Failure and Integrity

Modernist Studies Association Conference
Victoria, 2010

This paper examines the emblematic performance of integrity in an unsuccessful, declining modernist career, that of the poet and parodist Henry Savage. Any look in early twentieth century anthologies will show writers with Savage’s career trajectory — the career of the once-plausible poet. Young at the beginning of modernism, Savage was doing unimpeachable if unremarkable work. Although he had some initial modest success (“almost as good as Heine,” Ford Madox Ford claimed), he became aware of his slipping status quite early on. At this moment Savage writes parodies of Spoon River Anthology, in which he performs his integrity in a series of startling moments of denunciation. (Parody’s duplicity typically doesn’t lend itself to these articulated moments of integrity; it offers instead a generalizable point of origin that has integrity, one that is signaled by moments of exaggerated characteristics. Parody’s integrity typically surfaces as an implicit contrast.) As are most gestures of integrity, however, Savage’s parody is about a contrast, in this case about a refusal to participate in the “damnably easy“ work of modernism. Integrity (as it was for many high moderns) is understood as about resistance to power, fashion, and the pernicious aspects of mass culture.

Following these parodies come thirty years of artistic failure, of Savage being unable to find a publisher for his work. Seeing the end of his life approaching, in 1946 Savage self-published a final collection of his work, prefacing it with an analysis of his failed career that is defiant, unwittingly hilarious, and touching — and a curious performance of integrity. Savage sees his residual status as a sign of his integrity, and modernism has become reconceptualized from being a producer of lightweight and fizzy texts to an institution of power, a movement that denies access. Savage presents his public failures as a series of emblematic moments that demonstrate his integrity. With a series of allusions that ally him with the eternal values of literature, Savage argues that his integrity is demonstrated in his repeated resistance, over time, to modernism’s power. And Savage shows integrity by publishing these poems, an act which he hopes will prevent, in the far future, “some perhaps unpleasant person” from “benefit[ing] by them excessively” by “discovering” Savage’s unjustly neglected merits, and basing a career on them.