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.
