Marsden Hartley's Light Figures

r d n H rtl L ht F r

J t N l nd

Modernism/modernity, Volume 11, Number 4, November 2004, pp.621-650 (Article)

P bl h d b J hn H p n n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/mod.2005.0013

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NIELAND / marsden hartley’s light figures

621

MODERNISM / modernity

VOLUME ELEVEN, NUMBER

FOUR, PP 621–650.

© 2004 THE JOHNS

HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS

Justus Nieland is an

Assistant Professor of

English at Michigan

State University. This

essay is part of his book

in progress on

modernism, popular

performance, and

emotion in the public

sphere.

Marsden Hartley’s Light Figures

Justus Nieland

Indulge me in this undernarrated episode in the long historyof modernist caprice. During the summer of 1943, MarsdenHartley made a visit to Madison Square Garden to catch“Spangles,” a one-ring circus mounted by the Ringling Broth-ers. In early August, he wrote to his young friend Richard Sisson,an Army sergeant stationed in New York, asking him if he hadseen this “darling show” with a white horse that looked like “apage out of Wm. Blake’s prophetic books.”1 Hartley, who woulddie just a month later, also explained that he was putting thefinishing touches on his circus book, titled first Circus and later,more showily, Elephants and Rhinestones: A Book of Circus Val-ues. In this unfinished project, the aging Hartley would fulfill alongstanding desire to develop “the idea of acrobatics,” and to“make [himself] historian for these . . . esthetes of muscularmelody,” for whom “life is but one long day in which to makebeautiful their bodies, and make joyful the eyes of those wholove to look at them!”2 And so, sixty-six years old, with sore jointsand an ailing heart, Hartley returns to the place under the bigtop where his eyes can best get their fill: “I make the awful as-cent by the stairways, alas no elevators in the circus, and when Ihave achieved this exhausting feat, I am thoroughly at home.”3

This, the habitué’s accustomed seat (“section twenty five or six”),is the very apex of pleasure: “I always have wanted to be oppo-site the flying trapeze,” he claims, because “this is the act of allacts that I care for most . . . it is these artists who have alwaysgiven me the most” (C2, 2; C1, 1).

The precise nature of the acrobat’s gift is elusive but of cru-cial import for our understanding of modernism’s broad reper-toire of feeling in the public sphere, as well as of the political

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M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y

622 asymmetries informing such affective modes. In exploring the nexus of affect and pub-licity in Hartley’s work, I join the critical effort better to understand—but not simplyto recuperate—the place of sentiment in modernism and the politico-ethical positionssuch feeling might entail. Hartley’s work not only troubles still-current gendered tru-isms about “(masculine) modernism’s programmatic antisentimentalism, its ironic de-tachment from love,”4 but urges us to consider the exoteric structuring of modernistaffects within and across a dynamic and reflexive public sphere: here, for example,through the spectacular performances that so fascinated modernists.5 Indeed, Hartley’smisty-eyed attachment to acrobats is not just feeling but theory, a matter of desire andits negotiation, an attempt to think a form of public intimacy (“the idea of acrobatics”)premised, I will argue, not on a plummy fantasy of unmediated connection, nor aHabermasian “audience-oriented” intimacy that would train the subject to participatein rational-critical and market exchanges, but rather on a kind of subjective detach-ment produced by spectacle.

In his sustained connoisseurship of the private dimension of popular performance,of course, Hartley was not alone, but the stakes of his articulation of public intimacy,like the closely related terms of its conception—embodiment, vision, exteriorized de-tachment—were clearly overdetermined by his homosexuality and its own fraught figu-ration within contemporary aesthetic and sexological discourse.6 In this sense, Hartley’sattempt to think intimacy through itinerant public spectacles like the circus also reso-nates within the discourse of queer publicness, of homosexual intimacies in the publicsphere.7 At the risk of drawing too easy or anachronistic an analogy between Hartley’smodernist thing for acrobats and contemporary queer politics, we might say thatHartley’s acrobatic investments were attempts to imagine and legitimate, but not overlypublicize, a fugitive mode of idealized relation. If not true intersubjectivity, this proxi-mate grammar—constructed of figures both corporeal and linguistic—flickers betweenintimacy and publicity, social attachment and detachment, emotive personalism andspectacular disembodiment, surfacing both in Hartley’s painting and in his writing inthe form of what I call, after Hartley, the acrobat’s “light figure.” In what follows, Itrace the graceful utility of these figures and their attendant grammar: as their condi-tions of possibility emerge in the “age of blood and iron” of Wilhelmine Berlin, as theymediate Hartley’s tenuous relationship to New York dada and the Stieglitz circle in the1920s, and as they make their final, most eloquent performance in Elephants andRhinestones.

I. Feeling Outward

As Hartley saw it, the intimacy achieved by the truly light figure entailed a percep-tual attunement to a larger plurality, the “hobnobbing with the universe” to which hewas privy both on the streets of bohemian Paris and in that—for him—flagrant inte-rior of Gertrude Stein’s salon: “[Y]ou had much, in all human ways, out of an eveningthere . . . you had the quality of yourself and others, a kind of William James intimacy,which, as everyone knows, is style bringing the universe of ideas to your door in terms

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623of your own sensations” (AIA, 195).8 Like James, Hartley insisted on the complex beautyof a world of difference composed of “innumerable unforetold particulars,” but ac-cessed ultimately through individual perceptual experience, the “stuff of which every-thing is made.”9 Hartley put it thus in his essay “Concerning Fairy Tales and Me”:

I am related to the world by the way I feel attached to the life of it as exemplified in thevividness of the moment. I am, by reason of my peculiar personal experience, enabled toextract the magic from the moment, discarding the material husk of it precisely as thesquirrel does the shell of the nut.

I am preoccupied with the business of transmutation—which is to say, theproper evaluation of life as idea, of experience as delectable diversion. (AIA, 8)

“Experience as delectable diversion.” This logic seems simple enough: the more vividthe moment, the more bound to life one becomes; the more entrancing the spectacle,the stronger the attachment between the spectator and the heterogeneous splendor ofoutside life. And yet this moment of attunement is also figured as a separation of sorts,a discarding of the “material husk” of experience in the moment of “delectable diver-sion.” As Hartley explains this tension in an essay on the “new kind of poetic diversion”in the work of Emily Dickinson, a kind of “sublime, impertinent playfulness” is achievedthrough a “celestial attachedness, or must we call it detachedness” (AIA, 200). Here,Hartley offers us a decidedly modernist category, “experience,” that remains strangelyunrecognizable. This kind of feeling outward, we might say, is Jamesian insofar as itsvehicle is the perceiving individual, but decidedly un-Jamesian in its centrifugal move-ment away from the “private and the personal” and toward the “cosmic and the gen-eral,” in its seeming departure from the true self whose geometric locus James onceidentified at “the innermost center of the circle.”10 For Hartley, as for Walter Ben-jamin and the Frankfurt School tradition more broadly, “experience” is a conceptual“hinge between consciousness and world, inside and outside, monadic subject andcommunity,” but there is no mourning here of the eclipse of genuine Erfahrung byenervated Erlebnis.11 Nor is “diversion” a compensatory perceptual mode, as “distrac-tion” is in Benjamin’s and Siegfried Kracauer’s formulations.12 Conceptually speaking,diversion is delicious, rich with tasty antinomies Hartley toys with but refuses to re-solve: the senses exist in a state of heightened receptivity and diversion simultaneously,and experience radiates away from the individual, yet remains rooted in private delec-tation.

These erotic dynamics materialized early in Hartley’s career in the streets ofWilhelmine Berlin, where the painter moved from Paris after befriending the Germansculptor Arnold Rönnebeck. As Hartley explained in his autobiography, the spectacleof the Kaiser’s parade renewed his “love for any kind of pageantry, all coming fromearly boyhood and . . . the coming of the circus to Lewiston”; in the “voluptuous ten-sion” of prewar Berlin, Hartley “at last could have all [he] wanted of crowd paradepageantry public glamour and the like” (SP, 87, 86, 90). Located within thisunpunctuated chain of figures for publicness that joins cherished moments from

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624 Hartley’s boyhood to the urban present of martial modernity, the Kaiser’s parade andthe “real Barnum circus” code and cross-reference each other. What Hartley conjures,as a result, is less a glib militarism that conflates war and play than a potent and por-table fantasy of spectatorial release, of the joyous and intimate dynamic of “feelingoutward” mobilized, in this instance, by the martial scene: “I could always know that Iwas quite like other people when I was with a lot of people. [The crowd] would takeme out and make me feel outward and that has always been necessary—for it is a verybad thing to live inside so much—as no one has learned better than myself” (SP, 90).In this, Hartley’s riff on the “man of the crowd,” Charles Baudelaire’s dandy fails toconfirm his heroic individualism; Georg Simmel’s “blasé” metropolitan man finds him-self suddenly, erotically resensitized.13 Most importantly, the sensual publicity occa-sioned by the Kaiser’s parade satisfies the expatriate’s need “to feel outward” in a waythat manages to be both common (it reminds him that he “was quite like most otherpeople”) and intimate (it makes him “feel at home”) at once.14 Thus, this scene isremarkable not because it reworks a familiar trope of modern sociality, or, more lo-cally, a common swerve in Hartley’s career from inwardness to exteriority and public-ity, but rather because it marks an instance in which these distinctions collapse: amoment of intimate pleasure that Hartley would repeatedly seek in public spaces—inmusic halls, at the Kaiser’s parade, or near the trapeze.15

Hartley realized early on that this dynamic of “feeling outward” mobilized by pub-lic spectacle required a specific kind of body. In Berlin, the movement from the pri-vate to the cosmic was occasioned by the nation’s thoroughly aestheticized military-political regime, embodied in the “Kaiser’s special guard—all in white,” andmemorialized in Hartley’s The Warriors (1913; fig. 1; SP, 90). Hartley was overcomeby the “flair and perfection” of the guard and, by extension, of the thoroughly martialGerman nation, whose “spick and spanness” and “cleanliness” in “the order of life[Hartley] had never witnessed anywhere” (SP, 86). An homage to this order, The War-riors mirrors it with a perfectly balanced composition and, at the painting’s edges, asymmetrical dispersal of the soldiers within an abstracted field. The celestial, etherealplacement of these bodies as they march toward the setting sun (and thus, as Hartleyexplains, toward their deaths) makes clear that these are bodies en route to becomingGeist, political myth: “A real ecstasy for war is the only modern religious ecstasy—Theonly means of displaying the old time martyrdom—one shall not forget their hand-some smiling faces going by—waving hands, throwing kisses and shouting aufWiedersehen.”16

Seemingly celestial, these handsome bodies are not yet truly light figures; morepedantic than playful, they offer a hard lesson in the costs of a spectacular attachment,and one that energizes Hartley’s formulation of public intimacy. Critics tend to agreethat The Warriors marks Hartley’s “first significant figurative effort” in an early careermarked by a reluctance to treat the human form;17 further, this figuration carried anespecially intense private charge for Hartley, who had fallen for Germany’s militarism,its liberated Leibeskultur,18 and its relatively tolerant atmosphere toward homosexual-ity as he fell for a specific soldier, Lieutenant von Freyburg (Rönnebeck’s cousin), who

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would die in the Great War in 1914. Given these personal attachments and the power-ful associations between the German military and homosexuality in the early decadesof the twentieth century, The Warriors works as a thoroughly spectacular index of privatefeeling.19 Further, this exteriorization of intimacy—anchored in the mystico-spiritual-ist theories then fueling German artistic culture—implies an untroubled correspon-dence between formal exterior and subjective interior, a “heavy figure” that resur-faces, in intensely gendered terms, in the aesthetic theories of Stieglitz-circle critics.20

If Hartley increasingly turns—as I argue below—to the light figures that confoundsuch easy trafficking between surface and depth, the War Motif series—begun in 1914,as a memorial to von Freyburg—lays the conceptual groundwork for these figures’emergence. These paintings, including Portrait of a German Officer (1914; fig. 2) andPainting No. 47 (fig. 3), mark a salient departure from the The Warriors’s unchecked

▲

Fig. 1. The Warriors, 1913. Oil on canvas, 47 1/2 x 47 1/4 in. Private Collection, Courtesy Salander-O’Reilly

Galleries, New York.

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626

Fig. 2. Portrait of a German Officer, 1914.

Oil on canvas, 68 º x 41 3/8 in. The

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred

Stieglitz Collection, 1949. (49.70.42)

Fig. 3. Painting No. 47, Berlin, 1914-15. Oil on

canvas, 39 º x 31 5/8 in. Hirshhorn Museum

and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian

Institution. Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn,

1972. Photograph by Lee Stalsworth.

▲

▲

rhapsody of an ecstatic collectivity that depends upon public bodies poised in martialorchestration and political sublimation. Though Hartley would publicly disavow anypersonal symbolism in these paintings, his friend Rönnebeck decoded some of theimagery: von Freyburg’s initials, his age at death (twenty-four), the Iron Cross he re-ceived for his acts in battle. These symbols are superimposed on the trappings of theGerman military such that the flat collages scan anthropomorphically, recalling thelost totality of von Freyburg’s body through a quasi-cubist fragmentation (SV, 152).The disfigurement and death that Hartley could romanticize, prior to von Freyburg’sown, as a kind of martyrdom are, these paintings suggest, the cost of the spectacularbody dangerously attached to a larger totality. For here, von Freyburg’s body is liter-ally all spectacle, dispersed into a field of military signs in a manner bespeaking notspiritual triumph but the painful absence of a body. But for Hartley, the recalcitrantexteriority of the painting is quite useful. Two of Hartley’s more astute critics, notingthis strategic disembodiment, have emphasized the “elaborate veiling, layering, andmasking of identity” undertaken in these images, and suggested how Hartley “keep[s]desire at bay” here by withholding the physical body of his lover, how he diffuseshomosexual desire “through the multiple masks of literary obfuscation, abstract style,encoding, and death.” (PGCT, 179; SV, 161≠, 162). The implications of this techniquecan be drawn even more sharply: these paintings demonstrate Hartley’s investment insurpassing the dichotomies of private and public, interiority and exteriority. As such,Hartley’s lesson in the excesses of ecstatic intimacy in the War Motif series becomes anascent theory of public intimacy: at once all sign and hushed, the paintings suggesthow Hartley’s attachment to corporeal glamour—of the Prussian guard, of Barnumand Bailey—was premised on detachment: on spectacle’s ability to absent the selfrather than present it.

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627II. “Vivacious Hobbyhorse”

In 1921, in the crossfire of the American avant-garde’s reigning aesthetic and cor-poreal paradigms—the Stieglitz Circle and dada’s New York avatar—Hartley publishedhis first book of criticism, Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaude-ville, and Poets. Over and against New York dada’s cerebral and detached treatment ofthe commodified, mass-produced body, Alfred Stieglitz promulgated what MarciaBrennan has recently dubbed “embodied formalism,” a “general discursive tendency”swirling around those artists (Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, John Marin, and moreperipherally, Charles Demuth and Hartley) whom Stieglitz promoted as part of hiscall for an organic American art, freed from Puritan repression and continental effete-ness (PGCT, 8).21 This tendency, Brennan argues, was rooted in a model of“aestheticized, integrated selfhood” in which abstract and symbolic forms were under-stood by painters and their critics alike as transparent, sublimated “analogues of theartists’ own gendered presences,” and “no divisions obtained between the subject’sbody, their spirit, and the world around them” (PGCT, 43, 3, 43).

Hartley’s Adventures is literally framed by these discourses: it begins with an intro-duction by Waldo Frank, Stieglitz’s friend and champion, ends with Hartley’s essay,“The Importance of Being ‘Dada,’” and is filled in between with a range of essays onpainting, poetry, film, and performance, all penned in Hartley’s quirky style—witty,epigrammatic, and relentlessly Emersonian in its elliptical manner. Frank’s openingsalvo presents the author as itinerant, various, and profoundly intimate; his essays are“chronicles not so much [of] these actual worlds as his own pleasure of them. They arebut mirrors, many-shaped and lighted, for his own delicate, incisive humor.”22 Yet theyare also, by virtue of their critical publicity, a form of embodiment:

When the creator turns critic, we are in the presence of a consummation: we have acomplete experience: we have a sort of sacrament. For to the intrusion of the world heinterposes his own body. In his art, the creator’s body would be itself intrusion. The artistis too humble and too sane to break the ecstatic flow of vision with his personal form. Thetrue artist despises the personal as an end. He makes fluid, and distills his personal form.He channels it beyond himself to a Unity which of course contains it. But Criticism isnothing which is not the sheer projection of the body. The artist turns Self into a universalForm: but the critic reduces Form to Self. Criticism is to the artist the intrusion, in a formirreducible to art, of the body of the world. What can he do but interpose his own?23

Notice here how Frank figures the act of criticism—the sheer projection of the bodyinto the world—as a secularized transubstantiation, one that reverses the centrifugalmovement of aesthetic production from private to cosmic, forcing Hartley-as-criticback into a personalism and, by extension, a body whose publicity Hartley found in-creasingly dangerous in the wake of the war’s carnage. While this frame is in keepingwith Frank’s relentless stumping throughout the 1920s for a corporeal nativism inAmerican art, it sits awkwardly around the variegated essays of Adventures, whichbounce nervously between the competing charms of corporeality and intellection,personalism and detachment, intimacy and publicity.24 As exercises in taste, then, these

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628 critical essays entail not just, as Frank explains, the “sheer projection of a body,” butalso, as Joseph Litvak puts it in a slightly different register, the queer projection of anexcessive desire—a sophistication that seems suspiciously “impure, contaminated fromthe outset by a desiring, and thus disgusting, body” within a culture wherein gay men“have traditionally functioned as objects of such distinguished epistemological andrhetorical aggressions as urbanity and knowingness.”25 As an adventure in queer so-phistication, Hartley’s critical delectation stands not—as Frank would have it—in op-position to the “actual” world, but as its very contested terrain; here, Hartley’s indul-gence in circus matters, like the mode of intimacy these spectacles occasion, is asexcessive as it is expertly controlled.

The terms of these dialectics are established in “Whitman and Cézanne,” for Hartley,the “two most notable innovators” in poetry and painting, alike in “esthetic intention”but divided by their “concepts of, and their attitudes toward life”: “For the one, lifewas a something to stay close to always, for the other, it was something to be afraid ofalmost to an abnormal degree; Whitman and his door never closed, Cézanne and hisdoor seldom or never opened, indeed, were heavily padlocked against the intrusion ofthe imaginary outsider” (AIA, 30, 32). Hartley nevertheless notes that Whitman’s open-door policy fueled a corporeal extensiveness that was

at one and the same time his virtue and his defect. For mystical reasons, it was imperativefor him to include all things in himself. . . . That he could leave nothing out was, it may besaid, his strongest esthetical defect, for it is by esthetical judgment that we choose andbring together those elements as we conceive it. . . . So that it is the tendency in Whitmanto catalogue in detail the entire obvious universe that makes many of his pages a strain onthe mind as well as on the senses, and the eye especially. (AIA, 34)

With this critique of Whitmanesque publicity comes an important revision of the termsof spectacle: in imperial Berlin, Hartley’s eye is insatiable, overcome by stimuli fromthe outside, ecstatic with the pleasure of an exteriorized self made intimate with theuniverse: “The coming face to face with so much life and art all at once—was all butblinding—but I have blue eyes and blue eyes can take in all things and not be dis-turbed by them—except to be extatically [sic] disturbed—which is their way of beingpassionate” (SP, 90). Now, he seems suspicious of the moment of self-absenting that—in the Emersonian and Whitmanesque model—enlarges the appetite of a gluttonous“I.” These “primitives” have “voiced most of all the imperative need of essential per-sonalism, of direct expression out of direct experience, with an eye to nothing butquality and proportion” (AIA, 36). Whitman’s limitation, then, is not his personalism,but the centrifugal movement of his senses. The excesses of the mystical eye, we mightsay, must be chastened by the kind of discrimination and taste found in Cézanne: “It isthe mark of good taste to reject that which is unessential, and the ‘tact of omission,’well exemplified in Cézanne, has been found excellently axiomatic” (AIA, 34).

For the training of the newly tractable eye, and for an example of the controlledrelations such sight, and such spectacles, occasion, Hartley turns to the popular per-formances of vaudeville and the circus in three thematically related essays: “The Twi-

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629light of the Acrobat,” “Vaudeville,” and “A Charming Equestrienne,” all written be-tween 1917 and 1920. Musing wistfully on the acrobat’s “aesthetic” death as “Twilight”opens, Hartley pouts that in contemporary variety “everything seems tuxedoed fordrawing room purposes,” and blames this loathsome state on “the so-called politeness. . . of the elimination of our once revered acrobats. The circus notion has been re-placed by the parlor entertainment notion” (AIA, 156, 158).26 The “variety that wasonce a joy is now a bore,” and the “habitual patron can no longer endure the offeringsof the present time with a degree of pleasure, much less with ease” (AIA, 160). SoHartley promptly calls for “the re-creation of variety into something more conduciveto light pleasure for the eye,” heralding the “return of the acrobat in a more moderndress” (AIA, 160). What Hartley has in mind

for instance, [is] a young and attractive girl bareback rider on a cantering white horseinscribing wondrous circles upon a stage exquisitely in harmony with herself and herwhite or black horse as the case may be; a rich cloth of gold backdrop carefully suffusedwith rose. There could be nothing handsomer, for example, than young and gracefultrapezists swinging melodically in turquoise blue doublets against a fine peacock back-ground or it might be a rich pale coral—all the artificial and spectacular ornament dis-pensed with. (AIA, 159)27

Wishing aloud, in vain, for a “Beardsley of the stage,” a messianic set designer whomight best frame his scopic pleasure, Hartley will go it alone, indulging in hypotheticalfancy: the acrobats “need first of all large plain spaces upon which to perform, andenjoy their own remarkably devised patterns of body” (AIA, 163, 162–3).28 This enjoy-ment is both the performer’s narcissistic self-enjoyment as spectacle (the equestri-enne “exquisitely in harmony with herself”) and, paradoxically, a spectatorial pleasurepremised on “intimacy with the beauty” of the performer, which Hartley would inten-sify, in his example, by relocating the Brothers Rath acrobats to the coveted center ofthe bill (AIA, 163). And it is this scene’s paradoxical nature—the way the performers’theatricalized isolation heightens spectatorial intimacy—that pleases Hartley. The in-timacy it imagines between the acrobat’s body and the spectator’s eye is mediated bybeauty, made tractable by framing, orchestration, and discernment. In this way, whenHartley’s fantasies of orchestration seem most excessive they are, in fact, the mostcontrolled, the most tasteful, and thus, the most delightful.29

Indeed, while Hartley decries the enervating ornamentation of higher vaudeville,his own set design nevertheless goes for baroque:

I want a Metropolitan Opera for my project. An orchestra of that size for the larger con-certed groups, numbers of stringed instruments for the wirewalkers and jugglers, a seriesof balanced woodwinds for others, and so on down the line, according to the quality ofthe performer. There should be a large stage for many elephants, ponies, dogs, tigers,seals. The stage should then be made more intimate for the solos, duets, trios, and quar-tets among the acrobats. I think a larger public should be made more aware of the beautyand skill of these people, who spend their lives in perfecting grace and power of body,creating the always fascinating pattern and form, orchestration if you will, the orchestra-tion of the muscles into a complete whole. (AIA, 164)

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630 Another fantasy of drilled figures, this dream recalls the Kaiser’s parade, the drama ofsublimated bodies whose exposure, in von Freyburg’s case, promises politico-spiritualtotality but ends in death and loss. Hartley himself draws the mnemonic links betweenthis playful project of corporeal orchestration and a historical moment of prewar eroticplenitude in “A Charming Equestrienne,” when he dates his “happiest memories” ofcircus expression, of the “artists of bodily vigor, of muscular melody” to “the streets ofParis before the war, the incomparably lovely fêtes. Only the sun knows where thesedear artists may be now” (AIA, 176, 175, 176). (In fact, the language here anticipateshis later description of The Warriors in his autobiography who, remember, “went outinto the sun and didn’t come back.”)30 Thus, Hartley’s circus fantasy is both nostalgic,harking back to a prelapsarian, prewar intimacy, and strategic, remembering eroticfullness within the controlled domain of “light pleasure for the eye” (AIA, 160).

More than just the fruit of Hartley’s erotic investment in the acrobat’s body, inti-macy (again, of a decidedly tractable sort) provides the foundation of what he calls the“idea of acrobatics”: the functionality of the acrobat both as a body viewed and as amode of embodiment, a visible object of “light pleasure” and a figure of proximaterelation. Consider, for example, Hartley’s rendering in the “Vaudeville” essay of anespecially striking “acrobatic novelty” in “The Legroh’s” act: “This ‘Legroh’ knows howto make a superb pattern with his body, and the things he does with it are done withsuch ease and skill as to make you forget the actual physical effort and you are lost forthe time being in the beauty of this muscular kaleidoscopic brilliancy. You feel it is likea ‘puzzle—find the man,’ for a time” (AIA, 171–2). Offering the performative versionof the same “puzzle” of the War Motif series, the acrobat’s skill is his ability to trace apattern so spectacular that it absents the performer, whose humanity (find the man!)transforms into “lovely flower and animal forms,” or even more abstractly, into “everchanging ever shifting bits of colour” and pattern (AIA, 172). This loss is doubled inthe spectator, whose purely visual pleasure unburdens him of thought as “the tum-bling blocks of the brain . . . fall into heaps”: “You have no chance for the fatigue ofproblem [sic]. You are at rest as far as thinking is concerned. It is something for the eyefirst and last” (AIA, 172–3). The “idea of acrobatics,” for Hartley, is oxymoronic, sincethis art jettisons ideation in both practitioner and spectator: “it is the art where thehuman mind is for once relieved of its stupidity. The acrobat is master of his body andhe lets his brain go a-roving upon other matters, if he has one” (AIA, 173). Issuingfrom the acrobat’s mindlessness (a state surely anathema to Duchamp and Picabia) isa silence that is itself useful for Hartley, suggestive of a Jamesian sociality: “He isexpected to be silent. He would agree with William James, transposing ‘music pre-vents thinking’ into ‘talking prevents silence.’ In so many instances, it prevents conver-sation. That is why I like tea chit-chat. Words are never meant to mean anything then.They are simply given legs and wings, and they jump and fly. They land where theycan, and fall flat if they must” (AIA, 173). The logic is seemingly paradoxical—talkingprevents silence and conversation—until we realize that Hartley is after a kind of talk-ing situated precisely on the seam of sociality. The privileged quiescence of the acro-bat hinges on a special, physical language that in becoming publicly embodied (like

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631the words that, in tea-talk, sprout appendages) is evacuated of heavy significance anddeep interiority. Unlike the more familiar mode of modernist impersonality as, forexample, T. S. Eliot defines it—wherein the poet detaches from the enervating imme-diacy of modern personation by finally embedding his language in the marrow of cul-tural tradition—Hartley depersonalizes in order to preserve less entangling interper-sonal connections, to facilitate more mobile, more tractable attachments.31 Hostile,like Eliot, to romantic notions of interiority, Harley idealizes a language whose light-ness enables an intersubjective condition at once flighty and controlled.32 Not saddledwith ponderous meaning, this tacit speech allows the agile ego to absent itself by be-coming entirely spectacular, relieved of semantic weightiness and, by extension, of theburden of corporeal transparency.

Given the logic of sexual transparency espoused by the Stieglitz circle, the terms ofPaul Rosenfeld’s review of Adventures fail to surprise.33 Picking up on the book’s campyostentation, Rosenfeld notes how “Hartley has striven to make his writing a superiorsort of talk, part of a seriously developed aesthetic of a spirit exquisitely civilized andurbane.”34 But he dismisses the “more simple, more slight, more fluffily iridescent”prose of Adventures as an attempt

to transcend the arid empty space about him by playing with bits of bright silk, curioustoys, heavy and fantastic flower-cups. Grace and charm and peacock-like magnificencehide and yet betray utter fatigue with never having really lived. Author and audience arein tacit conspiracy to fix their minds on some jolly and curious fragment of physical,unthinking life on “minstrels of muscular musical melody,” on girls who play ivory andsilver diamond-studded accordions, on the “brilliant excitation of the moment,” that theimmanence of death and corruption be forgotten.35

For Rosenfeld, Hartley’s dandified idiom is all small talk: it fixates on the unthinkingcorporeality of its subjects with a compensatory intensity that would transcend an un-derlying experiential sterility (the price, no doubt, of a bad object choice) or, in stillmore cowardly fashion, ignore the heavy reality of the exterior, the “immanence ofdeath and corruption.” In this reading, then, Hartley’s language hoists itself on its ownpetard: when it trains its attention on the physical, it is too light, its subject’s seemingcorporeality a mere pretext for unthinking detumescence.

Dismissing the book’s talkiness as the flaw of a gabby queer whose language andpigment are alike unmanned by a “vagabond libido,” Rosenfeld’s review misses thesubtleties of Hartley’s argument about language, especially as this communication isfigured through the acrobat, who may be dumb, but is never stupid.36 As Hartley laterframes it in “The Greatest Show on Earth,” he “puts his mind into his muscles and intohis eyes and he leaves purely cerebral concepts and words to their own natural futil-ity.”37 Intellect and language have not been abandoned, as Rosenfeld would assert, butare no longer purely cerebral—rather, they are embodied in a fashion that producestheir “exquisite speechlessness” (“GSE,” 88).38 As “bodies made intelligent as well asperfect,” Hartley’s acrobats model a synthesis of body and mind as well as the kind ofspectatorship predicated on this synthesis:

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632 With the proper training of the eyes to register shape and movement with intelligence,there will be no time for those inward dramas involving the tragedies of mankind. It iseyes, I believe, that must do the work of the world, eyes that must satisfy all aestheticneeds. Eyes that truly see and, seeing, transmit to the mind those impressions that makefor the sheer charm of existence, devoid of interpretation and confused commentary;eyes that really possess synthetically what they encounter; eyes that make emotional his-tory out of casual opportunity; what a rarity they are, even among artists! (“GSE,” 88, 33)

These eyes are the acrobat’s and, potentially, those of his spectators. And this passageis riddled with a series of paradoxes that surge from Hartley’s attempt to articulate thesort of intimacy this figure enacts with his viewer. On the one hand, the circus spec-tacle produces a simple distraction; its sensory intensity provides a diversion from“inward dramas” and “the sense of life’s disillusionments.” In this sense, à la Rosenfeld,the acrobat is simply a figure of detachment, and an occasion of the same in his viewer.But Hartley’s fantasy is more ambitious: the acrobat’s eyes are charged not just with“satisfying aesthetic needs” but also with the work of the material world. They arelinked to the mind but their semantic yield resists “interpretation and confused com-mentary.” They are attached to their object (they “possess synthetically what they en-counter”) and subject (they “make emotional history out of casual opportunity”). Assuch, they come to embody a Dickinsonian attached detachment, the conceptual cy-nosure of “experience as diversion.”

This experience, not surprisingly, is irresistible for Hartley, who concludes his essaywith yet another circus fantasy, and one that he can enjoy not just as spectator but asparticipant: “If there really is to be a Heaven hereafter, then let me go straight bypelican air service to that division of it set apart for the circus and go pellmell for therings and the bars, till I can join the splendid horde all turning and springing and flyingthrough the properly-roped spaces and merge myself in the fine pattern which thesesuperior artists make in what will no longer be ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’” (“GSE,”88). In this passage, with its characteristic mix of abandon and orchestrated restraint(the space of ecstasy must always be “properly-roped”), Hartley enacts his version ofdada as he formulates it in “The Importance of Being Dada,” Adventures’s final essay:“I ride my own hobby-horse away from the dangers of art which is with us a modernvice at present, into the wide expanse of magnanimous diversion from which I mayextract all the joyousness I am capable of from the patterns I encounter” (AIA, 251).This essay is not, as Brennan argues, a statement of “affiliation with the New YorkDada movement” that inaugurates Hartley’s growing disavowal of the personal.39 Noris it, as Rosenfeld would have it, a rhapsody of the “brilliant excitation of the moment”that trades fancy for life itself. Rather, Hartley’s understanding of dada as a kind ofcapricious individualism is neither Duchampian nor Picabian but itself highly capri-cious, a jejune misreading of the movement.40 Hartley is “a dada-ist because it is thenearest” he has come to “a scientific principle in existence,” a principle of fancifulenjoyment that is nevertheless outward-bound: “I have a hobby-horse therefore—toride away out into the world of intricate common experience; out into the arena withthose who know what the element of life itself is, and that I have become an expression

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633of the one issue in the mind worth the consideration of the artist, namely fluidic change”(AIA, 251).

This joyride remains controlled insofar as the experience finds Hartley tastefullymerged within a fine pattern.41 Rocking through flux with an engineer’s precision,Hartley’s hobbyhorse nevertheless refuses to settle, or to settle down. Rather thansubstituting the sterile, opaque, or otherwise detached dada corporeality for a vital,transparent one in the mold of the Stieglitz circle, Hartley’s acrobat—flitting on theseam of public and private—allows him to think both at once. Neither, alone, wouldsatisfy; the former forsaking the virility and vitality of the plastic body for the mind, thelatter predicated on weighty and troublesome semantic equations between art andessence, text and sex, publicity and intimacy. Attached to the “intricate world of com-mon experience,” the light figure mediates the self and “that to which I am not re-lated” with a rhetoric of corporeal intimacy that, by virtue of its lightness, achieves acelestial detachment:

You will find, therefore, that if you are aware of yourself, you will be your own perfectdada-ist, in that you are for the first time riding your own hobby-horse into infinity ofsensation through experience, and that you are one more satisfactory vaudevillian amongthe multitudes of dancing legs and flying wits. You will learn that after all that the buga-boo called LIFE is a matter of the tightrope and that the stars will shine their friskyapproval as you glide, if you glide sensibly, with an eye on the fun in the performance.(AIA, 253)

Experience as diversion here remains resolutely childish, and this passage is not sim-ply innocent, as Frank would have it, but strategically so. To borrow from Litvak again,Hartley’s hobbyhorse figures a kind of sophisticated naïveté, riding away not from theactual, but from the monotonous actuality of “universal heterosexualization, whereby‘growing up’ in fact means shutting down, tuning out, closing off various receptivitiesthat make it possible to find the world interesting.”42 In Elephants and Rhinestones,Hartley would struggle to disentangle the acrobat’s vitality from his heterosexualdeathliness. But for now, this walk on the high wire is predominantly a gay affair.

III. The “Codona Madness”

If it is not the properly “historical account” of the wonders of acrobatic life pro-posed in Adventures, Elephants and Rhinestones remains Hartley’s last and most sus-tained foray into the vicissitudes of public intimacy and the fate of its enabling figures.Elephants is loosely organized through Hartley’s ruminations—ranging in length fromparagraph-long bursts to four-page rhapsodies—on individual performers, acts, lore,and trends in the circus, the institution that he has “loved . . . all [his] life, just as oneloves one’s dog, or pet canary, one’s marmoset, or one’s cockatoo” (C2, 1).43 Fragmentedand fawning, Elephants is this circus fan’s Passagen-Werk, and generally assumes cata-logue form: Hartley lists the individual name of a performer or event (“Barbette,”

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634 “Spangles—A Continental Circus,” “Grock,” etc.) and follows it with his reminiscence,often driven by a wildly associative train that leads him across time and space, andthen (usually) back to the subject under consideration, which is always both the osten-sible subject and Hartley himself. This freewheeling narrative, while personal, senti-mental, and quite melancholy, deploys throughout an inherently intersubjective rhe-torical mode. As it was for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, “one of the few great artists ofmodern times to whom the circus was an intimate language,” the circus for Hartley isa matter of “you” and “I,” and Hartley’s linguistic gambit in Elephants is to talk in anintimate language that approximates the elusive speech of the acrobat, to fashion aproximate grammar of relation from the intimate world of the circus (C1, 57). Notsurprisingly, then, Hartley’s linguistic figures, like the privileged physiques of theircorporeal analogue the acrobat, are rarely weighty. Rather, to poach the terms ofHartley’s critique of certain acrobatic “egoists” like the Fratellinis and Con Colleano,this “type of work calls for a slight and agile figure . . . for light figures” (C2, 10). Suchlightness, as a mode of gender (not, like Colleano, “too masculine”), as well as a condi-tion both semantic (it is not saddled with ponderous meaning) and, by extension, sub-jective (it is an ego negated through spectacle), continues and extends the “tea chit-chat” he champions in Adventures.

But in Elephants, Hartley seems torn between keeping his figures light and bur-dening them with significance. Indeed, in the middle of Circus 1, we find, in isolation,three quotations from the British sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis, which appear un-der the phrase “Elephants and Rhinestones” on what looks like a provisional title page.These epigraphs, which effectively give the lie to Hartley’s lightness, appear as follows:

“I never grow weary of the significance of little things. It is the little things that give itsbitterness to life, the little things, that direct the current of activity, the little things thatalone really reveal the intimate depths of personality.” —Havelock Ellis

“Everything is serious and at the same time frivolous.”

“There is the whole universe to dream over and one’s life is spent in the perpetual doingof an infinite series of little things. It is a hard task, if one loses the sense of the signifi-cance of little things, the little loose variegated threads which are yet the stuff of which apicture of the universe is made.” H.E. (C1, 72)

Taking the frivolous seriously and imbuing the superficial with interiority, Ellis’s epi-graphs reverse the work of the light figure, making too big a deal of little things. Thus,Hartley would seem to overburden his light figures, which now not only carry thereferential heft of sexological discourse, but are here uniquely charged with “reallyreveal[ing] the intimate depths of personality.”44 Hartley’s ambivalence toward his lightfigures is, in fact, the structuring contradiction of Elephants’s rhetoric, whose lightnessconjures a vital, intimate community of spectacular performers and “fan-atic” specta-tors, but is haunted throughout by loss, death, and the annihilation of the acrobaticself. At the center of this world, and of this grammar, is the drama of Alfredo Codona

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635and Lillian Leitzel, for Hartley the lightest, most spectacular of aerialists: “I miss witha wide band of deep mourning on my arm those two grand artists of the air . . . both ofwhom came to such tragic ends, one by a fall while performing in Copenhagen, andthe other by his own hand after the tragic denouement described elsewhere” (C2, 3).And as Hartley’s language traces its florid designs though this world, his circumlocu-tions keep circling back to the personal and public “tragedy of the Codona madness,”whose “holocaustic finalities” come to embody the drama of public intimacy, the ob-scenity of the exposed self, and, perhaps, the triumph of flesh-as-idea, a newly mate-rial imagination (C2, 7; C1, 8). In Elephants, Codona and Leitzel emerge at once asthe ideal avatars of public intimacy and as the corporeal index of this relational mode’sacute vulnerability; thus, the trauma of the “Codona madness” and the stakes of itsimaginative negotiation in Elephants are only meaningful if we keep in sight the in-tense theoretical burden these light figures bear in Hartley’s imagination.

For Hartley, to convey properly the intimate language of the circus in Elephants isto allow his reader to share his fantasy space, to undergo a queer rite of initiation intoa kind of intimacy.45 His acrobatic “eye” depends throughout Elephants on proximate,apostrophic address to his reader. And so, while the manuscript abounds with a first-person voice actively engaged in the act of imaginative vision-as-memory, it beckons areader and enlists a confidence:46

the circus is like a multicolored globe—into which you look and see the many wonders ofthe imagination’s world like the humongous crystal ball illuminated from under by a re-volving prismatic plate in the geological dept. of the museum of natural history. . . . Afterall, between you and me, life itself is all right—isn’t it—do we not live by what we know[,]the idea of life—and not what humans think it is—haven’t the dynasties and millenniumsproven that nothing can change the quality of the thing itself? Too much of elementalmetaphysics possibly for a book like this. (C1, 67)

“Between you and me”: these moments of lyric apostrophe proliferate in “Elephants”as Hartley fashions a communion of vision with his addressee: “If you saw [the jugglerEnrico] Rastelli once only, you would watch the dimness gather like a cloud”(C1, 18);“but you will know” ringmaster Fred Bradna “when you see him again” (C2, 6). Thesecond-person pronoun, of course, posits an addressee, another subject whose invoca-tion, as Emile Benveniste teaches us, establishes the “polarity of persons” as the “fun-damental condition in language.”47 But in Hartley’s case, the seemingly commonsensicalpoint that intersubjectivity in language is inevitable and is, in fact, its enabling condi-tion is at once reassuring and profoundly unsettling: reassuring, because it makes him“feel outward,” an exteriority whose rhetorical manifestation is apostrophe, a turning-outward; unsettling, because such communication always threatens to become, se-mantically speaking, heavy. And as a result, the balanced “polarity of persons” is thrownout of whack by a voracious subjectivity, and the silent purity of corporeal language issullied by the tedium of talk. If, as Maureen McLane puts it, “intimacy happens ifapostrophe works,” this success is always an ambivalent one for Hartley, and as a re-sult, his reader’s initiation is always incomplete.48

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636 We can get a better grip on this ambivalence if we consider the means by whichHartley communicates to his initiate. The explosion of first-person plurals that accom-panies Hartley’s occasional rants on the distasteful commercial attempts to provide“ultra-variations” on conventional circus numbers provides a clue: “A terrible showawaited us who think of ourselves as strictly orthodox in circus matters . . . who likeour circus ‘neat’” and who “like to have our forms keep to form” (C1, 29). “We” are animagined community of real, orthodox “circus fanatics” open to a language of intimacythat speaks to the eye with special eloquence: “for the circus is the greatest spectacleof joy that has ever been invented for the eye alone—the eye being the greatest me-dium of receptivity,” and sight, “as Paul Valery says . . . the most intellectual of thesenses” (C1, 3, 1). And “all you have to do at the circus as with everything else—openyour eyes and keep them open . . . you are I am [sic] talking like a real circus fan” (C1,60). So, in the following instance, Hartley will attempt to summon the “quality of thething itself,” of the materiality of the circus, through communicative vision and theintimacy that is its goal:

You must inhale the odors of warm straw of the all but hot fragrances of various animallife—and you will want to do like the charming clown did . . . mister clown wrapping hisarms around Rosie’s trunk saying to her with real emotion “You are such a beautiful girl,Rosie”— Rosie seeming to soak up all this affection blinking her right eye as if downwardto show some slight acknowledgment of her deep woman’s feelings. (C1, 68)

The circus is clearly a matter of physical presence, of a proximity that Hartley wouldintimate to his reader and that he tropes here in the pure, emotive communication ofRosie and “mister clown.” “Animal affection,” muses Hartley elsewhere, “is a veryexceptional affair” (C1, 21–2). The sentiment might be simply laughable if it were notso sincere; indeed, it is not too much to say that Hartley wishes to love and be loved,know and be known, in the mode of relation of Rosie and her trainer:

I love the elephants most of all but it is chiefly because they have some sort of sense ofsimple companionship—they like their keepers and their director and I suspect everyelephant of knowing it is loved and by whom . . . you can hug an elephant—at leasttrunkwise, and feel fine after it. You can pat or even kiss a seal if you want to, and you havebeen changed, and all it is a kind of transferred affection we may develop among themore tractable animals, when it comes to the wild feline idea—you’ve got something elsethere, literally . . . (C1, 20–1)

Here again, intimacy is idealized insofar as it remains controlled, a simple compan-ionship of transferred affection between proximate, knowing bodies. But deliveringthis sort of corporeal copresence to “you,” Hartley’s reader, remains seemingly beyondthe scope of his evocative language and its synaesthetic aporias, its desire to make thereader see the smells and touches of the circus. As in most publicly mediated intima-cies, the “potential failure to stabilize closeness always haunts [the] persistent activity”of Hartley’s attempt to posit a “we.”49 Entrance into this intimate community of “ec-

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637static spectators” is premised not on literal vision but on visionary talk, on the ability ofHartley’s language to conjure successfully first an addressee, and beyond that, the vitalpresence of what he sees and has seen. And this will prove doubly problematic, bothbecause the acrobat’s language, like intimacy itself, would eschew speech and aspire toa condition of silence, and because the more Hartley talks about “this vivid humanworld of the circus,” the more it looks like death (C2, 7).

If the success of Hartley’s apostrophe is predicated on his ability to open the eye ofhis addressee and fill it—lovingly, erotically—with the vital matter of the circus, thiscommunication eventually founders on the very nature of this matter, which provesmutable stuff indeed. The performers themselves appear before Hartley’s mnemonicsight only to shimmer, wink, and then disappear: “Alas, what has become of all theselittle jewel boxes, and will there be found ring artists to keep the great tradition alive?”(C2, 4).50 These characters are so fascinating for Hartley, in part, because in bodyingforth sublime pictures of corporeal plenitude, mastery, and beauty, they conjure pre-cisely the opposite: “The public does not know however that very often acute sufferingis involved because muscles can stand only so much anyhow, and the life of a circusperformer is never any too long, that is, for performing purposes” (C2, 12).

Caught between a desire to talk intimately and the urge to keep silent, Elephantsachieves an acute poignancy, as community is imagined only to be dissolved, presenceis conjured only to be forestalled. Put another way, Hartley’s catalogue of circus per-formers catches an oddly welcome case of le mal d’archive, Jacques Derrida’s term forthe inescapable loss that corrodes all attempts to archive originary moments of pres-ence, singularity, or contingency.51 This double bind—incarnated in the short, but in-tense, life of the circus performer—is most obvious when Hartley tries to breathe lifeinto his Metropolitan Opera fantasy of nearly twenty years past by calling for “a grandopera de luxe program of those great artists in this field who are still living and en-hance the present day values. There would alas not be a Barbette, there would not bea Grock, there could not be a Joe Jackson, but already I see the idea in outline” (C1,52–3). Here, though, the vision Hartley would share with his readers cannot be mate-rialized, fully fleshed out, because it is structured around absences: no Barbette, noGrock, no Joe Jackson. So, in one of Elephants’s most remarkable moments, Hartleywill transfer his hopes from the real world to the imagination. This attempt to recon-cile his desire that the stuff of the circus be, like the elements of Joe Jackson’s clown-ery, “dateless and deathless” (C1, 48), with his sense that the greatest artists “havedropped out from their accustomed spots in the pattern” (C2, 3), is a work of fantasythat dismantles its own assemblage as it builds it in the mind’s eye: “Let anyone whohas loved this style of show all his life—line up in his memory the high spots of hisexperience—and gather his galaxy of splendours for at least one de luxe performanceat the Metropolitan Opera” (C1, 37). And headlining Hartley’s “galaxy of splendours”are Codona and Leitzel, in a position that signals the centrality of their absence forHartley and for Elephants, whose rhetorical mode is now in lockstep with what McLanecalls the “self-imploding logic of romantic apostrophe” that culminates (or collapses)in the elegiac: “Death pushes apostrophe to its limit; to apostrophize the dead is to

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638 trace the faultiness always threatening to rupture the fantasy of successful, reciprocaladdress. Such apostrophe gestures towards the dream of perfect interlocutionary com-munion even as it undoes it.”52

In Hartley’s case, the failure of apostrophe to posit a presence—for McLane, a“drama experienced most painfully and intimately within and by the self”—inheres inthe position of his most beloved acrobats, Codona and Leitzel, on the sticky seam ofprivate and public.53 Their specialty, as it were, is their ability to be intimate and spec-tacular at once, to encourage attachments in the spectators who enjoy them publicly,but to conceal or absent themselves by virtue of their very publicity. In Elephants,Hartley is drawn, obsessively, to the liminal, libidinal moments where the performersemerge into publicity, or—the equally attractive converse—when the public spectatorgoes backstage, inside the performer’s dressing chambers. And the ur-moment of back-stage pleasure is Hartley’s introduction to Leitzel and Codona, a scene that is referredto once in Circus 2 and no less than five times in Circus 1:

Such . . . charm greeted us—Leitzel in her own little tent with oriental rugs on the floorand the maid dusting barrels of powder over her in all her chiffon and glitter. There wasa boyish looking fellow standing always to one side, in a white duck marine officer uni-form, smoking a large cigar. When I had finished with Leitzel for she was getting in theusual state typical of artists, I closed with her by saying “there is one other artist I want tomeet and that is Codona”—“There he is” she said and he stepped up from the other sideand we were introduced—and I greeted this bright alert person with “I want to writeabout you too”—“G—I’d drop dead if anyone wrote anything nice about me”—“well, Iam planning to try at least” I said—“it may never be printed, but we must all wait andsee.” I was presented with a handsome sheaf of signed photos of both these artists—andthey are both on my walls to this day—flying and leaping as was their daily custom. . . .(C1, 96–7)

In this intimate moment Hartley, backstage, talks with his most beloved artists, whoare (as they should be, as they almost always are) proximate and yet admired at arm’slength. They are clothed, we might say, in the auratic garments of the celebrity image.Leitzel, in a haze of make-up, is “all chiffon and glitter” and talks of her Bohemiandescent (though Hartley suspects she is American). Codona, whose public performancesHartley has seen “numbers of times,” is unrecognizable, and he and Hartley exchangepleasantries befitting a nervous fan and his object of worship. This chastened intimacy(fan to star) is echoed in the affection between Codona and Leitzel, which, like theperformers themselves, like the love between Rosie and Mr. Clown, is “very simple.”Their relation is less an index of heteronormative desire than, as Hartley explains inLeitzel’s elegy, the ungendered “love of sweet-heart for sweet-heart,” or, in a coollyprofessional register, the “deep admiration of one supreme artist for another” (C1,85). So too, presumably, Hartley’s love for Codona, whose supreme beauty in perfor-mance “can only be verified by those,” like Hartley, “who have been privileged to seethis artist at work numbers of times” (C1, 86).

Strategically occluded in these imaginative revisions is the “ensuing drama” of thispair: after Leitzel died in a public fall from the rings in 1931, Codona married another

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639acrobat, Vera Bruce, with whom he performed as “The Flying Codonas.” Their tem-pestuous private relationship was a far cry from the spectacular, simple intimacy ofLeitzel-Codona. It ended on July 30, 1937, when they met in a lawyer’s office to dis-cuss a property settlement in their divorce. There, Codona shot and killed his wife,before turning the gun on himself. What Hartley will only refer to obliquely as the“Codona madness,” then, marks the volatility of this seam between privacy and public-ity; it indexes the disaster of a tractable intimacy thrown out of control by the obscen-ity of the exposed self. In Codona’s case, this heaviness is especially devastating. AsHartley explains in “The Flying Man,” his curious nonelegy for the acrobat, Codona isthe paragon of an “art that pacifies and satisfies completely because for here for oncethe mouth is stopped—the intellect robbed of its powers, and the body is given fullplay to be its best and comforting self—and what is better than a perfect body—beingitself, completely itself. The body is clean and the life inside and out of it is clean” (C1,94).54 Now, as Hartley explains in his 1937 poem “The Trapezist’s Despair,” Codona is“the over-sensuous trapezist,” whose “acrobatic vanity” got too heavy. With the amne-sia of self-absorption, he forgets that the honorific “butterflies upon the silk of hisgarments,” a costume he first wore in memoriam to Leitzel, were made both to re-member and to release—to make him light as this “little gauze playmate,” who had“flown to the upper air.”55 This chilling contrast between figures light and heavy isillustrated in a magazine article (figs. 4 and 5) that Hartley tore out and placed in a fileof miscellaneous research materials he was collecting for the Elephants project. At thebottom left of the page is a photo of Vera and Alfredo in the midst of “The PassingLeap,” which the caption glosses as the “most spectacular display of the Codona’s [sic]perfect co-ordination.” To the right, another scene of public intimacy, captioned: “Lastcurtain went down on the Codonas lying side by side as they fell, Vera dying, Alfredodead.”

In Elephants, however, Hartley is clearly displeased by this “dead end of love”: “Imiss . . . Lillian Leitzel and Alfredo Codona, both of whom came to such tragic ends,one by a fall while performing in Copenhagen, and the other by his own hand after thetragic denouement described elsewhere. The which [sic] was to snuff out a romancebefore their marriage, at which juncture I met them through the kindly offices ofDexter Fellowes in the tent in Brooklyn” (C2, 3). Swiftly, lightly, tragic denouementoccasions a comic détournement, as Hartley rewrites Codona’s death as a necessaryerasure, one that facilitates his reunion with Leitzel. Thus, Hartley’s grammar of inti-macy restores a “celestial bond” of “ideal sweethearts” who had, presumably, beenseparated “forever by the indifferent spirit of death” (C1, 86). But what of Hartley’saffection for Codona, and the sort of intimacy he figures? The answer lies, it wouldseem, in the way Hartley remembers him, bodying forth his object of worship throughthe alchemy of the imagination: “Codona [had an] almost mystic sense that permits,when the artist wishes to dislodge the body from the idea, and the idea becomes athing for its own sake; plenty of performers have no doubt done the same thing . . . butthey do not have that special magic which is vouchsafed to the pure artist, who strivesas it were to fall into the arms of the true meaning of things themselves” (C2, 4).

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640

Fig. 4. “Public intimacy.” From an unidentified publication in Hartley’s files on Elephants and Rhinestones, The

Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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641

Fig. 5. “The dead end of love.” Detail, from an unidentified publication in Hartley’s files on Elephants and

Rhinestones, The Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Fig. 6. Sustained Comedy, 1939. Oil on board, 28 1/8 x 22 in. Carnegie

Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Gift of Mervin Jules in memory of Hudson

Walker.

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▲

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642 Codona’s “special magic” is a mystic sense that allows him to transcend mere corpo-reality (to dislodge the body from the idea) and become a newly hybrid figure for thesubstantiality of fantasy, of flesh-as-idea. The language here effectively duplicates theterms of Hartley’s essay “The Element of Absolutism in Leonardo’s Drawings” (c. 1939).Like Hartley’s Codona, Leonardo’s “creatures are of the flesh, but the flesh does notdictate their existence in his vision, he sees them as ideas, as symbolic representationsof the whole thing, as the absolutist consummation of one thing” (OA, 291). Codona isno longer a mere body. Only in this way does tragedy become the stuff of comedy,which is sustained not by death and loss but by an aesthetics of mystical intimacy thatpreoccupied Hartley in roughly the last decade of his life, as he turned firmly awayfrom the excessive personalism of a romantic imagination and toward a selfless art.56

As Hartley explained in 1929, “I want to be life and not myself, and how is one alltinged with questioning and tinged with mystic longings and relations ever to get outof the dull bondage. . . . I don’t want to be condemned to spectatorship. I want to bereleased by it.”57 With this release, Hartley revises the aesthetico-mystical imperativeas he defined it in Adventures—that voracious intimacy of Whitman, whose desire to“include all things into himself” constituted his “strongest esthetical defect” (AIA, 34).Fueled by the mystic writings of George Santayana, Miguel de Unamuno, Lucretius,and others, Hartley finally understood self-annihilation—and the perceptual claritythat accompanies it—as a goal to be achieved through precisely this spectatorial ec-stasy, in which the spectator/artist loses himself in his object of vision, in the sensuousquiddity of the thing. Thus, this self-annihilation must not be understood as a closetedsilence, or as the violent repudiation of queer subjectivity, but as the latter’s very en-actment in the mode of the light figure’s attached detachment.

Keeping in mind this formulation (subjective release via optical attachment), wemight return briefly, and with fresh eyes, to Hartley’s puzzling Sustained Comedy—Portrait of an Object (fig. 6). In the familiar accounts of this work, Hartley’s self-por-trait has all the gravitas of self-inflicted martyrdom, the body’s fleshly surface overwrit-ten with a dense network of images connecting, indeed condemning, the figure to thedeath and loss of the painter’s past.58 This subjective weight—Whitmanesque in itsattempt to include all things onto itself—is only compounded by acts of critical decod-ing, through which superficial symbolism reveals a rich but troubled emotional inte-rior. Read through Codona’s butterfly, and through Elephants’s fantastic retelling ofthe Codona madness, in which elegy gives way to intimacy, the painting may tell an-other story, now of identity’s comic undoing rather than its tragic overdetermination.59

In this story, the titular “comedy” is not bitterly ironic, but an apt description of theintimacy that accompanies mystical release. This reading would underscore how theeye, always an erotic site in Hartley, is penetrated with arrows aflame in butterflies,which ascend and dematerialize with acrobatic buoyancy. Within the logic of suchvisionary optics, when Hartley seems most firmly physical he is, paradoxically, de-tached and disembodied, thus laying claim to a privilege historically denied tomodernity’s others. Released by spectatorship, though, Hartley’s disembodiment is nosolipsistic idealism, and is less a relational modality for being entirely fantastic.

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643Irreducible to a sublimation or metaphysicalizing of desire, the sustained comedyof Hartley’s light figures discloses a modern mode of intimacy that is immanent,antisubjectivist, and finally enabled by the affective circuitry of a mediated public sphere.In this sense, Hartley’s light figures urge us not just to reconsider the nature of mod-ernist detachment, to recover “all that is energizing and active about a depersonalizingtendency,” but to do so with sensitivity to the ways that such liberating vectors “awayfrom the psychological and from personal identity itself” emerge in and through changesin modern publicity and visuality.60 The public sphere is, of course, a familiar space ofinauthenticity in modernism, guilty, it seems, by association with a disreputable con-stellation of falsities—mass culture, mediation, the feminine, the masses, reproduc-tion, and Erlebnis, to name just a few. Such commonplaces have been productivelychallenged in recent years, perhaps most forcefully by Miriam Hansen, who arguesthat the public sphere’s value inheres not in its relative authenticity but in its prag-matic utility as a “sensory-reflexive horizon” for negotiating modernity’s conflictingenergies.61 For me, Hansen’s account is compelling insofar as: 1) in understandingpublicity as a terrain of experiential negotiation, she refuses to accept lapsarian ac-counts of the fate of an authentic public sphere in technologically mediated moder-nity; and 2) she complicates recent critiques of modernism’s ideology of authenticityas suspiciously wed to a rejection of a certain logic of visibility. Drawing our attentionto what we might call modernism’s unseen—but no less potent—cultural erection,such critics notice the downright dubious trick whereby modernism shores up its au-thority by secreting authenticity to a private, interior, invisible space.62 Here,modernism’s strategic inwardness must dismiss a too-visible, too-superficial, and thusinauthentic public meaning. In fact, Bill Brown has described the seeming inevitabil-ity of modernist interiority as “the mark of a limit within modernism’s effort to acceptopacity, to satisfy itself with mere surfaces” and noted how the modernist “effort toaccept things in their physical quiddity becomes an effort to penetrate them, to seethrough them, and to find . . . within an object . . . the subject.”63

For my purposes, such trenchant appraisals of a dominant modernist gambit link-ing vision, authenticity, and privatized interiority serve to underscore the very quirki-ness of Hartley’s sentimental meditations on these matters. Normative modernism’s“iconophobia” has, of course, also been productively considered by queer theory, per-haps most iconically by Eve Sedgwick, who understands modernism’s characteristicaversion to realistic representation—its currents of antifigurality and abstraction—asa repudiation of sentimentality and of the desired, eroticized male body that is exces-sive feeling’s occasion.64 Sentimentality, Sedgwick argues, is less a theme or subjectthan a vicariously self-implicating “structure of relation, typically one involving theauthor- or audience-relations of spectacle.”65 Hartley’s iconophobia, as a painterly tech-nique, was intermittent at best; but his sentimental iconophilia, as a spectatorial mode,was unwavering. The conceptual trick of Hartley’s light figures, then, is to show how agushy optical investment is really an erotic divestiture. Take, for example, Hartley’svisionary indulgence in the public spectacle of Codona’s thingly figure—his “flesh-as-idea”—which effectively flips both Brown’s and Sedgwick’s formulations: rather than

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644 penetrating, his vision disperses; rather than implicating the spectator, it finds no sub-ject, only a fleeting attachment that Hartley secures by losing himself. The dominantmode of modernist visuality, as the critical accounts I’ve discussed here all variouslysuggest, depends on a series of relatively stable and interlocking binaries (public/pri-vate; exteriority/interiority; visibility/invisibility; surface/depth) and privileges the sec-ond term in all of them. In Hartley’s eyes, by contrast, these binaries are strategicallysurpassed through his paradoxical formulation of public intimacy, and, beyond that,through modernity’s “sensory-reflexive dimension,” which is, after all, the light figure’saffective terrain. In this sense, Hartley’s light figures emerge alongside, but remainirreducible to, other privileged tropes—the “impression,” “innervation,” or the“flâneur”—for mediating modernism’s felt relations between its “insides” and its“outsides” amidst a changing public sphere whose own mediated nature confounds amore traditional trafficking between the latter.66 This would mean understanding thelight figure as an attempt to think through what Siegfried Kracauer once called the“motley externalities” of modern life, indeed, to revalue the surface as the site not ofthe experiential poverty of the modern, but rather of its dynamic affective potential:here, for an erotic depersonalization that remains a relation—spectacular, to be sure,but also profoundly intimate.67

Notes1. Hartley, quoted in Townsend Ludington, Marsden Hartley: The Biography of an American

Artist (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 4; hereafter abbreviated as MH.2. See Hartley’s essay “A Charming Equestrienne,” in Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters

on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1972), 176, 179, 181; hereafterabbreviated as AIA.

3. See Hartley’s circus manuscripts, “Circus” and “Elephants and Rhinestones,” in the Yale Col-lection of American Literature (hereafter abbreviated as YCAL), Beinecke Rare Book and Manu-script Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. The first is a longer 104-page manuscriptwritten in Hartley’s spidery hand; the latter—likely a revision—is a typescript copy of roughly the firsttenth of the earlier version. Hartley tended to type his own manuscripts prior to publication, and thetypescript version, in one spot at least, is written over in Hartley’s own hand. These two versions arehereafter abbreviated as in the text as C1 and C2, respectively. Much of the language of the overlap-ping material in the two versions of Elephants is identical, though there are provocative changes ofphrasing in spots. For example, Hartley describes George Cohan’s seat at the Metropolitan Opera,and his own at the circus, as one where he is “at home” in the typescript version, though in C1 hedescribes it as one where “he could really hear the music and feel anonymous at the same time.”Taking Hartley’s suggestion, I refer to the two manuscripts together as Elephants and Rhinestones.My transcription of the manuscripts has generally followed the editorial precedents of Gail Scott andSusan Ryan. Like Ryan, I have thought it best not to dabble with Hartley’s running prose style, onecharacterized by an abundance of short and long dashes. Small dashes I have generally converted tocommas, keeping the large ones intact. Hartley, C2, 3.

4. See Paul Peppis, “Rewriting Sex: Mina Loy, Marie Stopes, and Sexology,” Modernism/moder-nity 9, no. 4 (November 2002): 575. For a trenchant reassessment of modernist sentiment, see JessicaBurstein, “A Few Words about Dubuque: Modernism, Sentimentalism, and the Blasé,” AmericanLiterary History 14, no. 2 (2002): 227–54. On the reflexive dynamism of modernity’s public sphere,Miriam Hansen’s work is exemplary, especially Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American SilentFilm (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991) and “Mass Production of the Senses: Clas-

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645sical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 6, no. 2 (April 1999): 59–77. For asustained discussion of the public, performative nature of sentimental politics in another context, seeGlenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

5. See, most famously, T. S. Eliot, “Marie Lloyd,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 173–4. For modernists’ fondness for acrobats specifi-cally, see Jean Cocteau and Man Ray, The Barbette Act (Berlin: Borderline-Verlag, 1988). For a sampleof the increasingly voluminous critical discussion of modernism and popular performance, see AndreasHuyssen’s After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1986); Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1999); Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso,Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994); David Chinitz, “T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide,” PMLA 110 (March 1995): 236–47; Barry Faulk, “Modernism andthe Popular: Eliot’s Music Halls,” Modernism/modernity 8, no. 4 (November 2001): 603–21.

6. On the various stakes of the fantasy of subjective transparency and its concomitant disavowal ofembodiment in modernism, see Karen Jacobs, The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Cul-ture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001). As just one example of contemporary sexology’sefforts to locate, classify, and visualize non-normative sexual types, see Edward J. Kempf, Psychopa-thology (St. Louis, Mo.: C. V. Mosby, 1921). For a critical discussion of this phenomenon, see SiobhanSomerville, “Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body,” The Journal of theHistory of Sexuality 5 (spring 1994), 243–66; Michael Warner’s introduction to Michael Warner, ed.,Fear of a Queer Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); and Lucy Bland andLaura Doan, eds., Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1998).

7. For an excellent discussion of the past, present, and future of such intimacies in the publicsphere, see Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” in Lauren Berlant, ed., Intimacy(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 310–30. For a related discussion of how modernists likeWoolf and Stein turned to drama and spectacle to articulate nonrepressive, liminal modes of publicinteriority as a response to a masculine public sphere and a debilitating linkage of the feminine andthe private, see Marianne DeKoven, “Woolf, Stein, and the Drama of Public Woman,” in Hugh Stevensand Caroline Howlett, eds., Modernist Sexualities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000),184–201.

8. For Hartley’s remarks on the pleasures of Parisian sociality, see Hartley to Norma Berger, 31July 1912; quoted in MH, 74. That Hartley should credit Stein’s salon for a similar “kind of WilliamJames intimacy” is no surprise; Stein, of course, studied under James while a psychology student atHarvard, and in fact loaned Hartley her copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience, which Hartleywould claim as a major influence on his work.

9. James, quoted, respectively, in Cary Wolfe, The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Poundand Emerson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 30; and Patricia McDonnell, “El Dorado:Marsden Hartley in Imperial Berlin,” in Patricia McDonnell, ed., Dictated by Life: Marsden Hartley’sGerman Paintings and Robert Indiana’s Elegies (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fredric R. Weisman Art Mu-seum, 1995), 21.

10. I refer here to James’s claim in The Varieties of Religious Experience that “so long as we dealwith the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal withprivate and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term,”quoted in McDonnell, “El Dorado,” 22; and his definition of self-possession in The Principles ofPsychology, quoted in Wolfe, Limits, 78. Susan Ryan has also observed the self-absenting that per-vades Hartley’s work, noting how Hartley repeatedly “seems drawn to this idea of a centrifugal self-referentiality that leaves the self, itself, out.” Again, Hartley’s own comments are illustrative in thisregard. As he puts it in a letter to Rebecca Strand in 1929, “My main trouble . . . is a passionate desireto eliminate myself. I don’t want to be the object of self-interest that one is supposed to be.” SeeSusan Elizabeth Ryan, introduction to Somehow a Past: The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, ed.Susan Elizabeth Ryan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 28, 32; hereafter abbreviated as SP.

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646 11. See Juan Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, andGay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 20.For a rigorous discussion of this category’s centrality to modernity, see Krzysztof Ziarek, The Historic-ity of Experience: Modernity, The Avant-Garde, and the Event (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univer-sity Press, 2001).

12. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations,ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969); Siegfried Kracauer, “TheCult of Distraction,” New German Critique 40 (winter 1987), reprinted in The Mass Ornament: WeimarEssays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

13. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Charles Baudelaire: Selected Writingson Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charval (New York: Penguin, 1972), 390–435; Georg Simmel, “TheMetropolis and Mental Life,” in Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (Thou-sand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1997), 174–86.

14. For a powerful critique of the ideological stakes of this desire to feel common and to identify acrossclass in the spectacular spaces of public performance, see T. J. Clark’s chapter “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,”in The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York: Knopf, 1985).

15. Jonathan Weinberg, one of Hartley’s most astute recent critics, characterizes the conflation ofthe martial and the ludic here as a retroactive dodge: “As if worried by the militarism and eroticism ofthis description, Hartley attributed his attraction to pageantry to his early love of the circus.” Thisunderestimates how, for Hartley, the martial and ludic orders were interchangeable to the extent thatthey informed a more systematic, theoretical investigation of spectacle—and, by extension, of publicembodiment and public intimacy—that spanned Hartley’s entire career. See Weinberg, Speaking forVice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 147; hereafter abbreviated as SV.

16. Hartley to Stieglitz, 2 September 1914, YCAL; quoted in SV, 154.17. See SV, 145.18. As his cultural allegiances shifted, Hartley began to transfer the debilities of French culture to

the bodies of French men, whom he found “degenerate,” “most pitiful to look upon,” lacking “inlegs[,] and as to carriage and physical demeanor they are dreadful.” By contrast, German men, espe-cially German military men like von Freyburg, were “wonderful specimens of health,” all “so blondeand radiant with health.” See, respectively, Hartley to Rockwell and Kathleen Kent, 22 August 1912,YCAL; quoted in MH, 76; Hartley to Rockwell Kent, late March 1913, YCAL; quoted in MH, 97.

19. On the connections between the German military and homosexuality, see Modris Ecksteins,Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Doubleday, 1989), esp.80–90; and McDonnell, “El Dorado.” For Hartley, McDonnell explains, the German military uni-form functioned as a “coded gesture” that enabled Hartley both to reveal and conceal his desire.

20. See Auguste Macke’s manifesto of the Blaue Reiter group, “Masks”: “Incomprehensible ideasexpress themselves in comprehensible forms. . . . Form is a mystery to us for it is the expression ofmysterious powers. Only through it do we sense the secret powers, the ‘invisible God’. . . . Manexpresses his life in forms. Each form of art is an expression of his inner life. The exterior form of artis its interior.” Quoted in MH, 84. On the gendered aesthetic discourse of the Stieglitz circle, seeMarcia Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and AmericanFormalist Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001); hereafter abbreviated as PGCT.

21. On the complex traffic between bodies, commodities, and signs in Duchampian dada, seeDavid Joselit’s Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998),especially the chapter “Between Reification and Regression: Readymades and Words.”

22. Waldo Frank, introduction to AIA, xvi.23. Ibid., xiv.24. See, for example, Frank’s study The Re-discovery of America (1929), in which he notes that the

“sense of aesthetic form is an unconscious adumbration of our sense of unity with our own body.”Quoted in PGCT, 9.

25. Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel (Durham, N.C.: DukeUniversity Press, 1998), 6, 4; italics in original.

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64726. Hartley’s suspicion is, of course, correct, and shrewdly identifies a particular stage in the trans-formation of vaudeville “from a marginalized sphere of popular entertainment, largely associatedwith vice and masculinity, to a consolidated network of commercial leisure,” one which catered to thefemale consumer with “refined,” “respectable,” indeed “wholesome” acts—opera singers, famousactors from the legitimate stage, Shakespeherian dramas, and the like. This transition was spurred onby the consolidation of the Keith vaudeville circuit, whose bills of entertainment relegated “sightacts” rooted in circus traditions, those acrobatic or animal acts “that could be appreciated despite thenoise of arriving or departing customers,” to the highly undesirable opening and closing spots. See M.Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 5, 152.

27. Thus stripped and streamlined, Hartley’s acrobat is moderne in the Legerian terms Hartleychampions in his roughly contemporaneous “Dissertation on Modern Painting” (1921). See MarsdenHartley, On Art, ed. Gail Scott (New York: Horizon Press, 1982), 69; hereafter abbreviated as OA.

28. Hartley wants to frame the acrobat’s body rather than jettison it. Thus, Hartley’s notion ofmasculine ornamentation departs from aestheticism insofar as it rejects the imperative to transcendthe materiality of the body, a corporeality associated with “feminine” nature. On the centrality of thismandate to the aestheticist project, see Rita Felski’s chapter “Making Masculinity: The Feminizationof Writing,” in The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

29. Hartley does remark on a more debilitating excess in his critique of the American circus,whose only shortcoming, it seems, is that it is just too spectacular. Whitmanesque in its inclusiveness,it too is a “strain on the eye”: it is “too diffused, too enormous in this country to permit of concen-trated interest” for any but the most “alert eye.” Instead of a integral viewing of the spectacle’s master-ful orchestration, one “goes away with many little bits.” Here though, the circus’s distracting, hetero-geneous massiveness is, problematically, both a formal and a social problem: “It is because the back-ground is made up of restless nervous dots, all anxious to get the combined quota which they havepaid for, when in reality they do not even get any one thing” (AIA, 164–5). Here, Hartley’s intimateenjoyment is explicitly threatened by circus dilettantes, which illuminates how Hartley’s perceptualattunement to larger patterns outside the self does not always entail an embrace of social plurality.That is, it is not impossible for Hartley to bypass social heterogeneity en route from a local, spectatorialintimacy to a cosmic one, a point of some importance for the terms of his imagined community inElephants and Rhinestones.

30. Indeed, the language of facing or entering the sun recurs often enough in highly cathectedcontexts that one is tempted to call it a queer nexus in Hartley’s work. Consider that, in addition to theinstances of solar encounter already cited, Hartley described the dense imagery of his Amerika Series’sall-male Indian Fantasy (1914) as the enactment of his racialized dream of “going Indian and travel-ing ‘to the West [to] face the sun forever.’” Hartley, quoted in Wanda Corn, “Marsden Hartley’s Na-tive Amerika,” in Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, ed., Marsden Hartley (New Haven, Conn.: WadsworthAtheneum Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2003), 71.

31. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose.32. See Peter Nicholls, “Apes and Familiars: Modernism, Mimesis, and the Work of Wyndham

Lewis.” Textual Practice 6, no. 3 (winter 1992): 421–38.33. Such critics read Hartley’s work as artificial and hermetic, lacking in the ejaculatory intensity

of Marin, the womanly fecundity of O’Keeffe, or the earthly naturalness of Dove. In Port of NewYork, Rosenfeld characterized Hartley’s problem thus: “On the materials of the exterior cosmos heestablishes a little sealed world declarative of his own inward human order.” Quoted in PGCT, 166.

34. Paul Rosenfeld, “Paint and Circuses,” 2, YCAL.35. Ibid., 2, 3.36. “Vagabond libido” is Rosenfeld’s phrase and emphasis. “Paint and Circuses,” 5, YCAL.37. Hartley, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Vanity Fair 22, no. 6 (August 1924): 88, hereafter

abbreviated as “GSE.”38. On the broader epistemic shift to—and disciplining of—embodied and subjective vision in the

mid-nineteenth century, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernityin the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).

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648 39. Noting the gendered critical discourse that surrounded his work, Brennan speculates thatHartley goes dada in the 1920s because it was cerebral and detached where the Stieglitz circle waspremised on an imperative of transparency that outed the painter: “With Dada’s characteristic icono-clasm and critique of an authentic self, the movement offered what must have seemed to Hartley like a‘readymade’ (if temporary) safe haven from the Stieglitz circle’s persistent emphasis on the mostintimate aspects of the self” (PGCT, 169–70). This claim is compelling in light of, for example, Hartley’s1928 essay “Art—and the Personal Life,” in which he admitted to joining “once and for all, the ranks ofthe intellectual experimentalists. I can hardly bear the sound of the words ‘expressionism,’ ‘emotionalism,’‘personality,’ and such, because they imply the wish to express personal life, and I prefer to have nopersonal life” (OA, 71). However, Brennan’s formulation reduces the complexity of Hartley’s negotiation ofthese competing avant-gardes: first, it assumes that Hartley was more prudish about acknowledging hissexual preferences than he was, as his enjoyment of the acrobat in Adventures suggests; second, itfollows a broader critical tendency to ignore Hartley’s abiding and erotic preoccupation with publicspectacle; finally, it suggests that Hartley understood dada as Duchamp or Picabia did, which he did not.

40. See, for example, his implicit definition of dada in another Adventures essay, “The Appeal ofPhotography”: Stieglitz, Hartley notes, “will not care to be called Dada, but it is nevertheless true. Hehas ridden his own vivacious hobbyhorse with as much liberty, and one may even say license, as ispossible for one intelligent human being” (AIA, 111).

41. If Hartley’s hobbyhorse has a genealogy, we might say it is drawn from the toybox of whatRichard Sheppard dubs mystical or “triune” dada, whose commitment to a polyphonic subjectivityequipped to negotiate the flux of creation entails imagining figures—Jean Arp’s “Kaspar,” KurtSchwitters’s “Anna Blume,” Richard Huelsenbeck’s “Mafarka,” and Tristan Tzara’s cosmic acrobats—that transcend the binaries they hold in balance: matter and spirit, human and animal, male andfemale, material world and cosmos. Hartley’s acrobat does similar work for the public/private binary.Sheppard draws a useful distinction between the French dadaists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia,who viewed nature as “inherently patternless” and “proclaim[ed] the Dada state of mind against abackground of absurdity and chaos,” and Zurich dada and the non-Marxist Berlin dadaists, who, bycontrast, “were prepared to affirm or at least countenance the coexistence in Nature of chaos andelusive pattern, dynamism and fluid structure.” Hartley’s embrace of flux and his desire to be mergedinto pattern aligns him clearly with the latter. See Sheppard’s chapter “Radical Cheek: Or, DadaReconsidered,” in Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,2000), 193; italics in original.

42. Litvak, Strange Gourmets, 79; italics in original.43. That the order of paragraphs, if such it can be called, remains unchanged in two versions of

Elephants suggests that, just as in his autobiography, Somehow a Past, Hartley’s narrative mode hereis purposefully episodic and associative.

44. Given their strange placement in the manuscript, these epigraphs might or might not havemade their way into the published version of Elephants and Rhinestones.

45. On the centrality of scenes of “queer initiation” for gay men, see Michael Moon, A Small Boyand Others: Imitation and Initiation from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-versity Press, 1988).

46. In this sense, Elephants returns to Hartley’s interest in the autobiographical mode as a meansof exploring the connection between vision and memory, and of gauging the potential of what Ryancalls “synthetic visual memory,” wherein “the form visually scrutinized and the imprint on the mind ofthe form once seen come together in an act that is partly sensory and partly mechanical, but that isequally intimate and emotive—a compound of viewer and viewed.” As Ryan notes, Hartley flirtedwith autobiography throughout his life, starting with the essay “Concerning Fairy Tales and Me” and,I would argue, culminating in Elephants. Ryan, introduction to Somehow, 2. However, I mean todistinguish Hartley’s use of an intersubjective rhetorical mode here from Ryan’s remarks on the inti-mate nature of Hartley’s autobiographical experiments in vision in Somehow a Past. Ryan insists thatthe hermeticism of such efforts differs from that of Stein and Alice B. Toklas: “As opposed to thelatter’s externalized viewpoint that constructs a self always in the eyes of the other, Hartley’s manu-script is clearly the voice of a man alone, talking to a reader who seems to be himself” (ibid., 2, 25).

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64947. See Benveniste’s chapter “Subjectivity in Language,” in his Problems in General Linguistics,trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), 225.

48. See Maureen McLane, “‘Why Should I Not Speak to You?’: The Rhetoric of Intimacy,” inLauren Berlant, ed., Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 436. My formulation ofHartley’s intimacy as a “grammar” is indebted to McLane.

49. See Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” in Berlant, ed., Intimacy, 2.50. Elephants brings Hartley repeatedly to the deterioriation and death of his beloved performers.

The charming mimic, Eva Tanguay? “Poor dear, now over sixty and helpless in bed.” His descriptionof high-wire performer Bird Millman ends simply, “heard lately she died—in want” (C1, 11). Thefamous transvestite tightrope walker Barbette is now a choreographer for Ringling Bros.: “Alas, greatartists frequently are unprepared, alas too often overtaken” (C1, 42). This “ex-virtuoso . . . will neverin all probability appear as Barbette again due I suspect to some physical disability to which all artistsof the circus world are liable—witness the terrible break-up of the great Alfredo Codona—and theappalling drama that ensued” (C1, 41–2).

51. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1996). In connecting with the archive’s drive for presence, singularity, andcontingency, I follow Mary Ann Doane’s excellent analysis of the pathos of archival desire in earlycinema in The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).

52. McLane, “Rhetoric,” 426, 439.53. McLane, “Rhetoric,” 439. McLane’s essay reformulates the dark logic of Paul de Man’s well-

known deconstructive essay, “Autobiography as De-facement.” There, through an analysis of themetaphoric language of Wordsworth’s epitaphs, de Man demonstrated “the impossibility of closureand of totalization (that is, the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems based ontropological substitutions.” Thus, de Man laid bare how any system of cognition built on languagecannot but forestall presence: “to the extent that language is figure . . . it is indeed not the thing itselfbut the representation, the picture of the thing and, as such, it is silent, mute as pictures are mute.Language, as a trope, is always privative.” This is especially unsettling in the genre of autobiography,which presumes to “reveal reliable self-knowledge,” but in underlying the inescapable “tropology ofthe subject,” “deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores.” “Autobiography as De-facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 71, 80, 81.

54. Even if we suppose that Hartley wrote “The Flying Man” before Codona’s death in 1937,which is unlikely, his choice neither to include the details of this death in Elephants nor to elegizeCodona as he does Leitzel is a striking disavowal of the denouement of the Codona madness.

55. The Collected Poems of Marsden Hartley, 1904–1943, ed. Gail R. Scott (Santa Rosa, Calif.:Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 170; C1, 91.

56. See especially his attack on surrealism’s solipsism in the essay “Max Ernst” (1928), in OA, 133–4.57. Marsden Hartley to Adelaide Kuntz, 22 September 1929, quoted in Scott’s introduction to

OA, 41.58. Critics have read the painting as a strongly emblematic work of mourning and a conflation of

death and homosexual desire not unlike the War Motif series: the flaming arrows allude to St. Sebastian,and beyond that, to a gay subculture; the pierced heart, like the ship, recalls Hart Crane, the gay poetwhose suicide by drowning Hartley had commemorated in his earlier work Eight Bells Folly: Memo-rial for Hart Crane (1933); “the rose on his shoulder and the Christ figure recall the various paintingsassociated with the Mason family,” a Nova Scotian fishing family whom Hartley befriended and withwhom he lived during the summers of 1935 and 1936, and whose sons Alty and Donny, beloved byHartley, were drowned at sea in July of 1936; the “form of the painting, with a single figure placed inthe center against a dark background, over which the various symbols are collaged, is a reprise of thewar motif series” (SV, 188).

59. As an example of the latter reading, I have in mind Bruce Robertson’s recent claim that this“self-portrait knits together Hartley’s identity at a point when it might have been dangerously frayed.”See his essay “Marsden Hartley and Self-Portraiture,” in Kornhauser, Hartley, 155.

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650 60. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York:Verso, 2002), 132, 135.

61. Here I have in mind Hansen’s gloss of Kracauer’s take on authenticity: “The mechanical me-diation may place mass culture in the realm of the ‘inauthentic’ (das Uneigentliche), but since theroad to the ‘authentic’ was blocked anyway, Kracauer increasingly asserted the reality and legitimacyof ‘Ersatz’; the very distinction becomes irrelevant in view of the perspective, however compromised,that mass media might be the only horizon in which an actual democratization of culture was takingplace.” See Hansen, “America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity,”in Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1995), 374.

62. Here I have in mind Karen Jacobs’s formulation of modernism’s “interior gaze” as an attemptto “wed the visionary with the empirical” by “represent[ing] the idea of visual truth as a quality irre-ducible to visual surfaces, and thus requiring an expert, artistic gaze capable of perceiving and bring-ing to visibility an inner truth.” See Jacobs, Eye’s Mind, 27. Consider also Nancy Armstrong’s similarclaim that modernism located “whatever it considered authentic in nature or culture within an invis-ible domain on the other side of the surfaces one ordinarily sees.” Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in theAge of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1999), 11.

63. Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 2003), 12.

64. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press,1990), 161.

65. Ibid., 143, 150.66. For a powerful account of the mediatory role of the impression in modernist literature, see

Jesse Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press,2001). On the utopian possibilities of Benjaminian innervation as an experiential shuttle between thetechnologized embodiments of mass culture and personal (and collective) affect, see Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62(fall 1992): 3–41; and Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” CriticalInquiry 25 (winter 1999): 306–43. On the flâneur’s interiorization of modernity’s exterior, see Ben-jamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:Verso, 1983); as well as Tom Gunning’s “The Exterior as Intérieur: Benjamin’s Optical Detective,”boundary 2 30, no. 1 (2003): 105–30.

67. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Cult of Distraction,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans.and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 327.

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Marsden Hartley's Light Figures

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