The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites & Public Culture by Lawrence Rainey
John O'Brien

Lawrence Rainey. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites & Public Culture. Yale Univ. Press, 1999. 240 pp. $25.00.

This is the second book within the last two years I have read that attempts to explain modernism (“high modernism,” that is) via money/investment/patrons. Rainey’s book is smarter and more precise than Who Paid for Modernism?, but it is also more subversive for its smartness and precision. Unlike the former, this book holds back its accusations until the evidence has been gathered, and then the hammer falls on the motives of Pound, Joyce, Eliot, H. D., et al. I don’t want to inspect the rightness or wrongness of what Rainey argues but rather guess at where all of this is leading. Both books’ subtext is that modernism purposely cut itself off from the “public,” and both say that it did so as a kind of marketing tool: if you can’t interest a million readers in your book and thereby become wealthy, then go after ten people with money who both appreciate the work and also see it as a solid investment. The modernists are at long last exposed! It’s all about money! They and their patrons were in pursuit of money—the same motives as the popular artist—but the patrons were willing to wait a generation for the payoff, and besides they got to go to better parties and mix with the right people. Underlying all of this is a populist axe to grind: that the People get left out, the Public is bewildered and prevented from entering the discourse, and the Common Man (who was it who said that the thing about the Common Man is that he is common?) had no access to this art. So something is afoot here and one should always be wary when “the public” is used to argue almost anything. I do not know whether these books (and no doubt articles and books to come) have an agenda of putting the last nail in modernism’s coffin or are somehow a response to the theory-based exclusivity now present in academia (e.g., “Anything and everything is a fucking text but only we are privileged to be able to decode it”) or, at least in the United States, a resurgence on the part of government to make art synonymous with mass consumption or perhaps commercial publishing’s way of authenticating best-sellers and why the public (incidentally urged on by publishers’ enormous marketing budgets to position their books before Oprah’s eyes) should decide what art is.
In his introduction Rainey anticipates the criticism that the works themselves are not discussed and responds with: “I reject the idea that history or theory are acceptable only if they take on the role of humble handmaiden to the aesthetic artifact.” In other words art is out there to fend for itself: fine. But Rainey’s book and its argument are in themselves establishing a handmaiden relationship, one in which writers’ nasty economic motives are inspected and the work itself made irrelevant (of course, of course). I suppose the subject of whether patrons allowed for the development of a certain kind of art (namely, that Pound was able to do what he wanted rather than having to worry about a popular audience) is passingly interesting, but then so are any number of other subjects that bear on these issues: agents; friends who help friends get published; the advantage of being published by a large commercial house; universities employing writers, and on and on. Each of these factors has some bearing on the production, accessibility, popularity, and “importance” of writers, books, and movements, but ultimately have little or nothing to do with quality (a naughty word, I know) of what results. I would rather use a lotto method for determining such things than to depend upon the public, though I would prefer the public to, for instance, the New York Times Book Review. [John O’Brien]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites & Public Culture by Lawrence Rainey John O'Brien Lawrence Rainey. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites & Public Culture. Yale Univ. Press, 1999. 240 pp. $25.00. This is the second book within the last two years I have read that attempts to explain modernism (“high modernism,” that is) via money/investment/patrons. Rainey’s book is smarter and more precise than Who Paid for Modernism?, but it is also more subversive for its smartness and precision. Unlike the former, this book holds back its accusations until the evidence has been gathered, and then the hammer falls on the motives of Pound, Joyce, Eliot, H. D., et al. I don’t want to inspect the rightness or wrongness of what Rainey argues but rather guess at where all of this is leading. Both books’ subtext is that modernism purposely cut itself off from the “public,” and both say that it did so as a kind of marketing tool: if you can’t interest a million readers in your book and thereby become wealthy, then go after ten people with money who both appreciate the work and also see it as a solid investment. The modernists are at long last exposed! It’s all about money! They and their patrons were in pursuit of money—the same motives as the popular artist—but the patrons were willing to wait a generation for the payoff, and besides they got to go to better parties and mix with the right people. Underlying all of this is a populist axe to grind: that the People get left out, the Public is bewildered and prevented from entering the discourse, and the Common Man (who was it who said that the thing about the Common Man is that he is common?) had no access to this art. So something is afoot here and one should always be wary when “the public” is used to argue almost anything. I do not know whether these books (and no doubt articles and books to come) have an agenda of putting the last nail in modernism’s coffin or are somehow a response to the theory-based exclusivity now present in academia (e.g., “Anything and everything is a fucking text but only we are privileged to be able to decode it”) or, at least in the United States, a resurgence on the part of government to make art synonymous with mass consumption or perhaps commercial publishing’s way of authenticating best-sellers and why the public (incidentally urged on by publishers’ enormous marketing budgets to position their books before Oprah’s eyes) should decide what art is. In his introduction Rainey anticipates the criticism that the works themselves are not discussed and responds with: “I reject the idea that history or theory are acceptable only if they take on the role of humble handmaiden to the aesthetic artifact.” In other words art is out there to fend for itself: fine. But Rainey’s book and its argument are in themselves establishing a handmaiden relationship, one in which writers’ nasty economic motives are inspected and the work itself made irrelevant (of course, of course). I suppose the subject of whether patrons allowed for the development of a certain kind of art (namely, that Pound was able to do what he wanted rather than having to worry about a popular audience) is passingly interesting, but then so are any number of other subjects that bear on these issues: agents; friends who help friends get published; the advantage of being published by a large commercial house; universities employing writers, and on and on. Each of these factors has some bearing on the production, accessibility, popularity, and “importance” of writers, books, and movements, but ultimately have little or nothing to do with quality (a naughty word, I know) of what results. I would rather use a lotto method for determining such things than to depend upon the public, though I would prefer the public to, for instance, the New York Times Book Review. [John O’Brien]

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