1
The Buzz and the Sting
On the face of it, two women could not be more different. Margaret Anderson was a breathless, dreamy, pretty girl pulsating with big ideas, so optimistic that one of her friends, Janet Flanner, wrote in a New Yorker profile that hers was “A Life on a Cloud.”1 A supremely lively young woman whose rebellious nature flouted convention, she cavalierly decided to start a radical literary magazine with no doubts about immediate success (and the Little Review would exceed her expectations). Jane Heap was a stellar conversationalist who was also a pessimistic, most likely clinically depressed artist who despaired of making a place for herself in the world. One embodied an optimistic flurry of activity; the other was an introvert whose scornful wit rarely missed its mark. While Anderson overflowed with uninhibited romanticism, Heap resorted to a caustic realism. While Heap tolerated Anderson’s flights of fancy, Anderson reveled in Heap’s brilliant repartee. The two of them were, in Heap’s words, “the Buzz and the Sting.”2
Margaret Anderson had a wild dream of a journal that would awaken the nascent revolutionary impulses of American arts and letters. She soldiered on with uneven results for two years before meeting Heap in 1916. Anderson was often caught up in the moment, embracing any artist whose work she deemed new and fresh, with predictable results. Not everyone published in the Little Review from 1914 to 1916 was an avatar of modernism. It was Heap’s discerning eye that helped to harness Anderson’s energy into a more discriminating force when it came to editorial decisions. Their partnership catapulted the Little Review into its place as the premiere avant-garde journal of international modernism in the twentieth century.
When Margaret Anderson founded the Little Review in 1914, two years before she met Heap, she was confident she could build it into an international journal by sheer force of personality. Essential to her self-conception was a resistance to authority that, she claimed, transcended not only economic and cultural barriers but metaphysical ones as well. “I have,” she wrote, “always held myself quite definitely aloof from natural laws.”3 The repeated themes throughout her editorials and three autobiographies consist of the stupidity of the world and of reality itself, and Anderson’s endless battles to illuminate others. “It isn’t that I’m antagonistic,” she insists on the first page of her autobiography, “but life is antagonistic.” She continues,
You spend a few years fighting your family because they want you to be what you don’t want to be … You make friends who love your ideas and lose them because they don’t know what an idea is. You fight the mob because they want to make or break you. You fall in love and soon find out what that is—giving to one human being the opportunity to invade and misunderstand you that you wouldn’t dream of giving to the mob. So then you fight the individual. And finally, you find your stride … and from then on everything goes just as badly as ever. So then you fight the whole system again from the beginning.4
Anderson’s family “wanted [her] to be Aimee McPherson,” an evangelical leader of Pentecostal revivals.5 No doubt they saw similarities; both women were beautiful and theatrical. Anderson would later be described by several sources as an evangelist for objects of her enthusiasm, including Nietzsche, anarchism, James Joyce, and later, George I. Gurdjieff.
Our view into Anderson’s early life and Little Review career comes from the first of three autobiographies, My Thirty Years’ War: Beginnings and Battles to 1930. The book is replete with satirical accounts of wars Anderson fought with prima donnas of literature, conservative political forces, and a public oblivious of the necessity of a revolution in the arts. She introduces her book with a salvo. “My greatest enemy is reality. I have fought it successfully for thirty years. What have I been so unreal about? I have never been able to accept the two great laws of humanity— that you’re always being suppressed if you’re inspired and always being pushed into a corner if you’re exceptional. I won’t be cornered and I won’t stay suppressed. This book is a record of refusals.” 6 This bravado remains throughout the book and breaks through margins of the genre. Anderson’s departure from traditional women’s accounts, particularly her self-assurance, is clear to students of feminist biography. As Julia Willis writes, “For me, Anderson’s sense of self-worth is what is most astonishing and valuable about her autobiography. Call it egoism if you like, but I can think of few women with such unswerving faith in her own perceptions.”7 Edna Levy gave the ultimate compliment that would have pleased Anderson: “She reminds you of Mary Garden, Isadora Duncan, Lysistrata, Sappho, all packed into one dynamic personality.”8
Nevertheless, her breezy chatter in My Thirty Years War has opened her to charges of being a clueless dilettante who skirted on the reputations of the modernists she published. Her autobiography was an unusual foray into a field that is often marked by the “female virtues” of self-effacement and modesty. Anderson was often cryptic in her writing, using hyphens, asterisks, ellipses, and epigrams while jumping around in time and repeating long conversations. While on the one hand she seems brazenly honest, on the other there is an impersonal quality, leaving the reader unsure of the real Anderson. As most autobiographers do, she constructs a self, and in her case it was a self that believed wholeheartedly in her own judgement and destiny—she had little interest in those who saw her as an opinionated prima donna.
Anderson spoke of her new mission with a passion that swept others into her vision of the Little Review as a revolutionary magazine dedicated to the arts. Eunice Tietjens, a Chicago poet present when Anderson announced her new venture, vividly recalled the effect she had on the group. “She stood pouring out such a flood of high-hearted enthusiasm that we were all swept after her into some dream of a magazine where Art with a capital A and Beauty with a still bigger capital B were to reign supreme, where ‘Life itself’ was to blossom into some fantastic shape of incredible warmth and vitality.” Tietjens concluded that anyone “who could resist Margaret Anderson was granite and cold steel.”9
Anderson’s good looks were noted with frequency by her contemporaries. Her friend Janet Flanner commented that her physical beauty and seeming air of distraction disguised another reality. She wrote “Her profile was delicious, her hair blonde and wavy, her laughter a soprano ripple, her gait undulating beneath her snug tailleur. The truth was that within her lay the mixture and mystery of her real consistence, in no way like her exterior.” “Her visible beauty” wrote her friend of decades “enveloped a will of tempered steel.”10
Floyd Dell described Anderson as “austerely idealistic, matching her starry-eyed, unearthly young loveliness which was too saint like.”11 To Little Review contributor Ben Hecht her face was “Scandinavian,” and she was “as chic as any of the girls who model today for fashion magazines.”12 Anderson was aware of her beauty and pronounced with unashamed swagger, “It would be unbecoming of me not to know that I was extravagantly pretty in those days—extravagantly and disgustingly pretty.” Echoing Hecht, she said, “I looked like a composite of all the most offensive magazine covers.”13
Those who knew Anderson may have seen her as she saw herself—as totally unique—but in fact she was representative of the “New Woman” of her generation. Breaking free of the Victorian middle-class parlor, the New Woman was independent and increasingly college educated. Margaret Anderson was born on November 24, 1886, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the eldest of three girls. Her father, Arthur Aubrey Anderson, was raised by a single mother and rose in the ranks to become president of the midwestern Interurban Electric Lines. Her mother, Jessie Shortridge Anderson, was from a prominent Indiana family.14 As an adult, Margaret Anderson would record dramatically different feelings about each parent. The household as she described it in her first autobiography was a place of tension dominated by her mother’s mood swings. “Mother was a nervous woman … she liked being a victim of nerves because it made everything disagreeable, and she was one of those people who get infinite pleasure out of making things disagreeable.” In Thirty Years,’ Anderson portrayed her father as a gentle, submissive man trying to conciliate his demanding, self-centered wife. Anderson’s critical view of her mother as someone who forced her family to perpetually move and buy new furniture tells us very little of the actual Jessie Shortridge. She was a class-conscious woman who, Anderson tells us, extolled the “joys of country clubs and bridge.”15 Yet Anderson’s dismissive portrait of her mother reveals a more complex dynamic.
Jessie Shortridge Anderson was a Christian Scientist. The mind cure or New Thought movement of the late nineteenth century that attracted many women with similar backgrounds has an interesting connection with Margaret Anderson’s own spiritual quest later in life.16 Recent scholarship plausibly suggests a direct link from Gnosticism to Theosophy to Christian Science—and in fact, Christian Science parallels some of the basic beliefs espoused by George Gurdjieff. Like Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, Gurdjieff also proclaimed that his work was based on the falseness of material reality, the power of the mind to lead to individual transformation, and the direct correlation between individual enlightenment and a correction of a universal trajectory gone awry. Many of these beliefs were also shared by Madame Blavatsky, whose Theosophical views later influenced Gurdjieff. Eddy’s and Blavatsky’s books were published within years of one another in the late nineteenth century. Anderson’s mother, clearly an assiduous reader of Eddy’s works, could argue the finer points of Christian Science for hours. Regardless of Anderson’s exasperation with and condemnation of her mother’s views, many of those arguments contained beliefs she would later embrace.
As a child and young adult Anderson was relentlessly searching and questioning spiritual truths presented to her by her family, church, and education. In her second autobiography, The Fiery Fountains, she reflected, “My first thoughts about the universe, and man’s place and function in it, trace back to an American Sunday-school.” The class was taught by Anderson’s aunt, who was “very important in her religious authority.” At the age of seven or eight Anderson argued with her aunt over the possibility that the world had been created in six days. “All week I tried to argue her out of this fallacy and when Sunday came I went to Sunday school early and sat in the front row where I would stare at her unpleasantly, daring her to tell the class this untruth. She always dared and no one ever objected.”17
After a childhood following her father’s assignment to various midwestern towns, Anderson entered the 1903 junior preparatory class of Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. “The Western,” as it came to be known in later years, was founded in 1855 as the Western Female Seminary under the supervision of Daniel Tenney, a friend of the famous Presbyterian minister, Lyman Beecher, who encouraged Tenney in his project for furthering women’s education. Anderson’s internal division and spiritual questioning continued to haunt her throughout her time at the college. She recalled, “My only feeling of relation to a conscious universe was my consciousness of personal privilege—I always seemed to get what I wanted. My abstract distress had quieted into a periodic brooding, purely nostalgic, over the questions: What is the mystery of the universe and what is the meaning of God. But I remember one day in college when an emotional minister made a speech in the chapel, urging us to think of the meaning of life.” When the minister asked “who wanted a higher life,” she stood up. “When I saw that I was the only one of our lawbreaking group on her feet I held my head higher and stood more firmly. The group jeered me afterward—I, the leading lawbreaker, standing up for an evangelist’s pleadings. I was rather ashamed of having been so emotionalized so I asked them defiantly what anyone else could want.”18
As much as she was drawn to spiritual questions, her main interest in college was the piano. Music was a primary passion her entire life—close to her death she was still writing letters enthusing about the latest classical records sent to her by friends. She loved the opera and the Sturm und Drang of the Romantics, particularly Rachmaninoff, Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of music and could write with authority on the performances of noted pianists. Throughout the history of the Little Review she wrote rapturous reviews of the concerts she attended—those she approved of. Lesser talents were accorded their due. And her love of music would be a segue to Gurdjieff, who used music and dance as vehicles for learning his system and who wrote melancholy piano pieces that moved Anderson’s (in Gurdjieffian terms) “emotional center.”
Anderson left Western after three years without a degree, claiming boredom. Now floundering without direction, she returned home where tensions with her mother increased. Between arguments, she spent most of her time ensconced in her room planning her escape and writing her father twenty-page letters “exposing the criminality of our family life.”19She wrote to Clara Laughlin, a Chicago writer known for her book The Work-a-Day Girl that encouraged young women to be self-supporting. Laughlin wrote Anderson back and invited her to Chicago for a visit. At this time, Laughlin was the literary editor of the Interior, a religious magazine founded by Cyrus McCormick. Anderson met her in her office on the corner of Randolph and Clark streets; they hit it off and spent the day together, later attending the play The Easiest Way with Frances Starr, the theatrical hit of the Chicago season. After returning home to Columbus, Anderson received a letter from Laughlin offering her a job reviewing books for the Interior. After much consternation, Anderson’s parents agreed that she could go—with the condition that her younger sister Lois join her. The job paid nothing. For income Anderson took the books she reviewed to A. C. McClurg’s on Wabash—advertised as “The Biggest Bookstore of the World”—and sold them for seventy-five cents. Anderson’s early career with the Interior was hectic; Laughlin would call, informing her she needed a review of fifty books by Monday.
Laughlin had arranged for the two sisters to live in the YWCA. She felt that it “would be wise for [them] to live under the protection of Christianity.” Anderson was not happy with the choice, recalling that “it smelled (the institution—also the Christianity) like a laundry.”20 Anderson was employed and busy, but her extravagance with money made self-support increasingly difficult. Among the apparent necessities of life were Oriental rugs and a Steinway piano for her room. She opened charge accounts at the likes of Marshall Fields and bought clothes and travel luggage (despite the fact that she had no plans to travel). Every day she bought herself a yellow rose and “depleted” the YWCA candy shop. Her debts accumulated. Anderson’s real trouble began when Clara Laughlin discovered that the sisters had not only taken up smoking but had also initiated other women of the Y into the habit. Arthur Anderson retrieved his renegade girls, but after months of cajoling his eldest daughter returned to the Y alone.
Anderson returned to Chicago with newfound financial realism and a new job as a clerk in Browne’s Bookstore, located on the seventh floor of the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue. Built in 1887 as a seven-story showcase for the Studebaker Co, it was rechristened as the Fine Arts Building in 1889. It was reconfigured to house Curtiss Hall and the Auditorium Theater for performances by the Chicago Symphony as well as offices, music studios, and small stages. Tenants at one time or another included the noted Chicago sculptor Larado Taft, Harriet Monroe, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright designed Browne’s Bookstore for Francis Browne on the main floor of the building. Browne was also the publisher of the Dial and he hired Anderson to work on the Dial’s printing staff, where she learned the basics of typesetting, proofreading, and make-up—skills that would be essential when she started the Little Review. She also began supplementing her income by writing occasional reviews for the Literary Review of the Chicago Evening Post. Despite earlier tensions, Clara Laughlin recommended Anderson to replace her as literary editor of the Interior (renamed the Continent in 1912). Her job at the Continent was a step up in the Chicago literary world, but Anderson soon became restless. “For a year everything went well on the Continent, but inevitably that paper began to suffer under my administration and I had to chafe under its restrictions.”21 She ran into difficulties when complaints poured in over a favorable review she had given to Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. She was inundated with angry letters from subscribers who argued the book was immoral and was enraged when the general editor told her that “one thing everyone knows” is when a book is immoral. On hearing this, her “paralysis changed to a St. Vitus dance.”22 By the time she faced the same charge over the Little Review’s publication of Ulysses years later, she was seasoned (if not successful) in arguing the “impossibility” of immoral literature. However, in 1913 the uproar over Sister Carrie and the arrival of the fall publishing season, which required reviews of three hundred books, understandably discouraged Anderson. Her response was to simply start her own literary journal.
In Thirty Years’ War, Anderson described the decisive moment that launched the Little Review. “I had been curiously depressed all day,” she wrote. She awoke in the night. “First precise thought: I know why I’m depressed—nothing inspiring is going on. Second: I demand that life be inspired every moment. Third: The only way to guarantee this is to have inspired conversation every moment. Fourth: Most people never get so far as conversation; they haven’t the stamina and there is no time. Fifth: If I had a magazine, I could spend my time filling it up with the best conversation the world has to offer. Sixth: Marvelous idea—salvation. Seventh: Decision to do it. Deep sleep.” 23 Feeling her endeavor was already “an accomplished fact,” Anderson began boasting to everyone she was “about to publish the most interesting magazine that has ever been launched.”24
The literary “renaissance” in early twentieth-century Chicago was in large part responsible for Anderson’s success in establishing the Little Review. In the previous century Chicago’s reputation had revolved around its stockyards more than its culture. Still, the city had established itself as a publishing base. After the Civil War, the Western News Company sponsored several publications distributed via the railroad. Magazines such as the Chicago Ledger, the Little Corporal, the Lakeside Magazine and, later, the Chapbook and the Dial were distributed in Chicago and throughout the Midwest. This in turn attracted many midwesterners, particularly those interested in a literary career, to Chicago.
Chicago had been the object of a sustained campaign of cultural improvement. Concerned by the powerful commercial forces in Chicago and the city’s image as a meatpacking “Porkopolis,” several citizens sought to alter the image of the city as something other than a midwestern cesspool of materialism. In her study of charity and cultural philanthropy in Chicago, Kathleen McCarthy points out that the Gilded Age sponsors of culture who were concerned with ameliorating the negative effects of rampant growth were often the same individuals who had made fortunes from the cities’ industries. Given the tensions arising from the inequities of the era, patronage of cultural institutions was in certain respects self-serving.25 In the beginning of the twentieth century, the wealth of Chicago’s millionaires had constructed huge cultural and educational institutions such as the Chicago Symphony, the Newberry Library, the Art Institute, and the University of Chicago. Accompanying this was the creation of various small groups, societies, and clubs that revolved around literary discussions and cultural topics. The two most famous of these groups were the Little Room, which met in the Fine Arts Building on Friday afternoon after symphony concerts, and the Cliff Dwellers, which met in the penthouse of Orchestra Hall. Both were composed of patrons, artists, and writers engaging in dialogues that emphasized the genteel tradition of high culture. Anderson found this milieu unwelcoming. The social world of women like Laughlin and Harriet Monroe, meeting for teas and literary luncheons and attending popular dramas in the Chicago theater, was too staid—or, in one of Anderson’s favorite epithets, “unstimulating.”
Anderson was able to undertake the Little Review because of more recent radical developments. By the turn of the century the appreciation of the arts was superseded by the Chicago Literary Renaissance, a far more revolutionary movement. The change in the artistic world of Chicago was in part formed by the economic and social transformation of the city’s landscape. The emergence of three rooming house districts on the West, South, and North sides of the city, populated mostly by wage laborers and transient lodgers, led to the creation of social networks and peer subcultures that tolerated a fairly liberated lifestyle. Two of these working-class districts helped to forge an urban bohemia in Chicago: the South Side between 57th Street and Stoney Island Avenue and the North Side in the area surrounding a water tower known as Towertown. Both areas were known for “strong assertions of individuality-artiness, intellectuality, radical politics, anti-religion, free love, and homosexuality.”26 Drawing on the tolerance of working-class neighborhoods, young intellectuals translated their newfound freedom into artistic, social, and political creeds. As one historian has observed, “Outside the web of family and hometown, the young writers lived in the heady atmosphere of creative friends seeking new personal and aesthetic definitions. Sexual liaisons and friendly separations were accepted; open collars, scarves, and capes took the place of neckties and jackets; socialist economics were the norm.”27
Amid the inhabitants of the South Side bohemia, Anderson found herself in the literary vortex of the Chicago Renaissance. Her peers there lived in vacated storefronts left over from the 1893 Colombian Exposition. Single rooms with one large window in front, and often without plumbing, their buildings did have the advantage of being across from Jackson Park and near a railroad stop that went to the Loop. Among the area residents were Floyd Dell and his wife Margery Currey, who created an informal salon for other writers and artists in their storefront home. Dell, who met Anderson when he took over as editor of the Friday Literary Review, invited her to the gatherings. There she met many of the writers who were a part of the literary revival including Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser, Maurice Browne, Ben Hecht, and Maxwell Bodenheim. Like Anderson, many of the participants of the Chicago Renaissance came from midwestern towns, anxious to escape their provincial backgrounds.
In his study of the Chicago Renaissance, Bernard Duffey traces the birth of Chicago’s literary transformation to a series of pivotal events. The first was the founding of the Friday Literary Review in 1909 by Francis Hackett, an Irish Fabian who used the paper to praise the work of Henrik Ibsen, Walt Whitman, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw and to attack the artificiality of the genteel tradition. When Hackett left Chicago in 1911, he turned the editorship over to Dell, who continued Hackett’s approach. The second event of importance was the founding of Poetry by Harriet Monroe. Monroe, a member of the Little Room, had one foot in the genteel tradition but nevertheless became a major promoter of modern poetry. Uncomfortable with the “dry conservatism” of contemporary poetry, Monroe was interested in experiments of free and blank verse. Not a bohemian herself, she financed the magazine with a guarantor system of contributions from wealthy Chicagoans, including the scions of the International Harvesting Company farm tractor corporations, the Deerings and McCormicks. But Monroe’s openness to new trends and young minds led her to publish the best of modern poets such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.28 Other events that led to a new wave of high culture in Chicago included the 1913 arrival of the New York Post-Impressionist Armory show to the Art Institute and the founding of the Little Theater by Maurice Browne, which helped to foster a nationwide little theater movement from the Fine Arts Building.
It was this movement that inspired Anderson to call her journal the Little Review. Although many of her colleagues were doubtful about raising the necessary funds, Anderson was unconcerned. “I knew someone would give me the money,” she later wrote. “This is the one kind of natural law I always see in operation. Someone would have to. Of course someone did.” That person was Dewitt C. Wing, a journalist who met Anderson at a Dell party. Wing, called Dick by Anderson, was a writer for the rather unbohemian journal Breeder’s Gazette. Although professionally concerned with agricultural matters, Wing was involved with writers and artists of the South Side assemblage. He was, according to Anderson, the only person who really “saw” the Little Review. Wing put aside money from his salary to pay for office rent and printing bills. On Wing’s suggestion, Anderson went to New York and Boston to get advertising revenue from major publishers. She was successful and returned to Chicago with four hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of ads from publishers such as Houghton Mifflin and Scribner’s. While at Scribner’s she met a young F. Scott Fitzgerald who was going over the proofs for his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Describing Fitzgerald as “smiling, blond, and nervous,” she claims he “regretted with blushes that his stuff was too popular to be solicited by a magazine of new prose.”29
Back in Chicago, Anderson established an office for the Little Review in Room 917 of the Fine Arts Building. In spite of her extreme confidence and the apparent good timing of her venture, she began her career as editor in March of 1914 amid a personal life marked by grief and tension. Anderson’s parents had moved to Chicago, and Anderson, broke, lived with them. Only months after she moved in, however, Arthur Anderson died, weakened from a stroke and showing signs of dementia.
After her father’s death, Anderson’s life with her rigid and anxious mother was too much for the both of them. Jessie Anderson left Chicago, taking with her all the furnishings with the exception of two beds, two forks, two knives, and two spoons. Left with the problem of coming up with a hundred dollars a month for rent, Anderson was nevertheless delighted to be free of her mother. She preferred the apartment in its new incarnation, “nude as the day it was built.” The only piece of furniture she added was a baby grand piano that she solicited from the Mason-Hamlin company in exchange for a year of free advertising in the Little Review. She initiated a subscription campaign for her magazine and feverishly solicited contributions from individuals. Some rather large donations came as a welcome surprise: Eunice Tietjens gave Anderson her diamond engagement ring to sell (she was divorced), and Frank Lloyd Wright sent her one hundred dollars. The excitement of these events and the camaraderie of the new bohemians created an atmosphere charged with promise. Sherwood Anderson wrote in his memoirs, “Something which had been very hard in American life was beginning to crack, and in our group we often spoke of it hopefully. And how exciting it was. Something seemingly new was in the very air we breathed.”30
One of the things beginning to “crack” was the attitude towards homosexuality, which would be crucial for Anderson personally as someone who decided to live openly and, as editor of the Little Review, whose treatment of same sex attraction would help earn the journal its radical reputation. As Chad Heap (no relation to Jane) wrote in Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940, “a nearly identical process” existed in the creation of Chicago’s Towertown working class and bohemian alliance, and those in New York’s Greenwich Village. “Even as bohemian fashion provided a public marker of the transgression of gender norms, its evocation of popular stereotypes of gender inversion and sexual deviance created an atmosphere where lesbians and fairies felt relatively comfortable mingling in public with the districts’ artists and radicals. To some extent, this sense of comfort was simply a product of the presence of numerous ‘third sex’ types among the creative women and men of Towertown and the Village.” Chicago’s Towertown was welcoming as well because, “as regular Ben Reitman noted, they accepted [homosexuals] ‘in full fellowship … No one insults them by calling them queer or kids them for being sissies.’ ”31 Chicago had a number of saloons and tea rooms such as the Green Mask, Blue Fish, and Red Lantern of Towertown where queer denizens and radical literati mingled. The Dill Pickle Club became one of the most famous of such spots, with one visitor describing the club as a place where “pale girls with daring bobbed heads … and tortoise-shelled glasses discuss Nietzsche and Prudhomme [sic] and Havelock Ellis with boys whose eyes dreamed and visioned.”32
The British sexologist Havelock Ellis was an early and vocal empathetic supporter of sexual inverts, as he termed them. To contemporary readers Ellis’s book Sexual Inversion may seem a hodgepodge of modern empathy and conventional myths, yet to an early-twentieth-century audience his views were radical, even contemptible. More important to people like Anderson, however, was the fact that Ellis noted the contributions of many famous homosexuals in history, and even more crucial was his argument that “inverts” were born with their condition, hence attempts to cure them were inappropriate and futile.
Members of the 57th Street bohemian circle in Chicago in which Anderson traveled, influenced by such modern thinkers as Ellis, approached female and male same-sex attraction with a mixture of openness and anxiety. Floyd Dell wrote in his autobiography (with ambiguity), “We were in love with life, and willing to believe almost any theory which gave us a chance to live our lives more fully.”33 In his autobiographical novel about his Chicago contemporaries, The Briary Bush, the hero, based on Dell, learns much to his disgust that the director of a little theater group is a gay man. His girlfriend points out, however, that the definition of “queers and freaks” is relative according to the values of any given place or time. She tells her boyfriend that his rebellion against most of the standards of society also make him a freak and yet such an unorthodox status is really a positive accomplishment.
Part of the bohemians’ attempt to come to terms with the subject came with their fascination with Freud and psychoanalysis. Sherwood Anderson recalls in his memoirs the constant efforts of members of the 57th Street colony to “psyche” everyone. An “unfortunate moment” occurred one evening when they were gathered at Dell’s house came and he “brought up the subject of homosexuality.” He told the group of his confusion and fear in observing “homosexuality that was unashamed” years before when he had worked in a Chicago warehouse. His colleagues informed him that his fear was a sign that Anderson himself was a homosexual. Later as he walked in Jackson Park with a friend who had been at that gathering, Anderson picked up a twig and broke it in two. His friend excitedly informed him that by breaking the twig, Anderson was trying to “destroy the phallic” in himself and “had secretly desired to be a woman.”34
As Estelle Freedman and John D’Emilio tell us, subcultures of sexual minorities in major urban areas were located in places exhibiting “either moral ambiguity in American society or of a transient relationship, such as red light districts, theaters, clubs, military bases, YMCAs and bohemian communities.”35 The 1911 report of the Chicago Vice Commission, which was originally assigned to study the problems of prostitution, child labor, and venereal disease, also addressed the perception of Chicago judges and police that there existed an “increase in sex perversion.” The commission concluded,
It appears that in this community there is a large number of men who are thoroughly gregarious in habit; who mostly affect the carriage, mannerisms, and speech of women; who are fond of many articles ordinarily dear to the feminine heart; who are often people of a good deal of talent; who lean to the fantastic in dress and other modes of expression, and who have a definite cult when it comes to sexual life. They preach the value of non-association with women from various standpoints and yet with one another have practices which are nauseous and repulsive … They have a vocabulary and signs of recognition of their own which serve as an introduction to their own society.36
What about Margaret Anderson herself? When did she first recognize her own lesbianism? Since Western was an all-female school, one wonders to what extent her college life contributed to her self-knowledge. Women’s colleges from their beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century until Anderson’s day were known to foster close relationships between students resembling crushes, something that often caught the attention of school committees.37 These relationships were interpreted as sexually innocent and in some respects thought to be a harmless rehearsal for marriage. Information on Anderson’s time at Western is sparse and any conclusion about the nature of her friendships would be speculative, but it seems likely her years there raised questions in her own mind concerning her orientation. That is difficult to say precisely, of course, but we can surmise that she achieved some level of self-awareness early on given the fact that she made a point to read Havelock Ellis before she left home for Chicago. Doing so was not easy; in a Little Review article in 1915 she commented, “It is worth your life to get Havelock Ellis’s six volumes from a bookstore or a library. You can only do it with a doctor’s certificate or something of that sort.”38
We know that she also read the sexologist Otto Weininger and sexual radical Edward Carpenter, but whether she read them before going to Chicago is not clear. In the same 1915 article, she complained of “how difficult it is for the mass to become educated about sex.” She related an incident most likely from her own experience: “Even if you ask about Weininger you are taken behind locked doors, forced to swear that you want it out of no ‘morbid curiosity,’ that you will keep it only a week, and above all that you won’t let anyone else read it.”39 Anderson’s only comment on her first relationship in Thirty Years’ reads as follows: “… and I was in love. My first love—I should say, my first real love. And it was a great love—great in everything including disappointment. But oh, how I was in love …”40 We know, however, from a letter she wrote fifty years later that this affair, which occurred when she was writing book reviews for the Continent, was with a married woman. Anderson was “consumed with jealousy” and the affair was apparently short-lived.41 Her second love was Harriet Dean, a native of Indianapolis who had attended Vassar and was part of the Little Review’s early staff. In writing about her first meeting with Anderson, Emma Goldman took note of Dean and contrasted the personal styles of the two women. “Harriet Dean was as much a novel type to me as Margaret, yet the two were entirely unlike. Harriet was athletic, masculine looking, reserved, and self-conscious. Margaret, on the contrary, was feminine in the extreme, constantly bubbling over with enthusiasm.”42 According to other accounts, the two were inseparable and Dean idolized Anderson. Anderson herself described Dean as “worshipful about the L.R.” and as someone who went around “hurling at everyone quotations from what I said on page so and so.”43
One of the most fascinating, if condescending, portraits of Anderson and Dean comes from Maxwell Bodenheim’s autobiographical novel, Blackguard. The book was a thinly veiled account of the literary scene during the Chicago Renaissance. Anderson is Martha Apperson, the editor of a magazine called Art and Life, whose office is a gathering place for young rebels. Martha’s nickname is Mart (Anderson’s was Martie) and she is described by Bodenheim as a “tall, sturdily slender woman with a blithely symmetrical swerve to her body … Life to her was a rapidly taunting mixture of glints, hints, undertones, surface blooms, fleeting tints, portentous shadows with little shape to them, broken images, and misty heights, and she was forever trying to lure them all into a cohesive whole by striding from one philosophy and creed to another, adding another stride every three or four months.”44 Dean was Helen Wilbur, “a young disciple who scarcely ever left her side.” Although Anderson was the first person to publish Bodenheim’s poems, his description of the two women is patronizing and even callous. Dean, he wrote, “had made a fine art of her determination to persuade herself that she was masculine, giving it the intense paraphernalia of stolen words and gestures, but beneath her dubiously mannish attire and desperately swinging limbs the desires of an average woman were feebly questioning the validity of her days.” Bodenheim’s admission that he was attracted to Anderson is also made in a deliberately insulting manner. He wrote that “he wanted her body because it was the only mystery that she seemed to possess and because he wondered whether it might not be able to make her thoughts less obvious.”45
Bodenheim was not the only one of Anderson’s male contemporaries who simultaneously expressed admiration and contempt for her. Dell described her as “beautiful in a cool and standoffish way,” and Maurice Browne of the Little Theater referred to her “cool and cameo-like beauty.”46 This perceived coolness, of course, was frequently translated into frigidity. Ben Hecht wrote in his autobiography that one friend of his was “a little embittered by her beauty and chastity” and he “called her Diana, the frigid huntress.” Hecht personally “forgave her chastity because she was a genius.” Her genius, he continues, “consisted of making young writers want to please her rather than a larger, more lucrative audience.”47 In a comment directed to Hecht, the same friend also referred to Anderson as “your idiot friend Sappho.”48
The depiction of Anderson as cold, cool, frigid, chaste, and virginal—a characterization that conflicts with other descriptions of her, by men and women alike, as fiery, passionate, and intense—reveals the sexual tensions that existed even amongst the most enlightened of the early twentieth-century bohemians. Her attractiveness and femininity probably made it even more difficult for her male contemporaries to accept her lesbianism, and the borderline angry tone of some descriptions no doubt stemmed from their incredulity that such a woman would have no interest in them.
Anderson’s treatment of gender and sexuality in her first autobiography is unusual for autobiographies by women in the early twentieth century. Her trademark bravado is in full force when she identifies herself to her readers on page four as “a fairly attractive woman in her thirties.” She says that “such a human being falls inevitably into one or more human categories … I am not a daughter: my father is dead and my mother rejected me long ago. I am not sister: my two sisters find me more than a little mad, and that is no basis for a sisterly relationship. I am certainly not a niece; (…). I could almost be called an aunt … but my two nephews don’t find me convincing: so I’m not an aunt. I am no man’s wife, no man’s delightful mistress, and I will never, never, never, be a mother.”49 For a woman in the late twenties this was heresy.
In all three of Anderson’s autobiographies, she swerves from being transgressive to a stranger in the larger scheme of things. “I have no place in the world—no fixed place. I don’t know just what kind of thing I am. Nobody else seems to know either.” Going further, she claims, “I have been called a lovely freak of nature.”50 Here she is launching a preemptive attack, reclaiming the stigmatizing language of “freak” and owning the label of being queer. Nina Van Gessel examines Anderson’s book as a direct contrast to Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness, published one year earlier. Instead of the “bitter self-loathing” of Hall’s protagonist, Anderson employs “wholesome self-satire.” Van Gessel contends that, “discarding the tragic scripts thrust upon her in favor of self-directed comedy, Anderson employs laughter as a weapon with which to counter clichés of the lesbian as a tortured misfit.” Anderson presaged later lesbian culture to the point of reconfiguring “stigma into superiority,” which could be the motto for her life.51
Anderson’s early time in Chicago was an adventure that she described as her “beautiful life” there. She had broken free of the expectations of her parents and was undertaking a journey that would lead to liberation from larger constricting norms. She started a radical journal that would flourish amid an artistic revolutionary milieu. However, the Little Review of 1914–16, while promulgating free verse, feminism, and acceptance of homosexuality, was a hodgepodge of the new and old in the arts. The Little Review would begin to mark its beginning as a truly avant-garde journal after 1916, when Anderson met Jane Heap. They were to form, wrote Anderson, “a consolidation that was to make us much loved and even more loathed.”52
Jane Heap is somewhat of a mystery woman to historians of the avant-garde. Unlike Anderson, who wrote three autobiographies lauding her own adventures and accomplishments, Heap retained a low profile. In many ways she deliberately sought anonymity while working with Anderson; she strongly resisted Anderson’s pleas that she write for the Little Review and, on relenting, signed her contributions with her initials, “jh.” As a cross-dressing lesbian, she did stand out and is mentioned in most of the autobiographies of the Chicago Renaissance and in accounts of Greenwich Villagers and expatriate Paris in the teens, twenties, and thirties.
Jane Heap was born in 1884 in Topeka, Kansas, the second of four children of Emma and George Heap. After graduating from Topeka High School in 1901, she immediately went to Chicago, where she studied at the Art Institute. Finishing her studies in 1905, she earned thirteen Honorable Mentions for “outstanding work in figure drawing and composition.”53 After graduation she studied in Germany, learning tapestry, weaving, and mural decoration while living at an artist’s colony near Munich.54 Returning to Chicago, she took evening classes at the Art Institute from 1909 to 1911, teaching at the Lewis Institute in Chicago where she had at one time studied jewelry making and participated in theatrical productions.
The only sense we have of Heap’s early years are from letters she wrote to a Chicago native, Florence Reynolds, in the summers of 1908 and 1909 while living with her parents in Topeka to save money. Heap’s letters to Reynolds are an interesting preview of the woman who would later make a decisive impact on the Little Review; she was preoccupied with art, literature, love, and God. It is clear that Heap tried to spend as much time as possible sketching, painting, and writing poetry and stories in the free time she had from doing household chores. “Coming home always upsets me—here it is the Real,” she wrote Reynolds. “In Chicago it is Love and Art and Play—as soon as I find time to start a composition or to read a lot of poetry the Real will lose some of its power to stun one’s soul.”55 During this period Heap often felt a sense of despair about her life, and the letters she wrote to Reynolds indicate what might have been clinical depression. In 1908 she wrote, “O I had such a bad night last night—such doubt and despair—all the glorious years going and I doing nothing—because I never can and was never meant to—I never did see things as they are, so I know I have deluded myself into thinking I could do something big even.”56 There is little doubt that her father’s employment for the Topeka State Insane Asylum, which was adjacent to the Heap home and on whose grounds she played as a child, had an unsettling impact on her into adulthood. One letter she wrote Reynolds in the early autumn of 1908 described an excursion she and her sister Edna had taken to the asylum grounds to sketch trees. She related an encounter with a patient who had known both of them as children: “He had such beautiful, clear, sad eyes. It hurt to think of his life there.”57 Years later in the Little Review she would argue, along with the surrealists she admired, that insanity was a sacred source of creativity. As a young woman Heap demonstrated a spiritual introspection that she directly connected to art. On hearing the news that Reynolds’ sister Hattie had given birth to a baby daughter, she wrote, “I hope Hattie does not bring her up a Christian. If we could get a chance at her, we would have her know no God but Beauty, would we? I have been thinking very much these days of Beauty—(poor name is it not for anything so Holy). I know that if everyone felt Beauty strongly, felt that everything beautiful was God and all things not beautiful not God. That woman was the nearest Symbol for Beauty. If one could see this—there would be no sin, or squalor, or unhappiness in the whole world.”58
While Anderson’s youthful religious queries dealt with Sunday school, family doctors, and ministers’ sermons, Heap’s early questions are mostly referencing literature, theater, and poetry. As a young woman Heap was attracted to the shadowy, mysterious work of the Symbolists, writers who are important in understanding her intellectual evolution, her career as a critic for the Little Review, and her eventual conversion to George Gurdjieff’s belief system.
During the period she was writing to Reynolds she often indulged in an almost post-adolescent self-pity about being misunderstood by the world—an alienated artist questing for solace in exploring God and Beauty, all themes germane to the work of the Symbolists. As the next chapter will show, modernism’s roots developed from the nineteenth century; Symbolists like Yeats were important conduits to the later work of High modernism. Heap, as a young woman, read Arthur Symons’ 1899 The Symbolist Movement in Literature, and the book was highly influential to Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, all of whom who had prominent publications in the Little Review. As a literary critic Heap made explicit connections between these generations of artists.
In addition, her early interests presaged her correlation between sexuality and art—Symons, Ernest Dowson, and another writer, Mary Robinson, whom Heap often invoked, were noted translators of Sappho as well. Heap’s letters to Reynolds included her own stories and poems, often invoking fairy-tale-like legends of knights and ladies riding proud stallions in fantastical natural surroundings. The hero is always a young man on a mission enveloped in a mystery, with Heap, who began signing her letters to Reynolds “Lancelot,” clearly identifying herself with the male character. “Can we keep our love as it is?” she wrote in the summer of 1908. “Like our knight and lady on the white horse, forever riding in a flowered meadow, in the sunlight, never arriving—we can. I know a way.”59 In another letter she explicitly identifies herself as the hero of her poem “Vagabond,” in which she writes, “Over my shoulder I bear my pack / Fancies and dreams and memories / Love of women and Beauty / A wonderful crowded pack.”60
Heap was distressed to be in Topeka, not only because of the household drudgery she experienced—she clearly pined for Reynolds. “Dear little Delight the days are passing,” she wrote in August of 1908, “soon we will have each other again—We will do so many things together—We will love so that we will never at any time to come regret not having loved enough.”61 The following year, Heap’s ardor remained strong. In July 1909 she wrote Reynolds, “I have always felt that I was a good lover, but since I have loved you I feel how utterly impossible it is to convey my idea of love to you… . I wish you were here tonight and every night to go to sleep on my arm.”62 The following month Heap wrote again, “Sometimes I lie quite still at night and imagine you close, touching me all along until it becomes so real I nearly cry of emptiness.” She also reflected about the reticence she felt concerning any public perceptions of their relationship. “It seems to me now as if I did not ‘love you up’ often enough when we were together. Why did I always feel conscious when there were people present—as if it were not fair to you or something to love you publicly or what was it?”63
The physical references in Heap’s letters to kissing, touching, and sleeping together, or even the use of the word “lover,” cannot in themselves be conclusive evidence that Reynolds and Heap maintained a sexual relationship. Women in the nineteenth century frequently used passionate language in their correspondence with female friends. What does indicate that this was not a platonic friendship was the fact that Heap was cross-dressing at the time she was writing these letters, and in one of her letters she refers to a mutual friend, Marie Blanke, nicknamed James. “I have just written to James,” Heap wrote, “She has been visiting at some very ‘swell’ houses. She said she had been doing some of my stunts dressing up in men’s clothes and making love to girls— I wonder how near a representation she could give of me.”64 There are photographs from this period showing Heap in men’s suits, ties, and hats. Her cross-dressing emerged at a pivotal point in changing notions of women’s sexuality. Heap, of course, was not the only future member of the female avant-garde who cross-dressed; clothing for many women in the early twentieth century was the key to emancipation in both a literal and figurative sense. Adopting male attire gave them simultaneously physical freedom from the constraints of female clothing and symbolic freedom from the narrow constraints of gender. Heap’s image as it was to develop was as the “mannish lesbian” that attracted the attention of early twentieth century sexologists. Her letters to Reynolds suggest that she and other women found each other partially from the practice of cross-dressing. They repeatedly mention particular names, like James, that suggest a community of friends, some of whom may have had romantic involvements with each other. Photographs exist not only of Heap but also of other women she knew from Chicago, such as Olive Garnet and Elsa Koop, dressed in men’s clothing as well. Heap’s letters and the photos suggest that this was a self-conscious lesbian community in America in the early century, predating earlier estimations of when such communities existed.
An interesting aspect of Heap’s cross-dressing was her involvement in little theater productions in Chicago in which she appeared to play only male roles, similar to Willa Cather in her amateur Nebraska productions. Photographs of her in unnamed productions show her dressed as a bellboy and a man in traditional Arabian garb. Exactly what these productions were is difficult to say, although we do know that Heap joined Maurice Browne’s Little Theater in Chicago, where she acted in the company’s production of W. B. Yeats’ On Baile’s Strand. Her interest went beyond acting to scenery, costume design, and writing.
Among her early papers exists a bill—largely a collection of jokes—of “Blanke and Heap’s Nickel Theatre” presenting “American History I” at the Lewis Institute in 1910. Also among her papers is the play “Pyg-male-one” written by “O. Pshaw, A. Hammer, and Monkey Wrench.” The takeoff on Shaw’s Pygmalion reverses the story line and sex roles; the professor is Vera Still Bible, “Professor of Neurotics,” and the flower picker is William Albert Grabbed-for. In the play Professor Still Bible, referring to Grabbed-for, states “I’ll wager that I can make a nervous and financial wreck of him in six months.”65 The play give us early evidence of Heap’s iconoclastic humor that readers of her work in the Little Review would come to know well.
Aside from her interest in theater, Heap was gaining attention as a visual artist. As early as 1911 her work had been noticed in the Sunday Tribune with a favorable review from Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry.66 She later had an exhibit at the American Architecture Exhibit and the Municipal Art League and was featured in two articles by the Topeka Capitol. The paper reported on her success in Chicago and noted that she did mural paintings in the homes of “two mid-western prominent citizens” as well as preparing murals for two public schools. By 1914 Heap had another exhibit of watercolors at the Artist Guild’s gallery, and the work was given accolades by Ferdinand Schevill. “Her method is simplicity itself and consists in reducing and eliminating until she gets the billowy line of hill and stream, and foliage enveloping the fewest possible shades of olive, umber or mauve. Her filmy work is in perfect keeping with her light medium, which is always water-color, and one is impressed that it would lend itself admirably to reproduction.”67
Since the Artist Guild Gallery and the Little Theater were both in the Fine Arts Building, the home of the Little Review, it was only a question of time before the paths of Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson would cross. They met in early 1916 when a mutual friend brought Heap to the Little Review studio. Heap’s impact was immediate and profound.
In later years Anderson would write pages trying to describe Heap’s extraordinary influence over her. The Little Review editor felt that Heap was a “genius” who provided the most fascinating conversation she had ever encountered. Anderson, who had started the Little Review with the idea that it would be based on conversation, found Heap’s talent in this area an unexpected godsend. She often had difficulty in expressing what it was about Heap’s conversation that was so riveting. “There is no one in the modern world whose conversation I haven’t sampled, I believe, except Picasso’s. So, I can’t say it isn’t better than Jane Heap’s. But I doubt it in spite of his reputation. I felt in 1916 and feel to-day that Jane Heap is the world’s best talker.” She struggled on in her explanation: “It isn’t a question of words, facility, style. It isn’t a question of erudition. It isn’t even a question of truth. (Who knows whether what she says is true?) It is entirely a question of ideas. No one can find such interesting things to say on any subject. I have often thought I should like to give my life over to talk-racing, with my money on Jane. No one else would ever win—you can’t win against magic … No one can find such interesting things to say on any subject. What it is exactly—this making of ideas—I don’t know. Jane herself doesn’t know. Things become known to me she says.”68
Others shared the sense of Heap as a sparkling yet puzzling talker. Robert MacAlmon, the American expatriate publisher who travelled in the same circles as Heap and Anderson during their Paris years, wrote in his memoirs of overhearing a conversation between Heap and Mina Loy. They were, he recalled, “both talking brilliantly … Jane, her breezy travelling salesman of the world tosh which was impossible to recall later. But neither of these ladies needed to make sense. Conversation is an art with them, something entirely unrelated to sense or reality, or logic …”69 Anderson recalled one woman saying to Heap, “You’re the best talker I’ve ever listened to. I don’t understand a word you say.” One reason Anderson was attracted to Heap was the chance to engage in a genuinely challenging argument. She loved what she called “the discussibility” of “the ideas Jane offered, the challenge and the opportunity for argument—agreement or resistance: ideal conditions for [her] temperament, [her] nature, [her] mind.” “At last,” she wrote elsewhere, “I could argue as long as I wanted. Instead of discouraging Jane, this stimulated her. She was always saying that she never found enough resistance in life to make talking worthwhile—or anything else for that.”70 Anderson always felt frustrated that most people wanted to drop a conversation if it became too heated or controversial. For her, this process was energizing and liberating.
Heap and Anderson were, in Anderson’s words, “as different as two people could be. Temperamentally, we were almost never in accord, intellectually we had taken different routes.”71 One basic difference was that while Heap enjoyed talking with Anderson, she did not like to perform in front of groups when Anderson wanted to show off her talents. Anderson would make up arguments at parties so that Heap could demonstrate her conversational powers. Heap did not appreciate this and told Anderson she put her in an awkward position. “Margaret,” she told a friend, “carries me around like a fighting cock and throws me into every ring she sees. And she sees nothing but rings.”72 Anderson was clearly mesmerized by Heap. Decades later she would recall their meeting as leading to “a new, unexpected extra life that to me was like a second birth.” “Here” she continued “was my obsession—the special human being, the special point of view.” Her “mind was inflamed” by Heap’s ideas—“this was what I had been waiting for, searching for, all my life.”
Despite their obvious differences, however, there were underlying similarities. Both women were rebels with a taste for the theatrical. Like Heap, Anderson had felt alienated by her middle-class midwestern family and had sought refuge in art and literature. Both had known of their sexuality as young women and had moved to Chicago to break free from their provincial homes. Both had minimally supportive families somewhat bewildered by their daughters’ unconventional interests but unwilling to stand in the way of their drive for self-fulfillment. While Anderson recorded her feelings for Heap in multiple publications, we have no public utterances about her from Heap that would explain their partnership from her perspective. We can only speculate, but perhaps Heap saw in the Little Review her early dream, as she put it to Reynolds, “to do something big.” In addition, as depressed as Heap seemed to be, perhaps Anderson’s sunny demeanor provided some respite from her darker moments.
Anderson launched the Little Review in March of 1914. Although she would not meet Heap until two years later, the journal made an astonishing debut that amazed her contemporaries. It would become the most radical symbol of the Chicago Renaissance. Bernard Duffey, referring to the Renaissance as “the Liberation,” asserts that the Little Review was first among equals. “If Poetry marked for the Liberation an achievement of status, and the Friday Literary Review supplied a rationale for it, the Little Review may be said to have held up a mirror to its soul.”73