Introduction

The story of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap is often told in snippets, small fragments in the larger tapestry depicting the celebrated masters of modernism whom the women published and promoted in their journal, the Little Review (1914–29). Although they are perhaps best known for serializing James Joyce’s Ulysses and subsequently enduring a 1921 obscenity trial, Anderson’s and Heap’s careers extended far beyond that noteworthy moment. To be sure, the Little Review published male modernists such as Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot and championed the early work of female modernists—H. D., Djuna Barnes, Dorothy Richardson, and Gertrude Stein. Other talented women such as May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, and Mary Butts, rediscovered decades later by feminist literary scholars, found their first champions in Anderson and Heap. However, the women worked on a larger canvas, bringing attention to every major movement in early twentieth-century literature and art, including Imagism, Dada, surrealism, constructivism, and Machine Age aesthetics. In the pages of their magazine, they introduced to American audiences the works of Brâncuşi, Picabia, Tzara, and Le Corbusier, among many others of the European avant-garde. The Little Review was, “without question, the finest collection of modern writing in the country at the time.”¹

How did two women born in the late nineteenth-century American Midwest become arbiters of twentieth-century modernism? What propelled them from their parochial origins into experimental art, radical politics, and lives of personal liberation in the avant-garde circles of Chicago, Greenwich Village, and Paris? Finally, and most germane to this book, how did their interest in modernism pave the way for their lifelong immersion in the opaque, complex, and largely misunderstood esoteric philosophy of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff? An Armenian mystic (some say charlatan), Gurdjieff appears sporadically in studies of modernists who were seeking answers beyond what artistic expression could offer. Anderson and Heap shared that quest, as evident in the evolving editorial decisions they made for the Little Review. The allure of this controversial teacher for the two editors emerged from their enthusiasm for the intellectual underpinnings of modernism and their dissatisfaction with its limitations. Despairing about the state of art, the two women eventually gave up the Little Review in 1929 but remained steadfast to Gurdjieff’s philosophy until their deaths. I argue that it was their embrace of modernism that paved the way for their Gurdjieffian conversion. Key to this book is a facet of modernism that until recently has been neglected: the role that spirituality, specifically Western esotericism, played in modernism.

The adventure of Anderson, Heap, and the Little Review began in Chicago. Transplants from Indiana and Kansas, respectively, the two women were among a generation of young midwesterners longing for intellectual stimulation, artistic exploration, and personal liberation. Although they came from similar backgrounds and they both saw in art their deliverance from a moribund culture, their personalities were markedly distinct. Anderson, a comely feminine woman who talked and wrote with a certain breathless quality, came to Chicago to find her way as a writer. While living at the YWCA, she got her training by writing book reviews for the Literary Review of the Chicago Evening Post and learned typescript from the Dial. Heap, a masculine sometime crossdresser, was an artist who traveled to Chicago to attend the Art Institute. Where Anderson was cheerful and brimming over with enthusiasm, giving the sense of writing with exclamation points, Heap was pessimistic and often cynical, writing with a sly humor that impaled her targets.

Pre–World War I Chicago had a vibrant LGBTQ subculture on both the south side, where bohemians moved into vacant storefronts leftover from the 1893 Chicago Exposition, and the north side’s “Towertown,” where artists, bohemians, and queer Chicagoans gathered. In Chicago, Anderson and Heap, who were self-identified and out lesbians, encountered kindred spirits. Floyd Dell, Sherwood Anderson, Ben Hecht, and Maxwell Bodenheim, among others, challenged Victorian beliefs on art, religion, politics, gender, and sexuality. This constellation of radical talents was the nucleus of the Chicago Literary Renaissance, a moment of artistic revolution that catalyzed the city’s form of modernism. Chicago was also where the two women met Emma Goldman, an early supporter of LGBTQ people, who gave them a crash course in the principles of anarchism that they would enthusiastically celebrate in the pages of Little Review.

Anderson, however, was not satisfied with what she found in Chicago. Her review of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie in the small Chicago magazine the Continent had embroiled her in a controversy over “immorality” in letters, a fate she would endure again later in the Ulysses obscenity trial. Feeling stymied by what she saw as an ever-present conservative dominance in the arts, Anderson launched her own journal. She set up an office in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue and announced her new venture; shortly thereafter, the Little Review began publishing writers of the Chicago Literary Renaissance. Anderson’s decision to declare her frustration by starting her journal was, on the face of it, not an uncommon impulse for radicals of the day. Goldman herself founded Mother Earth in 1906, Harriet Monroe started Poetry in Chicago in 1912, and Margaret Sanger established the Woman Rebel in March of 1914, the same month and year of the Little Review debut. Little magazines were the major transmitters of modernism, and women were central to their creation and survival.² Among the women filling significant roles in editing modernist magazines were H. D., Harriet Weaver Shaw, Marianne Moore, Dora Marsden, Jessie Fauset, and Katherine Mansfield. Anderson and Heap joined this cohort of women as founders, publishers, editors, writers, readers, critics, and patrons of these small radical journals.

Anderson focused on the relationships among literature, sexuality, and politics during the first two years of the Little Review. Anarchism and the new movement in poetry, Imagism, were among the main philosophical themes preoccupying the editors, contributors, and readers, and sometimes the legal authorities. From 1914 to 1916, the pages of the Little Review were also full of articles referencing the philosophies of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century icons of the intelligentsia, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde, among others. The equality of women, acceptance of same-sex attraction, and a conviction of the artist’s superiority were all topics that Anderson and her colleagues were burning to redefine within the politics and culture of their milieu. Sometimes contradictory but always interrelated, the ideas that appeared in the Little Review provide insight into American rebels in general and their own specific personal sojourns. Two years after Anderson launched the Little Review she met Jane Heap, who soon became a provocative contributor and cheeky spirit in the pages of the journal. She originally wrote under pseudonyms until signing her contributions with the lowercase initials “jh.”

In 1917 the two women moved to New York, settling in Greenwich Village during the height of World War I anti-war activism. No longer able to depend on their Chicago Renaissance friends to provide content for the journal, they relied on their new Village network, including Djuna Barnes, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and the Dada poet the Baroness Freytag-Loringhoven among many others. More critically, however, Anderson’s goal was to make the Little Review “an international concern” by accepting Ezra Pound’s offer to serve as their foreign editor. Their success in becoming a transnational phenomenon exceeded their expectations; within months they published not only Pound but also Wyndham Lewis, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Their serialization of Joyce’s Ulysses (in 1918) cemented the Little Review’s place in literary history. Bombarded by public disgust and legal attacks, in 1921 they were convicted of obscenity charges, the first salvo in the long litigious history of that modern masterpiece.

Anderson and Heap’s partnership had been under strain since leaving Chicago, and the Ulysses trial led to the unraveling of their romantic relationship, which had begun in 1916 shortly after they met that year. Infuriated and distraught, Anderson wanted to bring her scrappy little journal to an end. Heap, however, was adamantly opposed and became the primary editor from 1921 onward. Heap increased the presence of visual art in the pages of the journal as well as publishing works of Surrealism, Machine Age aesthetics, and Bauhaus, elevating the Little Review to greater prominence by promoting an international cross-fertilization in the fields of modern literature and art, theater, architecture, and design. Despite the radical directions Anderson had undertaken in the early years of the Little Review, the Heap era was the most revolutionary period in the history of the journal.

In late 1923 Anderson and Heap and a group of other Villagers met with A. R. Orage, the British editor of the New Age, a literary and political journal that had much in common with the Little Review. Orage was a former Theosophist, the author of two books on Nietzsche, and a highly regarded literary critic. His task was to introduce Americans to an Armenian mystic whose self-enlightenment system had already attracted European—especially British—spiritually inclined artists and writers. George Gurdjieff was due to arrive in New York City early the following year with a troupe of students from his newly established Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man outside Paris. In January of 1924 the two women attended demonstrations of Gurdjieff students who performed dances reminiscent of those practiced by Sufi dervishes. Gurdjieff himself cut an enigmatic and charismatic figure. More than one person who met him commented on his penetrating gaze and mysterious demeanor.

Anderson and Heap were captivated. Among those who found themselves just as enamored with Gurdjieff were Katherine Mansfield, Gorham Munson, Hart Crane, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Jean Toomer, Muriel Draper, Waldo Frank, and Herbert Croly. Though no longer a couple, Anderson and Heap traveled to France in the spring of that year to study at Gurdjieff’s Institute. They were joined by Anderson’s new love, the French opera singer Georgette Leblanc (a former partner of the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck), who was also intrigued by Gurdjieff’s philosophy. After this expedition, Little Review readers could see the influence of Gurdjieff in the pages of the journal. There were also contributions from other Gurdjieff followers, most notably Jean Toomer and Muriel Draper.

In 1929, after developing the journal into an international forum for the work of the most avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, Heap reunited with Anderson in Paris to publish the last issue of the Little Review. By then, Gurdjieff’s influence had changed both women’s view of art as a path to spiritual enlightenment. In her farewell editorial, poignantly entitled “Lost a Renaissance,” Heap mused, “For years we offered the Little Review as a trial-track for racers. We hoped to find artists who could run with the great artists of the past or men who could make new records. But you can’t get race-horses from mules. I do not believe that the conditions of our life can produce men who can give us masterpieces. Masterpieces are not made from chaos. If there is a confusion of life, there will be a confusion of art.”³ In her own parting editorial, Anderson wrote she did not want to hear any more about “it’s the artist who transforms life. I know it. But I’m not particularly interested at the moment in transformation. I want a little illumination.”⁴

Throughout the thirties, Anderson and Heap continued their Gurdjieffian studies in Paris with the master himself and an all-women, mostly lesbian group who called themselves “The Rope.” They included Katherine Hulme, author of The Nun’s Story, and Solita Solano, lover of the writer Janet Flanner. Anderson published her first autobiography, My Thirty Years’ War, and remained in France with Leblanc until the outbreak of World War II. Gurdjieff dispatched Heap to London in 1939 to lead study groups; she carried on sharing his teachings during the wartime blitz and soon became one of the most prominent of his disciples. The war brought extraordinary hardships for Anderson and Leblanc as it coincided with Leblanc’s diagnosis of breast cancer. Their attempts to escape Europe were repeatedly thwarted, and they remained in France until Leblanc’s death in 1941. Anderson returned to America alone, with her passage paid for by Little Review contributor Ernest Hemingway. On the ship voyage back she met Dorothy Caruso, widow of the opera singer Enrico Caruso, with whom she embarked on a long relationship until Caruso also died of breast cancer in 1955.

Anderson returned to France where she wrote two more autobiographies, an anthology of her favorite Little Review contributions, and The Unknowable Gurdjieff, her salvo to defend Gurdjieff against his critics. She unsuccessfully attempted to publish an autobiographical lesbian novel Forbidden Fires, eventually issued by the lesbian imprint Naiad Press after her death. As the years passed Heap stopped communicating with her ex-lover, but Anderson’s wider circle of friends, including members of the Rope, supported her until her death. Heap died a revered and beloved teacher of Gurdjieff’s thought in 1964; Anderson’s death followed in 1973.

Scholarship on the lives and careers of Anderson and Heap has run the gamut of interpretation and portrayals—as “midwives” to modernist male geniuses; as clueless dilettantes and sexually suspect women; as brilliant editors, early feminists, and lesbian icons. In his coverage of the Ulysses trial, for instance, Hugh Kenner framed them in condescending terms when he depicted their defense attorney John Quinn as a man who was “subjecting himself to the tedious bohemianism of one editress, Jane Heap, out of admiration for Margaret Anderson, the other.”⁵ The admiration was sexual until Quinn discovered that Anderson was involved with Heap. (Quinn responded by penning an outpouring of misogynic letters to Ezra Pound.) More recent scholarship has been increasingly insightful and nuanced. Jayne Marek, in her study of gender and modernism, argues that Anderson’s and Heap’s styles of editing relied heavily on interactive forms of conversation with Little Review readers and that their privately coded exchanges with each other represented “a form of critical exchange reflecting the multifaceted nature of modernism itself.”⁶

Placing Anderson and Heap’s editorial practices within modernism’s “multifaceted nature” is crucial, but their story is also a more complex fusion of both modernism and modernity. Modernism is often described as a reaction to modernity through both negative and positive lenses. The revolution in everyday reality (trains, planes, and automobiles), a waning belief in God, scientific discoveries such as the atom, and the emergence of new theories of physics altered people’s perceptions of time and space. Artists’ reactions varied. While some welcomed technological changes, others saw the subsequent disjointed experience of daily life as jarring and viewed art as the primary vehicle to recover a sense of wholeness. In editing the Little Review, Anderson and Heap addressed the challenge of seeking an organic whole or synthesis of vision via fragmented depictions of nonrepresentational reality. That quest also explains their later conversion to Gurdjieff.

The record of the Little Review alone would guarantee Anderson and Heap a prominent role in the history of modernism and of little magazines. Through the emerging field of New Modernist Studies we have gained a new and more discerning lens through which to examine little magazines and their role in promoting modernism in the first three decades of the twentieth century. In addition to the Little Review, magazines such as Poetry, the Dial, the Masses, the Freewoman, the New Freewoman, the Egoist, the New Age, and others were key to transporting radical innovation throughout the Anglo-American landscape. The rise of Periodical Studies likewise endorses the fundamental premise that these journals were responsible for establishing modernism. As Andrew Thacker writes, “Without magazines from 291 to The Little Review, or Poetry to Pagany, the contours of American modernism, and indeed also the transnational character of modernism, would not be as we know it.”⁷ The founding of digital archives such as the Modernist Journals Project has allowed scholars to research complete issues of little and mass culture magazines and has been responsible for many innovative interpretations of their missions. Questions of gender, sexuality, and race as well as transnational and postcolonial categories expand the area of inquiry while editorial theory, including the scrutiny of both linguistic and bibliographic codes (typology, covers, advertisements, etc.), gives us tools to focus on little magazines as primary texts. The fields of New Modernist Studies and Periodical Studies demonstrate how the Little Review was “the quintessential modernist magazine.”⁸

Matters of gender and sexuality are important in modernist scholarship as a counterpoint to the often-told tale of male modernists, particularly the “men of 1914.” Since Anderson and Heap were a rare example of two women living openly as lesbians during this period, it is crucial to examine, as this book does, how sexuality intersects with art and spirituality. The Oxford reform movement of the late nineteenth century, which paved the way for a less draconian view of sexuality than that of the Victorians, inevitably led to authors who profoundly influenced Anderson, including Walter Pater, Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, and Walt Whitman. Some women writers of the Little Review—Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, H. D., Amy Lowell—were also lesbians, and their work in the Little Review contained lesbian themes. Anderson’s editorials and Heap’s critical reviews, among other work submitted to the journal, included both overt and covert themes about women loving women. In addition, in their work Mina Loy, May Sinclair, Mary Butts, and the Baroness Freytag von Loringhoven were also all interested in esoteric questions that overlapped with Anderson’s and Heap’s interests in their pre-Gurdjieff days.

Central to the fresh eye that this book brings to the modernist inquiry is the somewhat tangled, often obscure, and frequently misrepresented topic of modernism and spirituality. As Robert Crunden writes in Body and Soul: The Making of American Modernism, the “interest in Theosophy, Vedanta, the Wisdom of the East,” and other forms of spiritual belief systems “turns out to be the greatest missing patch in the crazy quilt of modernism.”⁹ As everyday people found themselves bombarded by a dizzying array of sights and sounds, modernist artists reflected that in their work. Esoteric spiritual questions served as a channel for new ways to think about creativity and the cosmos. Crunden points out that literary critics have long noticed the spiritual obsessions of two Little Review contributors, T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, observing that they duly recorded Eliot’s creative reliance on religion and “noted with alarm the wildly imaginative notions of William Butler Yeats … but even the most devoted and long-winded biographers have been known to neglect the role of spiritualism, the occult, hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, and the rest in writing up their subjects, or else passed by such things with scarcely a nod.”¹⁰ These spiritual philosophies captured the imaginations of other contributors to the Little Review, including Joyce, Pound, H. D., May Sinclair, and Mary Butts. Pound’s critical analysis of modern French poets, such as Jules Laforgue and Jean de Bosschere, some of them self-described mystics—or described by others as clearly esoteric in their preoccupations—were relevant to Gurdjieff’s thought and were among Pound’s best contributions to the journal. The poems of H. D. and W. B. Yeats, the mystical novels of Mary Butts, the “uncanny” short stories of May Sinclair, all published in the Little Review, further make the case. Finally, the Little Review’s serialization of James Joyce’s Ulysses, underscores the mythological, metaphysical, and esoteric themes that predated their interest in Gurdjieff. But Gurdjieff was the one who brought them closer to the surface.

Similar esoteric traditions and religions, most notably Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Theosophy, were important influences on Gurdjieff. His autobiographical accounts of his youthful travels seeking wisdom throughout Central Asia are difficult to verify, but we know he was in Moscow in 1914 and engaged in attracting a modest group of followers among the Russian intelligentsia. Notable among them was P. D. Ouspensky, a mystically inclined mathematician who dabbled in various esoteric schools, particularly Theosophy, which was much in vogue with Russian intellectuals and artists. When World War I and the Russian Revolution erupted, Gurdjieff led his small band of disciples across Russia, first to London, then to France, establishing his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man outside of Paris in 1922. Gurdjieff’s influence extended well into the twentieth century, inspiring such diverse figures as the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the cofounder of the New York City Ballet Lincoln Kirstein, the jazz composer Sun Ra, the British director Peter Brook (who made the 1979 film of Gurdjieff’s autobiography, Meetings with Remarkable Men), and Pamela Travers (who wrote the Mary Poppins series). They all agreed with Roger Lipsey, who wrote in The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art that art and spirituality are “two streams” and that what they “have in common is more important than what distinguishes them.”¹¹

Gurdjieff has always been a mystery figure to those who have tried to trace his origins and the influences that merged to produce what he called “the Fourth Way” or simply “the Work.” The novelist Henry Miller described him as “a cross between the Gnostics of old and the latter day Dadaists.”¹² He was a practitioner of Western esotericism and positioned himself as a teacher with knowledge from ancient and hidden sources of wisdom. His “Wisdom Tradition” posits that over the centuries “masters” passed down knowledge through oral or written transmission. That knowledge had its origins in ancient Egypt and Greece, particularly the Hermetic tradition—the identification of the Greek God Hermes with the Egyptian God Thoth, ultimately configured as Hermes Trismegistus or “Hermes the Thrice Great”—whose manuscript Hermetica Corpus was viewed as a significant source of secret wisdom. While knowledge of this tradition remained in Eastern Byzantium during the Middle Ages, the Byzantine empire’s fall to the Ottoman Turks led to the dissemination of various ancient manuscripts that reemerged in western Europe during the Renaissance. Later mystical ideas such as Jacob Boehme’s “signatures” and Emmanuel Swedenborg’s “correspondences” served as roadmaps to connect with the divine. Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, the Christian Kabbalah, and Neo-Platonism were other movements and groups promoting the secrets of an ancient wisdom.

From 1880 to 1920 the revival of occult schools of thought led to a burgeoning interest in mysticism among artists. This revival harkened back to the same sources of the Wisdom Tradition—ancient Egypt and Greece, especially Hermes Trismegistus. Hermes’s best-known aphorism from The Emerald Tablet, “as above, so below,” was the mantra of occult practitioners, validating the correspondence of the material world to the Absolute.¹³ While the reputation of occultism during this era is often associated with the infamous Aleister Crowley (founder of the religion of Thelema, a precursor to modern Wicca), more moderate expressions were the norm. The emergence of secret societies that practiced magic was best typified by The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, led by Little Review contributor William Butler Yeats. The Golden Dawn attracted artists and poets associated with the advent of the Symbolist literary movement. As proclaimed by Arthur Symons, the symbol was to “spiritualize literature and to free it from the bondage of materialism.”¹⁴ Authors were mystics whose task was to communicate to the reader their perceptions of the soul as it sought divine integration. Poetry was the conduit to self-transfiguration. This particular form of esotericism was the foundation for the aesthetics of certain practitioners of modernism.

Anderson and Heap were clear from the beginning that art was an intermediary to the otherworldly. Their youthful quests in art and literature were inseparable from deeper metaphysical matters. Anderson was remarkably well-read in esoteric literature as a young woman. In 1915 she wrote in the Little Review, “I enjoy reading Greek Mythologies in the Spring, Hindu legends in the Summer, the Bible anytime, Norse sagas in Winter nights.”¹⁵ As a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, Heap’s youthful letters were full of ruminations on God, truth, and beauty—frequently expressed by her love of Symbolists poets. Speaking for both of them Anderson later wrote, “We had never thought of art simply as painting, poetry, music, sculpture. We thought art was an expression, through the arts, of a need of something else.”¹⁶

Given the variety of spiritualist trends circulating during the early twentieth century, how do we explain Anderson and Heap’s conversion to Gurdjieff in particular? Some of their compatriots in the literary world saw him as little more than a money-grubbing, morally reprehensible fraud. His constant efforts, in his words, to “shear the sheep” (his followers) of money or ply his students with excessive alcohol struck some as less than holy. His belief that women are examples of “passive” energy and that same-sex attraction and masturbation were unnatural sexual offenses was enough to quell the enthusiasm of many. Edmund Wilson wrote that he was a “Russo-Greek charlatan … who undertook to renovate the personalities of discontented well-to-do persons.”¹⁷ According to this narrative, a ditzy Anderson and morbid Heap succumbed to this Armenian exile who took them on a magic carpet ride to the end of their lives. Taking their conversion seriously enables us to recognize the compelling personal and significant social and cultural issues that led to their path. The Ulysses trial inflicted a powerful blow. Anderson believed it precipitated her nervous breakdown, an event real enough that other Villagers noted it in their correspondence. Anderson and Heap, whose relationship had been previously strained, broke up. Moreover, the political and artistic chaos of the period raised broader questions that left scores of other American radicals feeling a keen need for alternatives to existing philosophies. Intellectuals and artists were floundering after the “Great War”; it appeared to be the ultimate act of madness, and they were now looking into a future that appeared as a dark enveloping abyss. The deep necessity of seeking meaning in the face of unprecedented catastrophe sparked a postwar search for answers to assuage the hunger for the sacred and holy. The failure of Versailles, the Red Scare, the reemergence of nativism and fundamentalism, and the advent of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover all left thoughtful Americans with a sense that their country was floundering. The Progressive-era emergence of a bureaucratic managerial business sector and an ethos of consumer culture did little to inspire confidence among the artist class. Turning away from politics, many wondered how they could cope with the onslaught of the conservative, even reactionary trends dominating the nation’s political and social agenda. As the writer Malcolm Cowley noted in his memoir Exile’s Return, even the committed politicos of the era were searching elsewhere for relief. Cowley writes, “Most radicals who became converted to psychoanalysts or glands or Gurdjieff gradually abandoned their political radicalism.”¹⁸ These trends, taken together with evidence that the two women were capable of separating Gurdjieff’s less desirable qualities from his system of thought, were crucial elements in their turn to that system. They trusted his admonition that his teachings must be “verified” by their own experience; no one should blindly accept any dictum he espoused.

Gurdjieff’s system of thought had both cosmological and psychological tenets. Like many of their contemporaries in the Chicago Renaissance and Greenwich Village, the two women immersed themselves in Freudian analysis. “Psyching” one another and their friends became a sort of sport, but the true goal was to understand themselves on a level that seemed revolutionary. The road from Freud to Gurdjieff was mediated by Darwin. Under Gurdjieff’s tutelage, Darwin’s theory of evolution also applied to individual spiritual progress. This concept of evolution was based on an interpretation of Darwin that permeated the late nineteenth-century occult revival and had a profound influence on the emergence of twentieth-century modernism. Gurdjieff has been described, along with Madame Blavatsky and Rudolph Steiner, as an “occult evolutionist” who implemented “the first Western effort to ground psychotherapy in the evolutionary image.”¹⁹ Once committed to, however, their path was not an easy one. Gurdjieff’s approach required intellectual discipline, uncomfortable insights, and physical labor, or what Theodore Roszak calls “therapy by ordeal.”²⁰ Those who dismissed Anderson as a ditzy lightweight underestimated her essential fortitude. The fierceness she used to stand up to censors, reactionaries, and other wrongdoers was evident in her lifelong allegiance to Gurdjieff’s thought.

That thought was, and still is today, challenging for many to understand. His writings are convoluted and difficult to decipher. It took a prolonged effort by his students to understand his views. Nor was his thought particularly optimistic. Since only an elite few could begin to comprehend the “absolute” truths he promulgated, it meant humankind would fail to evolve to a “super consciousness” anytime soon. As much as Anderson and Heap’s interest in achieving this form of enlightened consciousness was a search for God, like many seekers, they claimed it was not incontrovertibly opposed to science. The Victorians grappled with a crisis of faith but could reconcile the march of science with religion in various ways. In Max Weber’s phrase, science became a “method of legitimation” for those who argued that it could prove the existence of the divine.²¹ While various esoteric and occult teachers, including Gurdjieff, accepted evolution on earth as a physical phenomenon, they also believed that it could explain the soul’s development from the material world to the Absolute. The imprimatur of science, spiritual seekers believed, would allay the perceptions of others about odd or bizarre beliefs concerning the esoteric or occult. The Society for Psychical Research, established in London in 1882, was created to scientifically explain (rather than dismiss) otherwise inexplicable experiences such as mediumship, telepathy, and apparitions, among others. An American Society was founded two years later in New York.

By the late nineteenth century, the American Society for Psychical Research could look back on a rich history—one not only of unexplained phenomena but also of a nation that enticed both religious seekers and freethinkers from the beginning. The Jesuit missions in the Southwest, Puritanism, and the Great Awakenings were all unique in their American applications. By the mid-nineteenth century, the “Burnt Over District” of religious revivals in upstate New York gave way to a fascination with Spiritualism, or communicating with the dead.²² The Transcendental movement expressed in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson was based on Platonic idealism and perennial philosophy (also found in Gurdjieff) and marked the evolution of American philosophy as congruent with Western esotericism. Theosophy, another school of thought based on communication by spirit masters, was established in 1875 by Madame Helena Blavatsky in New York. Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science was a formidable church by this time. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the emergence of the New Thought movement, which also promoted a psychological approach to faith. By the early twentieth century, Anderson and Heap’s contemporaries such as Waldo Frank, Gorham Munson, and Hart Crane “were all preoccupied with a mystical interpretation of American history in which America appears as a visionary place where the spiritual regeneration impossible in the old world is a real possibility and they wondered whether Gurdjieff might not be the agent of this spiritual renewal.”²³

For too long, scholarship on Anderson and Heap has ignored, minimized, or ridiculed the questing, spiritual aspect of their lives. Perhaps that approach is understandable given the difficult and often impenetrable quality of Gurdjieff’s thought and the problematic nature of his personal conduct. Nevertheless, if we are to comprehend their legacy fully, we must understand how their later commitment to the esoteric philosophy of life had its origins in their passion for modernist art and literature. To dismiss or look down on modernists who attended séances, studied the tarot, or read medieval mystics risks obscuring the more erudite comprehension of these artists and hence the depth of the influence of the esoteric in their work. To avoid some of these pitfalls, I have chosen in particular to rely on Arthur Versluis’s reminder that “in the field of Western esotericism, as in that of religious studies more generally, it is important to balance on one hand the virtues of scholarship that strives to achieve a standard of objectivity, and on the other hand the virtues of an approach that seeks to sympathetically understand one’s subject, to understand it from the inside out, so to speak.”²⁴ In other words, while I am a Gurdjieffian agnostic, Anderson and Heap were true believers, and I respect their journey.

The concentric rings of modernism, sexuality, and spirituality reveal an intriguing and untold story of the journey of Anderson, Heap, their historic journal, and their mysterious search for the sacred. This book, the first full-length account of their lives, brings these topics together in ways that raise provocative questions and reevaluations of the intersection between esotericism and art. The arc of their story, including their turbulent inner and outer lives, adds another layer to the quest to understand both them and their cohorts, the intriguing rebels of early twentieth-century modernism.