Introduction: Modernism and Collaboration

In Henry James's wryly funny short story, ‘Collaboration’ (1892) a classic scene of fin-de-siècle Paris unfolds: artists, writers and musicians ‘congregate [at the unnamed narrator's studio] at dusky hours on winter afternoons, or on long, dim evenings’. ¹ They smoke and drink and talk. They laugh and socialise together across their national and political differences; the air, the narrator writes, is ‘international, as only Parisian air can be’. ² The narrator jokes that the parties and conversations are better, often, than the art itself. Over the course of these evenings a musician, Herman Heidenmauer, and a poet, Felix Vendemer, decide to write an opera together. Heidenmauer and Vendemer become so caught up in their art and in their shared aesthetic project that they forget entirely about money and their personal relationships. The narrator is quick to point out the pitfalls of working together: ‘There were postponements and difficulties at first, and there will be more serious ones in the future, when it is a question of giving the finished work to the world’. ³ He is also sceptical about the opera itself, a difficult modernist piece that he terms a ‘monstrous collaboration’. ⁴ However, despite evident challenges, the narrator sees a kind of redemptive beauty even in the most deluded of grand collaborative projects: ‘At present they work for themselves and for each other, amid drawbacks of several kinds […] In their way they are working for human happiness’. ⁵ In working with and for something larger than the self, Heidenmauer and Vendemer find aesthetic meaning, and even if the final aesthetic product is not perfect, the act of collaboration affords an interpersonal value of its own.

This story was published in the English Illustrated Magazine in 1892, at the edges of most historical demarcations of modernism. The title ‘Collaboration’ invites a playful reconsideration of the practice in both art and national politics, ⁶ and James’ story stands on the cusp of a proliferation of now famous modernist collaborations across the arts, from Henri Matisse's cut-out designs for Léonide Massine's ballet, to Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad's co-written novels, to Vanessa Bell's cover designs for Virginia Woolf's publications, to the Dadaists’ radical acts of co-creation. Moreover, many of the forms of modernist aesthetics (the ‘little’ magazine, the anthology, the ballet, translation) lent themselves intuitively to collective efforts by being inherently or necessarily collaborative kinds of aesthetic productions. James's astute comments on the particular difficulties and beauties of collaborative artistic production set the stage for the simultaneously challenging and enriching experience of modernist collaboration.

This special issue offers an exploration of the aesthetics, politics and practices of modernist collaboration. It has its origins in a two-day conference at Franklin University, Switzerland where, under the broad umbrella of ‘Modernism and Collaboration’, a diversity of papers explored the modernists and their contemporaries as keen and innovative collaborators who pursued collective publishing, co-created journals and co-produced creative and commercial projects. Collaboration has also been a theme in other recent events, including the Beinecke exhibition on ‘The Art of Collaboration’ (January–April 2018), a 2016 conference at Trinity College Dublin on ‘Poetry and Collaboration in the Age of Modernism’ and a special 2018 Print Plus edition of Modernism/Modernity dedicated to this theme. Collaboration, it seems, is currently on our minds. Susan McCabe writes that ‘collaborative relationships, like the works they produced, were in themselves modernist experiments’. ⁷ Collaboration has been positively connected to modernism's ‘rich tradition’ of interdisciplinarity’. ⁸ It has also been approvingly linked to modernist internationalism with, for example, Brian Carr and Tova Cooper's analysis of Nancy Cunard's Negro anthology as ‘a substantial collaboration between European, Anglo-American, Caribbean and African-American modernists’ ⁹ and Michael North's judicious exploration of how Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso's ‘collaborative use of African models’ was key in ‘inventing modernism’. ¹⁰ While collaboration has been used by large in a positive sense in connection with co-authorship and collaboration across artistic disciplines, its changing – and increasingly negative – historical and political meaning through the two world wars and within the context of colonial power dynamics also adds a significant layer of complexity, as many of the essays in this issue show.

A growing body of work in modernist book history and material culture helps us understand collaboration as a particularly modernist praxis. Lisa Otty, for example, defines ‘small press modernists’ in terms of ‘collaboration’ and ‘experimentation’. ¹¹ In this special issue, we explore the sense of collaboration as not only two or more artists or authors making work together, but also an historical phenomenon implicating all sorts of institutions, from Poets Essayists and Novelists (P.E.N) to the publishing houses, and individuals involved in literary and cultural activities. This broader understanding of collaboration is articulated Virginia Woolf in the statement that ‘masterpieces are not single and solitary births’, but rather ‘the outcome of many years of thinking in common, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice’. ¹² The publication of Woolf's own work at the Hogarth Press, for example, was an intensely collaborative endeavour involving editorial conversations, book production work and distribution. Deciphering the different notes and tones that sound within that ‘single voice’ becomes the work of the critic analysing collaborative modernist practice. While criticism has repeatedly told us that modernism is collaborative – the example of Ezra Pound's editorial interventions into T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is widely known – there has been much less specific and sustained attention paid to what it means and how it works to ‘think in common’, that's to say, what collaboration facilitates (or obscures) as both a way of thinking and a practice of production at all levels. The Beinecke exhibition defines collaboration as ‘a social and interpersonal mode of artistic practice’, noting that collaboration is frequently (and we would add often uncomfortably) tied to conceptions of friendship, community and also professionalism. It goes on to explain that ‘creative collaborations […] invite us to consider the additive possibilities of thinking and working together’, the significant word ‘additive’ suggesting that collaboration is more than just what Desmond MacCarthy called ‘composite consciousness’. ¹³ It also asks us to consider what collaboration adds: it may be layers of ideas and more value, but it may also be more tension or difficulty. Collaboration, while often viewed in idealistic ways, is, in practice, almost always messy, unequal and conflictual. It often aspires to, yet can almost never achieve, equality; it strives for unity but is defined by difference. Such apparent failures, however, do not negate the value of collaboration, and it is indeed these paradoxes of collaboration that reward analysis.

We begin the issue with Anna Snaith's essay, ‘Introducing Mulk Raj Anand: The Colonial Politics of Collaboration’, which interrogates ‘the politics and contours of collaboration’ by considering Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster's prefaces to Anand's published work as complex post-compositional collaborations (12). These are, Snaith notes, examples of multiple authorship under one cover and she draws attention to the complicated relationship between preface and text: while the authors of the prefaces variously, sometimes simultaneously, framed, authenticated, translated or silenced the colonial text, Anand was nonetheless astute about engaging the cultural capital of the metropolitan, English author. Snaith consistently highlights the complexity of these collaborative dynamics: never denying colonial hierarchies materialised in the relationships between texts and prefaces but instead recognising these collaborations as the complex social and political experiences that they were.

In ‘“A Cracked Sheet-Glass Mirror”: Conditions of Collaboration at the 1945 P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference’, Charlotte Nunes draws extensively on archived correspondence, highlighting the collaborative nature of letter-writing. Nunes explores the internationalist collaborative aspirations of P.E.N., with particular attention to the All-India Writers’ Conference in Jaipur in 1945. She notes that while P.E.N. ‘emerged ostensibly to foster mutual exchange among writers internationally, mutuality was compromised under political conditions of imperialism hinging on hierarchal notions of culture’ (67). Collaboration here, as in the other essays, is always marked by the historical and social conditions in which it takes place and in the case of P.E.N., the idealistic discourses of friendship and exchange often fall short of their promises. Collaboration, Nunes suggests, does not just fail to transcend imperialist models but can actually reinforce them. However, the ‘uneven’, ‘cautious’, ‘critical’ exchanges that took place between Indian and British writers during the conference still created a possibility of ‘dialogue and exchange’ despite conflicting loyalties (77).

Stephanie Brown's contribution, ‘Claude McKay, The Worker's Dreadnought and Collaborative Poetics’, shares an interest in the power dynamics of collaboration but, here, these are directly connected to the ‘aspirational, collective, collaborative or political’ values of the labour movement (30). Brown considers Sylvia Pankhurst and Claude McKay's roles in collaboratively producing representations of London's East End designed specifically for a local audience. This is, for Brown, a ‘dialogic collaboration’ between a black Jamaican-born poet and a white English suffragette that is self-consciously at the intersection of race and class (34). The historical East End richly evoked by Brown in this essay is itself a collaborative space, created from outsider and insider voices.

With Nicola Wilson's essay, ‘“So now tell me what you think!”: Sylvia Lynd's Collaborative Reading and Reviewing and the Work of an Interwar Middlewoman’, we turn to the archives in order to uncover the collaborative dynamics of the Book Society. Sylvia Lynd was a writer and tastemaker who played a key role in the Book Society. With her nuanced discussion of Lynd's multiple roles as reader, reviewer, gatekeeper, editor and hostess, Wilson gives a sense of an ‘alternative, though intersecting’ (50) modernist set – the ‘broadbrow’ as opposed to the highbrow. Wilson examines the social spaces of Lynd's renowned dinner parties, which were often sites of ‘unofficial’ collaboration where literary-minded guests discussed and debated books and readers and the Society's choices were made. Wilson's feminist intervention in traditional book history narratives goes beyond an examination of the formal editorial and publishing processes and asks us to reconsider the importance of ‘sociable reading’ and the often-unseen labour involved in communal taste-making (51).

Finally, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein's essay, ‘So Easy to See: Muriel Rukeyser and Berenice Abbott's Unfinished Collaboration’ explores the lost poetic and photographic collaboration between Rukeyser and Abbott who were friends and lovers as well as intellectual and artistic foils. In the context of feminist practices and lesbian desire, Kennedy-Epstein asks what kinds of collaborative practices are sanctioned and interrogates, too, the reasons why some collaborations disappear from history while others are remembered. The ‘drafts, descriptions, correspondences and fragments, to be pieced together from across various archives’, come together in this essay to give a sense of the deep personal intimacy between Abbott and Rukeyser and offer a modernist narrative of collaboration marked by experimentation, interdisciplinarity, radicalism and love (89). While this collaboration was never officially completed, Kennedy-Epstein suggests the inherent value of processes of collaboration that create alternative spaces for knowledge and, ultimately, argues that scholarship uncovering even incomplete artistic partnerships may be recuperative.

Taken together, this diverse group of essays both complicate and expand preconceived notions about modernism and collaboration, re-conceptualising collaboration as a fully aesthetic, social and even political experience rather than simply a synonym for ‘co-authorship’ or ‘co-creation’. The authors and artists that our contributors write about (Mulk Raj Anand, Claude McKay, Sylvia Lynd, Sophia Wadia, Muriel Rukeyser) are seldom considered among the well-known modernist author-genius collaborators. Looking at modernism as a collaborative practice involving all sorts of people – from editors to periodical publishers to photographers – allows us to see beyond the big personalities of Joyce, Woolf and others and to offer a detailed view of how art is actually made. Yet, it is also true that collaborative work can be hard to recognise, often occurring behind the scenes and in the margins. These essays consistently draw attention to the fact that collaboration is complicated by political and social circumstances – from the power dynamics inevitably infusing transnational relationship in an imperial era to racial and gender inequalities – but can, at the same time, be a way for marginalised people or groups to create community and, moreover, strategies of resistance. The essays also draw attention to the value ascribed (or not ascribed) to collaborative work and the ways in which collective labour is often either hidden from view or obscured by a literary system that values the individual voice of the single artist. How can we critique, or even know about, collaborative work when so much of it is, in the end, untraceable, occurring in conversation, in letters and notes? Recovering lost collaborations is thus a significant theme across the issue as many of our contributors turn to the archive and to ephemera in order to trace hitherto unacknowledged histories of collaboration. These essays, moreover, reveal that collaboration is not just a compositional process: it happens in the creative spaces of dreaming up artistic work, in the fields of publishing and marketing and in reception and reading practices. They ask us to consider both when and where collaboration happens, drawing attention to the spaces, structures and sites, both personal and institutional, within which collective labour is performed. All of these essays offer a view of collaboration that is neither simplistically idealistic nor unhopeful, but rather, as Anna Snaith puts it, ‘ambivalent and layered’ (11).

Focussing on specific, small historical instances of collaboration, as all these essays do, helps us see larger collaborative structures – including transnational organisations, nations, municipal institutions and political and social groups – and analyse the relational dynamics of those structures. The broader archival and materialist turn in modernist studies has foregrounded the historical objects of collaboration. ¹⁴ These historical instances of collaboration open up a parallel conversation about the ways in which collaboration shapes our own critical acts as literary scholars today at a time when criticism in the humanities is increasingly moving beyond and supplementing the lone-scholar model. ¹⁵ Collaborative work in contemporary scholarship exists both in naturalised and embedded scholarly processes like conferences and increasingly in more unusual and inventive modes like co-authorship of monographs and digital humanities projects created by large teams. Even as experiments in collaboratively produced scholarship are on the rise in our discipline, institutional and regulatory bodies often do not quite know how to evaluate or respond to collaborative work, tending to, first, try to identify individual contributions and, then, see those contributions not as additive or generative, but as partial or incomplete. ¹⁶ Projects such as the ‘Collaborators’ Bill of Rights’ invite us to be attentive to the ethics of collaboration and encourage a larger conversation about what it means to co-labour as scholars. ¹⁷ Thinking about and through collaboration in modernist studies can not only bring tacit practices to the fore but also allows us to think about the relationships that form literary production in a way that values the process of working together while attending to the difficulties and asymmetries of shared work. After all, we are always collaborating in the production of knowledge – with students, with colleagues and with other scholars – whether we acknowledge it or not. As Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible note in a Modernism/modernity Print Plus column on collaborative practices in modernist scholarship, ‘the term “monograph” actually belies the exchange of ideas that occurred through print and over time to produce the work. Collaboration animates and personalizes the scholarly exchange. Without it, we’d have nothing to say’. ¹⁸

Though collaboration is, as the essays in this issue show, almost always imperfect and unequal, it offers a model of scholarship and creativity as co-constituted and shared. An emphasis on understanding artistic and intellectual labour as undertaken by lone geniuses risks neglecting a long and rich history of collaborative craft, storytelling and thinking. While it is naive to valorise an idealistic model of collaboration, or to ignore the power dynamics inherent in collaborative practices, those of us who embark on shared work tend to keep on coming back for more, suggesting that we enjoy the process as much as the work it produces. Perhaps this is because even the most uneven and fraught collaborations produce something of value or at least the chance of unexpected outcomes and offshoots. It is this possibility, the element of surprise that inevitably arises from different minds thinking and coming together, that perhaps makes collaboration so suggestive and appealing. And yet, while the essays gathered together here reveal some important examples, practices and models of collaboration in specific, grounded ways, there is something about collaboration that remains somewhat elusive. Our work, in its final forms, still tends to privilege the unified voice of an imagined single author; the to-ing and fro-ing of collaborative work (in letters, notes, emails, conversations) is for the most part hidden by final products that aspire to unity and completion. Perhaps, then, the final question that these evocative modernist collaborations invite us to consider is how we might begin to find new forms that allow room for more than a single authorial voice and make visible not only a collaborative ethos but the layers and complexities of working together.