A Champion of Modernism, in Literature and Life

Many editors languish in the margins of history, their contributions largely invisible despite how much they shape whom and how we read. But in recent years, amid a wave of books unearthing overlooked figures, biographers have turned their sights to pioneering book and magazine editors—including Malcolm Cowley of Viking, Judith Jones of Knopf, Bennett Cerf of Random House, and Katharine S. White of The New Yorker—anointing them as the unsung architects of the American literary canon. These biographies tend to illuminate not only the editors’ work, but their lives, challenging the stereotype that they were mere pencil pushers.

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before the trend came for Margaret C. Anderson, whose avant-garde, Chicago-based literary magazine, The Little Review, introduced American readers to such modernist heavyweights as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Adam Morgan’s impassioned, finely researched new book, A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, isn’t the first account of Anderson’s life and work—that would be Making No Compromise, Holly A. Baggett’s dual biography of Anderson and her co-editor and romantic partner, Jane Heap. But this is the first to focus entirely on Anderson, who founded The Little Review in 1914. Morgan, also the founding editor of a Chicago-based literary magazine, convincingly argues that Anderson more or less single-handedly transformed the Review “from a Chicago curio” into a transatlantic journal of note by publishing a coterie of experimental European and American expat writers.

That Anderson isn’t particularly well remembered is somewhat surprising when you consider her central role in one of the first literary-obscenity trials in American history. In 1918, four years before the American bookseller Sylvia Beach published Joyce’s Ulysses in Paris, Anderson began serializing the novel in The Little Review. She was forced to stop in 1920, when censors arrested and charged her and Heap with the felony of publishing something—in particular, the book’s sexually explicit “Nausicaa” episode—so “lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent and disgusting.” The women were found guilty, and each was fined $50. The ruling effectively banned Ulysses in the United States, where it would not be published in full until 1934, by Random House.

[Read: Yes I will read Ulysses yes]

The freewheeling Anderson was the kind of ahead-of-her-time woman whose story is likely to be catnip to many contemporary readers, myself included. Before she championed modernism in literature, she applied its tenets in life and love, rejecting tradition and embracing experimentation. At the age of 21, she left the staid Indianapolis for Chicago, a metropolis at the height of its literary renaissance, and later lived in the bohemian hotbeds of Greenwich Village and Paris. And she managed to fund and distribute her publication despite sexism, homophobia, a world war, and political censorship.

All of this helps explain why a full-scale treatment of Anderson feels overdue, but some circumstances complicate the pursuit of a comprehensive biography. Although The Little Review’s legacy was lasting, her affiliation with it—and with the world of American letters—was brief. She had been an editor for less than a decade before departing both the magazine and the U.S. In reality, she was less a lifelong champion of the written word than an aesthete who seemed to constantly seek intellectual stimulation, whether in the form of literature, music, sex, or spirited conversation. After her short but intense dalliance with publishing, she mostly wandered Europe in pursuit of pleasure, not so much channeling her passions toward a goal as accreting experiences—which is to say, living the way most people do, somewhat aimlessly.

The anticlimactic arc of Anderson’s story presents a challenge to the biographer keen on keeping readers’ attention. In the case of A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, Morgan focuses on the most interesting and narratively coherent portion of his subject’s life—her tenure as an editor—while spending less than a third of the book on the 50 years that she lived after leaving the magazine. So Morgan’s conclusion, on the last page, that Anderson’s “greatest work” was not The Little Review but rather “the life she had forged” is a bit surprising. Contrary to his own assessment, Morgan provides a far more extensive account of his subject’s early work than her life as a whole. And at times, he appears to struggle to see Anderson for who she was, rather than who he seems to want her to be.

From 1914 to 1923, Anderson’s life was inseparable from her work. “The ultimate reason for life is Art,” she declares in a 1916 issue of The Little Review by way of a mission statement. And she walked the walk: In the magazine’s early days, when its subscriber base had faltered because of Anderson’s anarchist sympathies, Morgan writes, she was “faced with a choice between keeping her magazine alive and keeping a roof over her head”—and so for six months, she lived in a tent on the banks of Lake Michigan, editing by firelight. But in the early ’20s, her youthful enthusiasm was eroded by the backlash to Ulysses, which had cost her both advertisers and subscribers even before the taxing trial and public censure. And when critics celebrated Beach’s edition of Ulysses, a book they had greeted with silence if not ridicule when Anderson serialized it, she took it as an insult. Thoroughly disenchanted, she saw that she was perhaps not cut out for a life so devoted to one’s work, that is, a career in the arts.

By 1924, Anderson writes in her 1951 memoir, “it wasn’t the Little Review that mattered; and it wasn’t Art that mattered any longer.” She was now interested in what she calls “an art of life”—a way of living that wrung every drop from existence by accumulating experiences. This renunciation of her editorial work doesn’t appear in A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, though Morgan leans heavily on Anderson’s writings to scaffold the book. (He acknowledges, however, that she could be an unreliable if not outright mendacious memoirist: She claimed, for instance, to have spoken with F. Scott Fitzgerald at the office of his editor, Max Perkins, in 1913, when Fitzgerald would have been a teenager—years before he and Perkins actually met.) The half century that followed is a thornier, more muddled chapter in Anderson’s story: She led a peripatetic, often cash-strapped existence in France alongside her lover, the opera singer Georgette Leblanc (as well as several other paramours), before spending her later years as a self-described “recluse” in New York. She also spent decades in thrall to the spiritual leader George Gurdjieff, an Armenian-born mystic who preached divinity through labor.

As its subject’s life loses coherence, the book moves through the years with a sense of rushed obligation. Morgan concedes that, although Anderson still rubbed elbows with the literati, her “passion for art, music, and literature was transforming into something more esoteric”—and therefore more difficult to make legible, let alone compelling. Morgan’s less energetic attempts to cover these years, contrasted with the absorbing sections that come before it, brings to mind biographies that benefited from jettisoning the impulse to be comprehensive. Take Vivian Gornick’s The Solitude of Self, about the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Jazmina Barrera’s The Queen of Swords, about the Mexican writer Elena Garro—two unconventionally structured and hardly exhaustive, but nonetheless superb, accounts of a figure close to the author’s heart, just as Anderson is to Morgan’s.

[Read: A book that puts the life back into biography]

Morgan isn’t the first admirer of Anderson who has related strongly to one aspect of her life only to struggle to metabolize the rest of it. In Jessa Crispin’s 2015 book, The Dead Ladies Project, about exiled and expat writers and artists, the author devotes a chapter to Anderson’s second act in the south of France. Yet Crispin concedes that she really wants to write only about Anderson’s “hard climb out of her hometown,” which echoes Crispin’s own experience and is, in her estimation, simply more interesting. “In France she found her spiritual home. How boring,” she writes. “Wouldn’t we all just rather picture Hannibal moving elephants over mountains than winning battles against the Romans?”

Here Crispin cheekily poses a choice that all biographers must make: what to do with the boring bits. And behind this choice is a more profound question: Are biographers storytellers or annalists? The best of them combine the two vocations. But all writers are guided by their own affinities. Both Crispin and Morgan, for instance, train their eyes on the portions of Anderson’s life that hew most closely to their own; Morgan notes, in the introduction, that before following in Anderson’s editorial footsteps, he moved to Chicago “exactly one hundred summers after Margaret did the same,” and attended grad school next door to the building where The Little Review’s offices had been housed. It’s no coincidence that the sections of the book that mirror his own life are the ones that shine most brightly.

Every work of biography, no matter its scope, attempts the impossible: to impose order and meaning on a person’s existence. And every attempt tends to emphasize the inherent chasm between a life and books about a life. The case of Margaret Anderson, who shook the literary landscape and then all but renounced it, brings this tension to the fore. She seems almost to dare her biographers to wrangle her, to make her life make sense. The editor in her might have liked to see them try.