Epilogue

Post–Little Review Years

In her remaining forty-four years Anderson wrote three autobiographies, a Little Review anthology, and an unpublished novel about a lesbian love affair.¹ Though she had no career or steady income for the rest of her life, she traveled widely, lived in impressive dwellings, and concerned herself with her continuing quest for self-understanding.

Both Anderson and Heap combined trips back to New York with long-term residences in Paris during the thirties. Leblanc had been invited to do a tour in America, and Anderson was to act as her accompanist. Leblanc’s career was in decline, however, and the promised concert dates were withdrawn. They held small concerts at the Theatre Club off Washington Square Park with their friend Louise Davidson, a theater director, as their manager before giving up and sailing back to France. The two women were able to survive initially because Leblanc was from a wealthy family that parsimoniously doled out funds and living spaces in their chateaux. Anderson recalled the family in detail with a combination of humor and dread. At first they stayed at the family’s eleventh-century chateau in Normandy; however, a series of family arguments, reconciliations, and upset plans shifted them to other chateaux, hotel apartments in Paris, and even—to Anderson’s delight—an abandoned lighthouse.² Each woman earned some income by writing her autobiography: Anderson’s My Thirty Years’ War and Leblanc’s Souvenirs: My Years With Maeterlinck.³ During the thirties Anderson and Heap formed a small Gurdjieff study group in Paris with LeBlanc, Solita Solana, Katherine Hulme, and Louise Davidson. They met with Gurdjieff himself, either in his apartment or a café he preferred. Heap emerged as one of his more adept students and in 1935 was told by Gurdjieff to go to London and form a group there.

In 1939 Leblanc was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in her arm. Her illness coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War, and the two women, along with Leblanc’s faithful companion Monique Serrure, attempted to escape the predicted bombing of Paris by traveling to the neutral country of Spain. Losing their passports, all three returned to France and settled in the small town of Le Cannet, two miles north of Cannes, where a three-room house called Chalet Rose became their new home. After an agonizingly long period of pain Leblanc died in the house in October 1941. Florence Reynolds, who had moved to Tarrytown, New York, to teach in Andrebrook, a private girl’s school, communicated with Heap about Anderson’s travails in wartime Europe. She told Heap she heard about Anderson via Solano and was concerned. On November 9, 1941, she wrote, “Janie, my Dear: … I feel so strange about Margaret. As long as Georgette was alive I could visualize their life—after all, taking care of someone who is ill follows a pattern known to almost everyone, but now it is as though she is in a vacuum and I have lost her completely. What is she doing? Is she trying to get here and what does that entail? Is she hungry, is she cold? Do you know what I mean?”⁴ Anderson was devastated by Leblanc’s death, and eight months later, while the war raged on, she returned with Monique to America. The two women were broke, and their passage on the U. S. S. Drottningholm was paid by the former Little Review contributor Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was unassuming in response to Solano’s anxiety and gratitude for his help with Anderson’s escape. He told her, “Don’t ever worry because as long as any of us have money we all have money.”⁵

Meanwhile Heap, now an expatriate in London, had met a new companion, Elspeth Champcommunal, a former editor of British Vogue. Within a few years Heap found herself trying to run her groups under the shadow of the Battle of Britain. In the spring of 1938 she wrote to Reynolds, “Everyday I learn my gas attack lesson, printed in the paper and how to dig a trench in your garden, and then I laugh because we have no garden.”⁶ Heap was extremely philosophical concerning her situation: “There is no place to go if one’s time is up, so why worry and spoil in the meantime.”⁷ More seriously, however, she wrote to Reynolds, “I feel the way you do about the Germans never before have I had this hate that wearing down process that they use that is just too disgusting.”⁸ She described one evening: “Elspeth knitting and I reading out loud, when heard a noise above the house, stood right up, and said ‘Well, I ask you!’ E. looked at me in surprise and said ‘What?’ then a rocking crash.”⁹ In response to Reynolds’ repeated entreaties for Heap to come home she responded good humoredly, “Sorry I can’t come home now, must wait for the invasion.”¹⁰ Later she wrote, “There is a crater in our street one block down that fills the street from curb to curb. It is impossible to imagine anything about it from photographs or descriptions. It is as if something came out of hell and blasted and blighted.”¹¹ Shortly after that Champcommunal and Heap left London for the Gotten Farm Manor in the town of Chale on the Isle of Wight. However, the war still was not far from their day-to-day lives. In October 1940 Heap wrote Reynolds from the Manor, “I saw an air battle, 22 planes taking part. They passed over as I was going to the village. I waited under a wild crab apple tree in a hedge. They were making for a port. You could soon hear them drop down, anti-air guns roaring and then the fighter driving them back.”¹²

After the war Heap continued her Gurdjieff teachings in London and opened a shop called The Rocking Horse that sold toys salvaged from Victorian houses. Working to repair these toys also instructed her students in a sort of mindful concentration necessary for their studies. Although she declared she had turned her back on the arts, she used plays, opera, and the reenactment of fairy tales complete with elaborate set designs. She also mounted “festivals” that coincided with the holidays of the year, complemented with exotic food and spices seemingly impossible to find during a time of post-wartime rations. Her student Nesta Brooking recalled, “Guitar playing, screen printing, and carpentry all added to the stretch for a purpose and were tested and explored in the larger spheres of festivals.”¹³ Her students remembered Heap as formidable but compassionate. Brooking wrote, “One could sense Jane’s sincerity of purpose—though the balance between her seeming harshness and unexpected kindness were more understood in retrospect!”¹⁴ Heap’s most famous student was Peter Brook, the British playwright, theatre, and film director, best known for Mahabharata, a nine-hour play based on a Hindu myth. In his autobiography Brook recalled meeting Heap for the first time in her Hamilton Terrace house in St. John Wood. “The teacher was Jane Heap. She was American, short, dressed like a man, with closely cropped gray hair … She was gentle, ferocious, and compassionate. Her idiom was a rich slangy vernacular from the Midwest, bringing an earthly common sense to everything she proposed; when need be she could give her listener a sudden shock, like the grand slam of the bat on a ping pong ball when it is close to the net. What is my biggest obstacle to real understanding? I asked Jane after a few weeks. The reply was instantaneous: Peter.”¹⁵

On the deck of the USS Drottningholm, Anderson met the woman who would become her companion for the next thirteen years. In her third and final autobiography, The Strange Necessity, Anderson describes seeing Dorothy “Duffy” Caruso, the widow of Enrico Caruso, for the first time. “The second day at sea I was sitting on the promenade deck, trying to forget where I was and where I was going, seeing only the grave I was leaving behind. The sun was bright and at the open end of the promenade I saw a tall woman in blue—that summer blue of Cannes, always worn with a touch of red—leave her chair and walk across the deck. Her hair was gold, her eyes were bluer than her dress … eyes of a visionary or a mystic, I thought.”¹⁶ The two women struck up a conversation about poetry and Gurdjieff and were companions from that point on. Upon arriving in New Jersey, Anderson and Caruso were greeted at the dock by Flanner, who now had a new partner, Natalia Murray, and Solano, who also had a new love, Elizabeth Jenks Clark. When they saw Anderson come down the plank with Caruso, they were greatly relieved. Flanner commented, “There have never been such many happy endings since Gilbert and Sullivan!”¹⁷

Anderson and Caruso moved into a brownstone on the Upper East Side. On February 26, 1942, they invited Reynolds to a dinner that turned out to be a surprise birthday party for her. She wrote to Heap, “Cakes with candles and champagne, chicken and dumplings, can you imagine that? Margaret, Solita and Lynn [Elizabeth Clark] and Dorothy’s young daughter Jackie. All so pleasant and friendly. I felt so cherished and protected, so in another world. Margaret looked lovely.”¹⁸ Two years later Reynolds moved to Hollywood, California, to live with her sister Hattie; her letters indicate she did so due to illness. Her last extant letter to Heap is from March 1945, and she died in December 1949. Her sister wrote a note in her address book: “Ho [her nickname for Florence] died in St. Vincent Hospital Friday at 9:55 am Dec. 2, 1949. Starvation due to cancer.”¹⁹

This circle of women had lives that had been intertwined with one another beyond the conventional bonds of friendship. Heap and Reynolds’s letters from 1908 to 1909 were those of two pining lovers. Yet Reynolds accepted Anderson when she became involved with Heap and moved to New York. Heap then changed the salutations of her letters from “Dear Tiny Heart” to “Mother.” “Mother” was the moniker Anderson also used in her letters to Reynolds. Reynolds continuously supported the Little Review over the years, from writing checks to carrying copies of the journal to Chicago bookstores. Her later letters use Gurdjieffian vocabulary, demonstrating that she accepted and assimilated Heap’s conversion. Before she died, she set up a trust fund for Heap. In many ways the diminutive Reynolds lived for the larger-than-life Heap, following, accepting, and encouraging each new stage in her life. As a result, she was embraced by the larger group of Leblanc, Solano, Flanner, and Caruso.

In the fifties Anderson and Caruso moved to Riderwood, Maryland, where Caruso had a home. Now close to Washington, D. C., Anderson wrote frequently to Ezra Pound, who was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital. She clearly attempted to cheer him up, sending him work to translate, engaging in literary gossip, and promising visits, although it is not clear she ever followed through.²⁰ During this period Anderson finished her second autobiography, The Fiery Fountains, and edited The Little Review Anthology, a collection of the best of the journal. There were trips to France and continued meetings with the group of women who conducted a Gurdjieff study group for several years in Paris. As Heap drew deeper into teaching, she would not answer letters from friends; instead, Elspeth Champcommunal occasionally corresponded and wrote of their daily lives. In 1960 Anderson, reflecting about their relationship, wrote to Solano that she had written Heap “about certain things of the past which I had never understood until now, and for which I had remorse. Thought of course she would answer such a letter, but no, not a word.”²¹

In Maryland, Anderson and Caruso led fairly conventional lives. Anderson described herself as a happy recluse, busy with her writing and enjoying the cocktail hour before her favorite television shows came on.²² This domestic idyll was shattered, however, when Caruso also fell ill with the same cancer as Leblanc and died the week before Christmas in 1955. In certain ways Caruso’s death was more difficult for Anderson because, unlike Leblanc, Duffy was still a relatively young woman, and her death was sudden and unexpected. Shortly after her death, Anderson wrote Janet Flanner, “I am all right; but I hear myself walking through the house crying out loud like an animal, and I can’t seem to stop—don’t even want to stop, it’s the only relief.”²³ That Christmas Solano and her lover Elizabeth Clark traveled to Maryland and took Anderson to Clark’s family estate in Morristown, New Jersey. The following April the three left together for France, and Anderson reestablished herself with Monique Serrure in the Chalet Rose where Leblanc had died. Caruso’s will left enough money to Anderson that she was not pressed by financial insecurity. However, another blow was on the way: Monique died at age ninety-two in June 1961. Shortly afterward Anderson wrote to Solano, “4 o’clock, and I can use my typewriter because there’s no one here to be disturbed. Oh, I didn’t know it would be so terrible. Georgette died, but there was still Monique and together we could believe that she was still living. Duffy died, and there was still Monique … for the first time in my life I don’t know what to do or how to endure what I’m feeling.”²⁴

In her last autobiography, Anderson described taking a walk every evening, writing that she was joined by her “ghost companions” with whom she conversed.²⁵ Not long after these losses came perhaps the most tremendous blow: she received word from Champcommunal in June 1964 that Heap had died due to complications from diabetes. In spite of their distance, Anderson was deeply shaken. She wrote to Allen Tanner, “Oh, oh a world without ‘jh.’ ”²⁶ The years had done much to soften antagonisms of the past on other fronts, too. After hearing of Heap’s death Djuna Barnes, Anderson’s rival for Heap, wrote to Anderson, “Death bringing everything full circle, she’s at home again; that house being yours, I send my sympathy.”²⁷

As the decade of the sixties progressed, Anderson finished her third autobiography, The Strange Necessity, in which her losses were poignantly described. Under the heading “My Atomic Age” Anderson wrote, “As after a final holocaust, nearly everyone who has made life wonderful for me has died. All my lovely companions nearly all—are faded and gone.”²⁸ The book is also informative for revealing how Anderson, the radical bohemian of the twenties, was less than excited by the cultural revolution of the sixties. “I am tired,” she wrote, “of ‘new writing’ and of ‘powerful new novelists,’ I am tired of today’s new people; I’m tired of their lives, of their tastes, their reading, their language, their singing, their sedatives and their psychiatrists, their houses, their furniture, and their faces … What am I most tired of? Today’s arid poets. What do I most loathe? Today’s rancid sex books.”²⁹ In an article a few years later Anderson wrote, “There exists a present-day phenomenon which must never be talked about. It is called Hippie … meaning noise for music, beards for beauty, and nervous breakdowns for civilized humanity … under such victimization one has to use a tight control.”³⁰ The former radical anarchist was clearly not in step with the counterculture created by the new generation of bohemians.

In 1969 all three Anderson autobiographies were republished by Horizon Press. They garnered a review on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review written by Alfred Kazin. His account swayed back and forth between admiring Anderson’s entire career and belittling her ability as a writer. “Miss Anderson,” Kazin proclaimed “is a talker, not a writer.” Noting her enthusiasm he continued, “in her seventies, she talks like the girls in my high school class.” He concluded by stating she was a certain type—“a Midwestern feminist.”³¹ Anderson wrote Kazin a letter stating she also did not think of herself as a writer, “but lately I was beginning to think I was becoming one and now you are stripping me of that excitement.” She then quoted Janet Flanner’s estimation of The Fiery Fountains: “Her talent as a writer, her sure hasty touch in catching the right word and image, give her book a special rich quality.” Nevertheless, she did not seem bitter, attaching a handwritten note at the end of the letter: “For all the most many thanks; and all the best wishes.”³² In addition to the republishing of her autobiographies, Anderson gained some financial security in her later years through the sale of Heap’s Little Review papers to the University of Wisconsin for seventy thousand dollars, which she split with Champcommunal. She gave away fifteen thousand to her sisters, nephews, and “two or three other hard up people.”³³

Although happy about the publication of her autobiographies, Anderson was frustrated and disappointed over her inability to get her autobiographical lesbian novel Forbidden Fires published. She originally began it as an effort to stop grieving over Caruso. The novel was based on Anderson’s obsession with the aunt of a former flame, Gladys Tilden—the stage actress Josephine Plows-Day, also known as Aunt “Tippy.” Plows-Day had performed in the company of Richard Mansfield in works by Shakespeare, Moliere, and Ibsen, whose words she invoked in conversation, obviously adding to Anderson’s attraction. They met briefly in New York and Anderson was immediately smitten. Describing Plows-Day (“Audrey Leigh” in Forbidden Fires), Anderson’s character “Margaret” observes, “She walked slowly towards us. There seemed to be a silence around her, as there would be for a heroine making her first entrance in a stage play … The long silver chain she wore swung to the rhythm of her walk with a sound of soft chimes. She seemed so incredibly lovely to me that when she gave me her hand, looking directly into my eyes and saying ‘Ah,’ I felt a little movement of pain in my heart.”³⁴

Also in the novel was Heap as Kaye, Leblanc as Claire, and Champcommunal as Eleanor. In Forbidden Fires “Margaret” faces her awakening with the bald statement, “I began by quickly accepting the fact that what had happened to me wasn’t the kind of thing that happened to other people. Boys fell in love with girls, girls fell in love with boys, but for some reason I didn’t fall in love with boys.”³⁵ As Margaret declares her love, Audrey Leigh shrinks away in self-consciousness that “people have been talking.” Anderson’s character responds, “I’ve never had that absurd Well of Loneliness feeling of isolation and guilt—it seems tragic and unnecessary to me.”³⁶ After debating the religious and philosophical implications of lesbianism in society, Audrey Leigh succumbs. At the conclusion of the book, Margaret uses Gurdjieffian terminology. “I shan’t say it lasted forever. It had a deeper time, a time in height and depth. It gave us unbearable partings, unbelievable meetings, a full lifespan. It had its ending, but it never came to an end.”³⁷

Anderson was stymied trying to find a publisher; she sent the manuscript to Ben Hecht, who also tried unsuccessfully. She sent her manuscript to Jeannette Foster, the author of Sex Variant Women in Literature, asking for any suggestion for publishers. Foster responded with praise for Forbidden Fires: “It is really a beautiful thing, not only in form, but in almost every word of its phrasing.”³⁸ After recounting her own disastrous experiences with publishers, Foster suggested the Daughters of Bilitis and The Mattachine Society organizations, both of which published magazines.³⁹ The book was finally published by a lesbian paperback press, Naiad Press, in 1992. Although the romanticism of it would not appeal to lesbians of the 1990s, it remains an important historical document, an example of mid-century lesbian fiction that did not end in suicide or madness.

By the late sixties a weak heart and worsening emphysema forced Anderson to move from her beloved Chalet Rose into the Hotel La Reine des Prés in October 1967. Self-conscious about her looks, she did not want to go out in public and received visits only from old friends such as Solano and Clark. “I am literally too ruined,” she wrote Solano, “especially in the face, all my medicines may be causing swelling of features.”⁴⁰ Solano, Clark, and Flanner repeatedly begged Anderson to move to Orgeval, where Flanner’s new lover Noel Murphy had a villa and where they all stayed. She refused, afraid of becoming a dependent with little autonomy; she felt she needed to keep her privacy and as much independence as she could. She kept up a busy correspondence with friends and her sisters, Lois and Jean, showing concern for others and a lack of self-pity for her own situation. She often recalled the early days of the Little Review, and in the year before her death even commented on a subject she remained silent about most of her life—her mother. To her sister Lois, Anderson wrote:

In our young days Jean was no good to anybody and neither was I. I did nothing except to be interested in the L.R and in writing books. But you were sweet to everyone—especially to Dad, and he knew that you were the one who loved him, and he loved you. I see it all so clearly now, but I never thought of it at all then. The things I DIDN’T do now seem like crimes to me. And to think how good you were to mother at the end—when I was too busy and still too alienated from her, to think of her at all. As Gurdjieff said, “Only he who loves his mother and father.” … oh dear, oh dear.⁴¹

Several months before her own death Anderson was “living a sort of wheel chair life, never leaving my room, trying not to leave my armchair.”⁴² By September 1973 she had been moved to the Anglo-American Hospital. Her emphysema was clearly killing her. She wrote to Solano, “Thursday morning there is no longer any doubt, everyone sees at last that I am seriously dying, as I have seriously been trying to tell them … I suppose this is my last letter.”⁴³ At the end of the letter was a handwritten note: “I love you so much. M.”⁴⁴ A month later, on the night she died, she wrote, “I must never spend annoyer [sic] like this one, I can’t breathe. The agony is so terrible I must write it.”⁴⁵

Solano was at her side and wrote to Anderson’s sister Jean, describing her death gasping for breath as “agonizingly painful.”⁴⁶ Ironically, the enthusiastic young woman who founded the Little Review, so often described and characterized as “breathless,” literally died from want of oxygen. According to Solano there was no religious service but instead “many flowers” and “several friends from London.”⁴⁷ Per her request, Anderson was buried in the same grave as Georgette and Monique in the Notre Dame des Anges Cemetery in Cannes. She was eighty-seven years old. One year later Flanner published a profile of Anderson in the New Yorker called “Life on a Cloud.”⁴⁸ She wrote, “The demise of Margaret Anderson in southern France in the autumn of 1973 removed the last standing figure from that small circle of amateur American publishers—oddly all female—whose avant-garde output a half a century ago unexpectedly became a new kind of important international literature.”⁴⁹

Whether or not these women acknowledged it, on a conscious level they lived in a manner that later generations of lesbians would recognize—they were choosing their family, and as such their sense of responsibility for one another extended beyond mere friendship over decades. This included being lovers—Reynolds with Heap, Heap with Anderson, Anderson with Leblanc and Solano, Solano with Flanner. Although they had their moments of pique and jealousy, the fact that they ultimately remained supportive of each other for years on end is a testament to their love for one another on many levels. Writing about women in Paris in the twenties, Bertha Harris takes this web of relationships to a new level, describing them as a dominion among themselves. “They were American and English and French, but mostly American, but with the father’s nationality in effect wiped out by the more profound nationality of their lesbianism.”⁵⁰ And their legacy was remembered by those who lived where they began: in 2006 Anderson and Heap were inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame.

It is curious that the entire fascinating story of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap has gone largely unrecorded. Apart from some articles on the Ulysses trial, little magazines, or references in published accounts of LGBTQ history, the story of Anderson and Heap has not previously been told in its entirety. Nineteenth-century-born midwestern mavericks, they grew up to be iconoclastic rebels, flaunting their lesbianism, advocating causes ranging from anarchy and antiwar activism to feminism and free love, their lives and work shattered cultural, social, and sexual norms. As their paths crisscrossed America and Europe, two World Wars, and an incredible parade of the most celebrated artists of their time, they managed to transform themselves and their little journal into a major force for shifting—and not always welcome—perspectives on modern literature and art. Their fascination with a mystical guru, charlatan or not, only underscores their profoundly deep search for meaning in a world that, more often than not, seemed squarely set against them.

Gurdjieff’s influence on the post-Little Review lives of Anderson and Heap has been explained away (when given any attention) as the result of the rigors of the Ulysses trial, the dissolution of their relationship, or a nervous breakdown by Anderson. However, since Gurdjieff-like influences can be seen prior to their actual knowledge of this mysterious figure, such explanations don’t hold up. An examination of the Little Review from the debut number onward foreshadows a variety of influences that point to the compelling prospect of a later life of spiritual transformation. Seen through their identities as modernists, the pull of Gurdjieff was part of a continuous journey rather than a bizarre detour explained only by official censorship, broken relationships, or mental collapses. We can clearly connect Gurdjieff’s psychology and cosmology in particular to the development of Anderson’s and Heap’s thoughts on modernism from the first issues of the Little Review until they ceased publication.

The end of their professional careers was a conscious decision in part because art and literature, modernist or not, failed to take them far enough on a journey that Anderson would describe as “transformative.”⁵¹ This was the view at the end of their careers; at the beginning we see a clear foreshadowing of a mystical incline that would lead them to Gurdjieff—he was in the right place in the right time. Without their prescient understanding of the important influence of modernism on both individual human beings and modern culture at large, it is unlikely that Gurdjieff would have been their next step.

Furthermore, we can see a form of spiritual pursuit even before their modernist journey and Little Review careers. Anderson’s description in her autobiographies of her life before Gurdjieff is replete with a religious vocabulary, and she believed that anyone with a basic foundation of spiritual interest should be open to Gurdjieff’s message. While she railed against traditional Protestantism by arguing with her Sunday school–teaching aunt, she also allowed for the metaphysical endorsement that she was “aloof from natural laws” and the belief that she was under some greater protection. The same held for Heap, who wrote to Reynolds in 1908 that “everything beautiful was God and all things not beautiful not God.”

The primary influences on both of them—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Walt Whitman, and Henri Bergson—appeared in the early years of the Little Review and were consistent with the strands of Gurdjieff’s philosophy that they later embraced. The influence of Christian, ancient Greek, and pagan themes in the literature, art, and poetry of contributors from 1914 to 1916 also point to Gurdjieffian themes. Anderson made it clear that these same giants of nineteenth-century thought served as the foundation for the “new” in twentieth-century criticism. They all criticized traditional Christianity and with it the social norms of their day. Nietzsche, Pater, Wilde, and Whitman all believed, and guided Anderson and Heap to accept as true, that art has no moral purpose—hence their combative heroic fight over Ulysses. The epiphanies of James Joyce were presaged by Bergson’s intuitive flashes, which Anderson championed as the basis for arguing that the critic was just as creative as the artist—a position also held by Pater, Wilde, and Nietzsche.

Even more sweeping, of course, was their radical agreement with these thinkers on the minefield of sexuality. They all decried false morality and supported the expression of sexuality within poetry, literature, and art. Whitman’s biographer, as we have seen, views Whitman’s “Cosmic Enthusiasm” as not only his expression in poetry but the basis for a new religion—or mysticism—that was particularly American. Anderson’s radicalism concerning the political repression of gay Americans was expressed in her 1915 editorial “Mrs. Ellis’s Failure,” in which she referenced Wilde and Edward Carpenter. This political assessment was extended the same year to Anderson’s laudatory editorials on Emma Goldman, whom she described as a prophet and “practical Nietzschean.” And Goldman, of course, shared Anderson’s, Whitman’s, and Wilde’s prophetic belief that homosexuality should not only be decriminalized but accepted.

By 1917, when Ezra Pound signed on as foreign editor, he was already under the sway of a wide range of esoteric practices. This included the Eastern traditions of the Chinese ideogram and Japanese Noh as well as Western traditions such as the Rosicrucians, Orphism, Pythagorean Mathematics, and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Pound was not a follower of Gurdjieff, but his critical analysis of the “modern” French poets such as Jules Laforgue and Jean de Bosschère, some of them self-described mystics (or described by others as clearly esoteric in their preoccupations), was among his best received work in the journal. Whether his poetry is described as metaphysical occultism or in the tradition of alchemy, Pound espoused the concept of the artist as master of the soul. In the tradition of Pater, Wilde, Nietzsche, and Gurdjieff, and in the thoughts expressed by Anderson herself, the artist or “magus” was premised on a superior caste of the enlightened living among commonplace souls.

Pound’s acerbic retorts to Little Review readers who seemed puzzled by his impenetrable choices as editor only underscored this belief. He saw modernism itself as a parallel to ancient secret societies of initiates who were a caste of priests that comprehended the esoteric and occult. W. B. Yeats went a step further than Pound in that he actually belonged to esoteric secret societies that practiced ceremonies and rituals. Part of Gurdjieff’s appeal to Anderson, Heap, and their contemporaries was rituals like the Toasts of the Idiots, group readings of his manuscript Beelzebub, and dance movements that initiated his students. Gurdjieff’s teachings and study groups such as the Rope also served as a secret society of sorts, drawing new members through attraction rather than promotion. And similar to Pound’s role as a magus and Yeats’ experience in various theosophical lodges, in Gurdjieff’s world one could step outside into “the unreal world” and carry on a life they understood as illusion. Reality would be found in the fourth dimension—both spiritually and artistically. The later years of the journal merged the thought of Gurdjieff with the avant-garde world of Cubism, surrealism and Machine Age aesthetics that reinforced the mechanical metaphors he claimed were key to comprehending both the human psyche and the fate of the cosmos.

While the obscenity trial of Ulysses may be the most historically significant episode of the Little Review, the most radical aspect of the journal’s history was the intersection of lesbian and feminist themes—often intertwined with mysticism as well. Whether it was Heap’s own contributions, Goldman’s “prophetic” anarchism, Amy Lowell’s and H. D’s imagist poems, the dark vision of Djuna Barnes, the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven’s creative madness, Mina Loy’s “Cosmic Neurosis,” May Sinclair’s ghost stories, Dorothy Richardson’s stream of consciousness, or Mary Butts’s women acting as the savior of supernatural England, politically radical, feminist, lesbian, and mystical women writers placed a significant imprint on the history of the Little Review.

Anderson started the Little Review to have a personal magazine that would inspire a conversation. She accomplished that and more. While she may not have been aware of the tumultuous road ahead, her partnership with Heap broke new ground in promoting a radical articulation of literature, art, criticism, and sexuality that was essential for the revolutionary emergence of modernism. Anderson and Heap’s investigation of the esoteric through a myriad of artistic influences paved the way for their turn to Gurdjieff. While illness and tragedies may have marred their later years, their allegiance to Gurdjieff remained steady. Although Anderson acknowledged that being a sojourner in Gurdjieff’s world did not provide protection from unhappiness and regret, she felt that her life was an exceptional blend of synchronicities that made it unique and blessed. In one of the last passages in her final autobiography she wrote:

I wondered why I have wanted to write the story of my life. I know it first hand, but so incompletely that it has little meaning. It has been so happy and so sad, as happy as flowers, as sad as moonlight—a happy life that loves the saddest music. It has been a striving and a failing; a development and a diminution; it has been proud and egotistic, modest; aggressive and unassuming; alert and unconscious; hopeful, and I fear, lost. It has overflowed with thankfulness and remorse—a life like any other, but which has seemed to me so different, so special, as to be unique. The blessings I wanted were love and music, books and great ideas and beauty of environment. I have had them all, and to a degree beyond my asking, even beyond my imagining.⁵²