What we now call modernism was a loose collection of small cultural insurgencies driven by a broad, sometimes inchoate discontent with Western civilization—from the way poems were written to the way governments functioned and capital flowed. Suffragettes, anarchists, Imagists and socialists rarely formed tight bonds, but they were a part of the same guerrilla band. The outposts of modernism were small, do-it-yourself magazines. The serial format encouraged shifting allegiances and sudden rifts like Pound’s leap from Imagism to Vorticism. Writers could argue, experiment and change their minds from one month to the next. Timeless names shared pages with amateurs and eccentrics long since forgotten. Writers were rarely paid, and their contributions were uneven, but they were plentiful. Pound submitted 117 magazine contributions in 1918 alone. Portions of virtually everything Joyce wrote—including Dubliners, A Portrait, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake—appeared as experiments in magazines before they were finalized in books. The “little magazines,” as they were called, were a misnomer—their biggest asset was space. They published hasty drafts, unfinished work and immoderate opinions. They traded free ads with other magazines to create a network of experimental outlets with overlapping readerships. Magazines were modernism’s blogosphere.
The Egoist took material that other London magazines like The English Review and The New Age wouldn’t publish. In Chicago, Harriet Monroe’s Poetry shared readers with The Dial. A Dublin little magazine called Dana published three of Joyce’s poems—all inspired by Nora—shortly after they rejected his first prose piece, “A Portrait of the Artist,” in 1904. But the most important magazine for Joyce, for Ulysses and possibly for modernism, was a homespun Chicago monthly called The Little Review, which drew small circles of devoted readers who sustained themselves on discussions of Nietzsche, Bergson and H. G. Wells. Headlines like “Feminism and New Music” appeared alongside coverage of Chicago’s first citywide election in which women had the right to vote (male turnout soared). The Little Review published an astounding field of contributors over the years: Hemingway, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Sherwood Anderson, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, to name just a few. It reproduced artwork from Brancusi, Cocteau and Picabia.
One of the magazine’s biggest draws was the bold enthusiasm of its founding editor, Margaret Anderson, the woman destined to bring Ulysses to the public, no matter how controversial it was. In the March 1915 issue, Anderson became possibly the first woman to advocate gay rights in print when she protested the fact that people were “tortured and crucified every day for their love—because it is not expressed according to conventional morality.” “With us,” she wrote, “love is just as punishable as murder or robbery.” People walked up to the magazine’s graceful editor on the street and said, “Aren’t you Margaret Anderson? Congratulations!” Letters to The Little Review trickled in from kindred spirits in Wyoming, Kansas and Ontario. “I feel as if I had found my companions . . . I believe that you can become the heart of our new age of letters—if you are true.”
Margaret Anderson recalled her decision to start her own magazine as a flash of inspiration in the middle of the night: “I demand that life be inspired every moment.” The problem was that no one had the time or stamina for the work that inspiration requires. “If I had a magazine,” she thought, “I could spend my time filling it up with the best conversation the world has to offer.” Anderson cut her teeth in the magazine business in 1910 as a staff assistant for The Dial, where she learned her way around the printing room before the editor’s unwanted advances compelled her to quit. She was there just long enough to know how heedless it was to start her own magazine. She was horrible with finances and deadlines. She knew little about layouts, marketing and publicity, and she had no money.
What she had was conviction. She traveled to Boston and New York and extracted $450 in revenue from skeptical advertising managers at places like Houghton Mifflin, Scribner’s and Goodyear (“A New Day Dawns in Tires”). She arranged a fundraising dinner at Chicago’s preeminent literary salon, the Little Room. A writer named Eunice Tietjens remembered how Anderson “stood pouring out such a flood of high-hearted enthusiasm that we were all swept after her into some dream of a magazine where Art with a capital A and Beauty with a still bigger B were to reign supreme.” Anderson secured several financial backers, including DeWitt Wing, an enthusiast of Nietzsche and bird watching, who promised to pay the magazine’s office rent and printing costs.
In March 1914, Margaret C. Anderson’s name appeared on the cover of the first issue of The Little Review. “Little” wasn’t diminutive. It was intimate. The title was printed on a vellum label hand-pasted onto a plain, tan cover, and the issue’s first pages carried the editor’s stirring announcement:
If you’ve ever read poetry with a feeling that it was your religion, if you’ve ever come suddenly upon the whiteness of a Venus in a dim, deep room, if, in the early morning, you’ve watched a bird with great white wings fly straight up into the rose-colored sun . . . If these things have happened to you and continue to happen until you’re left quite speechless with the wonder of it all, then you will understand our hope to bring them nearer to the common experience of the people who read us.
Anderson grew up in Indiana and attended Ohio’s Western College for Women, an offshoot of Mount Holyoke. A university education was rare for a woman at the turn of the century, and her degree was supposed to be a social token for an affluent family or, at most, a palliative for a bright young woman when she would not tolerate attending a finishing school. As soon as she graduated, Anderson’s parents brought her back home to Indiana, where, from an upstairs room overlooking lilac bushes, she plotted her next escape. She would type out twenty-page letters detailing the household’s routine injustices and place them on her father’s desk in the early morning so that he could read them at his earliest convenience. Carbon copies appeared on her sisters’ beds.
When Anderson came across the opportunity to write book reviews for a small Christian weekly in Chicago, she assembled the family on the couch and delivered a rousing argument for her departure as if performing before a rapt crowd. A few weeks later, when Anderson’s father heard that she was smoking cigarettes and racking up debts at a candy store, he rushed to the Chicago YWCA and packed her bags. Anderson vowed to escape Indiana again and, as she put it, “conquer the world.”
—
CIGARETTES AND CANDY STORE debts were quaint compared to Anderson’s association with Emma Goldman, the most notorious anarchist in the United States. At the time, Americans considered anarchism a more dangerous threat to democracy than socialism. And for good reason. In 1901, a young man claiming to be inspired by Goldman wrapped a revolver in a handkerchief, walked up to President McKinley at an exposition in Buffalo and shot him twice in the stomach. Two years after the assassination, Teddy Roosevelt signed a law authorizing the government to bar or deport noncitizen anarchists, and Goldman, who was born in Russia, went into hiding.
Being persecuted only spurred Emma Goldman’s defiance. When she reemerged from hiding in 1906, her lectures drew thousands of people across the country, and by 1914, as the world was about to wage war for reasons that were murky, if not opaque, Goldman’s clarity was appealing. She spoke in stirring absolutes: The individual was spontaneous and free. Governments were coercive and violent. “The State,” she declared, “is organized exploitation, organized force, and crime.” Governments were not even a necessary evil. The crime and poverty they claimed to control were in fact created by governments themselves when they corrupted the individual’s natural goodness with artificial laws. Insofar as we believe that the State maintains the order that makes individual freedom possible, the State has us hoodwinked.
Structures of oppression were embedded in corporations, churches and an entire array of institutions, from marriage to the media, and what was remarkable about Goldman was that her sweeping critiques gave way to a relentless optimism about anarchy. Emma Goldman gave anarchism its charisma. Rather than politicizing a rigid logic, she was a defender of dreams. She transformed skepticism into a fighting faith, a philosophy of the self into something larger than the self. She thought of the individual as an embodiment of natural law, a “living force” and, invoking Walt Whitman, “a cosmos.” Anarchism was about more than the defiance of all laws. It was about “the salvation of man.”
Margaret Anderson attended two Goldman lectures when she toured Chicago in 1914, and like so many others, she was captivated by her brio and idealism. More important, she showed Anderson how to bridge radical politics and radical art: one lecture railed against Christianity while the other examined modern drama. Art, for Goldman, was an individualist deed as integral to anarchism as a bomb or a labor strike. She gave speeches about Chekhov and Ibsen as well as Yeats, Lady Gregory and George Bernard Shaw.
In other words, Emma Goldman was doing what Marsden and Pound were trying to do in The Egoist, and it was suddenly what Margaret Anderson wanted to do in The Little Review. After hearing Goldman speak, Anderson had just enough time to commit to anarchism before the May 1914 issue went to press. She had known nothing about Goldman when she started The Little Review. Six months later, she was hosting the Queen of the Anarchists and her radical associates in her apartment.
Anderson declared The Little Review’s credo to be “Applied Anarchism,” and she called Goldman’s philosophy the highest human ideal. High as it was, Anderson applied the ideal rather lightly. On Christmas Day 1914, she and a friend freed themselves from property rights by cutting down a Christmas tree from a publisher’s carefully landscaped estate. A few days later, a constable served Anderson with a warrant at a train station, and the judge fined her ten dollars despite her rousing defense (“We thought we were in the primeval forest”). Anderson resumed cigarette smoking and began wearing trousers, which, as the editor of a quasi-anarchist magazine, earned her national attention. The Washington Post quoted her protest: “Why shouldn’t women do anything they want to do? . . . We are all in bondage to social convention, and only by rebellion may we break those bonds. I have been in revolt since I was eight.” A Mississippi paper called Miss Anderson the “missing link of humanity.” The paper didn’t object to rebellion; it insisted, “but we draw the line at cigarette smoking and long pants for the women folks.”
Sometimes the rebellions were less innocent. In 1915, The Little Review printed one of Goldman’s speeches urging people to prepare for the “overthrow of both capitalism and the state.” That same year, the state of Utah executed a labor activist for murder despite scant evidence, and Anderson protested, “why didn’t someone shoot the governor of Utah before he could shoot Joe Hill?” She ended the article in exasperation: “For God’s sake, why doesn’t someone start the Revolution?” Statements like this were provocative even in tranquil times. To publish them while the skittish country was edging toward war was reckless. Detectives showed up at the Little Review office to investigate.
Patrons and advertisers withdrew their support as soon as the magazine became anarchistic. Anderson was kicked out of her apartment before the end of 1914, so she moved to a community north of Chicago nicknamed “Editors’ Row,” where she joined people associated with various Chicago magazines, including The Dial and Poetry. When the Christmas Tree Heist deprived her of that home, too (the tree belonged to her landlord), Anderson set up camp with her two sisters on the Lake Michigan shore. Their tents had wooden floors and oriental rugs. They roasted corn by the fire, baked potatoes in the ashes and washed their dishes and clothes with sand (“the original cleansing powder,” Anderson called it). Friends visited over the next six months. The writer Sherwood Anderson told stories by the campfire, and other writers pinned poems to the tents like valentines.
—
IN 1916, Anderson met Jane Heap. She seemed intimidating at first, and she was husky, owned a revolver, looked squarely at everyone she spoke to, had short hair she swept across her broad forehead and full lips that reminded Anderson of Oscar Wilde. Jane Heap was from Topeka, Kansas. She grew up next door to a mental institution, which, to Jane, was Topeka’s only point of interest. She responded to the isolation of Kansas by being more exotic. She imagined her ancestral home as the Arctic Circle, where her mother’s Norwegian family once lived. She and her friends wore trousers and neckties and called one another by masculine names such as “Richard” and “James.” After high school, she left Kansas, studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, affiliated herself with Chicago’s Little Theatre and devoted her life to the beautiful. “I know that if everyone felt Beauty strongly,” she wrote to a woman she met in Chicago, “felt that everything beautiful was god and all things not beautiful not God, that woman was the nearest Symbol for Beauty, if one could see this—there would be no sin, or squalor, or unhappiness in the whole world.”
Margaret Anderson recognized herself in Jane’s lonely idealism, and she had never heard anyone talk the way she did. Emma Goldman delivered spine-tingling speeches, but Jane had a knack for conversation. Anderson used to think of speaking as a stage performance—as a lecture to her family assembled on the couch—so she went browsing for wisdom. She recited poetry and quoted philosophers, but Jane never quoted anyone. Everything she said seemed like a revelation in progress. Martie, as Jane called her, jotted down their conversations and begged her to write for The Little Review. Jane resisted at first, but before long she became the de facto art editor. She transformed the magazine’s design, altered the page headers and discarded the bland tan covers for striking colors and better layouts. The Little Review was no longer just Margaret Anderson’s.
Jane reminded Anderson that revolution was subservient to art, not the other way around, and when Anderson saw Goldman in July, it became clear that Anderson had been pulled into a different orbit. Jane thought Goldman’s ideas were vague and illogical, and the Queen of the Anarchists thought Jane was too aggressive. “I felt as if she were pushing me against a wall,” Goldman said later. When Goldman’s friends began praising “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” Oscar Wilde’s sentimental lament drawing from his imprisonment, Anderson scoffed at their ideologically driven appraisal of a bad poem. The anarchists thought Anderson was corrupted by bourgeois aestheticism, and Anderson thought they were trapped by radical kitsch. Each thought the other insulted individualism.
Anderson’s initial enthusiasm for Goldman had masked the differences between them. She didn’t share Goldman’s unshakable faith in the individual. Goldman thought the public’s resistance to individualism was a by-product of a conformist power structure, but Anderson thought it was endemic. “Our culture—or what little we have of such a thing—is clogged by masses of dead people who have no conscious inner life,” she wrote in 1914, and her contempt deepened into disgust. “‘People’ has become to me a word that—crawls,” she wrote in 1915. “Peo-pul.” She saw the public as “a cosmic squirming mass of black caterpillars” writhing in protest against the rare butterfly. Whenever Goldman praised the individual, Anderson imagined the artist, a person not just incidentally exceptional—not someone who summoned the virtues everyone possesses—but fundamentally, almost biologically exceptional.
Anderson folded Goldman’s defiant politics into an expansive conception of artistic genius, the purest form of individualism. “The ultimate reason for life is Art,” Anderson declared in the August 1916 issue. “And revolution? Revolution is Art.” By then, The Little Review seemed feeble, so feeble, in fact, that Anderson threatened to leave the pages blank—an empty magazine was better than a bad magazine. She threw down the gauntlet before the public: “Now we shall have Art in this magazine or we shall stop publishing it. I don’t care where it comes from—America or the South Sea Islands. I don’t care whether it is brought by youth or age. I only want the miracle!
“Where are the artists?”
—
THE DISPUTE BETWEEN Emma Goldman and Margaret Anderson dramatized tensions that rippled through the various modernist insurgencies and began to influence Joyce’s new book. It was not clear how the exceptional and the mundane—the artist and the ad man—could interact, or how individuals could be revolutionary when revolutions were almost by definition the work of collectives. One solution was to change the understanding of revolution altogether. For modernists like Anderson and Joyce, the greatest individualist triumph was to bypass the political struggles Goldman ceaselessly fought, to sweep away conformity and subservience with mighty works of art. The dispute about individualism arose from precisely the thing that made individualism captivating: an overweening faith in the individual’s power.
Part of what made the tension so fraught was that both political and artistic individualists drew much of their faith from the same source, an 1844 treatise by Max Stirner called The Ego and His Own. Stirner maintained that the individual was the only source of virtue and the only reality—everything else was an abstraction, and all abstractions were “spooks,” ghosts vexing the ego. Anti-individual forces—corporations, bureaucracies, churches, states—were not merely unjust. They were unreal. Such sweeping skepticism generated sweeping dismissals of higher causes and concepts like God, truth and freedom. Stirner concluded his book with the declaration, “All things are nothing to me.”
The Ego and His Own went through forty-nine printings from 1900 to 1929, and its ideas united an array of modernists. Joyce read Stirner. So did Emma Goldman. So did Nietzsche. So did Miss Weaver. Ezra Pound and Margaret Anderson encountered his ideas through other writers, and Dora Marsden called The Ego and His Own the “most powerful work that has ever emerged from a single human mind.” It inspired her choice to rechristen The New Freewoman as The Egoist. Shrinking the world down to the ego made the twentieth century manageable. It fueled Goldman’s optimism and Joyce’s dogged determination.
Egoism appealed to modernists who found politics hopeless. In what seemed to be a permanent era of corporations and jostling empires, egoism provided anarchism with a way to retreat into culture while making that retreat seem like a more principled defiance. The individual would defeat collectivism not through protests and dynamite but through philosophy, art and literature. Turn-of-the-century individualist anarchists rejected political violence, deemphasized communal associations and celebrated a tradition of anarchist ideas already in circulation, from Wordsworth, Whitman and Zola to Thomas Paine, Rousseau, Nietzsche and Ibsen. It suited Joyce perfectly.
Joyce was steeped in individualist modernism in his formative years—A Portrait depicts the development of his egoism in Stephen’s defiance of home, fatherland and Church—and yet in 1914 he began to alter the entire tradition. Ulysses swerves from Stephen’s heady defiance toward Leopold Bloom’s humbler individualism. The novel opens with Stephen back in Dublin where he started, but Bloom never tries to leave. His individuality resides resolutely within a mental and municipal matrix. Bloom’s qualms and jokes, his fears and memories, his errors, insights and half-pursued speculations help him navigate the delicate spaces that separate him from the Dubliners around him and, crucially, from himself.
When Bloom gazes out of a carriage window on his way to a funeral and sees Stephen, skinny and alone and in the garb of someone in mourning, it is Joyce looking at himself. Stephen and Bloom, the young Joyce and the older Joyce, wander through Dublin, obliquely aware of each other, and cross paths briefly before moving onward. Ulysses split the ego that A Portrait built, and that split is the fission through which the world bursts forth. Joyce began to write Ulysses thinking that a person is more than a singularity sweeping away a world of abstractions. The individual is something fraught, multiple, contradictory, something deceptively small, something already marbled with abstractions. In Ulysses, Joyce was exploring what egoism always was: a way to find God in atoms. It was one of modernism’s greatest insurgencies.