A
I I
0
1
PLUS:
Color Samples to Clip
Color Discovery in Williamsburg
FIFTY-NINE YEARS LATER
The cover for May 1967 is in the radiant color now used effectively throughout the magazine.
under Jenkins—a feminine procession interrupted only when Ellery Sedgwick had a try at it in 1922.
Jenkins broadened the magazine’s scope thematically and geographically. Its specified fields were “Building, Furnishing, Planting.” Its spring building numbers became comprehensive and important. Special issues dealing with homes in various states and cities attracted attention; in the 1920’s, Indianapolis, Lincoln, and Pasadena (to name but three) were so treated. Though it continued to emphasize “modest homes,” it talked no longer of $3,500 incomes during this carefree decade of larger earnings for nearly everyone, expansion of credit, and mass production by new technologies; the new upper middle class was interested not only in the magazine’s traditional- emphasis on simplicity and economy but also in more elaborate houses and furnishings.
The magazine joined in the general prosperity. Within a year after the removal to Boston, each number carried about sixty pages, at least half of them filled with advertising. And by the early 1930’s House Beautiful (The had been dropped in 1925) was a high-class, well-produced monthly book, lavishly illustrated, consisting of about a hundred pages and having a circulation of 100,000 copies or more.
Then came the unhappy years of the Great Depression, and another change of ownership for House Beautiful. In 1934 the magazine was sold to the International Magazines Company, Richard E. Berlin, president. This was the magazine division of the William Randolph Hearst enterprises. The new owner merged its monthly Home and Field with its newdy acquired magazine. The essential vitality of House Beautiful is attested by the fact that, though it changed hands repeatedly and three of its purchasers consolidated their own house-and-home periodicals with it, it kept its own name; and through all its vicissitudes of changing owners, editors, and places of publication, it maintained a reasonable consistency in editorial policy. It was now moved back to New York, and Arthur Hiram Samuels was installed as editor. Samuels had formerly held editorial positions on the New Yorker, Home and Field, and Harped s Bazaar; but he proved to be another short-term editor of
HOUSE BEAUTIFUL 163
House Beautiful and was followed in 1936 by Kenneth K. Stowell.
It was in 1941 that House Beautiful found an editor so well fitted for the position that she was to continue to fill it with distinction for many years. Elizabeth Gordon had been a newspaper woman and an advertising agency worker before Hearst Magazines hired her for its Good Housekeeping staff. She was already writing a syndicated column on housing, and it was not long before she was moved over to the editorship of House Beautiful. No single individual could be credited with the success of such a complicated operation as House Beautiful became in the next two decades; but with the assistance of an able staff and the cooperation of ownership, Miss Gordon saw the magazine grow in that period from less than one hundred pages to over two hundred (sometimes over three hundred), from a circulation of about 200,000 to 750,000, crammed with advertising, scintillating with color, and still maintaining its original principle of sensible spending for good building and furnishing. By 1964 its circulation was over 900,000.
Common in later years had been a special theme for emphasis in each number, such as the “Three-Bedroom House With Two-Car Garage for $8,650” (April 1947), “Frank Lloyd Wright—His Contribution to the Beauty of American Life” (November 1955), “Three Houses Built by the Owner’s Own Hands” (July 1960), and “Remodeling” (September 1963). As many as a dozen articles commonly centered upon the special theme.
A semiannual publication entitled House Beautiful’s Building Manual was begun in 1935, reprinting articles on building from the magazine. In 1940 the predecessor of House Beautiful’s current annual Gardening and Outdoor Living was begun. An annual Houses and Plans Book was established in 1957, followed in 1962 by the semiannual Portfolio of Home Decorating, and in 1964 by Home Remodeling .*
An outstanding feature of the modern House Beautiful is its
* The first issue of House Beautiful’s Vacation Homes annual appeared in 1967.
“Window Shopping” department. This was begun as “Shopping Guide (in Metropolitan Shops)” while the magazine was still published in Chicago; it then occupied four pages, with a supplementary “Real Estate Directory” of three pages. This was expanded after the moves to New York and Boston, but it was not until the early 1940’s that it became a unique characteristic of the magazine’s appeal.
In recent years the “Window Shopping” section has commonly consisted of more than fifty pages of small advertisements of retailers (mainly gift shops, specialty dealers, personal or small producers and manufacturers) offering their products for sale by mail delivery. These pages are divided into twelfths, though on nearly every page at least one advertiser takes two of these small spaces; thus there are many pages carrying eleven “ads.” These pages are divided vertically into two halves, with small display “ads” on the left half, and on the other side six reading notices, each with an illustration of the product lined up to its left. All this adds up to a respectable typographical layout instead of the hodge-podge that might be expected in the presentation of so many small advertisements. Besides the big “Window Shopping” section, there are two other “product departments”—“Take It Easy,” advertising household appliances and gadgets in quarter-page reading notices, and a similar “It’s Worth Mentioning,” with shorter “readers.”
If all this sounds like a mail-order catalog—well, that is what it is. But the skillful typography, good printing, and interesting variety of offerings make these sections fascinating reading for any home owner. In a sense, this is a throw-back to the old mail-order journal technique that began in the late 1870’s and lasted for three decades. 9 But there is a vast difference between those old cheaply printed periodicals and House Beautiful, so that any comparison seems a little absurd. In the first place, the contrast in quality of presentation is obvious; and in the second, House Beautiful is strict about the kind and quality of the products advertised. It accepts no objectionable patent medicine copy, and it requires its advertisers to refund purchase prices when dissatisfied patrons return
9 Mott, American Magazines, v. 4 (1957), pp. 364-68.
merchandise and also when they are unable to make delivery within two weeks (unless the purchaser agrees to an extension of time).
The number of advertisements in any single issue of House Beautijul in the 1950’s and 1960’s is amazing—ranging from six to eight hundred. Of these, a hundred or so will carry double-page, full-page, or half-page announcements. In these larger spaces, full color is the rule. A single page in full color was quoted at $8,750 in 1964.
The combined facts that House Beautijul publishes so much highly practical editorial matter in the home building and furnishing fields (“more than any other national consumer magazine,” it claims 10 ) and that it presents such an amazing array of advertising for the home owner make its production an extraordinary industrial operation. And it may be added, incidentally, that the end result is an interesting and valuable magazine.*
10 Standard Rate and Data Service, Feb. 27, 1960 (Consumer Magazine and Farm Publication Section, p. 157).
* This historical sketch was written in 1964. Elizabeth Gordon retired from the editorship at the end of 1964. She was succeeded by Sarah Tomerlin Lee in January, 1965. Prior to joining House Beautiful, Mrs. Lee was vice-president of Lord & Taylor, responsible for advertising, public relations, and promotion. She has held positions on the editorial staffs of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Circulation of House Beautiful in 1966 was slightly under 1,000,000.
13
THE LITTLE REVIEW 1
T HE Little Review was an outgrowth of a Chicago cultural movement which followed the Columbian Exposition and developed over two decades or more notable talents in art, music, and literature. Nevertheless, the editor was without the slightest doubt correct in claiming in her first number that the little magazine was her own “personal enterprise.” 2
Margaret Anderson escaped from her home town of Columbus, Indiana, in 1912 when she was nineteen. She had little family feeling, except perhaps for her father, who later died in a sanitarium. In her autobiography she wrote: “I am not a daughter: my father is dead and my mother rejected me long ago. I am not a sister: my two sisters find me more than a little mad, and that is no basis for a sisterly relationship.” 3 In
1 Title: The Little Review.
First issue: March 1914. Last issue: May 1929.
Periodicity: Monthly, March 1914—April 1920; irregular, July-Aug. 1920— May 1929. Vol. 1, March 1914—Feb. 1915 (Aug. number omitted) ; 2, March 1915—Feb. 1916 (Jan.-Feb., June-July combined) ; 3, March, April, May, June-July, Aug., Sept., Nov. 1916, Jan., March, April 1917; 4, May 1917—April 1918; 5, May 1918—April 1919 (Feb.-March combined); 6, May 1919—April 1920 (Feb. number omitted) ; 7, May-June, July-Aug., Sept.-Dee., 1920, Jan- March 1921; 8, Autumn 1921, Spring 1922; 9, Autumn 1922, Winter 1922, Spring 1923, Autumn-Winter 1923-24; 10, Spring 1924, Autumn-Winter 1924-25; 11, Spring 1925, Winter 1926; 12, Spring-Summer 1926, May 1929.
Editor, publisher, owner: Margaret C. Anderson, 1914-29. Associate editor: Jane Heap, 1916-29. Foreign editors: Ezra Pound, 1917-19, 1921-24; Jules Romains, 1919-21; John Rodker, 1919-21; Francis Picabia, 1921-23. Business manager, Charles A. Zwaska, 1914-17. Chicago, March 1914—May 1916, November 1916—January 1917; San Francisco, June-July, August-September, 1916; New York, February 1917-1926; Paris, France, May 1929.
Index: An Index to ‘The Little Review’ 1914-1929, compiled by Kenneth A. Lohf and Eugene P. Sheehy, New York Public Library, 1961.
References: Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War: An Autobiography (New York, 1930) ; Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton, N.J., 1946), chap, iv; Harry Hansen, Midwest Portraits (New York, 1923), pp. 102-7; Margaret Anderson, ed., The Little Review Anthology (New York, 1953).
2 Little Review, v. 1, March 1914, p. 2.
3 Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War, p. 4.
166
Chicago Margaret found employment working in a bookstore and writing reviews for Chicago’s conservative literary weekly, the Dial, which took her on its staff for a time, and for the religious weekly, the Interior, for which she served briefly as literary editor. 4 She could not be happy long with either of these periodicals; but she learned something about magazine work from them, and soon she was projecting her own journal, to be called the Little Review.
“The thing I wanted—would die without,” wrote Miss Anderson when she recounted in the magazine’s last number the story of its founding, “—was conversation. The only way to get it was to reach people with ideas.” 5 This “conversation” objective is restated again and again in the magazine and in the editor’s autobiography. And the content of the Little Review itself, the mood, was that of animated conversation— informal, personal, unacademic. This was true especially in the early numbers, in which there was a larger proportion of criticism than in those that followed. There was sharp controversy, but in general the keynote was unrestrained praise. Miss Anderson wrote in the first number of “our perfectly inexpressible enthusiasm,” and a correspondent in the “Reader Critic” department called the magazine “the official organ of exuberance.” 6
As soon as she decided to publish a magazine, she talked about it to all her acquaintances. She interested a young man whom she calls “Dick” in her autobiography; he was on the staff of an agricultural journal and promised to contribute a substantial share of his salary to the project for at least a year. 7 Then Margaret hastened to New York to sell advertising in the magazine of which not even a trial number had been issued. And she did it, too—about $450 worth to book publishers. Her charming personality, 8 her ability to talk with en-
thusiasm (that “conversation” that she could not live without) won over the most hard-hearted publishers.
And so the first number of the Little Review, “A Magazine of the Arts, Making No Compromise with the Public Taste,” appeared under the date of March 1914. It consisted of sixty- four pages (seventeen of them devoted to book advertising) measuring six by nine inches and bound in a brown cover. This initial issue contained several pieces by the editor, including an enthusiastic review of Galsworthy’s The Dark Flower and one of Ethel Sidgwick’s Succession; of the latter novelist, the reviewer declared, “. . . I enjoy her novels more than any novels I have ever read. . . .” 9 In an article entitled “Paderewski and the New Gods,” Miss Anderson, who was herself a devoted pianist, struggles to express what seems to be almost an agony of admiration. Two midwestern poets who were later to be frequent contributors bow to the Little Review audience in this first number—Vachel Lindsay and Arthur Davidson Ficke; and Sherwood Anderson, who was to publish some of his Winesburg stories in this magazine, contributed a short article on writing. George Soule, who was to furnish a New York literary letter for early issues, made his first appearance. George Burman Foster, of the University of Chicago, who was also to be found frequently in later Little Review pages, always as an interpreter of liberal thought, contributed to the first number a four-page discussion of Nietzsche as “The Prophet of a New Culture”; and Llewellyn Jones, then literary editor of the Chicago Evening Post, wrote about Henri Bergson.
This initial number was typical of the Little Review in content and tone for the first year or two. It came gradually to devote more attention, however, to poetry; and the work of poets of various “modernist” schools became prominent. Eventually revolutionary movements in painting and sculpture were emphasized. Indeed, the history of the magazine is the story of a succession of enthusiasms for new ideas and forms, for the “marked,” and the eccentric.
Margaret Anderson’s first and abiding enthusiasm was for “beauty.” That is a word not easy to define philosophically,
9 Little Review, v. 1, March 1914, p. 34.
THE LITTLE REVIEW 169
but Margaret did it emotionally in the introduction to the first issue of her magazine:
If you’ve ever read poetry with a feeling that it was your religion, your very life; if you’ve ever come suddenly upon the whiteness of a Venus in a dim, deep room; if you’ve ever felt music replacing your 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 the common experience of the people who read us. 10
Perhaps it is not fair to quote this passage without quoting also an observation made by Miss Anderson sixteen years later in her autobiography: “The first number betrayed nothing but my adolescence.” 11 But despite editorial excesses in early numbers, the magazine found devoted friends in a limited circle. It was lively and exciting because of its “causes,” and because its contributors represented new movements in writing.
Feminism was almost as persistent an interest of Miss Anderson’s as “beauty” though it was not pursued with a crusading spirit, except perhaps in her defense of Margaret Sanger and her birth-control campaign. More definitely a crusade was the Little Review’s stout support of anarchism, which began with an article by the editor in the third number on Emma Goldman, who had just delivered some lectures in Chicago. The editor and the propagandist for philosophical anarchism became personal friends, and the magazine published Miss Goldman’s “Letters from Prison” in May 1916. But fifteen months later Margaret wrote of the tenets of anarchism: “I have long since given them up.” 12
Her support of anarchism had alienated Miss Anderson from some of her friends—notably from “Dick,” who withdrew his financial support of the magazine. 13 She had no thought of giving up, however, but expected “miracles” to turn up to keep the magazine going. It kept going, if not by
10 Little Review, v. 1 , March 1914, p. 2.
11 Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War, p. 47.
12 Little Review, v. 4, Aug. 1917, p. 20.
13 Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War, pp. 55-56.
The Little | Rev | I E W |
Literature Drama | Music | Art |
MARGARET C. ANDERSON | ||
EDITOR |
SEPTEMBER, 1915
Reversals The Editor
Moods: Ben Hecht
Sorrow Humoresque Rain
-.An Invitation to Cheat Posterity My Island
Soul-Sleep and Modern Novels Will Levington Comfort
Poems:
Pastels
Thoughts
A Woman in the Park Richard Aldington’s Poetry Cafe Sketches Emma Goldman on Trial Poetry versus Imagism The New Idol Book Discussion The Poets’ Translation Series The Reader Critic
Maxwell Bodenkeim
Amy L cm ell Arthur Davison Ficke Louise Bryant Hunity Carter George Bur man Foster
15 cents a copy
Published Monthly
MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher Fine Arts Building CHICAGO
$1.50 a year
Entered as second-clsss matter at Postofiice, Chicago
THE EXCITEMENT WAS INSIDE THE COVER
The date: September 1915. During the first half of the Little Review’s existence the covers were plain. The title was on a kind of sticker glued to the brown sheet bearing the table of contents. Later the sticker appeared in various colors, and finally modernistic drawings on brilliantly colored paper shattered the earlier tradition.
170
miracles, by dogged persistence, self-sacrifice, begging, occasional omissions of regular issues, and all kinds of shenanigans with printers and owners of office and living quarters, over a period of no less than fifteen years. Eunice Tietjens donated a diamond ring to pay a printer’s bill at one crisis; at another, Lawrence Langner, who had just sold a play to Vanity Fair, turned over the check to the Little Review . 14 In December of its first year Miss Anderson sent out an emotional appeal for funds, and from time to time friends were asked for donations of five dollars or more. 15 In 1918, after the magazine had moved to New York, a group of four wealthy persons, including Otto Kahn, contributed $400 each to supply the magazine’s deficits for a year. 16
The magazine’s subscription price was $2.50 yearly at the beginning, reduced after six months to $1.50 but restored in 1918 to $2.50. It seems unlikely that circulation ever rose to much over a thousand, 17 and with advertising seldom or never exceeding $500 a year, it was hard to meet printers’ bills, pay rent on offices or “studio,” and find much left for the living expenses of the editor and her close associates who helped with the magazine. In the summer of 1914, announcing the change in price, the editor declared that the Little Review was “free of debt” and “we even have money in the bank.” 18 Such a situation may have recurred from time to time, but in general, the magazine was chronically insolvent; in the third volume Miss Anderson laments “our eternal poverty.” 19 There were times when she was half-starved, had only one presentable outfit of clothes, and, with her associate, Jane Heap, did her own cooking, housework, cleaning, and so on. They even cut each other’s hair. 20
Jane Heap was the most important and persistent of Miss
14 Ibid., pp. 68, 142.
15 The appeal was included in the magazine’s advertising section, December 1914, also see, for example, the issue for May-June, 1920.
16 Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War, p. 208.
17 The “conjecture” of a circulation of 2,000 in Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich, Little Magazine, p. 57, with its unreliable foundation, seems unacceptable. The magazine never furnished its circulation figures to the directories.
18 Little Review, v. 1, July 1914, p. 67.
19 Ibid., v. 3, March 1917, p. 22.
20 Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War, pp. 156, 205-6.
Anderson’s associates in the conduct of the Little Review. None of these associates was hired; they just came. First was Charles A. Zwaska, a seventeen-year-old boy who was fascinated by the first number of the v magazine and offered his services as office-boy by telephone. Wrote Miss Anderson later: “He joined the staff half an hour after his telephone call, he did all the practical work in the office for years, besides writing occasionally for the magazine, and he always insisted on calling himself the office boy. We called him Caesar.” 21 Each of Margaret’s sisters shared for a time in the hardships and editorial work of the staff. Harriet Dean came from Indianapolis to serve the magazine, drawn by much the same hypnotic force as that which had attracted Caesar; she shared the good and ill of the staff for about two years. 22
Jane Heap was a Chicago art student who frequented the soirees where the “New Chicago Movement” was being nursed and its achievements celebrated. She and Miss Anderson were united by a natural magnetic attraction. “I felt in 1916,” wrote Miss Anderson in her autobiography, “and I feel today that Jane Heap is the world’s best talker.” 23 Thus it was the integration and collision of ideas in the “conversation”, of which both were so fond, that drew them together and soon made “jh” de facto associate editor of the Little Review for the remainder of its life. Through much of the file her name did not appear at all.
The rest of the sketch is by John T. Frederick. Dr. Mott was writing this history of the Little Review at the time of his death. Professor Frederick was asked to complete the chapter, following the outline Dr. Mott had made for the entire sketch and using his notes. In addition, Professor Frederick reviewed for himself the entire file of the magazine .*
21 Ibid., p. 51. He was specified as “business manager” in the statement of ownership for 1917. Apparently he did not go with the magazine when it was moved to New York the next year.
22 Ibid., pp. 67-68.
23 Ibid., p. 103.
* Professor Frederick was editor of the Midland, a Midwest-oriented “little magazine” devoted to belles-lettres, which existed contemporaneously with the Little Review and outlasted it by a few years. For five years in the 1920’s Dr. Mott was co-editor of the Midland with Professor Frederick. In an autobi-
In attempting to assess after five decades the achievement of the Little Review, one is compelled to recognize (as would be true of any magazine of the period) the substantial proportion of space devoted to the work of writers now largely forgotten. However, the chief impression is that of a very high proportion of significant discoveries and early recognitions. The Little Review’s record for publication of important contemporary writers is not surpassed—if indeed it is equalled— by that of any other magazine of the period. Within its twelve volumes the Little Review presented work of Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, Theodore Dreiser, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Lady Gregory, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and William Butler Yeats: a list which could be extended.
Though many of these names are those of American writers, the number is misleading. Actually the lion’s share of the Little Review’s space was given to British and European writers, and the expatriate Ezra Pound. The “episodes” from Joyce’s Ulysses occupied over 300 pages, the varied contributions of Ezra Pound over 250, Dorothy Richardson’s novel Interim nearly 150, and the works of Wyndham Lewis and Ford Madox Ford nearly 100 pages each. The only American writers represented in comparable extent were Sherwood Anderson with some 90 pages and Ben Hecht with 120.
The high incidence of British and continental European writers was due primarily to the efforts of Ezra Pound, foreign editor for most of the magazine’s career. He was directly responsible for Joyce’s sending the Ulysses material to the Little Review, 24 and for the interest of Eliot, Richard Aldington,
ographical essay written much later, touching on those years, Dr. Mott wrote: “Never was there a happier partnership. The editors agreed basically in theory and nearly always in taste. . . .” His relationship with Professor Frederick he described as “one of the most valued friendships of my life.” Time Enough (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1962), chap. viii.
Author of two novels dealing with midwestern life, Professor Frederick is now teaching in the English Department of the University of Iowa.
24 Margaret Anderson, ed., The Little Review Anthology (New York, 1953), p. 175. References are made to this book when possible rather than to files of the magazine because of its greater availability. [J.T.F.]
Ford Madox Ford, and many others. Predictably, Pound was not easy to work with. Periodically he demanded money which the magazine did not have:
My net value to the concern appears to be about $2350, of which over $2000 does not “accrue” to the protagonist. . . . Roughly speaking, either the Little Review will have to provide me with the necessities of life and a reasonable amount of leisure, by May 1st, 1919, or I shall have to apply my energies elsewhere. 25
He tended to criticize severely editorial choices made by the American editors, and to use the pages of the periodical for airing of his personal controversies and grievances. However, to readers who objected to Pound’s work and influence in the magazine, Jane Heap replied:
As long as Mr. Pound sends us work by Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, de Boschere,—work bearing the stamp of originality and permanence —we have no complaint of him as an editor. If we are slightly jarred by his manner of asking for alms, or by any other personal manifestation, we can take care of that outside the magazine. We need no commiseration for our connection with Mr. Pound. 26
Pound’s greatest single service to the magazine was his suggestion to James Joyce that he send portions of Ulysses to the Little Review. Both Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap had praised Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on its appearance, Miss Anderson declaring: “This James Joyce book is the most beautiful piece of writing and the most creative piece of prose anywhere to be seen on the horizon today;” 27 and when Pound made his suggestion, Joyce responded promptly. The subsequent prosecution and conviction of Margaret Anderson for the publication of certain allegedly obscene passages of Ulysses was the most dramatic incident in the Little Review’s colorful history, and affords one of the most interesting passages in My Thirty Years’ War. 28 Actually an earlier issue of the Little Review had been suppressed —also on the complaint of John Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice—for publication of the
25 Ibid., pp. 185, 186.
26 Ibid., pp. 272-73.
27 Little Review, v. 3, April 1917, p. 9.
28 Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War, pp. 214-22.
story “Cantelman’s Spring-mate” by Wyndham Lewis (October 1917). One of the most revealing passages in Miss Anderson’s autobiography is her sympathetic and almost affectionate portrayal of Sumner in connection with the Ulysses proceedings. 29
Among the major editorial contributions of Pound were his “Henry James Number” (August 1918), most of which, he complained, he had to write himself, 30 and the “W. H. Hudson Number” (May-June, 1920). The issue for November 1918 was called an “Ezra Pound Number” and was largely by or about Pound. His long article, written with Ernest Fenol- losa, on “The Chinese Written Character as a medium for poetry,” appeared in four issues of the following year. In summary, it is clear that if the material written by or obtained by Pound were subtracted from the file of the Little Review , the magazine’s historical importance would be greatly diminished. This is not at all to disparage the courage and judgment of Miss Anderson in accepting and publishing the material, nor her achievement in “getting along” with Pound as long as she did. At the end their relations were not cordial. When for the final number Jane Heap sent out a rather preposterous questionnaire asking broad questions about highly personal matters of purposes and convictions, Ezra replied:
Print what you’ve got on hand.—Ezra Pound. P.S. This refers to mss. of mine suppressed by you or “jh”, when I last assisted you in preparing a number of the L. R., and never returned to the author.
On which Miss Anderson commented:
(Suppressed by me, dear Ezra, and conscientiously thrown into the wastebasket; and a very good thing for you. Such a lot of stale witticisms it has rarely been my lot to receive. You really couldn’t have hoped to get away with them in a magazine published in New York City, U.S.A., in the year 1926.)—M.C.A. 31
In addition to the abundant and usually distinguished work of British writers, contemporary French literature received much emphasis in the pages of the magazine. Pound contrib-
29 Ibid., pp. 218-19.
30 Anderson, Anthology, p. 185.
31 Anderson, Anthology, p. 366.
uted “A Study in French Poets” which occupied some sixty pages, and the work of some of these poets was published frequently, usually in French. French writers were consistently discussed in reviews and editorials, and other European literature was reviewed or sparingly represented.
That the editors were in a measure aware of the degree to which the Little Review was dominated by foreign material is suggested by their identifying two numbers—for June and December, 1918—as “American Numbers.” Actually the earlier volumes (before Pound was named as foreign editor) were largely American in origin. The desire for “good conversation,” which was Margaret Anderson’s avowed primary motive in starting the magazine, led to her coming to know most of the members of the literary group then centered in Chicago; and the early volumes of the Little Review included representative work of Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Ben Hecht, Sherwood Anderson and others of that group in addition to the literary criticism most of which was written by Chicagoans.
Most of these American contributors, however, fell away before or soon after the advent of Pound. The only ones for whom mutual loyalty between writer and editor continued significantly were Sherwood Anderson, who was represented in all volumes of the Little Review but one, Ben Hecht, Arthur Davison Ficke, and Maxwell Bodenheim, who appeared in all volumes but three. Miss Anderson was totally antipathetic to the important regional movement in all parts of the United States during this period. With the exception of pieces by Anderson and a very few others, the only American life represented in the Little Review is that of the great cities. Further, Miss Anderson was not notably successful, if indeed she was sincere, in her proclaimed search for promising American writers. Highly significant is her comment in the Little Review Anthology that a certain piece of work was “one of the two or three unsolicited manuscripts we printed in all the years.” 32
Most of the important American writers mentioned earlier in this account had only minuscule representation—among these, Cummings, Dreiser, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and
32 Anderson, Anthology, p. 21.
Marianne Moore. Miss Anderson frankly disliked what she called the “intellectual” poetry of Miss Moore: “It is almost impossible for me to express, with moderation, my dislike of intellectual poetry. It is an anomaly. I can’t read it without impatience. It can enrage me. My position needs no defense —the simplest statement defends it: INTELLECTUAL POETRY IS NOT POETRY.” She also disparaged most of the work of Gertrude Stein, and included in the Little Review Anthology an example “as typical of why her work didn’t interest me.” 33
Perhaps the only American writers of lasting importance to whom the Little Review gave really substantial aid and comfort through publication were Sherwood Anderson and William Carlos Williams; Williams’ highly individual work occupies some seventy pages of the Little Review file. In addition to a few of the stories collected later in Winesburg, Ohio and The Triumph of the Egg, and some shorter pieces, Anderson contributed (to the sixth and seventh volumes) a series of twelve “Testaments” which include some of his most characteristic writing. Parts of these appeared in his A New Testament in 1927, labeled as “poems” and curiously fragmented and altered so that they are far less impressive than in their original form in the Little Review.
It is quite possibly true that in terms of actual influence on and participation in the cultural current of its times, the Little Review was more influential in the other arts than in that of literature. Margaret Anderson was throughout the career of the magazine intensely interested in and responsive to matters of music; and the early volumes of the Little Review display this interest very generously. The editorial pages tend to give as much emphasis to music and musicians as to books and writers. Articles about—and in some cases by—musicians are numerous. To a slightly less marked degree, the Little Review was devoted to the theatre—in the persons of its editors as playgoers, and in their comments in the magazine.
Perhaps even more substantial was the function of the Little Review in introducing new names and new work in painting and sculpture. From the beginning, in spite of her limited
33 Ibid., pp. 187, 317.
178
THE LITTLE REVIEW
financial resources, Miss Anderson contrived to publish many excellent portraits of her contributors—among these Pound, Yeats, and many others. In the later volumes there was markedly increased presentation of reproductions of new painting
and sculpture. Indeed, Miss Anderson herself commented:
*
From this time on (1926) the virtue of The Little Review, to me, lay exclusively in its reproductions of modern painting and sculpture. There is not a name of international fame today, I believe, that was not included in our roster—Archipenko, Arp, Brancusi, Braque, Gaudier-Brzeska, Chagall, Chirico, Demuth, Ernst, Gabo, Gris, Grosz, Kandinsky, Klee, Leger, Wyndham Lewis, Lipchitz, Marcousis, Matisse, Miro, Modigliani, Moholy-Nagy, Pascin, Peuz- ner, Picabia, Picasso, Man Ray, Segonzac, Stella, Tchelietchev, Zadkine, etc., etc.
As for the literature that filled the pages of these last years, I will give samples only. I “was not amused.” 34
The European orientation in this impressive list is of course manifest. The Little Review gave little attention to American painters and sculptors. Even more markedly than in the field of literature, the magazine’s primary service lay in the introduction to America of foreign talent and tendencies.
The ultimate effect and value of the Little Review’s emphasis on contemporary music, painting and sculpture I am not competent to assess. I have no doubt, however, of the importance of the magazine’s service to literature. I count as its major contributions its publication of portions of Joyce’s Ulysses, and of some of the best poems of Pound, Eliot, and Yeats; and its encouragement and extensive publication of Sherwood Anderson and William Carlos Williams.
34 Anderson, Anthology, pp. 345-46.
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