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KEVIN JACKSON AND MODERNISM: CONSTELLATIONS OF GENIUS
Kevin Jackson died this week, suddenly and unexpectedly. It was a tragic loss; he was a unique polymath in the English arts scene, of whom I was aware through his editing of Anthony Burgess’ poems and his remarkable book Schrader on Schrader, about the film writer and director. We began communicating on social media through mutual friends; a number of potential meetings were all scuttled by problems with travel, schedules and lately Covid. It helped that five years ago, in January 2016, I wrote an appreciation of his book about modernism for my Irresistible Targets blog. The book, as you will see, meant a lot to me and was indeed my best-of-the-year choice from 2015, and might have been so in any year. I reprint it here, with a few small changes. RIP Moose.
My favourite book of 2015 was Kevin Jackson’s Constellation Of Genius, which was published in 2012 but my being me, I caught up to it only this summer. It’s subtitled 1922: Modernism And All That Jazz and it is basically a diary of the year which Jackson says was the start of a new age. Or rather, Ezra Pound said it, calling 1922 year one ‘post scriptum Ulixi’ or ‘after the writing of Ulysses’. Of course, Pound’s new epoch soon was subsumed in his enthusiasm for Mussolini, but that’s a different constellation.
In his introduction Jackson acknowledges that what we think of as modernism actually arises over a period of time that began nearly two decades earlier, but because his view is predominantly literary, and predominantly Anglo-centric, 1922 makes sense, bracketed as it were by James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land. 1922 was also the year William Carlos Williams, in America, published Spring And All, revolutionary in its own way, but it passes without notice here.
But the book is not designed as an argument; it is an unfolding of a year presented as an outflowing of ideas, and as such becomes a joy to follow. It created a dilemma for me as a reader: should I keep it handy to simply dip into bit by bit, entranced by its surprises and welcoming its invitations to make connections and reconsider our perceptions of art? Or should I just surrender to the momentum of the calendar, and read along in a flurry of excitement? How many books do you read these days that create excitement? The same sort that reading Ulysses for…
