3
Political and Literary Radicals
While Anderson was navigating her way through the explosive minefield of emerging modernism from 1914 to 1916, two major themes—one literary and one political—emerged to dominate the discussion. Anarchism and imagism, which overtook the early years of the Little Review, were movements that may appear to represent contrary impulses. However, in this phase of her life and career, Anderson believed politics and art could coexist. She would later conclude that her hopes were misplaced, but anarchism and imagism in the pages of the Little Review made for some of the journal’s most impassioned writing.
In the Little Review, anarchism and imagism were reflected by Anderson’s friendship with the high priestesses of the two respective movements, Emma Goldman and Amy Lowell. At first glance, the Boston Brahmin poet and the immigrant revolutionary seem to be polar opposites, and Anderson’s involvement with both raises certain questions. Differences aside, however, aspects of Goldman’s and Lowell’s philosophies dovetailed. Both Goldman and Lowell shared (in spirit if not always in practice) Anderson’s interest in Nietzschean philosophy, feminist politics, and lesbian sexuality. Goldman was a fierce admirer of Nietzsche, a dedicated feminist and promoter of birth control, and someone (like Anderson) who saw suffrage as irrelevant to the liberation of women. We do not know Lowell’s view of Nietzsche, but as a poet she embodied his concept of the artist who demonstrated superiority over others, and Anderson clearly saw her as one of the best poets of the day. An independent, wealthy, cigar-smoking woman whose poems were often about the beauty of women, Lowell was anything but cowed by gender restrictions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lowell was a lesbian, and Goldman was one of the earliest defenders of homosexuals.
Each woman, however, had her own cause and promoted it with Anderson’s energetic help in the Little Review. Goldman, who edited her own journal, Mother Earth, was delighted by the calls for revolution, labor uprisings, and pacifism that appeared repeatedly in Anderson’s magazine. For Lowell the cause was imagism, which she planned to capture under Ezra Pound’s leadership; the Little Review figured prominently in her strategy, and Anderson was happy to comply. Goldman and Lowell each touched something deep within Anderson. She responded to both of them with her characteristic enthusiasm, but at the same time retained firm control of the Little Review when their ardor jeopardized her magazine.
In May of 1914, while she was preparing the third issue of the Little Review, Anderson attended two of Goldman’s lectures, one on drama given to a group of wealthy Chicago women, another addressed to a gathering of anarchists and syndicalists. She was so awestruck by the famous radical, she wrote, that she “had just time to turn anarchist before the presses closed.”1 In the May issue Anderson published her editorial, “The Challenge of Emma Goldman,” lauding the anarchist as a “practical Nietzschean” and stating, “Zarathustra kept running through my mind.”2 Anderson quoted extensively from Goldman’s essays “The Failure of Christianity” and “The Victims of Morality,” demonstrating that she had quickly submerged herself in the thought of America’s foremost anarchist. Goldman was “fighting for the repudiation of such ‘spooks’ as Christianity, conventional morality, immortality, and other ‘myths’ that stand as obstacles to progress, freedom, health, truth, and beauty. One thus achieves that position beyond good and evil for which Nietzsche had pleaded.”3 It is interesting to note that Anderson was willing to disagree with Goldman on the topic of religion. Referring to her philosophy as her “gospel,” Anderson argued that Goldman’s assertion that “she had no use for religion” was similar to saying “that one has no use for poetry; religion is not a mere matter of Christianity, or Catholicism, or Buddhism, or any other classifiable quantity. Also, if it is true that the person to be distrusted is the one who has found the answer to the riddle, then Emma Goldman is to be discounted.” Nevertheless, she concluded that Goldman is a “prophet who dares to preach that our failures are not in the wrong application of values but in the values themselves.”4
One major source of the interest in anarchism among the American intelligentsia was Russia, and as a result the Little Review devoted considerable space to all things Russian. References to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were numerous in addition to articles on other Russian writers, some famous and others less known to an American audience, including Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreyev, Mikhail Lermontov, Vladimir Korolenko, Aleksandr Kuprin, Maximilian Voloshin, and Boris Artzybasheff. In addition, there were articles about the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and her dance troupe’s tour of the United States, with a discussion of Russian innovations in ballet due to the contributions of Sergei Diaghilev and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.5
Many Little Review articles dealt with the political earthquakes that had shaken Russia since the late nineteenth century. It was an era when a burgeoning fascination with various strains of occultism seemed to explode. In her study of this period, Maria Carlson writes that “all sorts of mysticism were popular” and notes that spiritualism led the way in sheer numbers of followers while Theosophy attracted a smaller cadre of intellectuals.6 Carlson argues that scholars have “erroneously disdained them [Theosophists and spiritualists] as trivial,” yet they were a key factor in the cultural and intellectual course of the era.7 According to Carlson, “Occultism … has not received its due as a contributing factor to the aesthetic and philosophical consciousness of the times.”8 Between 1881 and 1918, thirty-five registered groups, hundreds of nonregistered circles, and more than thirty publications were dedicated to various aspects of the occult. As revolutionary political movements mushroomed and were compounded by the looming Great War, the artist and intellectual looked to a spirituality that was aesthetically appealing, thus attempting to combine culture and religion into one fold. One notable Russian Theosophist was Wassily Kandinsky, whose Concerning the Spiritual in Art was quoted in aphoristic forms in the Little Review. Among those profoundly affected was the mathematician P. D. Ouspensky, whose 1919 book, Tertium Organum, introduced Anderson and Heap to esoteric thought, leading them to George Gurdjieff.
One of Anderson’s most frequent contributors in the first two years of the Little Review was Alexander Kaun, a Russian émigré who in 1914 was an instructor at the Chicago Hebrew Institute; he later became a professor of Slavic languages at the University of California-Berkeley. Kaun wrote impassioned articles about his native land describing the profound political and social changes occurring during the early years of the twentieth century. In his review, “Two Biographies: Verlaine and Tolstoy,” Kaun quotes Tolstoy on the leaders of the 1905 Revolution. “Our consciousness of the law of God demands from us only one thing—moral self-perfection; i.e., the liberation of oneself from all those weaknesses and vices which make one the slave of governments and participants in their crimes.”9 Yet Kaun is mocking Tolstoy—he believed Tolstoy was a hypocrite, much in the same fashion Lenin did. The Bolshevik leader wrote of the Christian anarchist, “On one hand we have the great artist, the genius who has not only drawn incomparable pictures of Russian life but has made first-class contributions to world literature. On the other hand, we have the landlord obsessed with Christ. On the one hand the remarkably powerful, forthright and sincere protest against social falsehood and hypocrisy; on the other the ‘Tolstoyan,’ i.e., the jaded, hysterical sniveler called the Russian intellectual, who publicly beats his breast and wails: ‘I am a bad wicked man, but I am practicing moral self-perfection.’ ”10
Although Tolstoy never actually used the phrase “Christian anarchism,” in the Kingdom of God he used the word “anarchism” as synonymous with “freedom” and “God.” Goldman, who had a picture of Tolstoy hanging in her home, seemed more forgiving. She argued, “Tolstoy was the last true Christian, and as such he undermined the stronghold of the Church with all its pernicious power of darkness, with all its injustice and cruelty.11 Anderson addressed the Tolstoyan paradox in her second article on Goldman, “The Immutable.” She wrote of one of Goldman’s Chicago lectures, “She mixed her sources from the positivist Comte to the Christian Tolstoy.”12
Nevertheless, Anderson’s personal friendship with Goldman developed and established the genuine feeling of a comradeship. Goldman read Anderson’s first glowing review of her speech and wrote to thank her for her supportive remarks. When Anderson discovered that Goldman would be returning to Chicago soon, she invited the anarchist to stay in her apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. Goldman responded with gratitude but declined due to the fact that she could not tolerate “bourgeois lifestyles” even for a few days, and instead invited Anderson to visit her at the Lexington Hotel. Goldman was genuinely impressed by the Little Review. As she later wrote in her autobiography, “I felt like a desert wanderer who unexpectedly discovers a stream of fresh water. At last, a magazine to sound a note of rebellion in creative endeavor!”13 The anarchist was looking forward to meeting the editor of the Little Review, but when they met in the hallway Goldman was taken aback by Anderson’s “chic society girl appearance.”14 Rather than greeting her visitor, the anarchist turned around and began to walk away. Anderson later wrote that she was “amazed and hurt” by the reception but pursued Goldman down the hallway. Goldman, in a self-admitted “cold tone,” invited Anderson into her room and was greeted by a breathless invitation to visit Anderson’s apartment to rest and relax. “I was so overwhelmed,” Goldman wrote later, “by the wordy avalanche and I felt remorseful at the frigid reception I had given the generous girl.”15
Goldman went to the apartment and felt so at home in the empty space that she called anarchist comrades who were traveling with her and told them to join her. They included Ben Reitman, whom Anderson characterized as “not so bad if you could hastily drop all our ideas as to how human beings should look and act,” and eye-patch wearing Big Bill Haywood of the Wobblies.16 At the apartment the group talked, listened to Anderson play the piano, and took long walks along the lakeshore. As they became more relaxed both women felt surprised by one another’s character. Anderson recorded that Goldman was “more human than she appeared on the platform … in private she was gay, communicative, tender.”17 The small group sang Russian folk songs and quoted Walt Whitman—prompting Big Bill to weep, Anderson noted, out of his one eye. After a few hours, Goldman later admitted, Anderson had “entirely changed [Goldman’s] first impression and made [her] realize that under her apparent lightness was depth and strength of character to pursue whatever aim in life she might choose.”18Anderson turned the Little Review office over to Goldman. “The girls were as poor as church mice, never sure of their next meal much less able to pay the printer or the landlord. Yet there were always fresh flowers on my desk to cheer me,” wrote the anarchist. “Something new and precious had grown up between us.”19
The next two years witnessed what may have seemed to readers like a never-ending flow of laudatory articles about anarchism in the pages of the Little Review. Anderson’s article after meeting Goldman, appearing in the November 1914 issue, was just as flattering—if not more so—than her first summation of the anarchist’s greatness. She wrote, “A great sense of her humanity sweeps upon you, and the nobility of the idealist who wrenches her integrity from the grimmest depths … A mountain top figure, calm, vast, dynamic, awful in loneliness, exalted in its tragedy— this is Emma Goldman.”20 Anderson’s newfound political radicalism expressed itself in concern about a variety of issues; the most pressing was the outbreak of war in Europe in the fall of 1914. Anderson’s lead article of the September 1914 issue was given the biblical title “Armageddon.” “The greatest war of history,” she wrote, “flames away all other concerns.” In her view, the “terrific human waste” of the war was clear. It consisted of “twenty-odd million men flying at each other’s throats and destroying the bitterly won triumphs of peace, without any good reason.” These sentiments culminated in 1915 with a plea for action: “For God’s sake, why doesn’t someone start the Revolution?”21 As a result of this editorial, detectives appeared at the Little Review office. Anderson was not there, but a new admirer—“an influential person” visiting from New York—convinced the agents that she was “a flighty society girl who meant nothing she said.”22 Anderson made sure Goldman remained a constant presence in the Little Review into the next year. She published Louise Bryant’s article describing Goldman’s arrest and trial in Portland, Oregon, on charges of distributing birth control information. Goldman’s essay on the war, “Preparedness: The Universal Slaughter,” appeared in the December 1915 issue.
That December issue of the magazine captured the attention of legal authorities and marked the high tide of Anderson’s most radical pronouncements under the influence of anarchism. In “Toward Revolution,” she addressed the funeral of Joe Hill, asking, “Why didn’t someone shoot the governor of Utah before he could shoot Joe Hill?” She followed this with, “There are Schmidt and Caplan. Why doesn’t someone see to it they are released? Labor could do it. And there are the Chicago garment strikers. Why doesn’t someone arrange for the beating up of the police squad? That would make a good beginning; or set fire to some of the factories or start a convincing sabotage in the shops?”23 In “The Labor Farce,” an article that addressed the arrests of five individuals for the bombing at San Francisco’s 1916 Preparedness Parade, she berated the internal divisions within the left wing over strategy to help the defendants.24 In a complaint familiar to anyone well versed in the internal strife of left-wing politics, she traced the efforts of Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and a “few other anarchists” to raise money for lawyers, followed by “three weeks of argument and hesitation” among their comrades over how to proceed.25 Still, Anderson was more generous than Goldman, who in her autobiography decried “radicals and liberals” who “at the first sign of danger ran to cover like a pack of sheep at the approach at the storm.”26 Anderson described watching “Emma Goldman and Berkman brooding over this strange and awful spectacle, two prophets whose souls are slowly petrifying under the antics of their disciples.” Always coming back to the “artist,” the figure who would precipitate her ideological break with Goldman, she wrote, “The propagandist can’t think. But for that matter only one kind of mind really does think and that is the artist kind.”27
Under the influence of Goldman, Anderson began to explore the writings of other American anarchists. She published a review by Lilian Heller Udell of The Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, a little-known Philadelphia anarchist who died in 1912. In the article, Udell described de Cleyre as an “Amazon of the spirit” who formulated “the most comprehensive exposition of philosophical anarchism that has appeared since the days of Proudhon and Stirner.”28 Anderson’s own language in addressing anarchism in general and Goldman specifically was clearly religious in nature; she repeatedly referred to Goldman as a “prophet” who was at times “crucified.”29 She wrote that Goldman’s “mere presence is a benediction,” and portrayed herself as Goldman’s most devoted disciple.30 Anderson’s choice of words portrays the Jewish atheist as a Christ-like figure; even though Anderson intellectually abhorred Christianity, it was her most common expression of spiritual thought.
As a result of her admiration for Goldman, Anderson found herself facing serious financial setbacks. Her very first article on anarchism in the May issue of 1914 lost her the backing of her original source of funds, De Witt Wing, who feared his association with Anderson would cost him his job at the Breeder’s Gazette. By the end of 1914 the death of her father, the expense of the lakeside apartment, and the falling subscriptions— which Anderson claimed, most likely correctly, were a direct result of her interest in anarchism—brought financial and personal problems together in a pressing fashion. To solve them, she decided that moving was a priority, so she hustled Harriet Dean (her lover), her sister Lois, and Lois’s two young sons, Tom and Fritz, off to a house in Lake Bluff. The house was unheated (Alexander Berkman cut his visit short, claiming the house was “too Siberian”), and the three women and two children soon moved to another house nearby.31 They remained at this location from the winter of 1914 to the spring of 1915, when the fallout from Anderson’s anarchist reputation made it difficult for her to pay the rent for either the house or the Little Review studio. Her solution was to move everyone to a secluded strip of beach near Braeside and to camp there during the summer of 1915.
The people Anderson referred to as her family by now included Clara Crane, an African American woman, and her small son; Crane worked as a cook and nursemaid for the children. This may seem a curious addition for people who were so poor they could not afford shelter. But Crane (who was recommended by Goldman) may have been equally down on her luck and entered into a compact of mutual help with the down and out collective. On the beach the entire menagerie set up tents, each equipped with a cot, deck chair, and Oriental rug. In spite of her economic and political problems, Anderson later wrote that the six months on the beach were “the most lyrical of my life.”32 Despite the rustic circumstances, her contemporaries were surprised at how well-coiffed the new revolutionary was. In his memoirs, Harry Hansen wrote, “She was always exquisite as if emerging from a scented boudoir, not a mildewed tent.”33
Among the visitors to the campsite were Little Review contributors and supporters, including Ben Hecht and Maxwell Bodenheim, who walked out from the city to pin poems on her tent; Sherwood Anderson, who told stories; and the radical playwright Lawrence Langner, who visited, according to Anderson, “to extol group action and socialism.”34 Langner left the most vivid portrait of the beach site. Invited to spend the weekend, he found the surroundings somewhat less than utopian:
Cooking utensils, furniture, newspapers, and books littered the beach, while sitting on a kitchen chair outside a tent sat the dignified, matronly Emma Goldman, wearing a heavy black gown and looking like a tragedy queen dispossessed from her rightful throne. “I don’t know what I’m doing out here” she remarked to me, savagely killing a mosquito which had settled on the back of her neck. “I have a nice, cool, comfortable hotel room in Chicago, and I let Margaret drag me away for the weekend.” “But don’t you feel free here?” said Margaret, looking like Adriane in a baby blue bathing suit. “Why don’t you take off some of your clothes?” “The flies and mosquitoes are eating me alive,” grumbled Emma. “I need more clothes, not less.”35
The camp and its illustrious visitors soon caught the attention of the local press, much to Anderson’s annoyance. Articles described the settlement as “a Hellenistic revival, a freak art group, a Nietzschean stronghold.”36 The Little Review beachhead did have its problems. Lois decided the bohemian life was not for her and left. And in spite of the newly tried economies, the magazine still struggled to survive financially. In the June–July 1915 issue, Anderson, frustrated at not being able to convince more local businesses to advertise, tried putting the name of a potential advertiser’s company in a box in the middle of a blank page with comments designed to cajole the potential client into action. One of her victims was the publishing firm of Mitchell Kennerley, which had halted business with the Little Review because of Anderson’s anarchism. Kennerley was subjected to the following admonition: “This page might have been used very profitably by Mr. Mitchell Kennerly to announce the publication of poems by Florence Kiper Frank. I think it is to be out this summer—though of course I can’t pretend to give the details accurately, not having been provided with the ‘ad.’ But the Little Review readers will want the book nevertheless.”37
Anderson’s financial reversals were temporarily halted in the fall when she received an unexpected contribution of seventy-five dollars from a local poet, Hi Simmons. Simmons had read about the struggles of the Little Review in the Chicago Tribune; he wrote to Anderson that he was “shocked and deeply hurt to learn the Little Review is in such straits.” Simmons was not a wealthy patron of the arts; he was offering Anderson seventy-five dollars out of a savings account that totaled one hundred. “I believe,” he wrote, “that the New Word must be said. I believe in your magazine. I would consider it a great loss to Literature if your paper should be compelled to suspend. We Young Men need the Little Review. I am willing to do my share to keep it alive.”38 Anderson’s thank you letter to Simmons reflected both the difficulties she was experiencing and her determination to continue. “Your letter is such a miracle that it has left me speechless; and it came at the very minute when everything seemed so black. I didn’t know where to turn. If you can really afford to do such a thing and will let me return it when the Little Review has got on its feet, I shall be so glad to accept your offer.” She went on to complain that the newspapers “have said such horrible things!”39 And though she admitted the accounts of her financial problems and the hostility she had received as a result of her “terrible ideas” were true, she wrote, “They’ve cheapened what we’re trying to do with such ridiculous comments that I’m really afraid to read any more papers.”40 Anderson added that due to Simmons’ contribution, the September issue could be printed. Harriet Dean, she wrote, “trots around every day holding up as many people as possible.”41 She concluded her note to Simmons, “May something wonderful happen to you soon!”42
Though extremely determined, Anderson faced one inevitability—the impossibility of living on the beach during the winter. Once again, she began to look for shelter and came upon an abandoned cottage whose long porch and many fireplaces made it “the most sympathetic house anyone had seen.”43 Anderson found the owner who, charmed by her enthusiasm for the property, agreed to have the group take it over rent-free for a year. Unfortunately, Anderson’s reputation as an anarchist radical once again interfered. When Harriet Dean visited the landlady to make final arrangements, she was told that if Anderson was the same person appearing in the newspapers, the agreement was withdrawn. The woman kept repeating to Dean that it had been “a great shock to her to discover that anyone who appeared so charming could be so depraved.”44 Anderson was crestfallen. Revealingly, she later wrote, “To one of my intense inter-uterine nature there is no measuring the shock that a loss of a house can cause.”45
Anarchism was merely a new label for a philosophy Anderson already possessed as a young woman; individualism and flouting authority were in her DNA. Bernard Duffey writes in his study of the Chicago Renaissance, “The writer-intellectual of the nineties in the Midwest could have scarcely identified himself with anarchism—a criminal, unwashed and totally foreign affair—but to Margaret Anderson in 1914 anarchism was only a rephrasing of the central Emersonian ideal.”46 The central Emersonian ideal, of course, was the expression of one’s true individual self. Anderson, like Emerson, was in the same vein as the American anarchist Benjamin Tucker, who espoused a philosophy that was anarchism based on individualism. In spite of her pronouncements on Joe Hill, strikes, and revolution, Anderson’s espousal of anarchism had more to do with individual self-expression than a sustained critique of political or economic inequities in American society. Emma Goldman clearly recognized Anderson’s and Dean’s lack of a systematic analysis of social ills when she first met them at Anderson’s lakeside apartment. “The girls were not actuated by any sense of social injustice, like the Russian intelligentsia, for instance. Strongly individualized, they had broken the shackles of their middle-class homes to find release from family bondage and bourgeois tradition. I regretted their lack of social consciousness, but as rebels for their own liberation, Margaret Anderson and Harriet Dean strengthened my faith in the possibilities of my adopted country.”47 Anderson in this period was the incarnation of the angry rebel engrossed with militant movements.48 Although she “was always pretending that [she] was a poor working girl, always forgetting that [she] was really poor—also a working girl,” she nevertheless saw herself not as a member of the collective revolt but rather a member of a select society.49 Nevertheless, in her article “Art and Anarchism,” which had very little about art, Anderson used some of her most forceful language, intertwining feminism with anarchism to launch a withering attack on the criminalization of birth control and the consequences of illegal abortion.50
Anarchists were in sympathy with Anderson’s views on a number of points—most notably homosexuality. They were practically alone in their defense of Oscar Wilde. Goldman’s Mother Earth and other journals such as Lucifer, the Light Bearer, and the Light, saw the Wilde trial as a wakeup call that spurred an anarchist critique of state-sanctioned criminalization of homosexuality. Whitman was another artist with whom Goldman and other anarchists felt a deep kinship. As discussed in the previous chapter, the evolution of current criticism of Whitman’s homoerotic poems has developed from a nineteenth-century understanding of his work as “comradely love,” but in the early twentieth century, others (including Goldman) clearly saw his work as homoerotic and felt Whitman’s own mixed messages were due to a deliberate “obfuscation” because of contemporary prejudice. Goldman’s biographer Candace Falk maintains that Goldman’s observation about Anderson and Dean breaking their “shackles” was specifically referring to their lesbianism.51 Goldman was a lonely defender of Wilde and was also an admirer of Edward Carpenter for his allegiance to anarchism. Goldman’s lectures were “unprecedented in their scope and reach and were a critical part of the politics of homosexuality.”52 The anarchists were alone in “successfully articulating a political critique of American social and legal rules, and the cultural norms that regulated same sex relations.”53 Goldman had many lesbian acquaintances and may have had a sexual encounter with one such friend, Almeda Sperry. The friendship between Sperry and Goldman was enough to make Goldman’s longtime lover, Ben Reitman, uneasy. When Sperry was planning to visit while Reitman was away, he wrote to Goldman, “I love you and am completely yours. I hope you enjoy your visit with Sperry and I trust you will not develop any new TECHNIQUE whereby you can displace me.”54 Goldman had to assure Reitman about Anderson when she informed him Anderson was coming for a visit. “Yes, Margaret is coming,” she wrote, “and I am glad of that. But I do not incline that way.”55
However, in spite of her protests, Goldman may have been sexually attracted to Anderson and vice versa. It was clear that Goldman was charmed by Anderson and that the Little Review editor worshipped the famous anarchist. Reitman saw this himself when he wrote Goldman, “She is crazy about you. This will be another case of Sperry. Oh, your women.” Alice Wexler, another of Goldman’s biographers, suggests that Goldman may have hinted at feelings deeper than friendship for Anderson when she wrote of “the stirrings as a result of my friendship with Margaret—expressive of my previous theoretic interest in sex variation.”56 Goldman’s views of homosexuality were deeply informed by the writings of Havelock Ellis, Richard von Kraft-Ebbing, and other sexologists. While twenty-first-century historians see much of their work as conservative and even damaging, to Anderson’s contemporaries there was much that was liberating, especially in the writings of Carpenter and Ellis, whom Goldman took pains to refer to as anarchists. In Goldman’s view, Ellis in particular deserved the label because Sexual Inversion was published by the same company that published works by the Legitimation League, “an anarchist sex radical” organization.57
Like good Nietzscheans who believed society viewed them as insignificant, artists and bohemians of this era saw their trivialization as a badge of superiority. Anderson linked Goldman to Nietzscheans, writing that the anarchist was fighting for “the same things concretely that Nietzsche and Max Stirner fought for abstractly.”58 Max Stirner may have been an even larger influence on Anderson during this period. It is clear from her articles she had read Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, a widely read piece of work in anarchistic circles. In My Thirty Years’ War she wrote, “Even the waiter at Pittsburgh Joe (where we ate when funds were low) talked Max Stirner with me.” Perhaps the waiter at Pittsburgh Joe was an artist anarchist, or simply a workingman talking Stirner and Nietzsche as well with the other diners; according to Stirner there was no contradiction between being a destitute bohemian/proletariat and exalting one’s anarchism as the mark of supremacy. In fact, the exalting of oneself was the road to the anarchist state—the crux of Stirner’s philosophy was an extreme form of egoism that clearly fit Anderson’s matrix of radicalism. And she was not alone—her fellow feminist anarchist editor Dora Marsden founded The Freewoman, New Freewoman, and finally The Egoist based on Stirner’s values.59Stirner’s egoism was more complex than simple self-interest. It is rather a sense of autonomy—from government as well as the end of one’s subservience to social norms, leading to individuals cultivating their own “unique egos.” “Governments may come and go,” Anderson wrote in “Art and Anarchism,” “may change or cease to be and nothing remains forever except your ‘type.’ ”60 When an individual achieved self-realization, it led to self-consciousness and awareness of the state and its oppression. This process reinforced Anderson’s own belief in her uniqueness, giving her a philosophical view rather than a dry political and economic creed and allowing for the possibility of a conversion experience (thus paving the way for her later sojourns into mysticism). Again, though Christianity was her most abhorred example of religion, she consistently used, as David Weir describes, an “evangelist” idiom urging her readers to follow anarchism to the promised land. She writes, “Clean out your minds … If you believe these things—no, that is not enough; if you live them—you are an anarchist. You can be one right now. You needn’t wait for change in human nature, for the millennium, or for the permission of your family. Just be one!” This full-throated exclamation was reminiscent of a “Christian camp-meeting.”61
The question for Anderson and the Little Review concerned the nexus of anarchism and modernism. Anarchists such as Goldman, Anderson was to discover to her chagrin, saw art as the handmaiden of revolution. Modernist aesthetics for them could not be further from the anarchist agenda. Anderson recounted her argument in Thirty Years’ War: “When I used the black swan in Amy Lowell’s ‘Malmaison’ to illustrate a certain way of pointing to emotion there was a general uprising. E. G. [Emma Goldman] was a little beside herself. ‘The working-man hasn’t enough leisure to be interested in black swans,’ she thundered. ‘What’s that got to do with the revolution?’ ‘But that isn’t the argument,’ I groaned … ‘We’re talking art, not economics.”62 Anderson concluded, “I have never known people more rabid about art than the anarchists. Anything and everything is art for them—that is, anything containing an element of revolt. We tried in vain to divorce them from their exclusive preoccupation with subject matter.”63
However, the division between art and politics was not always so clear. Anarchism, particularly Stirner’s egoism, could be adapted to modernism. Individualism could easily be as aesthetic as it was political; in fact, the fragmented form of modernism expressed through the distinctiveness of the artist was a more likely outcome of individualism than a political collective of egoist anarchists. As political anarchism declined into the twentieth century, modernism based on egoistic aesthetics began to flourish. Anderson’s modernism connected ego and art with her statement, “I have always accepted or rejected manuscripts on one basis—art as the person. An artist is an exceptional person.”64 The exceptional person is the extreme individualist—in itself, to Anderson, a political statement. The artist, like the anarchist, is an outlaw, as Anderson and Heap would all too literally find out in the Ulysses trial. The fact that the high modernist aesthetics of Joyce hurtled two American editors into a courtroom over the right of the state to censor art ultimately, Anderson felt, vindicated her belief that the individualism of the “exceptional person” was the only way to change society.
At the same time, there is more than adequate evidence that Anderson clung to the comforts of her bourgeois middle-class upbringing, and she saw no contradiction in trumpeting them in the Little Review. Though she braved empty apartments with cots, “Siberian” rentals, and beachfront camps, her paean to a Christmas visit to her parents’ suburban home in “country club country” in her article “Home as an Emotional Adventure” was as ecstatic as any pro-Goldman anarchist editorial she penned.65 Later in the Little Review Anderson would admit to a certain embarrassment about her anarchist enthusiasm. Nevertheless, although these political/artistic disputes caused tensions, she remained a warm admirer of Goldman and was supportive of her during the criminal charges, trials, and imprisonments that were yet to come.
Ironically, Anderson’s arguments with Goldman began over an Amy Lowell poem. Lowell at one point threatened to withdraw her support of the Little Review if Anderson kept publishing political radicalism; in fact, Lowell thought she might be a target of anarchists as a symbol of undeserved inherited wealth and kept a revolver in her house. Between 1914 and 1916, at the same time Anderson was enamored of Goldman, she was also embroiled in a radical artistic debate over the meaning and proprietorship of imagism. While the poetry wars were fought out on the pages of the Little Review, Anderson and Lowell exchanged letters revealing a complex story of art, politics, and sexuality.
Lowell has become a figure of renewed interest. Contemporary critics attribute sexism, homophobia, and repulsion over Lowell’s obesity as reasons for her marginalization as a minor poet. Those familiar with Lowell’s work know it was her reading of an H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) poem that led her to the epiphany that she belonged to the new school of poetry known as imagism. The story of Lowell and Ezra Pound’s battle over imagism, with H. D. and Richard Aldington (who was married to H, D,) wedged somewhat in the middle, has been well documented. It was a classic power struggle between two self-appointed leaders of a modernist movement.66 Imagism was a new theory of poetry originating in England around 1910 as a reaction to the Georgian and Romantic schools; it demanded a precise rendering of a poetic image rather than a wordy or flowery description. It also, though not necessarily, advocated free verse instead of a rhymed meter. Pound became the first self-acknowledged leader of imagist poets in London and used his influence to promote the publication of H. D. and Richard Aldington in Poetry. In 1914 Pound released an anthology, Des Imagistes, which included along with his own work that of H. D., Aldington, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, and Amy Lowell. Lowell, however, attempted to have her poem, “In the Garden,” withdrawn from the anthology before publication. While visiting London in 1914 Lowell approached H. D. and Aldington with the idea of a second anthology, which would be more “democratic,” with everyone deciding who would be included and each contributor given equal space, and the pair agreed to Lowell’s suggestion. Pound was invited to participate but scoffed at the idea of a poetry anthology created by committee.
Lowell had prepared the groundwork for assuming command of the imagists in London before she left America, and the Little Review figured prominently in her plan. In the spring of 1914, Lowell wrote Anderson informing her of the second trip to England and offering to write a “London Letter” for the Little Review. Anderson responded that she would be “happy beyond words” to accept Lowell’s offer or “anything else you may feel like sending us.”67 This letter marked the beginning of an intense correspondence between Anderson and Lowell over the next two years. Lowell often wrote several times within one month suggesting that Anderson publish certain works of her imagist group as well as sending over a dozen poems of her own in the same period. Lowell’s first contribution to the Little Review was an essay in the June 1914 number issue entitled “Miss Columbia: An Old-Fashioned Girl,” which criticized the lack of innovation and artistic experimentation in American letters. “The United States,” wrote Lowell, “is hopelessly fettered in the strings of tradition” and suffers from “the shallow and frivolous optimism which hangs like an obscuring fog over practically all our writing.”68 The following month Anderson wrote Lowell, “What you’ve said is very true; it needed to be said, and the Little Review is proud to print it. Thank You!” She then invited Lowell to visit her in Chicago and to “send … another arrangement.”69 When the First World War broke out in August 1914, temporarily stranding the poet in England, Anderson wrote to Lowell first exclaiming her concern—“I do hope you’re safe!”—and describing the war as “an impossible H. G. Wells story.” She implored Lowell to “tell us something of what really is going on.”70 Anderson also thanked Lowell for two poems she had sent, “Clear, With Light Variable Winds” and “Fool’s Moneybags,” informing her they would appear in the September issue.
After Lowell’s return to the United States in October, she wrote “at once” to Anderson to know when she would be coming to Boston: “I have a great many things I should like to say to you and you can imagine that I should be glad to shake the hand of the person who has been so appreciative of my work.”71 Anderson had informed Lowell that she would be in the east trying to secure advertising revenue from major publishers; no doubt Lowell expected her to come to Boston. Lowell began her concentrated campaign in the same letter to use the Little Review as a springboard for her own imagist group. She offered Anderson a Richard Aldington translation of a Remy de Gourmont essay, writing, “[Aldington] is one of the very most delightful prose writers as well as a poet whom we have, and if you can attach him to your regular contributors I think you will have done an excellent thing for yourself and a very good thing for him.”72 In a letter the following month, Lowell informed Anderson that she might be in Chicago in December and hinted at her plans for a closer alliance with the Little Review as well as her quarrel with Pound. “I have some things I should like to talk over with you which I think may be to our mutual advantage,” she wrote. “I am a good deal amused at Ezra Pound’s advertisement of The Egoist on your book page, leaving me out as a contributor when they have published a number of my poems, all owing to a simple difference of opinion which I had with him this summer and which I tried so hard to avoid. Certainly the jealousy of poets is quite equal to the proverbial one of Opera singers.”73 Several weeks later Lowell wrote Anderson again, sending her a “batch” of her poems.74 Anderson was more than happy to encourage Lowell’s interest in the Little Review, but she was not ready to permit Lowell’s leadership in the imagist movement to overshadow her own autonomy in deciding what would go into the journal or to ignore criticism of the movement itself.
Imagism was the sounding board for some of the most energetic dialogues in the pages of the Little Review. The month after Lowell’s debut, Anderson published a somewhat qualified review of Pound’s Des Imagistes by Charles Ashleigh. Ashleigh wrote that while the imagists “have done some beautiful work as such,” he was put off by the stance of those who “claim monopoly of inspiration or art as some of them appear to do.”75 It is interesting that the debate was over the similarity of language used by both proponents and opponents of the new movement. It was generally couched in spiritual language drawing on an esoteric vocabulary. This is evident in Ashleigh’s review when he wrote about his reaction to poetry: “If in me there is that responsive vibration—then you are a poet.”76 Aldington, in writing about H. D. in “A Young American Poet” (without mentioning that the young American was his wife), suggested that her poem “Hermes of the Ways” could only be explained as a “paradox … [It] is kind of an accurate mystery.”77
The very month Lowell began making specific suggestions concerning articles, poems, and contributors, Anderson published an attack on imagism by Eunice Tietjens, interestingly entitled “The Spiritual [emphasis mine] Dangers of Vers Libre.” The article suggested that free verse encouraged “mental laziness,” a “tendency to the grotesque,” and “the immediate enlargement of the ego” of the poet.78 Tietjens pointed to Pound as the clearest example of these abuses, describing him as “the young self- expatriated American who wails ‘that ass my country, has not employed me.’ ” Tietjens thought Pound’s pre–free verse poetry was beautiful, but his imagist efforts represented a “spiritual and cerebral degeneration.”79 These attacks on imagism apparently did not put Lowell off, most likely because Anderson treated Pound with equal severity. Pound had derided Lowell’s leadership of the movement by calling it “Amygism,” and no doubt Lowell was glad to see Pound get his comeuppance in print. Anderson was trying to use the controversy raging within the poetry world to emphasize her dialogic approach, which propelled this movement forward. The December 1914 issue made clear that all viewpoints were permitted in the Little Review. That number contained two poems by Richard Aldington, “On a Motorbus at Night” and “Church Walk, Kensington,” as well as four articles arguing the merits of imagism. Two of the essays were critical. Arthur Davison Ficke wrote in “In Defense of Vers Libre” that there was “something sickly and soul destroying about earlier verse forms.” Ficke, like many other defenders and contemporary scholars, saw the origins of free verse in Whitman.80 In “Aesthetics and Common Sense,” Llewellyn Jones wrote a critique of imagism, ending his article with a strange paragraph that sharply foreshadowed Anderson’s interest in esoteric spirituality. Jones had “heard there was a book on the fourth dimensions,” which if read, he asserted, would help him understand imagism. Jones may have been referring to Charles Hinton’s book The Fourth Dimension (1904).81 These articles were followed by an impassioned defense of the movement by Maxwell Bodenheim in “The Decorative Strait-Jacket: Rhymed Verse.” True to her principles, Anderson also continued to publish criticism of imagism by Ficke, Witter Bynner, and Huntley Carter. Carter’s article, “Poetry versus Imagism” (September 1916), so aroused Anderson’s sensibilities that she could not publish it without an editor’s preface—one of her favorite devices—to add fuel to her magazine’s conversational fires. Anderson wrote, “I entirely disagree with Mr. Carter’s point of view—as much of it as I can fathom. But I hope his article will provoke discussion that will provoke a clearer understanding of the Imagist’s art in a country where even poets are blind to it.”82
There was no question of where Anderson stood in the controversy. The same issue contained her review of Lowell’s new book of poetry, Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds, in which she proclaimed that Lowell’s work “refutes all the critical disparagement of vers libre, imagism, or ‘unrhymed cadence,’ as Miss Lowell herself chooses to call her work.” “Her poems,” she wrote, “will put to shame our hackneyed and slovenly ‘accepted’ poets.”83 In the May 1915 issue, a Mr. “George Lane” reviewed Lowell’s Some Imagist Poets, the anthology she organized in response to Pound. The review evaluated the six poets in the book—Lowell, John Gould Fletcher, H. D., Aldington, D. H. Lawrence, and F. S. Flint. “George Lane” was actually Lowell and Fletcher, who cowrote the review with Anderson’s blessing. The most specific critiques concerned H. D.’s work. Anderson published two H. D. poems, “Late Spring” and “Night,” in the January–February 1915 issue of the journal; she also announced a “Vers Libre Contest” in which H. D.’s “Sea Poppies” emerged a winner.84
H. D. was well known for her interest in mysticism, hermeticism, and other esoteric studies. However, unlike others who employed esoteric themes in her work, she was one of the few “practicing occultists.”85 Timothy Materer in Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult writes that H. D. “embraced equally the knowledge from classical Greek texts to table- tipping séances” and was “the least self-conscious about occultism.”86 Her Hellenic interests included classical Greece and the Alexandrian strain of Hermes Trismegistus, a touchstone of George Gurdjieff’s thought. Four years after her poems were published in the Little Review, H. D. had her famous visions on the wall of her hotel room in Corfu. The criticism in the Little Review of her poems in Des Imagistes and Some Imagist Poets direct their attention to her esoteric orientation. The review by “George Lane” of Some Imagist Poets in the May 1915 issue baldly stated, “If one believed in reincarnations one could say, and be certain, that H. D. was the reincarnation of some dead Greek singer.”87 John Gould Fletcher in his review, “Three Imagists Poets,” wrote that H. D.’s poems were “like a series of hymns of some forgotten and primitive religion … purely and frankly pagan.”88 H. D. was a lesbian; she maintained a lifelong relationship with heiress and novelist Winifred Bryher. Her poetry and lesbianism intertwined; she was not simply a translator of Sappho, but as Diana Collecott argues, “Her entire oeuvre can be read as a creative dialogue with Sappho, and it is most vivid when so read.” This collaboration, writes Collecott, “is not purely imaginary, but persistently textual.”89
In spite of her enthusiasm for Lowell’s work, Anderson found herself in the position of resisting Lowell’s growing interest in the Little Review. The same month that imagism was being debated so vigorously in its pages, Lowell wrote to Anderson proposing that in exchange for “a certain sum yearly toward your magazine,” she would be appointed poetry editor.90 Lowell explained: “To be sure, you have always welcomed the things of mine which I have sent most cordially, and also those of other people which I have sent. I have nothing whatever to complain of, therefore, in the handsome manner in which you have treated me, but I have been looking out for a long time for a magazine the editorial staff of which I could join. I cannot afford to run one totally alone, but I could quite easily purchase a certain interest in your magazine and receive in return certain privileges.”91 Lowell said that if Anderson was interested she would travel to Chicago after Christmas to discuss the arrangements, insisting that any agreement must be “put on paper.”92
We do not know Anderson’s written response to this offer, but Lowell did travel to Chicago in January of 1915; their meeting was not a propitious one for the poet’s ambitions. Anderson’s description of her first meeting with Lowell as a cigar-smoking woman dressed “in the mode of Godey’s Lady’s Book,” with the nose “of a Roman emperor and a manner somewhat more masterful” is one of her more droll portraits of artists she met during these years.93 Anderson had spoken to Lowell over the phone before their meeting, and because of Lowell’s high-pitched and rapid voice she imagined “a slender and imperious blond.”94 Anderson was taken back when Lowell appeared at the Little Review office and was “of such vastness that she entered the door with difficulty.”95 In Thirty Years’ War, Anderson wrote that Lowell made her an offer of money in exchange for control of the “poetry department” at the time of her visit rather than in a letter prior to her trip to Chicago. Anderson was clearly anticipating Lowell’s suggestion, however, and was prepared to turn her down. Lowell’s first topic of conversation was her dispute with Pound and her own attempts to gather attention for the imagists in America. She renewed her offer, this time suggesting one hundred and fifty dollars a month with Anderson remaining in charge and Lowell working as poetry editor. “You can count on me,” Anderson recalled Lowell saying, “never to dictate.” Anderson, however, instinctively felt that “no clairvoyance was needed to know that Amy Lowell would dictate, uniquely and majestically, any adventure in which she had a part.” She declined the offer, telling Lowell she could not “function in ‘association.’ ”96 According to Anderson, Lowell was “furious,” but when she saw she could not sway Anderson she changed the subject and never brought it up again. Lowell and Anderson corresponded for another year with no evidence that their lack of a formal partnership strained their relationship. The following spring Lowell wrote Anderson about various literary matters and made a point of praising the Little Review by writing to Jane Heap, “It is the only magazine which I ever really read … Perhaps you were right to refuse my offer, although in spite of being ‘businesslike’ I am so much in sympathy with everything you are trying to do that I do not think you would have found me quite the fish you imagine.”97 Anderson’s perspective on Lowell was stated directly in an April 1916 article entitled “The Poet Speaks.” “There is one type of person,” she wrote, “we always eject promptly from the office of the Little Review. He is the person who says that Amy Lowell’s poetry has no feeling in it.”98 The article was a defense of Lowell from criticisms by a local poet and an unfavorable review of a personal reading of poetry Lowell gave that appeared in the Chicago Tribune. “Lots of people,” complained Anderson, “have been splitting hairs over Amy Lowell’s work, but no human being has been heard to remark: ‘A beautiful thing is happening in America; Amy Lowell is writing poetry for us.’ ”99 Anderson quoted Lowell’s poem, “Vernal Equinox,” which was one of her personal favorites. When Anderson made another revenue-raising trip to New York, Lowell again hoped that Anderson would travel to Boston for a visit. Anderson wrote to the poet stating she was unable to see her but asking, “Aren’t you by any chance coming here? I should so love to see you. Your things in the Sept. Poetry are—beyond words. They live with me every day.” She then quoted a line from “Vernal Equinox”—“ ‘That scent of hyacinths like a pale mist—there is nothing like you!’ ”100 Lowell responded with appreciation, writing, “Your whole attitude is a joy to us poets. No wonder we send you our best things.”101
Lowell and Anderson had a long and philosophical discussion concerning the nature of love during Lowell’s trip to Chicago. After Lowell returned to Boston, she wrote to Anderson in April and referred to their “conversation on the difference between love and lust,” reminding Anderson how well they agreed: “Now you see love on the purely physical side is as unpleasant as raw beefsteak. It is the combination of the two which is perfection.”102 The poet then complained to Anderson that some of the stories published in the Little Review displayed “brute animal appetite” which was “doing [Anderson’s] own point of view quite as much injustice as if [she] were to write the goody-goody stories of the ordinary magazines.”103 Lowell was often uncomfortable with the frankness of some of the fictional material in the Little Review as well as Anderson’s anarchist tendencies. In this same letter, Lowell offered Anderson a one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar contribution with “a string attached”—that Anderson publish at least one number of the Little Review “which would not advocate violence.”104 The most interesting section of this letter was a postscript in which Lowell thanked Anderson for a hyacinth flower reminiscent of “Vernal Equinox” that Anderson had given her in Chicago. The “beautiful hyacinth, and the card,” wrote Lowell, “was so sweet a tribute to my little poem. I don’t know when anything has touched me as your giving me that hyacinth did.” She told Anderson that she put the flower on the windowsill of the train during the “long, tiresome journey” back to Boston and then put it on her bookcase at home.105 It seems that Lowell’s thank you was not mere politeness but rather genuine gratitude for the thoughtful gesture. She mentioned the flower again four months later in a letter to Anderson thanking her for the care taken on the proof of her poem “Malmaison,” which appeared in the June–July issue. Lowell pointed out that there were no mistakes in the proof, an unusual condition for many pieces published in the Little Review. “I think perhaps,” wrote Lowell, “your care with that proof has touched me more than anything except the hyacinth. You remember the lovely white hyacinth you gave me when I was leaving Chicago?”106
The episode raises the question: To what degree did they acknowledge between themselves the fact that they were lesbians? Biographies of Lowell deal sparingly with her sexuality, referring to her having “bi-sexual tendencies without knowing it” or as a woman “troubled with psycho-sexual conflict.”107 Her orientation was described in such terms while acknowledging the importance of her thirteen-year relationship with Ada Dwyer Russell who lived with Lowell and whom Lowell nicknamed Peter. The lesbian poems in Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds (1914), Pictures of the Floating World (1919), What’s O’Clock (1925), and Ballads for Sale (1927) comprise one of the most detailed records in literature of an emotional and erotic relationship between two women.108 Beyond the hyacinth episode and conversations on love and lust, it is difficult to determine whether Lowell and Anderson recognized one another as lesbians. Lowell did make a point of writing Anderson after her bold review of Edith Ellis’s talk concerning the defense of inversion to say she agreed with Anderson’s views, but it was a brief statement in the midst of imagist business. Their correspondence could be interpreted to display a certain flirtatious quality, with the occasional use of nicknames such as “Angel” and “Fairy Godmother,” even though nearly all begin with the salutations of “Miss Lowell” and “My dear Miss Anderson.” It is safe to say that some sense of distance other than the geographical separated Anderson and Lowell; one was a Boston Brahmin with an inescapable air of patrician culture, the other a middle-class firebrand intent on upsetting established tastes. Their frequent and intense correspondence, however, suggest a brief intimate comradeship.
The April 1916 letter in which Lowell offered “a string attached” raises the question of how this Boston Brahmin could fit in with the Little Review at a time when Goldman dominated the pages. The same month Lowell wrote that letter, however, she published a poem in TheMasses and was bragging to Anderson that she was getting her social peers interested in the Little Review.109 She continued, “Your May number came some time ago and I think that it quite fulfills my conditions. Certainly it does on the sexual side. I am not quite sure that printing Emma Goldman’s letters fulfills the condition on the political side—in theory, that is, not immaterial, for her letters are interesting, tender and pathetic.”110 Lowell was a more complicated political creature than might be supposed; like most of her artistic contemporaries, she was horrified by the Great War. The first sentence in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry reads, “It is impossible for anyone today not to be affected by the war. It has overwhelmed us like a tidal wave.”111 Lowell wrote anti-war poems in which she attacked the war’s needless bloodshed, waste, and human savagery. One of her most famous poems that appeared in the pages of the Little Review was “Malmaison,” in which Josephine (Napoleon’s wife) herself is a scarred casualty of the Napoleonic wars.
We see ample evidence that Lowell was indeed an exemplar of radical poetic and cultural visions. Unlike Pound, who looked to Europe and the past for a foundation, Lowell looked to America and the New World. While Pound saw imagism and every form of art as an elite preoccupation of high modernism, Lowell broke free of patrician mores and fought for poetry in general, and imagism in particular, to be promulgated by and exposed to as many people as possible. Lowell saw the Victorian heritage as a dead weight threatening America, which had taken in her view “the most advanced step” in poetry.112 She was a woman among other artists of her generation who related more to younger women of modernism than to her Victorian peers. In Tendencies in Modern Poetry Lowell wrote, “It is not my intention here to combat the opinions of the conservatives. Conservatives are always with us; they have been opposing change ever since the days of the cave men. But, for this reason, the symbol has taken on a new intensity and is given much prominence. Fortunately for mankind, they agitate in vain.”113
Celeste Schenck’s account of the British poet Charlotte Mew holds compelling similarities with Lowell; Schenk asks, “The radical poetics of canonized ‘modernism’ often masks a deeply conservative politics, might it also be true that the seemingly genteel, conservative poetics of women poets such as Mew, whose worth even feminists have overlooked, would pitch a more radical poetics than we considered possible?”114 Mew, May Sinclair, and H. D. are described by Diane Collecott as forming “another Bloomsbury” of literary networks among women in London during this period. We have already seen how H. D.’s work was given exposure in the Little Review, and it was through Lowell that H. D.’s first volume of poems, Sea Garden, came out from her own London publisher. H. D. took over as editor of the Egoist in 1916 for a single year and published only three reviews—of works by Lowell, Mew, and Marianne Moore.115 Collecott argues convincingly that “these Women of 1916” took their cue not from the “Men of 1914” but rather from the late romanticism of Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats. Anderson highly praised and published Yeats during the same period of the Little Review when Wilde was a revered figure (1914–16), and she would later emulate Yeats’s immersion into mysticism.
Goldman and Lowell, the main figures of this period of the Little Review, were both inheritors of Wilde and Henri Bergson, and even Walter Pater, if we assume an anarchistic spirituality, a heterogeneous expression, and aesthetic values that eschew morals. Anderson’s personal and professional relationships with the two women illustrate several things about Anderson and her editorship of the Little Review. She did not hesitate to proclaim, at times with obvious hyperbole, her advocacy of individuals and movements regardless of their controversy. In fact, it is safe to assume that the more volatile the person or topic, the greater potential it held for promoting the Little Review. This is not to say Anderson was cynically manipulating her readership; the sincerity of her position was clear. However, with such issues as anarchism and imagism, Anderson had found what she had hungered for—intelligent and spirited exchanges on important questions. Anderson’s actions also illustrate that in spite of the outcry that resulted from public discussion of these topics in the pages of the Little Review, she was determined to retain control of the magazine regardless of the consequences. The financial crisis precipitated by her support of anarchism that led Anderson to live on a beach rather than give up the journal changed nothing. When Lowell offered to donate some much-needed support in exchange for editorial input, Anderson declined.
On Lowell’s death in 1925, Heap and Anderson printed her name and dates in a black-draped memorial image of her silhouette drawn by Heap inside the Little Review, a gesture they made with no other contributor. As with Goldman, differences did not destroy their mutual respect. In each case, Anderson held her ground. Her next challenge, taking on Ezra Pound as foreign editor, would present opportunities for the journal that would catapult it into history and lead to an uncertain future.