5

Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce

Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap had mixed feelings about Ezra Pound’s tenure as the Little Review foreign editor between 1917 and 1919. On the one hand, to Anderson, this “middle phase” of the three eras of the Little Review was the most vital stage of the magazine. It culminated in Pound’s forwarding of Joyce’s Ulysses, which was responsible in her view for making the journal a “legend.”¹ On the other hand, even the most loyal Little Review subscribers were strongly put off by Pound’s contributions, arguing that, in an almost rabid fashion, he fostered an anti-American tilt that was decidedly obnoxious. Heap both defended Pound and piled on her own criticism. In their introduction to the published Pound-Anderson correspondence, Thomas Scott and Melvin Freidman noted that Pound’s first letter soliciting space in the Little Review suggested a great deal about his view of Anderson as an editor. “In his words,” they wrote, “we glimpse his perception of the Little Review and its editor: ‘sporting,’ willing to risk the irritation of those readers who were unable to read French, open to the experimental, flexible to adjust the magazine’s format to the material to be printed, and indifferent to accusations of appearing ‘too European.’ ”² Pound’s assessment was for the most part accurate. On November 29, 1916, he sent Anderson a proposal to serve as the Little Review’s foreign editor. Remarking on her impending move to New York, he asked, “Why stop at New York? London and Paris are quite as interesting, even in war time.” The following sentence admits, “I am writing really to ask whether there is any use [in] my trying to help the L. R. If you want me to try, etc.”³ Anderson and Heap hailed the offer.

In January 1917, shortly after the two had met in New York to outline the conditions of their arrangement, Pound wrote Anderson again. “I want an ‘official organ’ (vile phrase). I mean 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.” He pressed for five thousand words per issue and a pledge from Anderson that the Little Review would be published at least eight times a year. In exchange, he offered a “prospective guarantor,” a “Mr. X,” who would donate money to pay the contributors that Pound could secure.⁴ Mr. X was John Quinn, a New York attorney, collector, and patron of the arts who agreed to provide financial backing for the Little Review. Quinn was a significant presence in New York art circles and Democratic politics. He contributed to the 1913 Armory Show and persuaded Oscar Underwood to exempt modern art from the 1913 Tariff Act. Although some have portrayed Pound and Quinn as plotting a “takeover scheme” of the Little Review, Pound was exceedingly candid about the extent of his desired involvement. He conceded that all his conditions sounded “very dictatorial” but added, “I don’t mean it that way.”⁵

Anderson and Heap did not feel threatened that Pound might assume too large a role within the Little Review. Their move to New York left a vacuum in their pool of contributors; they no longer could rely on a ready-made circle of friends such as they had in Chicago. One of Anderson’s reasons for moving to New York was to make the Little Review “an international organ,” and Pound was just the person to make that happen.⁶ In her announcement of Pound’s addition to the magazine in the April 1917 issue, she wrote that it was “the most stunning plan that any magazine has had the good fortune to announce for a long, long time. It means that a great deal of the most creative work of modern London and Paris will be published in these pages.”⁷

An assessment of pre-Little Review influences on Pound, his contributions, and the material of others he forwarded, particularly that of French poets as well as of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, begs the question of how much sway the occult as a topic held for him.⁸ The year he became foreign editor in 1917, Pound was already under the sway of Joséphin Péladan, a French Rosicrucian of the late nineteenth and twentieth century who traced Greek drama from its beginnings in the mysteries of Eleusis Orphism, Dionysus, and Pythagoras.⁹ The word “alchemist” often arises in conjunction with Pound—Timothy Materer in Modernist Alchemy argues that Pound’s “use of alchemy has been less explored (than Yeats), even though it was one of his longest continuing occult interests. Through the tradition of alchemy, he developed his conception of ‘master of the soul’ as poet as well as magus.”¹⁰ It is also possible to glean the influence of Allen Upward’s works, The New Word (1908) and The Divine Mystery (1913), where he argues the existence of a superior caste of the enlightened living among commonplace souls. Pound was influenced not only by Upward but also by G. R. S. Mead, the founder of The Quest Society.

Pound’s interest in the esoteric influenced his view of modernism as parallel to ancient secret societies of initiates protected from the unknowing unwashed outside. Leon Surette argues that The Cantos are intended for initiates “or perhaps more accurately for those whom the poem itself can initiate into the mysteries it obscurely manifests.”¹¹ Between 1917 and 1919 Pound was in a creatively dry period.¹² His Little Review contributions included criticism, poems, prose pieces, and one drama, basically all considered weak by contemporary scholars. Anderson found his criticism in this period to be better than his poetry, writing in The Little Review Anthology, “I usually prefer Pound as a critic to Pound the creator.”¹³ She had written him that his prose piece “Jodindranath Mawhwor’s Occupation” was “no good.” In response Pound wrote that he was sorry she did not like it, but he was trying to “put [his] prose stuff into some sort of possibly permanent form.”¹⁴ Four pages later in the same letter he returned to the subject: “I wonder if the beastly Jodindra [sic] goes too fast on paper, and if it is only good when read with a very retarded utterance (as I read it). If that’s the bloody matter.”¹⁵ Nevertheless, he was defensive about Anderson’s criticism, protesting, “Still, the first [paragraph] in section 3 is yes, hang it all, IS an excellent paragraph, and the fourth sentence is an excellent sentence. The beginning of that section is at least decently written.”¹⁶

The February 1918 issue, entitled “A Study of Modern French Poets,” was dedicated to the work of fourteen poets accompanied by Pound’s critical commentary. It is considered one of Pound’s more nuanced pieces of criticism, responsible for introducing important poets to American audiences; the issue gained notice (if not notoriety) for his and Anderson’s willingness to print the poems entirely in French. Although Pound addressed the work of dozens of poets, a few shed light on his debt to the esoteric: Jules Laforgue, Jules Romains, Remy de Gourmont, and Jean de Bosschere. Pound also used half of the February–March issue of 1919 to further concentrate on de Gourmont and de Bosschere and published translations of Romains in other issues. Arthur Rimbaud was also clearly a hero of his. Though Pound’s comments about him were brief in the “Modern French Poets” issue, he translated Rimbaud’s “Six Illuminations” in a later issue of the magazine.

Jules Laforgue was a French Symbolist, an admirer of Walt Whitman, and a poet who greatly influenced Pound and T. S. Eliot. Known for his pessimistic sense of irony and his certainty in the power of the subconscious, he was also appreciated as an artist who demonstrated a reflective understanding of modern aesthetics. He was, wrote Pound, “an angel whom our modern poetic Jacob must struggle with.”¹⁷ Jules Romains was the founder of the Unanimism movement, which advocated the existence of a collective consciousness and viewed individual artists as part of a “collective soul” that influenced their work. Prior to World War I, Romains founded the Abbaye, a community of artists based on Unanimism. Unanimism was similar to Pound’s idea of artists as a particular group of initiates. Like Gurdjieff’s Institute for Harmonious Development for Man, Romains’s Abbaye was in a Paris suburb. Both Romains and Gurdjieff concentrated on the complexities of the intersection between individual personality and communal society. Pound paid the French poet the ultimate compliment when he wrote, “The group centering in Romains is the only one which seems to me any where nearly so energized as the Blast group in London.”¹⁸ While similar in style to Laforgue and Romains, Remy de Gourmont was a poet who was most influential as a critic. One of the Mercure de France founders, de Gourmont was also a close friend and associate of Joris-Karl Huysmans, a personal favorite of Heap. Like Anderson, de Gourmont believed that the professional critic should be individualized and passionate; he argued that criticism is analogous to other art forms. Particularly of interest to Anderson and Heap were his essays in the Lettres à L’Amazone (Letters to the Amazon, 1914), written about his conversations with the American lesbian expatriate Natalie Clifford Barney.

Pound had met the author and painter de Bosschere in London where he was escaping World War I. De Bosschere’s work was marked by an enthrallment with the occult that combined spiritual and sexual elements; his erotic illustrations included the works of Ovid and Oscar Wilde. Accused of Satanism, de Bosschere proudly entitled his 1933 autobiography Satan l’Obscure. Two other poets Pound selected for the issue have particularly intriguing connections to the occult: the American symbolist poet Stuart Merrill, who mainly wrote in French, was a follower of Whitman and a public supporter of anarchism and Wilde; and the poet Stanislas de Guaita undertook a resurrection of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood by founding the Cabalistic Order of the Rosicrucian in 1888.

Like many of the moderns, Pound was influenced by Eastern culture and art. His major contribution came in 1919 when he published the sinologist Ernest Fenollosa’s notes on “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” in four installments at the end of the year. Pound wrote in the Little Review, “Like nature, the Chinese words are alive and plastic because thing and action are not formally separated.”¹⁹ He read Confucius as he put the finishing touches on Chinese style poems he would publish in Des Imagistes (1914) and dug into “oriental esoteric” reading such as Japanese and Chinese history and literature.

It was only natural that Pound would forward the poems of W. B. Yeats to the Little Review given their history together. Pound had served as Yeats’s private secretary in the south of England during the winters from 1913 to 1916, and at Stone Cottage in Sussex they developed a relationship of mutual respect. Anderson and Heap had been great admirers of the Irish poet since their youths and were delighted to have his work appear in their journal. Anderson’s first reference to Yeats came in the second issue of the Little Review as he was touring America. She reprinted parts of “William Butler Yeats to American Poets,” his speech during a Chicago visit originally printed in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry. In a brief introduction, Anderson reported, “He took occasion to warn his confreres in America against a number of besetting sins.”²⁰ The particular selections of his speech that she chose to reprint foreshadow Pound’s later tenure as foreign editor, including passages in which Yeats went to great lengths to laud French poets. As we know from her letters, Heap was a follower of Yeats as a young woman, and she played King Conchobar in Yeats’s “On Baile’s Strand” for Chicago’s Little Theater. Pound secured a total of twenty-one poems from Yeats for publication in the Little Review, including “Upon a Dying Lady,” “In Memory of Robert Gregory,” and the play “The Dreaming of Bones,” all published between 1917 and 1918. Anderson included “The Wild Swans at Coole” and “Presences” among her favorites in The Little Review Anthology.

Yeats’s history with the occult is well documented. After reading A. P. Sinnett’s The Occult World and Esoteric Buddhism, he became a Theosophist and began a pattern of joining and then quitting a variety of esoteric organizations. At various times he was a member of the “inner lodge” of the Esoteric Section of London’s Theosophical Society, the Dublin Lodge of the Hermetic Society, and The Order of the Golden Dawn. While the Hermetic Society was based on the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, The Order of the Golden Dawn practiced theurgy, the practice of magic by soliciting the aid of the supernatural for one’s everyday life. Under official tutelage, the Golden Dawn gave Yeats an insight into practical magic, ritual, and ceremony. In Yeats’s universe, the poet was the conduit between the spiritual realm and earth. In 1890, the same year he was formally initiated into the Golden Dawn, Yeats co-founded The Rhymers’ Club with Ernest Rhys. Other prominent members included Arthur Symons, Lionel Johnson, and Ernest Dowson, the latter a favorite of the young Heap. Oscar Wilde occasionally attended their meetings. While the club was a venue for poets to read their work to one another, the major attraction was their mutual belief in the autonomy and superiority of the artist as argued by the Pre-Raphaelites, Wilde, and Walter Pater. Like Pound’s notion of an artistic community as a secret society of sorts, Yeats’s vision of the Rhymers’ Club had them as an illustrative embodiment of the same circle of kindred spirits. In his book on the three winters Pound and Yeats spent in Stone Cottage, James Longenbach argues that while it has long been posited that “Pound transformed Yeats from the whispering poet of ‘The Wind among the Reeds’ to the stark modern poet of ‘Responsibilities,’ ” new interpretations suggest that Yeats was a significant influence on the younger poet rather than the reverse.²¹ Longenbach claims that “the occult studies Yeats shared with Pound provided the younger poet with confirmation of his own esoteric doctrine of the Image.”²² He points out that “the metaphors of secret societies serve to characterize the Stone Cottage writers well because Pound and Yeats used the metaphors themselves. No matter what their interests or activities, one keynote echoes throughout the work: the opposition of the artist’s aristocratic ‘state of mind’ … to the unpurged sensibility of the ‘mob.’ ”²³ Pound in his Cantos later looks back with fondness on a small circle of men and women he saw as such a privileged society; Yeats delivered the dream.

Nevertheless, Pound’s interest in Eastern literature and philosophy, particularly his study of the Chinese ideogram and Japanese Noh plays and other such sources, would profoundly affect the elder poet. At Stone Cottage, his translations of Japanese Noh plays introduced Yeats to the form and inspired him to undertake his own attempt to write Noh plays. “The Dreaming of the Bones,” published in the January 1919 issue of the Little Review, was generally regarded as the purest expression of Yeats’s Noh plays and of his “belief in the soul’s dreaming back through the most passionate moments of its past life.” Heap wrote to Florence Reynolds that it contained “lines to make you weep.”²⁴ During the same period, Yeats studied Irish folklore and spiritualist literature, producing the two essays, “Witches and Wizards in Irish Folklore” and “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places.” Pound and Yeats realized that their studies were linked; correspondences between folk legends could be found not simply within the Western tradition but with the traditions of the East as well. “Everything Pound and Yeats studied at Stone Cottage was chosen for its esoteric value: Noh plays, Chinese poetry, Western demonology, even Lady Gregory’s folklore, in their efforts to separate themselves from what they perceived as an ignorant public.”²⁵ They were the esoteric elite.

At the same time Yeats appeared in the Little Review, Pound sent Anderson and Heap the work of T. S. Eliot, including most of the poetry he wrote during that period. The magazine published a total of eight poems by T. S. Eliot, including “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” and “Lune de Miel.” His 1919 volume, Poems, was composed of all the work he had published in the Little Review. The influence of Eliot’s religious conservatism on his work has been noted at length. However, several scholars now endorse the notion that while he publicly rejected the occult, he was nevertheless fascinated, if not obsessed, by it. Eliot acknowledged the profound influence of Arthur Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature on his creative development, particularly introducing him to the work of the French poets Laforgue and Verlaine, whom Pound triumphed in the pages of the Little Review. In his book, Symons discusses Auguste Villiers de I’Isle-Adam, Pythagoras, Hermes, Boehme, and Swedenborg—all direct influences on Gurdjieff’s philosophy. Eliot’s short story “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” published in two Little Review issues (May and September 1917), was one of Anderson’s favorite works; she later republished it in the Little Review Anthology. Although not considered by critics to be anywhere near his best work, the story—whose characters are said to be based on Eliot (Eeldrop) and Pound (Appleplex)—gives us a glimpse into Eliot’s mystical leanings and his view of Pound. His Eeldrop/Eliot is “reflective, with a taste for theology and mysticism,” while Appleplex/Pound is the materialist.²⁶ Between 1910 and 1922, Eliot had a number of experiences that led him to further investigations of spiritualism, mysticism, and the occult. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he read closely books that dealt with the metaphysical and mystical, including William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience and Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness; he also wrote graduate papers on Henri Bergson. According to Lyndall Gordon, in 1910 Eliot experienced a “vision” in the streets of Boston; people were “shrinking and dividing” before his eyes, an experience he recorded in his poem, “Silence.”²⁷ Donald J. Childs argues that Eliot deliberately engaged “Theosophists, psychical researchers, fortune tellers, astrologers, therapeutic spiritualists—Eliot had personally met examples of them all by 1917.”²⁸

In 1914, he met Yeats in London and they discussed the occult. By 1920 he had attended séances sponsored by Lady Rothermere; his wife Vivien Eliot scornfully described Lady Rothermere a year later as living “in that asylum for the insane called La Prieuré where she does religious dances naked.”²⁹ The séances were conducted by P. D. Ouspensky, who became George Gurdjieff’s indispensable acolyte. Anderson and Heap were introduced to Ouspensky’s book Tertium Organum shortly before they became aware of Gurdjieff. Another Gurdjieffian connection Eliot made in his early years in London was A. R. Orage, editor of The New Age, a journal of literature and politics that was the British version of the Little Review—provocative and radical. Orage was a Theosophist and Fabian who became a follower of Gurdjieff during this same period. He was universally admired for his erudition in political, literary, and mystical subjects. Eliot’s 1934 obituary for Orage is revealing. He admits “disdain” for Orage’s mystical beliefs and at the same time writes, “Perhaps my own attitude is suggestive of the reformed drunkard’s abhorrence of intemperance.”³⁰In addition to the work of French poets, Yeats, and Eliot, Pound sent Joyce’s Ulysses manuscript to the Little Review, an effort that proved controversial and exhausting for all involved. Pound would announce his departure from the Little Review before all the Ulysses chapters were published and before the resulting trial of Anderson and Heap for publishing obscenity. His departure was due in part to his exasperation with American attitudes toward literature and art—many of them expressed by faithful Little Review readers. Anderson had liked Pound’s debut editorial in the May 1917 issue for its attack on the genteel tradition, including strong criticism of Harriet Monroe and Poetry for “unflagging courtesy to a lot of old fools and fogies whom I should have told to go to hell.”³¹ His colorful tirades included arguing the lack of American appreciation for Jules Romains. “Certain fusty old crocks have pretended to look after ‘culture,’ they have run fat, dull, and profitable periodicals for their own emolument, or emollition, and is for the card-boardizing of the American mind.”³² Anderson and Heap were strong supporters of Pound, yet nevertheless dismayed by some of his more vitriolic pronouncements. Eventually, like their Little Review followers, they were happy to see him go.

Though some Little Review readers had appreciated Pound’s efforts, most of the letters published in the “Reader Critic” section shortly after his arrival lambasted the new addition. Mrs. “O. D. J.,” wrote in the June 1917 issue, “I have great faith in the artistic life of America and I don’t think Ezra Pound’s notions of it are very healthy. I sincerely hope the trend of it will not emulate the ‘smart’ or dissipated literature which seems to please London and which can hardly come under the head of ‘good letters!’ ”³³ The following month, Louis Puttelis of Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote that Pound was “below your earlier standard—almost below zero. What sympathy can the majority of readers feel for the foreign editor, Ezra Pound, with his contemptuous invective against the vulgus?”³⁴ In the same issue, “I. E. P.” from White Plains, New York, wrote, “Your magazine is rubbish, disappointingly insipid, heavily stupid.” The crux of most of the complaints was the predominance of writers from abroad.”³⁵ “H. C. L.” from Chicago wrote, “I wish you didn’t have such a craze for foreigners and self-exiled Americans. I think you have missed your chance right here in your own country.”³⁶ “V. H.” from Maine protested, “It’s so damned British!”³⁷

The emerging debate over the role and ability of American artists versus those from Europe dated back to the early republic. Its equivalent in the early twentieth-century struggle between “literary nationalists” and European partisans was played out on the pages of the Little Review with genuine passion. However, this debate had another component—challenging or “incomprehensible” art as opposed to art that was accessible to the average reader. This dichotomy raises the question of modernism as a reactionary or progressive force. Although Anderson tended to side with Pound in these debates, Heap exercised more independent judgment. Heap did come to Pound’s defense when Little Review readers and other critics first attacked him, but as time went on she began to note her displeasure with what she saw as his more obnoxious statements. Moreover, though she would later energetically procure the work of European painters and sculptors for reproductions in the journal, she was also responsible for the two “All American” numbers of the Little Review published in June and December of 1918.

The argument has persisted that Pound dominated the Little Review by dictating to Anderson and Heap from across the Atlantic. There is no question that he was tireless and sincere in promoting the work of talented writers and in exposing their literature to the American reading public. However, Anderson and Heap often turned down his suggestions for publication, including his own work. Many letters reveal the depth of loyalty Little Review readers had for the pre-Pound publication. One fan, identified only as “An Old Reader,” proclaimed that after reading the debut issue in 1914, “The Little Review was my religion; it converted me to a faith in a New America; it inspired me to dreams and creative work. It was my First American sweetheart.” Then one night the Old Reader was “awakened by an apparition wailing, ‘Help! Margaret Anderson is murdering me!’… Was it the spirit of the Little Review? For surely the spirit of the old Little Review is dead.” Pound was, of course, the reason. “An Ezraized Little Review will have no appeal to Young America,” the Old Reader predicted. “I hope that you will soon tire of your over-sophisticated associates and drive them out of the sanctuary.”³⁸

Even American contributors to the Little Review were unhappy about the new turn. Maxwell Bodenheim wrote a letter in the June issue, complaining that Pound’s statement that T. S. Eliot was “the only really creative poet brought forth during recent times” was “absurd.” Bodenheim named H. D., John Gould Fletcher, Marianne Moore, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens as “not inevitably below Eliot in quality of work.”³⁹ As may be expected, Pound’s old adversary, Amy Lowell, was less than happy to see his influence over the Little Review. When Anderson wrote her in the summer of 1917 soliciting poetry for future issues, Lowell’s reply was blunt: “I am awfully sorry to disappoint you, but I am going to tell you the truth. I do not want to put anything in your magazine while you are running those men so hard. Much as I admire Ezra Pound’s work, I do not like his attitude, and I feel the same about the other contributors, only in most cases without the admiration.” Lowell told Anderson, “[I] always had a strong feeling of friendship for you and an interest in the ‘Little Review,’ and I wanted to do all I could for it, but when you went over bodily to my bitterest enemies, although it in no sense disturbs my feeling of friendship nor my relations with you, it does disturb my relations to the magazine, and so long as you continue to give such prominence to these men, I do not feel like appearing in it.” She added, “Should you ever change your policy, I should of course, reconsider my point of view.”⁴⁰

What was the response of Anderson and Heap to this onslaught of criticism by previously loyal readers and contributors? Heap replied directly to some negative letters in the Reader Critic section. In her response to Mrs. O. D. J. in the June number, she wrote, “Fear not, dear ones. We have learned to be penny wise; we will not be Pound foolish. We agree with Pound in the spirit; if we don’t always agree with him in the letter be sure we will mention it. And Pound didn’t slip up on us unaware. A mutual misery over the situation brought us together.”⁴¹ Responding specifically to Mrs. O. D. J.’s worry that Pound’s notions of the artistic life in America were “unhealthy,” Heap wrote, “The unhealth is in the artistic life of America, and whatever the ailment, bitter and acid medicine seems necessary to cure it.”⁴²

In the same issue, Anderson devoted an entire article, “What the Public Doesn’t Want,” to critics of the new Little Review. Anderson acknowledged that in the first few years of publication the magazine had only “irregularly” attained her goal of “Art and good talk about Art.” She conceded that the journal might have suffered due to the distraction caused by “my concern about various matters,” a specific reference to her previous dedication to anarchism. She saw Pound’s influence as instrumental to the salvation of her original goal. “And now, after working through unbelievable aridness the Little Review has at last arrived at the place from which I wanted it to start. At least we are printing stuff which is creative and inventive and, thank heaven, not purely local.” The audience’s reaction, she stated, was resentment. She reported that the circulation of the Little Review was actually growing “in spite of criticism and misunderstanding.”⁴³

As time went on, however, it appears the unhappiness of their readers with Pound’s influence did have some influence on Anderson and Heap. Heap was the driving force behind issuing an “All-American” number; by the spring of 1918, both women were writing to American artists soliciting contributions. Their letters suggest they were quite sensitive to the charges that they were biased toward European artists. Anderson wrote Amy Lowell once again pleading for some poems. “Please don’t think I’m trying to be a pest,” she began apologetically, “but I can’t avoid asking you if you’d like to appear in our All-American number. The June issue is to contain none of the Englishmen (with the possible exception of Joyce, whose novel is to appear serially), but is to be turned over entirely to work that we can get on this side. Pound and Lewis and the rest won’t have a line in!—the object being to prove that as good or better work can be found here. If the thing’s a success we shall have American numbers at regular intervals.”⁴⁴ Lowell agreed and sent her the poem “Dreams in War Time.” Heap went so far as to write Mitchell Dawson, who was busy training in the U. S. Ambulance Service during World War I, for a contribution. “Can you send us some work? Those English are putting it all over us.”⁴⁵

Other contributors to the All-American number included William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, Ben Hecht, Sherwood Anderson, and Djuna Barnes. The reactions to the number ranged from tremendous enthusiasm—“simply superb” and “the best yet”—to disdain from devotees of European writers who saw it as evidence that American artists were indeed inferior. “X. T.” wrote, “Cut out the American stuff, please!” Morris Reisen described it as “very nondescript. Highlights mixed with the weirdest sort of rubbish. I wondered if you conceived the number because you knew it would be a humorous answer to those who criticize you for printing too much foreign stuff?”⁴⁶

By June of 1918, Pound had served as foreign editor for a little over a year and was keenly aware of the controversy he inspired. The following month he wrote an article entitled “Cooperation,” which reviewed his contributions, addressed his critics, and threatened his departure if his role as foreign editor did not prove more lucrative. In his article, Pound complained that though he had managed to publish the work of Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, Lewis, and Ford, the American reading public was unimpressed. “The response has been oligarchic. The plain man in his gum overshoes, with his touching belief in W. J. Bryan, Eddie Bok, etc. is not with us.”⁴⁷ Pound informed Little Review readers that he was making little money for his efforts on behalf of the journal, and his editing kept him from his own creative work. “There are,” he wrote caustically, “plenty of voices ready with the quite obvious reply that nobody wants me to continue my hideous career as either author, editor, or journalist. I can, in imagination, hear the poluploisbious twitter of rural requests for my silence and extinction.” However, he felt there were also people who valued his talents as a poet. He concluded his article: “Either the Little Review will have to provide me with the necessities of life and a reasonable amount of leisure, by May 1, 1919, or I shall have to apply my energies elsewhere.”⁴⁸ Pound had complained to Anderson before that he was feeling overwhelmed sponsoring the work of others and was unable to devote time to his poetry. When he sent Anderson the “Cooperation” article, he explained it was a “harangue to the plebiscite” and a plea for additional subscriptions to help “pay for our piping.”⁴⁹

From the fall of 1918 to the spring of the following year, the time of his threatened departure, it became clear that Pound was losing the support of Heap. The evidence for this can be found in a controversy over an article about Chicago poets entitled “The Western School” by the British critic Edgar Jepson. Harriet Monroe initially commissioned the article for Poetry, then refused to print it. Monroe stated she would not publish the article because it was not criticism but merely “opinionating.”⁵⁰ Pound printed a condensed version of Jepson’s article in the Little Review and added in a postscript that Monroe had turned it down because of Jepson’s “lack of flattery” in reviewing the works of such Chicago based poets as Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg.⁵¹ Pound, who felt Jepson was a superior literary critic, concurred with his low assessment of most American poets. When Monroe read Jepson’s condensed article in the Little Review with Pound’s postscript, she was livid. In an editorial printed in Poetry, Monroe wrote she rejected the article not because Jepson denigrated Chicago poets but rather due to “its cheap incompetence.” Monroe felt that by reprinting the Jepson article and adding a snide postscript, Pound was attacking her magazine. This she found somewhat strange since Pound was also acting as the foreign editor of Poetry. “Evidently,” wrote Monroe, “this poet obeys the scriptural injunction not to let his right hand know what his left hand is doing.” As for the Little Review, it was “now under the dictatorship of Ezra Pound.”⁵² Heap entered the argument by reprinting Monroe’s editorial and following it with an article of her own entitled “The Episode Continued.” The piece defended Pound’s ability as an editor but also savaged him. “Miss Monroe,” she wrote, “is not the first to tell us that the Little Review is under the dictatorship of Pound. Our idea of having a foreign editor is not to sit in our New York office and mess up, censor, or throw out work sent to us by an editor in London. We have let Ezra Pound be our foreign editor in the only way we see it. We have let him be as foreign as he likes—foreign to taste, foreign to courtesy, foreign to our standards of Art.”

Heap went on to say she agreed with Monroe’s judgment of the quality of Jepson’s critical abilities. “Mr. Jepson,” she wrote, “uses all the threadbare terminology of half-baked aesthetic criticism.” She also blasted the patronizing attitudes of those in Pound’s British literary circle: “Cursing, endless repetitions of abuse of all outsiders, a mutual advertising agency for themselves, seem to be a popular kind of indoor sport of the literary lizards in London. They call it criticism.” Heap’s distaste for this condescension extended to Pound’s work on the August 1918 number devoted to Henry James. She commented, “Neither can I quite see literature reduced to a profession of the mind in just the way these men do it. Among other things, I am thinking of the Henry James number with its legal smell; step into my office and I will tell you of Mr. James.”⁵³

She called out Pound’s strident tone and xenophobic outbursts. “Pound’s animadversions of his own countrymen include a sullen boredom and a greater inattention of the arts, while his ‘slurs’ and ‘insults’ of foreign races and nationalities living here arouse anger and bewilderment.” She went on to say that she “had countless letters from Jews, Letts, Greeks, Finns, Irish, etc. protesting against Mr. Pound’s ignorance and indiscrimination. I have answered that this is always true of mushroom nations—this fixed imperception of the qualities and culture of all other nations. And then there are some of us who come from races of ancient culture to whom Mr. Pound’s ravings sound but the torturing of an inferiority complex.” However, she pointed out, “All this has nothing to do with editing a magazine” and “as long as Mr. Pound sends us work by Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, de Bosschere—work bearing the stamp of originality and permanence—we have no complaint of him as an editor. If we are slightly jarred by his manner of asking for alms, or by any other personal manifestation, we can take care of that outside the magazine. We need no commiseration for our connection with Mr. Pound. We are not blind deficient children.”⁵⁴

Immediately following Heap’s article was an unsigned piece entitled “Pounding Ezra,” which Anderson later acknowledged was written by Ben Hecht. Hecht contended that as a critic Pound displayed a “sane, clear-visioned, cultured mind,” but that his role as a critic and mentor to others superseded his importance as a poet. “Perhaps Pound’s place,” Hecht mused, “is, as others have fervently pointed out, in the literary politics of the day rather than in its literature.” Hecht characterizes Pound as “some Pied Piper luring his swarm of literary rodents out of their conventional stables to their doom.” However, the crux of Hecht’s comments was what he saw as “the elusive boredom” of Pound’s poetry. “His style appeals to me not as the cunning mask for ideas but as inflections borrowed, as posturings filched for a moment from a scholastic wardrobe trunk.” Writing that Pound “has always about him the air of a mimic” and that he was an “exquisite showman minus a show,” Hecht dismissed him as a major poet.⁵⁵

These attacks in the November 1918 issue were followed in December by another All-American number, perhaps indicating a decline in Pound’s influence with Anderson and Heap. By that time, Pound had completed most of the work he would do for the journal. The February–March 1919 issue, devoted chiefly to Remy de Gourmont, had been completed in December. Pound would officially resign as foreign editor in May of 1919, as he had stated. It is easy to believe Pound left because, as he publicly announced, he wanted more time and money for his creative work. The funds promised for the Little Review by his guarantor John Quinn were due to end that month. In addition, the constant tension over legal troubles concerning the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses, as we shall see, was exasperating to Pound. Most likely the foreign editorship of the Little Review was a burden Pound was glad to leave behind.

However, it is also evident that Pound was not happy with the loss of authority he seemed to suffer in the wake of the attacks by Heap and Hecht, along with the persistent drumbeat of criticism he received from Little Review readers. Undoubtedly, Pound saw this criticism as the limited judgment of his intellectual inferiors, and it hardly dented his confidence in his powers, both as an artist and critic. When Pound left, it was without any serious rancor on his part, and the new foreign editor, John Rodker, was his own hand-picked successor. However, Rodker would in no way wield the influence—and controversy—Pound had, and the vacuum remaining was filled by Heap. Heap was the dominant influence ruling the next ten years until the Little Review’s demise in 1929. She wrote in the Little Review that it was “of no interest” to her whether the American public came to appreciate art “early or late or never,” and she would not try to “lure or lead or goad or shame them” to accept it. She was declaring her independence from the missionary zeal Pound and Anderson had demonstrated toward the reading public. It was not that Heap shied away from controversy; her writing was provocative and caustic, yet she often displayed a bemused detachment from the criticism she received. To what extent this masked her underlying depression is impossible to say, but in the pages of the Little Review, Heap’s measured and often witty replies to her critics were a stark contrast to Pound’s sarcasm and Anderson’s outbursts. One reason for Heap’s attitude may be that she did not share the pessimism of her co-editors concerning the state of art in America. “I cannot understand Ezra Pound and Margaret Anderson,” she wrote in the December 1917 issue, “when they become impatient with the American public because it won’t take Art. I believe if you leave the right kind of food out the right kind of animals will get it—if they are hungry.” Addressing the belief that only Europeans have superior artistic sensibilities, Heap made the point that “Americans always talk and act as if all individuality, all nationality and race-consciousness, were inevitably washed away in the Atlantic from everyone who dared come to America. If there is to be Art in America, no fear; Art will have its way.” Heap did warn, however, “The appalling and unholy thing is a nation that is satisfied and thinks it can exist without Art.”⁵⁶

As she became the dominating editorial influence after Pound’s departure, Heap demonstrated a judicious selection of those she considered the true artists of New York while continuing to publish work from abroad. The fact that she was the driving force behind the two All-American numbers testified to her conviction that Americans were producing genuine art that deserved an audience. Many of these American authors were published in the Little Review while Pound was still foreign editor. This illustrates that despite the central role given to Ezra Pound in various accounts of the Little Review, Anderson and Heap remained firmly in charge. The fact that Pound’s comments on American work ranged from condescending approval to outright insult had little impact on the two women. Heap and Anderson had a levelheaded firmness in the face of Pound’s persistent grumbling and occasional furies and retained this attitude, as we shall see, in the tumultuous wake of the Ulysses trial, where they battled not only the courts and the Society for the Suppression of Vice but Pound as well.

A close examination of the obscenity trial Anderson and Heap endured for the serialization of James Joyce’s Ulysses speaks volumes concerning two issues: the social tensions concerning lesbians at this critical period of transition and the connection between modernism and certain esoteric schools of thought in vogue at that time. The general anxiety about lesbians, and by extension, Anderson and Heap, had a political component. The equation of the spread of lesbianism with the emergence of modern feminism permeated the writing of physicians and social critics as well as average citizens. The Ulysses case was undoubtedly an example of the effort to suppress literature considered to be “obscenity,” but the dynamics of the trial revealed it was also very much an attempt to silence the “New Woman,” a threatening sexual creature. At the same time, the text of Ulysses itself can be interpreted as a source of Joyce’s interest in Western esoteric subjects.⁵⁷

The trial of Anderson and Heap cannot be divorced from attacks on feminists and anxiety about female sexuality. The evidence for this comes from the primary source of attack on the two women. Though the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice formally brought obscenity charges against them, and the Court of Special Sessions convicted them, the angriest assault on Anderson and Heap can be found in the correspondence of their attorney, John Quinn. Quinn’s discovery of his clients’ lesbianism brought forth an explosion of misogynist fury that, to a certain extent, accounted for his self-defeating legal strategy in the courtroom. The entire saga of Anderson, Heap, and Quinn illustrates how the effort to bring together separate spheres in life and literature could lead, as it did in this case, not to the integration of dichotomous categories but a bitter collision.⁵⁸

John Quinn was well known in New York art circles; his private collection of modern art was massive. In My Thirty Years’ War, Anderson recalled dining with Quinn in his Central Park West apartment. “Every inch of space from baseboard to ceiling was covered with modern sculpture. [Constantin] Brâncuşi’s ‘Child in the World’ stood out grotesquely in the confusion.”⁵⁹ If Anderson’s observation brings to mind the Victorian love of conspicuous consumption, it is because Quinn was in many respects a transitional figure between Victorianism and modernism. The son of an Ohio baker, he collected art in the same way many Gilded Age tycoons did as an expression of status. Quinn’s parents were Irish immigrants, and he was interested in sponsoring Irish authors; he served as Joyce’s agent in America. Money sent to Pound by Quinn was meant to pay Joyce for work published in the Little Review. Quinn was very much a social conservative. His interest in “modern” art did not necessarily endear him to radical thought, particularly concerning political rebellion or sexual freedom. In a revealing letter to Pound, Quinn expressed his disgust with the pseudo-Bohemianism of Washington Square. “It is a vulgar, disgusting conglomeration of second and third rate artists and would be artists, of I.W.W. [Industrial Workers of the World] agitators, of sluts, kept or casual, clean and unclean, of Socialists, of poetasters and pimps, of fornicators and dancers and those who dance to fornicate—but hell, words fail me to express my contempt for the whole damn bunch.”⁶⁰

Quinn was also clearly making a connection between political radicalism and sexual promiscuity. When he began his association with the Little Review, he was unaware that it was edited by two lesbians who included “Red Emma” as one of their dearest friends. After his first visit to Anderson, he wrote Pound, “Miss Anderson is a woman of taste and refinement and good looking.” However, he did have his suspicions about Heap, “a typical Washington Squarite.” “I only saw her once,” he wrote, “and if she has not got bobbed hair it should be.”⁶¹ Several months later, Quinn was still impressed with Anderson and even included Heap in his praise of their work. Anderson, he gushed, was a “damn attractive young woman, one of the handsomest I have ever seen, very high-spirited, very courageous and very fine. And, I think it is all to their credit that they are making this uphill fight decently and almost alone. I don’t know that I have seen any two women who were less maudlin, less sentimental and slushy about it, and more courageous.”⁶²

Quinn was not celebrating female autonomy; he doubted, he wrote Pound, that any two women could make a success out of a magazine like the Little Review. In his scenario Anderson and Heap were the two fine and upright but helpless heroines of a Victorian novel. Anderson, the beauty, required a hero to save the magazine. However, the hero was a Freudian modernist intent on mixing business with pleasure. “Miss A is a very beautiful woman,” he wrote in the same letter. “I have no doubt that she could get a good ‘backer’ if she was willing to have him be a ‘fronter’ first.”⁶³ For their part, Anderson and Heap expressed doubts about Quinn. They had serious misgivings about his “aesthetic judgment” and were annoyed with his propensity to give them constant advice. Pound, who was the receptor of each party’s summation of the other, became worried that the entire arrangement might be jeopardized by “personal bickerings with sexual undertones.”⁶⁴ His concern was justified. When Quinn discovered that Anderson and Heap were lesbians and that as Joyce’s agent he must defend them against obscenity charges, sexual undertones erupted with violent intensity.

In late 1917 Pound received the first three chapters of Ulysses from Joyce. Although he immediately sensed censorship obstacles, he was in favor of publication. Despite the seizure of their magazine because of Wyndham Lewis’s “Cantleman’s Spring-mate,” Anderson and Heap were also willing to risk printing Ulysses. Anderson wrote years later that when she came across the sentence “Ineluctable modality of Being, sea-sprawn, sea-wracked signature of all things I read,” she said to Heap, “This is the most beautiful thing we’ll ever have … We’ll print it if it’s the last effort of our lives.” To Little Review readers she announced, “WE are about to publish a prose masterpiece.”⁶⁵ When Quinn saw the first installment, he was livid. Although he was a patron of Joyce, he thought Ulysses was “toilet room literature, pissoir art,” and that specific passages would “subject it to damnation in thirty seconds by any court or jury.” In a letter to Pound about the Ulysses issue, Quinn indicated that he was aware of Anderson’s lesbianism. Anyone reading the entire issue, he wrote, “would say that the person or persons responsible for the selection of that number suffered from sex mania or the obsession of sex, or that they were taking out on paper and in type what they should have taken out between some man’s or woman’s legs.” In a supreme twist of irony Quinn wrote, “Those who are sexually satisfied don’t take it out on paper. Vide Havelock Ellis works passim.”⁶⁶ Quinn’s mention of Havelock Ellis is a clue here; the British sexologist spent much of his career studying homosexuality, specifically lesbianism. In this letter, Quinn pinpointed a central response toward lesbians in the early twentieth century: they were viewed as simultaneously sexually insatiable and frigid. Throughout Quinn’s association with Anderson and Heap, their frequent dismissal of his opinions angered him. He complained to Pound that Anderson was like most other women in not appreciating free advice. “I don’t give a damn for her morals or lack of morals, but I object to her lack of politeness.”⁶⁷ Quinn would come to see Anderson’s sexuality as the reason for her indifference to authority and her next confrontation with the law—her “abnormality” had forced the issue. He wrote that he “was through” with Anderson and Heap; by the end of that year he informed them that he would no longer pay contributors to the Little Review. Pound’s departure from the Little Review followed Quinn’s, and Anderson and Heap continued to publish Ulysses without any assistance from either. In early 1919, the Post Office suppressed the January and May issues of the Little Review for obscenity.

The Postal Inspectors were not the only people disgusted by Ulysses; many Little Review subscribers registered their disapproval. One reader asserted that the two women had become advocates for “abnormal art … sexual perverted cheap Bowery vileness.”⁶⁸ Others complained that they could not understand the novel. “Really now, Joyce! What does he think he is doing? I swear I’ve read his Ulysses and haven’t found out yet what it is about, who is who or where. Each month is worse than the last.”⁶⁹ Another subscriber argued that it was not prudery that led her to dislike the novel, but the description of “natural functions” that were better left alone.⁷⁰ Heap dryly responded, “Yes, I think you must be right. I once knew a woman so modest that she didn’t wear underwear; she couldn’t stand its being seen in the wash.”⁷¹

The controversy brought to a halt the revenue from publishing houses advertised in the magazine; some specifically cited the legal troubles of Ulysses for the termination of their accounts. Anderson fought back by writing “To the Book Publishers of America,” an angry editorial in which she defiantly observed, “We have managed to keep alive in spite of an unsympathetic and ignorant public, a jeering press, and a censor that expects the worse of any effort dedicated to the best.”⁷² The reaction of Anderson and Heap to both advertisers and readers demonstrated their self-image and priorities as editors. They were determined to publish what they wanted, regardless of the criticism they received. They realized this stance was financially dangerous; if they antagonized enough people they would be out of business. However, as Anderson pointed out in her “Cantleman’s Spring-mate” editorial, if they were not in conflict with popular tastes, there was no reason for the Little Review to exist. It was this stance that made them feel perfectly justified in defying Pound and infuriating Quinn.

After Pound’s departure, Heap wrote directly to Joyce for the first time. She expressed concern over the slow delivery of chapters rather than the possible obscenity of the content. In January of 1920, she writes that she felt “much like a robber in starting this letter … [T]here has always been such a note of ownership in Ezra Pound’s attitude toward you and your work that we have held back, with a little amusement, from breaking in even when there has been a necessity for us to express our pleasure and pride in printing you, or our anger and disgust at the suppression.” She informed Joyce that the May issue had been burned by the Post Office, which also threatened to permanently suppress the Little Review if they did not “stop pulling that stuff.”⁷³ The same month Heap was writing Joyce another issue was confiscated. When she wrote him with this news Heap admitted, “We laughed so much reading proof on that episode that we forgot to think ‘obscenity.’ The flowery passages are too good—I shall be sorry when Bloom finishes his day.”⁷⁴ However, after twenty-three installments over two years and nine months, Joyce’s protagonist Leopold Bloom would never complete his day in the pages of the Little Review.

In the summer of 1920, the Little Review was confiscated again, and this issue led to formal obscenity charges and a trial. The themes of Ulysses cannot be divorced from the attack on its publishers. “Nausicaa,” the Ulysses chapter that led to the legal attack on Anderson and Heap, is the story of Leopold Bloom’s encounter with the young Gerty MacDowell on Sandymount Beach. Joyce fashioned Gerty’s character as a parody of both Victorian womanhood and literature. Joyce’s use of voice is crucial to understanding his intention in “Nausicaa.” It “comically subverts the possibility and desirability” of the traditional Victorian heroine’s virtue.⁷⁵ The critical scene in the chapter that led to obscenity charges was when Bloom masturbates while looking at Gerty, purposefully leaning back to expose herself. The sexual charge of the scene is not confined to Bloom’s orgasm; it includes the satisfaction Gerty experiences “watching Bloom watch her.”⁷⁶ Just as Anderson’s lesbianism disqualified her from Quinn’s Victorian model, Gerty MacDowell failed the purity requirement that defined her nineteenth-century fictional sisters.

On October 18, 1920, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice under the leadership of John Sumner formally pressed charges against Anderson and Heap for circulating obscenity through the mail. Despite his lack of affection for Anderson and Heap, John Quinn defended the Little Review for the sake of Joyce. When Anderson and Heap met with Quinn in his office shortly after the charges were filed, the lawyer exploded in a fit of rage and told them they belonged in jail. Anderson was somewhat nonplused by Quinn’s outburst and suggested the Little Review would get another lawyer, “knowing that no power on earth could have wrested that power from him.” “One didn’t argue with John Quinn,” she wrote in her autobiography. “One enjoyed his performances too much. He was better than a prima donna. No woman would throw such obvious scenes or look around so hopefully for the applause of her audience.”⁷⁷

During this period, Quinn’s letters to Pound make constant and increasingly vitriolic statements connecting their sexuality to the trial. “I have no interest at all,” he wrote in the fall of 1920, “in defending people who are stupidly and brazenly and Sapphoistically and pederastically and urinally, and menstrually violate [sic] the law, and think they are courageous… . THEY ARE BORES. They are too damn fresh. They stand for no principle. They are cheap self-advertisers. All pederasts want to go into court. Bringing libel suits is one of the stigmata of buggery. The bugger and the Lesbian constantly think in terms of suits and defenses.⁷⁸ In his view, Anderson and Heap had deliberately and wantonly broken the law. By extension, he believed their sexual proclivities had forced the entire case. The equation of lesbianism with litigation underlined Quinn’s fundamental conviction that the real offense was their sexuality. By the time of the pretrial hearing, Quinn’s attitude became one of pure misogyny. He wrote Pound a description of women who had come to the hearing in support of Anderson and Heap. “There was Heap plus Anderson, plus heaps of other Heaps and Andersons. Some good looking, some indifferent. The two rows of them looking as though a fashionable whorehouse had been pinched and all its inmates hauled into court, with Heap in the part of the brazen madam. The women,” he continued, “seemed about as interested and excited about what was going to happen as though they expected to be raped. Nothing but a rape could excite them so much.”⁷⁹

Quinn’s comments degenerated into violence by the time of the hearing. He suggested that any woman in court was there due to prurient interest in Anderson or Heap or the sexual aspects of Ulysses. Legal, literary, or intellectual concerns could not account for their participation; hence, they were branded whores or lesbians. The large number of women who attended in support of Anderson and Heap and were by implication endorsing resistance to the male-dominated legal system constituted a powerful presence in the courtroom. This galled Quinn, who responded by attempting to reimpose his authority through the invocation of rape. Quinn lashed out in what came to be a sexual war, where his enemies and clients were one and the same.

In the hearing, Quinn asserted that the judge should distinguish between two types of “filth.” There was, he argued, “the strong hard filth of a man like Joyce” compared to the filth produced by “a soft flabby man like Wilde.” The filth of Joyce, he continued, was a deterrent to sexual indulgence while Wilde’s unquestionably led to “corruption.” To demonstrate his thesis, Quinn asserted: “If a young man is in love with a woman and his mother should write to him, ‘My boy, the woman you are infatuated with is not real … she sweats, she stinks, she is flatulent. Her flesh is discolored, her breath is bad. She makes ugly noises when she eats and discharges other natural functions,’ [this] would not send the aforesaid beloved son into the arms of that fairy but would be more likely to turn him from her in disgust.”⁸⁰ These remarks, Quinn later wrote Pound, were directly addressed to Anderson, Heap, and their supporters. If they came to court for the truth, he wrote, he would “give it to them unvarnished.”⁸¹ Quinn also argued that Ulysses could not corrupt anyone who could not understand the admittedly difficult novel. Those who could understand it (“Heaps and Andersons”) could do so only because they were already corrupted. The judge disagreed: no one could misunderstand “the episode where the man went off in his pants.” The Little Review went to trial.⁸²

According to Richard Ellman, this was not necessarily seen by Joyce, who “had a penchant for litigation,” as bad news, and he was dreaming of “a trial of Ulysses as successful as that of Madame Bovary.”⁸³ In a letter to Joyce, Pound described Anderson and Heap as incompetents who “messed and muddled, never to their own detriment.”⁸⁴ Joyce was unmoved by Pound’s and Quinn’s attempts to discredit the two women, and Anderson and Heap were determined to proceed regardless of the consequences. Despite the obscenity charge, they published the next installment of Ulysses. In the December 1920 number, they launched an attack against the notion that art could be judged in a courtroom. “The heavy farce and sad futility of trying a creative work in a court of law appalls me,” wrote Heap in her article, “Art and the Law.” She subtly introduced the duplicity of laws protecting sexual “innocence” written by less than pure politicians. “The society for which Mr. Sumner is agent, I am told, was founded to protect the public from corruption. When asked ‘What public?’ its defenders spring to the rock on which America was founded—the cream puff of sentimentality—and answer chivalrously, ‘Our young girls.’ So,” Heap continued, “the mind of the young girl rules this country? In it rests the safety, progress and luster of a nation. One might have guessed it … but—why is she given such representatives? I recall a photograph of the United States Senators, a galaxy of noble manhood that could only have been assembled from far-flung country stores where it had spat and gossiped and stolen prunes.” The Ulysses case was “truly ironical,” Heap pointed out, because the Little Review was being prosecuted “for printing the thoughts in a young girl’s mind.”⁸⁵ Heap put her finger on the hypocrisy of censorship based on the pretense of protecting “young girls.” Female sexuality, whether in twentieth-century America or the character of Gerty MacDowell, was the crux of male anxiety and the resulting sentimental cant surrounding the purity of women.

The trial was held in February 1921 in a Special Sessions court before three judges, two of whom, according to Anderson, slept through the entire proceedings. The initial proceedings demonstrated both the attempt to silence “New Women” and the refusal to acknowledge the right of women to be exposed to any material deemed sexual. Quinn did not permit Anderson or Heap to testify, a strategy Anderson saw as an attempt to render them inconspicuous, meek, and silent. When the Assistant District Attorney announced that he would read the offending passage aloud, one of the judges objected. He thought the passage should not be read in the presence of a young woman such as Anderson. Anderson later wrote that the judge regarded her with “a protective paternity” and “refused to allow the obscenity to be read in [her] hearing.” When Quinn informed him she was the publisher, the judge responded he was sure she “did not know the significance of what she was publishing.”⁸⁶ The offending passage was read, and the court recessed for a week to enable the judges to read the entire chapter.

When the trial resumed Quinn repeated his argument that the lasciviousness of Ulysses was a deterrent to filth rather than a corrupting influence. He argued that only those familiar with the city of Dublin could understand what was really happening in the book and that the erratic punctuation—which he attributed to Joyce’s poor eyesight—made it incomprehensible to everyone else. Finally, Quinn argued that he did not understand Ulysses and offered the opinion that “Joyce has carried his method too far in this experiment.” “Yes,” responded one judge, “it sounds like the ravings of a disordered mind. I can’t see why anyone would want to publish it.” After this exchange, Anderson began to stand up and respond to the judge’s statement. She was stopped, however, by Heap pounding her in the ribs with the admonition, “don’t try and talk; don’t put yourself in their hands.”⁸⁷

The two women were found guilty of obscenity, fined one hundred dollars, forced to promise not to publish any further chapters, and fingerprinted. Anderson did contemplate refusing to have her fine paid for her by a sympathetic benefactor, writing, “If I had refused to permit the payment of the fine I might have circulated some intelligent propaganda about Ulysses from a jail cell.”⁸⁸ Anderson and Heap had faced a hostile prosecution, unsympathetic judges, and a defense attorney who thought they were guilty. It went against Anderson’s grain, but she agreed with Heap not to speak. In “Ulysses in Court”—an article written during the trial—Anderson stated, “I am determined, during this unnecessary hour in court, to adopt the philosophy of self-preservation. I will protect my sensibilities and my brain cells by being unhearing and untalkative.”⁸⁹ Both women were deliberately disengaging themselves from this “heavy farce,” as Heap phrased it.⁹⁰ This withdrawal was not acquiescence to the judicial system or John Quinn. They were symbolically repatriating themselves (as they would later physically do by moving to Paris later in the decade) from the rules of a society unable to come to terms with the uncomfortable questions raised by modernism in both art and life.

Contemporary journalists were not the only ones to ridicule Anderson and Heap. As late as the 1990s, scholars continued to paint the two women as incompetent. It is revealing that though portions of Quinn’s correspondence to Pound have been published, the most violent woman-hating passages were deleted, and in biographies of the principals, we are left with the image of a bad-tempered but perhaps unfairly overburdened attorney attempting to do right by his well-meaning but misguided clients. One biography of Pound portrays Quinn as the heroic rescuer of Anderson and Heap, who are described as “two damsels in distress.”⁹¹ Timothy Materer, the editor of the published Pound/Quinn correspondence, has argued that Anderson and Heap were “impractical” and ungrateful for Quinn’s efforts to rescue them.⁹² It is striking that after Anderson and Heap’s misadventure with Ulysses, Sylvia Beach, another American lesbian, successfully found a publisher for the book in France. Announcing this to Little Review readers the year after their trial, Heap simply commented, “We limp from the field.”⁹³ The Joyce trial is of interest in the larger story of Anderson and Heap not only because of their central roles in an important historical event in literary history but also because Joyce was well read in Western esoteric works. References to occult schools of thought make appearances in Ulysses, linking Anderson and Heap’s Joycean sojourn to their mystical Gurdjieffian journey. In the first work that unveiled Joyce’s schemata, Stuart Gilbert argues that “it is impossible to grasp the meaning of Ulysses, its symbolism and the significance of its leitmotifs without an understanding of the esoteric theories which underlie the work.”⁹⁴ Among the schools of thought, concepts, and people that grace Ulysses, Buddhism, Rosicrucianism, medieval mystics, Karma, metempsychosis, Theosophy, Kabbalah, alchemy, Gnosticism, Pythagoreanism, Hermes Trismegistus, and the Seal of Solomon have been identified by Gilbert and scholars who have followed. In Occult Joyce: The Hidden Ulysses Enrico Terrinoni argues that the “Nausicaa” chapter itself is an example of an occult text. The chapter, he claims, is full of everything, including “magic divination, astrology, metempsychosis, vampires, and finally satanic allusions.”⁹⁵

Perhaps most central to Joyce’s esoteric slant was Theosophy. Many scholars argue his references to actual individuals known as “the Dublin Theosophists”—W. B. Yeats, A. E. (George Russell), and John Eglinton—in Ulysses were sarcastic exercises in caricature. Phrases such as “Yogibogeybox,” “cross-legged under an umbrel umbershoot,” “Aztec logos,” and “pineal glands aglow” in the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter seem to ridicule the Theosophists and their beliefs. Nevertheless, as Bonnie Kime Scott has pointed out, “Both Joyce and Joyce scholars have given more attention to his differences with the Dublin Theosophists than to his considerable debts. Despite several serious objections and a great deal of camouflage, Joyce took the Dublin Theosophists quite seriously.” Kime-Scott notes that Joyce was “eager to find out what they could contribute to his art and literary career.” The most notable Dublin Theosophist was, of course, Yeats. The prickly relationship between the two Irish bards has been well documented. While Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann does not accept Joyce as an esoteric author, he writes that Joyce “continued to mull over such themes as historical periodicity, the soul’s urge to repeat its pattern in a new body, and the reducibility of existence to certain unchanging laws.” Joyce also accepted Yeats’s and Pound’s view of artists, particularly poets as the “spiritual elite.”⁹⁶

Joyce’s brother Stanislaus believed that Joyce saw Theosophy as an “interim religion.” Joyce’s library included Buddhist Catechism by Henry Olcott (Madame Blavatsky’s lieutenant) and Walter Adams’s The House of Hidden Places: A Clue to the Creed of Early Egypt. In Ulysses, Joyce references Joachim of Flora, a twelfth-century Abbott, and the seventeenth-century German mystic Jacob Boehme. One of Boehme’s books was entitled The Signature of All Things, which Joyce quotes in his first chapter in Ulysses, the very sentence that had so enchanted Anderson. Boehme used the correspondences of Hermes as a literary device, a method that also dominates Ulysses. Most of Joyce’s references to the occult and esoteric were cryptic but frequent enough to prompt speculation by scholars about his interest, particularly his abundant references to Hermes and the Emerald Tablet, prompting one critic to argue that Joyce’s thoughts “are Hermetic.”⁹⁷ Central to Hermeticism is the relationship between the microcosm and macrocosm, esoteric correspondences between human and divine reflected in the famous saying of Hermes in the Emerald Tablet, often repeated by George Gurdjieff: “As above, so below.” Anderson herself later wrote, “I think that I really thought of Gurdjieff, at first, as a sort of Hermes teaching his son Tat. I felt that the essence of the Emerald Tablet itself might be made understandable to us through Gurdjieff’s method of teaching.”⁹⁸

The thoughts of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus explicitly underscore the fundamental axiom of Hermeticism—as above, so below—all things are connected one to another by mutual correspondences, in a chain that extends from the highest to the lowest. The “1,1, and 1.1” Stephen refers to are, according to Ralph Jenkins, Joyce’s use of Theosophical forms of the body—“the mind body, the astral body and the physical body.”⁹⁹ Gurdjieff would argue that these bodies are represented by the “fakir,” the “monk,” and the “yogi.” The Gurdjieffian goal was a man who had synthesized all these aspects into “The Fourth Way” School. One achieves ascension to the Fourth Way by, among other things, “self-remembering,” an active attempt to note every thought and action analogous to Joyce’s stream of consciousness technique. The purging of negative traits through self-remembering and other types of disciplines led to the shedding of one’s false personality, which in turn would lead to the ultimate goal of the communion of one’s essence with the “absolute” or highest power in the universe.

Like Joyce, Anderson and Heap were asking the most basic questions—the nature of the universe, the meaning of life, the truth about human beings. Like Stephen Daedalus, they were intellectual dissenters on a sacred mission. As Robert Crunden has written of Anderson and Heap, “The history of Stephen Daedalus proved important to them less for its contribution to literature than for its contribution to their acceptance of mystical religion. Joyce never intended any such thing, but then the history of modernism, like history in general, was full of unintended consequences.”¹⁰⁰