Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes by James Gifford

Reviewed by: Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes by James Gifford Allan Antliff James Gifford. Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2014. Personal Modernisms is an original and thought-provoking study of a network of Late Modernists in Europe, China, and North America. Gifford is overly modest when he suggests he has “merely reordered already existing information, albeit in a unique configuration” (200). He has done much more than that. His examination involves, among other things, a comprehensive overview of the critical blinders that have hampered our understanding of the “Personalists” (a circle of poets, writers, and critics who promoted their tendency as “New Apocalypse,” “Personalist,” and “New Romantic”) in the current literature. Gifford undertakes a devastating critique of Fredric Jameson’s failure to grapple with the anarchist currents he is examining and brings a fresh historical perspective to bear on contemporary “postanarchist” theories of the subject propounded by political theorist Saul Newman and others. Finally, his work foregrounds a Late Modernist constellation that has largely gone unrecognized (with the notable exception of Arthur Edward Salmon’s foundational 1983 overview, [End Page 138] Poets of the Apocalypse), and important figures in the canon, notably Henry Miller, Robert Duncan, Elizabeth Smart, and Lawrence Durrell, emerge looking quite different. Personal Modernisms is one of those rarities—a foundational revisiting of a key period in the history of twentieth-century literary modernism. The opening chapter, “Late Modernism Inside the Whale: The Shape of Literary Criticism,” provides a genealogical overview of Late Modernism’s codification, beginning with its historical framing in Alan Wilde’s Horizons of Assent (1981) as “a transitional period between the modern and post-modern” (2). Samuel Hynes’s The Auden Generation (1976), which endorses the partial accounts of its protagonists to the detriment of the circles Gifford examines, is the touchstone for Wilde’s study and a host of ensuing treatments, culminating with Tyus Miller’s Late Modernism (1999). In lockstep with his predecessors, Miller reduces the currents amalgamated under that term to an ineffectual reaction, absent any cohesive political-literary vision of its own, to “the Auden generation and its communism as well as High Modernism’s elitism” (Gifford 42). Gifford’s purpose is to configure our understanding of Late Modernism through the concerns of World War Two era anarchist-oriented poets, critics, and novelists. His point of departure is Henry Miller’s Paris-based “Villa Seurat” circle. Gifford’s second chapter, “Narrative Itinerary: From Villa Seurat to English Post-Surrealists,” focuses on Miller’s impact in the late 1930s, when he began attacking Surrealism for its complicity with Communist politics, most famously in his frequently reprinted “An Open Letter To Surrealists Everywhere” (1937). Refusing to commit to leftist politics of any kind, Miller adopted an anarchist position of disengagement in the name of creative freedom, a stance that influenced Herbert Read, David Gasgoyne, Durrell, and others. Gifford charts how Durrell’s Delta journal promoted this brand of anarchism during 1938–39, first in Paris and then in Greece. During World War Two, Miller’s position also found a welcome reception in Britain, where “post-surrealist” currents eventually coalesced around Transformation (edited by “Personalist” anarchists Henry Treece and Stefen Schimanski) and a host of other journals. Gifford also detects Miller’s trace in far-flung places such as New York, San Francisco, Cairo, and Shanghai, although what this amounts to is less than clear. (By the early 1940s, Personalism’s theoretical epicentre is clearly Britain and its international network develops from this base.) Gifford’s third chapter, “Authority’s Apocalypse: Theories of Personalism,” revisits Marxist assertions that anarchism is a “bourgeois individualist” ideology, a misrepresentation underpinning Jameson’s claim that Late [End Page 139] Modernists are boxed into ineffectual processes of “self-consciousness, reflexivity and irony or self-reference” divorced from any “revolutionary transmutation of the world of actuality itself” (Gifford 154) and one that figures as well in David Weir’s naive reading of contemporary anarchism as a cultural variant of postmodern capitalism (Gifford 157). Gifford is having none of it: tracing the “relations among thought, form, and praxis” in the poetic, literary, and critical writings of...

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