Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- A Note of Thanks
- The Guest List
- Introduction: A Welcome from the Host
- 1 ‘The dinner was indeed quiet’: Domestic Parties in the Work of Joseph Conrad
- 2 Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea
- 3 Party Joyce: From the ‘Dead’ to When We ‘Wake’
- 4 ‘Looking at the party with you’: Pivotal Moments in Katherine Mansfield's Party Stories
- 5 Virginia Woolf's Idea of a Party
- 6 Proustian Peristalsis: Parties Before, During and After
- 7 ‘Ezra through the open door’: The Parties of Natalie Barney, Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach as Lesbian Modernist Cultural Production
- 8 ‘Indeed everybody did come’: Parties, Publicity and Intimacy in Gertrude Stein's Plays
- 9 The Interracial Party of Modernist Primitivism and the Black ‘After-Party’
- 10 The Party In Extremis in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love
- 11 Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club
- 12 ‘Pleasure too often repeated’: Aldous Huxley's Modernity
- Index
11 - Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- A Note of Thanks
- The Guest List
- Introduction: A Welcome from the Host
- 1 ‘The dinner was indeed quiet’: Domestic Parties in the Work of Joseph Conrad
- 2 Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea
- 3 Party Joyce: From the ‘Dead’ to When We ‘Wake’
- 4 ‘Looking at the party with you’: Pivotal Moments in Katherine Mansfield's Party Stories
- 5 Virginia Woolf's Idea of a Party
- 6 Proustian Peristalsis: Parties Before, During and After
- 7 ‘Ezra through the open door’: The Parties of Natalie Barney, Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach as Lesbian Modernist Cultural Production
- 8 ‘Indeed everybody did come’: Parties, Publicity and Intimacy in Gertrude Stein's Plays
- 9 The Interracial Party of Modernist Primitivism and the Black ‘After-Party’
- 10 The Party In Extremis in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love
- 11 Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club
- 12 ‘Pleasure too often repeated’: Aldous Huxley's Modernity
- Index
Summary
The English dramatist Ashley Dukes wrote in The Scene Is Changed (1942) that immediately before the First World War he frequented the Café Royal on Regent Street in London, where, with such artists as Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Christopher Nevinson and Robert Bevan, among others, he would talk ‘about the world, the inevitability of war, Marinetti's futurism or Ezra Pound's verse, or the paper that Wyndham Lewis was bringing out called Blast’. This ‘lucky’ time, as Dukes put it, of intermingling artists and impresarios sharply contrasted with the world to come after 1918, a world ambivalently characterised by ‘deliverance and freedom’ but also by ‘unrest’, with the years of 1919–20 in particular being ‘a time of impatience, of protest, [and] of action that threatened many abrupt and even violent issues’. Like Ford Madox Ford, who claimed in Return to Yesterday (1931) that those ‘who cannot remember London’ in 1914 ‘do not know what life holds’, and who in 1921 wrote about ‘the groans of the Body-Politic’ and marvelled at the rifeness of despair in a ‘State not immediately menaced by Fire, Famine, Pestilence or Strife in Arms’, Dukes remembered this collective cultural life as something that would never again be recaptured. This was so not least because many of its central personalities (Gaudier-Brzeska and T. E. Hulme among them) would be killed in the First World War, but also because the socio-cultural conditions which allowed that collective life to emerge would never again materialise in quite the same fashion.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Modernist Party , pp. 192 - 209Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013