MAKING NO COMPROMISE : MARGARET ANDERSON, JANE HEAP, AND THE LITTLE REVIEW

By Holly A. Baggett

Northern Illinois University Press. 296 pages. £28.99. ISBN 978-1501-771446

Reviewed by Jim Burns

Little magazines were essential to the development of the modernist movement in literature. Without them it may have been difficult for struggling writers to find outlets for the new, the experimental, and anything that stood outside the framework of established and accepted forms of novels, short stories, and poems. And even if many little magazines didn’t aim to deliberately break new ground they often drew attention to young writers and to others who had been overlooked or unfairly forgotten.

The Little Review was founded in Chicago in 1914 by Margaret Anderson, a lady escaping from her dull roots in Indianapolis. Chicago, at that time, had a lively bohemian literary and political community. Writers like Floyd Dell. Ben Hecht, and Maxwell Bodenheim were active. Holly Baggett points out that Bodenheim’s early novel, Blackguard, originally published in 1923 and recently reprinted, “was a thinly veiled account of the literary scene during the Chicago Renaissance”, with Anderson appearing under the name Martha Apperson.  Also active in Chicago was the anarchist Emma Goldman, with her magazine, Mother Earth. And Harriet Monroe with Poetry. In addition, the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) had its headquarters there, and was busy promoting the idea of syndicalism and direct action to further its policies. Its publications often used poems to hammer home its message.

The first two years of the Little Review were heavily shaped by Anderson’s interests. Baggett describes the magazine as a “personal enterprise” and says it “repeatedly referenced mid-to late Victorian dissidents such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde alongside their Edwardian successors Galsworthy and Wells while engaging in the modern Imagist poetry wars of the early twentieth century”. Anderson’s friendship with Emma Goldman was also in evidence when articles about anarchism and Max Stirner appeared in the Little Review. Stirner’s The Ego and his Own was “a widely read piece of work in anarchist circles” and Baggett is certain that Anderson was familiar with it. It exercised a great influence on individualist anarchists and members of the artistic community.

The contents of the Little Review began to change from around 1916 when Anderson met Jane Heap. She came from Kansas and had studied at the Chicago Art Institute where she was commended for “outstanding work in figure drawing and composition”. She then moved to Germany where she learned “tapestry, weaving, and mural decoration while living in an artist’s colony near Munich”. When she returned to Chicago she taught at “Lewis institute where she had at one time studied jewelry making and participated in theatrical productions”. Like Anderson she was a lesbian, though unlike her she was more outgoing about her feelings. Male bohemians and their contemporaries often commented on Anderson’s attractive figure, femininity (she always dressed well) and good looks, whereas Heap indulged in cross-dressing and left no-one in any doubt about her sexual preferences.   

Both women shared an interest in the ideas of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, which, says Baggett, drew them into “the world of mysticism”. Opinions about him seem to have varied. Was his “esoteric philosophy” genuine or a mixture designed to distract from any serious consideration of it? Baggett points to the fact that “To some observers, Gurdjieff was little more than a self-serving obnoxious fraud who bamboozled Anderson and Heap along with other members of the literati”.  She devotes a whole chapter to his influence on the two women and, through them, the contents of the Little Review. I haven’t the space to weigh the pros and cons of his appeal, but there’s no doubt about the fact that many well-educated, intelligent people fell under his spell, perhaps because they were searching for something which might replace the faith they had lost in a world that was increasingly complicated and violent. According to Baggett, among those who were followers of Gurdjieff’s teachings, and had work published in the Little Review, were Muriel Draper, Hart Crane, Gorham Munson, and Jean Toomer. Not all of their names will be recognised by contemporary readers, but they were known in their day.

Ezra Pound was drawn into the world of the Little Review when he took on the role of European editor. It was through him that W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis began to appear in the magazine. The relationship to the occult or aspects of Eastern philosophy is relevant here. Baggett notes that Pound had an “interest in Eastern literature and philosophy” and asserts that “several scholars now endorse the notion that while he publicly rejected the occult, he was nevertheless fascinated, if not obsessed, by it”. She adds that Yeats’s “history with the occult is well documented”, and quotes another scholar, Stuart Gilbert, to the effect that “it is impossible to grasp the meaning of James Joyce’s Ulysses and the significance of its leitmotifs without an understanding of the esoteric theories which underlie the work”.     

It wasn’t the esoteric that landed Anderson and Heap in court when they started to use excerpts from Ulysses in the Little Review in 1920. The charge was the more down-to-earth one of “circulating obscenity through the mail”. It could be that it was the Ulysses trial that gave the magazine a notoriety that ensured its place in the history of literary modernism. Baggett outlines the story, and the judgement which found the editors guilty and fined them, a fact which may have had an effect on the magazine’s future. It continued to appear, though there was a slowing down in its regularity. Only five issues came out between 1925 and 1929. Money was always a problem for little magazines, especially those attempting to publish anything new or different.

There is a chapter in Making No Compromise which focuses on “Lesbian Literature, Women Writers, and Modernist Mysticism” and offers some useful information and insights into Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, Getrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Mary Butts, and the “first American Dada”, the strange Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. I have to admit that I’ve never known how seriously to take the latter eccentric who, in earlier accounts I’ve read, was noted more for her odd behaviour than any literary talent. More recent considerations, especially those by historians of modernism, have thrown new light on her writings. She now occupies a place in an anthology like Modernist Women Poets, edited by Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp (Counterpoint Press, 2015) where her work sits easily alongside that by Mina Loy, Getrude Stein, Lola Ridge, Amy Lowell, and others. There is a valid point made by Baggett when she says that “modernism itself can be re-evaluated through the prism of feminist literary perspectives”, though the anthology shows that men can also be active in that field.

I was interested in what Baggett had to say about Mary Butts, a writer I began to be fascinated by when I found, on a side-street book stall in Liverpool, a copy of Speed the Plough, a collection of her short stories published in 1923. Baggett refers to her “distinctly bohemian life in London and Paris in the circles of Pound, Sinclair, Stein and Cocteau. In the twenties, Butts began a lifelong habit of using opium, hashish, and heroin”. She also made “fervent explorations” into the occult, which took her into the dark world of Aleister Crowley, and his “infamous” Abbey of Thelema in Sicily.  Pound, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and others praised her work, but Sylvia Beach described her life as “tragic” and she died in 1937 when she was 46. Years ago I found a copy of The Best Short Stories of 1924 in a second-hand bookshop and read her story, “Deosil”, reprinted from The Transatlantic Review. Along the way I picked up other items relating to Butts, including a copy of Little Ceasar 12 from 1981 which had a short tribute to her by Oswell Blakeston who had known her in the 1930s. The full story of the adventures and experiences of Mary Butts can be found in Nathalie Blondel’s 1998 biography, Mary Butts : Scenes from the Life.

As the Little Review moved into the 1920s it was obvious that Jane Heap was the dominant influence on what it published. She had little or no interest in the kind of “missionary zeal” that Baggett says both Anderson and Pound shared when it came to presenting new work to the public. She quotes Heap as writing that it was “of no interest” to her whether the American public came to appreciate art “early or late or never”. It’s an attitude I’ve sometimes heard expressed by little magazine editors and writers over the years, and it denotes a kind of “purity”, but it is hardly likely to increase the circulation of a publication which is probably struggling to stay alive, anyway. As I mentioned earlier, only five issues of the Little Review appeared between 1925 and 1929.

Very few little magazines have survived for more than a handful of issues, but the Little Review managed to stay alive from 1914 to 1929 by, in Baggett’s words, “bringing attention to every major movement in early twentieth-century literature and art”.  And she adds, “In the twenties Heap issued numbers that included every movement from Cubism, surrealism, Russian Constructivism, and De Stijl architecture to Bauhaus, modern theatre design, and Machine Age aesthetics”. A long list of the names of those featured in the magazine includes Man Ray, Max Ernst, Hans Arp, Joseph Stella, and George Grosz. I have a copy of the Winter 1924 issue which spotlights Juan Gris alongside Hemingway, Stein, Paul Eluard, Francis Picabia, Dorothy Richardson, Nathan Asch, and others. I’m also inclined to point to The Little Review Anthology, edited by Margaret Anderson in 1953, and which provides a good impression of the range of contributors and their concerns.

I think it’s worth quoting what Jane Heap said when “defending her right to publish what she pleased”: “We have printed more isms than any other ten journals and have never caught one. Our pages are open to isms, ists, ites…we have been after the work, not the name….our drooling critics, in true American fashion, become sea-sick over a name…we are enjoying ourselves”.   I like that phrase, “we have been after the work, not the name”, which seems to me to sum up an ideal policy for a little magazine, printing something because it’s interesting and not because it fits to a preconceived notion of what a work of art should be.

Making No Compromise is a book packed with information about a significant publication and the personalities behind it, and is sure to appeal to anyone interested in literary modernism, women writers, and little magazines. I’m conscious of perhaps not indicating how much it covers in terms of the people it published and their ideas. Holly Baggett is rightly keen to show how women editors and writers were involved in what came to be known as the modernist movement, and the value of their contributions to it. She also indicates how a magazine like the Little Review played a prominent part in bringing writers together in ways that could allow them to develop their own ideas but also see what others were doing. And open up their work to the attention of a discerning audience.

There are photos of some of the principal actors in the Little Review story, useful notes, and an extensive bibliography. Having enjoyed the book so much It possibly seems churlish to pick up on one thing that bothered me. However, on page 26 Baggett says that Margaret Anderson, while raising funds for her magazine in 1914, went to New York to “get advertising revenue from major publishers…. While at Scribner’s she met a young F. Scott Fitzgerald who was going over the proofs for his first novel, This Side of Paradise”. Fitzgerald’s novel was only published in 1920, so Anderson couldn’t have met him at Scribner’s in 1914, despite what she says in her autobiography, My Thirty Years War, published in 1930, which is where Baggett drew her information from. I have a copy of Anderson’s book and it’s quite clear she’s mistaken when she recalls meeting Fitzgerald correcting proofs of his novel around 1914.