4

Interregnum: Chicago, San Francisco, New York

Between 1916 and 1917, Margaret Anderson would undergo a transition in both her personal and professional lives that would have significant consequences for the future of the Little Review. She met Jane Heap, took the Little Review on the road, printed some of its more memorable issues from San Francisco, and decided to move the Little Review permanently to New York. There she, Heap, and their new foreign editor Ezra Pound would create what Anderson called the most vital period in the journal’s history.

In Anderson’s account, Heap’s arrival at the Little Review was accompanied by some commotion. According to Anderson, “An erratic rich woman with a high temper”—Aline Barnsdall, nicknamed “Nineteen Millions” because it was reputed to be the size of her fortune—was considering giving a generous contribution to the Little Review.¹ She met Heap at the Little Review office and took an instant dislike to her. Later, in her first autobiography, Anderson described the unpromising scenario:

We were talking of Duse and D’Annunzio. The millionairess hated Fire and felt that D’Annunzio was ignoble to have exposed Duse to such intimate treatment. She worked up her theme with sentimental abandon. Jane regarded her with interest and then gave a loud and tender laugh. “God love Duse,” said Jane; “she has always given me a large pain.” Nineteen Millions was furious. She left the studio saying that she disliked frivolity. She had always felt that the Little Review was a sanctum one could depend on for serious and inspiring conversation. My reaction was different. I felt that I could never henceforth dispense with Jane Heap’s frivolity.²

Anderson’s efforts to recruit Heap to write for the magazine took months of badgering. When Heap would groan that “she had no interest in life,” followed by “I’m a talker; I’m no writer,” Anderson knew her exertions were beginning to pay off. However, the titanic battle was far from over. Anderson would lock Heap in a room for hours to give her uninterrupted time to think. “I would do all the marketing—which was just as well in any case, as Jane disliked divulging to trades people the perfectly private matter of what food she was going to consume.” The process included Anderson taking Heap’s thoughts down in longhand, “touching such a range of subjects that it was impossible to decide which one would be of greatest news value for the Little Review.”³

One of Heap’s first articles was a paragraph criticizing her alma mater, the Art Institute of Chicago, comparing it to a trade school. This did not please the Chicago art establishment; Heap received considerable condemnation for her critique of the beloved local institution. Her response was the provocatively entitled article “Potatoes in the Cellar,” written under the pseudonym “R.G.” Her first sentence proclaimed, “I AM not here to harry institutions, to prod up mummies swathed in red tape and embalmed in routine and respectability, nor am I here to bury the unburied dead.” Getting directly to the matter, she wrote, “People say, ‘Why do you jump on the Art Institute for becoming a trade school? It is only following the tendencies of the times. Art is like everything else.’ There you have it!—the whole trouble. There is no consciousness of art, no consciousness that art is beyond all these things—that it is as the sun to the earth, and if it were to fail us we should grow like potatoes in a deep cellar.”⁴ Heap’s comments reveal her sense of despair, even failure, in her desire to pursue the path of a fulfilled artist. “An artist almost disgraces the family into which he is born,” she wrote. “He is pitied little by outsiders; he is left alone. At last, when he can stand it no longer, he breaks the parent’s heart and goes out full of high hope to find his own kind and to keep his own faith. After a short time he finds the art school very much like a factory; he learns to do his piece when he had thought to create a new beauty, and he finds, too, that he is still an outcast for his beliefs and desires.”⁵ What is clear from the outset of this article is that Heap shared with Anderson the same belief in the connection of art and spirituality, although, also like Anderson at this stage, she was ambiguous rather than precise in her beliefs. In the same article, Heap wrote, “The Artist knows as surely as though he walked with God upon those six days of creation that this He made and nothing more—but here He made all. Other men fill in the gap between what they are and what they feel they could be, what they long for and cannot find, what they attain and aspire to, with Religion.”⁶ However, what God had on his mind concerning other inexplicable mysteries, Heap left to others. She was not, we know, a Christian Scientist, a Theosophist, a New Thinker, and certainly not yet Gurdjieffian, but she was a Believer. As she wrote in one letter to Florence Reynolds, “Everything beautiful is God and all things not beautiful not God.”⁷ Like her private letters, her public articles reveal a woman who, though she may have been sharp-tongued and jaundiced, had not given up on the ultimate question. She was not afraid to lay bare in front of any audience the inherent contradictions with which she struggled.

When writing criticism, Heap also was not reluctant to let her rawer emotions show. More often than not, these occasions were when Heap herself—rather than the artist she was critiquing—was the center of her article. In an October 1916 article ostensibly about a concert by Ignacy Paderewski, the pianist shared the limelight with Heap and a famous member of the audience, the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Heap wrote, “we speculated prayerfully” that he would be in the audience since he was known to be in town.⁸ Even though Anderson and Heap were jammed standing in the back of the theater and Tagore occupied the first seat in the first row, somehow all four of the principles, along with members of the feline species, seem to figure somewhat seamlessly in Heap’s tale of an enchanted evening. She began her review of Paderewski’s performance with a curious opening: “THIS morning I lay in bed looking at the ceiling and thinking about cats. How elegant they are, and impenetrable,—and with what narrow slant-eyed contempt they look out upon the world. Perhaps that’s the way it looks through little black perpendicular slits … Anyway I thought of cats, and of violin strings made of catgut, and wondered about cats and music. Is it because violins are made of living things—wood and catgut and mother-of-pearl and hair—that they make the most beautiful music in the world?”⁹ Preparing for the beginning of Paderewski’s concert, she looked indifferently at the crowded house. There were too many people. “Then, with tears hurting my eyes and an ache in my throat choking me,” she pointed out Tagore to her friends “and made them look quickly so they wouldn’t see [her] cry. There he sat in the first chair in a robe the color of grass-cloth and a pale violet cap upon his head. From where [they] stood, it looked like a high forage cap, but soft; and he wore great glasses made of horn.” She continues, “[I] watched him until I was almost in a trance—the angle at which his head was put on, the cheekbones that were like an extra feature … Everything that lies beyond the reach of thought and wonder seemed concentrated in that dark Stranger. I trembled, frightened by my imagination and a little melancholy. At last Paderewski came out to his piano, elegant and impenetrable. I seemed to see him quite differently beside Tagore—a bright heaven beside a still universe. I was so filled there was no room left in me for the music.”¹⁰ Although Heap appreciated Paderewski’s performance, she gave his actual playing few sentences. The reader might conclude that Heap was attending a Tagore poetry reading as opposed to a Paderewski concert. Nevertheless, the fact that she contrasted the “bright heaven” of the pianist with the “still universe” of Tagore indicates she saw the dimension for art and the mystic within the same realm, though through different prisms.¹¹

When she was writing more traditional criticism, Heap tended to go for the jugular. In what became a regular column called “And”—a few paragraphs on current books, plays, music, etc.—Heap wrote brief, sharp observations on her subjects. Despite her midwestern background, or perhaps because of it, Heap was curtly dismissive of writers such as Sherwood Anderson—whom she once called a “pre-natal foetus”—and Theodore Dreiser, stating that “these writers want their books to be homely—the great American vice; made from the people, by the people, for the people. It’s merely another form of glorification of sockless senators, etc.” As if references to sockless senators were not insulting enough, she added, “They all sound as though they had been written in the morning.”¹²

Shortly after Anderson met Heap, Aline (“Nineteen Millions”) Barnsdall invited Anderson to spend the summer in Mill Valley, California. Anderson was delighted; she conceived a plan to publish the Little Review from nearby San Francisco for the duration of her stay. She was also determined to bring Heap along in spite of the scene in the Little Review office. Anderson later claimed that her typically stringent sense of etiquette fell victim to her fascination with Heap; she informed Barnsdall that Heap would also be arriving. When Barnsdall telegraphed Anderson, insisting she visit alone, Anderson threw the telegram away and proceeded with her plans. Anderson’s entourage also included Harriet Dean and Caesar Zwaska, a teenager and aspiring poet/ballet dancer from Licking, Missouri, who had enthusiastically read the Little Review and asked to be an office boy. When the entire group arrived, Barnsdale was predictably angry and refused to accommodate them. Anderson wrote in her autobiography that “Nineteen Millions” was so infuriated it was a wonder “she didn’t strike me. I once saw her strike a man in the face simply because he wouldn’t answer her. But then is there anything so exasperating as not being answered?”¹³ Zwaska and Dean were put in charge of finding an office in San Francisco; Heap and Anderson went off to find an affordable mountain cabin. The pair headed into the Muir Woods near Mill Valley. They found an empty ranch house, three miles from the sea and surrounded by eucalyptus trees; Anderson wrote that it “fulfilled all demands—it was old, simple, homely, deserted, isolated, sympathetic.” The two women broke in, discussed their redecorating judgments, and went off to find the proprietor. They confessed to this individual, one Mr. Chase, that they had broken into his home in order to familiarize themselves with its potential. Mr. Chase then identified himself as the sheriff of Mill Valley and wondered out loud how he should handle such a crime—nevertheless he rented the house to them.¹⁴

Anderson would repeatedly recall the summer of 1916 as one of the happiest of her life. Heap constructed and painted furniture in a part of the cabin she appropriated as an artist studio and carpentry shop. Anderson, whose ingenuity in procuring free pianos for unlikely dwellings seemed inexhaustible, wrote to the president of the Mason- Hamlin firm in Boston requesting a complimentary piano for her mountain home. In her letter, she stated that “it was [her] intention to become one of the world’s greatest pianists and since the Mason-Hamlin was the world’s most beautiful piano, [she] didn’t see how [she] could live without one for the whole summer. Could he tolerate this situation?”¹⁵ Incredibly, Mason of Mason-Hamlin arranged for Anderson to select a baby grand from his San Francisco store and sent it to Mill Valley at his expense.¹⁶ Anderson’s routine was to practice the piano in the morning, ride a rented horse through Muir Woods to buy provisions from an inn, have lunch, then address Little Review business. With Heap she would have tea in the afternoon, then “walk under the misty eucalyptus trees, chiefly for the comfort of returning to a fire lit room.” In the evening, she recalled, “We dressed elaborately in pajamas, discussed sensuous plans for dinner, and prepared it in a kitchen lighted only by a kerosene lamp.” She continued, “There was nothing to do after dinner but push the table away, light another cigarette, and then fall off to sleep under the impression that we hadn’t stopped.”¹⁷ In describing the physicality of their talk, the “spell” they were under, the fire and mist of the California rainy season, the rustic setting in the company of someone who “inflamed her mind,” Anderson renders a highly romantic account of her stay in Mill Valley. In her accounts of their talks, we see a foreshadowing of the type of intellectual exchanges they would find again when they began to investigate the teachings of Gurdjieff.¹⁸ A few years later, when they explored Freud and other psychological thinkers—most notably the Russian Theosophist P. D. Ouspensky—they engaged in “the psychology of combat,” as Anderson termed it, mainly with the intent of winning debates. A similar process can be seen years later in their attempts to lead others by verifying the truth of Gurdjieff’s teachings through their own experiences. “Jane taught me,” Anderson wrote, “new ways to defend myself, taught me to develop my powers of speech instead of placing myself guilelessly in the enemy’s hands, taught me that revenge induces respect. She taught me how to gauge an audience, how to give what was desired or merited but no more, that giving too much was as bad as giving too little. I pounced on this knowledge. I assimilated it.” Although Anderson conceded that she had “almost never been able to use it”—no doubt due to her preference for her own idiosyncratic form of engaging in debate (in which she was perpetually exasperated that her opponent would not simply give in)—it does give credence to Heap’s teaching.¹⁹ Many Gurdjieff students of Heap in the 1930s and 1940s maintained that she had a rare gift as a teacher of his ideas because she employed intellectual techniques that they felt encouraged them to think for themselves.²⁰

In spite of Anderson’s joyful description of the summer of 1916, there existed another reality. As she came to know Heap better, Anderson realized Heap’s complex and somewhat dark side. The despair that would arise in Heap’s earlier letters to Florence Reynolds became apparent to Anderson, who in fact worried that Heap was deeply depressed. Much to Anderson’s dismay, Heap would “brood” and “sulk,” “retreat into silences,” and occasionally “implement her favorite device,” the threat of suicide. Heap would blurt out to Anderson, “The light is too brutal for me here. I am going back to the grave from which I came.”²¹ The discord caused by Heap’s moods was exacerbated by the fact that she had brought a gun to Mill Valley, keeping it in a trunk. Anderson decided to ignore the suicide threats but later recalled that the summer was full of extreme tension. She would come to see Heap’s threats as an attention-getting device and feel angry over the manipulation they entailed. Heap, she concluded, was someone who required constant small doses of high drama in life to feel alive. This no doubt was especially irritating to Anderson because she was guilty of the same behavior.

Anderson also thought, however, that the “burden of Jane’s unhappiness was an integral part of her genius,” and she “wanted that genius for the Little Review.”²² The June–July 1916 issue was the first of several future Little Review issues combined into two months instead of the standard monthly edition. In this issue, which she called “The Migratory Magazine,” Anderson explained to her subscribers that the financial costs of the Little Review’s temporary visit to San Francisco necessitated the combined volume. It would be the first but not the last time Anderson was forced into such a corner. Complaints from readers, however, were rare. The trip to San Francisco was more than a youthful adventure or an opportunity to secure Heap’s agreement to write for the Little Review. By the time she landed in San Francisco, Anderson had been undergoing a stern reevaluation of what she was trying to accomplish with the magazine. She was increasingly unhappy with the content and quality of the contributions. In the second Little Review issue published from San Francisco (August 1916), she led with an editorial, entitled “A Real Magazine,” that began as follows: “I am afraid to write anything; I am ashamed. I have been realizing the ridiculous tragedy of the Little Review. It has been published for over two years without coming near its ideal … I wanted Art in the Little Review. There has been very little of it, just a very little … it is tragic, I tell you.”²³

She then threatened to stop publishing the magazine altogether and proceeded to criticize the value of the contributions of the current issue. Directly addressing the writers she had accepted, Anderson wrote, “Helen Hoyt, you have a poem in this issue called ‘The Tree.’ It is not Art. It is merely a rather good poem. You could have made it Art. Do it every time, for the love of the gods!” She went on, “Sue Golden has one about Jim and Arabella. It is an interesting idea that many people need to understand. Why not make Art of it? I loathe compromise, and yet I have been compromising in every issue by putting in things that were ‘almost good’ or ‘interesting enough’ or ‘important.’ There will be no more of it. If there is only one really beautiful thing for the September number, it shall go in and the other pages will be left blank. Come on, all of you!”²⁴

Despite her general dissatisfaction with the quality of art and literature in her magazine, political events on the ground in San Francisco were giving the Little Review plenty of fodder for publication. On July 22, 1916, Emma Goldman was scheduled to give her lecture “Preparedness” (against the Preparedness Movement, which advocated US entry into World War I), a version of which was published in the Little Review as “Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter.” When a bomb went off in the city at a pro-Preparedness parade on the same day, Goldman, Anderson, and local activists became embroiled in the resulting hysteria. Five labor leaders were rounded up, falsely linked to anarchism and charged with the bombing. Both Goldman and Anderson were furious with the “railroading” of the labor leaders. However, their greatest animus was reserved for “the lack of Courage” of both liberals and radicals, other union leaders, and lawyers who would not touch the case.²⁵ In the September 1916 issue of the Little Review Anderson ran two articles, “The San Francisco Bomb Case” and “What is a Poor Executioner to Do Against a Man Who is Willing to Die?” In her editorial “The Labor Farce,” Anderson backed up Goldman, particularly her criticism of “friendly” allies who stood aside and watched as their comrades were making their way to a death sentence. When local authorities warned Anderson and Heap’s landlord, Sheriff Chase, to be on the lookout because Goldman was in his area, he ruefully replied he already knew that—the infamous outlaw was a visitor in his house.²⁶

Although her differences with Emma Goldman were bubbling to the surface, Anderson still considered the famous anarchist a friend. The events occurring in San Francisco in the summer and fall of 1916 were given comprehensive and supportive coverage in the Little Review. Nevertheless, this dramatic time did lead to several examples of both comradeship and conflict. The first snag was Anderson’s excitement in introducing Goldman to Heap. She was convinced that the two “geniuses” would hit it off immediately; unfortunately, however, Goldman’s response to Heap was similar to that of Anderson’s capitalist nemesis, “Nineteen Millions” Barnsdall. While Alexander Berkman and Heap were “congenial,” with Goldman it was “rather less so.” Goldman complained that she found Heap “too aggressive.” When Anderson protested, “But I’m twice as violent as Jane,” Goldman responded, “It doesn’t matter. No one can get angry with you. We all know your bark is worse than your bite.”²⁷ Once again Goldman and Anderson delved into an imbroglio over art and politics. Goldman mentioned an artist who had done excellent portraits of her and Berkman. “He’s a great artist,” Anderson recorded the anarchist as saying. “And so of course he and his family will starve to death.” Such arguments drove Anderson wild with fury, which she promptly reported in the Little Review. Goldman, however, was not the only follower of the Little Review who ran afoul of Anderson. Anderson recorded an exchange with Upton Sinclair who sided with Goldman and Berkman. “ ‘Please cease sending me the Little Review,’ he wrote. ‘I no longer understand anything in it, so it no longer interests me.’ ” Anderson replied, “Please cease sending me your socialist paper. I understand everything in it; therefore it no longer interests me.”²⁸

The culmination of the San Francisco sojourn was what came to be known (misleadingly) as the famous “Blank Issue” of the Little Review. Anderson and others claimed that, with the exception of a cartoon drawn of Anderson by Heap at their mountain vigil, the rest of the issue consisted of sixty-four blank pages. The myth of the “Blank Issue” began when Anderson reported it in My Thirty Years’ War, and this was simply accepted by historians. Those who have looked at the September 1916 issue see that while there are indeed many blank pages and Heap’s cartoon, there are also labor strife articles. Anderson did admit that only a few manuscripts were arriving at the Little Review San Francisco office, and no doubt the logistics of taking a magazine on the road, few funds, and slow mail service contributed to a dearth of material.

The September 1916 issue was the last published in San Francisco. With the start of the California rainy season, Heap and Anderson returned to Chicago. It appears that on returning there, Anderson had made up her mind to pursue a dramatic new direction for the Little Review, one that involved moving the magazine to New York. The last two issues from Chicago were November 1916 and January 1917. The decision to leave Chicago was “inconvenient” for one rather monumental reason—Heap did not want to go. The two of them walked at night in the familiar snowy streets, summoning their feelings about a city they both loved with a passion; goodbyes were bestowed on elevator boys and corner flower women. On one of her last days in the Little Review office, Anderson ran into Ben Hecht, who told her that after she left, he would put up an electric sign across the Fine Arts Building asking, “Where is Athens now?” Anderson had ambitions for the Little Review she felt could not be realized in Chicago; New York was the only city in America where she could make the journal “an international organ.”²⁹ She also hoped that the move would provide a solution to improving the artistic merit of the work she was receiving. It is highly likely that Anderson was motivated by other literary Chicagoans who had already left for New York, such as Dreiser, Bodenheim, and especially Dell.

New York, like Chicago, had been undergoing its own “Little Renaissance” during roughly the same period, 1908 to 1917. Comparisons between the two urban responses to modernism have put Chicago in a lesser light, usually portraying it as a regional and even primitive example, although defenders of the Windy City argue that little magazines such as the Little Review and Poetry had a disproportionate impact despite their midwestern origins. However, partisans of New York saw a much more sophisticated, organized, and internationally connected movement.³⁰ Discussions of New York’s Renaissance usually revolve around the influx of artists and writers into Greenwich Village after the turn of the century. Although the Village in the nineteenth century had been a locale for aristocrats, by the 1890s working-class and immigrant tenements were pressing on the area south of Fourteenth Street. The eventual decline in property values attracted impoverished artists and political radicals who created the famous bohemian quarter of the Village. Those who moved there would later become the giants of American literature, drama, criticism, and activism: Eugene O’Neill, Marianne Moore, Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams, John Reed, Lincoln Steffens, Max and Crystal Eastman, Mabel Dodge, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Randolph Bourne. They would express themselves in a variety of little magazines, small galleries, and experimental theaters, as well as formal and informal clubs and meeting places. Such institutions as The Masses, the Provincetown Players, the 291 Gallery, Polly’s restaurant, the Hell Hole bar, and Mabel Dodge’s salon were the most famous, among many other meeting places. Precisely what this group of individualists hoped to find in coming to the Village has been discussed extensively. Was it to find a sense of belonging amid a turn-of-the-century breakdown of traditional communities, to escape an increasingly regimented economic order, or to fight the Victorian boogeymen of religion and patriarchy? Whatever the motivation, these young radicals have been seen as creating a golden moment of “lyrical” leftism whose creeds included socialism, feminism, free love, and modernism in art and literature. While Anderson saw the move to the center of the American modernist universe as essential to the Little Review and was determined to do what it took for the success of her magazine, Heap was another question. According to Anderson, Heap accepted the decision to move “in a coma of regret and indecision.”³¹ When the pair made the actual move to New York in January 1917, they checked in at the Brevoort Hotel, a favorite gathering place of Villagers when they were feeling flush, hanging out in the basement cafe. On entering their hotel room Heap threw herself down on the bed and refused to move. After unsuccessfully trying to cheer her up, Anderson left to search for permanent housing, returning later to find that Heap had not moved. She stayed in that position until the next morning.³²

In spite of this dismal beginning, the couple found a home at 24 West Sixteenth Street. They rented four rooms on the second floor of the house, which had once belonged to William Cullen Bryant, a fact that pleased Anderson. Their happiness with the house was not diminished when they discovered they shared it with a funeral parlor and an exterminating business. To publish the Little Review, Heap and Anderson rented a separate studio at 31 West Fourteenth Street. As was always the case with Anderson’s moves, the first order of business was interior decorating. In My Thirty Years’ War, she lovingly recalls the design, colors, and textures of their New York home. In the room set aside for conversation with visiting writers and artists, “the woodwork was pale cream, the floor dark plum, the furniture old mahogany … between the windows was a large reading table with a yellow lemon lamp.” The most distinctive feature of the room was a large bed hanging from the ceiling by four black chains. This bed was mentioned in other autobiographies; William Carlos Williams wrote, “We poor males would stare at it timidly.”³³

Although their interior decorating seemed a nice fit with the bohemian style, Anderson went to great lengths to claim that she and Heap were “a great disappointment to the literati” and their fellow Villagers. They did not, she claimed, patronize bohemian “haunts,” and were more interested in their private domestic realm. They began to “create a hearthstone … dedicated to the ceremonies of living.” By “the ceremonies of living,” Anderson meant keeping the house in the most perfect order. “We cleaned, scrubbed, dusted, cooked, washed dishes. We made our own fires, cleaned our hearths … did our own shopping—chose our own meats and vegetables—and as Jane had an intelligent old-fashioned prejudice against canned foods, hulled our own peas. We washed and ironed our own clothes. We cut our own hair—very well too.” She and Heap did most of their housework because, as Anderson proclaimed without any sense of self-consciousness, “we could never afford a charwoman.”³⁴ The women were so assiduous in their housekeeping that Djuna Barnes complained they washed their soap.

Cleanliness aside, evidence suggests that Anderson and Heap may not have been all that different from their Village neighbors. Scholarly studies and autobiographies point out that a large number of these young rebel bohemians were actually over the age of thirty, from middle and upper-middle-class backgrounds. In her memoir Susan Glaspell sums up a sentiment that could have easily come from Anderson’s account of those years: “It seems to me we were a particularly simple people, who sought to arrange life for the things we wanted to do, needing each other as protection against complexities, yet living as we did because of an instinct for the old, old things—to have a garden, and neighbors, to keep up the fire and let the cat in at night.”³⁵ Heap’s impressions of her fellow Villagers include anything but dashing bohemians—many to her were frauds. It was a place, she wrote, invaded by “hundreds of little Cézannes, Yeats, Nijinskies and Bernhardts, boys and girls from all over the country who couldn’t pass school.” Savaging the posing of the pseudo-bohemians, Heap charged they were driving up rents for real artists and were only interested in the Village as a place where they could “come upon the thrill of some yet undiscovered license.”³⁶ She wrote Florence Reynolds, with whom she stayed in touch, that John Reed “looks like a fat fortyish version of your chauffeur Sam.”³⁷

As Anderson points out herself, however, by the time they moved there in 1917 the heyday of Greenwich Village was over. The entry of America into the First World War, four months after Anderson and Heap’s arrival in New York, would harm the lyrical idealism of their generation’s rebellion. Anderson and Heap would publish several antiwar editorials and articles. In one of the first, Anderson relied on her success in gaining attention for the San Francisco “Blank Issue” with a one-sentence editorial simply entitled “War.” The page was blank except for one sentence at the bottom stating, “We will probably be suppressed for this.”³⁸ Interestingly, Heap would emerge as the more active political voice, and the war was not her only concern. Her two-sentence review of Theodore Roosevelt’s The Foes of Our Household illustrated her ability to write sly dismissals of what she viewed as silly or irrelevant. “This is an invaluable book,” she wrote. “It is a compilation of all the outworn thought of the last two generations.”³⁹ In a rare prose poem, “The War, Madmen!” Heap addressed not only the war but also other social ills with words that Goldman could have written. She wrote of “misery, forced famines, sweatshops, child labor,” and “suppression of freedom of speech, leaks, lynchings, frame-ups, prisons.” War, she wrote, meant “Millions for munitions. Starvation for millions,” and the “glory” of war meant “Parades, cheers, flags: Wooden limbs, blindness, widows, orphans, poverty, Soldiers’-Homes, asylums.”

In the same number, under the title “The Price of Empire,” Heap informed readers that the two Richard Aldington poems in the issue, “Thanatos” and “Hermes of the Dead,” “with their frail reticent sadness, were sent to [them] from the trenches. Why do poets keep on singing in a world that doesn’t value them?”⁴⁰ A disgruntled reader complained to her, “These are times for men to be attending to more serious things than aesthetic oddities.” Heap responded with a sneering put-down of establishment figures who fancied themselves supporters of the arts without understanding the meaning of art. “The above letter was written to us by one of the front citizens of a large city, on his club stationery—a men’s club where old Betties gossip and criticize women’s clothes… .”⁴¹

One of Heap’s articles, “Push-Face,” contrasted an Emma Goldman anti-draft rally with a Red Cross fundraiser, prompting several furious responses and subscription cancellations. Heap recorded how police charged into the anti-conscription crowd “with raised clubs, teeth bared, and snarling … Nasty little Fords with powerful searchlights raced up and down and about the hollow square.” “How much of this treatment,” she asked, “will it take to obliterate every element of individuality amongst us?” She then described the Red Cross function attended by “plutocrats and artists” in Greenwich Village. “You can easily pick out the pluts; they look like figures from the wax works.” The “artists” or people who were “costumed” as artists, clearly Greenwich Village slummers, did not fare better in Heap’s view. She described one woman who “had short hempy hair; she was dressed in street gamin clothes; she was at least forty; her cheek bones were on line with her nostrils. No human head should be made that way; it’s intolerable except in fish, frogs or snakes.” Children from the slums behind Washington Square “were pushed in the face and told to get out, to move on, by policemen and some more rough fellows in khaki … because this was a fete for humanity.”⁴²

When America entered the war and Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917, Anderson and Heap watched in dismay as fellow antiwar critics ran afoul of the new law. In July of that year the U. S. Postmaster officially deemed The Masses, a strongly antiwar socialist journal, as not fit for distribution in the mail. In August the Little Review ran a full-page ad from The Masses that urged readers to continue to buy the magazine from newsstands until their mailing rights were restored. In the fall of 1917, the editors of The Masses (including Anderson’s Chicago mentor Floyd Dell) were indicted (leading eventually to two trials and two hung juries).⁴³

While they bemoaned the experience of The Masses, Anderson and Heap were about to run into a censorship problem connected with the war but with a somewhat different twist. In October 1917 they published “Cantleman’s Spring-mate,” an antiwar short story by the British author and painter Wyndham Lewis concerning a soldier who loses his humanity through war, seduces a young woman, and ignores her subsequent pregnancy. The Post Office confiscated the issue, unbeknownst to Anderson and Heap until they started receiving complaints about undelivered Little Reviews. Although the story was antiwar—it portrayed the brutal consequences of war—the Post Office did not charge Anderson with violation of the Espionage Act. Instead, the charge was a violation of Section 211 of the United States Criminal Code, otherwise known as the “Comstock Law,” which banned from the mail any “lewd, obscene, or lascivious, and filthy book, pamphlet, writing or other publication.” The law was notable for including “literature” in the same category banning information concerning conception and abortion.⁴⁴ Judge Augustus Hand, District Judge of the Southern District of New York, upheld the decision of the Postmaster, stating, “The young girl and the relations of the man with her are described in a degree of detail that does not appear necessary.” When the decision was handed down, Ezra Pound wrote “The Classics Escape,” a scathing commentary published in the Little Review, stating he found it amazing that the law saw literature through the eyes of “Dr. Condom.”⁴⁵

In spite of the obscenity decision, Judge Hand did cite in a peripheral way the case of The Masses, indicating that the court must uphold the decision of the Post Office as “conclusive” unless it appeared that “it was completely wrong.”⁴⁶ Anderson, Heap, and their lawyer, John Quinn, believed the magazine was caught up in the government’s crusade against antiwar messengers. In the December issue of the Little Review Anderson printed the entire decision in her article, “Judicial Opinion (Our Suppressed October Issue).” The article began with the claim that the law was incompatible with art and literature. As she would in her later Ulysses trial, she argued that there was no place for consideration of good or bad morality in art. She insisted the Little Review “would have no function or reason for being if it did not continually conflict [with] the prevalent art values in America.”⁴⁷ She further asserted that discussing art in a courtroom was inane because inhabitants of the halls of justice did not understand that the artist “is a master of the mysterious laws by which words are made into patterns or rhythms, so that you read them for the spirit contained in the rhythms, which is the only way at getting to the context.” Finally, she concluded that the fact she was called “an iconoclast” for making the arguments she did was a “measure of contemporary fatuity.”⁴⁸

Aside from exasperation over the confiscated issue of the Little Review, Anderson and Heap’s most personal and emotional wartime political experience had to do with Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and their trial for violation of the Conscription Act the very same year. They went to the courtroom where Goldman’s trial took place and were angered by the hostility towards their friend. Heap’s description of the trial in a long letter to Florence Reynolds demonstrates how personally the two women took the proceedings. “Mart,” she wrote of Anderson, “is so crazy about the trial I can’t even get her attention.” When they went outside for the lunch break Heap stated, “Hod carriers working in the street yell out to us, ‘I hope you are deported;’ ‘I hope you hang.’ You know, the working men—the wolves that E. G. is trying to keep out of wolves clothing.”⁴⁹ Once again, as in the San Francisco bomb case, their real ire was for so-called radicals who refused to show support by attending the trial. “Max Eastman won’t do anything—makes excuses … Deansie [Harriet Dean from Chicago] never went near the court—is off for a week up the river—turned artist and cautious overnight.”⁵⁰

Heap and Anderson went to both jury selection and the trial itself, describing dramatic tensions in the courtroom. “We got into a fight. Far away down in the street somewhere a band played star-spangled. Mart, David Hochstein [Goldman’s nephew] and I refused to stand. The Marshal yelled out, ‘Stand up, everybody!’ When we wouldn’t, he grabbed David by the arm and threw him into the hall. Mart went up and told the District Attorney, Mr. Content, what had happened; he said, ‘Well, that was too good for him—I think he should be shot.’ And I made a speech to the bystanders who had sneered. I said, “You poor fools; must a man cheer at his relative’s funeral?”⁵¹

Heap made other such speeches and penned a public letter to circulate within the city asking citizens to “PROTEST” by contacting the Assistant Attorney General and judge in the case. She signed the letter with Anderson’s name, believing it would have more impact. Heap was earnest and forthright, shedding her droll Little Review persona for her friends: “Dear American Citizens!” her letter began. She pointed out that while “millions of other people in this country” were against the conscription bill, “Protesting became a crime overnight. They kept on protesting. Emma Goldman and Berkman are not conciliators nor will they be conciliated. The Government will have its way with them unless something is done at once. This is not an anarchist issue; it is the fight of every individual. They should be saved if for no other reason than for the conservation of courage in this country.”⁵² The letter led to Anderson’s and Heap’s eviction from their Little Review studio. Heap wrote to Reynolds, “If I were not so mad I’d cry, but I am not mad; I am resigned. They have taken our studio away from us because of the letter, which was published in all the New York papers. I went to see John Quinn this morning; of course, there is nothing to do. I have just returned from the agents. No, we must go. The owners are good Americans and won’t have that kind of publicity about their building.”⁵³

In addition to writing public letters and attending the trial, Heap wrote to friends for money to fund Goldman’s and Berkman’s defense. As much as they might have wanted to, Anderson and Heap were in no position to help financially. On top of losing their Little Review office, the question of money—both for the Little Review and their own living expenses—was a constant issue. In 1917 the journal had three thousand subscribers in the United States and Canada, not enough to keep the operation afloat. It is clear from Heap’s letters to Florence Reynolds that she was sending the two editors money—most likely quite a considerable amount since Anderson wrote Reynolds directly promising they would repay their debts. No doubt after her long relationship with Heap, Reynolds was willing to help out in any way she could; she was also given tasks such as delivering Little Reviews to bookstores and collecting payments. To supplement subscriptions, Anderson opened a bookstore in the front room of the new Little Review office—“Sit by a fire and choose your books and perhaps even drink a cup of tea during your selection,” she announced. “It will have all the books you want, or if you are the kind of person who wants books nobody else wants we can guarantee to get them for you within half a day.”⁵⁴

Anderson claimed that several people offered her endowments, but she was always on guard against editorial designs by the donor and therefore declined them. However, a few individuals made sporadic significant contributions without expecting any influence over the Little Review. J. S. Watson of the Dial would drop by the bookstore and offer a hundred-dollar bill for his purchase, declining any change. Anderson, nevertheless, became uncharacteristically shy about soliciting friends for help. “People,” she wrote, “were very kind and had helped too often to be asked again.”⁵⁵ Her Greenwich Village friends did try to help by holding a benefit concert at the Provincetown Theater. The event was a memorable night for those who attended, but so many impoverished artists were admitted free that it was not a lucrative evening. Rather than rely on her equally poor associates, Anderson took a new approach and canvassed wealthy strangers. She bluffed herself past the secretaries of prominent businessmen on Wall Street and asked for their support of “the most interesting review of modern art published in America today.” Even Anderson was surprised that she actually had some success with this tactic but soon felt uneasy with what she called “these hold-up methods.”⁵⁶

The two editors tried to economize the expenses of publishing the Little Review. Anderson saved money by hiring the cheapest printer she could find in New York, a Serbian immigrant named Popovitch. They further reduced the fee by folding pages and doing the proofreading themselves. Such chores were necessary not only because of money but also because of Popovitch’s poor command of English. The Little Review was plagued by typographical errors, which enraged Ezra Pound. He angrily asked Anderson, “What the ensanguined llllllllllllllll is the matter with this BLOODY goddamnedblasted bastardbitchbornsonofaputridseahorse of a foetid and stinkerous printer????? Is his Serbo-Croatian optic utterly impervious to the twelfth letter of the alphabet???? JHEEZUSMARIAJOSE!!!”⁵⁷

There were at least two occasions when the editors did not have adequate food and subsisted on only potatoes and biscuits for days at a time. The constant struggle for money eventually wore down Anderson, impacting both her energy and her self-image. In My Thirty Years’ War she wrote, “Tired of having no clothes, tired of being continually ugly, I dressed for dinner in the apartment in the only becoming garment I had left—a crepe de chine chemise. Draped in an old scarf and installed before the fire, I enjoyed the décolleté and talked better for the illusion of charm.”⁵⁸ Without the close-knit circle of friends and contributors they had in Chicago, Anderson and Heap were also struggling to find provocative material to publish. What they did publish was limited by their inability to pay for work or even to publish the Little Review.

Adding to the desperation of the situation, Anderson and Heap’s relationship once again became volatile. The tensions were apparent by the spring of 1917 when a wealthy Chicago woman invited them to spend the weekend at her Long Island home. One day while walking in the nearby town of Brookhaven, Anderson came upon the shell of a century-old house and was determined it would serve as the temporary quarters of the Little Review. She found the owner, rented the house for twelve dollars a month, and proceeded to make it livable. Her description of Brookhaven was in some ways reminiscent of Mill Valley. The house, which was near the sea and had a garden, was to function as her special space for inspiring conversation. In her second autobiography, The Fiery Fountains, written forty years later, Anderson wrote, “Under the blue locust trees, in shadows of sun and mist, we continued our shadowy speculations.”⁵⁹ However, the tone of the conversation in Brookhaven was sharper and more biting than in Mill Valley. At the time the two women were immersing themselves in psychoanalytic theory and, according to Anderson, “We could find the Achilles heel in everybody’s psychic set-up—the psychoanalysts were inferior sleuths compared to us. We stuck pins into people.”⁶⁰ It seems clear, however, that it was Heap primarily who was interested in sticking pins into Anderson. Attacking Anderson’s character, both in speech and in writing, Heap seemed angered when she failed to provoke her partner. As Anderson recalled, “When she resorted to analyzing me and came upon facts too scathing to be spoken she would put them in a letter, under my door. It is certainly more painful to be pinned in a letter than in conversation—the telling phrase leaps out at you in a way that takes your breath. I always liked this. Jane still tells how, hoping to have reduced my self-esteem to a pulp, she would see a look of exaltation spread over my face… .”⁶¹

This rather curious statement suggests that Anderson was singularly unfazed by Heap’s attacks. Years later she wrote to Djuna Barnes, asking, “Remember my cerebral excitement over the cruel critical letters Janie used to slip under my door?”⁶² Perhaps she enjoyed Heap’s volleys as an intellectual performance, while also exacting her revenge by not taking her seriously. In 1959 Anderson wrote to her friend, the pianist Allen Tanner, who was often a guest of the two women during those years, “There has never been anything reasonable about Jane, as you know. Remember one day in Brookhaven when you and I were seized with hysterics about one of her rages, and laughed all morning, unable to stop, which added to her fury?”⁶³ Whatever the reasons for her cool reactions, it is clear that Anderson had begun to distance herself from Heap, both professionally and personally. Anderson’s loss of interest in the Little Review seemed apparent to Heap by 1918, as she assumed the burden of its work. Whereas in the summer of 1917 Anderson shared with her partner the long hours required for the magazine, by 1918 the situation had clearly changed. “Such a week as we have had,” wrote Heap to Florence Reynolds in 1917, “up about 7:30 and at it until one and one thirty—we addressed—wrapped & mailed the magazine here in my room—besides we got out 480 letters to prospective subscribers and pleas for renewals.”⁶⁴ By the following summer, however, Anderson was avoiding their joint labor and Heap was growing angry. “Mart won’t look at the magazine,” she complained, “so I read proof and made the cover, etc. and went back and forth to the post office with it all—No meals—no practicing—such a mockery–—such sickening pretensions.”⁶⁵

Anderson’s indifference to the Little Review and her abandonment of Heap were both precipitated by the fact that she was seeing another woman. The affair with “Gladys” seems not to have been the first of Anderson’s infidelities, but it affected Heap so dramatically that it threatened their life together as nothing else had. According to Heap, Anderson had betrayed their love by her attraction to Gladys. “If she were not born in the sex in which she was,” wrote Heap bitterly, “she would go from one Gladys to another—whenever she is thrown with those people she has an affair. This summer she has dragged me into a situation where the lowest values of the mind have been operating.”⁶⁶ By early fall of that year Anderson’s behavior had left Heap feeling exhausted, hurt, and alone. “Where do I go next?” she asked Reynolds. “This summer I have suffered— I have worked harder than I have ever suffered … I have written nothing—made nothing—but I have lost something. I cannot lose much more? I am more of an exile than it is good to tell.” She had decided “to cut out the whole connection,” to leave both Anderson and the Little Review.⁶⁷ Anderson, unsurprisingly, viewed her affair with Gladys differently. Only through some “long talks” during which Heap expressed a desire “to be done with it all” did she come to realize the depth of Heap’s devastation. To Anderson, what she felt for Gladys was “only … tenderness … [that] would pass.” She distinguished between her feelings for Gladys—“only an attraction”—and “her love for [Heap, which] was the big thing.” Heap was not mollified; she described Anderson’s proclamations as “rotten talk.”⁶⁸

As time went on, Heap seemed to grow more philosophical about Anderson’s new relationship. This suggests there may have been truth in the widely held belief that Heap and Djuna Barnes had an affair sometime between 1918 and 1920. Barnes kept a picture of Heap on her mantle and years later confided to a friend that she had feelings for Heap for a long time.⁶⁹ Given her own unfaithfulness, it is hard to say how Anderson reacted to Heap’s relationship with Barnes. It does shed light on her description in her first autobiography of feeling distant from Barnes, however, and indicates that it was Heap and not Anderson who was responsible for publishing Barnes in the Little Review.

Their first meeting in Chicago, their California sojourn, the move to New York, the vicissitudes of financial penury, and relationship contretemps contributed to an exceedingly tumultuous year. Despite this turmoil, things were about to take a dramatic turn for the better. Ezra Pound, the expatriate poet, would serve as their foreign editor and procure some of the finest modern writing from abroad. Imagism and anarchism would give way to the high modernism of Pound and Joyce, among others, and the next three years would be among the high points in the journal’s entire history. The subject matter would increasingly become centered on literature embroiled in questions of esoteric philosophies and thought, pushing Anderson and Heap closer to what they would see in retrospect as the most critical influence in their lives.