By Shao Xunmei
Edited and Translated Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala
Reviewed by Charles Laughlin
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright October, 2024)
Shao Xunmei, One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939 Edited and translated by Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2023. 454 pp. ISBN: 978-9629376604 (paper).
Over the past quarter century, there has been growing scholarly attention to Shao Xunmei 邵洵美 (1906-1968), initially as a poet, but increasingly as a publisher and cultural figure. One chapter of Leo Ou-fan Lee’s 1999 book Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945, introduces Shao as a decadent poet alongside the “dandy” Ye Lingfeng 葉靈鳳, but also devotes space to his important role in the publishing industry.[1] In 2001, Jonathan Hutt published an article entitled “La Maison d’Or: The Sumptuous World of Shao Xunmei.” In 2016, Jicheng Sun and Harold Swindall published a collection of Shao’s poetry in English translation, The Verse of Shao Xunmei. More recently, in 2020, is Tian Jin’s critical study of Shao’s poetry, The Condition of Music: Anglophone Influences in the Poetry of Shao Xunmei.
Parallel to this increased attention to Shao’s poetry, Paul Bevan has published extensively on Western impacts on Republican era print culture with a particular emphasis on illustrated magazines, and these works have fleshed out Shao Xunmei’s broader profile as a cultural figure. In 2018, Bevan published a monograph on Shao Xunmei’s Modern Miscellany (時代畫報), and in 2020 he brought out “Intoxicating Shanghai”—An Urban Montage: Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines in Shanghai’s Jazz Age, a broader study on pictorial magazines based in Shanghai and their contributing artists. Bevan has also published a journal article on Mexican illustrator Miguel Covarrubias’ momentous encounter with 1930s Shanghai and his impact on its visual print culture (2021), and more recently a book chapter on Shao’s bookshop The Golden House and his relationship with translation (2024), both of which overlap with the content of One Man Talking. One Man Talking can thus be seen as a collection of source materials on Shao Xunmei that supplements Bevan’s research on Shao and his milieu, that establishes Shao as a cultural figure using his own (prose) voice. This effort is aided by the editors’ collaboration with Shao’s daughter Shao Xiaohong, who provided valuable materials, including an essay on Shao’s wartime publication efforts, and to whose memory the book is dedicated. The book also features a foreword by Leo Ou-fan Lee, translations and commentary by co-editor Susan Daruvala, Michel Hockx, Helen Wang, and Sun Xinqi.
One Man Talking is arranged into eight chapters, which include full translations of one or more of Shao’s essays, accompanied by explanatory and interpretive articles by the editors. The first chapter is a general introduction by Bevan, while the subsequent chapters, ordered more by theme than chronology, concern key aspects of Shao’s career and thought: his ideas on contemporary art; the popularization of literature, especially through salons; the importance of pictorial magazines in raising readers’ cultural literacy; the contribution of prominent foreign illustrators like Miguel Covarrubias and Soviet woodcut artists to China’s visual print culture; and the predicament of cultural figures living in the “Solitary Island” of Shanghai’s International Settlement from late 1937 to December 1941.
In addition to shorter magazine articles Shao wrote on these subjects, One Man Talking features two long essays of particular importance. The first is the title essay, published as a serial column over several consecutive issues of the magazine Renyan (人言) in 1934, translated here by Susan Daruvala in chapter 4 and accompanied by Daruvala’s rich analysis. The second, “A Year in Shanghai,” included in chapter 8, was also a serial column, originally published in his magazine Ziyou tan (自由談) between October 1938 and March 1939. Unlike “One Man Talking,” which articulates many of Shao Xunmei’s artistic aspirations and cultural philosophy, “A Year in Shanghai” is more of a memoir of the disintegration of the cultural circles and activities so cherished in Shao’s other articles, and the arduous task of maintaining literary and cultural activities in Shanghai under the condition of war against Japan.
Intersecting with these categories and materials are some significant throughlines that fill out Shanghai’s cultural history and Shao’s role in cultivating an Anglophone salon culture that helped define it. Poet extraordinaire Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 (1897-1931) brought back from Cambridge a fondness for the salon format of facilitating convivial social interactions among cultural figures,[2] and Xu’s status as Shao’s early mentor is duly attended to throughout One Man Talking. But many other features of this grouping are vividly on display in this book as nowhere before. First, the seminal role of American socialite Bernardine Fritz in promoting Shanghai salon culture, and the key role Shao played in her efforts. Second, Shao can be viewed primarily as a publisher, and his many magazines reflect his high standards for state-of-the-art pictorial publishing. This relates both to his unique ideas about the popularization of literature, his interactions and responses to foreign figures, and the membership of his cultural circles, which included cosmopolitan Chinese figures like Lin Yutang 林語堂 and foreign connections like Miguel and Rosa Covarrubias and Emily Hahn. Leo Lee’s account addresses Shao’s publishing projects, but One Man Talking draws out the link between them and Shao’s visual aesthetics. Third, the close attention to Miguel Covarrubias himself, with whom Shao became acquainted through Bernardine Fritz, is unequalled in studies of modern Chinese culture in English so far.[3] The recent proliferation of studies of visual print culture (particularly pictorial magazines and cartoons, manhua 漫畫), has not fully attended to Covarrubias’ influence, and the two essays by Shao and Bevan’s essay do so brilliantly by both emphasizing Chinese artists influenced by him, such as Zhang Guangyu 張光宇, Zhang Zhengyu 張正宇, Chen Jingsheng 陳靜生, and Wang Zimei 汪子美, as well as relating Covarrubias’ whole story, from his youth in Mexico to his rapid rise in the New York publishing world to his adventures as a world traveler. Bevan presents a convincing argument, based on English scholarship from outside Chinese studies, including rich archival resources in Mexico, that Covarrubias was more than a mere “illustrator” or “caricaturist,” but should be taken seriously as a twentieth century artist. This includes viewing the manhua/manga in general as a serious modern art form transcending not only the “cartoon” or humorous caricature to which it is often reduced, on a par with or in some ways transcending the traditional “fine arts” of drawing, oil painting, and watercolor. All these ideas are given greater resonance by Shao’s earlier essay on the French-returned artist Sanyu (Chang Yu 常玉; chapter 2), whose focus on “line” resonates with Shao’s appreciation of Covarrubias’ art, especially in relation to ancient Mexican jade carving (53-54; 195).
The inclusion of Shao’s long essays makes One Man Talking an invaluable contribution to primary works in modern Chinese prose (still represented only partially in English), documenting Shao’s unusual yet influential voice in modern Chinese culture. Shao’s writing, both in his own English, as represented in “Confucius on Poetry: Some Notes” (published in T’ien Hsia Monthly in 1938), and in the translations of other essays included in this volume, conveys a discerning and sensitive mind, impassioned by high ambitions, expressed in a raw and febrile idiom and in a rambling manner, something of which the author is consciously aware. In fact, the “serial memorandum” (as Shao himself describes it) of “One Man Talking” represents the author’s effort to express what are often unique ideas in a very unusual manner for the Chinese cultural scene at the time. If we use the informal essay (xiaopin wen 小品文) as a model, we can see that Shao adopts the associative structure of such (usually lyrical) writing to discuss serious aesthetic views without attending to logical or structural rigor, and is able to connect them serially through segues and refrains stretching across separate entries.[4]
As Bevan’s introduction also emphasizes, what is striking about Shao’s ideas is not that his vision of the aims and function of literature vastly differ from other voices and trends in the decade before war broke out with Japan. Anglophone figures have tended to be stereotyped as bourgeois cultural elitists at best and lackeys of Anglo-American imperialism at worst, not only at the time, but also through the formation of what would become the modern Chinese literary canon up. On the contrary, like the League of Leftwing Writers (est. 1930) and the Association of Chinese Artists and Writers (est. 1936), Shao also strived to make literature more broadly accessible to the public with underlying moral and educational aims. What differed were instead the means by which popularization would be attained, and the models adopted for the sociocultural goals (specifically in the form of attitudes toward social revolution and the experience of the Soviet Union).
Unlike most writers of his time, Shao finds a model for the value of literature to society in the Analects of Confucius. In “Confucius on Poetry: Some Notes,” Shao seems to be in part inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Ends and Means (1937), whose discussion of literature as a means to the end of some sort of cultural perfection must have resonated with Shao as he reflected on passages from the Analects in which Confucius spoke of poetry (or of The Book of Odes). Although the idea of literature as a vehicle for cultural reformation was common among literary communities in Republican China, it is jarring to see Shao use Confucius, whose legitimacy was at its nadir from the New Culture Movement through most of the twentieth century, to illustrate the morally edifying and socially transcendent qualities of poetry/literature, not to mention that he published these ideas in English rather than Chinese.
It may be a reflection of the unusual, self-censoring publishing atmosphere of the “Solitary Island” period that Shao used the dual shields of the English language and traditional Chinese culture to express his ideals for literature, but they are in substance similar to what he espouses in his Chinese writings. A similar reflection of this environment is Cosmic Wind (宇宙風), one of several humor and commentary magazines established by Lin Yutang (the others being The Analects Fortnightly [論語半月刊] and This Human World [人間世]), distinguished by a particular focus on premodern Chinese culture and published, in part, in Shanghai’s “Solitary Island” period.[5] Leo Ou-fan Lee’s foreword to One Man Talking points out that Shao was the editor of Cosmic Wind (presumably before the war and its relocation to Guangzhou), but surprisingly, Cosmic Wind is not mentioned again in One Man Talking.
Shao’s daughter, Shao Xiaohong 邵綃紅, contributes an essay devoted to setting the record straight about Shao’s patriotism and his political posture during the war. This makes the entire last chapter particularly interesting in that, beginning with the opening theme of “A Year in Shanghai,” Shao Xunmei dramatizes how the drastic change in his living environment and family circumstances, as well as the disappearance of the way of life that he had cultivated and to which he had become accustomed before the war, brought about a substantial change of heart. With the exception of Emily Hahn, who was determined to contribute to China’s war effort through publications in Shanghai, all of Shao’s foreign contacts had disappeared, and he described his life in this period as that of “a hermit,” quite unlike the cultural impresario who had become one of the great conveners of the 1930s cultural scene, even including Lu Xun 魯迅 and his followers with whom he was scarcely on speaking terms, something also vividly illustrated in One Man Talking (332-334).
One Man Talking will have lasting value as a portrait of an important cultural figure, but also as a bibliographic repository relevant to many aspects of Shanghai cultural life in the 1930s. The book has 31 essential illustrations, including five color plates, something rarely seen in scholarly monographs on modern Chinese literature, made possible perhaps through the resources of City University of Hong Kong Press. In addition, and quite necessary due to the voluminous references to illustrations, are links to online archives of Chinese manhua and the artistic works of Miguel Covarrubias. There are useful lists of Chinese- and English-language magazines of the time, as well as an extensive bibliography (although the bibliography unnecessarily divides books from book chapters and articles—perhaps a requirement of the publisher) and a list of archives consulted. The materials found at Yale’s Beinecke Library (letters from Shao Xunmei, Harold Acton, and Rosa Covarrubias) and in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum (letters from the artist Sanyu) illustrate the importance of including international contacts as leads in research on modern Chinese literary figures. All these resources, as well as Bevan’s discussion of the challenges of archival research on early twentieth century Chinese visual print culture in his introduction make this an excellent resource for further research into Shao Xunmei, Republican period print and visual culture, Chinese cosmopolitanisms, and the Anglophone circle centered in Shanghai, not to mention (potentially) the “Beijing School,” which also branched off of Xu Zhimo’s Crescent Moon group, and included salon activities in the homes of Zhu Guangqian 朱光潛, Zhou Zuoren 周作人, Liang Sicheng 梁思成, and Lin Huiyin 林徽因, as well as Shen Congwen 沈從文 and Yang Gang 楊剛, who are mentioned in the book. I like that the book uses footnotes rather than endnotes, and they are very thorough and useful, but at times excessively fastidious. For example, there are dozens of cross-references to other chapters and sections in the book for which a simple “see translation in Chapter 5” would have sufficed, yet in most cases they appear in the form, “a translated version of this essay is included in this volume in Chapter x, pp xx-xxx.”
In the end, although One Man Talking has made great strides in clarifying Shao Xunmei’s place in literary history, questions of influence and impact still remain unanswered: how insulated was this Anglophone group within Chinese cultural circles, and how broad was their readership? Shao Xunmei’s strongest claim for cultural impact is the many magazines he established, which included works by many important authors that did not belong to his “core cultural group.” When we read Shao’s ideas on literature and art, we can see both where they resonate with broader literary trends and where they differ. The fact that in an article on a Soviet woodblock exhibition, in which he was personally involved, Shao did not mention Lu Xun and his role in promoting woodblock print in China, suggests that Shao was confident that much of his readership would not have objected to the omission, and raises the question of how compartmentalized different “camps” of writers and readers were on the eve of war against Japan. In other words, I wonder how many enthusiastic readers of Lu Xun, Mao Dun 茅盾, or Ba Jin 巴金 were likely to have been meaningfully impacted by Shao Xunmei’s ideas?
This is not to say that the purpose of the book should be to prove that Shao and his circle were more influential than is commonly thought, but more information pertaining to their impact would help contextualize them for the reader. The claim of large circulation numbers for his magazines is there (227; 241), but the numbers are only loosely compared with numbers for other literary publications. Similarly, in relation to illustration, considering that more work (also mentioned in the book) is being done now on manhua and visual print culture from the latter half of the twentieth century, any impact Shao’s circle can be shown to have had on later manhua trends would be best illustrated with examples.
Charles A. Laughlin
University of Virginia
NOTES:
[1] Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945, 241–54.
[2] Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, 115; 121–22; Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945, 241–45.
[3] See Laughlin, “The Analects Group and the Genre of Xiaopin,” 212–17.
[4] See my discussion of this approach to essay writing in Laughlin, The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity, 49–59.
[5] Laughlin, “The Analects Group and the Genre of Xiaopin,” 210.
WORKS CITED:
Bevan, Paul, A Modern Miscellany: Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926-1938. Leiden: Brill, 2018.
—–. ‘Intoxicating Shanghai’: Modern Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
—–. “The Impact of the Work of Miguel Covarrubias on the Artists of Shanghai.” Anales, Journal of the Institute of Aesthetic Investigations of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas) 116 (May 2020): 17-49.
—–. “Sappho’s Younger Brother: Shao Xunmei, Translation and his Golden House Bookshop.” In Cosima Bruno, Lucas Klein and Chris Song, eds., The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation. London: Bloomsbury, 2023, 141-52.
Hutt, Jonathan. “La Maison D’Or: The Sumptuous World of Shao Xunmei.” East Asian History 21 (June 2001): 111-42.
Jin, Tian. The Condition of Music: Anglophone Influences in the Poetry of Shao Xunmei. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2020.
Laughlin, Charles A. “The Analects Group and the Genre of Xiaopin.” In Michel Hockx and Kirk A. Denton, eds., Literary Societies of Republican China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008, 207-40.
———. The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008.
Lee, Leo Ou-fan. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Spence, Jonathan. The Gate of Heavenly Peace. New York: Penguin, 1982.
Sun, Jicheng and Harold Swindall, trs. The Verse of Shao Xunmei: Heaven and May (1927) and Twenty-Five Poems (1936). Paramus, NJ: Homa and Sekey, 2016.