The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (11 page)

Pound, who was nothing if not resourceful, came up with an idea: they could leave large blank spaces in the text wherever a printer wished to cut words or passages. Then they could type out all of the deleted portions on quality paper and paste the omitted words into every single copy—“And damn the censors.” Joyce thought it was ingenious. The printers, unfortunately, thought it was madcap.

England’s rejection of
A Portrait
made Pound feel that, after years of relentless socializing, he was still an outsider. He had insinuated himself, to one degree or another, into an array of modernist magazines—
The
Egoist
,
The
New Age
,
Poetry
,
Poetry and Drama
,
North American Review
and others—only to find that he was still at the mercy of “Victorian-minded” editors, printers and publishers. When Joyce implored Pound in 1916 to get a handful of his poems published in any magazine that could pay, Pound responded that he had run out of connections in England. “There is no editor whom I wouldn’t cheerfully fry in oil and none who wouldn’t as cheerfully do the same by me.” What Ezra Pound wanted was his own magazine, a magazine that would bring the Vortex together and publish their material without fear of censorship.

It was difficult to see, but prospects were beginning to turn for Pound and his young cohort, and no one’s prospects had shifted more dramatically than Joyce’s. In just two years, he had gone from being an unpublished novelist teaching Berlitz classes to being a writer with zealous allies, a small but avid magazine audience and—rarest of all assets—a fearless, accommodating publisher. After so many years toiling in exile, a viable future as a writer was starting to seem real. It may not have been much—Pound, Weaver and Dora Marsden were only marginal figures in a world preoccupied by war—but a supportive coterie was enough to encourage Joyce to venture much further out into his writing than he ever had before.

6.

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.