6

Lesbian Literature, Women Writers, and Modernist Mysticism

The Little Review’s contemporary and historical reputation as a sponsor of modernism was primarily the result of the prodigious publication of work by the “men of 1914”—Joyce, Pound, and Eliot.¹ Anderson and Heap’s role in promoting female modernists during this same period has been largely overlooked. After Pound left the Little Review in 1919, work by Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Mary Butts, and “the first American Dada,” Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, appeared in its pages. Stein, Barnes, and Loy (and Heap as well) authored several contributions to the Little Review that explored lesbian themes, an important element of female modernism. These women all neatly fit Terry Castle’s notion of “the apparitional lesbian” of this period, a figure who is “elusive, vaporous, difficult to spot—even when she is there, in plain view.”² Most of these women had long-term affiliations with other women that were more abiding than their relationships with the men in their lives. In the span of Heap’s and Anderson’s professional careers, webs of relationships were central to the work they published in the Little Review. Heap worked studiously to get Stein’s novel, The Making of Americans, published; Sinclair promoted Richardson’s work; Barnes and Heap were lovers; Loy and Barnes were best friends and neighbors. Another important element in many of these women’s writing was the spiritual and esoteric. The mysticism of May Sinclair’s and Mary Butts’s fiction, and the inspired “madness” of Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven’s poetry, intrigued Anderson and Heap. As Heather Ingman writes, “It is apparent that many female modernists drew on their spiritual experiences to challenge received notions of gender and sexuality.”³

Anderson’s first mention of homosexuality in the Little Review was her 1915 essay on Edith Ellis, but references to lesbianism became more pronounced after Heap joined the magazine. This happened at the very same time that the subject became increasingly visible to the public. Prior to the early twentieth century, fiction based on intense female friendships with romantic overtones frequently appeared in a variety of magazines. Magazines such as the Ladies Home Journal, Century, Strand, and Harper’s treated the subject without “self-consciousness.”⁴ As Lillian Faderman notes, in the late nineteenth century, these stories were not considered threatening because the term “lesbian” had only recently been created and was known only to medical theorists. The relationships described between women were seen as a rehearsal for a woman’s later and inevitable marriage to a man; examples of this fiction continued to appear into the early twentieth century.⁵ As time went on, however, such stories evaporated from the view of the general reading public or, where they appeared, portrayed the protagonists as evil, victimized, or both. Growing public awareness of the writings of sexologists such as Otto Weininger and Havelock Ellis gave scientific credence to the existence of both male and female homosexuals. The popularization of Freud, who asserted that women were sexual creatures, made any intimate friendship between women potentially sexual.

In her study of marriage in the early twentieth century, Christina Simmons writes that by 1920 there was “a surprisingly extensive commentary on female homosexuality.”⁶ In fact, by the twenties, there appeared to be a backlash against the sexuality of women who were not interested in marriage. The rise of what was termed “companionate marriage” resulted in articles and marriage manuals advocating replacing the rigid conventions of nineteenth-century sex relations with a more relaxed and intimate view of matrimony. Husbands and wives were to be friends and partners; the sexual satisfaction of the wife was considered a crucial element for a successful marriage. As a result, friendships between women were seen as increasingly unnecessary and frequently suspect. Women were encouraged to emphasize the importance of husbands in their lives, relegating female friends to a station of considerably less importance. Lesbians, as we saw from John Quinn’s letters, were viewed as women who were unable to achieve “normal” sexual satisfaction and therefore preyed on vulnerable heterosexual women. As Christina Simmons writes, the recognition of sexual inequality “engendered in the culture a male fear of resistance, often expressed as a fear of lesbianism.”⁷

In publishing writing with lesbian themes Anderson and Heap were not necessarily operating in an atmosphere of acceptance—the attitude of bohemian Greenwich Village “freethinkers” was at best ambivalent. The male inhabitants of the Village were consumed by the Freudian notion of women as sexual creatures and by the sexual implications of companionate marriage. Among bohemian men (who controlled the mores of the Village, despite their occasional pretense to sexual egalitarianism), sexual love between women was never validated as equal to heterosexual intercourse. The growing weight of negative public discourse concerning lesbianism and its superficial acceptance by many male Villagers made the publication of lesbian-related material a bold gesture in the early 1920s.⁸

The most forthright pieces with lesbian themes in the Little Review came from the pen of Heap herself. In the April 1917 issue, Heap reviewed the autobiographical work I, Mary MacLane, a sequel to The Story of Mary MacLane published in 1902. In the first book, MacLane wrote of being in love with another woman whose presence inspired “a convulsion and a melting within.”⁹ The sequel, however, illustrated a knowledge of professional sexual theorists and their labeling of lesbianism as a sickness. In I, Mary MacLane, the author writes, “I have lightly kissed and been kissed by lesbian lips.” Yet “I am too personally fastidious … to walk in direct repellant roads of vice even in the freest moods.”¹⁰ Heap began her review: “When I heard that there was to be a new Mary MacLane book I was full of excitement, remembering vaguely her first book. ‘What has the world done to you?’ I thought as I went rapidly and curiously through the pages.” The 1917 book proved very disappointing to Heap. It was, she wrote, “surprisingly ungrown, surprisingly commonplace … surprisingly not a surprise.” Addressing MacLane’s change in attitude concerning her sexuality, Heap wrote, “She lovingly cherishes her free analytical mind and then in chapters like ‘I Am Someway the Lesbian Woman’ and ‘I Am not Respectable and Refined nor in Good Taste,’ she refutes her free analytical mind … A grown mind does not question the integrity of its emotions.” Heap concluded, “Mary MacLane has created nothing. She has given us an anatomical drawing of her life … some imagination, honesty, and humor.” The newspapers, she predicted, “will take it up; it will be praised and jeered and quoted by wits and half-wits; moral fossils will refuse to sell it and others to read it. Lady writers will say ‘she has made a contribution to literature.’ She has made a contribution, but it would seem rather to sexual theory.”¹¹

While Heap had no problem openly discussing books or plays with homosexual content, the two works of fiction she published in the Little Review with lesbian themes do not bear her name. In the prose poem “I Cannot Sleep”—printed with an “Unsigned” credit—Heap wrote, “That woman’s hands scare me / I am glad I shall never have to be her lover / I know they leave her arms and crawl about over things in the night / Lean faded spiders.”¹² In the second piece, a short story entitled “Karen,” Heap signed the work “Os-Anders,” leading Faderman to assume the author was Anderson. From Heap’s letters to Florence Reynolds, it is clear that she did not want anyone to know she was the author. She instructed Reynolds, “Don’t tell anyone that I wrote Karen until later—never anyone who could tell my family.”¹³ Indeed, Heap’s family might have recognized the characters. The story, which appeared in the Little Review’s Spring 1922 issue, is the tale of a Norwegian immigrant on a Midwestern farm. Karen is in love with a woman, Dorothea. Grief-stricken by Dorothea’s death, Karen marries Dorothea’s husband to be close to her beloved’s surroundings and possessions. The husband dies after a thirteen-year unconsummated marriage. Cruelly treated by her stepdaughters, who hint that they know her secret, Karen later falls seriously ill. Heap’s Karen is a deftly drawn masculine woman who is lonely and unhappy. She dresses in “heavy men’s clothes, the trousers put down into the boot tops.” Her isolation is deeply felt. “There was something about her that made people shun her.”¹⁴ “Karen” differed from the few published lesbian stories because the main character is a sympathetic figure. The fact that it was written in 1922 after the quantity of lesbian fiction was drying up indicates that Heap and Anderson were not intimidated by the public debate on lesbianism. In her study of lesbian magazine fiction in the early twentieth century, Faderman observes that the ultimate moral of these stories was that “women could not find satisfaction with each other, and some terrible disaster would befall those who tested the truth. The few lesbian stories that did not emphasize this moral appeared only in ‘art’ magazines such as the Little Review.”¹⁵

Another lesbian short story, “Chance Encounter,” written by Winifred Bryher, the longtime companion of the poet H. D., appeared in the Autumn/Winter 1924–25 issue.¹⁶ The narrator’s infatuation with another woman is described amid the exotic locales of Greece and Egypt, two countries that fascinated H. D., leaving little doubt that she was the model for Bryher’s object of desire. The narrator—who spends a great deal of time simply waiting for her beloved to pass by—states, “If I said she was as beautiful as a stem of Sicilian papyrus she would probably laugh.”¹⁷ For a short time, Richard Aldington, who was married to H. D., contributed “Myrrhine and Konallis,” a twelve-part prose poem that described an affair between two women in ancient Greece. Headings of various sections of the poem were given provocative titles such as “The Wine of Lesbos,” and “After the Orgy.”¹⁸ May Sinclair wrote in The Egoist that although “the love is lesbian,” “Myrrhine and Konallis” was “a sequence of the most exquisite love poems in the language.”¹⁹

Anderson’s use of a dialogic approach to criticism extended to publishing a piece that mocked something she and Heap truly valued. She printed a lampoon of Aldington’s poem by Sue Golden entitled “Murine and Kola-Kola.” Heap followed Golden’s parody with an uncharacteristically defensive statement: “Yes, how sad it all is that some minds have to jeer at everything in the world, from Helen’s beauty to Bernhardt’s ‘wooden leg.’ ”²⁰ Another interesting representation of women with a possible lesbian theme was the reproduction of two sculptures by the Russian artist Chana Orloff. The May-June 1920 issue printed three sculptures: “Maternité,” a pregnant woman; “The Amazon,” a woman on horseback; and “Danseuses,” two women dancing together. A commentary by Muriel Ciolkowski accompanying the reproductions stated, “It occurred to me that Little Review readers would be sensible to the charm and wit of ‘L’Amazone,’ novel to the sculpturer especially.”²¹

The contributions of Gertrude Stein are an example of both overt and covert references to lesbian sexuality in the journal. Stein was the most famous lesbian of Parisian avant-garde circles, yet her work was often, according to literary scholars, “encoded” to disguise lesbian themes. An example of such codes can be seen in Stein’s first publication in the Little Review, “Vacation in Brittany,” which appeared in the Spring 1922 issue. The short prose piece begins, “Little fool little stool little fool for me. / Little stool little fool little stool for me. / And what is a stool. / That was the elegant name for a cow.”²² Scholars today have noted the repeated use of the word “cow” in Stein’s pieces, including a well-known short story, “A Wife Has a Cow.” The term “cow” is a code for a variety of meanings, ranging from nurturance to orgasm.²³ Another Stein contribution, “Bundles for Them: A History of Giving Bundles,” which appeared in the Spring 1923 number, was more overt: “If you hear her snore / It is not before you love her / You love her so that to be her beau is very lovely… .”²⁴

Although Anderson wrote to Stein soliciting material, Stein’s contributions came mainly through the efforts of Heap. Stein’s work was mentioned in the premier issue of the Little Review in March 1914, but in the form of a critical essay by George Soule that ridiculed her work. Anderson agreed with the assertion that Stein’s work was “unreadable.” Her dislike of the writer’s creative efforts was compounded by Stein’s and Anderson’s dislike of one another. Stein was offended that the Little Review did not pay contributors. She told Anderson so, which only angered the editor. Anderson also felt that Stein’s self-image as a genius was “slightly insane.”²⁵ Anderson wrote to a friend that Stein and Heap “got on marvelously.” Indeed, Heap was genuinely impressed by Stein.²⁶ In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein wrote, “Gertrude Stein then and always liked Jane Heap immensely. Margaret Anderson interested her much less.”²⁷

The eight short stories and one play Djuna Barnes published in the Little Review between 1918 and 1921 were crucial in establishing her early reputation as an author with a unique, if quite dark, perspective. It seems clear that printing Barnes’s work was entirely the decision of Anderson and Heap rather than Pound. Shari Benstock has observed that Pound “had little sympathy for her work, felt that her reputation was exaggerated and ‘in need of deflation.’ ”²⁸ This is corroborated by the fact that there are no substantive references to Barnes by Pound in his Little Review correspondence with Anderson.

Barnes was born in upstate New York in a highly eccentric and possibly incestuous family. The towering figure in her life was her grandmother Zadel, an intense personality and a published journalist. She was also a spiritualist who conjured up, among others, Franz Liszt, Jack London, and Lord Kitchener. Barnes began her career as a freelance journalist writing for New York newspapers. She soon developed into a poet, artist, short story writer, playwright, and novelist. Her first published book, The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), a series of lesbian poems, made a splash in Greenwich Village. In the Village, she joined the Provincetown Players, forming a close friendship with her fellow Little Review contributor Mina Loy and a more complicated one with Anderson and Heap.

It is evident from Anderson’s autobiography that she was not entirely fond of Barnes. When they first published her work, Anderson wrote, “Djuna and the Little Review began a friendship which might have been great had it not been that Djuna felt some fundamental distrust of our life—of our talk.” Barnes displayed an “intense maternity,” Anderson claimed, which “covered the resentment for the first year or so.” She would bring Anderson and Heap the “first strawberries of spring and the last oysters of winter, but to the more important luxuries of the soul she turned an unhearing ear.” Barnes described herself to Anderson as “reserved,” but Anderson concluded that she was in fact “unenlightened” and “not on speaking terms with her own psyche.”²⁹ Still, Anderson’s difficulty relating to Barnes personally did not stop her from publishing Barnes’s work. Heap’s enthusiasm about Barnes’s work may have been due to its dark themes—and the widespread rumor that she and Barnes were having an affair at some point during the journal’s tenure in New York may have influenced her support.³⁰

Critics have argued a great deal about the place of Barnes in the modernist canon. Like Dorothy Richardson, she was compared to Joyce and declared a lesser talent. However, feminist critics examining the themes of gender and sex within Barnes’s work find her a fascinating example of how modernism itself can be re-evaluated through the prism of feminist literary perspectives. The themes of her early stories published in the Little Review are relentlessly grim—murder, suicide, illness, betrayal, infidelity, and incest plague the lives of the people Barnes created. They are dark, unsympathetic characters, often with grotesque physiques; relations between the sexes are manipulative and frequently masochistic. The stories focus more on women than men and often deal with strained and damaged relationships within families. Most of the protagonists are strong-willed women and the men are weak and pompous. In “The Robin’s House” (September–December 1920), Nelly Grissard—a spiritualist and phrenologist—treats her lover with such disdain he fakes suicide just to see her reaction. In “A Night Among the Horses” (December 1918), a groom treated cruelly by his fiancée is trampled to death by his beloved horses. In “Beyond the End” (December 1919), a tubercular woman brings home a dying child she conceived in a sanatorium, pushing her husband to suicide. In “The Finale” (June 1918), a rodent steals the favorite scarf of a deceased man as mourners stand over his corpse. In Decadent Culture in the United States, David Weir writes that Barnes is an example of pre–World War I New Yorkers who “began to renew interest in the cultural decadence that had circulated among artistic circles in the late nineteenth century.” Weir refers to Barnes’s lesbian-themed Book of Repulsive Women—where she takes on the “classic decadent narrative for the purpose of exploring female pleasure… .”³¹

The characters in Barnes’s short stories refer to religion but in an uncertain, hopeless fashion. In the story “Oscar” (April 1920), Ulric Straussmann—one of two unpleasant men that Emma Gonsberg is involved with—asks her, “What is it that you want?” She answers, “I think it’s religion, but it’s probably love.”³² In “Beyond the End,” when Julie Anspacher’s husband asks, “Have you a religion, Julie?” she replies, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’ve tried to believe in something external, something that might envelope this and carry it beyond—that’s what we demand of our faiths isn’t it?”³³ In “Katrina Silverstaff” (January 1921), a woman who takes a door-to-door Bible salesman, Castillion Rodkin, as her lover, states plainly, “ ‘We must talk about religion.’ And with an awkwardness unusual to him he asked, ‘Why?’ ‘Because,’ she said in a strained voice, making a hurt gesture, ‘it is so far from me.’ ”³⁴ All of Barnes’s characters here yearn for the transcendent but are doomed never to realize it, due in large part to the long shadows of their own intrinsically malevolent natures that they are incapable of escaping. Louis Kannenstine argues that Katrina “is seeking her apotheosis in the very reverse terms of apotheosis that she is out to attain—a state of spiritual exaltation in her own madness and through the degradation of another.”³⁵

Later in life, Barnes did not look favorably on the work she had published in the Little Review. When Anderson was putting together material for the Little Review Anthology in 1952, she wrote to Barnes for permission to include “A Night Among the Horses” and the poem “Lament of Women.” Barnes replied, “I so heartily dislike parts of each that I must say no.” Among her early stories there was only one Barnes cared for, “Aller et Retour,” but she could not recall if it had been published in the Little Review. She wrote Anderson, “I feel it a grave disservice to letters to re-issue merely because one may have a name for later work or for the unfortunately praised earlier work, or for the purposes of nostalgia or ‘history’ which might more happily be left interred.”³⁶ Anderson wrote back saying she was sorry Barnes did not like her early work. In a somewhat miffed tone she stated that she was also sorry “that you regard such an anthology as merely nostalgic… . On the contrary, it is an important historical record of an important historical epoch in American letters.”³⁷ Barnes later agreed to have her story “The Valet” (May 1919) published in the anthology.If Barnes’s work was dark and brooding, that of the British author and artist Mina Loy was playful and provocative. Her work represents a potent amalgamation of feminist protest, linguistic experiments, spiritual endeavor, and overt sexuality. Her first American poems appeared in Others; her debut in the Little Review was in the September–December 1920 issue with her poem “Lions’ Jaws.” This was followed by a manifesto entitled “Psycho-Democracy” (Autumn 1921) and her long poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (Spring 1923, Autumn–Winter 1923–24).

A Futurist, Christian Scientist, painter, poet, and lampshade entrepreneur, Loy and her body of work have been excavated and admired in recent years—including as the subject of rock songs.³⁸ Born in London in 1882 to a Hungarian Jewish immigrant and a middle-class British Protestant, Loy frequently felt like an outsider in her homeland. She studied art in Paris and Berlin and moved to Florence in 1907, where she befriended Mable Dodge and Gertrude Stein.³⁹ Loy became enamored of the Futurist movement, having affairs with both Filippo Marinetti and Giovanni Papini. Ultimately disillusioned with the misogynistic tendencies of Futurism, Loy forcefully expressed her dissatisfaction in “Feminist Manifesto” and “Lions’ Jaws,” a satire of the movement, with sly references to her involvement. Loy moved to New York in 1916, where she became a member of Dadaist circles. Djuna Barnes became one of her most intimate friends. She was also a frequent visitor to Anderson’s and Heap’s Greenwich Village apartment. When Anderson and Heap went to court during the Ulysses trial, Loy sat behind them in the Jefferson Street courthouse as a sign of support.

When Loy moved to Paris in the twenties, she lived in the same building as Barnes and continued socializing with Anderson and Heap. Loy was also the only heterosexual in Djuna Barnes’s playful paean to lesbians, Ladies Almanac, appearing as Patience Scalpel.⁴⁰ Aside from Anderson herself, of all of the Little Review’s women writers, Loy was the most forthright in her unapologetic espousal of feminism. In her 1914 “Feminist Manifesto,” she proclaimed, “The Feminist Movement as instituted at present is inadequate.” “Leave off,” she wrote, “looking to men to find out what you are not. Seek within yourselves to find what you are. As conditions are at present constituted you have the choice between Parasitism, Prostitution, or Negation.”⁴¹ Loy’s solution to the sexual oppression of women was “the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity throughout the female population at puberty.”⁴² While some stunned readers took this statement at face value, Rachel Potter perceives this as a prime example of Loy’s humor. She writes, “Loy’s wry recommendation that pubescent girls be surgically divested of their assets irreverently dismantles the idea of feminine purity.”⁴³ Loy also promoted a positive attitude toward sex that was controversial at the time. In “Feminist Manifesto” Loy stated that there “was nothing impure in sex—except the mental attitude toward it.” Rectifying this attitude, she wrote, “will constitute an incalculable & wider social regeneration than it is possible for our generation to imagine.”⁴⁴

In her poem “Psychic Evolution” Loy addressed “Criminal Lunacy” and “Cosmic Neurosis,” the latter of which she defined as fear-based on “inhibitive social and religious precepts.” In “Psycho-Democracy,” she uses the vocabulary of the occult to describe politics. “Power is a secret society of the minority whose hold on the majority lies in the esoteric or actual value of social ideas.”⁴⁵ Unlike Pound or Yeats, who saw an aristocratic secret society of artists as an entry into secret knowledge, Loy saw such posturing as dangerous. The goal for Loy was “to vindicate Humanity’s claim to Divine Destiny.”⁴⁶ Loy’s political and spiritual beliefs advance the model of progress that “takes place as individuals remove the mask of materiality, recognize the fictiveness of the physical realm, and move collectively toward a higher cosmic consciousness.”⁴⁷ Loy was also influenced by Eastern mysticism and Bergsonianism, which predisposed her to Christian Science in 1909 (she remained a believer until she died in 1966). She first became attracted to Christian Science in Florence when her daughter became ill and a practitioner of the religion seemed to help the child. (In Florence, there were many bohemian followers of Mary Baker Eddy, including Gertrude Stein and her family.) The appeal of Christian Science may be the source of Loy’s belief in an underlying scientific view of the universe.⁴⁸ The connection between politics and spirituality is evident in Loy’s poetry in the Little Review, particularly “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.”

Mina Loy was indeed an original. Modern scholars are finding her work a fascinating vehicle for uncovering the role of women artists in the avant-garde. Carolyn Burke writes, “Although Loy’s radicalism was disconcerting in her own time, contemporary readers are rediscovering her elliptical, fragmented images of a modern woman’s psychosexual experience as the revisionary histories of both modernism and feminism are gradually pieced together.”⁴⁹ Loy, later in life, seems to evade those determined to rescue her from oblivion, and even in her early years, she seemed indifferent to any lack of appreciation, telling Carl Van Vechten, “I have a fundamental masculine conceit that ascribes lack of appreciation of my work to want of perspicacity in the observer.”⁵⁰A more sedate writer than Loy, but just as invested in a spiritual lens, Dorothy Richardson, whose work was serialized in the Little Review, was one of the most prolific female modernists. She wrote thirteen novels, published from 1915 to 1935, collectively entitled Pilgrimage. The fifth novel of Pilgrimage, Interim, was published serially in the Little Review from June 1919 to April 1920. Each novel charts the journey of Richardson’s autobiographical heroine, Miriam Henderson. Richardson’s early-middle-class childhood security was devastated by her father’s bankruptcy and her mother’s suicide, and she was forced into jobs such as governess, tutor, and dental assistant. Her heroine, Miriam, follows a similar course; she lives in London as a boarder in a series of houses whose claustrophobic atmospheres contrast with a picturesque view of the large, expansive city. Indeed, as Richardson’s patron and friend Winifred Bryher believed, if people wanted “to know what England was like between 1890 and 1914, they must read Pilgrimage.”⁵¹ May Sinclair, an admirer of Richardson, reviewed the first three novels of Pilgrimage in a groundbreaking article published simultaneously in the Little Review and The Egoist in April 1918. In “The Novels of Dorothy Richardson” Sinclair was the first critic to utilize William James’s term “stream of consciousness” to describe the technique employed to reveal the inner mind of a character. “Miss Richardson has not plunged deeper than Mr. James Joyce in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” she writes, but “it is as if no other writer had ever used their senses so purely and with so intense a joy in their use.”⁵²

The comparison of Pilgrimage to the work of James Joyce would come up in future criticism; however, Richardson as a woman writer was also compared by later critics to Virginia Woolf. Woolf had read both Ulysses and Interim in the Little Review and admired—with certain qualifications—the boldness of their departures. Woolf’s particular connection to Richardson’s work was not merely implementing the stream of consciousness technique but also using it to investigate female consciousness. The inner workings of a woman’s psyche became inseparable from the question of a feminist consciousness in the work of Richardson and Woolf. Reviewing a later work by Richardson, Woolf wrote, “She has invented … a sentence … of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particle, of enveloping the vaguest shapes … It is a woman’s sentence.”⁵³ Feminist literary critics have grappled with the debate over language and gender, asking, “Is anatomy linguistic destiny?”⁵⁴ Dorothy Richardson certainly thought so. Her heroine, Miriam, states, “By every word they use men and women mean different things.”⁵⁵ Miriam Henderson, as Gillian Hanscombe and Virginia Smyers write, “thunders one of the most feminist cries in all twentieth-century literature—‘I wouldn’t have a man’s consciousness for anything.’ ”⁵⁶ Critics have perceived Miriam’s attitude toward men in Pilgrimage as ranging from “simultaneously attracted and repulsed” to one of utter indifference.⁵⁷ In his 1918 Dial review of Honeycomb, the third novel in the Pilgrimage series, Randolph Bourne writes, “To Miriam men are scarcely more than a distant earthquake registered on the seismograph of her wonder and perfect uncomprehendingness.”⁵⁸ In Interim, however, there is more than ample evidence that Miriam often has hostile thoughts about men. In the chapter that appeared in the August 1919 issue, Miriam attends a public lecture and thinks to herself, “Most men … used their knowledge like a code or weapon to crush someone.” They did so because they liked the “suggestion of their superior knowledge.”⁵⁹ In a particularly interesting passage, Miriam reflects on a group of Canadian medical interns living in her London boarding house. “Being doctors and still students they ought to be the most hateful and awful kind of men in relation to women, thinking and believing all the horrors of medical science—the hundred golden rules of gynecology. If they had been Englishmen they would have gone about making one want to murder them, but they did not … to Canadians, women were people.”⁶⁰

Richardson’s tenure in London exposed her to a dazzling variety of intellectual influences that informed her worldview. As Gloria Fromm wrote in her biography of Richardson, she encountered “learned Russian Jews, anarchists, freethinkers, vegetarians, Cambridge philosophers, Anglican bishops, mystics, Quakers, scientists, writers. All of these and more worked their special effects, mixed with each other, and entered the life stream of a girl one would have scarcely noticed on a London street.”⁶¹Pilgrimage “looks back in its narrative content to London in the ‘long’ turn of the century and articulates the often tense relationship between rationalism and mysticism, specifically of the interaction between socialism, feminism, and religion.”⁶²

Richardson’s interest in mysticism and religion was explicitly geared to the Quaker faith. Before writing Pilgrimage, she lived in a Quaker commune in Sussex and wrote two books on the religion. She was attracted to Quakerism because of the emphasis on the inner light, as opposed to the institutional hierarchy of the Anglican Church, and the respect shown to women as equals. Howard Finn holds that Richardson engaged in a “conflation of mystic, feminist and socialist in the figure of the artist” which “has to be seen in the context of the convergence of Christian and socialist sects in the London of the 1880s and 1890s.”⁶³ Richardson wrote that Quaker women were “entirely self-centered, self-controlled, proud and serene and withdrawn, yet not withholding.” For them “the world is home and the home is the world.”⁶⁴

Like other writers in this chapter, Richardson was sustained by friendships with women, including H. D. and Winifred Bryher, the daughter of a shipping magnate, who assisted Richardson financially over the years with a regular allowance. In her autobiography, The Heart to Artemis, Bryher compared Richardson to the French author Colette. “Both were true revolutionaries, fighting not for dogmas of any colour but for the elementary rights of an inarticulate body of women who were treated like slaves until the end of the First World War.”⁶⁵

Although she traveled in the company of lesbians, the question of Richardson’s intimate involvement with women has been contested among scholars. She had an affair with H. G. Wells and was later married to Alan Odle, an artist fifteen years her junior, from 1917 to 1948. Biographical studies of Richardson have described an intense emotional relationship with Vera Leslie-Jones and alluded to the possibility of a sexual encounter. Joanne Winning in The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson contends that Richardson was in love with Leslie-Jones and mentions “the possibility of a lesbian sexual relationship.”⁶⁶ More significantly, Winning argues that in Pilgrimage itself, there exists “the thread of lesbian desire that operates just below the surface narrative of the text”; in fact, she argues, “If Pilgrimage does possess a ‘master’ narrative, I believe it is the embedded lesbian subtext that runs throughout its thirteen-novel length.”⁶⁷ Perhaps more so than other examples of modernist heterosexual women who may or may not have had emotional/sexual relationships with other women and may or may not have incorporated those relationships into their art, the case of Richardson remains unclear. However, regardless of what Anderson and Heap thought of the question of what they were publishing, their appreciation of her work was deep enough to serialize Interim simultaneously with Ulysses.Like Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair was born into a comfortable middle-class family that was soon ruined and broken up by poverty. Also, like Richardson, she was immensely prolific, writing twenty-four novels, forty short stories, two books of poetry, two books of philosophy, and multiple critical essays whose range was truly astounding. She deeply explored such varied subjects as feminism, psychical research, Imagism, mysticism, psychoanalysis, and other explorations of the confluence of consciousness, art, and politics. Sinclair graced the pages of the Little Review, mainly with the serialization of her most popular novel, Mary Olivier, as well as with trenchant literary reviews that broke new critical ground. However, her reputation faded, and she is now a competitor for most forgotten feminist pioneer of the early modernist era.

Sinclair’s 1904 novel The Divine Fire, a book some thought was a mischievous portrait of Ezra Pound, brought her first real public attention. Sinclair was important to Pound and other early Imagists. After Pound arrived in London, she introduced him to Ford Madox Ford and Harriett Monroe. She defended the Imagists, whom establishment poets criticized, and incorporated their precepts into her work. Pound included her poem “After the Retreat” in a 1915 issue of The Egoist dedicated to Imagism. Pound also introduced Sinclair to H. D., whose work Sinclair soon praised in print. Her review of H. D.’s piece “Two Notes” in The Egoist singles the poet out for special praise. “To me,” Sinclair wrote, “H. D. is the most significant of the Imagists, the one for whom Imagism has most triumphantly ‘come off.’ ” She continued, “What the Imagists are ‘out for’ is direct naked contact with reality. You must get closer and closer.”⁶⁸ During this period, Pound also sought Sinclair’s help in his effort to assist T. S. Eliot. Her groundbreaking essay, “Prufrock and Other Observations,” solicited by Pound for publication in the Little Review in December of 1917, put Eliot on the map.

As noted above, Sinclair did much the same for Dorothy Richardson. Andrew Kunka and Michele Troy point out that “she helped confer legitimacy on Dorothy Richardson’s prose by creating a theory that could frame in a positive light what many critics have previously disregarded as Richardson’s unrestrained babbling.”⁶⁹ In the immediate aftermath of her famous review of Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Sinclair began her breakthrough work, Mary Olivier: A Life, serialized in the Little Review from January to May of 1919. Contemporary reviewers and modern critics have often compared Richardson’s portrayal of Miriam in Pilgrimage to Sinclair’s Mary Olivier. In a 1919 article in The Dial, Babette Deutsch reviewed Richardson’s The Tunnel (the book that immediately followed Interim) and Mary Olivier, arguing that “for all their interesting differences, they use one method and achieve one end.”⁷⁰ There were differences, though. Whereas Miriam ventures early toward broader horizons, Mary is ensnared and circumscribed by the jealous possessiveness of her mother. While both are spiritual seekers in their own way, Mary is truly the pursuer of “Reality.” As an infant, Mary has mystical experiences: “A clear white light everywhere, like water, thin and clear … She saw the queer white light for the first time and drew in her breath with a sharp check.”⁷¹ As she grows, Mary becomes intellectually precocious, reading Kant, Spinoza, and Locke while rebelling against her mother’s Christianity. This religious mutiny coincides with her growing interest in being a writer, immersing herself in Idealism and reconciling a lost love with her endless quest for Reality. However, not all critics saw the heroine as a model of spiritual growth. One of the more barbed accounts was from the Gurdjieff disciple Katherine Mansfield, who wrote, “In the beginning Mary is two, but at the end she is still two.”⁷²

Although Pound solicited Sinclair to write the Eliot appraisal for the Little Review, it seems unlikely he invited Mary Olivier for publication. The story of Mary Olivier, a young woman struggling to break free from a suffocating mother and the tyranny of Victorian morality, probably held little fascination for Pound. However, it might have greatly attracted Anderson, who could easily identify with striving for independence from an overbearing mother—the heroine fights with her mother, as Anderson did, for example, for the right to read certain books. While Anderson may have been interested in both Sinclair’s content and technique, Heap was less impressed. After the novel’s serialization had concluded in the Little Review, Heap wrote a critique that is of interest not only because it demonstrates her powers as a critic but also because it reveals her own personal distance from the heroine—a figure thought of by others as a rebel. “Mary Olivier, who is supposed to be an ‘exceptional being,’—mentally, spiritually, physically—also an artist, is frustrated at every turn by her weak beautiful mama—her life deferred for forty years. May Sinclair has very successfully portrayed this type of mother—the carnivorous flowers, but she seems to forget that carnivorous flowers devour only insects.” Heap continues, “Mary Olivier may be to some readers all that May Sinclair puts her up to be, but to me she is the prototype of the American college woman—always young, always untouched, with mind and heart of some psychic rubber from which tragedy, experience, intuitions bounce off, leaving them forever buoyant athletic debutantes of life, at whatever age you meet them … minds, voices, gestures, bodies ungrown and oblivious of grace and contours of sex. I call them unfertilized eggs.”⁷³

Sinclair was sufficiently annoyed by Heap’s review to write her a personal letter of complaint. “I was surprised to find jh taking the crass & attentive view of the least intelligent of my British reviewers. I would have thought it was obvious that this book was the history of our escape from the Mother, the ‘Carnivorous flower.’ Mary manages to do all the things that matter, most in spite of opposition. From the very beginning, her inside life was absolutely untouched. You seem to consider this soundness a sign of sex deficiency—there again I would have thought it obvious that Mary had rather more, if anything, than less, of the normal equipment.”⁷⁴

The allusion to sexuality here is interesting. In Sinclair’s view, the “Life-Force” or reproductive capacities of women are intimately connected to moral superiority and inspired genius. A woman such as Mary Olivier (who Sinclair freely admitted was based at least partly on herself) could ultimately sublimate sexuality into artistic creativity. Sinclair’s personal life no doubt contributed to this view; she never married or had children. Like Mary Olivier, her relationships with men that may have ended in marriage were thwarted by Sinclair’s sense of obligation to her mother. The themes of Mary Olivier elaborate on the way underlying family tensions, some of them rooted in themes of sexual frustration and desire, were a particular obstacle to women’s pursuit of their dreams. Sinclair’s interest in psychoanalysis (she was invited to join the board of the Medico-Psychological Clinic in London in 1913) accounts for the subterranean dynamics of family life she explores in her work.

Sinclair held a somewhat complicated view of feminism, considering her wide range of intellectual and artistic interests. There were feminist themes in many of her fictional works, including her earliest novels Audrey Craven (1897), Mr. and Mrs. Neville Tyson (1898), The Helpmate (1907), and The Judgment of Eve (1908). More specifically, Sinclair supported the British suffragists of the early twentieth century. She joined the Women Writers’ Suffrage League and Women’s Freedom League, wrote articles supporting the vote, and collected money on the London streets for the cause. Sinclair’s 1905 article in the New York Times Saturday Review, “Superman: A Symposium” introduced American audiences to the phrase “Superwoman.” In 1908, Sinclair published an article in the periodical Votes for Women in which she wrote, “The Nineteenth Century was an age of material cocksureness and of spiritual doubt. The Twentieth Century will be the age of spiritual certainty … [which will] come through the coming revolution by the release of long captive forces—by the breathing in among us of the spirit of Life, the genius of enfranchised womanhood.”⁷⁵ Sinclair couches feminism in the language of her philosophical Idealism. She was, as Jim Gough writes, the “Idealist-Feminist Philosopher” who was “creating a full communion with the Life Force, like mystics, poets and musicians—and the suffragist.”⁷⁶

Idealism was a philosophy that permeated all of Sinclair’s interests; her philosophical treatises A Defense of Idealism (1917) and The New Idealism (1922) were efforts to explore her magnified awareness. Babette Deutsch, in her review of Mary Olivier, wrote that the novel “reads like a fictional transcription of Miss Sinclair’s Defense of Idealism.”⁷⁷ In her introduction to Defense of Idealism, Sinclair defends her decision to include a chapter on Mysticism, anticipating that readers “may even look on its inclusion as an outrageous loading of the dice.” Egging on her critics, she writes, “To them I can only reply that that is why I have given to Mysticism a place apart.”⁷⁸ Another aspect of Sinclair’s work is demonstrated by the “spooky stories” that appear in two books, Uncanny Stories (1923) and The Intercessor (1931). These ghost stories shed light on her view of and history with the otherworldly: Sinclair believed she saw a ghost as a child, and as an adult, she attended séances and was elected to the Society for Psychical Research in 1914. Rebecca Neff has pointed out that Uncanny Stories “provides an impressive link between the nineteenth-century fascination with Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Psychical Research and the modern revival of interest in parapsychology, faith healing and mind control.”⁷⁹ Neff argues that the “flashes of Reality” described in Mary Olivier were Sinclair’s own experiences, “which she early associated with the workings of the unconscious. These recurring incidents prompted her continuing interest in those powers variously called intuitive, psychic, mystic, and initiated a personal quest for ultimate reality.”⁸⁰ In Sinclair’s story “The Finding of the Absolute,” James Spaulding—an Idealist— cannot reconcile evil with his belief in Absolute Goodness. Spaulding, “like Sinclair, rejected the God of Christianity because He is not metaphysical enough.”⁸¹ When Spaulding dies, he has a personal encounter with his hero Kant; they chat about metaphysical concepts of Space, Time, and the Categorical Imperative, among other subjects.⁸²

It is possible that most Sinclair scholars deliberately avoid dealing in depth with her “spooky stories,” fearing that her precarious attachment to modernism might be lessened further. In Defense of Idealism Sinclair wrote, “There is a certain embarrassment in coming forward with an Apology for Idealistic Monism at the present moment. You cannot be quite sure whether you are putting in an appearance too late or too early.”⁸³ Indeed, for May Sinclair the experience of being too late or too early was one she never resolved in her life or letters.Admired by many of her contemporaries, Mary Butts, like Sinclair, has only recently been examined in depth by current scholars. Butts seems to be “the most neglected of the female modernists” published in the Little Review. Her biographer writes, “Mary Butts was no marginal figure on the Modernist scene … [yet] again and again she has slipped through the net of literary histories of the period, often appearing as an inaccurate footnote.”⁸⁴ Butts deeply shared May Sinclair’s interest in “spooky stories.” Her critical essay “Ghosties and Ghoulies: Uses of the Supernatural in English Fiction” demonstrates that Butts was a voracious reader of these stories. She praised Sinclair’s Uncanny Tales, observing that the work had “a most persuasive enchantment.” However, Butts’s interest in the occult was much more personal than Sinclair’s.

Mary Butts was born in 1890 at her family’s home, Salterns, in Dorset, a place that would figure prominently in her thought and work. Her great grandfather, Thomas Butts, was a friend and patron of William Blake, and over forty original Blake illustrations hung in the home where Mary grew up. Her father died when she was a child, but she received a decent education for girls at the time, attending school in St. Andrews, Scotland, and in 1914 graduated from the London School of Economics with a certificate in social science. Butts began a diary in 1916 when her affair with Eleanor Rogers was ending and she was falling in love with the poet John Rodker, who was in hiding to avoid wartime conscription. Her diary continued until a month before her death in 1937. She recorded a distinctly bohemian life in London and Paris in the circles of Pound, Sinclair, Stein, and Cocteau. In the twenties, Butts began a life-long habit of using opium, hashish, and heroin. Her drug addiction made her too unconventional for some modernist affiliates such as H. D, Bryher (who nevertheless admired her work), and Virginia Woolf, who disliked her and called her a member of “the underground.”⁸⁵ Regardless, Butts did indeed cut a striking figure, described as having “carrot-colored hair, pale blue eyes, nearly translucent white skin, a single white jade earring … Crawling in and out of pubs, bars, cafes, under the influence of myriad substances, her persona no doubt in some ways dwarfed her work.”⁸⁶

Butts’s fervent explorations into the occult made her particularly exceptional to her peers. Her second husband, Cecil Maitland, well known for his interest in magic, introduced her to Aleister Crowley, aka “The Great Beast, 666.” The couple even stayed at Crowley’s infamous Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily, in 1921; however, Butts did not remain enamored of Crowley, calling his den of witchcraft full of “profligacy and vice.” She may have been exacting revenge because Crowley portrayed her in his novel, Diary of a Drug Fiend, as a “fat, bold, red-headed slut” who wrote the “most deplorably dreary drivel.”⁸⁷ By the thirties Butts continued to be plagued by drugs and poverty. Late in life, she converted to Anglo-Catholicism.

Although Butts died at an early age, she produced five novels, three collections of short stories, one novella, an autobiography, poetry, and numerous critical reviews. Her work published in the Little Review included “Lettres Imaginaires” (Oct–Nov 1919), five chapters of her mystic novel Ashe of Rings (January–March, Autumn 1921), a number of poetry reviews, and the short story “Magic” (July–August 1920), which Roslyn Foy described as her “initial foray” into the supernatural and occult writing.⁸⁸ The depth of Butts’s interest in the occult is evident in her diary. It is teeming with observations on the fourth dimension, Greek religion, Russian literature, T. S. Eliot, and the “Daimon,” among other spiritual/literary references. One entry, on February 25, 1920, reads, “Have practiced automatic writing—were scrawls, but so far as I can tell, automatic.”⁸⁹ The following spring she wrote more confidently, “Took an astral journey before going to sleep.”⁹⁰ However, it was not a purely personal subject; the themes of mysticism and magic were fundamental to her work.

Her novel Ashe of Rings, which appeared in the Little Review in 1921 (published in book form by Contact Press four years later), illustrates how her biography and art were closely intertwined. The protagonist, Anthony Ashe, presides over his ancestral home on the seacoast of England. The name “Rings” refers to a mysterious set of concentric rings near the house, making it a “place of legend” where druid priests, Romans, Celts, and Saxons all conducted ancient rituals. A fairy tale full of references to the occult, paganism, and witchcraft, the novel weaves a complex story whose heroine is ultimately restored as the rightful heir to the ancient seat of her family’s sacred land. Butts’s inspiration for Ashe of Rings went back to her childhood. She was raised near an area known as Badbury Rings, “a mysterious set of prehistoric mounded circles” that had a profound influence on her. As a youth, Butts had a mystical experience at Badbury Rings that she describes in her autobiography, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns (1937): “That afternoon I was received. Like any other candidate for ancient initiations, accepted. Then in essence, but a process that time after time would be perfected in me. Rituals whose objects were knitting up and setting out and the makings of correspondence, a translation which should be ever valid, between the seen and unseen.”⁹¹ In the character of Valentine Ashe, the brother of the heroine Vanna, Butts makes clear connections to the Hermetic traditions so close to Yeats’s heart: Basil Valentine was a renowned Renaissance alchemist. Butts’s connection to the land, specifically to “a lost Albion,” informed her life and work. While many artists saw in the end of the Great War a civilization destroyed, Butts saw a vanished realm in a uniquely personal way. Roslyn Foy writes that in Ashe the heroine, Vanna, “is the embodiment of an ancient priestess who authentically practices the ritual and magic that her ancestors so clearly bequeath to her. She is closely connected to the animism of the land. For her, divinity is inseparable from the land and is immanent in nature.”⁹²

Her first publication in the Little Review was “Lettres Imaginaires” (1919), which traces the bitter breakup of a relationship from the woman’s perspective. It reveals the intense acrimony between the sexes. Hurt by her lover’s rejection, Varya, the main character, writes, “I understand that I was a target for some sacred male encounter with its own might.”⁹³ Like her contemporaries, Butts thought and wrote about the feminist philosophy of early twentieth-century England; very much like Sinclair, she intertwined the mystical themes of her work with a feminist foundation. Both Sinclair and Butts were avid readers of the work of the Classics scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, whose interpretation of Greek myths “links the decline of the Mother Goddess with the thwarting of women’s creativity in the patriarchy, and argues that retrieving her power would liberate women’s creativity and spirituality.”⁹⁴ In her novels Armed with Madness (1928) and The Death of Felicity Taverner (1932), Butts’s work, writes Heather Ingman, “combines Hellenic myth with legends of the Grail to align women with nature and position them as saviors of the land of England.”⁹⁵ Butts was briefly the focal point of the “Berkeley Renaissance” in the late 1940s, and a further revival of interest was prompted by the publication of her biography and diary in 1998. Her fascination with magic and paganism in particular have served as vehicles to rekindle interest in her art.⁹⁶The promotion of Dada and one of the most controversial American Dadaist poets, Baroness Elsa von Freytag- Loringhoven, cemented the Little Review’s reputation as the most iconoclastic journal of the avant-garde.

Pound sent Anderson the “Dada Manifesto,” written by Tristan Tzara, which Anderson published in the January–March 1921 issue. Although he admired the work of some individual Dadaists, including Tzara, Pound was not impressed by the movement as a whole. When he stepped down as foreign editor of the Little Review, Pound recommended the famous Dadaist Frances Picabia to replace him. However, he wrote Anderson in April 1921, “In taking Picabia, I do NOT suggest that you take Dadaism and all ‘les petits dadas.’ ”⁹⁷ It was a suggestion Anderson and Heap had already ignored. The most prominent European and American Dadaists—along with their artistic offspring, the surrealists—would appear with great regularity in the Little Review.

Dada was not classifiable with any person, perspective, or design; it never demonstrated a single consistent platform; and it was continually fluid and fluctuating. It was an international movement springing up in urban areas of Switzerland, Germany, France, and the United States. Most art historians agree that the birth of Dada was a direct result of the artists’ perception of the insanity and brutality of World War I. As a movement, Dada exalted chaos, discord, nihilism, and irrationality. Hans Arp, one of the founders of Dada and a contributor to the Little Review, believed that Dada aimed “to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order. Dada wanted to replace logical nonsense of the men today by the illogically senseless.”⁹⁸ The leading light of Dada was Tzara, who, it is said, picked the term out of the dictionary at random. Tzara argued, “Dada does not mean anything;” it was “a state of mind.”⁹⁹

The key figures of New York Dada were Frances Picabia, who made several extended visits to the city beginning in 1913; Marcel Duchamp, who moved there from France in 1915; and the New York transplant Man Ray, who spent most of his career in Paris. There was close communication between New York and Parisian Dada circles. Tzara’s letters to Walter Arensberg, the wealthy art collector and friend of Duchamp, indicate that Tzara was consciously trying to forge an international movement. In the early 1920s, the Little Review published the most famous Dadaists’ writing and artwork, including that of Tzara, Picabia, Ray, André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Phillipe Soupault. Other writers not strictly defined as Dada but whose work had related elements, such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, and Fernand Léger, also had poetry and prose pieces published in the Little Review. Anderson wrote in the Little Review that Dada was a vital movement in the arts, though years later she flatly stated she detested it.¹⁰⁰

However, one Dadaist artist commanded the respect of both Anderson and Heap: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She was, according to Anderson, “perhaps the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet extraordinary.”¹⁰¹ She was a poet and artist who, for many, served as a flesh and blood incarnation of Dada; if there was an American Dada it was embodied in the work and life of the Baroness. Loringhoven’s career and personality can serve as a prism through which we can examine issues of art, gender, sexuality, and poverty in the bohemian community. Anderson and Heap were fascinated by her unconventional yet deeply earnest use of costume as a statement of self. The intense quality of the Baroness’s poetry led some to question her sanity. Heap no doubt felt an added attraction because of the debate over the role of madness and art, which had engrossed her since childhood. Freytag-Loringhoven’s poetry, her aggressive sexuality, and her Nietzschean conviction of her superiority as an artist were factors that certainly impressed Anderson and Heap. These very same qualities seemed to have repulsed others. In an arena where radical politics, sexual freedom, and avant-garde art were supposed to be the norm, the Baroness was still a bit too much for many Villagers. Nevertheless, in spite of their feelings of being overwhelmed by her behavior at times, the two Little Review editors remained convinced of her genius. They were deeply aggrieved by her struggles and early death, which Anderson characterized as tragic.

Born in Germany in 1874 to a middle-class family, Freytag-Loringhoven studied drama in Berlin and art at Dachau as a young woman. After a peripatetic existence in Kentucky and Ohio, she made her way in 1913 to New York, where she met and married the Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven. When World War I erupted the baron returned to Germany where he was captured as a POW and subsequently committed suicide, leaving his widow alone and penniless. The Baroness moved to Greenwich Village and lived in cold-water flats while supporting herself as an artist’s model. She worked at the New York School of Art and the Ferrer School and posed for John Sloan, Robert Henri, George Bellows, William Glackens, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Beatrice Abbott. She appeared in Ray and Duchamp’s New York Dada and posed nude for a Ray film, shaving her pubic hair. As more European artists arrived in New York, they gathered at Arensberg’s salon, where the Baroness mingled and was one of the favorite objects of gossip.¹⁰² Poverty was a chronic problem. At one point, she worked in a cigarette factory until co-workers, unnerved by her unusual garb and brash behavior, physically attacked her. She also spent her time writing, painting, and making sculptures out of objects she found in the city streets or shoplifted from department stores. Anderson wrote that the Baroness was so adept at escaping from paddy wagons that the police often let her go out of admiration for her skills. Her love of dogs intensified her predicament; she often kept several, feeding them by scavenging city garbage pails. Not only was her work described as Dada but her very person also seemed to embody the quintessence of the movement. Her poetry, ready-mades, and sculptures definitely attracted attention, but even her body and performance art personified the soul of Dada. She had established a unique and colorful brand, scathing, rancorous, audacious, combative, scandalous, and flabbergasting.

Anderson’s description of the Baroness during her first visit to the Little Review office gives a vivid sense of her dramatic costumes. The Baroness “wore a red Scotch plaid suit with a kilt hanging just below the knees, a bolero jacket with sleeves to the elbows, and arms covered with a quantity of ten-cent-store bracelets—silver, gilt, bronze, green, and yellow.” Anderson goes on to describe the Baroness’s “high wide spats with a decorative furniture braid around the top. Hanging from her bust were tea balls from which the nickel had worn away. On her head was a black velvet Tam O’Shanter with a feather and several spoons—long ice cream-soda spoons. She had enormous earrings of tarnished silver and on her hands were many rings, on the little finger high peasant buttons filled with shot.”¹⁰³

This was apparently one of her milder fashion statements. The Baroness was seen in the Village wearing a coal scuttle for a hat, a vegetable grater for a brooch, and walking naked under a Mexican blanket. During that first visit to Heap and Anderson’s office, the Baroness stole a roll of stamps, but they took it philosophically. “Knowing her as we did later,” explained Anderson, “it is safe to assume that she used them for decorative purposes.”¹⁰⁴ Anderson was correct. When the Baroness attended the Provincetown Theatre’s benefit for the Little Review, she appeared with lips painted black and postage stamps plastered on her yellow-painted face.

As Robert Reiss points out, the Baroness was mentioned in various autobiographies of Villagers of that era, but usually only as a “footnote … and then only as comic relief to otherwise sound narratives.”¹⁰⁵ Indeed, most of the accounts of Freytag-Loringhoven concern such behavior as shaving her head, acting in a sexually aggressive fashion toward men, or being arrested for theft or indecent exposure. Two of her romances, a platonic one with Duchamp and a more notorious tangle with Williams Carlos Williams, were played out in her poetry, the pages of the Little Review, and memoirs about the Village in the age of Dada. The Baroness and Duchamp lived in the same apartment building for a while and engaged in prolonged discussions of art. She was clearly in love with Duchamp, revered his brilliance as an artist, and found him invaluable in sustaining her spirits.

Esoteric or occult interests within the Duchamp/Arensberg/Dreier sphere seem to have functioned through a self-perpetuating circle of influence. In Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp, the art historian John Moffitt argues that Duchamp’s career mirrored that of earlier occultist artists—in particular, he was a practicing alchemist—and also makes a case for occult interests in Duchamp’s intimate New York assemblage. Arensberg was captivated with alchemy and cryptology; he wrote books arguing that Francis Bacon was the true Shakespeare and the founder of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Arensberg’s compatriot, Katherine Dreier, was a Theosophist. Dreier and Duchamp founded the Société Anonyme in 1920. Moffitt assumes that because Arensberg and Dreier were financially and emotionally supporting Duchamp, their views must have influenced his work. However, he does not take into account the Baroness’s beliefs in this interpretation. Although Moffitt addresses all of the familiar artists of the Arensberg/Dreier salons at length, the Baroness is not mentioned once in his three hundred and seventy-five-page book.

Duchamp, though he expressed appreciation of the Baroness’s work, certainly did not reciprocate her romantic feelings. When she tired of his indifference, she recorded her feelings in her first poem published in the Little Review. “Love—Chemical Relationship,” dedicated to Duchamp, references his epic piece, Large Glass.

Thou now livest motionless in a mirror!/
Everything is a mirage in thee—thine world is glass-glassy!/
Glassy are thine ears—thine hands—thine feet and thine face …/
SO long must I love it until I myself will become glass …¹⁰⁶

Although we have no way of knowing if “chemical” in the poem alludes to alchemy, it certainly does refer to Duchamp’s well-known reserve—a coldness the effusive Baroness must have felt acutely.

If her relationship with Duchamp was unreciprocated, her romantic entanglement with William Carlos Williams was volatile. Many Villagers of this period described the Baroness’s infatuation with Williams, who was also a Little Review contributor. Williams first became aware of the Baroness when he went to the Little Review office and saw her sculpture of Duchamp. He later wrote that the Dadaist structure looked to him “like chicken guts, possibly imitated in wax.”¹⁰⁷ Williams expressed an interest in meeting the artist but was informed by Anderson and Heap that the Baroness was currently incarcerated in the Women’s House of Detention for stealing an umbrella. They met on her release, he took her out to breakfast, and a volatile friendship was begun. Williams told the Baroness he was in love with her; she became obsessed with the poet, tirelessly pursuing him. Williams soon grew weary of her constant surveillance. He “flattened her,” in his words, “with a stiff punch to the mouth,” then made a complaint to have her arrested.¹⁰⁸ According to Anderson, Freytag-Loringhoven was deeply aggrieved by Williams’ rejection; she dressed in a mourning crepe, stolen from a department store. The imbroglio with Williams exploded into a battle of the sexes, with local observers taking sides. Williams himself wrote, “All the old girls of Greenwich Village were backing her.”¹⁰⁹ Anderson argued that Williams could have put a stop to the Baroness’s pursuit by “treating her like a human being (as Marcel Duchamp did) and convincing her that it was no use. But instead he acted like a small boy and wrote her insulting letters in which his panic was all too visible.”¹¹⁰ Williams’s biographer wrote that he was “comic, flippant, cruel, when he talked about the Baroness, but he really did admire her ability to survive and eat life whole.”¹¹¹

The Baroness exacted revenge on her erstwhile lovers in her poems. In “Graveyard Surrounding Nunnery,” a poem sent to the Little Review, she unloaded on Duchamp, Williams, and her in-between flame, Robert Fulton Logan, a painter and teacher. The poem was not published, no doubt because it was accompanied by drawings of penises in a graveyard; this was too much for the editors, who feared further censorship.

Several critics surmise that the depth of her betrayal went beyond unrequited love. The Baroness’s fury may have been stoked by the perception that Duchamp and Williams played as bohemians while she had the guts, as Heap so aptly put it, to be someone “who dresses Dada, loves Dada, lives Dada.”¹¹² As Heap saw it, while Duchamp and Williams gloried in their macho bravado as society’s outlaws, they came nowhere near the Baroness in her sheer grit, eking out a real artistic life. This was to be a running theme in the Baroness’s art and love life, one she was not shy shouting about (literally) from the Village’s streets to the pages of the Little Review.

The Baroness’s poems, which numbered over twenty, and various other letters and commentary were published in the journal fairly consistently until 1922. A few—such as “Merk Mar Mustir” (December 1918), “The Cast-Iron Lover” (September 1919), and “Thee I Call Hamlet of the Wedding Ring” (January-March 1921)—created acute astonishment even among self-proclaimed makers of the “new.” “Thee I Call Hamlet of the Wedding Ring,” her eleven-page critique of Williams’s “Kora in Hell,” was pitiless in its mockery of Williams, his art, and his masculinity “that masqueraded in brutality: male bluff …

In vino veritas.
Try it-W.C.
Ostrich-head in dollar heap
… Hideous cripple … audacity of inexperience—cowardice of insincerity Carlos Williams—you wobbly-legged business satchel-carrying little louse!¹¹³

Kuenzli writes that the Baroness’s review was “arguably the most outrageous item the Little Review published in all its years of existence. Never had a male writer been so excoriated by a female critic.”¹¹⁴

While worthy of heated gossip, the Williams controversy was not the only one associated with the Baroness. Her views on spirituality have drawn the attention of some scholars. The most intriguing if ambivalent piece of evidence of her spiritual proclivities is her 1917 sculpture God, most often described as a piece of a contorted plumbing trap on a wooden miter box. Susan Noyes Platt argues persuasively that some modernists, including Heap, saw the American “Machine Age” as full of potential for spiritual exploration and expression (see chapter 7). The Baroness’s work reveals a contemptuous attitude towards a spiritual higher power—or at least toward any evidence that such a Being manifests itself in human existence. Most of her poems that may seem to have spiritual concerns often conflate God, religion, and Christianity with sex.¹¹⁵

Anderson and Heap found themselves defending the Baroness from attackers who responded with outrage to the printing of her poetry. When the nine-page “Cast-Iron Lover” appeared in the September 1919 issue, it evoked heated complaints from incensed subscribers. Lola Ridge alleged that the poem was “a retching assault upon art.” “F. E. R.” (Florence Reynolds, Heap’s former lover in Chicago) wrote, “How can you who have had the honour of printing Yeats open your pages to the work of the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven?”¹¹⁶ Heap replied in “The Reader Critic” section, “It’s a bit too easy and a little sentimental, isn’t it, to ask such questions? Yeats was born an old master. Do you feel you ‘understand’ Yeats better than you do Elsa von Freytag? We are not limiting ourselves to the seven arts. No one has yet done much about the Art of Madness.”¹¹⁷ “F. E. R.” wrote back, charging Heap with being “glib” with the phrase “Art of Madness” and complaining, “My question as to why you publish the work of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven seems to me to be still unanswered. Will you kindly carry on the discussion?”¹¹⁸

The discussion was to carry on in the form of a debate primarily between Heap and the critic Evelyn Scott over the mental stability of the Baroness and its impact on her work. In the December 1919 issue, Scott argued that the Baroness was “as jh says … a mad woman.” For Scott, Freytag-Loringhoven’s insanity explained the eccentric yet feverish quality of her poetry. “It is only in a condition of disease or mania,” claimed Scott, “that one may enjoy an absolutely exalted state, that numbness of the sensibilities toward everything outside the single inspiration.”¹¹⁹ Heap protested that Scott’s interpretation misconstrued and distorted her use of the word “madness.” “It wouldn’t be the art of madness if it were merely an insanity such as Miss Scott describes. In the case of Freytag-Loringhoven, I am not talking of mania and disease of numbed sensibilities … hers is a willed state. A woman of brains, of mad beauty … who has abandoned sanity may at all times enjoy an exalted state. Madness is her chosen state of consciousness.”¹²⁰

It is essential to remember Heap’s youthful memories, sketching art on the grounds of the Topeka State Insane Asylum where her father worked. Her letters to Florence Reynolds in those summers of 1908–9 demonstrate a simple sympathy for the inmates and genuine empathy. In her defense of the Baroness, Heap argues that if madness is a willed state and the figure in question is an artist, then true art cannot help but follow. Furthermore, madness is a brave choice made by artists such as the Baroness, whose dedication to art meant true suffering in life, a clear contrast to Duchamp or Williams. The debate carried on into 1920 with Scott arguing that the Baroness was clinically insane and had “walked perilously near (if not passed over) the edge beyond which the vision of delirium melts into the blank self-enwrapped exaltation of trance.”¹²¹ Heap countered, “When a person has created a state of consciousness which is madness and adjusts (designs and executes) every form and aspect of her life to fit this state there is no disorder anywhere, and therefore no disease.”¹²² In a letter following Heap’s comments, Freytag-Loringhoven herself stated, “jh understands me wonderfully-perfectly … Is it not necessary for emotions to come out—is it not necessary for emotional people to be like insane sometimes—to be more sane and steady and strong than others, weaker people after that? Is it not wonderful to be able to control that then, that emotion which otherwise would throttle you—but take it by the neck and make Art out of it—and be free?”¹²³ Scott would not give up, however. In the March 1920 issue she said of the Baroness’s letter, “I cannot believe after reading this semi-intelligible prose that the mental processes of the Baroness ever achieve that completion of their cycle which results in thought.”¹²⁴ Heap had grown weary of the debate. She felt frustrated by her inability to make her case clear to Scott. After this last volley Heap wrote, “I am glad to allow Miss Scott the last word. I withdraw quietly. I feel that I have been permitted a glimpse of the gentle mystic soul of an adding machine.”¹²⁵

Yet Heap could not resist countering when Harriet Monroe of Poetry joined the fray. In the Spring 1922 issue of the Little Review, Heap reprinted and responded to an editorial by Monroe in Poetry attacking the quality of Freytag-Loringhoven’s verse. “The trouble is,” charged Monroe, “the Little Review never knows when to stop. Just now it is headed straight for Dada; but we could forgive even that if it would drop Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven on the way.” Heap’s response was a protracted defense of both Dada and the Baroness. She asked, “Is Miss Monroe against Dada because Dada laughs, jeers, grimaces, gibbers, denounces, explodes, introduces ridicule into too churchy a game? Dada has flung its crazy bridges to a new consciousness. They are quite strong to hold the few in this generation that will pass over. Dada is making a contribution to nonsense. However, we do intend to drop the Baroness—right into the middle of the history of American poetry!”¹²⁶

Aside from her confidence in the Baroness’s rightful place in the history of American poetry, Heap’s comments are revealing in connecting Dada, the Baroness, and spirituality. She suggests to the staider Miss Monroe that poetry is “too churchy a game.” Dada and the Baroness are sacrilegious in the institutional sense of the arts. However, the point of Dada’s jeers and grimaces was not simply to denigrate but, in Heap’s words, “to inspire bridges to a new consciousness.” Anderson and Heap’s roads to Dada, later surrealism, and Machine Age Aesthetics are direct paths to their conversion to Gurdjieff. Their journey was about a new consciousness— one that was intensely interior, disdainful of contemporary society, and indifferent to critics.

Freytag-Loringhoven found another supporter of her work in Djuna Barnes. It took a while for Barnes to warm up to the eccentric poet, but she became a crucial source of assistance during the remainder of the Baroness’s life. When both women left the United States for Paris, Barnes supported the Baroness financially by selling a printer’s copy of Ulysses that Joyce had given her. She also commissioned Freytag-Loringhoven to write her memoirs. Barnes was sincerely impressed by the Baroness’s poetry. Anderson wrote that Barnes viewed it “as perhaps the best of any woman’s of our time.”¹²⁷

The Baroness died in Paris in 1926 from gas fumes emitted by an open oven. Though suicide was suspected, the evidence seems to indicate it was an accident. As a memorial Barnes contributed several of the Baroness’s letters to her to Transition magazine, which also published the death mask of the poet as a tribute to the woman they called “the mother of Dada.” Anderson was so moved by the pathos of Freytag-Loringhoven’s accounts of poverty and loneliness in these letters that she reprinted one of them in both the last issue of the Little Review and in My Thirty Years’ War. In this letter, the Baroness described being reduced to selling newspapers on the street: “I on the streets—freezing to boot, in such weather people do not buy. I wish you would give me some time for comfort—once! Stroke my hands—and give me ‘cheer up.’ Talk with me; listen to me. I am human and am not newspaper seller! I have no more time—must go to sell—I should like to laugh with you—to be gay, I can be that! It is my nature—that sounds ghastly now … that is the tragedy—I still feel deep in me glittering …”¹²⁸ The person of the Baroness can be viewed as a literal manifestation of the spirit of the Little Review—iconoclastic, sexually liberated, and flirting with madness as artistic expression. It is little wonder that both Anderson and Heap felt strongly attracted by both the work and personality of the first American Dada.

The publications of Stein, Barnes, Loy, Richardson, Sinclair, Butts and the Baroness that appeared in the Little Review demonstrate that Anderson and Heap had a specific interest in promoting female modernists despite the unpopularity some had with male writers, including Pound. In publishing these women, and in particular in publishing writing pertaining to lesbian issues, Anderson and Heap took a rebellious stance in relation to trends in both sexuality and literature in the early twentieth century—including literature published by other avant-garde little magazines. The unabashed feminism of Loy, Richardson, Sinclair, Butts and the Baroness went far beyond calls for suffrage to examine the heart of male/female relationships, expressing attitudes that would not be revisited until second-wave feminism. Many of these writers had obvious differences—the dark vision of Barnes, the humor of Stein and Loy, the rather conventional lives of Richardson and Sinclair, the uninhibited choices of Butts and Freytag-Loringhoven.

The theme of spirituality—Barnes’s characters’ awareness of their own damnation, Sinclair’s visions, Richardson’s Quakerism, Butts’s magic and paganism, and even the Baroness’s contemptuous view of God’s cruel bequest to humankind—permeates the work of all these writers. As time progressed, material in the Little Review became increasingly iconoclastic and esoteric. By the mid to late 1920s, the journal would turn more and more to avant-garde interests such as Machine Age Aesthetics and surrealism and the intersection between art and the esoteric would become more pronounced. George Ivanovich Gurdjieff would be mentioned for the first time in its pages.