Photoplay, Literary Celebrity, and The Little Review

In her autobiography, My Thirty Years’ War, Margaret Anderson

remembers she received a telephone call from a young fan of The

Little Review who’d decided he wanted to work for her after reading

the magazine. “My name is Charles Zwaska,” he declared, “I think

your Little Review is wonderful and I want to help you in any way I

can.”1 Struck by his letter, Anderson gave the seventeen-year old

a job cleaning up the office and subsequently published some of

his poems in the same issue with notables Sherwood Anderson, Carl

Sandburg, and Ezra Pound. This event epitomizes the attraction

Anderson’s avant-garde little magazine had among a certain

population of readers. Headquartered in Chicago, New York,

briefly California, and Paris, The Little Review under the editorship

of Anderson and her partner Jane Heap published some of the most

celebrated modernists of their day, including Mina Loy, Marianne

Moore, Wyndham Lewis, Pound, W.B. Yeats, Ford Madox Hueffer,

H.D., Amy Lowell, Baroness Elsa Freytag Loringhoven, and James

Joyce. Perhaps no other periodical occupied a more central

position to the pulse of transatlantic modernism than The Little

Review, and, especially during Pound’s tenure as foreign editor,

2

Anderson used that fact to advantage. During its publication, The

Little Review negotiated a series of interactions among

contributors, audiences, patrons, and the market, but Anderson

also developed a complex site for audience participation in the

burgeoning world of celebrity modernism by using the magazine as

a forum for readers to appear in print. This participatory aspect

mirrored broader periodical trends in the early-twentieth century

that used the magazine format as a marketing technique to sell

proximity to a growing celebrity culture. The Little Review adapted

this format to the coterie world of modernism and enabled

Anderson and Heap to promote the Little Review as a location where

subscribers could engage the luminaries of the new art.

From its beginning in 1914, The Little Review was dedicated to

controversy and the attention such controversy generated. Early

issues broadcast Anderson’s interests in radical politics and

philosophy, especially the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, and were

full of discussion about current topics. The first issue serves

as an example of this early content. Contributions included an

essay on Bergsonism by Llewelyn Jones, a book review by DeWitt

Wing titled “A Remarkable Nietzschean Drama,” and an essay on

3

Nietzsche by George Burman Foster called “The Prophet of a New

Culture.”2 Anderson subsequently recognized that the magazine, in

these early years, had been a bit loose regarding its acceptance

of material. By 1916, Anderson had grown tired of the Chicago

writers and Nietzscheans submitting manuscripts and declared a

change in standards. In the August issue, under the heading “A

Real Magazine,” Anderson revealed her aspirations for securing

better artists and writers. “I have been realizing the ridiculous

tragedy of The Little Review” she lamented, “It has been published

for over two years without coming near its ideal.” Believing she

had not lived up to the ideals with which she began the magazine,

Anderson ended this manifesto with a promise: “I loathe

compromise, and yet I have been compromising in every issue by

putting in things that were ‘almost good’ or ‘interesting enough’

or ‘important.’ There will be no more of it.”3 I return to the

rhetorical weight of this statement, but this declaration is

important here because it signaled a shift in attitude toward

contributors, a move away from the political agitations of the

early Little Review and toward a more celebrated, and infamous,

modernism.

4

Anderson’s insistence on better art and writing for the

magazine, may have inspired Pound to seek her out. He wrote to

her two months after she produced a September “Want Ad,” which

printed the journal with seven blank pages as a protest against

mediocrity, asking if he could be of service to the magazine: “I

am writing really to ask whether there is any use [in] my trying

to help the Little Review. If you want me to try, etc.?”4 In

January 1917, Pound wrote to Anderson with his vision for the

magazine, and he promised to send his “best stuff” and provide

payment to the core groups of contributors, “The Men of 1914” as

Lewis dubbed them.5 Pound described his circle as a draw for

readers, characterizing the magazine as a forum for the artists

he constellated around himself: “Definitely a place for our

regular appearance and where our friends and readers (what few of

‘em there are) can look with assurance of finding us.” But he

also warned that his attraction for readers required his presence

to generate subscriptions, pointing out that a dearth of his

material in Harriet Monro’s Poetry had produced complaints: “I

persuade people to subscribe to Poetry, a few, and then they

blame me for there being nothing by me in a given number.”6 As

5

Timothy Materer argues, Pound was an “advertising genius” when

marketing and disseminating prominent modernists such as Lewis,

Joyce, and Eliot through little magazines.7 Anderson recognized

Pound’s potential for enticing readers and, by April 1917,

advertised his joining the magazine as foreign editor.

Anderson recognized and manipulated Pound’s reputation as a

means of rebranding her magazine and attracting aspiring

intellectuals interested in the latest developments in both

European and American modernism to subscribe. Pound and his

circle were well-known public figures during the late nineteen-

teens. Pound and Lewis had published their Vorticist magazine

Blast in 1914, making a splash with their puce-colored assault on

tradition and convention, at least according to Lewis, who

claimed “by August 1914 no newspaper was complete without news

about ‘vorticism.’”8 James Joyce, through Pound’s efforts, had

begun publishing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Harriet Shaw

Weaver and Dora Marsden’s magazine, The Egoist in 1914 and had

received promising reviews. Pound had also used his connections

to get Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” published in

Poetry. For readers interested in the new art, or disdainful of

6

it, these figures were cultural touchstones, and Anderson took

advantage of this fact to stage discussions and invite readers’

participation in the world of modernism within her magazine.

Recent scholarship on The Little Review has recognized

Anderson’s deft manipulation of marketing tactics prominently

used by mass-market magazines such as The Ladies’ Home Journal, Vanity

Fair, and Good Housekeeping. These magazines found creative ways to

“sell” issues by providing letter columns and “clubs” for

subscribers to join. Mark Morrisson argues that The Little Review

combined the “imbrications of commercial mass culture with the

self-fashioning of modernism.” In his account, Anderson’s letter

column “closely resembled a widely popular institution of

commercial journalism—letter and advice columns for youth in

newspapers and magazines.”9 These spaces within the letter column

were reserved for “discussion” of the magazine’s content through

letters sent from readers and published in the magazine. As Jayne

Marek contends, The Little Review’s letter columns established “an

arena for discussion with some of the finest modern artists

during a time when traditional forms and conventions were

changing dramatically.”10

7

Reading these accounts together proves that Anderson

possessed a keen awareness of both the marketing tactics of

mainstream periodicals and the need of a venue for aspiring

intellectuals to discuss experimental trends in art and

literature. Anderson used her letter column as a publishing space

reserved for the readers and subscribers to submit their letters

alongside the writings of prominent literary figures and the

critical reviews of such writings. The title of the magazine’s

letter section, “Reader Critic,” suggests that readers who wrote

to the journal were symbolically inaugurated as critics, included

in the broader discourses about literature and art circulating

within the magazine’s pages. Most importantly, however, their

letters also appeared in print alongside and in response to the

literary celebrities who populated the magazine. To further

advertise these literary figures, Anderson included invitations

to readers, asking them to get more involved by promoting social

events around the magazine. In this way, she employed similar

techniques to those of fan magazines dealing with celebrity

culture around film stars prominent in American culture of the

1910s, magazines that cleverly manipulated readerly desires for

8

access. Reading The Little Review alongside the fan magazine Photoplay

reveals that both publications used the magazine medium to

intercede between audiences and celebrities—cinematic and

literary. Anderson presented her variation on this cultural

phenomena in the “Reader Critic,” which stimulated dialogue

between artists and audiences both to encourage the “best

conversation the world has to offer” and to advertise

participation in that conversation to prospective subscribers.11

Anderson imagined her magazine modeling a form of access

narrative similar to the celebrity fan clubs prevalent at the

time.

Rising Stars and the Cult of Celebrity

Anderson would have been surrounded by an expanding

celebrity culture by the nineteen-teens. Celebrity culture had

begun with literary figures during the nineteenth century and had

been visible in American culture before cinematic celebrity

exploded in 1910. David Blake traces the contours of this early

literary celebrity culture, arguing that, “Like virtually any

celebrity that arises from the commercial sphere, authors become

advertisements for themselves as well as for the medium that

9

conveyed them.”12 Authors such as Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde had

enjoyed immense popularity in the U.S., but this celebrity

culture pervaded modernism, too. Aaron Jaffe claims that these

advertising possibilities were part and parcel of modernist

cultural production, that modernists fashioned themselves as

literary celebrities through a process of self-authorizing vis-à-vis

the modernist text: “the matrix of associations supporting their

reputations is not intrinsically image-based but predicated

instead on a distinctive textual mark of authorship, a sanction

for distinguishing a high literary product from the inflating

signs of consumption.”13 Unlike film stars who were visible on

screen as cinematic signs of cultural value, modernist literary

celebrity was fashioned by idiosyncrasies built in to the

aesthetic object itself. Experimentation with literary and

artistic forms, often mocked by the press, could generate quite a

bit of attention for the writer or painter. This literary

celebrity was not fashioned solely within the text or painting,

however, but relied on a wide range of media outlets including

magazines. Alexis Easley points out that “The periodical press

was a key medium within a dense network of discourses that

10

defined ‘the author’ in increasingly personal and invasive

ways.”14 Because access to cinematic celebrity was marketed in

fan magazines as a means of generating revenue from the expanding

fan culture of the 1910s, it became a visible and exciting way to

attract readers, and Anderson adapted these access narratives to

support her own deployment of literary celebrity in her review.

Before 1910, film studios kept actors’ names secret in order

to endorse the studio rather than the individual. According to

popular legend, the modern star system began when Carl Laemmle, a

distributor from Chicago who had broken with the Motion Picture

Patents Company in 1909 and become a leading figure in the

independent film movement, established his own film company.

Laemmle promoted young actors like Florence Lawrence who had left

Biograph at almost the same time he formed his new company.

Laemmle brilliantly capitalized on Lawrence’s success—she was

widely known only as the “Biograph Girl” due to her anonymity—and

in March 1910 distributed a report in the St. Louis Dispatch that she

had been killed in a street-car accident. The report featured a

picture so that audiences, who probably did not know Lawrence’s

name, could instantly recognize the enormity of their loss and

11

connect the beloved face to a name. Laemmle then exposed the

“lie” circulating about Lawrence’s death by publishing an ad in

Motion Picture World revealing that Lawrence was indeed alive. Film

stardom was created by manipulation of the audience via the

magazine, a technique subsequently used in modernist little

magazines.15

After 1910, when the film industry began including actors’

names in film credits, partly due to Laemmle’s stunt, recurring

and cherished figures grew in fame, and films became more

popular. By 1916, McClure’s magazine reported the outbreak of a new

disease, “filmitis,” which had infected filmgoers.16 Fans formed

clubs to celebrate certain actors and transformed early

enthusiasm about moving pictures into cult-like obsession. By the

1920s, many clubs produced membership cards, elected officers,

and petitioned theaters to feature their favorite films.17

Studios capitalized on this growing fandom by sponsoring events

where regular people could meet the stars. For example, The

Washington Times advertised motion picture balls which claimed that

stars Dixie Lee Eulalia Jensen, Marguerite Gale, William Park,

David Fischer, and Donald Hall “have promised to be present” at

12

Penn Hall. Participants were to be filmed alongside these stars,

dancing the night away at the ball and collapsing physical

distance between stars and fans.18 In a sense, the fans became

actors as cameras captured both groups in the film made of the

ball. The New York Sun publicized a motion picture ball in 1918,

promising “everybody you ever heard of will be there.” Admission

prices were advertised at $10.00 with tickets “on sale

everywhere.”19 As a means of encouraging fans without the burdens

of public meetings, celebrities often sent correspondence to fan

clubs, and these letters were frequently warm and personal,

establishing a more indirect but easier form of connection

between audiences and celebrities.20 These forms of interaction

correspond to what Richard Dyer describes as the “star complex,”

the “promotion of those films and of the star through pin-ups,

public appearances, studio hand-outs . . . as well as interviews,

biographies and coverage in the press.”21

Film magazines became obvious organs for such star

construction, yet they also served as intermediaries between

audiences hungry for access to the film world and celebrities

themselves. As the first film magazine, Photoplay pioneered the

13

genre of fan periodicals and, under the editorship of Julian

Johnson and James Quirk, became the predominant access point to

the world of cinematic celebrity. Photoplay used this access as a

marketing tool, promoting personal familiarity with actors

through the portal of the magazine. Especially in the nineteen-

teens, Photoplay presented itself as intimate reportage on film

stars. Barbara Gelman notes that “the magazine was starting to

satisfy the public need for ‘intimate glimpses’ into the lives of

the famous with ‘exclusive’ and ‘firsthand’ stories.”22 For

example, in December 1917, Richard Willis interviewed the Gish

sisters, Lillian and Dorothy, in a piece called “I Go A-Calling

on the Gish Girls.” Both sisters had become well-known actresses

by 1917, appearing in such films as Birth of a Nation and Intolerance

(Lillian) and Old Heidelberg and Gretchen the Greenhorn (Dorothy).

Willis’ interview began as casually as his title. “Most people

don’t like making calls,” he wrote, “but I am one of those old

fashioned individuals who enjoy it.” Willis framed his interview

with the Gish sisters as an ordinary social event. Moreover, the

Gish sisters reinforced this framing by characterizing themselves

as ordinary people during the interview: “We know that you hadn’t

14

come all this way just to see two foolish girls . . . please

don’t refer to us as ‘stars.’ It is too silly, because we haven’t

had time to be stars yet.”23 Articles such as this reinforced a

sense of access to celebrities via the magazine. Mediated by

Willis, fans gained an intimate glimpse into the private world of

film stars and discovered that the stars were ordinary people

too.

Photoplay also promoted audience participation in star

culture by highlighting accessibility to movie production. This

technique perpetuated the myth that film studios often

“discovered” regular people as actors or writers, feeding public

hunger for access into the inner workings of the industry that

only Photoplay could provide. In the February 1917 issue, Grace

Kingsley reported on “The Sweet Sobber of the Celluloid” who,

though only a fifteen-year-old chorus girl, sobbed her way to

stardom and “becomes a film star over night [sic].”24 In April,

Kingsley reported on “Extra Girls who Become Stars”:

And one day Totty Two-Shoes, after tiring of picking

oranges in the morning and making snowballs on Mt.

Baldy in the afternoon, decided to go out to the movie

15

studio and see how motion pictures are made. Director

Humpty Dumpty noticed her among the bystanders, and

halted his William S. Hart drama or his Mack Swain

comedy, instantly. There was a brief conversation, and

next morning Little Totty went to work for $200 a

week.25

Although she used this narrative to illustrate the pervasiveness

of romantic ideas about being “discovered,” the rest of the

editorial reinforced this possibility by recounting stories of

“extra” girls discovered on set such as Anita King, who landed a

role in The Virginian, and Mae Marsh, cast in Birth of a Nation. Kingsley

denigrated the motif of being discovered through her hyperbolic

language, yet the celebrities featured in her article were

average people discovered by observant directors, subtly

reinforcing the possibility of such discovery. These types of

editorials in Photoplay responded to readers’ desires to

participate in the film world and, at the same time, generated

that desire through transmission of access narratives.

These editorial access narratives mirrored Photoplay’s

advertising access narratives, revealing the extent to which the

16

magazine’s readership remained fascinated by participation in the

world of cinema. Contests for original “photoplays” offered $500

prizes to an amateur writer with “the best motion picture

plots.”26 Adverts for typewriters and want ads for plays and

scripts filled the back pages with promotions geared toward

readers interested in becoming scriptwriters. In one

representative example from the January 1916 issue, a full-page

ad offered rental Underwood typewriters, pitching the typewriter

as the way to get noticed: “Captain Peacocke says to Photoplay

Writers: you must learn to use a typewriter. A hand-written

‘script’ is never even glanced at in a scenario department.”27

This ad suggested an “insider” expertise, used to rent

typewriters to aspiring readers who could not afford to purchase

their own. Captain Peacocke, Photoplay’s “authority on writing and

editing scenarios,” provided his expertise on scriptwriting in

order to market these typewriters. Access narratives filled

Photoplay and generated subscribers from fans longing for more

participation in the cinema world.

“Are the Editors In? They Are”

17

These access narratives appeared elsewhere too. In April

1917, the same month Pound joined The Little Review as foreign

editor, the New York Tribune published an editorial on magazines

entitled “Are the Editors In? They Are.” In this article,

journalist Louise Bryant visited the headquarters of various

magazines in New York such as The Century, McClure’s, Good

Housekeeping, Pearson’s, The Smart Set, La Parisienne, The Masses, The Seven

Arts, Munsey’s, Saucy Stories, and The Little Review because “War or no war,

everybody is interested in the magazine editor.” 28 Encompassing a

spectrum of publications, including several magazines publishing

avant-garde material, the editorial reinforces the scholarly

reappraisal of modernism as intertwined with the daily dialogues

of magazine publishing. Despite the gruff exterior of many

editors, Bryant concluded, “once you are finally seated en téte-

a-téte with an editor you will find him, in the majority of

cases, an open-hearted, friendly soul.”29 This editorial

illustrates the insider’s view of submitting material for

publication as Bryant interviewed the various editors about what

materials they publish. The subtext of the editorial is the ease

with which one could gain physical and literary access to these

18

publications. “I loafed around this week in twenty-five magazine

offices and saw nearly all the editors,” Bryant concluded.30 She

boasted about accessing the editorial staff of nearly all the

magazines through plucky persistence, reiterating the access

narratives popularized in Photoplay and revealing that “insider”

fascination extended to magazine publishing as well.

Like Photoplay and other film magazines, which traded on

these kinds of access, The Little Review portrayed itself as a more

intimate literary magazine. Whereas Photoplay manipulated the

magazine format to imply accessibility to the film world, The Little

Review used the magazine format to promote access to avant-garde

literary figures. In a sense, The Little Review traded on this

literary celebrity in the same manner as Photoplay but for a

different audience and with a more subtle hand. Like Photoplay,

Anderson endorsed a dialogic arrangement between artists and

audiences that operated on the access narrative, but her targets

were a smaller group of aspiring intellectuals, bohemians,

political radicals, and young Americans tired of provincial

bourgeois strictures.

19

In September 1914, Anderson changed the correspondence

section from the more traditional “Letters to the Little Review”

to the “Reader Critic” for which The Little Review is better known.

In the original correspondence area, Anderson had maintained the

standard magazine format in which letters appeared—i.e. in

sequences at the end of the magazine sometimes including brief

bracketed responses signed “Editor” or “Ed”—a format predominant

in popular women’s magazines. The “Reader Critic” transformed

this format into a dialogic space set aside for artists,

intellectuals, editors, and readers to participate in debate over

artistic and social matters.31 The “Reader Critic” stimulated

readers of The Little Review to participate in broader discussions,

illuminating Anderson’s comment in My Thirty Years’ Was about Harriet

Monroe’s formula in Poetry, “To have great poets we must have

great audiences too.” “Not true, however you look at it,”

Anderson countered, “Great poets create great audiences, just as

great people create their experiences instead of being created by

them.”32 On the surface, this statement suggested an arrogant

dismissal of audience, but resituating this passage within the

context of the “Reader Critic” confirms that Anderson believed

20

bringing the audience into the conversation would elevate their

level of involvement in the world of art. Recognizing that her

audiences had opinions about the productions of artists and that

they may idolize certain figures, Anderson used her “Reader

Critic” to imply accessibility to the magazine’s contributors,

many of whom were quite well known among intellectuals and

aspiring intellectuals.

The first “Reader Critic” served as exemplary for the

dialogic possibilities of the section. Anarchist and feminist

Emma Goldman responded to an article Anderson wrote about her in

the previous issue. Anderson introduced Goldman by underscoring

the magazine’s commitment to dialogic inclusivity: “Readers have

a legitimate interest in the truth of critical articles. We

therefore believe they will welcome these comments by Miss

Goldman on the article about herself. If Miss Goldman had been

displeased, we should have printed her letter with equal

frankness.”33 However, Goldman’s praise was not the only letter

printed here. Anderson also included a letter “typical of the

older generation's response to the new order” which contained

“all the poison the younger generation hates most.” 34 This

21

letter, from a mother named Margaret Pixlee, criticized Anderson

for promoting youthfulness and forgetting that youth needs to be

managed by parents. Anderson positioned this letter next to one

from a young reader who, she claimed, “ought to throw some light

on the subject from the young generation's standpoint.” His

letter praised figures such as George Bernard Shaw for the

iconoclasm Pixlee criticized and explained why he rebelled

against his parents: “These are a few instances of parental ideas

that were useless so far as I was concerned. Was a rebellion

necessary? It was in my case and I may as well add that it has

already had results—to give the details would, I fear, be getting

too personal.”35 Anderson juxtaposed a celebrated (and reviled)

anarchist, a traditional mother, and a rebellious son, putting

them all in dialogue about adolescent emancipation and freedom.

Although Anderson clearly supported the forces of youth, she

still published Pixlee’s entire letter, giving her a voice and

using the boy’s correspondence to respond rather than simply

dismissing Pixlee as traditional and repressive. Pixlee may have

stood as an example of social forces inimical to the platform of

The Little Review, but allowing her to voice her opinions and

22

positioning her letter in dialogue with other readers established

the “Reader Critic” as a space for intellectual debate about

cultural issues. Young Americans chafing under the strictures of

provincial life and reading The Little Review may have resonated with

Anderson’s featuring of a boy reader in concert with an

iconoclast such as Goldman.

The “Reader Critic” also allowed readers to engage questions

of avant-garde aesthetics directly through correspondence with

the magazine. As the central hub for publication of the art and

literature of American and European avant-garde groups, The Little

Review occupied center stage in discussions about revolutionary

aesthetic movements with the “Reader Critic” operating as access

point for both modernist and anti-modernist readers. In the

January 1915 issue, Edward O’Brien submitted a manifesto of

Paroxysm, a short-lived avant-garde movement emphasizing

technical, dynamic, and anti-pastoral conceptions of literature:

It cultivates a scientific technique.

It does not reject any words in forming a vocabulary.

It seeks swift, hurtling, dynamic rhythms.

23

It is based on "dynamic notions of qualitative

duration, of heterogeneous continuity, of multiple and

mobile states of consciousness."

It perceives the elements of poetry contained in modern

cities, locomotives, aeroplanes, dreadnoughts, and

submarines; in a stock exchange, a Wall Street, or a

wheat pit ; and in every scientific marvel and in the

sonorous song of factories and railways.

It emphasizes their dynamic consciousness.36

Rex Lampman, a reader from Portland, Oregon, responded to

O’Brien’s aesthetic theories of industrial energy in March of the

same year by referring to his own particular geographical

location as non-conducive to Paroxysm: “Here in Portland the

skyscraper is pre-empting one by one our views of the evergreen

hills and the snowy mountains.” Lampman questions whether or not

readers accept O’Brien’s dicta, demonstrating suspicion toward

the faddism of the avant-garde:

But do we accept them? Beyond the skyscrapers are the

quiet hills, and however we throw ourselves into the

vortices of cities, however often we go down among the

24

red-mouthed, roaring furnaces, however we may acquiesce

in, and even exult in and exalt, the materialistic

horrors that multiply around us like monsters in a

steamy primal fen, deep in ourselves we know that all

these things are vain and vanishing, and that the

actual and enduring lie outside and beyond, or within

ourselves. The skyscraper is a monument to the Moloch

of Rent.37

Lampman proposed an alternative to the avant-garde fascination

with technology and architecture by advocating a return to

Romantic pastoral. Whereas O’Brien adopted the typically avant-

garde position of publishing inflammatory manifestoes, Lampman

questioned the faddism of avant-garde self-fashioning. The

“Reader Critic” facilitated and staged this exchange, implying

that even critics of literary notoriety would be published. By

including both positions, Anderson supported avant-garde artists

and, at the same time, encouraged potential readers who may have

been a bit tentative to participate in the dialogue. Overlapping

and competing views of modernity made up the complicated fabric

25

of the little magazine when readers were able to participate in

the discussion.

Advertising Ezra: Promoting Literary Celebrity

In order to promote the magazine, Anderson intimated access

to the elite world of modernism. Even as The Little Review promoted

the art and writing of a select group of individuals, it

advertised the possibility for a non-elite audience’s involvement

in the magazine’s discourse alongside featured literary

celebrities. Like Photoplay’s scriptwriting contest, Anderson held a

free-verse prize contest, which enabled readers to participate in

the world of modernism and have their work read by important

modernists. Anderson used these activities as a way to promote a

coterie circle within the magazine. For example, in August 1916

The Little Review sponsored “A Vers Libre Prize Contest” in which

readers submitted manuscripts to be read by William Carlos

Williams, Zoë Aikens and Helen Hoyt with winners awarded cash

prizes. In April 1917, she announced the winners of the contest,

including the names of all the poems in the table of contents.

The last poem, “A Mother’s Sacrifice” is mentioned alongside all

the others, but Anderson singled it out to mock its provincial

26

patriotism and failure to follow formal requirements: “This last

one may be printed as a sample of the rest of the contest, and

speaks for itself. It came with a little note saying ‘I hope it

may win one of the prizes in the contest, being original free

verse and very patriotic.’”38 The author of “A Mother’s

Sacrifice” dramatically misjudged her audience. The Little Review had

opposed World War I from the beginning, publishing editorials and

poems deriding the war. In this same issue, Anderson had left an

entire page blank with nothing but the caption “The War” followed

by the footnote, “We will probably be suppressed for this.”39

Anderson calculated that dismissing “A Mother’s Sacrifice” on the

grounds that it did not follow the formal conventions set forth

in the contest would provide a sense of community among the

poetry contest’s contributors. Readers were invited to laugh at

the woman who neither understood vers libre nor the political stance

of the editors—while maintaining the façade of critical editors

only interested in good art—which invited the audience “in the

know” to feel part of the coterie group. The combination of an

open invitation to submit poems to “A Vers Libre Prize Contest”

with the derisive comments on “A Mother’s Sacrifice” exemplifies

27

the complex position The Little Review negotiated in providing a

space for readerly involvement while maintaining an attractive

coterie character.

The Little Review also invited participation in the magazine

with an advertisement titled “To Serve an Idea” in the October

1914 “Reader Critic”:

There is no more vivid thing in life. All those people

who are vitally interested in THE LITTLE REVIEW and its

idea, its spirit and its growth, may want to become

part of a group which has just been suggested by

several of our contributors and readers . . . Such an

opportunity is planned in a series of gatherings—the

first to be held in 917 Fine Arts Building at eight

o'clock on Saturday evening, October 10. For further

details, address The Little Review Association, 917

Fine Arts Building, Chicago.40

This advert, suggestive of film fan clubs, indicates that

Anderson blurred the lines between artist and audience in

innovative ways. She publicized this gathering in the “Reader

Critic” because the gathering literalized what the “Reader

28

Critic” already symbolically enabled: participation in the

coterie sphere of an avant-garde magazine. By hosting these

gatherings in the offices of The Little Review, Anderson incorporated

interested parties into broader discussions about art in Chicago

with The Little Review as ground zero. As she remembers in her

autobiography, “Everybody came to the studio.”41 Attending this

meeting promised one’s access to poets and artists appearing

regularly in the magazine. Anderson claimed the idea for a group

attempting to influence art and literature in Chicago originated

with “several of our contributors and readers,” and she extended

her invitation to both audiences and artists, facilitating a more

direct conversation mediated by The Little Review and drawing on the

attraction of meeting writers and artists.

Anderson also advertised for contributors to The Little Review

when she grew tired of the submissions. In her editorial “A Real

Magazine,” Anderson expressed dissatisfaction with the quality of

art being submitted and issued a challenge to readers: “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

29

the miracle! Where are the artists?” Opening up the geographical

and physical parameters, Anderson revealed that any good art

would be put into the magazine. Like Photoplay’s manipulation of

the access narrative, this advert invited readers to submit their

material in the hopes of being “discovered” as poets or artists.

Concluding this editorial with the phrase “Come on, all of you!,”

Anderson both chastised contributors and invited newcomers to try

their art.42 In the September issue, she underscored the

invitational quality of this editorial issue by leaving twelve

pages blank, providing only a brief explanation at the beginning

of the magazine: “The Little Review hopes to become a magazine of

Art. The September issue is offered as a Want Ad.”43 This

editorial maneuver reoriented the realm of aesthetic occupation

by advertising for work, collapsing distinctions between authors

and readers and opening up the magazine to anybody. By posting a

“want ad,” the magazine invited its readers to submit work and

join the conversation even as it raises the stakes on the quality

of acceptable publications.

As part of this project to rebrand The Little Review, Anderson

invited Pound to join the staff as foreign editor in April 1917.

30

Pound envisioned his role in the magazine as a fulfillment of

readers’ desires. Adapting the notion of supply and demand, Pound

suggested to Anderson that he would provide a particular set of

literary products: himself, Lewis, Joyce, and Eliot.44 He wrote

Anderson in January 1917, claiming that The Little Review would

provide “a place for our regular appearance and where our friends

and readers (what few of ‘em there are) can look with assurance

of finding us.”45 Even his phrasing in the letter, “I want an

‘official organ’ (vile phrase),” appears almost verbatim in his

manifesto for The Little Review: “This means that he and T. S. Eliot

will have an American organ (horrible phrase) in which they can

appear regularly once a month, where James Joyce can appear when

he likes, and where Wyndham Lewis can appear if he comes back

from the war.”46 Pound imagined his position as both foreign

editor and mouthpiece of an elite group of avant-gardists,

continuing the sort of self-promotion that, as Lawrence Rainey

illustrates, is a prominent feature of Anglo-American

modernism.47 For Pound, this self-promotion included the best

male modernists of his time oriented around himself as both

promoter and participant. In essence, Pound’s constellation of

31

celebrity modernists enacted what Goldman describes as the

formation of “an entirely new kind of author—as not only the art

object par excellence, but also the master choreographer of the

culture that contains him as an object.”48 When Anderson asked

how he should be introduced, Pound responded, “IF it is any use

for adv. purposes you may state that a single copy of my first

book has just fetched ₤8.”49 Pound saw his participation as

beneficial to the goal of elevating the quality of submissions,

gauging his literary celebrity in terms of the price tags on his

books.

Hugh Kenner contends that Pound’s involvement in The Little

Review resulted in the bifurcation of the magazine, in the

creation of a “magazine within a magazine.”50 However, despite

Pound’s reputation for editorial control, Anderson manipulated

his status in the literary marketplace as a tactic to enhance the

visibility of her magazine. Central to this project was her

presentation of Pound to her readers as a crucial enhancement of

the magazine’s status. In March 1917, Anderson titillated

subscribers with “a gorgeous surprise” awaiting them in the next

issue.51 In April, she announced that the surprise was Ezra

32

Pound: “THE ‘surprise’ I promised in the last issue is this: Ezra

Pound is to become Foreign Editor of ‘The Little Review.’” After

celebrating Pound’s editorial abilities for getting “the most

creative work of London and Paris” into The Little Review, she

reminded readers that their contributions via subscription make

“the miracle” possible: “Now will all you subscribers help to

bring in as many new subscriptions as possible right away, and

will all of you whose subscriptions are overdue renew quickly,

and will any of you who are overburdened with money contribute a

little toward our next issue?”52 Anderson speculated on future

artistic investments Pound’s notoriety would draw in a bid to

attract readers to subscribe or renew past subscriptions. By

advertising Pound’s joining The Little Review, Anderson hoped to

generate readers based on the access she provided both to Pound

and to the literary celebrities he would certainly marshal within

future issues.

For example, in June 1917, Anderson published a letter from

James Joyce, recovering from illness in Switzerland. In this

letter, he praised the transformed magazine and promised to

submit new material as soon as his health improved. “I am very

33

glad to hear about the new plans for The Little Review” he wrote,

“and that you have got together so many good writers as

contributors. I hope to send you something very soon.” To

underscore his alignment with the magazine, Joyce’s appearance in

the “Reader Critic” was further paralleled by advertisements for

his books, including special “bundled” offers for purchasing both

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and year-long subscription to The

Little Review. As Katherine Mullin points out, “From the moment of

Joyce’s debut, he is positioned as an international celebrity,

his good wishes acting as an endorsement of the journal.”53

However, this letter appeared in the columns of the “Reader

Critic” alongside letters from regular readers who wrote in to

the magazine, some of who praised the new additions and some who

criticized them. This parallelism, of major modernist

contributors alongside regular readers, modeled a type of access

narrative: letters to the magazine might not only appear in print

but might appear next to those of a major writer.

This atmosphere of access to Pound and his circle reappeared

in the October 1917 “Reader Critic” in which Pound used some of

the space to answer personally the letters of readers. In a

34

section titled “Letters from Ezra Pound,” the new foreign editor

displayed unusual solicitude for readers. “Chere Editeuse,” Pound’s

section begins, “May I be permitted to leave the main part of the

magazine, and reply in the correspondence columns to several

other writers of letters?” Like other letters from modernists

that appeared in the “Reader Critic,” the replies to readers by

Pound imply openness within the space of the magazine for

ordinary people to engage with the current literary celebrities.

Some of the letters suggest intimacy between the writer and

modernist authors funneled through Pound. Responding to a letter

from V.H., in which she lightly criticized Lewis’ “Imaginary

Letters” as too “damned British!,” Pound writes,

Chère Madam: Could Lewis but hear you, through his gas-

mask, gazing at the ruins of one of the gun parapets of

his battery, I think he would smile with the delicate

and contented smile that I have at moments seen

‘lighting his countenance’. There was once a man who

began an article: ‘WE MUST KILL JOHN BULL, we must kill

him with Art . . . The writer was, needless to say,

35

Wyndham Lewis. He will probably have died for his

country before they find out what he meant.54

V.H.’s letter was part of a number of letters concerned that the

journal was becoming too European. For example, Mrs. O.D.J. also

defended American art from Pound’s “foreign” influence: “I have

great faith in the artistic life of America and I don't think

Ezra Pound's notions of it are very healthy. I sincerely hope the

trend of it will not emulate the ‘smart’ or dissipated literature

which seems to please London.”55 Pound replied to V.H. by

pointing out that Lewis had written a controversial tirade

against John Bull, a metonym for England, as an enemy of “good”

art. As if to underscore the tragedy of good artists fighting and

dying, Pound used an image of Lewis wearing his gas mask and

sitting among the ruins of modern war, itself a modernist image,

to underscore the degradation of civilization by national

conflicts. Despite his resistance to V.H.’s derision of European

writing, however, the tone of Pound’s response suggests intimacy,

inviting her to imagine Lewis physically responding—“the delicate

and contented smile”—to her critique. This expansion of the

modernist coterie, facilitated by the subtle invitation to V.H.

36

to imagine a conversation between herself and Pound and Lewis,

exemplifies Anderson’s promotion of Pound and his circle’s

involvement to generate readers.

Pound’s involvement with The Little Review proved fruitful for

collecting the brightest stars in the modernist firmament. During

the two years he served as foreign editor, The Little Review

published Eliot’s “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” Ford Madox Hueffer’s

“Women and Men,” Lewis’s “Cantleman’s Spring Mate,” which earned

the issue suppression, and James Joyce’s Ulysses which resulted in

litigation by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in

the now-famous obscenity trial of 1921. Anderson’s investment in

Pound as foreign editor paid off, and she recalled later that

publishing Ulysses was the most important thing accomplished in The

Little Review.56 Pound’s editorial accomplishments were impressive to

say the least, and he facilitated some of the best publications

of modernism within the pages of The Little Review. Anderson drew on

Pound’s notoriety to market both his celebrity and connections.

Reader Critics and Critical Readers

By this point, Pound had been well covered in the popular

press. In September 1915, Alfred Kreymborg humorously criticized

37

Pound in the New York Tribune for his anti-Americanism, reminding

readers “Pound is a Philadelphian. Never did so peaceful a town

send forth such a tornado in the guise of a human being.” 57

According to Kreymborg, Pound was disliked by conventional

artistic circles for his radicalism: “Mention his name at one of

the polite gatherings of the Poetry Society of America and you

will be gently conducted to a near exit. Dare to breathe praise

over a poem of his and some reviewer or columnist will show you

an arched brow.” Whether or not Kreymborg seriously disliked

Pound or just registered the social feeling towards him, the

article in the New York Tribune illustrated the kind of impression

Pound made on more traditional American audiences. This antipathy

entered the pages of The Little Review as well. Maxwell Bodenheim

contributed a letter accusing Pound of making artistic

pronouncements without any support. “I haven't sufficient

belief,” Bodenheim complained, “in the infallibility of Ezra

Pound's mind to require no substantion [sic] of his

statements.”58 In June, Anderson responded to readers such as

Mrs. O.D.J. who had begun express fears that Pound would take

over The Little Review:

38

We will take this opportunity of answering all those

who have verbally or in letters expressed the fear that

The Little Review will entirely change its nature and

be influenced in the future by its Foreign Editor. I do

not want to be flippant, but indeed little faith is

shown in us by all those who have known our struggle to

be what we believe, and our financial struggle to be at

all. Fear not, dear ones. We have learned to be penny

wise; we will not be Pound foolish. We agree with Pound

in the spirit; if we don't always agree with him in the

letter be sure we will mention it. And Pound didn't

slip up on us unaware. A mutual misery over the

situation brought us together.59

Anderson’s assuagement of her audience reveals she felt caught

between two worlds: her readers and her foreign editor—and the

cash he supplied. Considering she had just announced Pound with

such aplomb, she displayed a remarkable amount of ambivalence

toward him. Instead of defending her foreign editor, she

acknowledged his propensity to dictate editorial policy and

positioned herself and The Little Review on the side of the audience.

39

Anderson’s rationale for hiring Pound is more telling: economic

necessity, the “financial struggle to be at all,” required her to

make changes. According to her, Pound’s involvement was a

necessary evil, providing financial support to the magazine both

through John Quinn’s patronage and his own coterie of producing

artists.

Readers increasingly rebelled against Pound’s influence, and

the “Reader Critic” began to sound more hostile. A reader from

Chicago asked in July 1917: “I have just read your June issue.

Won't you ask Ezra Pound if he should mind making an effort to be

interesting?”60 In the same issue, reader Louis Putkelis

complains that the magazine no longer fostered a sense of

community:

I had hoped that discussions would arise among the

Reader Critic that would interest a larger circle of

readers and that would sift the question thoroughly. It

seems to me that the last few numbers of The Little

Review have been below your earlier standard—almost

below zero. What sympathy can the majority of readers

40

feel for the foreign editor, Ezra Pound, with his

contemptuous invective against the "vulgus"?61

His complaint suggests that the “Reader Critic” had shifted away

from the inclusive quality Anderson promoted earlier, and her

defensive reply to criticism drew on anti-mob rhetoric of

modernism: “A contempt for the ‘vulgus’ is the inevitable

reaction of any man or woman who observes the antics of the

‘flies in the marketplace.’”62 Frank Stuhlman of Vernon, New York

was even more direct. “Dear Editor, how could you!!” the letter

exclaimed, “Turn the beautiful Little Review, that once bid fair to

be one of the finest publications in America, into a thing of

freaks and fakes, or posturists and squeaking egoists!! The much

bepraised Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ is punk, Lewis’ ‘Imaginary Letters’

are punkier and Ezra Pound is punkiest”63 Since Anderson

maintained control over the letters which appeared, it remains

somewhat unclear how to read these criticisms. However, I

interpret these exchanges as another marketing ploy; Anderson

used her readers’ negativity toward Pound to arouse controversy

within the “Reader Critic,” which served to broadcast Pound’s

involvement further and provoke curiosity. Even as Anderson

41

criticized the “flies in the marketplace,” she understood that,

to some extent, The Little Review needed that marketplace. Anderson

manipulated Pound’s notoriety and celebrity in an effort to

generate attention at the same time The Little Review benefitted from

his artistic connections.

As star culture developed during the 1910s, it brought with

it a new awareness about the possibilities of celebrity access.

In particular, magazines attuned to these audience desires,

positioning themselves as intermediaries between buying publics

hungry for access and celebrities who were becoming commodified

objects of consumption. Photoplay adapted a dialogic attitude

towards actors and marketed the magazine’s ability to get the

insider’s view. Similarly, The Little Review, drawing on these same

marketing techniques, crafted a dialogic space within the “Reader

Critic” wherein readers could join the discussions and debates

surrounding avant-garde writing and visual art. As modernism was

becoming widely recognized, Anderson used the notoriety and fame

of its best practitioners to generate interest in The Little Review.

Publishing readers’ letters in the same issue in which major

modern writers appeared provided a kind of access to aspiring

42

intellectuals fascinated by new movements. By advertising

proximity to poets, writers, and artists within the “Reader

Critic,” Anderson appealed to audiences interested in modern

aesthetics and invited their opinions regarding these

innovations.

43

Notes

1I would like to thank Mark Whalan at the University of Oregon for his insightful

comments on this article and the anonymous reviewers for their generous

suggestions.

Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War (New York: Covici Friede Inc., 1930), 50-1.

2 See the table of contents for The Little Review, 1:1 (March 1914). All references to

The Little Review refer to the digital version housed at The Modernist Journals Project

(searchable database). Brown and Tulsa Universities, ongoing.

http://www.modjourn.org.

3 Margaret Anderson, “A Real Magazine,” The Little Review 3:5 (Aug. 1916), 1.

4 Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War, 4.

5 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (Berkeley: U of California P, 1967), 9.

6 Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War, 6.

7 Timothy Materer, “Make it Sell! Ezra Pound Advertises Modernism,” Marketing

Modernism eds. Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996),

18.

8 Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 32.

9 Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2000), 134,

153.

10 Jayne Marek, Women Editing Modernism (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1995), 63.

11 Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War, 35.

12 David Blake, Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity (New Haven: Yale UP, 2006),

39

13 Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge

UP, 2005), 1.

14 Alexis Easley, Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authority (Newark: U of Delaware P,

2011), 13.

15 This account comes from Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star

System in America (Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2001), 55-8.

16 Samantha Barbas, Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars, and the Cult of Celebrity (New York: Palgrave,

2001), 2.

17 Ibid, 111-12.

18 “Extra Special,” The Washington Times (Oct. 15, 1920) 14, The Library of Congress

(searchable database). http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.

19 “Hotel Astor,” The Sun (May 19, 1918) 4, The Library of Congress (searchable

database). http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.

20 In Barbas, 125.

21 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 2.

22 Barbara Gelman, Photoplay Treasury (New York: Crown Publishers, 1972), 3.

23 Richard Willis, “I Go A-Calling on the Gish Girls,” Photoplay 7:1 (Dec. 1917), 36.

All references to Photoplay come from Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free

Books, Movies, Music, and Wayback Machine. http://www.archive.org.

24Grace Kingsley, “Sweet Sobber of the Celluloid,” Photoplay 11:3 (1917) 13, 15, 27.

25 Grace Kingsley, “Extra Girls who Became Stars,” Photoplay 11:5 (Apr. 1917) 67.

26 “$500 in Cash Prizes for Motion Picture Plots,” Photoplay 7:2 (Jan. 1915), n.p.

27 “Captain Peacocke says Photoplay Writers,” Photoplay (Jan. 1916), n.p.. Strikingly,

this advertisement was placed opposite an editorial note asking readers to stop

submitting scripts to Photoplay for review.

28 Bryant begins her editorial by paradoxically pointing out the ubiquity of the

magazine industry with the relatively low profile of editors. Louise Bryant, Are

the Editors In? They Are,” New York Tribune (April 22, 1917) 5. The Library of

Congress (searchable database). http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov. The Evening Public

Ledger published a similar spread regarding film stars in 1915 entitled “Moviefolk

that the Artist Met at the Exhibitor’s Ball” and accompanied by caricatures of the

celebrities. In The Evening Ledger Amusement Section (Dec 11, 1915) 2. Library of

Congress (searchable database). http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.

29 Ibid, 5.

30 Ibid, 5.

31 For example, The Little Review’s transatlantic counterpart The Egoist maintained the

original format.

32 Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War, 60.

33 Anderson, “Emma Goldman,” The Little Review, 1:6 (Sept. 1914) 54.

34 Margaret Pixlee, “The Reader Critic,” The Little Review, 1:6 (Sept. 1914) 56.

35 A boy reader, “The Reader Critic,” The Little Review, 1:6 (Sept. 1914) 57-8.

36 Edward O’Brien, “A Note on Paroxysm in Poetry,” The Little Review, 1:10 (Jan, 1915)

15.

37 Rex Lampman, “Another Note on Paroxysm in Poetry,” The Little Review, 2:1 (March

1915) 57. This is not the only debate published in The Little Review. In the June/July

double issue in 1915, Huntly Carter and Richard Aldington engage in a debate over

the merits of free verse. See The Little Review, Vol. II, no. 4 (June/July, 1915) 54-5.

For more on debates regarding free verse and The Little Review, see Mark Whalan,

“Freeloading in Hobohemia: The Politics of Free Verse in American World War I

Periodical Culture,” Modernism/modernity, Vol. 21, no. 3 (Sept., 2014).

38 Anderson, “A Mother’s Sacrifice,” The Little Review, 3:10 (April 1917), 23.

39 Ibid, 4.

40 Anderson, “To Serve an Idea,” The Little Review, 1:7 (Oct. 1914). 58.

41 Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War, 59.

42 Anderson, “A Real Magazine,” The Little Review, 3:5 (Aug. 1916), 2.

43 Anderson, The Little Review, 3:6 (Sept. 1916), 1.

44 Intriguingly, these same figures form the central core of Jaffe’s analysis in

Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity.

45 Ezra Pound, Pound/The Little Review, Eds. Thomas Scott and Melvin Friedman (London:

Faber and Faber, 1988), 6.

46 See Ezra Pound, “Editorial,” The Little Review 4:1 (May 1917), 3.

47 In Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998).

48 Goldman, Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity (Austin: U of Texas P, 2011), 7.

49 Pound, Pound/The Little Review, 46.

50 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1971),

281.

51 Anderson, The Little Review, 3:9 (March 1917), 22.

52 Anderson, “Surprise!,” The Little Review, 3:10 (April 1917), 25. Compare to Pound’s

letter to Anderson in January 1917. In Pound/The Little Review, 6.

53 Katherine Mullin, “Joyce Through the Little Magazines,” A Companion to James Joyce Ed.

Richard Brown (Oxford: Blackwell P, 2008), 383.

54 Pound, “Letters from Ezra Pound,” The Little Review, 4:6 (Oct. 1917), 37. The full

statement from V.H. is interesting for the way in which it draws nuances among the

three major men: “I like the July number a lot. It’s consistently good all through.

The only thing I was disappointed in was the ‘Imaginary Letters’. It’s so damned

British! It’s very clever, there’s no question—but to me at least it lacks beauty.

The T.S. Eliot poems are in something the same vein but much more mature, and

awfully well written. I like the Ezra Pound very much—in fact everything else”

(24).

55 Anderson, “Fear Not,” The Little Review, 4:2 (June 1917), 26. “From James Joyce,”

Ibid.

56 She described Ulysses as the “epoch’s supreme articulation.” See My Thirty Years’ War,

230.

57 Kreymborg, “I am Coming Says Ezra Pound,” New York Tribune (Sept 05, 1915) 29, The

Library of Congress (searchable database). http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.

58 Maxwell Bodenheim, “A Poet’s Opinion,” The Little Review, 4:2 (June 1917), 28.

59 Mrs. O.D.J., “Fear Not.,” The Little Review, 4:2 (June 1917), 27.

60 F.E.R., “Interest Begins at Home,” The Little Review, 4:3 (July 1917), 27. A similar

letter appeared in the November 1918 issue from B.O.N. of Chicago: “Won’t you ask

Ezra to go ahead and make some remarks that would be considered bright in the

twentieth century?” In “Comments,” The Little Review 5:7 (Nov. 1918), 44.

61 Louis Putkelis, “Argument,” The Little Review, 4:3 (July 1917), 27.

62 Anderson, reply to “Argument,” 28.

63 Frank Stuhlman, “I have not read much in this number—,” The Little Review, 5:3 (July

1918), 64.