1920-1930: The Little Review
Of the half-dozen published photographs of Margaret C. Anderson (from
her magazine The Little Review), or her three autobiographies),
the most arresting is a full-face passport snapshot. It shows a confident
lady of 49 with thick, dark lipstick, a great tuft of white hair above
her high forehead, a dried-flower corsage, a cocked eyebrow, and probably
lots of perfume. She's staring with amused contempt at the passport photographer.
Other photos include a somber portrait taken by the dadaist Man Ray, but my favorite is a picture of Anderson at Cannes in 1927 (right), just as she was closing down The Little Review. She looks greatly relieved that it is over. She has short dark hair and is leaning against a wall in a sleeveless black dress with a string of pearls stretching down to her belly, her head thrown back, laughing. I'm probably projecting what I read onto the photograph, but she looks like a breathlessly energetic woman who has style but no money, who lives for what she calls inspired conversation and who is most proud that her passionate feelings about art, love and friendship are out of synch with the most mundane world around her.
"People who make Art are more interesting than people who don't," she wrote. "They have a special illumination about life; this illumination is the subject matter of all conversation; one might as well be dead as to live outside this radiance."
In 1914 these feelings made her want to start a magazine. She was 21, writing book reviews for an established Chicago journal, The Continent, and trying to escape from her family. They had followed her from Columbus, Indiana. Her mother was a high-strung Christian Scientist who wanted her daughter to live at home. Her father, a mild mannered, hard working businessman, had kept a wife and three daughters in a constant supply of new clothes and furniture for years, until he went into a sanitarium at age 50.
By that time Margaret had left home and was living alone in Chicago, still taking money from her mother. One night, lying awake, she decided her life was dull. "If I had a magazine," she said to herself, " I could spend my time filling it up with the best conversation the world has to offer". She decided to start one, fell immediately asleep, and woke up with the solid conviction that she was already an editor. All she had to do was get people to write for her and give her money.
With that spirit, she not only started The Little Review, but kept it running for 13 years, usually at the forefront of the latest controversial aesthetic movement, frequently with no income except a few subscriptions. She lived without furniture or in other peoples' houses. Sometimes she went without food or sold her clothes. She put off landlords, printers and creditors with aristocratic elan. When a landlord said she had written a bad check she replied, "I didn't tell you it was going to be good."
She became known in Chicago literary and political circles as a vividly beautiful woman who spoke, as she described it in "gaps, gasps, and gestures." From Chicago, she moved the magazine to tents on the shore of Lake Michigan; later to a ranch in Mill Valley, California, owned by the local sheriff; to the West Village in New York; and finally to Paris. Her only demanded possession was a Mason and Hamlin piano. She could usually get the manufacturer to lend her one for free wherever she was staying.
Perhaps easiest to summarize the impact of her magazine by quoting a list of contributors: Ezra Pound, James Joyce (whose Ulysses was first printed in The Little Review). Sherwood Anderson, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, W. B Yeats, Ben Hecht, William Carlos Williams, Djuna Barnes, Brancusi, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson, Francis Picabia, Guillaume Apollonaire. The inside back cover of later issues of the magazine thundered, "What other American publication old or new has done as much in equal or double or quintuple the number of pages?"
The Little Review started as a small, drab little monthly with a forward by John Galsworthy and a flowery critical style. "What I needed," Anderson later wrote, "was not a magazine, but a club room where I could have informed disciples twice a week that nature was wonderful, love beautiful, and art inspired." By the third issue the criticism was more sophisticated and Anderson had discovered her first controversy: anarchism. After Emma Goldman became a regular contributor, ads were cancelled, subscriptions were dropped, and Anderson herself was disowned by her mother. She put a sub-head under the cover logo: A Magazine of the Arts, Making No Compromise with the Public Taste. Thereafter her search for quality work embraced, in succession, feminism, imagism, cubism, surrealism, dadaism, and experimentalism in general.
In 1917 Ezra Pound, whom she had never met, wrote to ask for a position as foreign editor. Anderson accepted, and Pound helped bring a lot of European experimental writing, including Ulysses, into the magazine. From a letter to Joyce, Pound apparently regarded Anderson as a well intentioned but flighty artiste whose publication was a good resource but who was careless about typos.
But she was not a dilettante, despite all the fun she seemed to be having. She had strong ideas about what was good and what wasn't, and why. She knew when The Little Review was printing inferior material; in 1916 she printed an issue of blank pages because no one was sending good work. She never let anyone give money on condition of dictating the contents of the magazine. And in 1922 she paid a fine and risked a jail sentence because the US Postal Service considered Ulysses obscene.
All literary accounts agree that she created a magazine which the people who would become writers and artists of the 30s and 40s read. Along with Poetry, The Little Review is considered the most influential small magazine of its time.
I want to reproduce a conversation printed in its pages, between Anderson (MCA) and her friend and constant contributor, Jane Heap (JH). They lived together during most of the magazine's history, and Heap, known to readers only by her initials, defended the aesthetic stance of the magazine in a series of short critical articles. There is one publishes photograph of JH: it shows a young, stout, half-Norwegian woman with choppy brown hair and a look of sardonic detachment. Both women were compulsive talkers and argued continuously with each other, Anderson in exaggerated gasps and Heap in an acerbic monotone: The conversation begins here.
