8

The Heap Era

The Autumn 1921 number of the Little Review announced a new direction for the journal; the word “REORGANIZED” appeared in bold letters on the title page. The issue was described as a “protest” by international writers and artists against the magazine’s prosecution in the Ulysses case. Those protesting included Francis Picabia, Jean Cocteau, Constantin Brâncuşi, Paul Morand, and Ezra Pound. Pound was, in fact, named “Collaborator” on the title page, where Anderson was still listed as editor and Heap as associate editor. Once again, Pound was involved with the Little Review, but this time his influence was slight and his tenure brief. This was partly due to his reluctance to take on any new responsibilities to guarantee time for his own creative work. Nevertheless, Pound’s move to Paris in 1921, and his interest in promoting new artistic trends there, were responsible for his return to the Little Review. The Autumn 1921 issue was called the “Brâncuşi number” because it contained twenty reproductions of the Romanian sculptor’s abstract work, accompanied by an appreciative essay by Pound.

Pound’s desire that his Little Review burden be kept to a minimum was behind his suggestion that Francis Picabia serve in the official capacity as foreign editor. Anderson and Heap agreed, and Picabia’s name appeared on the masthead—though, interestingly enough, under Pound’s. No doubt Anderson felt some of the pressures on her lift after she and Heap compromised by issuing the Little Review as a quarterly. Although Anderson later complained that the Little Review never got anything from Picabia “except a Picabia number,” his official designation as foreign editor indicated that the Little Review was taking off in new directions. Picabia was making a name for himself in Paris as a Dadaist and later led the transition, along with other artists such as Duchamp, Marius de Zayas, and Max Ernst, from Dada to surrealism.

Despite the Little Review’s recent setbacks, the Autumn 1921 issue demonstrated that the scrappy little magazine was not running on its final fumes and it foreshadowed a torrent of the most genuinely avant-garde work done on the international stage. In the twenties Heap issued numbers that included every movement from Cubism, surrealism, Russian Constructivism, and De Stijl architecture to Bauhaus, modern theater design, and Machine Age aesthetics. They included innovators such as André Breton, André Masson, Matthew Josephson, Man Ray, Joseph Stella, Max Ernst, Hans Arp, Max Jacob, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, and Vladimir Tatlin, among many others. When Heap took over as the primary editor in the early twenties, reproductions and photographs of the works of these movements and artists often took up ten to twenty pages. Some issues were dedicated to a single artist, as with the Autumn 1921 Brâncuşi number; there were also numbers dedicated to Picabia (Spring 1922), Joseph Stella (Autumn 1922), and Juan Gris (Autumn and Winter 1924–25). These numbers included both multiple reproductions and detailed essays on the work of each artist. Other numbers were arranged around other themes: the Exiles number (Spring 1923), the French number (Autumn and Winter 1923–24), and the Surrealist number (Spring–Summer 1926). Heap seemed so pleased with the thematic tenor of upcoming issues she even named a number when it had no theme, the “Miscellany number” (Winter 1922).

By the early twenties, another new element can be found among Little Review contributors: people who were under the sway of Gurdjieff, aware of him, or who would soon also be avid followers, including Muriel Draper, Hart Crane, Gorhum Munson, and most notably Jean Toomer. In the Spring 1922 number, Heap published two poems by Muriel Draper, “Loose Leaf Products” and “America.” A friend of Gertrude Stein and Mable Dodge Luhan and, some say, the lover of Mina Loy, Draper was best known as a salon hostess in London and New York in the early twentieth century. She was also the author of Music at Midnight (1929), which described the salon she presided over in London between 1911 and 1915. However, it was New York in the twenties where she made her mark with her involvement in the Harlem Renaissance and her friendships with others in Anderson and Heap’s circle such as George Antheil, Lincoln Kirstein, and Jean Toomer.

Along with Kirstein and Munson, Draper also became a Gurdjieffian. Toomer belonged to the same Gurdjieff group in New York as Draper, and it has been speculated that Draper wrote Music at Midnight in a writing group to which she and Toomer belonged.¹ Toomer became a disciple shortly before the publication of his novel Cane after meeting Margaret Naumberg, the wife of Waldo Frank. Gorhum Munson and Hart Crane became interested in Gurdjieff at the same time as Anderson and Heap; all left anecdotes of how mesmerized they were by the dance performances in New York.

Toomer described the psychological turmoil he and his fellow bohemian artists suffered in this period, describing himself as “a bit of chaos dressed in formal attire.” He wrote, “Our psyches were split and chaotic. Our spirits were shrunken. Our souls were empty. To compensate for this emptiness, to avenge our tortured slow deaths, we had grown fangs and sacks of poison; and we used these fangs—race fangs, sex fangs, class fangs, national and religious fangs, all manner of personal fangs—with typical man-insanity against each other.”² He continues, “[Then] a pamphlet of the Gurdjieff Institute came into my hands … It was no wonder that I went heart and soul into the Gurdjieff work. Here was a work that gave man direction and helped him move on the way out of the chaos of modern civilization … Here was work whose scope was greater and more complete than anything I had dreamed of. Here, in fine, was truth.”³

Toomer made three contributions to the Little Review; the first was “Fern,” part of the novel Cane, published in full the following year. “Fern” was the story of a mysterious African American woman, a combination of a romantic encounter fused with the spiritual in a realistically written story. “Her eyes,” wrote Toomer, which were “unusually weird and open, held me. Held God … I felt strange, as I always do in Georgia, particularly at dusk. I felt that things unseen to men were tangibly immediate. It would not have surprised me had I had a vision.”⁴ His second short story, “Easter,” appeared in the Spring 1925 issue. “Easter,” as the title indicates, was also spiritual in nature; it is a somewhat disjointed account of hundreds of people awaiting the resurrection of Christ, leading one critic to conclude, “The crusade is spiritual and personal, but Toomer undercuts its religious significance by emphasizing church politics.”⁵ A particularly interesting piece by Toomer was “Oxen Cart and Warfare” in the Autumn–Winter 1924–25 number, which was a review of The White Oxen and other stories by Kenneth Burke. Burke and Toomer were friends, and for a while, Burke appeared to show interest in Gurdjieff, although he and Waldo Frank also began to mock it quietly. The review was negative and in its conclusion explicitly mentioned Burke’s reference to Gurdjieff. It was a distinctly Gurdjieffian review, taking Burke to task for failing to balance the faculties of intellect and emotion. Toomer criticized Burke for his interest in “technical mechanism” and ended his review with a long quote from the final pages of his story “Prince Llan,” which frequently mentions Gurdjieff as a spiritual advisor: “I bare my teeth at the yapping of the senses; I devote myself, rather, to seeing how, if a given thing is so, often things follow. Yet how strange that at this point, rising as I have above my own uneasiness, having found this rock on which to enforce myself, I should receive word from Gurdruff [sic].”⁶

Toomer went to Fontainebleau shortly after Anderson and Heap arrived. He established, with varying degrees of success, Gurdjieff groups in Harlem, Chicago, Wisconsin, California, and Pennsylvania. Later in life he converted to Quakerism. Nellie McKay, his biographer, argues that Toomer was put off by Gurdjieff’s treatment of disciples and his loose ethics with other people’s money.The Spring 1922 (Picabia) issue truly began the new era. Heap provided a forum for a series of Little Review numbers that published and commented on several avant-garde movements from the Cubists to Dada to surrealism. The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s groundbreaking study of the Cubists, Les Peintres Cubistes, was published first in French in 1913 but was translated in the Little Review through the three issues of 1922 (Spring, Autumn, and Winter) as “Aesthetic Meditations.” Apollinaire’s work was important on a variety of levels. Known better for his poetry than his criticism, Apollinaire in his “Meditations” included ruminations on a series of artists such as Picasso, Picabia, Braque, Gris, Metzinger, Duchamp, and Marie Laurencin, all individuals whose work was reproduced in the Little Review. He pinpointed the revolutionary departure of the Cubists, the variety of their work, and their connection to the esoteric, writing that the artist “quickly becomes accustomed to the bondage of the mysterious.”⁷

Apollinaire was explicitly promoting the metaphysical aspects of the new art form. He incorporated the recent work of mathematicians in his criticism, stating, “Today scholars no longer hold to the three dimensions of the euclidean geometry. The painters have been led quite naturally and, so to speak, by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with possible new measures of space … the fourth dimension.”⁸ Here he is referencing the work of Charles Hinton (see chapter 2), who invented the “tesseract” or four-dimensional cube as a method for visualizing a new concept of space. In Apollinaire’s view, there was a connection between such space and spiritual practice; he referred to artists as “adepts” because “great art” was “religious art.”⁹ While the history of the fourth dimension includes the work of mathematicians and physicists, it was also appropriated by spiritualists who saw it as proof of the astral plane where spirits reside. Books and articles on the fourth dimension were copious from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, initially due to the occult revival in the late Victorian era.

Heap’s own knowledge of the fourth dimension undoubtedly came from P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum, which acknowledged Hinton’s work and devoted several chapters to the concept. Apollinaire’s criticism was not only innovative; it was also prescient—in “Meditations,” he coined the term Orphism, based on Orpheus—the poet and musician in the religion of ancient Greece—as a type of Cubism that would serve as a link to a new radical abstract art in color and form. Marjorie Perloff has written that Apollinaire’s comments on the role of the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometry were responsible for “startling insights … insights no one else had fully formulated.”¹⁰ Heap was undoubtedly pleased that in his review of various artists, Apollinaire included laudatory remarks about the painter and printmaker Marie Laurencin and advocated for women artists. This section of his review commented on women artists in the sixteenth century, observing “Women bring to art a new vision full of the joy of the universe”; of Laurencin’s work, he wrote, “Her art dances like Salomé.”¹¹

Surrealism, whose name was first coined by Apollinaire in 1917, was, like Cubism, a revolutionary form of art with origins in the esoteric. Like so many other -isms published in the Little Review, surrealism had its roots in the Symbolist movement of the nineteenth century and even earlier occult origins. Celia Rabinovitch writes. “Surrealism consciously identified with the rejected lineage of occultism, transmuted throughout history from Graeco-Roman pagan origins to medieval alchemy and esotericism, expressed in the symbolist era of the late nineteenth century through the idea of correspondence between the natural and supernatural worlds.”¹² Conventional interpretations of the twentieth-century development of surrealism hold that it was derived from the dwindling embers of Dada. More nuanced explanations contend that it led straight to the expiration of Dada. An extremely fractious collection of artists and writers initially squared off in two groups, with Tzara, Picabia, Marcel Arland, and Robert and Sonia Delaunay in one corner and André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, and Paul Éluard in the other. Heap published all of them and others, taking Anderson’s approach in the early years of the Little Review of publishing artists warring against their enemies to an international level.

Despite initial sympathies with Dadaism, Breton led a rebellion from the then-current craze of the avant-garde to create the more bizarrely viewed sphere of surrealism. In Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields, 1920), Breton and Soupault introduced their approach of activating the unconscious by juxtaposing irrational images via automatic writing. By 1923 the break between rival camps was complete, with public fisticuffs and lawsuits. The following year Breton’s group emerged victorious in the battle to become the controlling authority of the movement with the publication of his “Surrealist Manifesto.” He threw down the gauntlet of ownership with explicit definitions of surrealism as delineated by his faction. His definition was “pure psychic automatism… . Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.” “With even more justification,” he writes, “we could have used SUPERNATURALISM, employed by Gerard de Nerval in the dedication of Filles de Feu. In fact, Nerval appears to have possessed to an admirable extent the spirit to which we refer.”¹³

Breton’s reference to Nerval’s Filles de Feu (Daughters of Fire) connects surrealism with a view of spirituality that directly leads us to Gurdjieff. Nerval was a nineteenth-century Romantic poet who influenced Rene Daumal, a surrealist poet and critic. In Paris in 1930 Daumal met Alexandre de Salzman and Jeanne de Salzman, two followers of Gurdjieff going back to his days in Russia. He soon became enamored of Gurdjieff’s philosophy, and his most famous work, Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, shows that influence. As a surrealist, Daumal was also inspired by Alfred Jarry, who published in the Little Review and was “excommunicated” from Breton’s group in 1929 for being insufficiently loyal.

Many self-proclaimed surrealists found themselves mesmerized by the movement’s provocative leaders only to become increasingly disenchanted with, if not downright disturbed by, what they saw as an emerging outlandishness that seemed to be expanding exponentially. Matthew Josephson, the founder of the little magazine Secession, was another participant/observer and another eventual surrealist outcast. In his memoir, Life Among the Surrealists, Josephson wrote of observing the development of both the Dadaists and surrealists; drew deft portraits of Tzara, Breton, and Aragón; and described the “decline and fall of Dada.” He argued that the tremendous rivalry among the leaders meant that Tzara, Breton, and Aragon were deeply suspicious of one another. “Tzara,” Josephson wrote, “wanted to keep Dada’ pure’; that is, purely destructive in its action, always ready for a big joke, and keeping its powder dry for new surprise attack.” Breton attacked Tzara in print, writing that he was “en route toward a new faith that would be derived from the romantic traditions and the ‘proto-Surrealists’ literature of France.” Josephson claimed that he tried to remain neutral in the contretemps, although “they kept changing sides so rapidly that one could not distinguish friend from foe.”¹⁴ His observations of the new group ventured from admiration to puzzlement and finally to disgust. Egoism, drug addiction, and what he considered the superfluities of automatic writing led to a highly critical appraisal in the Surrealism Issue (Spring–Summer 1926) of the Little Review. The issue contained work by Aragon, Soupault, and Eluard and reproductions of the work of Max Ernst, Robert Delaunay, Andre Masson, and Man Ray. Although they were not surrealists, the issue included reproductions of Braque, Modigliani, and Juan Gris. Aragon’s contribution, “A Man,” was a good example of the school—“IT IS BETTER TO KILL ONE’S FATHER THAN TO EAT NUTS or all other evidence: I think only by evidence. Having shaken my head with my two hands I read in the same apparatus before the fall of the dice clickety click. IT IS BETTER TO EAT ONE’S FATHER THAN TO KILL NUTS.”¹⁵

In the same issue, Heap published two searing criticisms of surrealism: G. Ribemont-Dessaignes’ s “In Praise of Violence” and Josephson’s “An Open Letter to My Friends.” G. Ribemont-Dessaignes exclaimed, “The strong hands which lead surrealism will, no doubt, withdraw, someday followed by loud laughter. But there may be then so many clouds of whipped cream that the whole world will have again put on its white cloak of the centuries of comfort, in the insipid asphyxia of prudish suns and moons in corsets.”¹⁶ In “An Open Letter to my Friends,” Josephson wrote, “Super-Realists. Chameleons, rattler! Even as one begins to scold you the colors change, and a new ‘movement’ is underway.” He continued, “As we billet this new artistic organism in the Little Review (alphabetized encyclopedia of the twentieth century) word comes that it is no longer among the living. After the exquisite uproar of Dada, which was incontestably a miraculous side-show for the world, this super-realism is the faint, ugly whine of a decrepit engine.”¹⁷ In his autobiography, Josephson recalled his Little Review salvo: “I attacked the Surrealists of Paris, some of whom were included in the French section of the same issue. Certainly, I had experienced a great change of heart toward the esthetic nihilists who had so long fascinated me … I now expressed a vehement dislike for their anti-social and irrational tendencies, as for their preoccupations with nightmare and daydreams: all the spiritist séances and pseudo-Freudian experiments.” As a result, “André Breton, the Surrealist ‘pope,’ turned livid on reading my offending remarks and pronounced me eternally damned, that is, excommunicated.”¹⁸

In keeping with Anderson’s approach to imagism and other movements, Heap published Dada and surrealism simultaneously with criticism of them both. Like her former coeditor, the more readers Heap irritated, the happier she seemed. Nevertheless, as Heap said in defending her right to publish what she pleased, “We have printed more isms than any other ten journals and have never caught one. Our pages are open to isms, ists, ites … we have been after the work, not the name … our drooling critics, in true American fashion, became sea-sick over a name … we are enjoying ourselves.”¹⁹

When she returned to New York from Paris in the summer of 1925, Heap was persuaded to mount a special exhibition of her lifelong passion—theater. Heap was aided in this by Tzara and Frederick Kiesler, the Austrian-American architect and theater designer who had also been influenced by the surrealists Heap’s plans, as she outlined them to Florence Reynolds, were modest: about twenty exhibits from five countries that would include models of theatrical sets, “drawings of sets, costumes, masks, photographs, etc.”²⁰

She worried about the price tag of transporting European work to New York. However, letters to Reynolds seemed confident that charging admission and selling the Little Review as a catalog would cover the expenses. She wrote, “I am only worrying about the things I bring with me.”²¹ Amazingly, however, the size of the exhibit swelled to over fifteen hundred contributions from fifteen countries, including Russia, France, Sweden, Poland, Holland, and Latvia. It was, according to the art historian Susan Noyes Platt, “the decade’s largest and most comprehensive exhibition of stage design based on mechanical principles.²² The size of the production prevented the Little Review Gallery Heap had established in 1925 from mounting Kiesler’s work, and the financial support for the show fell through. Nevertheless, an impressive network of groups such as the Theatre Guild, the Provincetown Playhouse the, Greenwich Village Theater, and the Neighborhood Playhouse contributed to present the exposition.

The entire issue of Winter 1926 was dedicated to the International Theatre Exposition in New York, with considerable emphasis on costuming and set design. The Theatre Exhibition was highly eclectic, including for instance the famed puppeteer and Provincetown Playhouse alum Remo Bufano, whose article “The Marionette in Theatre” lauded the superiority of puppets over human actors, and the costume designer Comte Etienne de Beaumont, who wrote of the 1924 “Soirées de Paris,” a five-week-long series of ballets, plays, and performances he commissioned with assistance from Cocteau, Picasso, and Tzara. Kiesler’s contribution, “Debacle of the Modern Theatre,” was a condemnation of the current state of affairs. “We have no contemporary theatre,” he declared. “No agitator’s theatre, no tribunal, no force which does not merely comment on life but shapes it.”²³

A. R. Orage, still working as Gurdjieff’s representative, contributed “A Theater for Us,” arguing, “Practically all modern plays consist of a triangle surrounded by three minor geometrical figures. Is it inconceivable what the next evolutionary step must be.”²⁴ He described a by-the-book suggestion of how a play’s construction should represent the Gurdjieffian concept of humans as “three centered beings,” termed “pivots” here—mind, emotion, and body, personified by various characters such as an animal, poet, child, savage, etc. This would serve to prove Gurdjieff’s contention that humans—or, more aptly phrased, “automatons”—would consistently demonstrate their lack of will as they are pulled apart by their three “appetites.” Such a production on the stage “would be highly entertaining, might be extremely instructive and ought to be truly illuminating.”²⁵ One may argue that Orage’s contribution was somewhat extraneous to theater criticism; regardless, the Theatre Issue was provocative and demonstrated an international and sophisticated approach to genuinely new philosophies of theater.

During the course of the mid- and late twenties, both Anderson and Heap traveled between Europe and America, but as time went on Anderson spent most of her time in France, living with Leblanc and writing her first autobiography, My Thirty Years’ War. Heap established the Little Review Gallery on Fifth Avenue and attempted to become an art dealer in America for European artists. Established in 1925, the Gallery only lasted for two years, but it exerted a major influence over the contents of the final Little Review numbers. Three of what would be only five remaining issues of the Little Review from 1925 to 1929 were intimately connected with what Heap was trying to do with her gallery. Hence, the final years of the Little Review remained concentrated on the visual arts.

A year before the International Theatre Exhibition issue, Heap announced plans for a “Machine Age Exposition” sponsored by the Little Review. “The Exposition,” stated Heap, “will show actual machines, parts, apparatuses, photographs, and drawings of machines, plants, constructions, etc., in juxtaposition with paintings, drawings, sculpture, constructions, and inventions by the most vital of the modern artists.”²⁶ She had already published Vladimir Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International” and Ferdinand Leger’s groundbreaking essay, “The Esthetics of the Machine Age,” in previous numbers as well as reproductions of Leger’s work, making it possible to see the evolution of the European artists she was introducing to Americans. By the time of the Machine Exposition Heap was well on her way to a complete assimilation of Gurdjieff’s views and this art would become central to her views of spirituality. Proclaiming “The Machine is the Religious Expression of Today,” the “Machine Age” issue was also significant because it introduced the work of Theo van Doesburg, a Dutch architect and writer whose De Stijl magazine was in the vanguard of European avant-garde architecture. Two years after announcing the exposition, Heap finally completed her massive project in 1927, and she published the sole Little Review issue of that year as a catalog for the exhibit. The issue reports that the production consisted of tractors from the International Harvester Co., a crankshaft from the Studebaker Co., a Carbon Resister Type Telemeter from the Department of Commerce, and an airplane model from Curtiss Aeroplane. Other items on display included ball bearings, oil burners, meat slicers, and various gears; architecture such as power plants, grain silos, and private Bauhaus homes; and visual works from such artists as Man Ray, Charles Demuth, Naum Gabo, and Jacques Lipchitz.

For Heap, the “Machine Age” in art corresponded to Gurdjieff’s mechanical metaphors. Gurdjieff’s machine analogies extended beyond the individual to a cosmology of the universe, complete with technical terms such as the “enneagram” and “hydrogen 24.” He maintained that it was as essential to understand the mechanical operation of the universe as it was to understand one’s soul. To Heap this not only made sense but it also had implications for the direction of art in the modern world. One year after her exposure to Gurdjieff, Heap wrote an essay in the Little Review that demonstrated how completely the marriage of the machine and art had captured Heap’s imagination. “There is,” wrote Heap, “a great new race of men in America; the Engineer. He has created a new mechanical world; he is segregated from men in other activities … it is inevitable and important to today’s civilization that he makes a union with the artist. The affiliation of the Artist and Engineer will benefit each other in his own domain; it will end the immense waste in each domain and will become a new creative force.²⁷ This creative force, as Heap put it, also had spiritual implications: “The legitimate pursuit of the Western World has been the acquisition of wealth, enjoyment of the senses, and commercial competition. America is supposed to have come nearer to an achievement of these aims than any of the other countries. It is beginning to be evident that no nation can progress beyond our present state unless subjected to the creative will.”²⁸

While some reviewers were open to considering these new trends, others such as the critic Henry McBride were more circumspect. With more than a bit of skepticism, McBride wrote, “Provocative Jane Heap, editress of the Little Review which troubles New York three or four times a year, that is to say whenever it appears, with the suspicion that it is twenty years behind the times instead of twenty years ahead, is at it again.” McBride reported that Heap “has arranged a strange art exhibition by the Russian Constructionists [sic] in her new gallery at 66 Fifth Avenue, and those who wish to accept or contend certain avowed aspirations of the time will be obliged to go there… . [They] play constructionally with the forms made familiar to many thousands of people in the industrial age… . [They] speak the language of the times … that is the language we would speak if we were ‘pure souls.’ ”²⁹

The Russian Constructivists were interested in minimizing the form of composition, favoring the construction by using modern materials. Originating out of the Russian Revolution, some viewed the movement as the labor of “cultural workers.” It also dealt with questions of time and space, attempting to delineate the vital forces of the contemporary world. The 1927 Machine Age Exposition was the next to last issue of the Little Review. No issue was published during 1928, and by the following year Heap now agreed with Anderson that it was time to bring the little journal to an end.The final issue of the Little Review was entitled “Confessions and Questions,” and the approach was to mail a questionnaire to every past contributor of the magazine reaching back to 1914. The form was also mailed to current friends who had never written for the magazine such as Leblanc, Janet Flanner, Solita Solano, Edith Sitwell, and Allan Tanner. The questions themselves reflected the changing preoccupations of both Heap and Anderson; Gurdjieff and the search for knowledge remarkably transcended concern or interest in the state of modern art. Among the ten questions asked were “What do you fear most from the future?,” “What has been the happiest moment of your life?,” “What do you consider your weakest characteristic?,” and “What is your world view? (Are you a reasonable being in a reasonable scheme?).” The self-analytical character of the questions reflects a waning interest in what had been the significant preoccupations of Anderson and Heap during the tenure of the Little Review. Of the ten questions, only one was about art (“What is your attitude about art today?”), and it was near the bottom of the list. This demonstrates the profound transformation of both editors from a life dedicated to art to one of introspection and personal evaluation. Many of the resulting answers likewise were sincere attempts to conform to the wishes of Heap and Anderson. Richard Aldington, Sherwood Anderson, Mary Butts, H. D., Jean Cocteau, Dorothy Richardson, Joseph Stella, and Mina Loy all dutifully numbered their answers and returned them to the Little Review. Emma Goldman did as well, but with the preface that she found the questions “terribly uninteresting.”³⁰

Goldman’s response is not surprising, given what must have been her severe disappointment with Anderson in particular. The anarchist certainly must have wondered what had happened to the young woman who wrote passionate calls for the revolution in the early days of the Little Review. Some former contributors, such as Ben Hecht, William Carlos Williams, and Maxwell Bodenheim, used the occasion to write essays recounting their careers with references to the magazine’s role. Others such as T. S. Eliot, Havelock Ellis, Wyndham Lewis, and Ford Madox Ford, wrote short notes of general condolence on the passing of the journal while avoiding the questions. Eliot recalled, “The Little Review was the only periodical in America which would accept my work, and indeed the only periodical there in which I cared to appear.”³¹ Natalie Barney and James Joyce responded by inviting Anderson and Heap to tea to discuss the questions. Joyce later canceled; whether the Barney invitation was accepted is not known. The most direct dismissal of the queries came from Djuna Barnes, who wrote back, “I am sorry, but the list of questions does not interest me to answer. Nor have I that respect for the public.”³² The most novel goodbye came from Gertrude Stein, who wrote a prose tribute to Heap entitled “An Appreciation of Jane”: “Jane was her name and Jane was her station and Jane her nation and Jane her situation … Thank you for thinking how do you do thank you Jane thank you too thank you for thinking thank you for thank you.”³³

The opening editorials written by Anderson and Heap explain their reasons for finally ending the fifteen-year career of the Little Review. Anderson’s essay clearly shows the profound shift in her interests. “Only artists had ideas … and of course only the very good ones. So, I made a magazine exclusively for the very good artists of the time. Nothing is more simple for me than to be the art arbiter of the world. I still feel the same way—with a rather important exception. As this number will show, even the artist doesn’t know what he is talking about. And I can no longer go on publishing a magazine in which no one really knows what he is talking about. It doesn’t interest me.³⁴

Directly appropriating Gurdjieffian language, Anderson wrote that she did not want to hear any more about “it’s the artist who transforms life.” “I know it,” she continued. “But I’m not particularly interested at the moment in transformation. I want a little illumination.”³⁵ Heap’s farewell essay repeated Anderson’s sentiments. It appears that this was one instance in which Anderson led Heap in the development of their ideas. Anderson had been ready to give up the Little Review several years before; she had doubted the efficacy of spending her life publishing an avant-garde magazine in the artistic climate of her milieu. She had other concerns, both personal and spiritual, that she wanted to nurture. Though Heap had suffered from the same frustrations as Anderson, she persisted in printing the journal. She thought it was possible to incorporate Gurdjieff’s ideas with the cutting edge of modern art, and she diligently tried with the Theater and Machine Expositions. Yet, eventually, Heap came to the same conclusions as Anderson: art was “interesting only as a pronounced symptom of an ailing and aimless society.”³⁶

In her editorial, poignantly entitled “Lost: A Renaissance,” Heap mused, “For years we offered the Little Review as a trial-track for racers. We hoped to find artists who could run with the great artists of the past or men who could make new records. But you can’t get race-horses from mules. I do not believe that the conditions of our life can produce men who can give us masterpieces. Masterpieces are not made from chaos. If there is a confusion of life there will be a confusion of art.” She continued, “Self-expression is not enough; experiment is not enough; the recording of special moments or cases is not enough. All the arts have broken faith or lost connection with their origin and function.” In her final paragraph, Heap starkly distanced herself from her past life: “Perhaps the situation is not so hopeless as I have described it. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Or perhaps it would be more than an intellectual adventure to give up our obsessions about art, hopelessness, and Little Reviews, and take on pursuits more becoming to human beings.”³⁷

Heap’s observation that art reflected the confused temper of the times was prescient. Published only months before the Wall Street crash, the final issue of the Little Review concluded as the rise of fascism and the advent of global war appeared on the horizon. While many Gurdjieffians scattered to the winds during the war, core groups remained in Paris and London. In the coming decades Anderson and Heap went their separate ways while still adhering to their belief in Gurdjieff until their deaths. But in 1929 their focus was on the future, not the past. The Little Review had come to an end.