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The History of Literature
672 The Little Review (with Holly A. Baggett) | My Last Book with Phil Jones
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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. This episode is brought to you by Companion. Iris and Josh seem like the perfect match, but when a weekend getaway turns into a nightmare, Iris realizes that things aren't as perfect as they appear.
- [00:23]
Holly Baggett
From the creators of Barbarian and the.
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Jack Wilson
Studio that brought you the Notebook comes a twisted tale of modern romance and the sweet satisfaction of revenge. Companion Only. In theaters January 31st. Rated R. Under 17. Not admitted without Parent. Hello. The world of publishing is one of giants striding across the landscape, absorbing everything that gets in their path. The giants tell us what to buy and what to read and what to think. Almost everything is owned by six publishing companies, and we think, six? How can there only be six? The world is so vast. There are so many people, so many voices, so many points of view. And then, even as we're thinking this, two of them merge and we're down to five, and the world narrows a little bit further. Art is about expansion. Commerce is about control. Luckily, there are green shoots that emerge from the blasted landscape. Green shoots, plucky plants taking root, looking for sunshine, popping up out of the wasteland, reaching for the skies. Speaking of the wasteland, that hallmark of modernism appeared in a smaller magazine edited by T.S. eliot, the poet himself, in 1922. But years before that, Eliot found a home for his works in a little magazine based out of Chicago. The Little Review, it was called. Contributors alongside TS Eliot included Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, Gene Toomer, William Carlos Williams, H.D. hart, Crane, Sherwood Anderson, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Emma Goldman, Wyndham Lewis and more. Their poems and essays in fiction were interspersed with artwork by Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst and Hans Arp and Joseph Stella. And when an Irishman living in exile wrote a work that many thought obscene, the big publishers wanted nothing to do with it. Why risk censorship? Why take on the moralizing critics? Why take on the government? Where's the money in that? The Irishman had to turn to the two ladies in Chicago who said, that's not the right question. The question isn't, where's the money? The question is, where's the art? And so the Little Review became the publisher of this allegedly obscene work, which, of course, was the novel Ulysses by James Joyce, widely considered the most important and artistically accomplished novel of the 20th century. Who were these women? What's their story? We'll talk to the woman who knows Holly Baggett today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'M Jack Wilson. Still feeling grateful that you're here today, even after all these episodes. You'd think I'd get tired of you people showing up and listening, or I'd get blase. I'd take you all for granted. But nope, I'm grateful for each and every one of you, each and every time. Which is why I say it. We have a fun one for you today. If you think I've been thinking a lot about publishing and commerce and podcasting and commerce and social media and news and how it all works. Well, yes, you'd be right. I have been thinking about all that. Thinking about the nobility of just saying, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to go down this path. I'm going to take a different path. I'll have some more announcements about that soon. And let me just say this. The right paths are seldom the easiest paths, that's for sure. But they are rewarding two people in their own way, which might not be financial, but they are rewarding. Two people who knew all about that were Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap and also Ezra Pound, who worked as a foreign editor for the Little Review for a time. But Anderson and Heap are the stars of the show today. They pushed forward modernism and made Chicago a perhaps unlikely center of a kind of renaissance. Then they moved to Greenwich Village, which is where they were when they started serializing James Joyce's Ulysses all the way back in 1918. By 1921, the post office was seizing copies of the magazine, and trials ensued. If for no other reason, this would have given Anderson and Heap a place in literary history. But there's much more to their story than just the obscenity trial. It was a magazine with a 15 year run, and I mentioned some of the authors and artists up front. An impressive list. But who were the editors? What were they hoping to accomplish? What did they accomplish? And what ended up happening to them? We'll explore the Little Review with Holly Baggett, and then we'll hear, let's see, can we find one that rhymes? I think we probably can. How about a My last book with Philip Jones, our expert in Dr. Johnson. But first, Holly Baggett and A Little Review. Okay. Joining me now is Holly A. Baggett, who is a history professor at Missouri State University and the editor of Dear Tiny the Letters of Jane Heap and Florence Reynolds. She's here today to discuss her new book, Making no Compromise. Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap and the Little Review. Holly Baggett, welcome to the history of Literature.
- [06:41]
Holly Baggett
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be with you.
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Jack Wilson
So let's start with a Little Review. What exactly was it and why was it so important?
- [06:51]
Holly Baggett
The World Review was an avant garde literary arts and to a certain extent, political magazine that was established in Chicago in 1914 by Margaret Anderson, a young woman from Indiana. And it went to 1929 when she and her co editor at the time, Jane Heath, decided to end the Little Review. And it's considered one of the best examples of little magazines during this period. And there were quite a few of them in introducing Americans to a whole host of writers and artists who were. Who later became important in modernism. And they had it for quite a while. A lot of these little magazines popped up and folded right away. So 15 years was a pretty good run. And they published everyone.
- [07:49]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Let's get some names on the table. Yeah. Ezra Pound and James Joyce and we could just go on and on.
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Holly Baggett
Right. Yates, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, early stories of Ernest Hemingway, T.S. eliot, what's often called in the history of this period the men of 1914. But they also published, as I said, people like Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell, HD and they published women writers at the time, such as May Sinclair and Mary Butts and Dorothy Richardson, who were basically forgotten until feminist scholars in the 1970s rediscovered their work. So they were very prescient in whose work was solid and good and experimental. And their most famous reason they're known to anyone who knows about them is that they published Joyce's Ulysses in installments. Ezra Pound became their foreign editor in 1917 and he sent them several chapters. And they. When we get to the chapter where Bloom is watching Gertie McDowell and masturbates to watching her, that was confiscated by the post office. And they are charged with obscenity.
- [09:10]
Jack Wilson
Right.
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Holly Baggett
And they have to go through a trial, which was somewhat bizarre in itself.
- [09:15]
Jack Wilson
I want to get to all of that, but I don't want to get too far ahead of our story because I kind of wanted to go back to, I guess, the initial impulse to start it up. Did they have in mind that this was going to be a way of bringing in a lot of these writers we've talked about were based in Europe, a kind of way of importing modernism into Chicago. Was there a manifesto or any kind of mission statement when they first opened up the Little Review?
- [09:47]
Holly Baggett
Well, their mission statement was making no compromise with the public taste. And so hence the title of my book.
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Jack Wilson
Title of your book, yeah.
- [09:58]
Holly Baggett
Yeah. Well, it's important to go back, as I said, it was started in 1914 by Margaret Anderson in Chicago. She didn't meet Jane Heap until 1916. She was working as a book reviewer for a Chicago magazine. And she she was a middle class girl from Indiana who wrote to a woman named Clara Laughlin in Chicago, who was a woman who wrote articles in Ladies Home Journal and talking about young women and how it's a new age for young women and women need to get out in the world. And she said how bored she was in her Indiana home. And Laughlin invited her to come to Chicago to meet her and then offered her a job reviewing these books. And Anderson said the most of what she read were just awful. And there's a sense of something that's breaking loose at the time that she hones in on. And at that particular time, the reason she was able to get it up and off was because there was something called the Chicago literary renaissance happening where you have writers like Sherwood Anderson, who was not yet famous, who was published in the first, the debut issue of the Little Review. Floyd Dell, who later became famous, a journalist with the masses in New York. Ben Hecht, Chicago newspaper guy who was starting to write fiction. Maxwell Bodenheim, a poet. So there were the people there already who were young, who were influenced by Nietzsche and all sorts of radical ideas that were floating around even in the Midwest at the time. And she just wanted something new. At the break with the Victorian era, I don't think there was any conscious, oh, we're going to open America to modernism from Europe. It came as sort of an organic thing. When she first started, she depended on these people in the local scene. And then in 1916 she meets Jane Heath, who had been an art student at the Chicago Institute of Art. And they met in the Little Review office, which was in the Fine Arts building. And Anderson fell madly in love with her and cajoled her to be a co editor, which he agreed to do. And so when they both go to New York in 1917 and they establish themselves in Greenwich Village, then they're able to branch out from New York because they're publishing Dunya Barnes and Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams. And then at the same time, when Pound becomes their foreign editor, he's based in London, they start getting the Joyce Pound's own stuff, Wyndham Lewis, etc. So it's new York period is a very vibrant period. And then in 1923 they meet someone who's going to influence their life. His name was George Gurdjieff, a spiritual teacher. And after that they go to Paris, where they hang out with Gertrude Stein and those people, and they go study with Gurdjieff at this institute he had outside Paris. And his ideas, really, they stuck with him for the rest of their lives. And in the 20s, the little review was stopped being published as a monthly. They just couldn't afford to get it together. And because they had broken up as well, and he took over the last several years. And as an artist, she concentrated on the visual arts, on architecture, on theater design, until they both decided to end it in 1929.
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Jack Wilson
Right. Okay. So Heap, I mean, in a few ways, I guess they were similar. That Anderson, as you said, was from Indiana, Heap was from Kansas. They came to Chicago to find their way, in Anderson's case as a writer and in Hebe's case as an artist. But you also say, on the face of it, two women could not be more different. What were their personalities?
- [14:02]
Holly Baggett
Polar opposites. Margaret Anderson was very enthusiastic, extroverted, bubbly, always sort of clutching her heart and going, oh, my God, the beauty of this poetry is going to kill me. That type of thing. Whereas he was, I believe, clinically depressed and not very happy with the world. She was ter. She had a very sharp wit, though, and you could just demolish things in an instant. And that's what Anderson wanted in terms of writing for her magazine. She was, Anderson believes, suicidal at times. But as often with people in that situation, she had a sense of humor. It was kind of dark, but it was a sense of humor about it. And Anderson thought he was brilliant. And particularly conversation. And she wanted to show off, she said, he ability to converse with anybody on anything. And what she wasn't particularly pleased with. But yeah, so they were like day and night.
- [15:08]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. And what motivated them to start the little review? Did they think they could make money at it? Was it purely artistic endeavor? Did they have some kind of funding from somewhere, or were they trying to make a go of it just from subscriptions?
- [15:27]
Holly Baggett
No, they had subscriptions, and then they were distributed in bookstores in major cities. They never had more than 4,000 subscriptions. And again, Anderson started in 1914. He didn't join until 1916. So in. Anderson's motivation was sort of, as I said, she was clued into the zeitgeist of the era of things were changing, it's the early 20th century. And she also said that in her debut editorial, she wanted a magazine based on conversation. So she said, we're not holding to any group edict, ideologue, et cetera. We're taking everybody and People who don't like what other people have written are invited in the pages of the little review to write an article opposing what somebody said. And they had a feature called Reader Critic where they published their subscribers letters who argued with them and then they would argue back to the letters. Reader Critic. So you did have all these different voices within one magazine. And that's what she liked. She wasn't there to lay down some logs. This is modernist, that's not. Et cetera, et cetera. And to make it an entertaining type of magazine for people who were interested in the arts.
- [16:46]
Jack Wilson
Right. And what did it look like? I mean, I kind of have an image in my mind and I have no idea if it's correct. I mean, would you describe it as thick or thin or. Or colorful, glossy, plain?
- [17:03]
Holly Baggett
Sometimes it was thin and sometimes it was thick. When Margaret started in 1914, the covers were very brown, like a grocery store bag type of thing. There wasn't any color. And the physical representation Anderson didn't care about. But when he came along, and especially later in the 20s, the covers changed. They were colorful. There are references to Cubism. It was heaps artist eye that did those covers. And she also, as I said, began publishing reproductions of work of visual artists such as Miro Picabia, Hans Arp, those type of artists. So as I said, Vixen starts off very boring and ends up colorful.
- [17:49]
Jack Wilson
And getting back to the two of them, before we take a break here, you describe them as openly queer. What did that mean in the Chicago of their day? What did that mean for them?
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Holly Baggett
Well, to give it a historical context, what you have going on in the late 19th century is physicians who start to study homosexuality and actually have a progressive view of things people like have. Ellis is best known example with his book Sexual Inversion. And people were referred to as inverts. Sexual inverts. Clear from Anderson's autobiography. She wrote three autobiographies. She read the Sexologist, she knew what was going on. And a lot of the intellectual avant garde artists had read it. Also Freud, even though he's popularized in the 20s. People have read Freud and that one of that most important thing that they took out of it was that women are now sexual creatures, which makes female friendships problematic. But that's another story. And there's a funny story where in Chicago, Sherwood Anderson talks about. They were walking across Jackson park and he picks up a twig and he snaps it in two as they're just walking along talking. And his friend tells him excitedly that what he just did was acknowledge that he was homosexual because he broke the twig which represented his phallus. I mean, that's how they're talking.
- [19:26]
Jack Wilson
Right.
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Holly Baggett
And at the same time, as in other cities, you have a part of Chicago called Tower Town, which was a working class neighborhood which also had gay welcoming bars. And a number of people wrote who were in that neighborhood wrote about how people could come and go and not be called. As Ben Reitman, Emma Goldman's lover, said, they're not treated as queers and sissies. So you have a real example of actual people who are congregating. And also the Chicago vice commission in 1911 published a report where they go on at quite length about the men in particular and how they act and behave, et cetera. It's somewhat comical, but. So probably we think of the early 20th century. You really don't think about out gay people. Yeah, but there were.
- [20:18]
Jack Wilson
But were they in danger? Was there the possibility of arrests or societal disapproval? And I mean, the picture you've painted so far sounds like it's not that way. It's kind of accepting, but it's pretty. Still pretty early in the 20th century. I was just wondering if Chicago had a little. If it was viewed as kind of a safe haven or was there danger in being open as they were.
- [20:47]
Holly Baggett
Well, Anderson never wrote about anything like that and neither did he. And I think as women, the authorities were less interested in women because they still had that Queen Victoria idea that women weren't sexual. And they didn't, you know, so it was. I'm sure there are cases of men being treated poorly in Chicago at the time. But the most crucial thing is about Anderson, that we know in terms of her feelings about being gay was in 1915 she wrote an editorial which is considered the first gay rights editorial written by a lesbian in America called Mrs. Ellis's failure. And this was Edith Ellis, who was the wife of Havelock Ellis, who was on a book tour and she was giving a talk called the Love of Tomorrow. And Anderson excitedly went and she had another person cover the talk too. So there are going to be two forms of the talk or two essays on the talk. And she was disappointed. And Edith Ellis, I don't know if Anderson knew this or not. Edith Ellis, married to Havelock Ellis, actually was a lesbian and he did a study on a small group of lesbians that included her. So Anderson believes she's going to go there and talk about sexual inversion. And she was very disappointed that she did not. She talked about the Love of Tomorrow being. She talked about it in spiritual ethereal ways about how love will not be the brutish expression of the past, etc. And Anderson came out, said. She didn't come out and say, I'm a lesbian. She said. She really said nothing in there. I mean, she did have a sentence about Oscar Wilde and Michelangelo. But the fact that these people, Mrs. Anderson speaking, should be celebrated rather than demeaned or criticized or hurt in any way. The thing about Havelock Ellis is people were born gay. They couldn't help it. So we need to be tolerant of them. And besides, he pointed out that many famous examples from the past. And she says in there with us today, love is the same as murder or robbery. We can be arrested, killed, tortured. And she wrote every day for our love. So. And the thing is, when people first met Anderson, they did not assume she was a lesbian because she presented in a very feminine way. And as I point out in the book, I mean, any man who ran into her found themselves very attractive. And who would write about how attractive she was later? But Jane Heap presented in a masculine way. She had short hair, she wore pants, etc. So it's not until Heep comes into the picture and they're inseparable that people put two and two together. So that was her situation.
- [23:39]
Jack Wilson
Okay, let's take a quick break and we'll come back and then we'll talk about the arc of the little review.
- [23:45]
Holly Baggett
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- [24:40]
Jack Wilson
Okay, we're back. So I want to ask about the Ulysses trial, but I feel like we'd still be jumping ahead a little bit. Why don't you maybe tell us about some of the early years and some of the successes and help us see the little review in the context of all of these little magazines. I know Harriet Monroe's poetry was there and Emma Goldman's Mother Earth, and. And what was going on with these publications? And how did the little review stand out?
- [25:14]
Holly Baggett
Well, it stood out, as I said, because it lasted so long. 15 years with very little money. Well, in the early years, you talk about, were they in any danger? The biggest danger she faced in the early years was the fact that she decided she was an anarchist. Emma Goldman had come to town to give us talk and she went and heard it. This was, this is in May of 1914. So just a couple of months after the debut issue. And she was just so overwhelmed she wrote that I just had time to turn anarchist before the presses closed. So she's writing all these pro Emma Goldman things and pro anarchism. When she was in her anarchist phase she was like why doesn't somebody shoot the governor of Utah before he can shoot Joe Hill? She talks about labor disputes and now insanity of World War I and, and all of that. She decided that she needed to take the little view on the road for a break. And she and Heep go to Mill Valley, California outside of San Francisco, and Goldman meets them there. And the September issue is about anarchism, the war and all these political things. And they were visited by the agents of the Justice Department and interviewed because of their anarchist tendencies, one person refused, backed out of renting them a house. So they ended up in spending a summer literally camping on the beach of Lake Michigan, which she thought was fine. She made a big venture out of it. So the first few years it was just a kind of a hodgepodge of hit and miss here and there, but they got attention because of the very assertive attitude that the arts need to be broken up and open from some staid historical past. And then when they go to New York and Pound becomes their foreign editor and they have that wealth of talent right there roaming around in Greenwich Village. And then the last few years where it came out sporadically or as combined issues, it got more and more esoteric with Heap at the helm, as I said, more visual, more colorful and really going into things like machine age aesthetics and what was happening with theater design at that time. So like any magazine, it organically goes through phases depending on really the status of their relationship and what else they were doing in their lives.
- [27:49]
Jack Wilson
Right, so who was reading the little review?
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Holly Baggett
Well, as I said, at its height, 4,000 subscriptions, so it was never really widespread. I mean it's, it's influence in terms of promoting writers and artists of modernism exceeded.
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Jack Wilson
Right. So it wasn't the hard working laborer at the end of his work week would read it by the fire or something. These were other artists and intellectuals and anarchists, political firebrands and so on. It was more of a magazine that reached an audience of fellow travelers, so to speak.
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Holly Baggett
Exactly. But one thing you can tell from the letters to the editor is was a youthful audience for the most part.
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Jack Wilson
Oh, huh. So a lot of students.
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Holly Baggett
Yeah, right. Were found in the pages of the Little Review more challenging and interesting than what they were being assigned in college or high school.
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Jack Wilson
Right. And I suppose in those days, I mean, I guess what was being assigned was probably a lot of the kind of Alfred, Lord Tennyson kind of poetry and. And that sort of thing. And they were looking to. To break free from the Victorian age and so on.
- [29:13]
Holly Baggett
Right, exactly.
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Jack Wilson
Okay, so tell us about the Ulysses trial. You talked about it a little bit already, but what exactly did it mean for the Little Review to be this controversial and to be publishing something that had caused this kind of a backlash from the authorities?
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Holly Baggett
Well, to start from the beginning, when Pound set them the first chapter, they were just bowled over. And she said, in the Little Review, we are about to publish a modern masterpiece.
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Jack Wilson
Wow.
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Holly Baggett
I mean, they got it exactly. You know, they knew what was going on. For many people, it's not the easiest book to read.
- [29:54]
Jack Wilson
Right.
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Holly Baggett
So. And they. They ran into problems with the authorities. Before Ulysses, the post office also confiscated an issue that had a short story by Wyndham Lewis called Tantamin Springmate, which was thought to be obscene. So they were already in trouble, and they were already on the radar. They get complaints from subscribers, where's my Little review? And then they have to write in the next issue. We just found out. It was confiscated and burned. But they persevere in spite of the fact that some of their readers did not like it at all, had no idea what was going on, and were like, what have you done with your magazine? You're going crazy. Not. I mean, they were the ones who would write these letters in letters like, what is this guy doing? And I don't understand. Yeah, you know, he wrote Joyce directly and said, we can't wait to see Leopold Bloom finish this day. And so they keep publishing it till they get to the Gertie McDowell chapter, in which the head of the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice came home to find his daughter reading the Little Review and reading that Joyce chapter and started the. To get people, the authorities, to press official charges. And the trial was in what's now called the Jefferson Market Courthouse. It's a. It's now a branch of the New York City Public Library. It's a really neat building, and it was right around the corner from where they. Where they lived and worked. So their lawyer is a man named John Quinn, who liked to support Irish writers and artists, and he was giving James Joyce a stipend to continue to write. And he was an art collector. And so he fancied himself a modern man of the arts. And so they meet. He's going to defend them, although he was angry because he said, you guys should have stopped publishing this when you were getting in trouble to start with. Why are you publishing something that's going to get you in such a. You know, it's your fault. You shouldn't have done this. So. And he thought it was obscene. He thought it was awful. He hated Ulysses. And so in Quinn's letters to Pound, we sort of see this evolution of his view of Anderson. Anderson he was very attracted to. And it's clear that not till later. I mean, he's awful. He's saying things like, well, she could get a backer if she would take a fronter first. You know what I mean? It's just like he's saying the Pound. And he does not, like, calls her a typical Washington Squareite, which, you know, all those bad things associated with the Village.
- [32:41]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Holly Baggett
And when he realizes that Anderson and he are a couple, his letters to Pound get absolutely vicious. You know, calling them, you know, I have no interest in anybody who. Who's a sassist, who's menstruating. I mean, it's just. It would just. I can't do it justice. It's just a string of one ugly thing after another. And I discovered this when I was. I wrote my dissertation on a little review, just not necessarily the lives, rest of their lives. And it really struck me how I had seen quotes of his letters in books about the trial and Joyce, etc. But everyone before had cut out all the obscene, vile things he was saying. And when they got to trial, he was angry because all these supporters who were women came into the courtroom and sat behind them. And he's saying things like, they deserve to look like they. They should be raped if they haven't been raped, they need to be raped. I mean, that type of ugly.
- [33:45]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Holly Baggett
And then finally, his legal argument to this panel of three judges is that Ulysses was written the way it was written because Joyce had poor eyesight. So, I mean, poor eyesight. He did have poor eyesight.
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Jack Wilson
Right.
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Holly Baggett
But to say that's why that's how he wrote Ulysses the way he did was ridiculous. And then also there are some homophobic references in his summation as well. He said there are two types of filth. There's the soft, flabby filth of a man like wild, and there's a hard, steely filth, like a man like Joyce. And the whole question legal Question. Is this piece of literature going to sexually arouse people? And Quinn said, obviously, Ulysses is not going to sexually arouse anyone because it's so disgusting. So he was ridiculous, but he thought a lot of himself. And Anderson wrote in her first autobiography, My thirty Years War, at one point he threatened to. To just leave and not represent them anymore. And she wrote it. You didn't need a divine power to know nobody was going to take this guy away from this case because of the attention it was getting. So they were found guilty and they're fined a hundred dollars. Anderson said she really should have gone to jail. And she has a very comical scene about when she's being fingerprinted. The whole thing was really a. One of the more interesting trials in American history. And you hear about a lot of trials, but you don't hear about this one. It was a really fascinating exploration of gender roles and sexuality and censorship and how they all ran into each other.
- [35:35]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Did that basically stay with them? Did it come to define the Little Review that they were the. The publishers of Ulysses, and was it something that they kind of carried with them for the rest of their lives?
- [35:50]
Holly Baggett
Well, after their experience, as you know, the Ulysses was published as a book by Sylvia beach in Paris, the owner of Shakespeare and Thompson, who was also a lesbian. It's kind of interesting. And in 1922 issue of the Little Review, Jane, he took note of it in just a small paragraph and said. She said her last line was, we limp from the field. But yes, they were very proud of that in another way. However, there's some people who think that it was that trial itself that kind of dealt a blow to the Little Review. As time went on, you know, their relationship was over. They were very angry with each other. And Anderson actually said. She said, I didn't know what to do afterwards, so I had a nervous breakdown. And she later claimed she was exaggerating when she said that. But when you read other people's letters, like Hart Crane's letters, asking about Anderson and saying, God, she, you know, really does seem like she's having a rough time. And I hope she gets on the men, and then they really start to go in their personal lives in. In different directions.
- [37:03]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, if I've pronounced that correctly. Who was he and how does he come into the story here?
- [37:18]
Holly Baggett
He comes into the story. He was a philosopher and spiritual teacher who was born in Armenia, we believe, in the 1870s, who, as a young man became interested in Spiritual questions and claims in his book Meetings with Remarkable Men, which is a version of an autobiography. He travels to Central and South Asia and the Middle east, where he goes to monasteries and places where there are wise people passing on hermetic wisdom from the ancient past, et cetera, through an oral tradition. And he learns all this stuff. And he ends up in Russia, where he was born. Russia was. Armenia was part of Russia when he was born. So he's going home and he gets followers. He starts to put advertisements for lectures on human spirituality, etc. And he starts to get a small group of followers who then try to outrun the Russian Revolution. And he ends up in France, where he establishes what's called the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in a large mansion outside Paris. And it really starts with literary people in Britain and in London in particular, because before he goes to Paris, he goes to London and there are people who are attracted to his teachings. He comes to New York in 1923 and an editor of a British little magazine called the New Age came before him and started to deliberately get people to come and hear Gurdjieff and talk about his ideas. And Anderson, he'd go to listen to him and see. He also had these public demonstration of dances his students would do. And a lot of people, including Hart, Crane and others who were there that night, said, wow, this was really something. And Heap and Anderson were really, really impressed. And they begin this journey of being followers of his ideas. Now, it's not like he was a cult or anything, because I think one of the attractions on it, people could just live their normal daily lives. However they did, they went to the Institute to study, but they didn't have to stay there, et cetera. And Anderson, and he believed in his ideas until their deaths. He died in 1964 and Anderson died in 1973. And Anderson wrote a book about it. He's got a very Byzantine philosophy and thought. His. His. The works he's written are very difficult for anyone to read or understand. His syntax and he makes up words. And one of his primary books is called Beelzebubs Tails to his Grandson, which is a man flying in a flying saucer around the planets. But the bottom line is he believed that people were just unawake. They were sleepwalking, was his phrase. We're all sleepwalking through our lives. We need to become awake. And how do you become awake? Through dances, labor, music, etc. He had these very specific things he had people, too do that we all. There's A sort of basic types of personalities, and we need to find out what type our personality is so we can live in alignment with who we really are. And the argument is, if as individual humans can awake, and usually it's just a small number of enlightened people to start with, but if it's possible that we all can become awake, then that will actually change the vibrations in the universe and we will send the universe on in a happier direction. It's much more complicated than that, but that's the simplest way I can really describe it. I mean, it's important to note that there are still Gurdjieff groups all over the country, all over the world.
- [41:24]
Jack Wilson
I think the way you put it in your book is he appears sporadically in the studies of modernists who were seeking answers beyond what artistic expression expression could offer. And did it just seem like art wasn't tangible enough for them or wasn't making enough of a change in people's lives that it was sort of. It was too remote to actually change one's spirituality or what. What was it that they found lacking in the. Because for a lot of us from the outside would say, well, you've got some of the greatest works ever, and this modernism period is so invigorating and exciting and cutting edge, and you were right there at the heart of it. And yet it seemed like it wasn't giving them enough. And so I'm just wondering if you've been able to identify exactly what it was that they found lacking in the art of modernism and why they ended up turning to Gurdjieff.
- [42:19]
Holly Baggett
Well, Anderson does come out and say that art no longer gives us the important answers to the important questions. She said, I want a little illumination and art no longer provides that. And he said in the final issue that the little review was a trial track for racers. All these individuals, all these schools, et cetera, we've done. Now is the time to put aside things like little reviews and concentrate more on being human. But they say that publicly, they write that, and I'm sure they believed it when they wrote it. But when you look at the rest of their lives, there's. She's writing letters, Anderson's writing letters to friends, going on about this new book or that piece of music. In a very excited way, Heap actually becomes a teacher of Gurdjieff ideas. There was a group of women in Paris who had a study group with Gurgiev, and he told her, I want you to go to London and start groups there. Which she did and she. When she died, she was a very respected teacher of his ideas. Her students talked a lot about how important she was in helping them awake to their true selves. And her students say that she used music, she used art, she used crafts as a way to explain his ideas. So even though they said that, you know, oh, forget art, Art stinks. I mean, they still certainly had an appreciation for it, were in it for the rest of their lives.
- [43:57]
Jack Wilson
Right. Okay, well, we're coming to the end here, but I do have one final question for you. What do you think we owe to the little review?
- [44:07]
Holly Baggett
Well, as one critic put it, they were the major organization of introducing modernism to America. That's what we owe to them.
- [44:18]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [44:18]
Holly Baggett
And I think the LGBT plus community owes. When scholars started looking into LGBT history and rediscovering, nobody knew who Margaret Anderson was. And all of a sudden, now she's an icon. Along with Jane, he's in the Chicago LGBT hall of Fame, which was not until 2006, but I think we owe them an awful lot, because when you look at the other little magazines as a period, they just couldn't achieve on the level, the breadth and the depth of what they did in terms of introducing Americans to this new form of writing and artistic expression.
- [45:00]
Jack Wilson
Right. And I said that was going to be my last question, but I actually do have one more, which is, what do you think that the two of them were searching for in their lives? And do you think they ever found it?
- [45:14]
Holly Baggett
I think, yes, I do. They were trying to understand themselves. And really, I think a lot of people seeking a spiritual way of life do that. I just. I think when you write, they found a gene. He found. Definitely found it, because she's a teacher of his ideas, and she's very revered. And Anderson, I believe, found it just by her letters. Her letters are in archives all over the place, and she wrote a lot, and particularly in the last years of her life, letters that are in the Library of Congress and the Ransom center down in Texas. She talks about him. She talks about his ideas. She writes a book where she's saying she's trying to explain them. I don't think she did a really good job of it, but I think at the end of the day, they both felt they had a framework of looking at life and themselves that gave them the answers to the questions they were asking. And whether it's art or spirituality, it just comes down to those basic questions of who am I? Why am I here? What am I supposed to be doing? Is there an afterlife? Etcetera and they did that, and in a very unique and fascinating way.
- [46:33]
Jack Wilson
With no compromise.
- [46:34]
Holly Baggett
Right, Exactly.
- [46:36]
Jack Wilson
Okay. Well, the book is called Making no Compromise. Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap and the little review. Holly Baggot, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [46:47]
Holly Baggett
Thank you, Jack. I really enjoyed it myself.
- [46:59]
Jack Wilson
And finally today, Philip Jones and I talked about Dr. Johnson in episode 600. After we finished, I asked him a special question.
- [47:18]
Holly Baggett
Foreign.
- [47:22]
Jack Wilson
Okay. We're joined by Philip Jones, chairman of the Johnson Society and author of the book Reading Samuel Johnson, Reception and Representation 1750-1970. Philip, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [47:46]
C
Well, that's a great question. And I'll go back to probably my favorite book, which is not a book by Johnson at all. It's James Joyce's Ulysses, which over the years I've read once every decade, I think. And I went with two friends in Dublin, and we did the Bloomsday Walk and walked around many of the sites which are still in existence in Dublin and walked out to Sandy Mountain beyond there and witnessed the sights which James Joyce brought to bear there. I mean, it's such a marvelous novel because for those of you who don't know, it just covers the life of particularly a character called Bloom in one day in 1906 in Dublin. And his adventures, in effect, parallel what happened in the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, the Odyssey in particular. But what he does is apply a high degree of realism. I mean, Joyce boasted that if Dublin were ever nuclear bombed, they could rebuild it just from reading Ulysses. I think that's probably an exaggeration, but he wrote it when he was living in Paris in exile, and he was writing about a world which had already disappeared 20 years before. But he used what was called Tom's Dublin Directory to recreate all the streets and shops that he knew. And so you get a sense not only of the detailed materiality of this world, you get a sense of the great conversationalists and wits in the pubs and the life of Dublin. But you also get, because of his use of this technique called the interior monologue, you get inside the characters in a way that had never really been happened before in literature. So you get this great masterpiece written in 18 different styles, which takes you in a day round Dublin. And it's a great book because it's ultimately about family, it's about love, and it Has a positive finish. It finishes with the word yes. And so whilst many people will probably say it's an unreadable book, give it a go, because when you read it for the second, third, fourth time, you'll be hooked. And it's a book you can treasure throughout your life.
- [49:52]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. You know, it's a great choice for a last book because, like you say, I feel like every time I read it, I get better at reading it. And it's not like some books where all the pleasure is in the first encounter and you never quite recapture the magic of the first time you read it. It's more like playing the piano or juggling or something where the more you do it, the better edit you get. And so you could feel like your next read of it is going to be the best read you've ever had of that book.
- [50:28]
C
That's a very good point, Jack. And in fact, when you first read it, perhaps as a student, you go with all the primers and hunt down the references. And as you read it for the second or third time, some of that's dropped in and you don't actually feel the need to do that. It's what Joyce called the trellis or the structure. You can simply then attend to it simply as a book and enjoy the depictions of Dublin and the depictions of the characters in their lives. It's very funny as well. Some of the chapters as funny as anything you'll ever read in literature. So he's a comic novelist. And as you say, you get more out of it and you read it better each time you read it.
- [51:07]
Jack Wilson
And what a great way to close the final chapter of the final book you read is to end with the final word. Yes, absolutely.
- [51:17]
C
And in fact, James Joyce does actually refer to Johnson in the Proteus section because he refers obliquely to the lexicographer kicking the stone. So he does make an appearance briefly in there.
- [51:29]
Jack Wilson
So you'll have that to look forward to as well.
- [51:32]
C
Thank you very much for hosting me, Jack. Really good fun.
- [51:36]
Jack Wilson
Well, thank you so much for joining me, Philip Jones. The book is called Reading Samuel Johnson, Reception and Representation, 1750-1970. Thank you for joining me on the history of literature.
- [51:47]
C
Thank you very much, Jack.
- [51:54]
Jack Wilson
Okay, there we go. My thanks to Holly Baggett and Philip Jones for joining me today. People, I am so excited to share this news with you, but I have to wait a little longer. Things need to ripen. So instead, I'll tell you what, what I can tell you about, which are the upcoming episodes. How about a look at the science fact behind science fiction or Ralph Waldo Emerson's gradual evolution on the subject of slavery and how his anti slavery position fit into his philosophy. How about a deep dive into Wuthering Heights and another story by Henry James? How about Mike Palindrome here for a story about Chinese American immigrants and another one by F. Scott Fitzgerald? All of these episodes are in the works, people. Thomas Kyd and Gatsby Siminon, Russian poetry and next week, a 20th century giant and an episode from the archives, Dylan Thomas and Fernando Pessoa soon after that. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [53:23]
Holly Baggett
Hey, it's Dan Cummins.
- [53:25]
Jack Wilson
If you're into the weird, the wild and the downright bizarre, check out my podcast, Time Suck.
- [53:30]
Holly Baggett
Each week I dive into shocking stories.
- [53:32]
Jack Wilson
Like the rise of the Nexium cult, the origins of conspiracies like Qanon, and.
- [53:36]
Holly Baggett
The San Francisco Witch Killer murders. With deep dives and dark humor, Time.
- [53:40]
Jack Wilson
Suck brings you the stories that'll fascinate.
- [53:42]
Holly Baggett
You, make you laugh, and fill your head with lots of strange facts.
- [53:45]
Jack Wilson
New episodes drop every Monday. Join the Cult of the Curious. Follow Time Suck wherever you get your podcasts. What role do books play in shaping who we are? Find out on the Five Books, the brand new podcast hosted by me, Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Each week I sit down with acclaimed Jewish authors to discuss the top five books that have shaped them. Hear from notable guests like Booker Prize finalist Yael van der Vowden and literary influencer Zibby up Cohens as we delve deep into what it means to live as a Jewish American today. Join me and listen to the Five Books wherever you get your podcasts.