demonstrated for her an Indian dance earlier in the novel, a dance that is recalled later on, it may well be that she emulates it. Like the array of figures she enacts for Gareth in this scene, the characteristics of Manisi’s dance traverse the globe: she describes it as “an Indian dance sequence . . . almostEgyptian postures . . . [like] ‘angular-like Norman sculpture.’ ” She even wonders if it has Aztec origins (70). This quality of rhythm Paul Fussell attributes to Romanticist poetry: “meter operates by inducing in the reader a state resembling hypnosis” (5). Delia comments that she has been “conditioned” to her role as “receiving station” “by her mystical visionary Moravian background and by her father’s scientific trend and devotion to abstract truth” (157). Helen Sword usefully draws on this passage to characterize biographically a tension between H.D.’s mother’s passive religion and her astronomer father’s active scientific pursuits (“H.D.’s Majic Ring” 358). In a letter to Bryher dated March 25, 1933, during her first sessions with Freud, H.D. referred to this experience as “my dance and song turn in Corfu” (Friedman, Analyzing 149). One of the reasons H.D. sought analysis with Freud is to confront writers’ block, and Freud read this vision as evidence that she wished to be an actress rather than a poet. This is, of course, shortly after the period in which H.D. starred in Macpherson’s films. The self-deprecating reference, I 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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38.

39.

40.

41. 42.

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would argue, is very much in line with the ambivalence Delia expresses here as she struggles to determine the validity of the vision and to maintain a sense of control over her body. This interpretation runs counter to Connor’s, who contends that what distinguishes this experience from other visionary experiences that the two women share (recorded in Tribute to Freud) is that “[w]hile Gareth functions in ‘Majic Ring’ as (passive) ‘spectator,’ Delia enacts her visionary experience” (127). The traditional model of séance demands balanced masculine and feminine, not male and female, energies. As I argue in chapter 2, this distinction is important. Many overstate the extent to which spiritualist experiences were heterosexualized. A lesbian relationship can operate within an active/passive dichotomy, so séances such as those described in H.D.’s 1940s novels (with Gareth supplying the masculine energy to Delia’s feminine force) are possible within that paradigm; as Sword notes, “H.D. had relied on her companion, Bryher, to provide the stable, logical, ‘masculine’ half of the visionary equation” (Engendering 168). Moreover, equating a woman’s body fluids to ectoplasm, which Connor cites (123), does not necessarily contain a heteronormative assumption. Though we disagree on several points, Collecott’s article remains the best close reading of the Greek montages incorporating nudes. The Web site of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (http://www.library.yale. edu/beinecke/) has made available many of the images from the scrapbook. See Budd, Chapter 2, for a discussion of the stage history of male and female statue posing, a precursor of Stebbins’s more spiritually inflected exercise. Collecott compares the collaboration between Annie and Elizabeth Brigman that produced nudes shot in the California Sierras with H.D. and Bryher’s (174). She stresses similarities in the photographs’ creation, however, rather than what I see as key differences between the end products of the collaborations.

4 Negotiating the Racialized Body 1. This passage from “Second River” is taken from the carbon of the first typescript (f. 533). 2. In this chapter, the term race entails a broad definition. It is used as their contemporaries would have understood it, in much the way that the term ethnicity would be employed today. See Jacobson on the cultural construction of “whiteness,” and Sollors, Chapter 1, on the use of the two terms in the twentieth century. I do not, however, wish in any way to conflate the differences in lived experience between those of African and those of Jewish heritage in the early twentieth century or to imply, for instance, that Jews in America endured the same degree of disenfranchisement and threat of violence as did African Americans. What interests me in this chapter is how these two very different writers could find appealing such similar theories of spiritual evolution. 3. Though a few scientific eugenicists argued for crossbreeding exclusively among Northern European whites, very few advocated crossbreeding between what they considered to be widely divergent races. One exception is horticulturalist

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Luther Burbank, who suggested that his knowledge of breeding vigorous hybrid plants could be applied to humans. Both DuPlessis and Frost address Loy’s admiration for the “mongrel” in ways complementary to my own approach. On Loy and evolutionary thought, see Frost for an illuminating reading of Loy’s mock-epic “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.” Frost notes of Loy’s rhetoric in her poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” “If Loy endorsed any eugenical idea, it might have been ‘hybrid vigor’ ” (159). While Frost stresses aspects of Loy’s poetic language, I am looking at spiritual and philosophical aspects of her theories of hybridity, and in particular the ways in which turn-of-the-century notions of Jewish identity inform her evolutionary theories, as well as how these theories enabled an escape from ethnic identity. By reading beyond Loy’s published work, as I do, a fuller portrait of her evolutionary concerns emerges. Though her book does not discuss specifically Toomer’s work, Daylanne English notes that in addition to other Harlem Renaissance luminaries, “Jean Toomer, too, believed in hybrid vigor” (18). On Toomer and evolutionary thought, see, especially, Hawkins, whose work is discussed at more length below. While this notion of “hybrid vigor” intersects with those of postcolonial theorists in theorizing hybridity as exposing the artificiality of race, they diverge in their explanations of how this exposure occurs. Loy and Toomer focus on the biological splitting of consciousness within the multiethnic subject rooted in genetic racial memory, whereas, for instance, Bhabha, Chapter 6, argues that in the encounter between colonizer and colonized there is a splitting of both figures and a slippage of identity, self into other. For Loy and Toomer, no such encounter is necessary, as the entire process occurs within the psyche of the individual. 4. The poem cited is “America * A Miracle,” written in 1941 when the United States entered World War II, according to both Conover (Loy, Last 327) and Burke. More on the poem’s composition and dating and on Loy’s naturalization as a U.S. citizen is found in Burke (393–94, 400). 5. These quotations are taken from two unpublished essays, the first from “America and Problems,” the second from “The Americans.” 6. Here, I enter into a debate between Daylanne English and Diana Williams about Toomer’s racial politics. While Williams sees Toomer’s eugenicist vision of “hybrid vigor” highly repressive, English has argued that it is important to take into account Toomer’s absolute rejection of racial purity: (E)ugenics, regardless of the racial or class politics underlying it, must be seen in its historical context as a progressive ideology, one with the widely shared, utopian aim of improving the national or racial stock by conscious intervention. In fact, eugenicists like Toomer and [George] Schuyler who advocated racial mixture as a source of genetic superiority could, perhaps even more legitimately than could the racial purists, consider their version of eugenics truly progressive and truly Darwinian, for Darwin had noted in The Origin of Species “that a cross between very distinct individuals of the same species . . . gives vigour to the offspring.” (English 18)

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8.

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10. 11. 12.

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While I do view Toomer’s concept of the “New American” as problematic in its elitism, I also think English’s point is well-taken. As should be clear, it seems to me that Toomer’s (and Loy’s) elevation of the mixed race individual is at once regressive and transgressive. See Baldanzi for a discussion of how Toomer’s eugenical ideology creates negative consequences for his female characters. On the latter reading, see Jaskoski, Feinstein, and Goody. On the former position, see Pozorski, who makes this argument by locating Loy within Futurist thought. Pozorski is right to point out Loy’s ambivalence about her Jewish lineage; however, her (and others’) argument for Loy as racist eugenicist hinges chiefly on one line of Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” which argues that “[e]very woman of superior intelligence should realize her race-responsibility by producing children in adequate proportion to the unfit or degenerate members of her sex” (Lost 155). Loy does not define “unfit” or “degenerate”; she stresses intelligence. If we read “race-responsibility” to mean responsibility to the human race—as it did for many spiritual evolutionists—then she is advocating a version of eugenics based not on ethnicity or race but on intelligence, a belief in concert with her early poems of the Lunar Baedecker, which celebrate the intellectually elite artistic vanguard of the period. At any rate, Pozorski surely runs the risk of oversimplifying the case when she asserts that Loy advocated a policy of eugenics that “promoted the destruction of her race” (46). Most critics take this stance to varying degrees, and many scholars recount the critical history of this view of Toomer; see Hawkins and Harmon for more recent attempts to do so. The more moderate stance, held by Nellie McKay, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and George Hutchinson, is that rather than embrace whiteness, Toomer refused to abandon it either. As Jessica Berman notes, the early twentieth century is an era of vexed and often conflicting responses to the notion of community, for the threat of “totalitarian models of national community, whether in the form of nativism, anti-Semitism, immigration restriction, proto-fascism, or unmodified patriarchal dominance, looms large in the first three decades of the century” (3). It is Berman’s thesis that while modernists bore a healthy distrust of community, they also sought out figurations of community that were based not in “nationalism” but in the possibility of “transformation,” which operates at both the local and the “cosmopolitan” level (8–9). Thus, for Berman, “modernist fiction becomes immersed in the politics of connection,” a fairly radical statement given traditional narratives of isolationist modernism (27). The first quotation is from a physician, Quackenbos (9), the second from a reverend, Dawson (119). On the general differences between American and English eugenics, see Kevles. See Surette for a discussion of “the overlap between theosophical and Nazi versions of the world and race history,” which he sees as “render[ing] the occult once more as sinister and dangerous”: “The Nazi adoption of a sense of history that had currency in occult circles—and virtually nowhere else—attached

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13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

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itself to a reverence for the past that had much greater currency and far more presentable provenance” (77). A requested search of archived church membership rolls at the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston did not yield a record for Loy, though, given her play with her name, she may have joined under a different moniker. On Loy’s commitment to Christian Science, which predated her 1914 entree into the literary world and lasted until her death in 1966, see Burke (117, 390). In its examination of Loy’s affiliation with Christian Science, my work runs counter to that of other Loy scholars who are wary of attributing too much significance to it, including Shreiber and Cook. Beliefs about the figure of the “Cosmopolitan Jew” crossed the Atlantic, according to Hödl (23). On the historical and philosophical overlap between Christian Science and psychology or psychoanalysis, see Cunningham, Appel, and Bednarowski. Cunningham claims that the emergence of psychoanalysis in the early part of the twentieth century is largely responsible for the decline in interest in Christian Science around the same time (905). Eddy’s theology is fundamentally unitarian; the trinity is in actuality a “unity,” a “three-in-one,” and Jesus is very much a physical being of “bodily existence” who is born of a mortal woman and ceases to exist after his death (227, 229). However, Eddy flatly rejects Judaism, “the antithesis of Christianity,” as “a finite and material system” without “true knowledge of God” (27). She declares, “The Jews, who sought to kill this man of God, showed plainly that their material views were the parents of their wicked deeds” (210). The most comprehensive account of Jewish Science is found in Umansky. See also Cunningham and Appel. Eddy has been accused frequently and rightly of plagiarizing various philosophical and religious sources. For accounts of the plagiarism controversies, see Johnsen (3–22) and Swihart (314–21). Christian Science inspired a number of offshoots and sub-sects in addition to Jewish Science. Because Eddy did not choose a successor, a schism occurred after her death, and several broke from the “Mother Church” to create their own Christian Science churches; for a significant time period in the early century, in the United States and abroad, “Christian Science” churches adhered to a wide range of practices and beliefs, many of which were not officially sanctioned. See Swihart. Corrections to the typescript indicate a change from “the impossible” to “our impossible” and a double underlining of the definite article preceding “POSSIBLE.” My argument is not that Loy read Bill but that they share a common interest in Eddy’s remarks on evolution; however, exposure to Bill is certainly possible. A savvy self-promoter who claimed to be rightful heir to Eddy, Bill was quite influential in Britain, and later in the United States and beyond, during the period in which Loy joined the sect, and she enjoyed the support of an influential American Jewish Science group; see Swihart (226–33, 112). 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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22. In this passage, Bill may draw on Bergson’s Creative Evolution, which uses the metaphor of a river in a passage evoking the same tension between the individual and the communal consciousness. Bergson posits the gushing forth of creative evolution as constantly “subdividing itself into individuals,” who are simultaneously dispersed and contained by “the great river” of consciousness, which is thus always mediating the distance between individuality and collectivity (294). Bill echoes this tension again and again, in statements such as this: “General progress in the logical line of rhythmically unfolding discovery is obviously dependent upon balancing the individual and collective human interests of the evolving social organism” (Method 16). In a different context, Loy uses a similar metaphor to describe consciousness: “Our present reality is a phenomenal foam from a wave that breaking upon the shores of our consciousness makes maps for our intellectual location. . . . But this effervescent frill is sinking all out of shape as another diagram of froth is thrown off the ceaseless ocean” (“Goy Israels” 125). 23. Loy crosses out “electric” and writes “electronic” above it. The term “electronic” carries a technological association that “electric” may not, emphasizing the newness and the modernity of the coming evolutionary transition. 24. Here I cite the version of the poem in the Mina Loy Papers at the Beinecke Library (f. 90) rather than the version appearing in The Last Lunar Baedeker, because that printed version omits the last two lines. 25. Cook notes of Christian Science’s influence on Loy, “a thematics of the will and its relationship to spiritually heightened senses of being is a regular feature of Loy’s work, particularly the later work” (48). 26. See Swihart for a further discussion of the role of free will in Bill’s thinking (270–75). 27. It is possible that during her years in Florence with the Italian Futurists, Loy studied Bergson as well. On the Futurists’ debt to Bergson, see Kinmont (72–73). 28. Hegel is not, of course, the only source for Eddy, though she obviously drew upon his idealist writings. Given the modernists’ predilection for occultic philosophy, which, as Surette argues in his introduction, is essentially monist, and their interest in Bergson’s texts, it is perhaps not surprising to find a Hegelian system at work here. Altieri observes, “Hegelian ideas are basic to some of the spiritualisms that fascinated [modernists]. . . . [A] substantial body of modernist art makes compelling and still vital imaginative structures out of their interests in quasi-spiritual claims about latent dynamism that we find in thinkers ranging from Bergson to Eddington” (79). 29. On “the ‘indestructible type’ of the Jew” in the writings of another American author, Henry James, see Blair (491). 30. On the term “mongrel” in American political discourse, see Jacobson (178). 31. Loy met and sketched Freud, and he read a few of her stories; see Burke (312–13). 32. Loy, who anglicized her surname from the more overtly Jewish Lowy, credits Jews with the founding of civilization, ethics, and intellectualism, and expresses 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

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deep concern over the presence of anti-Semitism in America (Mina Loy Papers, f. 189); however, her tendency to essentialize Jewish identity leads her at times in “Goy Israels” to less favorable and stereotypical notions of Jews (and other groups, like the British) as well, often in moments of frustration over what she saw as Jewish submission to British imperialism. Her efforts to escape the trap of biology, in her theories discussed in this chapter, might well be viewed in part as an anti-Semitic self-hatred; it may also offer some perspective on Loy’s obsession with beauty and aging. See Bramen on “soft” and “hard” notions of heredity. Loy’s representation of herself as an amalgam of her parents points to an earlier belief in nineteenthcentury “soft” notions of heredity, in which “[r]acial extremes . . . combine into a neutral third term, an average of the two parents” (205). Early twentiethcentury eugenics saw a reemergence of Mendelian-inspired “hard” genetics theories of “assymetrical inheritance,” in which some traits of nonwhites could overcome white traits in subsequent generations. Sollors connects this to the idea of a “curse” on those of mixed ancestry; he cites Horace Kallen in 1906, who averred that in the descendents of the Jew and non-Jew “what is not Jewish dies out or is transmuted” (224). This logic, of course, accords with that of Madison Grant quoted above. I am reminded by Goody, who argues that the poem is a “forthright statement of modernism as the rejection of the past,” that there are implications as well for Loy’s notion of modernist aesthetics (128). There are at least eight different versions of this poem in the Mina Loy Papers at the Beinecke Library, but I have been unable to locate the one printed in The Last Lunar Baedeker (f. 80). I cite here what I conjecture to be one of the more finalized versions rather than the poem as it appears in that edition, which may be an earnest composite of several witnesses. Several of these drafts are dated 1945, attesting to the longevity of Loy’s interest in spiritual evolution and racial memory. See Armstrong for a discussion of how this poem may be a comic response to Bryher’s “If I am a needle on a disk” (115–16). The epigraphs are taken from a letter dated April 19, 1923 (The Letters of Jean Toomer 160), a letter dated February 8, 1932 (Jean Toomer Papers f. 24), and Cane (85). The comparison of men and women to manikins is also made in one of his better-known poems, “The Blue Meridian” (Collected 58). Passages from “The Crock of Problems” are derived from the typescript (f. 634–35). Rusch is the first to argue, rightly, that Walt Whitman is one of Toomer’s influences in writing this poem: “In this poem, Toomer was able to bring together the prophetic universalism of Walt Whitman, the racial theories of Melville J. Herskovits, and his own feelings of cosmic unity to produce a strong and positive statement about his American identity” (42). According to many of his autobiographical texts, Toomer admired Whitman greatly and considered his first encounter with the poet to be revelatory. 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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40. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., remarks, “Despite the remarkably extensive body of critical writings about Toomer and his works, neither Toomer nor his texts afford simple or straightforward readings” (200). He, nonetheless, goes on to attempt such a “straightforward reading” of Toomer, as attempting, after 1930, to “efface his mask of blackness” (202). Likewise, Ronald Dorris contends that “[o]ne is hard pressed to find in these later autobiographical writings consistency in treating race as a contributing element to his own growth” (iv). I would argue that this lack of “consistency” can be traced throughout his career and his oeuvre, and not just within the various autobiographical texts Toomer produced in the 1930s and 1940s. 41. Passages from this autobiographical essay are taken from the typescript version (f. 513). 42. See Byrd for extensive quotations from Toomer on race in the period around the publication of Cane (55–60), and see McKay for another selection of quotations from the period after Cane’s publication (198–200). 43. Though they agree that a major shift in his thinking about race occurred, scholars offer different dates and circumstances to account for it. In “Jean Toomer: Fugitive,” for instance, Charles Scruggs suggests this occurred in the early 1920s when Toomer read Romain Rolland and met Waldo Frank. Because Toomer denied permission to James Weldon Johnson in 1930 to reprint poetry from Cane, Ronald Dorris and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., date the shift at this point. An argument could be made for 1934, when Toomer stopped writing “On Being an American,” his last work that explicitly addresses race, but I would argue that race never stops being a topic of concern for Toomer. 44. The letter to the Committee for the Release of Jacques Roumain is dated 1935–36; the letter to Langston Hughes is dated 1933; the letter about the AFSC Race Relations Committee is dated July 1, 1951; and the letter to the DC Vital Records department is dated June 13, 1941. Charles Larson speculates that Toomer was forced to pass as white because the Quaker congregation in Doylestown did not extend membership to African Americans (156). If this is true, his request for his parents’ records may be related to this problem, though his admission of his mixed heritage to the Quaker’s Race Relations Committee in 1951 suggests either that Larson is mistaken or that their membership policies had been reformed by the early 1950s. 45. The letter to Beardsley is dated November 1, 1930; the letter to La Follette is dated September 22, 1930; the letter to Johnson, often cited in the scholarship on Toomer, is dated July 11, 1930; and the letter to the NYPL is dated April 18, 1931. 46. On the first point, see Hawkins: “For Toomer, blood mixture, not purity, was the crucial reality of all races” (156). 47. Toomer’s scientific sources on notions of racial mixing include Franz Boas, Alex Hrdlicka, and Melville Herskovits. See Farebrother for a discussion of these sources in relation to Cane, and see Lindberg on Herskovits and Toomer in the post-Cane era. Both document the shifting terrain of racial theory among scientists of the modernist period. Whalan addresses Toomer and anthropology as well. 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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48. The typescript for “Incredible Journey” is incomplete, so passages from this text are taken from the holograph notes (f. 483–506). 49. Here I offer Toomer’s original line of the poem; The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer erroneously prints, “For those that are color blind.” Toomer is commenting that those who are not blind to color—that is, those who see people in terms of color—are blind to the true identities of people. In this poem, color, interestingly, is not just a characteristic of those of African or Asian heritage but everyone. In an undated essay entitled “The Possibilities of Human Growth,” he specifically interrogates whiteness as a category: “The man who is a white man and nothing more, and is bound around by his whiteness, is a small man. . . . Whiteness, in so far as it is a subject of pride and prejudice, is a limitation, a liability not an asset, a factor of arrestation that impedes growth.” 50. Toomer’s consistent misspelling of “blend” and its derivations in this essay and in “The Americans” may suggest his (or his typist’s) unconscious at work, mixing up consonants in a word denoting the mixing of races. A similar argument might be made about the misspelled “loose” for “lose” in his early letters and in “America and Problems,” a possible indication of anxiety over the loosened nature of that which might be lost. I am indebted to Rachel Blau DuPlessis for these astute observations; see her book for her call for a return to a close reading based in “social philology,” which claims that social materials (both specific and general politics, attitudes, subjectivities, ideologies, discourses, debates) are activated and situated within the deepest texture of, the sharpest specificities of, the poetic text: on the level of word choice, crypt word, impacted etymologies, semantivity and line break, the stanza, the image, diction, sound, genre, the ‘events’ and speakers selected inside the work (enounced), and the rhetorical tactics of the thing on the page (enunciation). All the materials of the signifier are susceptible of a topical/topographic reading in a social philology. (12) 51. This is yet another source of contradictory thought in Toomer, but because I want to focus my discussion on notions of heredity it is outside the scope of the book to account for Toomer’s anger at America’s materialism and spiritual sterility. In some of his harshest criticism of the United States, Toomer complains in “America and Problems” that “[e]nclosed in an island psychology, given to provincialism and to a sort of naive national egotism, Americans still often think that outside of the United States nothing of any consequence is happening, or will ever happen unless America takes the initiative.” He adds that “America began as a predatory nation and it has remained faithful to its origins” and that “[l]ife in America is void of real meaning.” Toomer’s unpublished drama “The Gallonwerps” is a biting satire on America’s materialism (Jean Toomer Papers, f. 920–33). In his poem “It Used To Be,” Toomer apostrophizes, “America, that you grow in us the need / To love and build; that you / grow the wish to scrap / What love has built” (Jean Toomer Papers, f. 1279). These criticisms appear in “The Blue Meridian,” as Toomer confronts the symbol of America, the eagle (“a sublime and bloody bird”) in all of its contradictions: “Its spread from tip

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52.

53.

54.

55.

56. 57.

58.

59.

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to tip denotes extremes / Of affirming and denying, / Creating, destroying –” (Complete 56). Toomer, who suffered from various stomach ailments during most of his adulthood, is fairly obsessed (as was Gurdjieff) with the processes of digestion throughout his writings of the 1930s and 1940s. Metaphors for digestion appear throughout his unpublished writings. The press release can be found in the Jean Toomer Papers (f. 343). The letter to Johnson is dated July 11, 1930; the letter to Cunard is dated February 8, 1932; and the letter to Godo Remszhardt is dated August 23, 1930. This letter is dated August 4, 1944. Toomer is commenting on the threat of racial violence and rioting in Philadelphia, arguing that if people saw themselves as what they are, “universal” men, they would cease to fight over racial matters. In the phrase “A race called the Americans –” I cite an alternate, unpublished version of the poem; The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer prints “Called Americans.” The first sentence of this passage had also appeared in a letter to John McClure of the Double Dealer dated June 30, 1922 (Letters 40). While the satirized character Mary Carson in Toomer’s 1922 drama certainly espouses something that sounds like Christian Science, one of the members of the literary salon depicted laments specifically that he is married to a Christian Scientist. Natalie Mann seems particularly troubled with the impact of the sect on the African American community. In his 1927 drama The Sacred Factory, the main character refers disparagingly to “all of the numerous cults, new and old . . . Theosophy, Christian Science . . . Suffragism” as unhealthy outlets for women dissatisfied in their marriage (Wayward 354). In a 1933 lecture typescript, Toomer accuses Christian Scientists of being driven by financial interests: “Christian Scientists, for instance, tend to be ‘hot on the dollar’ while they pursue their religious ideas” (“How We Can” 7). In “America and Problems,” he refers to “pseudo-Christian Science.” Byrd argues, in effect, that Gurdjieff is responsible for Toomer’s turning away from the theme of race in his creative works (94). As I will argue below, my own view is that while Gurdjieff did not appear to recognize racial difference as consequential in the development of higher consciousness, his theory of development is reliant upon principles that Toomer found tremendously productive in thinking through racial matters. In other words, Toomer is not attracted to Gurdjieff simply because “[a]ccording to Gurdjieff, man’s problems were not external but internal” (Byrd 94) but because the Gurdjieffian practices of selfobservation and nonidentification were instrumental to Toomer’s attempts to retheorize the racialized body. By his own account, as Stephanie Hawkins (most recently) and others have noted, his exposure to evolutionary theory in his college years caused him to suffer a breakdown, or, in Hawkins’ words, “an internal crisis of monumental proportions” (154). In “Book X,” Toomer writes of the three-day breakdown

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60. 61.

62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

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that ensued from exposure to this knowledge: “the ideas of evolution upset my ideas of divine descent. . . . [A] horde of monkeys were let loose to trample down my angel-ancestors—until I, a son of the Son of man, was deflated, collapsed, and left in ruins” (217). Noteworthy here is that the downfall is brought on at once by both the biological and the religious ramifications of this new knowledge. Hawkins cites the following passage from his short autobiography “On Being an American” and notes his alarming use of a lynching metaphor, which “yokes the hereditarian discourse of evolution to the lynch mob” : “Readings of Darwin and Haeckel, the evolutionists, the materialists, and the atheists, stripped me of all religious belief; and, though my mind was greatly stimulated, my emotions were such that for a time I felt as if the bottom of the world had dropped from under, leaving me dangling like a man being hung” (“On Being” 29; Hawkins 154). This letter, to Professor J. B. Rhine, is dated February 6, 1939. This statement is repeated often in other writings. For instance, in an undated essay entitled “Human Beings,” he writes, “we are beings at the stage of cosmic evolution called human.” And in an autobiographical text of the early 1940s, “Second River,” Toomer remarks that “we are human beings, beings at the human stage of cosmic evolution.” This passage from “Book X” is taken from a partial variant version of Chapter 1 (f. 370). Notes on Lamarckian theory can be found with the papers entitled “As the World Revolves.” See Hawkins for a discussion of Lamarck’s influence on Toomer’s thought in the context of his poem “The Blue Meridian” (155). Matthew Guterl notes the importance of Lamarckian theory when he argues that “Toomer’s celebration of the various ‘bloods’ and ‘stocks’ that coursed through his veins and enabled his own excessively embodied American citizenship owed more to the classical Victorian science to heredity, especially neo-Lamarckianism, than to the postwar allegiance to Mendel” (167). He observes further that Toomer appreciated that Lamarckian theory hypothesizes “progress toward an ideal” (167). This letter, dated May 19, 1944, is found in f. 233 with other letters seeking speaking engagements and scheduling talks. Passages from “Co-opposition” are taken from the typescript version (f, 629). This letter to Richard Walsh is dated June 20, 1939, and proposes three books, Mankind Is One being the first. This passage from “Second River” is taken from the carbon of the first typescript (f. 533). Free will is extraordinarily difficult to achieve in this Gurdjieffian formulation, and while America may be the site of the most rapid evolutionary change, it is also, to Toomer’s mind, particularly defined by a need to control oneself— “The fear of partially loosing [sic] control of oneself is proportionally strong”— and others, including those of other races and religions—“This fear . . . finds extension in the individual’s attitude towards men in general” (“America and Problems”). Just as evolution works against itself by producing a heightened 10.1057/9780230106451 - Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, Lara Vetter

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69. 70.

71. 72.

73.

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sense of individualism, it creates its own obstacles to self-control as it facilitates the acquisition of greater individual freedom. As Hawkins points out, though, it is just this Darwinian struggle that enables evolution to propel itself forward (158–60). This passage from “Second River” is taken from the second typescript (f. 548). Though he does not cite this particular passage, Mark Whalan productively links this view of the body to Toomer’s obsession with the physical culture movement: “In his view, the body’s materiality was largely contingent upon the discursive frameworks within which it was produced; it was material capable of being changed—and changing in return the very nature of individual subjectivity of which it formed a part” (181). A body without form is one that is radically malleable. See, for instance, “From Exile into Being,” “Earth-Being,” “The Book of Aims,” and “Psychologic Papers.” About idealism and dualism, Robert Jones traces two movements within Toomer’s post-Cane career, though he focuses chiefly on his aesthetic and not his conception of the body. One of the only scholars to treat Toomer’s involvement in Quakerism, Jones cogently argues that during the Gurdjieff years, Toomer embraces idealism, but that Quakerism preserves a dualistic notion of existence. He contends that Toomer is “perpetually searching for new forms of idealism to harmonize his fragmented personality” (133). Clearly, I agree with Jones that Toomer struggles with idealist notions of reality, and he is no doubt correct that the differences between these two belief systems influence Toomer greatly. I do not, however, find such a seamless narrative viable, and I would argue as well that the middle period of Toomer’s writings on “psychologic” deserve attention of their own in this regard. I am also not necessarily in accord with Jones’ conclusion that “[f]or Toomer, who had come to believe that the self was God, Quakerism meant alienation from God” (125). Rather, I find in Toomer a dualism in which the physical body is alienated from the true self, which is merged with God. This passage from “Second River” is taken from the second typescript (f. 554).

Coda 1. The epigraph is taken from “What is Enlightenment?” and pertains to Baudelaire’s concept of the “modern man” (Foucault Reader 41). 2. Even while “utterly passive,” the feminine medium is “articulate” (Cottom 111); likewise, as Elizabeth Petroff argues about the female mystic of the Middle Ages, “women mystics were extremely active in their enforced passivity, and they used the language of passivity to create a new discourse” (205–6). Ironically, as Bette London points out in her study of the medium Geraldine Cummins, locating authorial responsibility outside of a writer’s mind can afford literary opportunities not otherwise available: “When she writes best—i.e., ‘automatically’—the process takes her outside herself, permitting her to write authoritatively of things beyond her own experience, education, and provincial upbringing” (153).

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Notes

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Adorno, Theodor, 24 Africa, 49, 82 African Americans, 114–5, 137, 139, 173n22, 175n2, 181n44, 183n57 see also eugenics; race; Toomer, Jean Ahlers, Annie, 174n32 Albright, Daniel, 14, 57–8, 165n18 Aldington, Richard, 14 work of: “The Art of Poetry,” 64 Alexander, F. Matthias, 90 Alexander, Samuel, 5, 163n7 Altieri, Charles, 179n28 American Indians, 19, 97–8, 103, 144 “American race,” 28–9, 97, 113, 120–1, 133–4, 137–9 passim, 140–5, 147, 172n18, 173n21, 177n6, 183n55, 184n63 Anderson, Adrian, 81 Anderson, Sherwood, 137 anthroposophy, see Steiner, Rudolf anti-Semitism, 112, 123, 126, 129, 137, 165n18, 177n9, 178n16, 180n32 Appel, John J., 123, 178nn15,17 Armstrong, Tim, 16, 32, 166n26, 170n29, 180n35 Arnold, Elizabeth, 59 Artaud, Antonin, 82 Ashburner, John, 40 Athenaeum, 3, 10, 11, 164n13 Atlantic Monthly, The, 129

Atwood, Craig D., 168n19 Augustine, Jane, ix, 19–20 Babbitt, E. D., 7, 31–2, 73 Baker, Brownell, 114–15 Baldanzi, Jessica Hays, 177n6 Bales, Charles Ransom, 77 Balsillie, David, 10 Banner of Light, The, 40, 43 Barnes, Djuna work of: Ladies Almanack, 57 Barnett, Claude A., 134, 138 Barney, Natalie, 57 Basham, Diana, 45, 65–6 Baudelaire, Charles, 185n1 Beardsley, Josephine, 138, 181n45 Bednarowski, Mary Farrell, 124, 178n15 Beers, Eli, 77 Bell, Alexander Graham, 167n4 Bell, Robert, 10 Benjamin, Park, 35–6, 37, 54, 167n6 Benz, Ernst, 35, 37–38, 39 Bergson, Henri, 112, 122–7 passim, 132, 179nn22,27,28 Berman, Jessica, 177n9 Bhabha, Homi, 176n3 Bierce, Ambrose, 35 Bill, Annie C., 8, 123, 125–7, 178n21, 179nn22,26 Blair, Sara, 179n29 Blast, 17

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Blavatsky, H. P., 6, 119 and electricity, 36, 167n7 influence of, 9, 14, 19–20, 121, 165n24 and sexuality, 51 and theories of evolution and race, 117, 120, 121 see also theosophy Blundell, John W. F., 74, 75 Boas, Franz, 181n47 Boodin, John Elof, 127 Bowler, Peter J., 116 Boyle, Kay, 68, 69, 70, 170nn1,2 works of: Being Geniuses Together 1920–1930, 68; My Next Bride, 67–9, 70, 170n2 Bradbury, Malcolm, 25 Bradford, Edgar Greenleaf, 46 Bramen, Carrie Tirado, 180n33 Brancusi, Constantin, 9 Brandon, Ruth, 167n11 Braude, Ann, 44, 45 Brigman, Annie, 108, 175n42 Britain, Rev. S. B., 43 British Spiritual Telegraph, The, 40 Britten, Mrs. Emma Hardinge, 43, 44 Brown, J. F., 82–3 Brunn, Emilie Zum, 52 Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), 102, 108–9, 165n23, 170n33, 174n37, 175nn39,42 work of: The Heart to Artemis, 3, 25; “If I am a needle on a disk,” 180n35 Bücher, Karl, 173n22 Bucke, Richard Maurice, 112, 117, 120 Budd, Michael Anton, 16–17, 69–70, 87, 172n18, 175n41 Buranelli, Vincent, 41 Burbank, Luther, 176n3 Burke, Carolyn, 34, 123, 130, 131, 176n4, 178n13, 179n31 Burr, E. F., 6 Butler, George F., 76 Byrd, Rudolph P., 155, 172n17, 181n42, 183n58

Campbell, Bruce F., 120 Campbell, John Bunyan, 7, 74 Carpenter, Edward, 50, 51, 52, 53 Carroll, Michael Thomas, 167n4 Cavling, Viggo, 118, 119, 120, 121 Charm, 165n23 Chesterton, G. K., 10 Cheyette, Bryan, 128, 129 Childs, Donald J., 3, 163n3 Christian Science and idealism, 75, 124, 127, 131, 132, 145 and Jews, 123, 126, 178n21 and Loy, Mina, 19, 20, 29, 34, 112, 122–7 passim, 131, 132, 145, 178n13, 179nn21,25 and “new” physics, 8, 123, 124 and psychology, 123, 178n15 and schism, 178nn19,21 and spiritualism, 34 and theories of evolution and race, 20, 122, 125–7, 131, 132, 145 and Toomer, Jean, 145, 183n57 see also Bill, Annie C.; Eddy, Mary Baker; Jewish Science Christianity, 6, 19, 20, 23, 37, 42, 43, 52–3, 85, 88, 130, 178n16 see also Moravianism; mysticism; Quakerism Clarke, Bruce, 12, 163n5, 165n20 Collecott, Diana, 175nn40,42 Collins, Mabel, 19 Conger, George Perrigo, 4 Conklin, Edwin Grant, 116 Connor, Rachel, 44, 98, 106, 107, 175nn38,39 Conover, Roger L., 59, 176n4 Cook, Richard, 124, 178n13, 179n25 Coolidge, Calvin, 115 “Cosmopolitan Jew,” 29, 122, 129–30, 131, 133, 178n14, 179n29 Cottom, Daniel, 14, 160, 163n10, 185n2 Cotton, Edward H., 3, 5 Crabtree, Adam, 41–2, 52–3, 167n9

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Dalcroze, see Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile Daly, Ann, 71, 99, 103, 108 dance, 28, 67–73 passim, 77, 78–85, 88–92 passim, 96–109 passim, 144, 161, 164n16, 170nn4,5, 171n9, 172nn14,15,20, 173n22, 174nn32,34,37 Danius, Sara, 13, 16, 164n16 Darwin, Charles, 2, 26, 115, 116, 120–8 passim, 146, 147, 149, 163n2, 176n6, 184n59, 185n68 Davenport, Charles, 128, 130 Dawbarn, Charles, 47 Dawson, Marshall, 7, 114, 117, 177n10 de Tunzelmann, G. W., 46, 168n17 Dearmer, Percy, 75, 76 Delauney, Robert, 9 Delsarte, François, 69, 79–80, 84, 99, 108, 171n10, 172n20 Derr, Ezra Z. (Arze Z. Rred), 116 Dewey, John, 90 Dinsmore, Charles Allen, 5–6 Divisch, Procopius, 37 Dixon, Joy, 50–1 Dods, John Bovee, 34 Doherty, Gerald, 169n23 Donat, Joseph, 6 Dorchester, Frank E., 8, 73, 76 Dorris, Ronald, 181nn40,43 Double Dealer, The, 139, 145, 183n56 Dowse, Thomas Stretch, 74 Duncan, Isadora, 68, 80, 99, 102, 105, 106, 108–9, 174n32

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Duncan, Raymond, 67–9, 72, 78, 80, 99, 170nn1,2,3 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, ix, 122, 128, 166n30, 176n3, 182n50 Eddy, Mary Baker, 34, 122–7 passim, 178nn16,18,19,21, 179n28 see also Christian Science Egoist, The, 11 Egypt, ancient, 19, 36, 62, 170n4, 174n34 Einstein, Albert reception of, 13–14, 165n18 theories of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 10, 13, 17, 22, 26, 34, 35, 46, 47, 69, 80, 98 writings of, 4, 9, 154, 163n10 Eldridge, Richard, 172n17 electricity, see electromagnetism electrocution, 27, 28, 31, 32, 34, 60, 62, 64, 105, 170n29 electromagnetism, 31–66 passim and H.D., 27–8, 33, 34, 35, 55, 56, 57, 61–6, 70, 109, 170n31 history of, 3, 13, 31–4, 35–54 passim, 73, 74, 166n3, 167nn4,6,7,8, 168n17 and Lawrence, D. H., 55–6, 169nn22,23 and Loy, Mina, 27, 33, 34, 35, 56–61, 125, 161, 169n26, 179n23 and Mesmerism, 39–42, 65, 168n12 as metaphor, 2, 8, 12, 32, 33, 44–5, 55–66 passim, 109, 166n1, 169n22 and sexuality, 2, 27–8, 34–5, 37–8, 41–2, 44, 47–66 passim, 167n4, 169n26 and spiritualism, 34, 39, 40, 42–6, 52, 55, 57, 60–1, 63, 64, 65, 70, 166n2, 168nn12,13 and spirituality, 2, 17, 51–3, 167n7 and Toomer, Jean, 21, 25 see also electrocution Eliot, T. S., 14, 97, 104, 163n8, 165n18 Ellerman, Winifred, see Bryher

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Crowley, Aleister, 6, 80, 82–3 Crunden, Robert M., 9, 14, 163n9 Cullen, Countee, 138 Cummins, Geraldine, 185n2 Cunard, Nancy, 11, 134, 142, 183n53 Cunningham, R. J., 178nn15,17 Curie, Marie, 1, 2, 3, 20, 22, 122 Curtis, Heber, 4 Curtiss, F. Homer, 19–20, 165n24 Curtiss, Harriette Augusta, 19–20, 165n24

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Ellis, Havelock, 9, 11, 47–8, 49–50, 51, 53, 54–5, 63, 65, 73, 168nn15,17,18, 169n27, 173n22 Emmanuel Movement, 78, 171n8 English, Daylanne K., 114, 116, 176nn3,6 English Review, The, 3, 10, 11 Epiney-Burgard, Georgette, 52 ether, 4, 5, 17, 32–3, 39, 40, 46, 47, 53, 58, 62, 65, 77, 82, 163n6, 166n3 eugenics, 2, 3, 11, 28–9, 49, 87, 112–16, 127–34 passim, 136, 139, 147, 163n3, 175n3, 176n6, 177nn7,11, 180n33 eukinetics, see Laban, Rudolf von eurhythmics, see Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile Euripides work of: Bacchae, The, 100 eurythmy, see Steiner, Rudolf; Spock, Marjorie evolution, 2, 3, 4, 6, 11, 17, 20, 23, 28–9, 58, 88, 90, 95, 111–57 passim, 173n26, 175n2, 176n3, 177n7, 178n21, 179nn22,23, 180n35, 183n59, 184nn61,68 see also Darwin, Charles; Haeckel, Ernst; Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste; Spencer, Herbert Fairfield, F. F., 121 Faivre, Antoine, 9, 163n8 Farebrother, Rachel, 181n47 Faulkner, William, 131 Fear, Ralph Gordon, 74, 119, 120 Feinstein, Amy, 177n7 Felski, Rita, 24 Ferrer, Daniel, 26 film, 13, 22, 66, 109, 174n37 Fitch, Michael Hendrick, 74 Flammarion, Camille work of: Death and Its Mystery, 99; Lumen, 20, 98–9, 165n25 Flower, Sydney B., 72, 76–7

Ford, Ford Madox (Ford Madox Hueffer), 11, 20 Fortnightly Review, The, 3, 5, 10, 11, 32, 164n13 Foster, Hal, 165n22 Foucault, Michel, 38, 39, 159, 185n1 Frank, Waldo, 137, 138, 154, 171n13, 181n43 work of: Our America, 171n13 Franklin, Benjamin, 39, 44 Franko, Mark, 99, 104, 108–9 Frazier, James, 11 Freeman, R. Austin, 115, 128 Freud, Sigmund, 37, 49, 130, 167n5, 169n27, 174nn32,33,37, 179n31 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 34, 166n30, 167n5, 169n28, 170nn31,32,33, 174nn32,37 Frost, Elisabeth A., 176n3 Fuller, Margaret, 65–6 Fussell, Paul, 174n35 Futurism, Italian, 17, 34, 124, 126, 166n26, 169n22, 177n7, 179n27 see also Marinetti, F. T.; Papini, Giovanni Gaedtke, Andrew, 169n26 Galton, Francis, 3, 115, 129, 163n3 Gardner, John F., 76, 80 Garelick, Rhonda K., 32 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 140, 177n8, 181nn40,43 Gauguin, Paul, 9 Gauld, Alan, 40 Geley, Gustave, 116 Gilbert, William, 36, 48, 49 Gillespie, Neal C., 163n2 Gilman, Sander, 129 Gilmore, Paul, 166n1 Gold, Roberta S., 128 Golston, Michael, 12, 15, 32, 170n5, 173n30 Goody, Alex, 177n7, 180n34 Gordon, Mel, 88 Gour, Andrew A., 86

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Grant, Madison, 87, 115, 180n33 Greece, ancient and art, 80, 99, 108 and dance, 85, 99, 100–1, 105, 170n4 and Duncan, Isadora, 99, 174n32 and electromagnetism, 36, 37, 54, 167nn6,7 and H.D., 99, 100–1, 105, 108, 161, 174nn32,34, 175n40 and mythology/religion, 19, 85, 98, 100–1, 103 and physical culture, 100, 171n7 and sexuality, 48 Green, Arthur Jay, 7, 76, 77–8, 118–19, 120 Grierson, Francis, 164n12 Grosskurth, Phyllis, 168n17 Guest, Barbara, 170n33 Gurdjieff, Georges, influence of, 6, 11, 170n2 theories of, 19, 20, 28–9, 69, 70–1, 81, 84, 85, 88–90, 93, 94, 99, 112, 134–5, 136, 146, 152–3, 154, 156, 172n20, 173n21, 183n58, 184n68 and Toomer, Jean, 14, 18, 19, 28–9, 70–1, 78, 85, 88–94 passim, 96, 112, 135–6, 146, 147, 150, 152–7 passim, 173nn21,22, 183nn52,58, 184n68, 185n72 Guterl, Matthew Pratt, 87, 172nn17,18, 173n21, 184n63 Gutting, Gary, 38 gymnastics, see physical culture Haeckel, Ernst, 146, 147, 184n59 Hall, Lesley, 49, 169n21 Hall, Manly Palmer, 121 Hall, Radclyffe work of: The Well of Loneliness, 50 Harmon, Charles, 177n8 Harrison, Andrew, 169n22 Hauser, Renate, 49

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Hawkins, Stephanie L., 146–7, 176n3, 177n8, 181n46, 183n59, 184n63, 185n68 Hawthorne, Nathaniel work of: “The Birth-mark,” 31 Hazelgrove, Jenny, 168n11 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), 1, 2, 160, 161, 170n30 and dance, 28, 70–1, 85, 97–109, 174n32,37 and electromagnetism, 27–8, 33, 34, 35, 55, 56, 57, 61–6, 70, 109, 170n31 life and career of, 14, 18, 19, 20, 22, 26, 66, 108–9, 165n23, 173nn28,29, 174nn32,36,37, 175n42 and mystical/astral experience, 28, 71, 98, 103–8 passim and religion, 19–20, 28, 51, 57, 75, 98, 165nn24,25, 167n5 and science, 9, 22, 57, 98, 164n14, 166n30 and sexuality, 27–8, 34–5, 51, 52, 55, 56, 57, 61–6, 104–5, 106–7, 169nn22,27,28, 174nn32,33, 175n39 and spiritualism, 19, 20, 27, 28, 33, 34, 44, 57, 63, 64, 65, 70–1, 97–8, 102–7, 165n25, 166n30, 167n5, 175n39 works of: “Cassandra,” 97, 173n27; “Choros Sequence,” 101; “Choros Translations,” 100–1; “The Dancer,” 102, 107, 174n33; “H.D. by Delia Alton,” 44, 99; “The H.D. Scrapbook,” 108–9, 175n40, 175n42; Helen in Egypt, 20; Kora and Ka, 170n32; Majic Ring, 22, 28, 70–1, 94, 97–8, 101, 102–7, 108, 109, 174n34, 174n36, 174n37, 175n38; “The Master,” 174n33; Mira Mare, 170n32; “The Mysteries,” 101; Nights, 61–2, 63–5, 104–5, 106, 161,

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H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)—Continued 169n28, 170n31, 170n32; Notes on Thought and Vision, 26, 52, 57, 65, 70; Paint It To-day, 61, 62–3, 65; Palimpsest, 22; “The Poet,” 174n33; “Pursuit,” v; “R.A.F.,” 1, 163n1; Red Roses for Bronze, 101, 174n31; “Responsibilities,” 23; Sea Garden, 2, 100; “The Shrine,” xv, 2; The Sword Went Out to Sea, (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton, 98, 107–8, 165n25; “Trance,” 102–3; Tribute to Freud, 175n38; Trilogy, cover, 20, 97, 104 Hrdlicka, Alex, 181n47 Heard, Gerald, 8, 74, 95, 112, 117, 118, 146–7, 150–1, 173n26 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 24, 124, 127, 179n28 Heilbron, J. L., 38, 39, 167n8 Heindel, Max, 6 Heiniger, Rev. Dr. Johannes, 7, 74, 75 Hekma, Gert, 168n16 Herdt, Gilbert, 48 Herring, Robert, 65, 170n32 Herrmann, Anne, 25 Herskovits, Melville J., 180n39, 181n47 Hertz, Heinrich, 46 Hickman, Miranda B., ix, 164n14, 166n30, 169n28, 170n31, 173n28 Hinton, C. Howard, 6 Hirsch, Nathaniel D. Mittron, 130 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 50 Hobhouse, L. T., 4 Hödl, Klaus, 128, 129, 178n14 Holmes, S. J., 130 Horn, H. J., 44 Howells, William Dean, 134 Hughes, Langston, 138, 144, 181n44 Hulme, Harold, 76 Hutchinson, George, 95, 177n8 Huxley, Julian, 3 Huyssen, Andreas, 24

idealism, and Duncan, Isadora, 99 and evolution, 118, 119 and Gurdjieff, Georges, 29 and Loy, Mina, 29, 112, 113, 122, 124, 155 and modernism, 113–14, 179n28 and Toomer, Jean, 29, 112, 113, 155, 185n72 Imagism, 11, 12, 18, 64, 66, 101, 109, 164n14 immigration, 114–15, 128, 129, 159, 177n9 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 115, 128–9, 175n2, 179n30 Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile, 32, 69, 73, 78, 79, 83, 84, 85, 99, 170n5, 171nn9,12, 172n20 James, Henry, 179n29 Jaskoski, Helen, 177n7 Jeans, James, 9 Jews, 49, 115, 123, 126, 128–9, 131, 138, 165n18, 175n2, 176n3, 178n16, 180n33 see also “Cosmopolitan Jew”; Jewish Science; Judaism; Loy, Mina Jewish Science, 123, 124, 125, 178nn17,19,21 Johnsen, Thomas C., 178n18 Johnson, James Weldon, 138, 142, 181nn43,45, 183n53 Johnson, Mark, 103 Johnston, Devon, 160 Johnston, Donald Kent, 78 Johnston, Georgia, 169n27 Jones, Harry L., 97 Jones, Robert B., 96, 153, 155, 185n72 Joyce, James, 26 Judaism, 19, 49, 113, 122, 123, 126, 130, 178n16 see also “Cosmopolitan Jew”; Jewish Science; Jews; Loy, Mina Kallen, Horace, 180n33 Kandinsky, Wassily

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work of: Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 9 Kellogg, Vernon, 115 Kerman, Cynthia Earl, 172n17 Kevles, Daniel J., 128, 177n11 Kibble, Matthew, 174n32 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, 171n9 Kinmont, David, 179n27 Kircher, Athanasius, 39 Klee, Paul, 9 Korg, Jacob, 15, 160 Krafft-Ebing, Richard, 49–50 Kreymborg, Alfred, 165n23 La Follette, Suzanne, 138, 181n45 Laban, Rudolf von, 69, 80, 99–100 Laity, Cassandra, 16 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 147, 149, 184n63 LaMothe, Kimerer L., 24 Langdon-Davies, John, 9–10 Laqueur, Thomas, 45 Larson, Charles R., 181n44 Latimer, Marjorie, 142 Latour, Bruno, 33–4, 38 Lawrence, D. H. 33, 34, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 174n33 works of: “The Captain’s Doll,” 55; The Rainbow, 55–6; Studies in Classic American Fiction, 55, 56, 66; The Trespasser, 55; Women in Love, 55–6, 169nn22,23, 171n9 Le Conte, Joseph, 4, 117 Lecomte du Noüy, Pierre, 116–17 Leisenring, W. W., 113–14 Lewis, Wyndham, 13, 14, 165n18 Lichtenstein, Morris, 72, 123, 124, 125 Lighthall, W. D., 119–20 Lindberg, Kathryne V., 181n47 Lindsay, A. A., 53–4, 76, 120 Liveright, Horace, 138 Lodge, Sir Oliver, 4, 5, 11, 32–3, 46–7, 163n6, 166n3 London, Bette, 185n2

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Loy, Mina, 1, 2, 160, 161 and America, 112–13, 133–4 and Christian Science, 19, 20, 29, 34, 112, 122–7 passim, 131, 132, 145, 178n13, 179nn21,25 and electromagnetism, 27, 33, 34, 35, 56–61, 125, 161, 169n26, 179n23 and eugenics, 112–13, 115–16, 127–35, 142, 176n3, 177n7, 180n33 and evolution, 23, 28–9, 58, 112–13, 121, 122–7, 142, 150 and Italian Futurism, 34, 124 and Jewish identity, 28, 122–3, 129–31, 132 and Judaism, 122–3, 130 life and career of, 14, 18, 19, 26, 112 and race, 28–9, 111–14, 115–16, 121, 122–35, 141, 142, 145 and religion, 18, 19, 26, 28, 29, 34, 51, 55, 56–9, 70–1, 122–7, 145, 153, 155, 161 and science, 20–1, 23, 122–3, 133 and sexuality, 8, 27, 33, 34, 51, 55, 56–7, 58–61, 169n26 and spiritualism, 27, 33, 34, 57, 60–1, 70–1 works of: “America * A Miracle,” 112, 133, 176n4; “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” 176n3; “Aphorisms on Futurism,” 126, 132; “Brain,” 131–2, 134–5, 180n35; “The Child and the Parent”, 131; “Evolution,” 125–6, 179n24; “Feminist Manifesto,” 115, 177n7; “Gertrude Stein,” 20, 122; “Goy Israels,” 130, 132, 179n22, 180n32; “The History of Religion and Eros”, 51, 56–9, 70–1, 113, 124–5, 133, 160, 178n20, 179n23; Insel, 59–61, 169n26; “International Psycho-Democracy” 23; “Modern Poetry,” 133–4; “O Hell,” 122, 131, 132; “The Oil in the Machine?” 20–1, 166n26

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Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 18 Lynn, Mrs. Excell, 74, 78 Macfadden, Bernarr, 85–6, 88, 100, 172nn17,18 Mack, Phyllis, 52 MacKaye, Steele, 79 Macpherson, Kenneth, 174n37 Madeleine of Munich, 82 Maddalena dé Pazzi, Saint Maria, 52 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 11 magnetism, see electromagnetism Marinetti, F. T., 17–18, 32, 165n22 Marsden, Dora, 11–12, 33, 45–6, 113–14, 164n12 Martz, Louis L., 14, 159, 174n32 Marx, Henry, 82 Materer, Timothy, 14 Mather, Kirtley, 4 Mattison, Rev. H., 168n13 Maxwell, James Clerk, 46 McAlmon, Robert, 165n23 work of: Being Geniuses Together 1920–1930, 68 McCabe, Susan, 1, 16, 174n33 McCarren, Felicia M., 99 McClure, John, 139, 145, 183n56 McDonald, Jean A., 124 McFarlane, James, 25 McKay, Nellie Y., 155, 177n8, 181n42 Mead, G. R. S., 19, 51–2, 171n6 Mellen, Joan, 68 Menand, Louis Mendel, Gregor, 180n33, 184n63 Mesmer, Franz, 39–42, 44, 45, 167n9, 167n10 Mesmerism, 27, 37, 39–42, 43, 44, 45, 49, 52, 55, 65, 167nn9,10,11, 168nn12,13 Michaels, Walter Benn, 129 Miller, Cristanne, 122 Miller, James, 101, 105, 170n4 Mondrian, Piet, 9 Moore, Marianne, 13–14, 65, 165n23, 170n32

Moore, R. Laurence, 31, 34, 45, 167n11 Moore, Wm. J., 36, 65 Moravianism, 19, 22, 51, 168n19, 174n36 Morey, Grace Kincaid, 121 Morris, Adalaide, ix, 35, 166n30 Morrisson, Mark S., 6, 15, 163n4, 163n8 Morse, J. J., 40 Morus, Iwan Rhys, 31, 167n8 Mottelay, Paul Fleury, 36, 167nn6,7 Mussolini, Benito, 172n18 mystical or astral experience, 17, 28, 43, 52, 71, 89, 94, 98, 103–8, 111, 143, 155–7, 185n2 mysticism Eastern, 23, 37, 58, 122, 124–5 and Ellis, Havelock, 9, 50, 54–5 and H.D., 19, 28, 33, 51, 52, 57, 65, 71, 98, 103–8 passim, 160–1, 173n28, 174nn32,36 and Loy, Mina, 21, 33, 51, 57–9, 122, 124–5, 130, 160–1 and sexuality, 50–3 and Toomer, Jean, 19, 94, 95, 111, 143, 146, 150, 155–7, 160–1 Western, 17, 37, 52, 65, 71, 89, 94, 168n19, 185n2 and Williams, William Carlos, 32 see also mystical or astral experience Nelson, Geoffrey K., 43, 167n11 Neuberg, Victor, 82–3 New Age, The, 3, 6, 11 New Age Magazine, The, 121 New Freewoman, The, 3, 10, 11, 33, 45–6, 113–14, 164n12 New York Call, The, 137 Newton, Sir Isaac, 4, 10, 123 Noble, Edmund, 116 Oderman, Kevin, 168n20, 171n6 Oelze, Richard, 59–61 Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph, 37–8 O’Keefe, Georgia work of: Birth and Pine Trees, 71

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Page, Charles G., 168n13 Pape, A. G., 118 Papini, Giovanni, 34 Parks, Willis B., 77 Paul, Diane B., 128, 130 Pearson, Karl, 129 Peel, Robert, 124 Petroff, Elizabeth, 185n2 physical culture, 16, 19, 28, 69–70, 72–9 passim, 85–8, 100, 114, 171nn7,10, 172n17, 172n18, 185n70 Planck, Max, 2, 3 Poggi, Christine, 165n22 Porter, Roy, 49, 169n21 Pound, Ezra, 11, 12, 14, 15, 32, 51–2, 163n8, 164n14, 165n18, 168n20, 171n6 Pozorski, Aimee L., 177n7 Preston, Carrie J., 99, 106 Priestley, Joseph, 40, 48–9, 66 Priestley, R. E., 10 psychology, 10, 15, 17, 19, 34, 69, 75–6, 77–8, 123, 171nn6,8, 178n15 see also Bucke, Richard Maurice; Freud, Sigmund; Heard, Gerald; Sharpe, Ella Freeman psychoanalysis, see Freud, Sigmund; psychology Puritanism, American, 83, 108, 148, 154, 171n13 Quackenbos, John D., 75, 78, 114, 117–18, 120, 177n10 Quakerism, 18, 19, 88, 95, 138, 147, 150, 153, 181n44, 185n72

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Quema, Anne, 164n14 Quimby, Phineas, 124 race, 6, 11, 25, 28–9, 48, 79, 85, 87–8, 93, 100, 111–57 passim, 159, 161, 170n5, 173n21, 175nn2,3, 176n6, 177nn7,8,12, 179n30, 180nn32,33,39, 181nn40,42,43,44,46,47, 182nn49,50, 183nn54,55,58, 184nn59,63,68 see also “American race”; eugenics; racial memory racial memory, 130–2, 134–6, 176n3, 180n35 radium, 1, 3, 20, 62, 64, 122 Raizizun, Yacki, 77 Rand, Lizabeth A., 84–5 Raymond, Samuel, 143, 183n54 Remszhardt, Godo, 142, 183n53 Rhine, J. B., 148, 184n60 rhythm of dance/movement, 32, 70, 71, 78, 79, 83, 85, 90, 96–7, 99, 102–4, 108, 171nn5,9,11, 173n22 of nature, 99, 104, 108, 127, 171n5, 179n22 of poetry, 12, 15, 66, 96–7, 101–2, 103–4, 132, 173n30, 174n35 of technology, 12, 17, 32 Rice, Thurman B., 128 Richard of St. Victor, 52 Richards, Robert J., 2, 163n2 Roatcap, Adela Spindler, 68, 69, 170n1, 170n3 Rolland, Romain, 181n43 Rollins, Charlemae, 147 Romanticism, American, 166n1 Romanticism, British, 25, 174n35 Roosevelt, Theodore, 115 Rosicrucianism, 6, 14, 121 Roumain, Jacques, 138, 181n44 Rout, Ettie A., 72–3, 85 Rusch, Frederik L., 180n39 Russell, Bertrand, 163n6

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Olston, Albert B., 75, 145 Orage, Alfred, 6, 11 Oswald, Felix, 86 Otis, Laura, 166n2 Ouspensky, P. D., 6–7, 9 Owen, Alex, 44, 106 Owen, E. C. E., 3, 10

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Russell, George William (Æ), 19 Ruyter, Nancy Lee Chalfa, 171n10 Saleeby, Caleb Williams, 128 Salzmann, Jeanne von, 172n20 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 24 Schleifer, Ronald, 163n6, 164n15 Schoenberg, Arnold, 9 Schofield, Alfred T., 76 Schuyler, George, 176n6 Schwartz, Hillel, 78, 96 scientology, 18 Scruggs, Charles, 137, 181n43 séance, see spiritualism Seltzer, Mark, 13, 16, 165n19 Seneca, 80 Serres, Michel. 4, 34 sexology, 26, 27, 33, 46, 47–52, 53, 54, 63, 168nn15,16 see also Carpenter, Edward; Ellis, Havelock; Krafft-Ebing, Richard, Symonds, John Addington; Weininger, Otto sexuality, 33–66 passim and dance, 72–3, 84 and disease, 129 and Eddy, Mary Baker, 125 and electromagnetism, 2, 27–8, 34–5, 37–8, 41–2, 44, 47–66 passim, 167n4, 169n26 and H.D., 27–8, 34–5, 51, 52, 55, 56, 57, 61–6, 104–5, 106–7, 169nn22,27,28, 174nn32,33, 175n39 and Lawrence, D. H., 55–6, 169n22 and Loy, Mina, 18, 27, 33, 34, 51, 55, 56–7, 58–61, 169n26 and modernism, 11, 25, 169nn20,27 and spirituality, 2, 27–8, 33–66 passim, 104–5, 148, 168n19 and Toomer, Jean, 84, 86, 148, 172nn14,17 see also sexology Sharpe, Ella Freeman, 174n32

Shelley, Mary work of: Frankenstein, 33, 37 Shreiber, Maeera, 178n13 Silverstein, Louis, 98, 173n29, 174n32 Snaith, Anna, 70 Sollors, Werner, 175n2, 180n33 Somerville, Siobhan S., 172nn14,17 Spencer, Herbert, 146, 147 Sperry, Margaret, 138 spiritualism, 42–7 and Christian Science, 124 and Crowley, Aleister, 82–3 and electromagnetism, 34, 39, 40, 42–6, 52, 55, 57, 60–1, 63, 64, 65, 70, 166n2, 168nn12,13 and evolution, 127 and gender, 44–6, 47, 175n39, 185n2 and H.D., 19, 20, 27, 28, 33, 34, 44, 57, 63, 64, 65, 70–1, 97–8, 102–7, 165n25, 166n30, 167n5, 175n39 influence of, 10, 11, 15, 166n2, 167n11, 168n13 and Lawrence, D. H., 55 and Loy, Mina, 27, 33, 34, 57, 60–1, 70–1 and modernism, 14, 18, 159–61 and sexuality, 44, 47, 50, 168n14, 175n39 and suffragism, 164n12 Spock, Marjorie, 73, 82, 97, 104, 171n11, 173n27 Stead, W. T., 10 Stebbins, Genevieve, 79–80, 108–9, 171n10, 172n20, 175n41 Stein, Gertrude, 20, 68, 122, 123, 145 Stein, Leo, 123 Steiner, Rudolf, 69, 73, 76, 77, 80–82, 83, 84, 88, 97, 104, 171n12 Steinman, Lisa M., 13, 133, 163n7, 164n14, 165nn18,19,20 Stevens, Wallace, 14 Stewart, Balfour, 4 Stopes, Marie Carmichael, 33, 51, 53 suffragism, 10, 164n12, 183n57

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Surette, Leon, 14, 18, 163n8, 165n21, 168n20, 177n12, 179n28 Surrealism, 59–61 Swedenborgianism, 37, 42, 79, 124 Swihart, Altman K., 178nn18,19,21, 179n26 Sword, Helen, 14, 71, 101, 104, 159, 160, 166n30, 167n5, 174n36, 175n39 Symeon the Younger, 52 Symonds, John Addington, 48, 50 Székely, Edmond, 8, 74, 117 Tait, P. G., 4 Taylor, Paul Beekman, 89 technology as aesthetic, 12, 13–14, 17–8, 25 in America, 13–14, 121, 131, 133, 164nn17,19 innovations in, 3, 13–14, 15, 16, 20–1, 22, 32–3, 69, 70, 119, 121, 148, 159, 160 as metaphor, 7, 13, 20–1, 22, 33, 43–5 passim, 97–8, 106, 131–2, 134–6, 166n26, 179n23 opposition to, 13, 22–3, 164n16 of telecommunications, 3, 7, 13, 15, 32, 33, 43–4, 46, 119, 97–8, 106, 119, 166n2, 167nn4,26, 174n36 of war, 23 see also electromagnetism; electrocution; film; Futurism, Italian theosophy, 6, 9, 14–15, 19–20, 50–1, 51–2, 75, 80, 88, 163n8, 165nn21,24, 168n20, 171n6, 177n12, 183n57 see also Blavatsky, H. P.; Hinton, C. Howard; Mead, G. R. S.; Russell, George William (Æ) Thomas, Annie, 76 Thomas, Julia, 76 Thomson, J. Arthur, 1 Thurschwell, Pamela, 15, 168n14 Thurston, Herbert, 52

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Tichi, Cecelia, 13, 164nn14,17 time travel, 3, 20, 22, 97–9, 102–3, 107 Tolstoy, Leo, 11 Toomer, Jean, 1, 2, 160, 161 and America, 92, 97, 112–13, 121, 141–4, 148, 154, 171n13, 172n18, 173nn21,22, 177n6, 182n51, 183n54 and dance, 28, 70–1, 78, 84–5, 88, 90–2, 96–7, 100, 172n14 and eugenics, 28–9, 112, 115, 141–2, 147, 176nn3,6 and evolution, 29, 74, 88, 90, 112–13, 117, 119, 137, 138, 141–2, 146–52, 155, 173n26, 176n3, 183n59, 184nn61,63,68 and Gurdjieff, 14, 18, 19, 28–9, 70–1, 78, 85, 88–94 passim, 96, 112, 135–6, 146, 147, 150, 152–7 passim, 173nn21,22, 183nn52,58, 184n68, 185n72 life and career of, 14, 18, 25, 26–7, 83, 183n52, 184n64 and mystical/astral experience, 19, 93, 94, 111, 143, 155–56 and physical culture, 28, 29, 78, 85–8, 114, 171n7, 172nn17,18, 185n70 and race, 28–9, 87–8, 93, 111–14, 121, 134, 135–57, 161, 176nn3,6, 177n8, 180nn36,39,40,42, 181n43, 181nn44,45,46, 47, 182n50, 183nn53,54,58, 184n63 and religion, 18, 19, 21–2, 29, 75, 84–5, 88, 94–6, 104, 113, 135, 138, 145, 152, 153, 184n59, 185n72 and science, 20, 21–2, 22–3, 25, 173n21 and sexuality, 84, 86, 148, 172n14, 172n17

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Toomer, Jean—Continued works of: “Also Persuaded,” 45, 135; “America and Problems,” 92, 113, 139, 142, 176n5, 182nn50,51, 183n57, 184n68; “America 1924,” 93, 152; “The American Race,” 139, 141, 142; “The Americans,” 113, 141, 142, 176n5, 182n50; “The Angel Begori,” 83, 157, 171n12; “As the World Revolves,” 95, 111–12, 147, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154, 184n63; “The Blue Meridian,” 97, 111, 136, 143–4, 146, 180n37, 182n51, 183n55, 184n63; “The Book of Aims,” 185n71; “Book X,” 85–8 passim, 94, 136, 141, 145, 146, 148, 149, 156, 172n16, 183n59, 184n62; “Brown River, Smile,” 136, 143; Cane, 18–19, 84, 91, 134, 136, 137, 138, 142, 155, 172n14, 173n22, 180n36, 181nn42,43,47, 185n72; “Conquer This,” 153, 155; “Co-opposition,” 151, 152, 184n65; “The Crock of Problems,” 135–6, 180n38; “Drift,” 95; “Earth-Being,” 21, 25, 143, 156, 166n27, 185n71; Essentials, 138; “Faint Drift,” 93; “A Fiction and Some Facts,” 139–40, 141; “From Exile into Being,” 22, 91, 94, 111, 143, 148–9, 150, 151, 152, 155, 156–7, 166n28, 172n19, 185n71; “The Gallonwerps,” 182n51; “He Who Grows Thereby Serves God,” 150; “How We Can Make Creative Use of the Present ‘Depression’,” 153–4, 183n57; “Human Beings,” 184n61; “Incredible Journey,” 140, 141, 142, 145, 172n19, 182n48; “It Used To Be,” 182n51; “Let Us Go,” 95; “Lines Written in Response to People Bowed Down by a Sense of Oppression Because

of the Events of the World,” 148; “The Lost Dancer,” 96, 136, 137; “Man’s Home Companion,” 22–3, 173n21; “Member of Man,” 112, 140–1; “Men Are Made to Grow,” 148, 152; “Motion and Rest,” 95–6; Natalie Mann 84–5, 96, 145, 183n57; “The Negro Emergent,” 139; “On Being an American,” 137, 139, 142–3, 155, 181nn41,43, 184n59; “Outline of the Story of the Autobiography,” 142; “People,” 140, 182n49; “Portage Potential,” 91; “The Possibilities of Human Growth,” 143, 182n49; “Psychologic,” 92, 140, 146, 147, 154, 155, 173n24; “Psychologic Papers,” 93, 146, 148, 149–50, 153, 155, 173n25, 185n71; “Race Problems and Modern Society,” 115–16, 140; “Remember and Return,” 22, 93, 153, 157, 166n29; The Sacred Factory, 183n57; “Second River,” 92, 111, 152, 154, 157, 173n23, 175n1, 184nn61,67, 185n69, 185n73; “Thine,” 153; “Two Parts,” 153; “Unidentified Autobiography,” 135; “Values and Fiction,” 154;”World America,” 145, 148 Transatlantic Review, 20 transcendentalism, 81, 124 Tryphonopoulos, Demetres P., ix, 14, 163n8, 168n20, 171n6, 171n7 Tuck, Susan, 169n22 Turner, Darwin T., 85 Two Worlds, The, 43 Umansky, Ellen M., 123, 178n17 Underhill, Evelyn, 52 Ure, Andrew, 31 van der Leeuw, Gerardus, 24 Verschuur, Gerrit L., 36–7

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Vetter, Lara, 108 Vitae, Quaestor, 43–4 vitalism, 3–4, 163n5 Vorticism, 11, 12, 17, 32, 164n14, 173n28 Walker, W. L., 119 Walpole, Hugh works of: Maradick at Forty, 172n15; Portrait of a Man with Red Hair 83–4, 85, 172n15 Walsh, Richard, 151–2, 184n66 Watson, James G., 131 Watson, William, 39 Weininger, Otto, 48–50 Welch, F. G., 76, 77, 100, 171n7 Wells, H. G., 11 Wells, Katharine F., 73 West, Rebecca, 11 Whalan, Mark, 86, 87, 137, 172n17, 173n21, 181n47, 185n70 Whewell, William, 47 White, Andrew D., 5

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Whitman, Walt, 117, 134, 136, 143, 180n39 work of: “When Lilacs Last at the Dooryard Bloom’d,” v Whitworth, Michael H., 3, 13, 164nn11,13,16 Whyde, Janet M., 172n14 Wiggam, Albert Edward, 115 Williams, Diana I., 176n6 Williams, W. H., 7, 73–74 Williams, William Carlos, 13–14, 15, 32 Willis, Nathaniel Parker work of: “Parrhasius,” 80 Winter, Alison, 37, 42, 167n10 Yeats, W. B., 14, 15, 19, 20, 23, 103–4, 163n8, 164n14, 173n30 Young, Carl Haven, 72 Young, Suzanne, 170n31 Zaccaria, Paola, 174n33 Žižek, Slavoj, 161

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Index