In Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), D. H. Lawrence wrote with emphasis: ‘The great mass of humanity should never learn to read and write – never’ (Lawrence 2004: 118). Lawrence’s post-First World War writings on education can seem to epitomise the democracy-shy paranoia of a certain strain of high modernism. His proposition (or provocation) concerning literacy follows from what he called at Fantasia’s outset ‘an age of mistaken democracy’ (62). In a prior essay, ‘Education of the People’ (1920), Lawrence had claimed that the modern aspiration to universal literacy was wrongheadedly based on the notion that all humans are equally capable of, and would equally benefit from, intellectual or ‘mental’ development. The untruth of this notion is apprehended, Lawrence insisted, by all actual teachers (he had been a schoolteacher himself for some six years, three as a pupil-teacher in Nottinghamshire, and three, qualified and salaried, in Croydon, South London): ‘every teacher’ knows that they are always confronted by a majority of ‘uninstructibles’, the extent of the latter varying, within the unstable rhetoric of Lawrence’s essay, between ‘at least fifty-per cent’ of scholars and ‘a very large majority’ (Lawrence 1988: 96).

For the liberal education system of the early twentieth-century British state to insist on administering culture and literacy to such scholars was, Lawrence maintained, to ‘allow nothing except in terms of itself’ (1988: 96). Given (it is a considerable assumption) the inaptitude of the young people themselves, Lawrence’s concern was that such a policy was directly harmful to them – ‘psychologically barbaric’ – and also a form of idealist bullying (Lawrence reserved some of his most scathing moral disapprobation for the violence of bullying) (2004: 115). Conversely, he argued, the same children are clever enough to realise – with what might be called the alternative intelligence of the uninstructible – that only the ‘smatterings’ or ‘imbecile pretence’ of culture were on offer to them, through which the state could assuage its conscience whilst maintaining the necessary division of labour between minds and bodies (1988: 112). Beyond this schooling, they knew, lay their own inevitable capture by the industrial system – the laundry and the bottle factory. Either way, Lawrence insisted, the political correlative of this system could not be an educated democracy.

Modernist Clockwork

Like the Cyberdyne Systems model 101 cyborg in James Cameron’s The Terminator who suddenly materialises in a crackling time-displacement sphere in 1984 Los Angeles, the machine-human entity in E. V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man appears abruptly in the middle of a cricket match in an English village, having time-travelled to 1923 from 8,000 years in the future. In Odle’s text, which Brian Stableford and David Langford call ‘the earliest major cyborg novel’, this future human is ‘capable of going not only someplace but also somewhen’, because a special kind of clock has been implanted in his brain (Stableford and Langford 2018; Odle 1923: 90). By means of this internal ‘mechanical contrivance’, the clockwork man is not locked in the world of mechanistic linearity but freed from it – the clock allows him to access ‘a multiform world … a world of many dimensions’ (Odle 1923: 180, 146–7). While the novel’s anxieties about the cyborg’s loss of humanity tilt the narrative’s sympathies toward the ‘Makers’ rather than their clockwork, toward humanist finitude and freedom over slavish mechanism, The Clockwork Man also seizes ‘upon the clock as the possible symbol of a new counterpoint in human affairs’, a device for thinking beyond the usual conception of historicity and its limitations, the ‘old problems of Time and Space’ (Odle 1923: 80). Odle’s character Gregg, who considers the clock as an element in the final stages of human development, remarks that the ‘clock, perhaps, was the index of a new and enlarged order of things’, a symbol of speculative insights beyond what ‘his limited faculties could perceive’ (Odle 1923: 110, 111).

As an index of the order of things, the clock appears so frequently in early twentieth-century cultural production that, as Michael Levenson has said of the trope’s encompassing theme of temporality, ‘it can be taken as a cultural signature’ (Levenson 2004: 197). However one calculates the exact bookends of canonical modernism, the period’s time obsession lands squarely within what the historian Alexis McCrossen claims was ‘the height of the public clock era in the United States and indeed throughout the world’ (McCrossen 2013: 6).

War forced modernism’s uneasy romance with technology into crisis. Now rivals, now critics, now technophiles and technophobes, modernists confronted and embraced from the start the expansionist energies of technology. War would bring an aesthetic, political and ethical reckoning that disturbed and fractured this intimate relationship between modernism and technology. For their part, the more avant-garde writers and artists actively engaged and exacerbated the contradictions in technology revealed by the First World War. The technologies of war, like artillery, the machine gun, high explosive shells, poison gas, aeroplanes, camouflaged Dazzle Ships and the tank, seemed to be the violent double of modernist and avant-garde artistic experimentation. Like T. S. Eliot’s ‘mon semblable, mon frère’ in The Waste Land (1922), these technologies brought ‘the shock of the new’ to battlefields from late nineteenth-century ‘Little Colonial Wars’ to the First World War and beyond. Famously celebrated and aestheticised in Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos, they seemed to offer objective correlatives or even causal mechanisms for avant-garde shock tactics.

Yet the technologies that modernised warfare from 1914 to 1945 shattered the utopian, imperious promise of modern industrial power and communications, revealing and demystifying a dystopian drive towards colonialism and war. This reinforced a modernist sense of irony and epistemological scepticism, which Paul Fussell famously argued in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) marked a descent into a generalised sense of ironic disillusionment after 1914. More disturbing than the epochal violence unleashed by military technology was the revelation for many writers and artists that modern warfare not only impoverished experience, as Walter Benjamin noted in ‘The Story Teller’, but revealed a more profound transformation of human experience and social relations. Observing famously that ‘men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience’, Benjamin argued that this tendency was part of a larger logic of modernisation: ‘For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power’ (Benjamin 1969a: 84).

I will argue here that literary modernism offered a powerful lens through which to understand the relationship between technology and modern war not only because of its obsessive ambivalence towards these relations, but because of the intimate relationship between aesthetic experimentation and experimental technologies of violence. War exposed modernism’s internal contradictions.

In the first movement of Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s 1928 gender- and genrebending novel set in Elizabethan England, night is marked by an absence of light. For Woolf, darkness was the predominant experience of night in the seventeenth century; instances of nocturnal illumination only demonstrate the inherent fallibility of light. The introduction of the electric light does not occur in the novel at the time of its advent in the late 1870s, but in 1928, the moment in which the novel’s final movement is set. Woolf employs electric lights to signal the close of a very long nineteenth century and herald the belated beginning of the twentieth century. Orlando is astonished by the convenience of the instantaneous illumination of ‘a whole room’, of ‘hundreds of rooms’ at ‘a touch’. Not only was ‘the sky […] bright all night long’ but so too were ‘the pavements’ (Woolf 2008: 283). This proliferation of artificial illumination across the city distinguishes ‘the present moment’ from that preceding it. Orlando’s new world appears more vibrant and vital; ‘[t]here was something definite and distinct about the age’, something modern (Woolf 2008: 284). Following Woolf’s example, we take for granted that the electric light was an accepted object and, indeed, symbol of modernity. But was this still the case, fifty years after the first commercially viable electric lights were introduced in London’s streets?

As one of electricity’s most prominent and prevalent technologies, the electric light is entangled with an elision of technology and modernity and of modernity with modernisation. But electricity, electric lights and modernity are not interchangeable. Graeme Gooday challenges the presumption that ‘electrification and modernization are integral features of the same phenomenon, and thus that electricity is synonymous with modernity’ (Gooday 2008: 14–15). The orthogonal processes of domestication and modernisation were neither assured nor easily accomplished; before the electric light could become an object of modernity and, in turn, a modernist object, it needed first to be romanticised ‘as both an upper-class luxury and a mysterious magical force’ and anthropomorphised ‘as benign fairy, goddess, wizard or imp’ (Gooday 2008: 19).

Introduction

If you are what you eat, it stands to reason that it must be impossible to eat and remain unchanged. Routine exchanges of regulatory signals and genetic material between eater and eaten threaten the skin-encapsulated human self with contamination and corruption by the other from within. However, that same “persistence of others in the flesh” (Landecker, “Exposure” 169) also highlights how any subject, human or otherwise, can only emerge via relationships of corporeal intimacy with other species and other selves. To these ends, Donna Haraway engages the evolutionary theory of symbiogenesis – literally, “becoming by living together” – as an alternative origin story engendering new insights into the origins, dynamism, and diversity of Earthly life. A secular creation myth hinging not on “cooperation” or “competition” but rather “indigestion” (Haraway, “Symbiogenesis”), symbiogenesis unsettles atomistic understandings of the self, instead understanding subjectivity as fundamentally dynamic, entangled, and always-already multiple.

Speculative fiction has a long history of direct engagement with the theory of symbiogenesis (see, for example, Simak). One such work is Octavia E. Butler’s groundbreaking Xenogenesis trilogy (1987–1989), a sf story centrally concerned with the power dynamics of eating. In Xenogenesis, symbiogenesis informs an ethic of non-violence that eschews hierarchy and mandates dietary veganism yet remains embedded in deeply uneven power relations of coercion and instrumentalization. This confluence of utopian impulses and the acknowledgment of the inevitable insufficiency of such impulses is a constitutive feature not only of Butler’s sf, but of veganism itself (Quinn and Westwood 1). Both sf and veganism share a quality of estrangement from social norms (Schuster 219); symbiogenesis has likewise been deployed as a stratagem of imagining otherwise. As such, Xenogenesis thickens and complicates configurations of species and subjectivities, acknowledging selves as protean multispecies assemblages while affirming the differential accountability of such selves to others, human and otherwise.

Symbiogenesis

Symbiosis describes the long-lasting corporeal intimacy – obligate or optional, parasitic or pathogenic – of differently-named organisms. Symbiotic relationships express their liveliest potentialities in the phenomenon of symbiogenesis, or “long term stable symbiosis that leads to evolutionary change” (Margulis and Sagan, Genomes 12). In symbiogenesis, separate species “form a symbiotic consortium which becomes the target of selection as a single entity” (Mayr xiii), leading to “the appearance of a new phenotype, trait, tissue, organelle, organ, or organism formed through a symbiotic relationship” (Hird 58).

‘ The rupture of metal and safety glass and the deliberate destruction of deliberately engineered artefacts, had left me lightheaded’ (Ballard 1985: 125). In literature, the swirling buildup of the first phase of appalled fascination at what the automobile had wrought converged on one notorious text, J. G. Ballard’s Crash. The automobile’s promise of the thrilling experience of unprecedented personal speed, and the pushing of its driver’s sensations to their limits, had made it a new kind of commodity: one which not only granted the usual pleasures of consumerism and status, but demanded new, extreme, use of one’s senses, and which induced, in that very use, pleasurable stress. For Ballard, at the end of this era, it was only at the moment of the crash that the full implications of this new model of what it meant to be human in interaction with technology could be mapped in fascinated horror. Before him, many artists had experimented with elucidating the joys of car speeds: from Marinetti’s pro-car oratorio in the 1909 ‘Futurist Manifesto’ to the car chases of the first Hollywood films and the Jaguar spills of James Bond; the admiration for drivers and driving in Proust’s La Recherche and the excitements of driving joyously delineated in Woolf’s Orlando; the windscreen painting of Manet and the speeding-car photos of Jacques-Henri Lartigue. They had all been willing to celebrate the car as commodity, but with an undercurrent of concern about what is unleashed in the driver-subject. The experimental strategies of the various modernisms were excellent for plumbing the limits and the possible new intensities – of attentiveness, endurance, adrenaline rush and stress – that this new technology incited in its users. Delineating these stresses in turn drove various modernisms to their own limits of representation. This chapter will first consider the two poles of consumer celebration and terror which greeted the arrival of the automobile; we will then examine representations of the first sense stressed by the experience of driving at speed, that of sight. Seeing at speed became a modernist topic and a spur to new kinds of modernist representations and genres, which in turn prompted engineers to develop still newer technologies of seeing. Capturing the speed gaze became the task of the moving image; it also fostered a telegraphic, cinematic turn in literature and art.

There is perhaps no poet who more beautifully conveys the experience of Victorian doubt than G. M. Hopkins. So doubtful are his psychic grapplings with God, human suffering, and alienation that critics have happily secured his critical place among the modernists, within a world where God seems dead and the destructive nature of humankind reigns supreme. Yet Hopkins’s poetry is also restorative and ennobling. The irrepressible beauty of nature exudes from his verses, exemplifying the sheer beauty of dappled things. His homage to alliterative Old English verse heralds back to times more ancient with a reassuring stability. The rhythms of “chestnut-falls” and “finches’ wings” counterpoint the force of his sprung rhythm and arresting spondees: “Praise him.” The vibrant hues that color his lines create a boundless landscape in God’s glory: “descending blue,” “glassy peartree leaves and blooms,” “gold-vermillion,” “azurous hung hills,” “very-violet-sweet.” Hopkins’s poetry is one of solitude that carries the spirit of reflection, yet it does not necessarily find solace or repose. He revels in God’s grandeur but makes us question the heights to which our own fear and weakness can overwhelm and conquer faith. This “poetics of wavering” that I identify in Hopkins’s verses offers a recognition of the motion and movement that allow us to travel through the difficulties of life—whether “riding a river” or having the freedom to waver, to “fable and miss.”

Among the Victorian poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins would seem the furthest removed from the heavily commercial, xenophobic, and anti-Catholic world of 1790s English Gothic fiction. An English Jesuit priest who converted to Catholicism largely as a result of the Oxford Movement, Hopkins stands among the Victorians as a devotional poet who wrote serious spiritual verse. After being received into the church by John Henry Newman in October 1866, he resolved to become a priest in May 1868 upon returning to Hampstead. The burning of his early poems and the seven years of silence that followed his Jesuit initiation mark a commitment to his religious office that effectively cut him off from the public literary scene, though he was still engaged in serial and periodical print culture. It might be said that his literary circle consisted solely of a few family members and his friends, Robert Bridges, Coventry Patmore, and Richard Watson Dixon.

Introducing Vegan Literary Studies

Veganism is on the rise. As C. Lou Hamilton writes, “Veganism is hot” (2): a hot topic as much as a hot potato issue. Over the past few decades, the number of self-identified vegans has increased exponentially, particularly in the West. A 2016 survey indicated that the number of vegans in the UK alone had increased by 350 percent in the 10 years prior (Vegan Life). The COVID-19 pandemic and the international lockdowns it necessitated also correlate with a significant increase in the popularity of vegan foodstuffs. A study by the UK Vegan Society, for instance, suggests that during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, one in four Britons ate less meat, with tofu sales increasing by 81.7 percent and oat milk by 113 percent (Vegan Society). In the US, retail sales data from 2021 “shows that grocery sales of plant-based foods that directly replace animal products have grown 27 percent in the past year to $7 billion” (Good Food Institute). Seemingly providing people with more time to invest in food preparation and meal-planning as well as for greater reflection on the harms perpetuated by animal agriculture, the pandemic has accelerated ongoing cultural shifts whereby concerns about the impact of industrial meat production and consumption on the environment combine with attention to animal welfare concerns to increase the number of people turning to plant-based diets.

However, the rise in veganism should not be reduced solely to statistics of plant-based consumption. As Eva Haifa Giraud writes, the increased focus on plant-based foodstuffs within a capitalist economic framework risks depoliticizing the vegan movement. For Giraud “Understanding veganism as a conversation for change, rather than consumerist, eating-focused movement” is necessary in order to shift perceptions of veganism away from “something that is about dietary purity and only available to a few, to a way of thinking about and engaging with the world” (Veganism 158). The risk of depoliticization is reflected in Ethan Varian’s 2019 New York Times editorial, which details how “plant-based” offers health-conscious consumers a mode of eating that is “[f]ree from specific ethical constraints,” increasingly used as “a way to distance oneself from the rigid ideology of veganism, which calls for abstaining from animal products of all kinds.”

In such instances, it is necessary to note the implicit misogyny that underscores a recent spate of product placement and plant-based pontification.

In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), the protagonist Laura, having swapped the bustle of London for the peace and quiet of the Chiltern Hills, decides to spend some of her new-found leisure time reading. Having brought no books of her own, she borrows a couple of volumes from her landlady:

Like many modern readers, Laura finds herself dividing her attention between the escapist pleasures of literary romance and the valuable facts to be gleaned from a work of information. In this case, however, these two forms of reading also suggest the two worlds between which Laura herself is beginning to transition. The practical if soporific advice retailed by Enquire Within (1856) – the Chartist editor Robert Kemp Philp’s most successful contribution to the Victorian craze for self-improvement – recalls the bourgeois domesticity of daily life in her late brother’s London household. Meanwhile, the popular gothic novel Mehalah (1880), by the eminent nineteenth-century folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould, feeds the fascination for the supernatural and the weird that will ultimately carry Laura into a new life as a bona fide modern-day witch.

Laura Willowes’s reading preferences might seem to have little to do with questions of modernism and technology. Yet this marginal moment in a middlebrow novella of the 1920s serves to demonstrate both the evident popularity of informational reading in the early twentieth century and the sharp contrast many writers had begun to draw between such reading and its literary alternatives or complements. It also gives a good sense of what ‘information’ most readily suggested to a typical reader of the 1920s: an organised but discontinuous collection of facts, figures, measurements, recipes, instructions and the like, which might (or might not) turn out to be of practical use.

Introduction

The bodies of critical work in both ecocriticism and animal studies offer productive approaches to poetry that alert us to how the artform’s figurative and musical dimensions allow it to engage with nonhuman nature in ways that transcend mere depiction and powerfully convey our utter embeddedness in what we inadequately dub “the environment.” Such engagements thereby serve to undermine the anthropocentric discourses that authorize our continued exploitation and destruction of the other-than-human world. If a vegan approach to poetry is to distinguish itself from these critical ancestors, then, it must both draw upon the anti-anthropocentrism and empathetic attention to the nonhuman other that, at their best, they so successfully cultivate while also going beyond those considerable virtues to somehow embody, in its critical practice, the refusal at the root of veganism – namely, the radical abstinence from consuming or using the products of animal exploitation and execution. While recognizing this fundamental difficulty in staking out a specifically vegan reading practice, this chapter confronts that difficulty as a productive challenge, attempting to provisionally delineate a vegan mode of reading poetry in the teeth of the apparent discreteness of the realms of criticism and consumer choice. In the first section, I turn to one of the touchstone works of literary animal studies, J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999), drawing from that text’s engagement with animal poems four potential parameters for the vegan critic of poetry. In the second section, I undertake an experiment within those parameters, taking as a test object D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Fish” – a text that, I argue, evokes meat-eating as a means of gesturing ethically beyond it, to a world in which the human consumption of animal flesh is seen as a paltry squandering of our relational potential vis-à-vis the nonhuman other, a world in which veganism’s sliver of utopian promise has blossomed into fulfillment.

Towards a Vegan Approach to Poetry: Elizabeth Costello’s Poetics of Corporeality

The second of The Lives of Animals’ two sections, entitled “The Poets and the Animals,” offers a rare instance of poetry being approached in illuminating ways from what might be construed as a vegan perspective, as the fictional novelist-critic Elizabeth Costello compares the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke to that of Ted Hughes in terms of their portrayals of nonhuman animals, specifically big cats.

Within modernist scholarship, the term ‘network’ tends to lend its powerful connotation of complex connectivity to two interpretive contexts: first, in definitions of modernism as a far-flung set of constellations of people, publications and institutions across space and time, and second, in excursions into network analysis that use software to explore and visualise relationships among modernists or their texts. In the former case, the term ‘network’ crystallises what would be an amorphous cloud of movements into a discrete entity that seems definite but is flexible enough to support the new modernist studies’ transnational and transhistorical expansions of what counts as modernism. In the latter case, the term ‘network’ refers to the computational methods adapted by digital humanities scholars to craft visually compelling graphics and queryable datasets related to a particular text, genre or group of authors, often on a large scale. In both cases, the named entities comprising modernism are related but not conflated, allowing the scholar’s argument to overcome the slippery recalcitrance of its subject material while retaining its complexity.

Recent examples of arguments that deploy networks as a figure for modernism’s groups of mutual influence include Helen Southworth’s Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism (2010) and London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent, and Ephemeral Networks, 1960–1980 (Applin et al. 2017). For others, studying a single point in the mesh reframes the whole modernist network; Willa Cather does so for Janis P. Stout (2015), H. D. for Georgina Taylor (2001), D. H. Lawrence for Julianne Newmark (2016) and Taxco for A. Joan Saab (2011). By contrast, triangulating many points might redraw the network on a continental scale, as in Patricia Novillo-Corvalán’s Modernism and Latin America Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange (2017) and Wesley Beal’s Networks of Modernism (2015). Tracing a network is a political act that can recover occluded radical modernisms, as Wai Chee Dimock does by exploring representations of Native Americans in ‘Weak Network: Faulkner’s Transpacific Reparations’ (2018) and James Gifford does by redrawing lines of influence away from Marxism in Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes (2014). Clearly, the network – as a model for conceiving of artists and texts as agents whose most salient feature is that they interact with one another in complex ways – offers considerable explanatory power.

In early December 1924 Hart Crane sent a curt letter to the writer and editor Gorham Munson requesting that Munson ‘take whatever decisions or formalities are necessary to “excommunicate” me from your literary circle’. The letter, which followed a fractious lunch meeting between the two friends, referred to a long-standing argument between Munson’s own journal, Secession, and its stalking horse, Broom. But Crane’s deep irritation with Munson (their relationship never fully recovered from Crane’s missive) reveals his broader principles as a poet. ‘I am not prepared to welcome threats’, Crane wrote, ‘from any quarters that I know of – which are based on assumptions of my literary ambitions in relation to one group, faction “opportunity,” or another.’ Secession and Broom were both ‘exile’ journals – two magazines edited by Americans in Europe, following the relative strength of the post-war dollar. Their argument roughly mapped on to the Paris–Dada split between André Breton (Secession) and Tristan Tzara (Broom) and the emergence of Surrealism.

Munson had wished to claim Crane as a ‘Secessionist’. This would secure Crane’s affiliation with the magazine in Munson’s ongoing conflict with the Broom editors and Crane’s friends, Matthew Josephson and Malcolm Cowley, who had taken over the journal from its founder, Harold Loeb. Crane was wary of being seen ‘in relation’ to any particular aesthetic programme, both for the sake of the development of his own art and his reception in contemporary circles. Crane’s letters to Munson show his keenness to resist group affiliation and his aversion to Munson’s ‘rigorous’ aesthetic ‘program’. As Crane told Munson shortly before his December letter severed their friendship, his poetry required ‘a certain amount of “confusion” to bring [it] into form’, which was, he wrote, in conflict with the ‘program’ Munson had designed for Secession.

Crane appeared in a roll call of transatlantic periodicals that were crucial to the development and dissemination of various strands of literary modernism between his first publication in September 1916 and 27 April 1932, when Crane went overboard from the SS Orizaba, en route from Vera Cruz to New York. During his sixteen-year career, Crane amassed 109 publications in 26 journals, and published two volumes of poetry, White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930), with a third, Key West, in draft at the time of his death.

On a damp November afternoon in 1923, the editors of two rival literary magazines squared off against each other in a sodden field in Woodstock, New York. The ‘parley’ instigated by the co-editor of Broom, Matthew Josephson, was ostensibly to resolve long-standing tensions with Gorham Munson, founding editor of Secession. The quarrel had emerged during their time in Paris editing ‘exile journals’, Broom co-editor Malcolm Cowley’s term for Anglophone magazines founded and edited by Americans in Europe. In the autumn of 1921 Munson had moved to Paris, where, furnished with a letter of introduction from Hart Crane, he was introduced to Josephson and Cowley. The three whiled away the hours at La Rotonde, eating, drinking and playing dominoes with a fellow ‘exile’, the photographer Man Ray, and the Parisian Dadaists Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon and André Breton. In those Parisian years they sat at Gertrude Stein’s feet in her salon on the rue de Fleurus, met James Joyce – emaciated in his mouldy hotel room in the septième – and discussed publishing with little magazine ‘schoolmaster’ Ezra Pound – occasionally flanked by Ernest Hemingway, then working for the International News Service, but already deemed to be ‘something new in American literature’ by his mentor. The aesthetic theories of both Munson and Josephson were formed in the crucible of the theatrically fractious circles of Paris Dada, an arena of conflict that had a deep bearing on the emergence of Hart Crane’s distinctive poetic voice.

Like Hemingway, Cowley had returned to Paris after serving as an ambulance driver in the First World War. In its aftermath, publishing in Greenwich Village had grown increasingly difficult as a result of wartime censorship laws; ‘salvation’ was to be found only ‘by exile’ via the French Line Pier. Such was the ubiquity of Village exiles in Paris that they frequently sent themselves up in their own magazines: ‘bored, drinking too much, they analyse their use of adjectives in casual conversation, blithely moving from city to city and purchasing objets d’arts and other curios’. Secession, founded in Paris, and Broom in Rome, were forged in the complex literary dynamics of post-war Europe, shifting business headquarters from Paris, to Rome, Berlin, Vienna and the Tyrol as editors followed the exchange rate, keeping printing costs low.

Anatole Broyard (1920–90), the US-American writer, bookstore owner, literary critic and editor of The New York Times Book Review, was an important cultural figure in New York City’s literary scene. He wrote daily book reviews for fifteen years and published his reflections on literature and everyday experiences in two anthologies – Aroused by Books (1974) and Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes (1980). Broyard’s memoir Kafka Was the Rage focuses on life in Greenwich Village in the late 1940s and was published posthumously in 1993. After his death, it became known that Broyard had concealed his mixed-race origin and passed for white (B. Broyard; Gates). In Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine, Broyard’s writing about his own and his father’s illness has become a standard reference, anthologised in Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death (1992). In Intoxicated, Broyard describes his dissatisfaction with the reductive ways with which evidence-based medicine considers prostate cancer. He diagnoses an impoverishment and blandness that is at odds with the richness and depth that Broyard, to his own surprise, experienced when he got sick. Broyard claims in Intoxicated that the technical, matter-of-fact approaches of modern health care should be fundamentally rethought so that the boundary experience of illness become more fully resonant. Thus, rather than depriving illness of meaning, as Sontag polemically urges in her critique of illness metaphors (99), Broyard wishes to add more meaning, more options of sense-making and more capacious understandings of what it means to be sick. Metaphor is a crucial instrument in this endeavour.

In Intoxicated, Broyard makes a compelling case for metaphor over narrative by modelling a playful use of metaphors as an expression of his individual style. Like Susan Sontag and Audre Lorde, Broyard applies the battle metaphor to illness and creatively imagines different scenarios for his fight. However, the battle metaphor is only one of many that Broyard uses for illness. Moreover, instead of being primarily driven by an adversarial or resistant motivation, Broyard’s approach is best understood, I suggest, in terms of its reparative or even joyful qualities. In fact, Broyard directly calls for a ‘style for illness’ (Intoxicated 25), which he associates with self-love and self-care and which is informed by exaggeration, vanity and pleasure.