Politics and Paradigms for Art in America : Reframing Radicalism in The Little Review (1914-1929)
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1Launched in March 1914, months before the outbreak of World War I and folding in May 1929, months before the Stock Market Crash, the Little Review spanned a period marked by dramatic moments in the course of the twentieth- century. Consistently alive to its American contexts, the Little Review grew into an important document of the making of the Anglo-American modernist canon and the continental avant-gardes. Starting out in the Chicago Renaissance and promising to cover “literature, drama, music, art”, the Little Review became one of the most important cross-cultural platforms for the American dialogue with the continental avant-gardes. The editorial strategies and choices of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were as is the case with little magazines the product of circumstances, just as they attended to an initial ambition to embrace art as a force participating in cultural and social change1. Initially published in Chicago, moving to New York in the spring of 1917 and crossing over to Paris in early 1922, the Little Review created an intellectual space where claims for cultural and political radicalism alternately emerged as either antagonistic or strenuously converging.
2The Little Review’s cultural outlook shifted in its three moments : its early years in Chicago were framed within Anderson’s polemics about anarchism ; the Little Review’s New York and Paris years were marked by tensions between Pound’s work as foreign editor, the Little Review’s local contexts, and Jane Heap’s Dada vein. Margaret Anderson’s attraction to anarchism, Pound’s exilic cosmopolitanism, and Jane Heap’s irony marked the life of a little magazine where modernist and avant-garde art was contextualised beyond the much-fraught tension between political and aesthetic radicalism. In a little magazine where the intersections of modernism with mainstream culture and the public sphere pointed beyond the dichotomy between modernist elitism and the avant-garde’s anti-establishment rhetoric2, the attempt to set American and European contexts in dialogue was entwined with the awareness of art’s antagonism and complicity with the cultural field. Throughout the Little Review’s run, a dialogue with Europe unfolded alongside the difficult realignment between social and cultural change. While at the inception of the Little Review, Margaret Anderson saw American culture as a space where politics could pave the way for new art, as European art was making its way into the magazine, Anderson’s anticipation of a convergence between social and cultural change gave way to the realisation that the newness of the continental avant-garde was premised on a radicalism that could not ultimately be aligned with a collective dream, be it European or American.
3Throughout its first two years, and intermittently from 1917 onwards, the Little Review was a venue for the Chicago Renaissance, publishing Sherwood Anderson, Ben Hecht, Maxwell Bodenheim, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters. Anderson also consistently published polemics on American politics and social issues ranging from feminism and birth control to the United States’ intervention in the European war. The first two years of the Little Review were framed by Anderson’s wish to cut across social contexts and an attendant sense that America and Europe were in need of distinct aesthetic and cultural politics. Overall though, Anderson’s attempt to encompass politics and culture and to sustain a blueprint that would offer a record of change and progress jarred with the convulsions of the European war. Intellectually and culturally distanced from the despair of Europe, Anderson’s America claimed its own share of the new. It would not take long for the Little Review to become a ground where the rhetoric of change and newness could no longer be reconciled with radical politics, but was in fact mobilised in order to expose a European culture in crisis, and to challenge the hope that in America the destructive iconoclasm of the avant-garde could be translated into a realignment of art and politics for a participatory culture.
4In the inaugural number of the magazine, Margaret Anderson announced the Little Review as a venue intended to respond to the need for new art and for a renewed discourse as "criticism as an art has not flourished in this country3". Anderson hoped that the Little Review would mobilise the European avant-garde’s claims in the service of “social advance4” –as Sherwood Anderson would put it a little later–in their contemporary America. Anderson framed her hopes with a celebration of “life”, as “a glorious performance”, in which “everybody is given at least his chance to act5”. This “glorious performance” would become the context for an “eager, panting Art”, “treading on Life’s heels”, an art that, Anderson went on, “shows us the wonder of the way as we rush along6”. Anderson’s affirmative celebration of the dynamism of modern life would not be out of place in a futurist manifesto, and her assertion of the unconditional freedom of art spilling over onto the ground of life may sound like an anticipation of the early years of Parisian Surrealism. Yet her claims for an art and criticism that bear and shape the “ideas of an age7”, seem to circumvent the negating, nihilistic perspective that the continental avant-gardes afforded on the "life" that she was eager to celebrate.
5The challenge of the “new” and the stakes of “life” were also taken up by Sherwood Anderson who was at that time in Chicago with aspirations and expectations not unlike Margaret Anderson’s. On a more restrained and somewhat more anxious note, Anderson voiced a warning against the misappropriation, the uses and the abuses of the new :
Already a cult of the new has sprung up, and doddering old fellows, yellow with their sins, run here and there crying out that they are true prophets of the new, just as, following last year’s exhibit, every age-sick American painter began hastily to inject into his own work something clutched out of the seething mass of new forms and new effects scrawled upon the canvases by the living young cubists and futurists8.
6Sherwood Anderson too, in resonance with Margaret Anderson’s programmatic claims, tried to align Europe with America and gave an American inflection to his perspectives on the cultural politics of the avant-garde : positing the production of new art in America as a juncture of life and “craft” produced by new men “in a new world proclaiming [their] right to speak out the body and soul of youth9”, he was also eager to see a new American culture, politically and aesthetically radical, emerging out of its dual contact with Europe and progressive politics in America. In bringing their hopes for social change in America in line with the artistic experiments of Europe, Margaret Anderson and Sherwood Anderson wilfully misread the ethos of the avant-garde. Alexander S. Kaun would a little later remind that Futurism originated in the rejection of “the atavistic fetters of the old culture and civilization” and that in America such an “iconoclastic movement… is still a foreign plant10”. That America was “free of a burdensome heritage11” was for Kaun, America’s cultural, if not political, dis/advantage. America’s claims for its cultural moment and future contrasted with a European culture in crisis intent on its past.
7Margaret Anderson’s perspective on a new and independent art, and Sherwood Anderson’s anxiety share in the dreams of radicalism of the Chicago Renaissance where the avant-garde was expected to be a social and a cultural palimpsest that also intersected with the “commercial culture” of Chicago that Mark Morrisson maps out in his compelling contextual study of the emergence of modernist magazines. Dispelling established notions about how little magazines targeted their audiences, Morrisson describes how Anderson used the strategies of a growing mass publishing world and promoted and perceived the Little Review’s avant-gardism in a context where a “new ideology” was “setting the freedom of youth in public against constraining and authoritarian domesticity12”.
8The blueprint that was set in the first number was more or less the case with subsequent numbers. Alongside American contexts, the Little Review was publishing contributions from Europe and reports from the European front. In the first number, Anderson brought together Arthur Davison Ficke’s five Japanese prints, Floyd Dell’s review of a book on women and labour, her own coverage of Paderewski’s performance in Chicago, and the first of a series of essays on Nietzsche by the American theological writer George Burman Foster, as Nietzsche was a critical point of reference in American anarchist circles13. Book reviews mostly about social and political issues in contemporary America, and reviews of the performing arts were to become a standard feature of the magazine. John Galsworthy, whose writings Anderson dismissed a little later, bid the magazine good fortune with a hint about Anderson’s detachment : “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 visible14.”
9Looking back on the first year of the Little Review in February 1915, Anderson vindicated the Little Review’s non-partisan stance : “We have been. outlandishly anarchistic ; we have been uncritical, indiscriminate, juvenile, exuberant, chaotic, amateurish, emotional, tiresomely enthusiastic15.” A little later, looking back on the first two years, Anderson resented that for all her attempt to showcase new art and criticism for her American readership, the magazine’s contents were nowhere near her “ideal16”. Yet despite her dissatisfaction, Anderson’s polemics and editorials in the first years of the Little Review were marked by an essentially affirmative vision. Impressed by Emma Goldman’s lecture in Chicago, Anderson found a cultural icon and a paradigm for political radicalism that would set a precedent for a radical art. Grafted onto Emersonian individualism, Goldman’s anarchism informed Anderson’s editorials during the war years17. The alliance between anarchism and individualism was however more complex than Anderson seemed to have been aware at that time. American individualism was also a component of American nationalism, integral to the ideological underpinning of American capitalism, subsuming the myth of individual growth to a collective effort towards economic and industrial development.
10At a remove from the angst-ridden subjects of early modernist writing, in her editorial for the October 1914 issue, against the backdrop of the “dehumanization” caused by the European war, Anderson vindicated a revalued individualism which she defined as “a matter of heightened inner life”, an attribute of a “race purified of small struggles, small causes, small patriotisms18”. At the outbreak of the European war, Anderson sounded somewhat insensitive to the imminent European catastrophe, as in her editorial for the December 1914 number, marvelling at the “noise, jangle, rush and dirt” of modern Chicago19, she celebrated her local contexts. Consistent with her initial claims about art and culture, Anderson inflected cultural progress through the avant-garde’s oppositional impetus, while at the same time abstracting the continental avant-garde from its uncompromising rejection of Western values and traditions.
11Throughout 1915 Anderson projected her hopes for an American avantgarde culture onto political activism and anarchist internationalism. In the December 1915 issue, Anderson paid a tribute to Joe Hill in a text where her claims for art were underscored by her impatience with the advent of revolution20. In the same number, she published Maxwell Bodenheim’s “Images of Life and Death21”, and Goldman’s denunciation of both the European war and America’s “preparedness” for a capitalist war trading in ideals on a “Road to Universal Slaughter”. In her polemics, Goldman approached the cultural and the political history of America, in a way that however may have sounded resonant with the myth of American exceptionalism :
America is essentially the melting pot. No national unit composing it is in a position to boast of superior race purity, particular historic mission, or higher culture. The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but the America of the privileged class ; the class which robs and exploits the masses, and controls their lives22.
12Contra Emma Goldman’s opposition to America’s “preparedness” and Anderson’s exuberant enthusiasm for the modernity of Chicago, Maxwell Bodenheim –who declared himself an “intense admirer of Ezra Pound23” –in Armageddon voiced his scepticism about America’s non-involvement in the war that the anarchists denounced as a capitalist profit-making conflict. For Bodenheim, the cultural crisis of Europe was a warning for a crisis that could very well become America’s own24. Criticising America’s “aloofness”, he also criticised America’s isolationism and “provincial consciousness”. Bodenheim saw America sustaining the “ideals” of “patriotism”, “economic value”, and “private profit” that “led Europe to the present crisis25”. In February 1915, Richard Aldington claimed his affinity with the French as a political gesture against “the nationalist, narrow and dehumanizing influences of Berlin26”. In resonance with Aldington’s and Bodenheim’s anxiety was John Gould Fletcher’s poem “America 1915” : unlike Sandburg’s Chicago images, Fletcher evoked a bleak and anxious vision of American capitalism as a counter-attack to American optimism27. In the same number, Anderson also published the southwestern writer Will Levington Comfort who criticised the doctrine of non-involvement and protested against both American complacency and the savagery of Europe :
American predatory instincts, her self-worship, her attempt at neutrality while supplying explosives for the European slaughter arenas, her deepening confinement in matter during the past fifty years, have prepared her for the outright demoralization of war, just as surely as Europe is meeting today the red harvest from such instincts and activities28.
13Alongside Goldman’s internationalism, polemics for and against America’s intervention in the European war, and the Little Review’s correspondents’ anxiety over the moral and material bankruptcy of the Western world29, Anglo-American modernism’s entry in the Little Review was problematic both on cultural and political grounds. Was modernism ultimately complicit with and a product of the imperialist European states that had led the masses to a capitalist war, or were modernist and avant-garde experiments to be recuperated by American artists towards a revolutionary culture ? Such largely unstated dilemmas were bound to remain unresolved.
14It would take Pound’s exilic “foreignness” and Heap’s Dada vein to destabilise Anderson’s cultural paradigms and her hope that revolutionary reform and cultural pluralism would create the conditions for the production of new art. What Anderson circumvented in her editorials was that her perspective on life was incommensurable with the destruction of life in Europe at the time. It was in “Reversals” where intimations of the “panting” and “agonizing” life in Europe afforded a different slant on Anderson’s optimist drive :
what do you call the place you live in ?… It is a place where men do not hold up their heads and look free… Where revolt is the strongest of emotions and the weakest of actions. Where nations go to war for things they do no believe in. do you call it an asylum of crazed beings who annihilate each other ? Not at all. You call it the world. You say it is “a good world, after all”. And you resent the “freak” who tells you your world is upside down30.
15Anarchism, rather than avant-garde art, seemed, at this stage, to bear a promise against the destructive course of history. Anderson hailed Emma Goldman as the “most challenging spirit in America31” and as “an artist in life32” and in “Art and Anarchism”, she proclaimed anarchism as a form of art. Anderson’s anarchist sympathies may also seem to come as a corrective to the critiques of America that had appeared throughout 1914 and 1915. What the continental avant-gardes would claim about the destructiveness of their anti-art, Anderson would claim for anarchism “because anarchism and art are in the world for exactly the same kind of reason33”. By defending the internationalism of anarchism, Anderson was contemplating a political avant-gardism that, alongside art, would foster a new American culture beyond the cultural lag from Europe. Still, what underpinned Anderson’s conflating anarchist activism with the overcoming of the distance between art and life34 was her disillusion about the scarcity of art in the Little Review. A little later she expressed her frustration about “the ridiculous tragedy of The Little Review” which has not come “near its ideal” :
Well, I wanted Art in The Little Review. There has been a little of it, just a very little. It is tragic. I tell you.
And Revolution ? Revolution is Art. You want free people just as you want the Venus that was modelled by the sea. All my inadequate stammerings about Emma Goldman have been to show her as the artist she is : a great artist, working in her own material as a Michael Angelo worked in his35.
16Was it because Anderson was failing to find art as radical as anarchist politics, that she saw anarchism as a paradigm for progressive change in both social life and art ? Frustration with both art and politics ; frustration with the distance between radical politics in America and the politics of the continental avant-gardes might have also underscored the publicity-seeking gesture that led Anderson to publish a number with blank pages as “a Want Ad” in September 1916. Timothy Materer refers to this decision as a “publicity gesture worthy of Pound himself that convinced him that Anderson had high standards”, by addressing an elite audience worthy of modernist art36. For Edward Bishop, the Little Review “was neither respectable nor aggressively avant-garde” and for all her “commercial considerations”, Anderson was not that adept at making the Little Review sell37.
17Shortly after Heap’s Dada vein joined the Little Review, the magazine moved to New York. With her ironic dismissal of Sherwood Anderson as being yet “another man who hasn’t written the great American novel” ; her admiration for Coomaraswarmy and her eager anticipation of Tagore’s return to America38, Jane Heap alienated the Little Review from its American contexts. As Pound took over the post of “foreign editor” in May 1917, with Pound and Heap on board, the paradox of the politics of the Little Review became more marked. While Anderson launched the magazine as an attempt to align radical art and politics with a progressive social dynamic, Heap’s writings were too critical of America, while the new writings that Pound brought to the magazine seemed to negate the politics of change, enmeshed as they were in a cultural crisis that was more European than American. Pound’s intervention and Heap’s dadaist iconoclasm displaced the voices of the Chicago Renaissance that had struck a powerful note in the summer of 1916. In August 1916, alongside an enthusiastic review of Sandburg’s Chicago poems and Ben Hecht’s long poem “The Poet Sings to the World”, and where Hecht seems to be bringing together Whitman’s expansiveness with Apollinaire’s dynamism, Anderson raised “an anarchist’s question” by protesting against the unjust arrest of radical labour leaders for the bomb that killed “eight people” on the day of the Preparedness Parade in San Francisco39”. Anderson also attempted to bring together the social concerns of the Chicago Renaissance and the uncompromising ethos of the continental avant-gardes in a series of aphorisms in defence of the independence of the artist in her editorial “The Great Emotional Mind40”. As if attempting to inflect Pound’s and Heap’s attitudes, Anderson revisited the convergence of participatory politics with forms of art destined for wider audiences. In “What the Public Doesn’t Want”, she declared having given up anarchism and to wholeheartedly and exclusively embrace art41.
18It comes as no surprise that Anderson’s defiant disregard for the public appeared in the wake of Pound’s editorial. Detached from American radical politics, Pound’s “foreignness” complicated the politics of the Little Review. In his first editorial, Pound deflected the Little Review’s local contexts and social issues by wishing that the Little Review “will aid and abet the Egoist in its work”. Pound’s “radicalism” proclaimed the “sacredness” of the “formulation of thought in clear speech for the use of humanity ; any falsification or evasion is evil42”. As different perspectives on culture emerged, Anderson was from this point on, at pains to align Pound’s “thorough contempt for the mob43” and an oppositional art to the homegrown modernity of the “hogbutcher of the world”, to remember Sandburg’s lines. Bodenheim’s poignant anxiety over the European war ; Edgar Lee Masters’ socially-minded lines ; Vachel Lindsay’s populism ; Goldman’s anarchism ; the American labour movement ; Eunice Tietjens’s and Sarah Teasdale’s feminisms ; or Paderewski’s, Isadora Duncan’s and Mary Garden’s performances, could not easily be set in dialogue with Pound’s cult of the modernist artist. Still, against the backdrop of Anderson’s affirmative cultural eclecticism, Pound’s modernist canon was drawn into American expectations about the social role of art and the value of art as a form of protest within and against mainstream culture. Somewhat abstracted from a European angst, Jane Heap announced Joyce by highlighting how topical Stephen Dedalus’s predicament is for the “young artists” in America who “could suffer tortures far beyond anything suffered by Stephen”, while also noting that “the portrait itself” transcends “the social, political, and religious life of Ireland today44”. There may be another undertone in Heap’s announcement : the persona of the artist whose potential may be aborted or remain unfulfilled involved a more negative take to Anderson’s positing Emma Goldman as a paradigm for the young artist in America.
19From 1917 onwards, Pound and Heap provided a corrective to Anderson’s perspectives on politics and art, and reoriented Anderson’s mis/reading of the dynamism of the avant-garde towards European intellectual contexts and an internationalism of a different kind, as the Little Review was emerging as a transatlantic platform for modernist and avant-garde art. The first number with Pound on board published Eliot’s Eeldrop and Appleplex, an implied dialogue with Pound ironically debunking the Western philosophical tradition45, and Wyndham Lewis’ anti-humanist indictment of the war in the Imaginary Letters of a self-loathing, parodic persona declaring the intellect “cruel”, “repugnant” and “dirty46”.
20In June 1917, the Little Review appeared as “a magazine of the arts” with the motto that made much of its reputation, “making no compromise with the public taste”. Jane Heap’s “Push-Face” merged Pound’s and Anderson’s claims. On a defiant note, Heap resumed the lines of Anderson’s “announcement” of the Little Review, and wrote :
[it is] a great thing to be living when an age passes. If you are born in an age in which every impact of its expression is a pain, there is a beautiful poetic vengeance in being permitted to watch that age destroy itself47.
21Anderson’s anarchist sympathies and the prospect of social change gave way to Heap’s intent to critically confront destruction and regression : Heap inflected Anderson’s earlier individualist ideal through the privileged and aggressive position of the artist observing a course of destruction. Informed by the irony of Dada, Heap’s cultural critique revolved the negation and the rejection of the value of progress ; not only the Western European ideology of progress, but the industrial progress of American capitalism : “the wheels”, Heap wrote, “became rollers which have rolled life out thin and flat48” Heap also nuanced the Little Review’s earlier optimism by acknowledging that art had not reached the masses : "Life had made its protest through Art. But this consciousness never reached the unendowed mind. It (the unendowed mind) forced Life to avenge itself by flying into war49." The political game is for Heap a “push-face”, whether it is acted out by the governments of nation-states or revolutionary Russia.
22In the fall of the same year, announced as the “magazine that is read by those who write the Others”, the Little Review was a long way from Anderson’s dreams of inclusiveness and participation in a life in which “everybody at least is given a chance to act”.
23Whether or not it was Pound’s egoistic authority and his literary genealogies that elided the Little Review’s American issues, it came as no surprise that it was Ben Hecht who criticised Pound’s appointing himself as arbiter of modernism :
perhaps Pound’s place is, as others have fervently pointed out, in the literary politics of the day rather than in literature. He may be an influence, the patriarch cod of the vers libre school or anything of the sort which it beguiles less fallible historians than myself to nominate him… “Remy de Gourmont”, writes Pound, “has embedded his philosophy in a luxurious mist of the senses”. Were Pound writing of himself he might say, “Ezra Pound of Idaho has etched his philosophy upon a moonbeam50.”
24Despite Hecht’s protest, by the end of the war the Little Review entered its most important phase as an arbiter for Anglo-American modernism, and turned to the American expatriates and the European avant-gardes at the expense of American contingencies and local contexts. Pound’s politics, literary as they might have seemed, were politics nonetheless, aligning his Americans to the French avant-garde. Pound published an American number in December 1918 featuring Djuna Barnes, Wallace Stevens, Sherwood Anderson, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Ben Hecht, and Conrad Aiken. A special number on Remy de Gourmont appeared in the spring of 1919. William Carlos Williams’s Prologue and Improvisations were published in April and June 1919 and in September 1919, the Little Review began serialising Pound’s and Fenollosa’s “The Chinese Written Character.”
25Pound’s role as a “patriarch cod of vers libre” was challenged by Heap’s Dada affinities. It was with Heap’s intervention that the Little Review published in two instalments Else von Freytag’s Loringhoven’s sarcastic counter-attack against William Carlos Williams51. Alongside Joyce’s Ulysses, and Else von Freytag Loringhoven’s indictment of America, Heap’s editorial interventions and polemics radicalised and adjusted Anderson’s principle of life to the cultural crisis that had made its way into the pages of the Little Review. The Baroness’ attack of Williams undermined both Pound’s literary politics and Anderson’s earlier exuberant optimism, while Heap’s polemics exposed the alignment of radicalism with progressive cultural change and the attendant dream of a wider participation in social transformation through radical art, politics and sexuality. Ironically, when the Little Review hosted the movements that in Peter Burger’s much debated Theory of the Avant-Garde, sought to eliminate the distance between life and art, the Little Review’s Picabia number declared its independence from the public sphere of life that Anderson had initially sought to embrace :
[the Little Review] is certainly the only magazine which at the present moment desires to give to the public the work of men whose new quests are the aim in art–whether in painting, music, sculpture or literature. The Little Review is not influenced by the present established conventions which are for the most part commercial52.
26In the aftermath of the Ulysses trial, Francis Picabia joined the editorial board. The Little Review’s detachment from its American contexts was also marked with the publication of surrealist poems in French, reprints of pages from Picabia’s 391 and Yvan Goll’s poems in German. In the year that the Dial published the Wasteland, the Little Review moved to Paris with its Picabia number–a number that had rewon Williams to the Little Review– followed by a number for Joseph Stella53. Distanced from Anderson’s initial claims and exuberant immersion in the modernity of Chicago, Williams vindicated the “americanness” of the Little Review precisely because the Little Review’s European turn seemed to be “the only important reaction to the American environment, the only reaction that is not a coat of paint on the stanchion54”.
27Reflecting on Anderson’s retrospective claim that the New York years were the best years of the Little Review, Adam McKible notes that “the Little Review rejected the relevance of place in its pursuit of autonomous art55”. In resonance with Edward Said, McKible concludes that the Little Review’s “filiations” with American culture gave way to “affiliations” with an international culture56. Did the international, or rather European turn of the Little Review, expose how Anderson’s initial claims were culturally and socially circumscribed ? After all, plural and eclectic as the Little Review might have been, it navigated its cultural moment, or rather moments, also by sidestepping the hard politics of the Masses and the Liberator and virtually omitting from its social and cultural concerns the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance and the politics of the “new negro57”. Omissions notwithstanding, the Little Review’s “filiations” and “affiliations” were also defined by a divergence of outlook : at the moment of the inception of the Little Review in Chicago, radicalism in America was not tantamount to a negation of the idea of social progress and reconstruction, while the Western European variety of Dadaism emerged in response to a historical moment where negation seemed to be the only way of unmasking the very promise of progress. Moreover, uncompromising as they had wanted to be, Heap and Anderson also had to navigate the networks of production, dissemination and reception of art, and accommodate the paradox whereby a dream of active intervention in the public sphere conflicted with an attitude of resistance towards the social establishment.
28From 1922 onwards, the Little Review discontinued publication, leaving life behind for the living art of the avant-gardes. In the “Miscellany” number that appeared in the winter of 1922, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap resumed a dialogue attempting to defend and rescue their affirmation of life58. The Exiles number appeared in the Spring of 1923, followed by a bilingual surrealist number in the winter of 1923-1924. In the spring of 1924, the Little Review was announced as a “quarterly of art and letters”. In the wake of a special number on Juan Gris in 1925, and on returning to New York, Anderson and Heap organised the Machine Age exhibition, that was followed by an International Theatre exhibition.
29It is ironic that on returning to America, Anderson vented her disillusion about America and retrospectively vindicated the European turn of the Little Review :
we are too serious about art in America… so serious that we treat it as we treat the dead. with respect and no attempt at communication. The man who produces works of art is either treated as a god or as a rather ridiculous and useless member of society. As long as this attitude obtains there is little hope for art in America. If groups, cliques, revolutions, movements, tricks will change this we are for groups, cliques, etc.59.
30Anderson was rather a long way from her earlier paradigms for the convergence between art and revolution. Her resentment was telling too of the divergence between the cultural contexts that the Little Review brought together. Anderson’s, Pound’s and Heap’s perspectives diverged not only in terms of their aesthetic and ideological affinities but also in terms of their sense of the cultural work of art. While for Anderson, Emma Goldman’s persona was a usable paradigm for radicalism in America, Pound’s “foreignness to taste, to courtesy”, and to American “standards of Art,” as Heap wrote in defence of Pound’s editorship, was exposing the norms that were constraining American culture and blocking the intellectual communication between Europe and America60".
31Although in the Spring of 1922, Jane Heap responded with irony to Harriet Monroe’s impatience with the Little Review not knowing “when to stop” and instead [heading] “straight for Dada61”, the Little Review stopped in the spring of 1929. In May 1929, Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson announced the end of the Little Review : Margaret Anderson bent the impetus that had informed her announcing of the Little Review by declaring her lack of interest in the moment. At the outbreak of the war, “the epoch” and the “modern literary movement”, she wrote, needed a platform like the Little Review. By 1929, even “the artist doesn’t know what he is talking about”. For Anderson, the modernist revolution in consciousness and the radicalism of the avant-gardes seemed somewhat dissonant, if not out of pace with the moment. Anderson went on : “only don’t let me hear any more about ‘it’s the artist who transforms life.’ I know it. But I’m not particularly interested at the moment in transformation62”.
32In Lost : A Renaissance, Jane Heap, resumed her polemics and implied dialogue with Anderson63 and saw this turning point with disillusion. The Little Review, was a platform for “the revolution in the arts, begun before the war”, yet “the race seemed to have reached a standstill64”. In her account of “loss”, Heap was implicitly looking back on her own Dada affinities too. In regretting that “masterpieces are not made from chaos”, and that “all of the arts, have broken faith or lost connection with their origin and function”, Heap seems to regret the failed–or lost–dream of radicalism that informed the beginnings of the Little Review. While claiming that she held “no disappointment, despair, or fears for the future,” at the same time, she saw this transition as “a pronounced symptom of an ailing and aimless society65”. Heap’s tribute to the “revolution in the arts” was also an expression of regret as to whether a renaissance can emerge out of loss.
33In their farewell, Heap and Anderson seem no longer to be able to contemplate the revolution that art may bring about as an agent of social transformation. Heap’s outlook on life converged with the attitudes that defined the emergence of modernism in the early 1910s in Europe, just as it anticipated the disillusion of American radicals in the early 1940s, in the wake of the politicised decade of the 1930s. Uncompromising, idiosyncratic, and far-sighted, the Little Review was an attempt to frame art in a cultural programme and align American culture to the cultures of modernism. What began as a claim for new art concluded with a rhetorical negation of art, or rather the realisation that social change, politics, cultural change, and art intersect yet are also asynchronous. The Little Review came across the realisation that art may be radical without being an agent of cultural change, and that–to paraphrase Greenberg’s controversial lines in the “AvantGarde and Kitsch” essay of 1939, it was hard to sustain “a perspective of culture large enough” to contain the modernity of the “hog butcher of the world”, and the anxiety-ridden fables of Lewis, Eliot and Pound, and Dada’s “crazy bridges to a new consciousness66.
Footnotes
1 Jane Marek maps the importance of the Little Review in the development of modernism : Marek provides a crucial corrective to the masculinist bias of much modernist history and to Hoffman’s overview of the Little Review (J. E. Marek, Women Editing Modernism.“Little” Magazines & Literary History, Kentucky, Kentucky University Press, 1995, 1-22 and 60-100). Hoffman, while acknowledging the “magazine as the first to give us an adequate cross-section view of European and American experimentalism”, also sees the venture as essentially idiosyncratic and personal (F. J. Hoffman, “The Little Review”, in F. J. Hoffman et al., The Little Magazines. A History and a Bibliography, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1947, 66).
2 The most compelling recontextualisations of the Little Review beyond the great divide are Mark Morrisson’s “Youth in Public ; The Little Review and Commercial Culture in Chicago”, in M. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism, Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2001, 133-166 ; T. Materer, “Make It Sell ! Ezra Pound Advertises Modernism”, in K. J. H. Dettmar and S. Watt (eds), Marketing Modernisms. Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1996, 17-36 ; and E. Bishop, “Re :Covering Modernism-Format and Function in the Little Magazines”, in Ian R. Willison, G. Warwick and W. Chernaik (eds), Modernist Writers and the Marketplace, London, Macmillan, 1996, 287-319.
3 Margaret Anderson, “Announcement”, The Little Review, 1, March 1914, 1.
4 Sherwood Anderson, “More About the ‘New Note’ ”, The Little Review, 2, April 1914, 16-17.
5 Anderson, “Announcement”, Little Review, 1, March 1914, 1.
6 Ibid., Susan Noyes Platt has contextualised Anderson’s enthusiams in the emerging context of the Chicago Renaissance. Noyes Platt S., “The Little Review : Early Years and Avant-Garde Ideas”, Prince S. A. (ed.), The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde. Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1990, 139-54.
7 Anderson, “Announcement”, Little Review, 1, March 1914, 2.
8 Sherwood Anderson, “The New Note”, Little Review, 1, March 1914, 23.
9 Ibid.
10 Alexander S. Kaun, “Futurism and Pseudo-Futurism,” Little Review, 4, June 1914, 12.
11 Ibid.
12 M. Morrisson, 134. The cult of youth was the shared ground between the Chicago Renaissance and commercial mass culture : “But the intersection with commercial culture that most defined the early Little Review’s fashioning of modernism–and the Chicago Renaissance–was the cult of youth.” M. Morrisson, 136. Even the appeal of Ulysses, as Morrisson shows, was defined by Anderson’s and Heap’s sense of wonder before the “modern liberated world of consumption and experiment” and that “the wandering artist persona of young Stephen Dedalus” could offer an appealing paradigm of the youth “who rejects the constraining philistinism of family, country and religion”. Morrisson M., 162 and 163. With Pound and Heap on board, and as the European war had become a World War, the Little Review hosted texts and contexts that could hardly be squared with the positive and forward-looking outlook of the American cult of youth.
13 Floyd Dell, book review of Woman and Labor by Olive Schreiner, 10 ; Arthur Davison Ficke, Five Japanese Prints, 3 ; Margaret Anderson (MCA), “Paderewski and the New Gods”, 11 ; George Burman Foster, “The Prophet of a New Culture”, in Little Review, 1, March 1914, 14-17.
14 A letter from John Galsworthy, Written from Taormina, February 12, 1914, Little Review, March 1914, 1, 3.
15 Margaret Anderson, “Our First Year,” Little Review, 11, February 1915, 1.
16 Margaret Anderson, “A Real Magazine,” Little Review, 5, August 1916, 1.
17 In “Anarchism what it Really Stands for”, Emma Goldman draws on Emerson in her thought : “Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life ; not merely in nature, but in man. There is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts, any more than there is between the heart and the lungs… The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social life ; society is the lungs which are distributing the element to keep the life essence–that is, the individual–pure and strong. “The one thing of value in the world,” says Emerson, “is the active soul ; this every man contains within him. The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth and creates.” In other words, the individual instinct is the thing of value in the world. It is the true soul that sees and creates the truth alive, out of which is to come a still greater truth, the re-born social soul.” Emma Goldman, “Anarchism what it Really Stands for”, in Goldman E., Anarchism and Other Essays, Port Washington, New York and London, Kennikat Press, 1969, 58.
18 Margaret Anderson, “To the Innermost”, Little Review, October 1914, 7, 3. Adam McKible notes that Anderson’s celebration of individualism in her early writings is “[underscored by] her glorification of the individual artist/genius. Privileging the possibilities of freedom afforded by the mental state of exile, Anderson developed an aesthetics and a politics based on both an individualism abstracted from social context (which differed radically from the approach of Thayer’s Dial) and on the physical embodiment of the artist/genius. The development of Anderson’s thinking entails the diminution of place and the valorisation of the body.” Mckible A., The Space and Place of Modernism. The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines and New York, New York and London, Routledge, 2002, 81.
19 Margaret Anderson, “Home as an Emotional Adventure”, Little Review, 9, December 1914, 51.
20 Margaret Anderson, “Towards Revolution”, Little Review, 9, December 1915, 5.
21 Ibid., 6.
22 Emma Goldman, “Preparedness : The Road to Universal Slaughter”, Little Review, 9, December 1915, 7.
23 “Editorials”, Little Review, 6, September 1914, 32.
24 On American artists’ and activists’ opposition to World War I see “Nietzschean Matrix”, A. Antliff, Anarchist Modernism. Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2001, 145-66.
25 Maxwell Bodenheim, “Armageddon”, Little Review, 6, September 1914, 3-4.
26 Richard Aldington, “The Case of French Poetry”, Little Review, February 1915, 11, 19.
27 “Immense machines are clamoring, rattling, battling wheeling, screaming, heaving, weaving. and ends America-America-blood-stained and torn with choked, convulsive sighs, perhaps too late thou shalt arise, perhaps in vain shalt seek to rule the earth !” John Gould Fletcher, “America, 1915”, Little Review, 3, May 1915, 23 and 25.
28 Will Levington Comfort, “America’s Ignition”, Little Review, 3, May 1915, 7.
29 The Little Review’s “Letters” section is an important document in this respect : George Soule in a New York Letter claims the humanising potential of the age of the machine : “let us not repudiate machinery because it has not yet been consciously directed to an end that is worth gaining”. Little Review, March 1915, 1, 48. Alexander Kaun in “Notes of a Cosmopolite” declared that both “war-ridden Europe” and “peacefully complacent America” are accomplices in the same world order, notes the “bankruptcy of the illusionary spirit of internationalism”. Little Review, 4, June-July 1915, 16.
30 Anderson, “Reversals”, Little Review, 6, September 1915, 2, 3.
31 Anderson, “The Challenge of Emma Goldman”, Little Review, 3, May 1914, 9.
32 Anderson, “The Immutable”, Little Review, 8, November 1914, 22. In the same number, Anderson also published Marinetti’s, “War, the Only Hygiene of the World”, 30-31.
33 Anderson, “Art and Anarchism”, Little Review, 1, March 1916, 3.
34 The anarchist, Anderson writes, sets out to eliminate the gap between “government and life”, while the artist strives to overcome “the gulf that lies between life and love”. Anderson, “Art and Anarchism”, Little Review, 1, March 1916, 3.
35 Anderson, “A Real Magazine”, Little Review, 5, August 1916, 1.
36 T. Materer, 22.
37 E. Bishop, 301.
38 Jane Heap, “Jottings”, Little Review, 7, November 1917, 65
39 Charles Zwaska, Review of Chicago Poems, by Carl Sandburg, Little Review, August 1916, 5, 9-11 ; Ben Hecht, “The Poet Sings to the World”, Little Review, 5, August 1916, 13-14 ; Margaret Anderson, “An Anarchist’s Question”, Little Review, 5, August 1916, 19, unsigned in Editorials and Announcements section 18-19.
40 Anderson, “The Great Emotional Mind”, Little Review, 8, January 1917, 1-3.
41 Anderson, “What the Public Doesn’t Want”, Little Review, 4, August 1917, 20, 21.
42 Ezra Pound, “Editorial”, Little Review, 10, May 1917, 1.
43 Ibid.
44 Heap, “James Joyce”, Little Review, 1, April 1917, 8, 9.
45 T. S. Eliot, “Eeldrop and Appleplex”, Little Review, 1, May 1917, 7-11.
46 Wyndham Lewis, “Imaginary Letters”, Little Review, 1, May 1917, 19.
47 Heap, “Push-Face”, Little Review, 2, June 1917, 4.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ben Hecht, “Pounding Ezra [a conversation]”, Little Review, 7, November 1918, 38, 40.
51 Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, “Thee I call ‘Hamlet of Wedding-Ring’ : Criticism of William Carlos William’s ‘Kora in Hell’ ”, Little Review, 9, January 1920, and “Part II”, Little Review, 8, Autumn 1921.
52 Anderson, Little Review, Spring 1922, 42.
53 Dickran Tashjian articulates a corrective to his own relegating the Little Review to “a secondary level” in Skyscraper Primitives. He returns to the Little Review’s eclecticism and teases out how Anderson and Heap attempted to link “American aspirations with proliferating European avant-gardes”. D. Tashjian, “From Anarchy to Group Force : The Social Text of the Little Review”, N. Sawelson-gorse (ed.), Women in Dada, Essays on Sex, Gender and Identity, Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1998, 265 and 284n. He also notes that by 1922, the impact and the challenge of Dada in its American contexts has been disempowered. “Picabia’s featured presence in the Spring 1922 issue was hardly inflammatory. He himself could offer no rallying cause, and his machine drawings had lost their American context, which had given them their cultural power in the first instance. In The Little Review Picabia simply became anthologised, eventually one avant-garde star among many, as Joseph Stella (also associated with New York Dada) and Brancusi, earlier”. (D. Tashjian, 279).
54 William Carlos Williams, in the “Reader Critic”, Little Review, Autumn 1922, 59.
55 A. Mckible, 79.
56 Ibid., 80.
57 Walter Kalaidjian maps the debates and the slant on the avant-garde within the politics of the Masses, and the politics of the Harlem Renaissance : W. Kalaidjian, American Culture Between the Wars. Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique, New York, Columbia University Press, 1993, 19-104. See also A. Mckible, 17-108.
58 “Dialogue”, Little Review, Winter 1922, 23.
59 Margaret Anderson, Little Review, Spring 1926, 9.
60 Jane Heap, “Pounding Ezra”, in The Reader Critic, Little Review, 7, November 1918, 43.
61 Jane Heap, “Dada”, Little Review, Spring 1922, 46.
62 Margaret Anderson, “Editorial”, Little Review, May 1929, 4.
63 Jane Marek approaches Anderson’s and Heap’s editorials and polemics as dialogical spaces between themselves and their readers. Marek, Women Editing Modernism, 82-93.
64 Jane Heap, “Lost : A Renaissance,” Little Review, May 1929, 5.
65 Ibid., 6.
66 Jane Heap, “Dada,” Little Review, Spring 1922, 46.
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