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Temples of Tomorrow

Anderson and the Little Review, 1914–1916

Anderson’s editorial in the March 1914 debut issue proclaimed her enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. “If,” she wrote, “you have ever read poetry with a feeling that it was your religion, your very life; if you’ve ever come suddenly upon the whiteness of Venus in a dim deep room; if you ever felt music replacing your shabby soul with a new one of shining gold; if in the early morning, you’ve watched a bird with great white wings fly from the edge of the sea straight up into the rose colored sun—if these things have happened to you and continue to happen till you’re left quite speechless with the wonder of it all, then you’ll understand our hope to bring them nearer to the common experience of the people who read us.” Anderson later admitted the sentimentality of the editorial embarrassed her, but she still believed in the essence of her statement. She wrote forty years later, “The emotions I expressed in it were basic, laudable, and identical to those I feel today; my expression of it was incredible.”¹

An in-depth examination of the first issue of the Little Review delineates the major themes of the first two years, incorporating an evident spiritual proclivity that pervades the early issues of the journal alongside the subjects of literature, sexuality, and politics discussed in their pages. Central to Anderson’s blueprint for her creation was the concept of the Little Review as a “personal magazine” where she dictated the form as well as content, a form that encompassed a magazine “based on conversation.” In her debut editorial, she wrote, “Since the Little Review, which is neither directly nor indirectly connected in any way with any organization, society, company, cult, or movement, is the personal enterprise of the editor, it shall enjoy that untrammeled liberty which is the life of Art.”² By declaring the journal her own project, Anderson was staking her claim. However, doing what she pleased did not enforce conformity to any particular school or approach among her contributors. In fact, what she formulated from the beginning throughout the history of the journal was the antithesis of a party line. Anderson announced her intention to use her magazine as a forum for vigorous debate. She wrote, “Our point of view shall not be restrictive; we may present several judgments of our various enthusiastic contributors on one subject in the same issue. The net effect we hope will be stimulating and what we like to call releasing.”³ Not only did different contributors debate each other on current artistic controversies, Anderson and Heap weighed in as well, along with readers who wrote letters that were then often treated to parenthetical responses by the editors, including their retorts to one another. This approach signifies what both new modernist and periodical studies point to as the “dialogics of modernism.”⁴ The precise method of conversation in the Little Review by all involved mirrored the intricate and comprehensive spirit of the entire movement of modernism. Anderson’s zest and Heap’s cynical wit often engaged in simultaneously boisterous and derisive jousting with nearly everyone who had a relationship with the magazine. It is one reason the Little Review stood out, both then and now, as one of the most robust and revolutionary little magazines of the era. Although the journal went through many permutations from its debut in 1914 until the final issue in 1929, the intramural conversation never ended.

The first article Anderson published in the debut issue was a letter of good luck she solicited from the Edwardian novelist John Galsworthy. He good-naturedly responded, “My DEAR MADAM: You ask me to bid your magazine good speed, and so far, as I have any right I do indeed. It seems you are setting out to watch the street of Life from a high balcony, where at all events the air should be fresh and sunrise sometimes visible. I hope you will decide to sleep out there under the stars, for what kills most literary effort is the hothouse air of temples, clubs, and coteries that, never changed, breeds in us by turn febrility and torpor.”⁵ Although she published it, Anderson stated later that she was “disconcerted” by Galsworthy’s response. “A temple,” she ruefully reported, “was what I wanted. Not the petite chapelle of the aesthetes,” she explained, “but a temple of the great, the permanent, versus the transient, the exquisite; the special versus the typical; not the discriminations of the connoisseur but those of the creator; not the taste nor the standards of taste, but the perception of the masters.” With her typical self-referential perspective, she wrote, “Instead of avoiding all temples because of the risk of finding myself in the wrong one, I knew there was no risk involved—I was in the right one.”⁶

Immediately following Galsworthy’s good speed letter, Anderson launched into a laudatory review of Galsworthy’s novel, The Dark Flower, which seemed to some readers to advocate free love and adultery. Anderson’s review, entitled “The Dark Flower and the Moralists,” began with an assault on the “ignorant, naive, and stupid condemnation.” The Dark Flower, asserted Anderson, had no “moral. It simply offers you the truth about a human being and lets it go at that.” Marguerite Swawite wrote a counterresponse in a later issue, arguing that the novel was merely “a procession of futile experiences.”⁷ Galsworthy’s contemporary H. G. Wells was the subject of a more intense debate. One writer, identified only as M.M., criticized the novelist’s view of morality by writing, “He’s like a child who says, ‘Here’s a very dangerous beast in a flimsy inadequate cage. Let’s abolish the cage and let the beast run around openly and do what he wants.’ And the good old-fashioned word for that beast is lust, and it should be caged.” Frances Trevor responded with a somewhat personal riposte printed immediately following M.M.’s comments: “It is natural enough that the old lady should dislike Wells, for he’s found her out. He discloses to her scandalized eyes various unfortunate facts which she has done her best to conceal, as for instance there is such a thing as sex.”⁸ In the second issue, Anderson printed all the letters she received in response to the Little Review’s debut. “What an insouciant pagan journal you have,” wrote one reader.⁹ Later Anderson established the regular feature of “Reader Critic,” where letters to her and Heap became the subject of energetic, frequently humorous, and sometimes quite caustic exchanges between editors and readers, which then often evolved into a back and forth based on the letters themselves. As someone who loved a good argument, Anderson assured herself of always being in the midst of one—or many at the same time.

Nevertheless, while these dialogic debates were an earmark of modernism, the suggestion that the Little Review came bursting out as an unequivocal force for modernism is contradicted by several of Anderson’s choices as editor.¹⁰ While there were bold decisions and harbingers of what was to come, Anderson and her Little Review seem to have simultaneously floated in all three dimensions of past, present, and future. The chronology of modernism, endlessly debated by scholars, is evident in Anderson’s inconsistency in selecting “modern” topics and contributors. Her editorial choices were in perfect accordance with the disputes scholars have over the moment that modernism arrived and, as such, indicate several contradictions. As Michael Levenson has pointed out in his study of English modernism from the brief period of 1908 to 1922, the definition, manifestos, and understandings of the new movement were ever-shifting, often contradictory, and not even apparent to its progenitors. As Levenson puts it, modernism was “a movement of false starts, reversals, hesitations, resolutions.”¹¹ The fact that Levinson’s study of modernism’s vacillations is limited to one country over a span of fourteen years demonstrates the challenge of defining modernism’s precise beginnings. The Little Review was somewhat evolutionary in the early years, still planted in Victorian roots of incipient rebellion and following the flourishes of an emerging Edwardian Modernism. From 1914 to 1916, the Little Review repeatedly referenced mid- to late Victorian dissidents such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde alongside their Edwardian successors Galsworthy and Wells while simultaneously engaging in the modern Imagist poetry wars of the early twentieth century.

Anderson’s view of the Little Review as a personal enterprise extended to her philosophy of the function of criticism. It, too, was meant to be personal in approach and tone. Anderson reinforced her natural proclivity toward this stance with advice from Floyd Dell, who told her when she was writing book reviews under his editorship for the Friday Literary Review, “In heaven’s name don’t tell the story of the book! Bring to bear upon the book, in aesthetic terms, your attitude toward life.” Noting how Anderson took his guidance to heart, Dell later concluded, “She wrote well, if more enthusiastically than anybody had ever written before in the whole history of book reviewing.”¹² Dell’s suggestion may seem to reflect the tenets of the Chicago Renaissance but in fact had deeper roots in the writings of the Victorian dissidents, specifically Pater and Wilde, against the Arnoldian view on the purpose of criticism. Anderson was exposed to Pater’s work early; her family read it out loud to one another, and she loved his writing for the musicality of his language. She referred to Pater in her debut editorial and related in Thirty Years’ War how she and Dell spoke of Pater and living life, in Pater’s famous phrase, like a “hard, gem-like flame.” Anderson saw herself as Pater’s Aesthetic Hero, “a person who makes his art his life.”¹³ In her debut editorial, Anderson wholeheartedly shared Pater’s view that the role of the critic was as a conveyer of subjective perception: “Criticism that is creative is our highest goal. And criticism is never merely an interpretive function; it is creative: it gives birth!”¹⁴ We know that Anderson also read Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” where his essential message was not only the primacy of criticism but also the view that art had no moral purpose—as Anderson herself argued earlier in the Dreiser Sister Carrie and Galsworthy Dark Flower debates, foreshadowing her ultimate stance in the Ulysses trial.

In the first two years of the Little Review, Anderson’s mainstay contributors consisted of the 57th Street bohemians—Floyd Dell, Margery Currey, Sherwood Anderson, Arthur Davidson Fiske, Eunice Tietjens, Dewitt C. Wing, and Nicholas Vachel Lindsay. The interests of these writers varied greatly, but the influence of the Chicago Renaissance in literature was unmistakable. However, were they modernists? Some of Anderson’s other early contributors recruited from Chicago did sometimes venture far beyond the verbose sentimentality of the Victorians—doing their version of linguistic time travel—nevertheless, they were still more mired in the past than the future. It was often the case of two steps forward and one step back as Little Review contributors struggled to define what and who was to be included in the “new.” Anderson herself was one of the biggest culprits in misreading contemporary currents. In her review of the novel Succession by the now largely forgotten Ethel Sidgwick, she proclaimed, “Ethel Sidgwick is the next great women’s novelist.” Not content to leave it there, Anderson careened on in her gushing prediction that Sidgwick will “soon find herself in the company of George Eliot and the Brontës.”¹⁵ The first issue and subsequent two years included notable midwestern writers such as Vachel Lindsay, William Vaughn Moody, Edgar Lee Masters, and Sherwood Anderson—not generally categorized as giants of modernism. However, one of the strongest acknowledgments of the emergence of change in American arts and letters was Sherwood Anderson’s article, “The New Note,” in the Little Review debut issue. Sherwood wrote, “In the craft of writing there can be no such thing as age in the souls of the young poets and novelists who demand for themselves the right to stand up and be counted among the soldiers of the new. That there are such youths is brother to the fact that there are ardent young cubists and futurists, anarchists, socialists, and feminists; it is the promise of a perpetual sweet new birth of the world; it is a strong wind come out of the virgin west.”¹⁶

Like Galsworthy and Anderson, Sherwood Anderson also makes use of a “temple” in “The New Note,” describing two examples of temples: those of Galsworthy, “priests of falling temples, piling on stone to build a new temple, that they exact tribute as before,” and those of Anderson—“Among the voices of the old priests who weep are raised, also the voices of the many who cry, ‘Look at us! We are the new! We are the prophets; Follow us.’ ”¹⁷ The common vocabulary of religious terms such as temple and others were ubiquitous in the early years of the journal.¹⁸ The Little Review’s religiously suggestive titles during the first two years, based on Christian, ancient Greek, and pagan themes, included “Paderewski and the New Gods,” “The New Paganism,” “The Revolt of the Once Born,” “The Crucified Dionysus,” “A Great Pilgrim Pagan,” “The Prophecy of Gwic’hian,” “Heaven’s Jester,” and “A Mischievous Rhapsody of the First Occurrence.”¹⁹ As in the case of Pater and Wilde, as much as they may have seen themselves as proclaimers of the “new,” Anderson and her contemporaries drank deeply from the well of other European (and American) nineteenth-century writers, philosophers, and poets who essentially served as their guides to the new—or not so new—applications of their thoughts. Implicit in all their philosophies, however, were spiritual assumptions that were both overt and covert, demonstrating an early hunger on behalf of Anderson, and later Heap, for transcendent explanations via art in the pages of the Little Review.

The major European influence on Anderson and the moderns in general was, not surprisingly, Nietzsche. As the historian Jennifer Rosenhagen-Ratner points out in American Nietzsche, “Interest in Nietzsche grew so rapidly that by the 1910s observers could, without hyperbole, refer to the ‘Nietzschean vogue.’ ”²⁰ Using the language of the devotee, Anderson wrote, “Since we were a revolutionary magazine, naturally Nietzsche was our prophet.”²¹ The first two years of the Little Review amply illustrated the far-reaching grasp of Nietzsche over the spirits of young Chicago intellectuals. Each issue from 1914 to 1916 contained a lengthy article devoted to Nietzsche, requested explicitly by Anderson and written by George Burman Foster, a theology professor at the University of Chicago and a former Baptist minister. Foster was a part of Dell’s gatherings on 57th Street and was described by a contemporary as someone perpetually surrounded by youthful admirers. Foster’s first article in the debut issue was entitled “The Prophet [italics mine] of a New Culture,” in which he declared, “Down with the Bible; Up with the Anti-Christ.”²² Among his other articles solely concerning Nietzsche over the next two years were “Man and Superman,” “The Will to Live,” “The New Idol,” and “The Nietzschean Love of Eternity.” “Once in the horizon of his power,” Foster wrote in the first issue, “and you are held there as if by magic.”²³As Rosenhagen-Ratner has observed, “For Foster, the yearning Nietzsche awakened in moderns is the redemption not found in belief in miracles, in sacred scripture; it is created ever anew in the dynamic exchange of personality with personality.”²⁴ Since Anderson stated the Little Review was the “personal” enterprise of the editor and saw herself as the epitome of personality creating its own reality, Foster’s interpretation of Nietzsche reinforced both her self-image and world view.

In addition to Foster’s essays, Anderson published reviews of books about Nietzsche and printed aphorisms by the philosopher in several issues. Articles on various topics espousing a Nietzschean perspective, both artistic and political, appeared regularly from 1914 to 1916. As many scholars have pointed out, Nietzsche’s reliance on aphorisms and his seemingly contradictory statements have led to widespread debates on his body of work—the same fate of the work of Anderson’s later “prophet” Gurdjieff. The question here is what common elements of Nietzsche’s work appealed to American intellectuals in this period and to what extent these themes appealed to Anderson. For many writers, journalists, and political activists, Nietzsche was attractive for his dynamic way of criticizing society’s moral values, religious ideas, social arrangements, and political structures. Melvin Drimmer, who has written about the impact of Nietzsche on American intellectuals in this period, observes, “In different ways and for different reasons, Nietzsche found a ready response among the young, the avant-garde in the arts and literature, the free thinkers and religious liberals, the left-wing socialists and syndicalists, the champions of intellectual freedom, the debunkers of middle class mores, and from all those who were in revolt against their times.”²⁵

Nietzsche was first and foremost a rebel against convention, obviously, in the same way the young intellectuals of the Chicago Renaissance viewed themselves. His iconoclastic attack is on Christianity, sexual norms, economic materialism, and art that was stale and uncreative—the same issues attacked by young Americans who flocked to the urban bohemia searching for like-minded people. More specifically, Nietzsche’s “yea-saying” optimism and his belief in the “will to power” rang a bell for people like Anderson, who truly believed they could transform their lives through the force of their strong and superior personalities. Despite the radical politics of many of these bohemians, Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman and the importance of the aristocratic personality in contrast to the common herd was a tenet that figured prominently in their embrace of his philosophy. It can be argued that certain characteristics of Nietzsche’s philosophy resembled traditional patterns of American thought. Claiming that most of the Chicago intelligentsia were prepared for radical thought in the agrarian Midwest, Bernard Duffey asserts such areas were ripe for Nietzsche, among other modern thinkers. “As the far seeds of Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx fell on the Midwest during the second decade of the century,” Duffey wrote, “they took ready root in the already prepared native ground of dissent and rebellion.”²⁶

Perhaps the most attractive aspect of the Superman for such young Americans was the emphasis on rigorous and uncompromising individualism. For Anderson, the feeling of being different—apart from the desires and needs of other humans—was supported by Nietzsche’s vision of a unique race of individuals. In Thirty Years’ War, Anderson described herself as someone “aloof from natural laws,” meaning she was not restricted by realities that chained others. The conscious creation of her new “beautiful” life in Chicago and her view of the Little Review as an “accomplished fact” the moment she decided to establish a magazine testify to her faith in herself as someone who was the sole master of a unique destiny.²⁷ The sense of “feeling different” accounts for the prominence of Anderson’s references to conflict and struggle in her writing; it was, after all, a fundamental theme of the Superman’s path. This tension resulting from a feeling of difference in relation to inferiors also extends to fellow aristocrats. Hence, the Superman is always alone; even fraternizations on an elevated level with other superior types are unwelcome. “The instinct of born masters” wrote Nietzsche, “is at bottom irritated and disquieted by organization.”²⁸ Reinforcing this proclamation Anderson wrote, “I have always felt a horror, a fear, and a complete lack of attraction for any group, of any kind, for any purpose,” adding she was only willing to socialize with Dell’s coterie because she enjoyed the conversation so much.²⁹ Anderson’s insistence that the Little Review remain a personal magazine to free herself from any organizational ties reflected this self-image. She wrote in the 1915 June–July issue, “Individuals are persons who can stand alone. There ought to be individuals coming out of a generation raised on Nietzsche. Such an upbringing has taught us at least two things—first, that he who goes forward goes alone and second, that it is weakness rather than nobility to succumb to the caterpillars.”³⁰

Nietzsche’s comments on art struck a chord with young writers who saw themselves as serious artists and those like Anderson who were critics. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote, “The essential thing in art remains its consummation of existence, its production of perfection; art is essentially benediction, deification of existence.”³¹As in the case of Pater and Wilde, the appreciation of art by a critic was not considered by the German philosopher as a lesser station. The status of the critic is elevated further for Anderson through the lens of Nietzsche. Obviously, according to this view, only the few can determine what is art and what is not—a sentiment that Anderson unreservedly advocated. In the pages of the Little Review Anderson frequently lambasted nonartists and noncritics who presumed to make artistic judgments. In her 1920 editorial, “An Obvious Statement (for the Millionth Time),” Anderson proclaimed, “Only certain kinds of people are capable of art emotion (aesthetic emotion). They are the artist himself and the critic whose capacity for appreciation proves itself by an equal capacity to create.”³² Whether addressing art, personality, or the lone wolf distant from the herd, Nietzsche deeply touched a chord in a generation of artists and critics. His witty aphorisms and published works were to cast a long shadow over their intellectual, artistic, and spiritual lives.

Second only to Nietzsche, the French philosopher Henri Bergson hovered over the first year of the Little Review. Described as the philosopher of artists, Bergson was essential to the moderns on several fronts; his philosophy of the continuous duration of time influenced the concept of stream of consciousness so crucial to the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson. In addition, Bergson’s attack on logic resonated for Anderson. The importance of accentuating intuition over intellect was a philosophy Anderson argued from the earliest days of the Little Review until her final autobiography. In her second autobiography, The Fiery Fountains, Anderson wrote, “I don’t consider intellectuals intelligent; I don’t like them or their thoughts about life. They have,” she dismissively wrote, “opinions, but no point of view.”³³ Central to her interest in Bergson was his concept of the “élan vital.” The creative impulse, he argued, coursed through pure energy that unlocked the intuitive eye. It was, in essence, a life force that “short circuits the intellect and liberates the imagination.”³⁴ In the first issue of the Little Review Llewellyn Jones describes ‘élan vital’ in “The Meaning of Bergsonism,” as an “urge with endless potentialities and no fixed goal.”³⁵For Anderson that was half true. She saw the endless potential, writing in her debut editorial, “We take certain joyous pride in confessing our youth, our perfectly inexpressible enthusiasm, and our courage in the face of a serious undertaking—for those qualities mean freshness, reverence, and victory!”³⁶However, Anderson had a fixed goal. Writing forty years later, she maintained, “My conviction in founding the Little Review was that people who make Art are more interesting than those who don’t; that they have a special illumination about life; that this illumination is the subject-matter of all inspired conversation; that one might as well be dead as to live outside this radiance. I was sure that I could impose my conviction by creating a magazine dedicated to Art for Art’s sake. I see, today, that I succeeded.”³⁷

Anderson wrote that she meant to publish works that were “vital” (a term she stated was “a much-abused adjective”), perhaps because she agreed with Jones’s assertion that Bergson’s ideas could be used by a multiplicity of philosophical perspectives.³⁸ It also demonstrated that Anderson was among the number of cultural figures who joined, in the words of Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, “the critical vitalism of Bergson” with the “aesthetic and social vitalism of Nietzsche.”³⁹ Key to Anderson’s later conversion to Gurdjieff were two elements within Nietzsche’s and Bergson’s thought—the primacy of the superior individual and her initiation into a select group through the intuitive gleaning of knowledge.

While Anderson was well versed in the works of European theorists who she felt informed modern trends, she was also grounded in homegrown theorists of criticism and élan vital, demonstrated mainly by her repeated references to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. As with Nietzsche and Bergson, aphorisms from Emerson and Whitman were scattered among the pages of the early Little Review. More important, the Chicago and American Renaissances had much in common—primarily an attack on materialism and conformity and the emphasis on intuition and language as vehicles for changing consciousness. Nietzsche experienced a profound connection to Emerson in many ways that also galvanized young American intellectuals. Nietzsche read Emerson in his teens, and the New England transcendentalist served as a model for the rest of his life. Despite her admiration for Emerson, Anderson displays much more confidence in her place in the universal scheme of things than does the revered transcendentalist. Her exclamation that she was “aloof from natural laws” is a sharp contrast to Emerson’s more modest claim that he often found himself “aloof from all moorings.”⁴⁰ Nevertheless, both Emerson and Anderson had a fascination with transient moments—moments of aesthetic reception, intense and edifying conversations, and inspired reading. Transcendentalists also believed, as Bergson argued, that the mind must be accessed through intuition. Nietzsche was attracted to the Emersonian emphasis on individualism, and his attack on institutions in addition to his religious skepticism was an attitude Anderson and the Chicago literati shared. At the bottom of the page on Anderson’s debut editorial was an aphorism from Emerson’s essay Nature, “Poetry is in Nature, just as much as carbon is.”⁴¹ The first issue also contained a laudatory review of Emerson’s recently published Journal IX by Dewitt Wing, using the same temple analogy of Galsworthy and Anderson. Emerson, Wing contended, “composed the bricks which thousands of builders have used in fashioning beautiful temples.” Emerson’s “vitality” demonstrated a “spiritual universality” and was “talismanic.” “Those who are trying to achieve a personal religion which acknowledges God as an immanence instead of a proposition,” wrote Wing, “hail with a quiet joy every extraction from the great mine in which Emerson stored the jewels of his life.”⁴²

Walt Whitman was one of the most quoted writers in the aphorisms that intermittently dotted the pages of the magazine in the early years and he influenced Anderson on a level that transcended Nietzsche and Emerson. One of the narratives of the early years of the Little Review was the story of the evolving American character and how it was reflected in the arts. In addition to Vachel Lindsay, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, and Edgar Lee Masters, both Emerson and Whitman were placed in a higher realm by Anderson as quintessentially American and simultaneously responsible for America’s growing reputation abroad.⁴³ Whitman’s strong ego, even narcissism, was suited to Anderson’s self-perception. Her choice of self-laudatory Whitman aphorisms to put in the Little Review (“I am that which unseen comes and sings, sings, sings …”) underscored her healthy sense of self-worth.⁴⁴

Whitman was not simply an inspired poet or democratic chanter; he was a figure in whom sexuality and spirituality were intertwined. In Worshipping Walt, Michael Robertson makes a case that this was the firm belief of most of the disciples of Whitman. Researching the works of John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, and R. M. Bucke, Robertson states that Bucke (Whitman’s biographer) “devoted more than twenty years of his life to the service of what he often referred to simply as ‘the Cause’—that is, promoting Walt Whitman as the greatest religious figure in history.” ⁴⁵ John Addington Symonds was one of the many well-known Oxford students who benefitted from the famed tutor Benjamin Jowett’s attempt at reform by establishing Hellenistic studies that, though perhaps inadvertently, resulted in his students’ less repressive perspective on homosexuality. This reform movement had the unintended consequence of allowing Oxford gay men to see their sexuality as the descendant of a noble and pure tradition exemplified by the conservatism of Pater and connect them to a later more direct expression of sexuality exemplified by Wilde.⁴⁶ For figures such as Symonds, Leaves of Grass was a crucial link in this “purer” and “more innocent” expression of male love. For Symonds, Whitman “weaved homoeroticism into the divine fabric of a God-permeated universe, implicitly sanctioning the sexual desires that so tormented him.” Robertson describes how Symonds constructed his “Cosmic Enthusiasm,” as a “combination of immanence theology, Whitmanism, and Hellenism.” “Cosmic Enthusiasm” had in Symonds’ view a need to tackle the earthly pedestrian subject of a political campaign—specifically, he wanted to change the 1885 British law that criminalized sodomy or “gross indecency.” To educate the public, Symonds collaborated with Havelock Ellis on the book Sexual Inversion to enlighten public opinion and lead to a political transformation regarding homosexuality. As Symonds argued there was a connection between sexuality and democracy and that Whitman’s work was the “recognition of the divinity of things” that “is the secret of the democratic spirit.”⁴⁷

Edward Carpenter was an example of an even more extreme political, sexual, and spiritual radical than Whitman. An anarchist, socialist, women’s rights advocate, and environmentalist, Carpenter was most notably someone who went beyond his predecessors and contemporaries in searching for links between sexuality and spirituality. A student of Hinduism, Carpenter had a self-described mystical experience in 1881. He felt indebted to Whitman as an artist and gay man and later became the father of the cult of the simple life. Though he was involved in a plethora of political movements, Carpenter saw his politics, including anarchism and socialism, like Emerson and Whitman, as more of a religious experience than immersion in earthly social reform.⁴⁸ Anderson was an admirer of Carpenter and referenced him in her famous editorial on Edith Ellis’s Chicago talk on sexuality. Edith Ellis in turn was married to the famed sexologist Havelock Ellis, author of Sexual Inversion, a book considered by some to be a path-breaking sympathetic treatment of homosexuality, and a disciple of Carpenter’s.⁴⁹ Ellis had a mystical experience as a young man while rereading James Hinton’s A Life in Nature that inspired him to be a physician. As a result, Ellis joined the Fellowship of New Life, described by Antony Copley as “one of those utopian groups in the 1880s sustained by a quasi-religious belief in the enhancement of the interpersonal.” ⁵⁰ Edith Ellis met Havelock Ellis at a Fellowship meeting; Edith was a lesbian herself and a part of Havelock’s research. Indeed, one of Ellis’s biographers argues that the sexologist’s studies of lesbianism “were perhaps as much personal therapy as scientific investigation” because of his “tangled marriage.” ⁵¹ Edward Carpenter was also a member of the Fellowship as well as Margaret Hinton, wife of the physician James Hinton who so influenced Ellis. The Hintons’ son, Charles Hinton, was the author of many books and articles on the Fourth Dimension, including The Fourth Dimension, What is the Fourth Dimension, and An Episode of Flatland Or How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension. The Fourth Dimension, explored in the fiction of H. G. Wells, was a staple of the thought of both P. D. Ouspensky and George Gurdjieff.

The various strands of tolerance for homosexuality, spiritual progress, and practical activism came together when Edith Ellis was on her second speaking tour of America to promote her husband’s research.⁵² Her lecture, “The Love of Tomorrow,” was attended with great anticipation by Anderson, who was sorely disappointed as it turned out. In the March 1915 issue of the Little Review Anderson expressed her displeasure with the address. The talk, which Anderson believed would discuss “love, spirituality, sex abnormalities, and many other matters,” fell far short of her expectations. Because Edith Ellis emphasized spirituality as the nexus of love and sex, Anderson had reason to think she might give a more exciting speech than she delivered. In keeping with her ideal that the Little Review serve as a forum for stimulating conversation, Anderson printed two reviews of the talk, a positive response by Mary Adams Stearns and Anderson’s own less favorable notice. In “Mrs. Ellis’s Gift to Chicago,” Stearns wrote that the personality of the speaker “gleamed through every word she spoke and blazed into a pure white flame that seemed by its very intensity to create a new heaven and earth where love shall rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of souls and bodies consumed by a misunderstood and misused passion.”⁵³

For once, Anderson was the more restrained party. In “Mrs. Ellis’s Failure,” Anderson complained that the speech was one “which was beautifully and charmingly delivered and which said nothing at all. She said in brief that there should be no war between body and soul and that Oscar Wilde should have been understood rather than sent to jail. These things are not ideas; they are common sense.” Showing a thorough knowledge of recent theories of sexuality, Anderson complained that in Ellis’s “reference to intermediate types, she didn’t mention homosexuality; she had nothing to say about the difference between perversion and inversion, nor did she even hint at Carpenter’s social efforts in behalf of the homosexualist. What does Mrs. Ellis think about Weininger’s statement that the intermediate sexual forms are normal—not pathological phenomena—in all classes of organisms, and their appearance is no proof of physical decadence? It is not enough to report that Shakespeare and Michelangelo and Alexander the Great and Rosa Bonheur and Sappho were intermediates: How is the science of the future to meet these issues?”⁵⁴ In her closing paragraph Anderson returned to her passionate self, decrying the cruelty of society’s misunderstanding of the invert. “With us,” she wrote, “love is just as punishable as murder or robbery. Mrs. Ellis knows the workings of our courts; she knows of boys and girls, men and women, tortured or crucified every day for their love—because it is not expressed according to conventional morality.”⁵⁵ Jonathan Katz argues that Anderson’s editorial was “the earliest militant defense of homosexuality known to have been published by a lesbian in the United States.”⁵⁶

As dominant as spiritual concerns, prominent dissident philosophers, and the topic of sexual freedom were in the very first year of the Little Review, the issue of feminism was perhaps most dear to Anderson’s heart. In her debut editorial she wrote, “Feminism? A clear-thinking magazine can have only one attitude; the degree of ours is ardent!”⁵⁷ If parts of her debut editorial embarrassed her years later, her commitment to feminism only became more robust. “Feminism,” appearing in dictionaries in the 1910s, was a recent addition to the lexicon; however, Anderson and women like her seized on it with a zeal her editorial made clear. Unlike the feminism of Jane Addams, Crystal Eastman, or Alice Paul, the feminism of Anderson and her contemporaries belonged to a category that eschewed interest in legal or economic rights in favor of a more expansive focus on relief from archaic mentalities and the burden of the past. Anderson’s advocacy of feminism as she expressed it in the pages of the Little Review clearly places her in this category. For Anderson, feminism was, as Nancy Cott describes, “the joyfully self-important motive to flout convention” in addition to “other contemporaneous forms of cultural blasphemy.”⁵⁸ The published references to feminism in the Little Review were eclectic and rarely political. From 1914 to 1916, only two articles addressed suffrage. The vote did not engage Anderson’s interest, though she did comment once in the Little Review on the silliness of “someone who still believes in the antique theory that a woman must choose between her charm and the ballot.”⁵⁹ Though there were a few articles on political issues important to women such as prostitution and the education of girls, most of the articles with a feminist perspective dealt with literature, sexuality, and the idea of feminism as a “new religion.”

In the first issue of the Little Review, Anderson printed two articles about Rachel Varnhagen, who conducted an early nineteenth-century salon in Berlin attended by Heinrich Heine and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, among others. Varnhagen made public statements equating marriage with slavery, among other scandalous pronouncements. In Margery Currey’s review of Ellen Key’s biography of Varnhagen, Currey (who was at the time recently divorced from Floyd Dell) wrote, “The woman who has been filled with joyful amazement on finding that her only reliance is on herself—that she may depend not on this person or that convention to preserve her happiness—will know how to value her.”⁶⁰ The second article, written by Cornelia Anderson (married to Sherwood), described Varnhagen as “a true Feminist” who advocated “liberation through self-development.”⁶¹

Also in the first issue was a review by Dell of Olive Schreiner’s book Woman and Labor, which he praised as a “wise and beautiful book.” “She does not,” wrote Dell, “refer to the makeshift masquerade under the term ‘social usefulness.’ She means work done with the hands and the brain, work done for money, work that sets the individual free from dependence on any other individual.”⁶² The “Critic’s Critic” column by M. H. Partridge, a professor at Cornell, debuted in the March issue with a piece on “The Feminist Discussion,” where she lambasted an anti-feminist article in the Atlantic, asking, “Who has given men the power and the right to decide about woman’s errand in this world? For lo! these many years we have been letting husbands, fathers, and brothers decide for us just what it was best for us to do, and if the new idea has any significance at all it is just this: That we feel able to decide for ourselves what we most want and need.”⁶³ The second issue of the Little Review contained a review of C. Gasquoine Hartley’s book The Truth About Women, written by none other than Clara Laughlin, the woman responsible for Anderson moving to Chicago. Laughlin’s article, which demonstrated knowledge of the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Olive Schreiner, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was lukewarm toward The Truth About Women because she considered the author too tepid a feminist.⁶⁴

Anderson herself expressed her views on feminist literature, women’s fashion, and the modern family in several early articles. Her most enthusiastic article was a review of the novel Angel Island by the New York feminist Inez Haynes Gilmore. An early feminist fantasy tale, Angel Islandtells the story of five shipwrecked men who realize that the large birds circling the island are actually women with wings (with whimsical names such as “Peachy” and “Chiquita”). The men capture the women, marry them, and clip their wings because “a woman’s place is in the home not the air.”⁶⁵ The birdwomen have children, daughters with wings and sons without. To leave their husbands they secretly practice a combination of walking and pseudo-flying until escaping. The leader of the birdwomen, however, genuinely falls in love with one of the men and bears a son with wings. Anderson, a naturally effervescent reviewer, could hardly contain her joy at the novel’s message, which she proclaimed “original, profound, flaming. It leaves you with a gasping sense of having been swept through the skies, and also with a feeling of new life which comes with a plunge into cold deep seas.”⁶⁶

Anderson gave a more direct and detailed account of her views of American women, sexuality, and freedom in an animated piece entitled “Incense and Splendor.” Here she discussed the current theory that modern women had become “oversexed,” arguing that in fact “the American woman is pathetically undersexed. The critics who keep lecturing us on our oversexedness don’t realize that what they’re really trying to get at is our poverty of spirit, our emotional incapacities, our vanities, our pettiness— any number of qualities which spring from anything but too much sex.” She continued: “One thing is for certain; until we become conscious that there is something very wrong with our attitude toward sex, we’ll never get rid of the hard, tight, anemic, metallic woman who flourishes in America as nowhere else in the world.” Responding to the claim that “oversexedness” was manifested in the more revealing fashions of the early twentieth century Anderson wrote, “There has never been a time when women had such an opportunity to be beautiful physically. With the exception of the foolish and unnecessary restrictions in walking, women have such a splendid chance to look straight, unhampered, direct, lithe.”⁶⁷

The following month, Anderson revealed her position on some of the more controversial questions of the feminist movement in her era—birth control, motherhood, and family. Her article, “The Renaissance of Parenthood” (the title taken from Ellen Key’s book The Renaissance of Motherhood, published that same year), discussed the transitions occurring within the twentieth-century family, including the decline of parental authority and a public debate on the rights of children. The “distress” of the current American home, she wrote, might be “heralding a wonderful new conception of family potentiality.”⁶⁸ In this article, Anderson referred to an ongoing debate between Ellen Key and Charlotte Perkins Gilman concerning the solutions to the family’s future. Gilman’s argument that women should become economically independent while professionalizing domestic duties clashed with Key’s belief that change within the family, with a different perspective on women’s sexuality and motherhood, was essential to female liberation. Like Havelock Ellis (to whom she dedicated The Renaissance of Motherhood), Key was a contradictory thinker in many respects, incorporating radical sexual views with conservative implications. Key was above all an advocate of female sexual freedom, but she also believed that motherhood was the supreme fulfillment for women. They were not, as they may appear on the surface, contradictory goals; Key wrote that one of the ultimate responsibilities of motherhood was to counsel daughters on “their scientific sexual enlightenment.”⁶⁹ As Nancy Cott points out, Key’s linking of maternity and sexual desire made the latter “itself sacred and self-validating.” Yet Key’s insistence that women had a “sex-specific” destiny rather than a “human” one made many feminists uneasy. Anderson’s article sided with Key. “Her insistence is strongly upon the education of the feelings as the most important factor in soul-life. In her vision of the renaissance of motherhood, she begins with Nietzsche’s dictum that ‘a time will come when men think of nothing except education.’ ”⁷⁰

Key, like Anderson, did indeed quote Nietzsche—though the philosopher and feminists seem strange bedfellows. How did Anderson, Key, and other women reconcile the obvious tension between Nietzsche and feminism? We do not have any direct statement from Anderson, but perhaps her contemporaries can shed some light. In her biography of the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, Margaret Caffrey asserts that the misogynist statements of Nietzsche were simply ignored because Benedict saw herself as “different from the mass of women and his words did not apply to her.”⁷¹ It is easy to see Anderson, forever proclaiming she was different from others, assuming this attitude. Margaret Sanger, Ida Rauh, Mabel Dodge, Margery Currey, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Isadora Duncan were among other women who found a valuable message in Nietzsche. No doubt rationalizing much of his message, radical feminists of the day could envision themselves as an independent, strong, and forceful Superwoman. One obvious attraction for these modern women was Nietzsche’s critique of sexual and moral values. Criticizing loveless marriages, chastity, and silence about sex, Nietzsche resonated with the emerging “New Woman.” Margaret Sanger, in particular, found a role for the Superwoman in “the aspirational idea for achieving a woman’s right to bodily self-sovereignty.” The slogan she used for her journal Woman Rebel was “No Gods, No Masters.”⁷²

Agreement on the value of Nietzsche aside, it might seem puzzling that Anderson would prefer Key’s argument to Gilman’s given the fact that Anderson was a lesbian who had no interest in having children as well as a career woman in many ways adhering to Gilman’s view that women be economically independent. The answer may be that when considering the oppressiveness of the traditional family, Anderson still identified with the role of the subjugated daughter rather than that of the parent. As a free spirit who chafed under her mother’s prim conventionality, Anderson missed few opportunities to blast the restrictions placed on children. Key’s idea, wrote Anderson in her article, “means the elimination of all kinds of domestic follies—for one, the ghastly embarrassment of growing up to discover that you’re different from the rest of your family, and for that reason something of a criminal.”⁷³ For someone like Anderson, Key’s statement that “the family has often been a torture chamber for individuality” could strike a deep chord.⁷⁴ As with Ellis and Carpenter, there was a spiritual dimension to sexuality in Key’s scheme of human nature, including homosexuality. In her 1912 book The Woman Movement, she wrote she had never met the “Sapphic” women who were the frequent topic of conversation, but she had “often observed that the spiritually refined men of Hellas find most easily in their own sex the qualities which set their spiritual life in the finest vibration of admiration, inspiration, sympathy and adoration.”⁷⁵ Given Anderson’s rhapsodic feelings for Whitman and her review of Edith Ellis’s talk, she no doubt applauded Key’s linking of homosexuality with spirituality.

In The Renaissance of Motherhood, Key extrapolates beyond her philosophy of feminism to attack organized religion. She was dismissive, if not scathing at times, towards Christianity, using the scandalous George Eliot as a model of a true Christian. Key wrote of Eliot, “She demonstrated Nietzsche’s satirical words as to the lack of consistency of the Englishman who when discarding Christian faith holds closer than ever to Christian morals.” The “love of humanity,” Key continued, “has been practiced with more consistency by many so called heathens than by most confessors of the Christian faith.”⁷⁶ Pointing out that only two women, Mary Baker Eddy and Madame Blavatsky, had founded their own religions—neither one of which she endorsed—she called for a “new religion,” one that would not be a ‘refined Christianity’ but would rather remain ambiguous in nature. The key was that women subscribe to “individualism” since, Key argued, they can only be “converted” to “a new religious belief, namely that every human being ‘lives his own life’ in the greatest and most beautiful sense when his will is in harmony with that mighty will to create of the whole evolution-of culture as well as of nature-bears witness.”⁷⁷ Vague and distinctly unhelpful as these pronouncements are in ascertaining any truly insightful attributes of this “new religion,” two particular elements could almost have been crafted by Anderson herself: the romantic sensibility and the lack of rigorous definitions or sophisticated theology meshed with generalizations. Key and Anderson wanted freedom for women to express their individuality, and these freedoms included sexual and spiritual exploration, no matter where those paths took them.

A strong proponent of Key was Margaret Sanger, and some of Anderson’s most passionate editorials were written in defense of Sanger and contraception. Calling birth control “one of the milestones by which civilization will measure its progress,” Anderson wrote that she “prayed” Sanger would not return from England for trial in the United States. “Why,” she asked, “should she go to jail for ten years because we haven’t suppressed Anthony Comstock?” Noting that Sanger’s legal problems arose when her husband gave a copy of the pamphlet to a detective, Anderson stated she had read the pamphlet and gave it to everyone she knew “well enough to be sure they are not Comstock detectives.” “Margaret Sanger,” she argued, “couldn’t be obscene—she’s a gentle, serious, well-informed woman writing in a way that any high-minded physician might.” Significantly, Anderson managed to avoid the trap of the eugenics movement popular among many defenders of birth control. She wrote, “The science of eugenics has always seemed to me fundamentally a sentimentalization, because there is no such thing, really, as the scientific restriction of love and passion. These things don’t belong to the realm of science any more than one’s reactions to a sunrise do. But the restriction of the birth-rate does belong there, and science should make this one of its big battles.”⁷⁸ Anderson ended her article with a plea for funds to help William Sanger with his legal fees to be sent in care of the Little Review. When Margaret Sanger returned to face trial, Anderson and other Chicago notables wrote an open letter to President Wilson asking him “to use his powerful office to help Mrs. Sanger in the interest of free speech and the betterment of the race.”⁷⁹

The first two years of the Little Review were a veritable smorgasbord of topics and influences; Anderson was finding her way in terms of both content and quality for the magazine. Years later, she would admit that as an editor she “knew nothing of the art of writing in those early years.”⁸⁰ Yet she established two constants from 1914 to 1916 that would flourish as the Little Review matured: basing the magazine on raucous conversation and investigating spiritual themes among its contributors. Nevertheless, during these same years two movements, Imagism and anarchism, came to the fore and helped to crystallize, if not solidify, her entry into the more radical wings of art and poetry and also increased her confidence in real obstacles that were about to appear in her path. When she later became disenchanted with these movements (especially anarchism), Anderson demonstrated that her seemingly uncompromising passions could in fact waver. As she would discover by the end of 1916, the adventure of the Little Review was a journey, not a destination.