by William Dean
(11/12/03)
It is both fitting and romantic that controversy still surrounds Margaret Caroline Anderson thirty years after her death at age eighty-two. She said of herself, "I wasn't born to be a fighter. The causes I have fought for have invariably been causes that should have been gained by a delicate suggestion. Since they never were, I made myself into a fighter."
Those unfamiliar with her will doubtless wonder for what did this Indiana-born lesbian fight, how, and why. Most importantly, the question is did she win and is she still winning?
And thereby hangs a good part of the controversy.
Imagine yourself in the United States about 1908. Around you culture and society still wallow in the strange hypocrisies of the late Victorian Age while the glimmers of a new Modernist Age cluster in tiny barely known enclaves in Greenwich Village and along 57th Street in Chicago. Generally, alternative lifestyles still reflect the fear instilled by the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in scandal, and woman-for-woman love and desire -- the Sapphic Sin -- isn't even spoken of by the polite.
Imagine yourself, if you can, a woman with blue eyes, red-gold hair, with a regal pose and beauty that make you seem even taller than your five feet ten inch height. Imagine you've finally escaped your obsessive mother, small-town Indiana, a vacuous finishing school-type education, and now, jobless, friendless, you stand in your tiny hotel room, festooned by you with white lilacs framed against the window view of Lake Michigan. You repeat your personal vow: "I will become something beautiful. I swear it." You are just twenty-one years old.
Immersing herself in the small new Bohemian society of Chicago, Margaret Anderson first worked in the Dial bookstore, was befriended by her employer the magazine editor of the Dial itself, and, after a brief mentoring by him -- learning how a magazine is built and produced -- was cast off after she rebuffed him for kissing her.
By 1913 she was a book critic for the Chicago Evening Post. Having become bored with her work at the Post, however she decided to edit her own magazine, the Little Review, launched as a monthly in March of 1914. The first issue featured commentary on Nietzsche, feminism, and psychoanalysis, along with new works by Chicago poets Arthur Davidson Ficke and Eunice Tietjens. For the next two years Anderson published works by Imagist poets and featured political writings of such anarchists as Emma Goldman.
Two years later, she had formed a partnership with a former Art Institute student who talked "like a brilliant truck driver": Jane Heap. Jane affected men's suits and ties, wore her hair in a tumble-down pompadour, and had the tough-eyed stare of a bad girl from any era. Heap contributed a renewed sense of design to the Little Review and a series of histrionic depressions to their love life.
While fighting to champion the "new!" in Art, culture, thinking, and politics in America, Anderson and Heap -- as might be expected -- faced, too, Americans' general financial reluctance to support the avant-garde. Another series of landmark battles loomed on the horizon.
By September of 1916, the Little Review seemed desperate to survive. Anderson and Heap published a blank issue as a kind of "Want Ad" and into the breach stepped a pair of men eager to assert some control over America's cultural awakenings: Ezra Pound and John Quinn.
Pound still fancied himself, as always, a pseudo-rustic enfant terrible. Quinn was a wealthy connoiseur and collector with a legal bent to his mind. They set out to carve a major piece of the Little Review into a kind of misogynistic answer to what Pound called the "gynocracy."
Quinn poured seven hundred dollars per year into the financially fading Little Review in return for Pound becoming its European Editor and a free hand to publish his stable of all male writers, including himself (of course), T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce.
It was this which set the stage for the great controversy over obscenity in America. The first section of Joyce's Ulysses arrived at the magazine's office in February 1918. Anderson and Heap knew it was special and worthy of promotion. Margaret Anderson said, "We'll print this if it's the last thing we do!" It very nearly was.
The next month's issue began the novel's publication as a series of installments which continued for three years. After twenty-three installments, only half the massive novel had appeared and by then the magazine had been confiscated four times for obscenity and Anderson and Heap had been arrested.
Typically (and tellingly) Anderson proclaimed that the judges wouldn't know the difference between James Joyce and dirty postcards.
While Quinn argued that Ulysses was no more pornographic than the works of Swift, Rabelais, or Shakespeare, the trial descended into hypocritical and Puritanical comedy. The judge even refused to allow readings in court of Joyce's writings on the grounds that they would be offensive to Anderson and Heap present despite the fact they were the ones on trial for the publication of them.
The trial was lost and the co-editors fined fifty dollars apiece for obscenity.
Anderson capped the proceedings by announcing to the group of clerks ordered to fingerprint her that she would not "submit to such an obscenely repulsive performance" until they produced a pristine cake of soap, a bottle of good eau de cologne, and an immaculate towel. The bewildered clerks meekly complied.
Ulysses, of course, would go on to further controversies. Published in book form by Sylvia Beach, through her Shakespeare and Co. in Paris, it would again be censored in the United States and not be fully vindicated and published in America until 1933.
While on the surface, it appeared that Anderson had lost the trial, we must look at it in perspective. She had successfully published half of the controversial book, despite attempts by both Quinn and Pound to bend to the censors and delete "certain passages" rather than go to the trial stage. She had also shown up the complete ignorance of the courts as to what was "Art" and what was "obscene." The trial and its consequences, however, had depleted Anderson and wearied her of these particular literary pursuits. She also wanted something more inspiring in her love life.
She turned the reins of the Little Review over to Jane Heap and pursued and won the heart of another like herself -- a woman who lived for beauty and art: songstress extraordinaire Georgette Leblanc. In May 1923, Margaret and Georgette sailed for France and began a shared life that lasted until Georgette's death in 1941. It was a life of shared recitals, Norman chateaux, simple French food, chronic poverty, and days filled idyllically with music, books, and Art at Le Cannet on the French Riviera.
In 1942 Anderson returned to the United States, where she met Dorothy Caruso, widow of opera star Enrico Caruso. They lived together until Caruso's death in 1955. She returned to Le Cannet after Caruso's death, "writing and listening to music," until a serious bout with emphysema forced her to enter the Clinique Beausoleil in Cannes. She died there of heart failure in 1973. She was buried beside Georgette Leblanc in the Notre Dame des Agnes Cemetery.
Margaret wrote of her life, loves, and battles in three autobiographical books, My Thirty Years War, The Fiery Fountains, and The Strange Necessity. Her fictionalized account of her love affair with Georgette Leblanc, Forbidden Fires, remains a classic of lesbian literature.
What remains in controversy are some of the details of Margaret Anderson's life and the impact of her contributions to the avant-garde in American cultural history. I suspect she would appreciate that. As she said about herself and the Little Review (and to all of us): "To express the emotions of life is to live; to express the life of emotions is to make art."
