Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago before Stonewall

5. The Little Review

35 5 The Little Review Margaret Anderson’s intolerance for the mundane brought her from Indianapolis to Chicago, where she lived in what Emma Goldman called a “strange ménage” and started the Little Review literary magazine with Harriet “Deansie” Dean and Jane Heap. Like many bohemians of the period she migrated to New York and then Paris, searching for a new ism. Even as a child Margaret Anderson shunned the rules, was fiercely independent , and valued “ideas” above all else. Her entire life was a constant flight from mediocrity. In Chicago’s Left Bank (1953) author Alson J. Smith describes her as “volatile, unpredictable, brilliantly imaginative, impatient, and stubborn” and notes that Gertrude Stein called her “an hysteric, pure and simple.” Friend or foe, nobody could argue with the impact Anderson had on the arts. Margaret Caroline Anderson was born on November 24, 1886, into a wealthy Indianapolis family, but she rejected the bourgeois trappings when she left the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, and headed for Chicago; she had to sell a calfskin-bound book by Henrik Ibsen and two silk negligees to raise money for the train fare. On arrival Anderson worked for Clara Laughlin, the literary editor of Interior, a Presbyterian weekly, reviewing books. Her next job was as a clerk in the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed bookstore in the Fine Arts Building, run by Francis The Little Review 36 Fisher Browne, who also published the Dial, a Chicago-based literary journal he founded in 1882. While at the bookstore, Anderson also reviewed books for the Dial, where she learned the skills of publishing a small magazine. A seed was planted for the Little Review, so named because the little theater movement was in vogue at the time. Among Anderson’s talents was her ability to extract money from advertisers and donors for her ideas. On a visit to New York she raised $450 in advertising revenue for the first issue of the Little Review. She set up office in room 917 of the Fine Arts Building with the assistance of her lover, Harriet “Deansie” Dean, and published her magazine. In August 1915 Dean, who like Anderson came from a prominent Indianapolis family, wrote a piece for the Chicago Tribune about why she joined Anderson’s colony of writers: “I became a reader of Miss Anderson’s magazine and because I found in her writings an expression of my ideals. I came to her to give all that I could for her cause.” Articles in the premier issue of the Little Review included Anderson’s thoughts, “Life and Art,” and a piece on the Cubist literature of Gertrude Stein contributed by George Soule, an editor for the New Republic. The Little Review was among the first publications to embrace Dada. Anderson praised the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the American Dadaist who created sculpture from trash, performed sexual sound and music events on stage, and sometimes wore a tomato can bra, teaspoon earrings, and black lipstick. Most people thought the baroness was insane. Anderson hailed her as a genius. Anderson adopted “isms”: Futurism, Bergsonism, the New Paganism, Imagism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Anarchism all found a home in the Little Review. She adored the British bisexual poet Rupert Brooke. On a visit to Chicago, Brooke visited the offices of the magazine with Maurice Brown, a pioneer of the city’s Little Theatre. Anderson later described Brooke as “shy as a girl, an English girl. His beauty was a girl’s beauty.” Brooke was on the periphery of the Bloomsbury Group, the British literary circle that included homosexual writers James Strachey, his brother Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and Duncan Grant, all spinning satellites around the real star, the bisexual Virginia Woolf. Among others, the Little Review introduced the work of Ernest Hemingway to the world, also gay and bisexual writers like Witter Bryner, Hart Crane, Djuna Barnes, Max Bodenheim, the Imagist poet Amy Lowell, and black poet Mark Turbyfill. After attending a lecture by political agitator The Little Review 37 Emma Goldman, a longtime advocate for the rights of homosexuals, Anderson converted to anarchism on the spot, which led to her first blip on the radar of the authorities; when labor activist Joseph Hillstrom was executed in 1915, Anderson wrote in the Little Review: “Why didn’t someone shoot the governor of Utah before he could shoot Joe Hill?” This...