Margaret Caroline Anderson

55

Margaret Caroline Anderson : biography

November 24, 1886 – October 19, 1973

The writer Ben Hecht, who was at least partly in love with her then, described her this way: "She was blond, shapely, with lean ankles and a Scandinavian face. … I forgave her her chastity because she was a genius. During the years I knew her she wore the same suit, a tailored affair in robin’s egg blue. Despite this unvarying costume she was as chic as any of the girls who model today for the fashion magazines. … It was surprising to see a coiffure so neat on a noggin so stormy."Hecht, Ben. A Child of the Century. Simon & Schuster, 1950. p. 233

In 1916, Anderson met Jane Heap, Yale.edu. a spirited intellectual and artist immersed in the Chicago Arts and Crafts Movement, and a former lesbian lover to novelist Djuna Barnes. The two became lovers, and Anderson convinced her to become co-editor of The Little Review. Heap maintained a low profile, signing her contributions simply "jh", but she had a major impact on the success of the journal through its bold and radical content.

For a while, Anderson and Heap published the magazine out of a ranch in Muir Woods, across the San Francisco Bay Area, before moving to New York’s Greenwich Village in 1917. With the help of critic Ezra Pound, who acted as her foreign editor in London, The Little Review published some of the most influential new writers in the English language, including Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Pound himself, and William Butler Yeats. The magazine’s most published poet was New York dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, with whom Heap became friends on the basis of their shared confrontational feminist and artistic agendas.Gammel, Irene. “The Little Review and Its Dada Fuse, 1918-1921.” Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, 241. Other notable contributors included Sherwood Anderson, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Malcolm Cowley, Marcel Duchamp, Ford Madox Ford, Emma Goldman, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Francis Picabia, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Arthur Waley, and William Carlos Williams. Even so, however, she once published an issue with a dozen blank pages to protest the temporary lack of exciting new works.

In 1918, starting with the March issue, The Little Review began serializing James Joyce’s Ulysses. Over time the U.S. Post Office seized and burned four issues of the magazine, and Anderson and her companion and associate editor, Jane Heap, were convicted of obscenity charges. The Secret Treachery of Words: Feminism and Modernism in America, by Elizabeth Francis. Published by Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8166-3327-4. Although the obscenity trial was ostensibly about Ulysses, Irene Gammel argues that The Little Review came under attack for its overall subversive tone and, in particular, its publication of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s sexually explicit poetry and outspoken defense of Joyce.Gammel, Baroness Elsa, 253. During the trial in February, 1921, hundreds of "Greenwich Villagers", men and women, marched into Special Court Sessions; New York Times, February 15, 1921. eventually, Anderson and Heap were each fined $100 and fingerprinted. New York State Literary Tree.

Life in France

In early 1924, through Alfred Richard Orage, Anderson came to know of spiritual teacher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, and saw the performances of ‘Sacred dances’, first at the ‘Neighbourhood Playhouse’, and later at Carnegie Hall. She moved to France to visit Gurdjieff at Fountainebleau-Avon, along with Georgette Leblanc, Jane Heap and Monique Surrere, shortly after his automobile accident, where he had set up his institute at Château du Prieuré in Avon.A Life for a Life, Fiery Mountains. Gurdjieff: The Key Concepts, by Sophia Wellbeloved. Published by Routledge, 2003, ISBN 0-415-24897-3. Page 246.

Jean Heap and Anderson adopted sons of Anderson’s ailing sister Louis Peters, Tom and Arthur (‘Fritz’) Peters, whom they brought to Prieuré in June 1924, Gurdjieff’s America: Mediating the Miraculous, by Paul Beekman Taylor. Published by Lighthouse Editions Limited, 2004. ISBN 1-904998-00-3. Page 62. In 1925 when they returned to New York, the two children were brought up by Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein.The Biography of Alice B. Toklas, by Linda Simon.U of Nebraska Press, 1991. ISBN 0-8032-9203-1. Page 171.

The Little Review

Anderson published a three-volume autobiography: My Thirty Years’ War (1930), New York Times, May 25, 1930. The Fiery Fountains, and The Strange Necessity. In her last years in Le Cannet, she wrote her final book, part novel and part memoir, Forbidden Fires.