Running a small literary magazine is a tough job. It’s hard to make the numbers add up, and as much as a beleaguered editor may dream, offers of funding from generous millionaires are rare. So when in 1917 Ezra Pound wrote to Margaret Anderson, the founding editor of The Little Review, with a proposal that he join the masthead and bring a financial backer along with him, he perhaps knew the odds were on his side. Pound was straightforward: he was looking for an “official organ,” he told Anderson.
A place where I and T.S. Eliot can appear once a month (or once an issue) and where James Joyce can appear when he likes, and where Wyndham Lewis can appear if he comes back from the war.
In return his friend John Quinn—a patron to Pound and other penurious writers—would support the magazine financially. He acknowledged that the plan sounded “very dictatorial” but added, “I don’t mean it that way.”
Thus the April 1917 issue of The Little Review listed Pound as its foreign editor and proclaimed his appointment “the most stunning plan that any magazine has had the good fortune to announce for a long, long time.” Anderson had founded the magazine three years earlier, and since 1916 she had run it with her coeditor and romantic partner, Jane Heap. She was glad for respite from the financial troubles that had imperiled her work since the beginning and eager for the injection of excitement Pound’s involvement promised to bring to this capacious and protean publication. “It means,” she wrote, “that a great deal of the most creative work of modern London and Paris will be published in these pages.” It certainly did: The Little Review’s serial publication of Joyce’s Ulysses secured its place in literary history, though the subsequent and much-publicized obscenity trial nearly destroyed the magazine.
The historian Holly A. Baggett’s Making No Compromise—part history of the magazine, part dual biography of its coeditors—tells the story of how a tiny magazine run by a lesbian couple from the American Midwest came to publish some of the most innovative writing produced across Europe and the US between 1914 and 1929. At a time when the established American magazines were in thrall to their advertisers and, as Pound declared, “increasingly somnolent,” The Little Review set out to surprise, challenge, and entertain, with minimal regard for commercial imperatives. Anderson’s enthusiasm about Pound’s proposal was entirely characteristic. Her autobiography My Thirty Years’ War and the many editorials she wrote for The Little Review are peppered with exclamations, encomiums, and superlatives. She declared “reality” her greatest enemy and embraced anything she deemed “interesting”—a favorite word of hers.
Anderson was born in 1886, and as a young woman seeking escape from her hometown of Indianapolis (having dropped out of liberal arts college to study piano), she had written to Clara Laughlin, the author of a book called The Work-a-Day Girl, to seek advice on gaining employment. Laughlin invited her to Chicago and offered her a job reviewing books, sometimes fifty at a time, for a religious outlet called The Interior. (She wasn’t paid, but she was allowed to sell the books.) When the magazine was inundated with complaints after her positive report on Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie—a novel denounced by conservatives for its naturalistic depictions of sex and adultery and its refusal to condemn its “fallen woman” heroine—Anderson began to imagine a venture that would embrace controversy, publish radical work, and provide a forum for debate on the subjects she found most stimulating, from free verse to free love.
She told friends she was “about to publish the most interesting magazine that has ever been launched.” Its readers would be those who “have ever read poetry with a feeling that it was your religion, your very life” or “felt music replacing your shabby soul with a new one of shining gold.” It would attempt to approximate the feel of “inspired conversation,” she explained, and—being “the personal enterprise of the editor”—it would “enjoy that untrammelled liberty which is the life of Art.”
The Chicago journalist Dewitt C. Wing offered to foot the bill for the first months’ printing, and Anderson threw her considerable energy and charm into soliciting advertisers. A friend going through a divorce sold her engagement ring for the magazine’s benefit, while publishers signed on to list their forthcoming titles. (Anderson kept an eye out for potential perks as she negotiated, too: in exchange for a year’s free advertising for the Mason and Hamlin Company, she managed to bag a baby grand piano for her own apartment.)
Chicago in 1914 was a good place to start a literary review. It was full of writers, many of whom became Anderson’s contributors: Sherwood Anderson, Maurice Browne, Susan Glaspell, and John Cowper Powys. The city’s readers were primed for innovative work after encountering Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp at the controversial Armory Show—the first exhibition in America to showcase the latest European styles—which came to the Art Institute of Chicago from New York in 1913. Harriet Monroe started her influential Poetry magazine there in 1912, and Anderson had cut her teeth proofreading at The Dial. (She had met its editor, Francis Browne, in a bookshop by interrupting him to supply a word he couldn’t remember from a Matthew Arnold poem: “lovely.”)
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In her first editorial in The Little Review, Anderson called for work that pushed boundaries and redefined beauty. “Criticism,” she wrote, “is never merely an interpretative function; it is creative: it gives birth!” The magazine’s tagline was “Making no compromise with the public taste.” Anderson saw it as her job to strong-arm readers into liking what she liked, and she was ready to argue her case if they disagreed. In the second issue, she printed all the responses she had received to the first (“What an insouciant pagan journal you have”), and the letters pages regularly featured her own replies to complaints.
Her determination to publish work she deemed significant, no matter its form, place of origin, or popular reception, produced an intriguing if somewhat chaotic mix of subjects. From The Little Review’s launch until 1916, each issue contained a long essay on Nietzsche (whom Anderson called her “prophet”) by the theologian George Burman Foster, while another series of articles dissected the philosophies of Henri Bergson and Walt Whitman. Anderson would regularly throw her ample passions behind causes, movements, and individuals that caught her attention: a new friendship with Amy Lowell turned the magazine into a bastion of Imagist poetry, while an encounter with Emma Goldman—another “prophet”—introduced anarchist manifestos into the magazine’s regular repertoire. In her autobiography, Anderson wrote about federal detectives being sent to the office after the publication of an article in 1915 that pleaded, “For God’s sake, why doesn’t someone start the Revolution?”
Anderson’s deep, quasi-religious admiration for Goldman and her enthusiastic assumption of anarchist principles shaped the magazine’s coverage of labor issues and World War I. She responded to the war with horror at its “terrific human waste.” The magazine expressed outrage at Goldman’s arrest on charges of distributing information about birth control, and it sympathetically charted Goldman and Alexander Berkman’s efforts to raise money for the five anarchists arrested after the San Francisco Preparedness Day bombing. But Anderson’s increasingly radical editorial stance was met with alarm by many of the magazine’s early supporters. Subscriptions fell, advertisers pulled out, and she spent the summer of 1915 living in a tent on the beach outside Chicago, where contributors and admirers visited to swim, read poetry, and plot new forms of direct action. Ever positive, Anderson described those six months of encampment as “the most lyrical of my life.”
On the subject of feminism, Anderson was explicit in her first editorial: “A clear-thinking magazine can have only one attitude; the degree of ours is ardent!” This was apparent in the journal’s interest in new work on sexuality. In the first few months Anderson published two reviews of an address by the writer and activist Edith Ellis, who worked alongside her husband, the sexologist Havelock Ellis; one of these, by Anderson herself, was a strident defense of homosexuality, considered to be the first published by a woman in the US. In it, she condemns the fact that unconventional love is “as punishable as murder or robbery.” “I have been called a lovely freak of nature,” she wrote, with laudable candor. She also wrote about birth control (“one of the milestones by which civilisation will measure its progress”), motherhood, marriage, and labor. She was interested less in the procedural workings of the suffrage movement, Baggett suggests, than in feminism as a “new religion.” She tended to emphasize feminism’s intellectual history and emotional resonance: the first issue included two articles on the nineteenth-century Berlin salonnière Rachel Varnhagen, who compared marriage to slavery.
If Margaret Anderson was wide-eyed, Jane Heap was prone to eye rolls. Heap called the two of them “the Buzz and the Sting”: Anderson was feminine and enthusiastic while Heap was morose and sarcastic, and preferred masculine attire. Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1883, Heap had been living in an artists’ colony outside Munich before she came to Chicago to attend the Art Institute. Anderson thought Heap was a genius, and later described her as “the world’s best talker.” Anderson would invent outlandish positions for the pleasure of hearing Heap rebut them, sometimes whipping out a pen during breakfast to jot down Heap’s thoughts, and was known to lock her in a room to ensure she finished the articles Anderson wanted to publish.
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After Heap became coeditor in 1916, her vision, Baggett argues, shaped The Little Review from its bold but incoherent beginnings into “the premiere avant-garde journal of international modernism in the twentieth century.” Under Heap’s exacting eye, Anderson decided it was necessary to raise the quality of contributions. In her editorials she began to chastise her own contributors for not writing well enough: “Helen Hoyt, you have a poem in this issue called ‘The Tree.’ It is not Art. It is merely a rather good poem. You could have made it Art. Do it every time, for the love of the gods!” She once threatened to leave the next issue blank if she didn’t receive pieces that were “really beautiful”: “Come on, all of you!” The September 1916 issue did indeed contain several blank pages, as well as a cartoon by Heap, signed “jh” and titled “Light Occupations of the Editors When There Is Nothing to Edit,” showing Anderson swimming, playing piano, and listening to Emma Goldman lecture.
Early in 1917 Heap and Anderson moved to New York City, setting up in a studio in the radical bohemia of Greenwich Village. Antiwar activism was in full swing; crumbling tenements were bursting with poets and artists; Heterodoxy, the feminist debating club, gathered at Polly’s restaurant on MacDougal Street to wrestle over feminist politics, psychoanalysis, and pacifism. The process of settling in was not easy: they were evicted from their apartment after fundraising for Goldman’s defense. Then an issue of The Little Review was confiscated by the post office for publishing a story by Wyndham Lewis about a soldier disillusioned by war who abandons his pregnant lover. The post office acted on the grounds that the story was lascivious, though Anderson and Heap suspected it was censored for its antiwar politics. Either way, the skirmish with the law dealt a blow: they had to switch to a cheaper printer and cut down on food.
The appointment of Pound as foreign editor that April brought a welcome injection of capital from John Quinn, but it caused ructions among the readership: the letters pages were filled with laments that the old spirit of The Little Review was dead, that its aesthetics had swung wildly toward modernism, and that it was no longer an American magazine but a European one. The editors sought to reassure their readers: “Fear not, dear ones,” wrote Heap. “We have learned to be penny wise; we will not be Pound foolish.” (Pound, for his part, responded by hectoring readers for their “oligarchic” reaction to his influence at the magazine, which he claimed amounted to poetic nationalism. “I can, in imagination, hear the poluploisbious twitter of rural requests for my silence and extinction,” he wrote.) To reiterate their independence, they published an essay criticizing Pound’s poetry for its “elusive boredom.”
Pound sent the first three chapters of Ulysses to Anderson in late 1917. She later remembered reading the sentence “Ineluctable modality of Being, sea-sprawn, sea-wracked signature of all things I read” and telling Heap, “This is the most beautiful thing we’ll ever have…. We’ll print it if it’s the last effort of our lives.” It nearly was. The Little Review published twenty-three installments of Ulysses over two years and nine months, until October 1920, when it was formally charged with circulating obscenity through the mail. Joyce was pleased (he hoped for a trial “as successful as that of Madame Bovary”), and the editors, at first, were confident. They published the next installment accompanied by an editorial rejecting the idea that the public needs protection from serious literature.
Anderson and Heap saw the trial as a referendum on female sexuality. The offending passage, from the Nausicaa chapter, features Gerty MacDowell on Sandymount Beach enjoying the lascivious gaze of Leopold Bloom, and they were determined to defend it on both literary and political grounds. Anderson stood by the argument of her early essay on Sister Carrie: art was no place for moral instruction. “We have managed to keep alive,” she wrote defiantly, “in spite of an unsympathetic and ignorant public, a jeering press, and a censor that expects the worst of any effort dedicated to the best.”
They were represented by their erstwhile benefactor, Quinn: a Manhattan lawyer and an avid collector of modern art who had helped stage the Armory Show. Hugh Eakin’s fascinating 2022 book Picasso’s War explains how Quinn’s visionary collection became the partial inspiration for MoMA’s foundation. He comes off very differently here: Baggett quotes reams of vitriolic misogyny from his letters to Pound and suggests that his disgust with his clients’ sexuality accounted for a “self-defeating legal strategy” in the Ulysses trial. The most violent parts of Quinn’s letters to Pound, Baggett explains, have been cut from their published correspondence; in previous versions of this story he’s been portrayed as an overburdened attorney doing his best to rescue incompetent editors from a mess of their own making.
He agreed to defend them for Joyce’s sake, though he considered the book “toilet room literature.” He told Pound they had “stupidly and brazenly and Sapphoistically” violated the law, and he complained that the women who packed the courthouse in support turned the room into a “fashionable whorehouse.” At the trial in February 1921, the judge balked at having the novel read aloud in Anderson’s presence, insisting that she could not have known what she was publishing. Heap, wearing cravat and breeches and staring down the judge, was considered exempt from such aspersions of innocence; when Anderson leaped up to explain the novel’s literary merits, Heap had to dig her in the ribs to get her to sit down. They were fined a hundred dollars, which was paid by sympathetic benefactors—but Anderson attributed her subsequent nervous breakdown to the stress of the trial. And it nearly ended the magazine: Quinn revoked his subsidy, Pound resigned, readers grumbled, and advertisers hesitated. Amid the dissolution of their romantic relationship, Anderson pulled back, and Heap took over.
In autumn 1921 the title page of The Little Review—in an issue dedicated to protesting the verdict—read “REORGANIZED.” With Heap now directing operations, the magazine’s interests expanded into the visual arts, building on her background as a painter and set designer. Twenty reproductions of Brâncuşi’s abstract work were printed alongside essays on Cubism, surrealism, machine-age aesthetics, and theater design; Pound was replaced as foreign editor by the Dadaist Francis Picabia. Heap established the Little Review Gallery on Fifth Avenue and planned the “Machine-Age Exposition,” a lamplit hall where tractors, propellers, meat slicers, and diving suits were displayed next to art by Man Ray and Charles Demuth, among others, illustrated in a catalog by Fernand Léger.
The Ulysses trial is the most notorious moment in the magazine’s history. But beyond the “Men of 1914” promoted relentlessly by Pound, Baggett rightly points out the magazine’s commitment to the work of female writers, particularly in the 1920s: Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Mary Butts were among those who made their debuts or published significant pieces in the magazine. Between June 1919 and April 1920 The Little Review published the fifth installment of Dorothy Richardson’s epic novel cycle, Pilgrimage; May Sinclair had already reviewed the first three volumes in the magazine and was the first to use William James’s term “stream of consciousness” in a description of literature. Heap was a staunch supporter of Gertrude Stein and made numerous entreaties to publishers in the hope of finding an American home for her thousand-page behemoth, The Making of Americans. To readers confused by the Dadaist poetry of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Heap responded that the magazine would surely “drop” the writer—“right into the middle of the history of American poetry.”
But the major shift in direction, in the magazine and in both women’s lives, came in 1923 when the message of the spiritualist George Gurdjieff was brought to American shores. Gurdjieff insisted that most humans are passive automata sleepwalking through life, unaware of the reality around them; he urged his disciples to take control of their consciousnesses through a complex path of self-development, with the goal of holistic spiritual awakening. Among his most loyal pupils was the British editor A.R. Orage, who had contributed to The Little Review’s Henry James issue and had written sympathetically about the Ulysses trial in his own magazine, The New Age. After a spell at Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, near Fontainebleau-Avon, Orage was sent to the US to recruit new members. He approached Heap and Anderson, and in the spring of 1924 the pair sailed for France, along with Anderson’s new partner, the opera singer Georgette Leblanc. The institute was as yet little known in America, but it had already garnered a reputation among writers in Europe, some intrigued, others skeptical: Katherine Mansfield, suffering from tuberculosis, had gone there in October 1922 to spend her final months under Gurdjieff’s care. Her friend D.H. Lawrence called the institute a “rotten, false, self-conscious place of people playing a sickly stunt.” But Heap and Anderson threw themselves into group activities, from kitchen chores to circle games, and became lifelong disciples of the Armenian mystic.
Baggett makes a convincing case that spiritualism was an abiding concern of many of the magazine’s contributors; esoteric philosophies, with their hidden wisdom and promises of self-realization, offered much to interest practitioners of modernism as they explored new forms of language and nonrepresentational art. She argues that Heap and Anderson’s turn to Gurdjieff’s philosophy was rooted in their shared “enthusiasm for the intellectual underpinnings of modernism and their dissatisfaction with its limitations.” However, Anderson and Heap themselves seemed to draw a sharp line between spirituality and art, Gurdjieff and The Little Review. After her immersion in Gurdjieff’s teachings, Anderson declared that she no longer thought of art as “man’s highest aspiration”; she was now preoccupied with “evolution of the soul.” Heap, too, concluded that art was “interesting only as a pronounced symptom of an ailing and aimless society.”
Anderson later wrote that she and Heap saw art as an expression of a “need of something else.” Gurdjieff appeared to them as another messiah, “a man who could clarify for us a world we had hoped to fathom.” It’s a curious irony that Anderson’s preoccupation with everything modern was supplanted by a fascination with spiritualism, which had been a major fixation of the Victorians. But she had always sought out prophets, and her program with The Little Review had from the beginning represented a quest for knowledge, for new ways of seeing the world.
It’s easy to see why a school of philosophy promising consciousness-expanding enlightenment would appeal to Anderson. But spiritualism doesn’t account for her and Heap’s achievements with the magazine, which worked precisely because it allowed its writers (many of whom would deeply disagree with the idea of art as fulfilling some spiritual need, rather than existing on its own terms) to express themselves as they saw fit. Some wrote from a restless urge for enlightenment, others to explore the possibilities of pure language, others from political convictions and a desire to improve the earthly realm. “I do not believe that the conditions of our life can produce men who can give us masterpieces,” Anderson wrote in an editorial bringing The Little Review to a close. “Masterpieces are not made from chaos.”
The magazine published no issues in 1928 and only one in 1929, for which they mailed a questionnaire to every past contributor. (“What do you look forward to?” read one of the questions. Gertrude Stein, bemused, replied, “More of the same.”) The final issue consisted in its entirety of the responses, from more than fifty artists and writers, many of whom remonstrated with Heap and Anderson for the banality of the questions. In her last editorial, contrarian as ever, Anderson chastised her contributors for the final time: their nonplussed reaction to the questionnaire, she argued, proved that “even the artist doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
By the time of Heap’s death in 1964, the Buzz and the Sting had lost touch (Anderson died in 1973). But their partnership, as Baggett puts it, had promoted “a radical articulation of literature, art, criticism, and sexuality that was essential for the revolutionary emergence of modernism.” Many little magazines across Europe and America sprang up in the aftermath of The Little Review: The Partisan Review, founded in 1934, which was linked to the Communist Party and set radical political commentary alongside literature; The Paris Review, which sought to elevate fiction and poetry over criticism; The Kenyon Review, edited by John Crowe Ransom from Ohio, which represented a new wave of reviews coming out of universities, often serving as vehicles for emerging critical schools; and many more besides.
These journals and others built on the serious ambitions of The Little Review to publish original work outside mainstream channels, to take risks on unknown writers and on writing that was unconventional in form or idea, and to edit with vigor and openness to surprise. A short life span is no disgrace for a little magazine; The Little Review formed a brief chapter in its editors’ long lives. Yet Anderson’s youthful dream—to make a magazine that would feel like a good conversation—continues to reverberate: her refusal to compromise in the face of hostility was finally vindicated.
