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.
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.
Top Related