The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (13 page)

Pound bandied about ideas for a title.
The Alliance. The Vortex. The Hammer.
He sent a magazine prospectus for Quinn to show potential donors, and it included a decidedly masculine list of potential contributors. “I think active America is getting fed up on gynocracy and that it’s time for a male review,” he informed Quinn. Magazines had long been seen as feminized objects with content and advertising targeting women, and Pound imagined himself invading that gendered domain.

Pound told Quinn they should make an official announcement: “No woman shall be allowed to write for this magazine.” They would, of course, have sworn enemies from the outset. “BUT,” Pound banged on his typewriter, “most of the ills of american magazines (the rot of mediaeval literature before them, for that matter) are (or were) due to women”—women of both genders, he emphasized.
The Hammer, The Vortex
—whatever they called it—would be a force against the feminization of culture. When he finished the letter he realized that even sending it was dangerous, and he wrote out in large letters at the bottom of the page:

Quinn must have realized what was happening. This was the sort of screed that strained Ezra Pound’s ties in London, yet beneath his bluster was an offer of friendship. The young firebrand was making himself vulnerable to Quinn.

—

SEXISM WAS A FACET of Pound’s elitism, and while elitism made Pound abrasive, it also made him relentlessly productive. In a world overrun by mediocrity, individuals with extraordinary talent had extraordinary responsibility. Pound thought civilization depended upon a cultural vanguard leading the sheep onward. Good art was not a luxury or a recreation cordoned off from the business of life. It
was
the business of life. Even the Great War stemmed from bad literature. Pound argued in
The Egoist
that Germany’s belligerence was the result of “the non-existence of decent prose in the German language.” “Clear thought and sanity depend on clear prose . . . A nation that cannot write clearly cannot be trusted to govern nor yet to think.” The bombs and bullets rattling Europe were the consequences of bad poems and novels.

The trouble with Pound’s elitism was money. No one could make a living on a subscription list as meager as Pound was imagining, so his solution was to bypass mass-market publishing and rely upon the patronage model of the Italian Renaissance: artists would make a living not by pandering to the sheep but by creating an aristocracy of taste. What the aristocracy needed, he insisted, was an unscrupulous magazine backed by patrons who didn’t care about sales or popularity or politesse. Pound was transforming Quinn’s concept of patronage. Instead of buying the paintings and manuscripts of established or dead artists, Pound wanted him to support younger artists. This way, Quinn could be more than a cultural bystander, a mere collector of property like Isabella Stewart Gardner. When a patron’s money buys time and food, Pound argued, “the patron then makes himself equal to the artist, he is building art into the world. He creates.” Pound was inviting Quinn into the Vortex.

In 1916, Quinn began to gather contributions for Pound’s magazine with instructions that the editors were to remain “
absolutely free
.” Quinn himself gave Pound one hundred pounds per year for his work with
The
Egoist
, and if he needed more, he need only say the word. This was a good start. In April 1916, Pound, unbeknownst to Joyce, implored Quinn to send Joyce some money. Joyce and his family income had fled to Zurich, where he had no students and no income, and he was desperate. “Ten years teaching in Trieste,” Pound told Quinn, “so as to be able to write as he liked without listening to editors so as to be independent. Ousted by war, sick, subject to eye-rheumatism or something or other that makes him temporarily blind or at least too blind to keep most jobs.” For years, artists pestered Quinn for favors, and here was Ezra Pound writing frantic letters to help his friends.

Quinn began to live through Pound’s ambitions. By the summer of 1916, he planned magazine offices in London and New York. He wanted each issue to have 96 to 128 pages, far more than the 30 to 40 pages Pound was imagining. Quinn thought each issue should cost fifty cents instead of thirty-five. He calculated costs (about $6,880 per year), rattled off his shortlist of potential donors and searched for like-minded staff members. “We want a little savagery and some fierceness,” he told a friend.

But the plans never materialized. Pound didn’t have the patience, the salesmanship or the business sense to run a magazine—conquering the world required more than a battle ax and a globe. It was easier, of course, to take over an existing magazine than begin one from scratch. In November 1916, Pound went through some back issues of
The
Little Review
since Miss Margaret Anderson had taken it upon herself to send him the copies. Pound wrote to say that her magazine “seems to be looking up,” but it was still “rather scrappy and unselective.” She printed his letter. The magazine continued to improve. There were bombastic contributions about anarchism and prison letters from Emma Goldman, but the June-July issue devoted sixteen pages to Imagism that rounded out forty-five pages of respectable work. Yet the August 1916 issue was only twenty-five pages, and Anderson’s lead article, “A Real Magazine,” caught his attention.

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. If there is only one really

beautiful thing for the September number it shall go in and the other pages will be left blank.

Come on, all of you!

Pound dredged up the September issue and discovered that she actually did it. The first half of the magazine was blank. And that’s when it occurred to him that the only person who had any guts was a woman.

—

EZRA POUND HAD A VEHICLE to bring Joyce’s work to America, but he had to improve it first. As soon as Pound saw the blank pages of
The
Little Review
, he wrote to Margaret Anderson and asked if there was any way he could help. They wanted the same things: experimentation, unfettered thought and individualism. The editor of
The
Little Review
was outspoken, uncompromising and willing to curry Pound’s favor. She had two thousand subscribers, which was exactly what he wanted.
The
Little Review
was desperate for money and new material, and Pound had John Quinn and a stable of young talent. Anderson seemed amenable to his suggestions, and Pound had plenty to give. In other words, they were a perfect match.

In Pound’s second letter to Anderson, he told her he wanted
The
Little Review
to be his “official organ” in the United States. He peppered her with questions. How many words per issue could he have? How often would the review appear? How much capital did they need? His unnamed guarantor would offer £150 per year to pay contributors, expenses and Anderson’s and Heap’s salaries (ten dollars a week), and he wanted all of his contributors to appear at once. “BOMM! Simultaneous arrival of new force in pages of
Little Review
.” Pound wrote to Quinn that same day. And the next day. And then three days after that.
The
Little Review
published only glimmers of talent, he admitted to Quinn, but it had enthusiasm, and enthusiasm was enough. Quinn had misgivings. He suspected that Miss Anderson was a nauseating “Washington Squareite,” and their Fourteenth Street basement office (with no telephone) deepened his suspicions. “The thing I really want to find out,” he wrote to Pound, “is whether the woman has not merely discrimination but whether it is possible to work with her; whether she is neurotic or not; whether she is decent and bathes.”

Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap had moved to New York in 1917. They lived in a four-room apartment above an undertaker and a pest control company on Sixteenth Street. One of the rooms was
The
Little Review
’s literary salon, where poets, painters and anarchists could gather for inspiration and ideas. They papered the walls with long sheets of gold Chinese paper. Old mahogany furniture and a dark plum floor absorbed the light reflecting off the shimmering walls, and a large blue divan hung from the ceiling by chains. The poet William Carlos Williams found it intimidating.

Anderson and Heap believed the people who possessed
The
Little Review’s
élan would come to them, and they did. An eighteen-year-old Hart Crane arrived at their apartment with some of his early poems. Crane became the magazine’s advertising manager, sold one ad in two months and quit. After that, he rented two rooms above the
Little Review
office to remain in its orbit. Young writers were especially drawn to the magazine. Once, a young woman knocked on their door to beg them for advice.

“What shall I do to become a good writer?” she asked Anderson. She wrote heartbreaking short stories about mining tragedies and other proletarian disasters.

“First,” the editor counseled, “disabuse yourself of the national idea that genius is a capacity for hard work. The meaning of genius is that it doesn’t have to work to attain what people without it must labor for—and not attain.”

Bemused but undeterred, the young woman repeated, “Yes, but what shall I do?”

Miss Anderson looked down at the girl, “Use a little lip rouge, to begin with. Beauty may bring you experiences to write about.”

—

EZRA POUND BECAME
The
Little Review
’s foreign editor in May 1917, and he wasted no time. That summer, the magazine published fourteen poems by W. B. Yeats, including “The Wild Swans at Coole.” They published work from T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis. James Joyce wrote to
The
Little Review
from Zurich and promised to send new fiction as soon as he recovered from an undisclosed illness. Anderson and Heap increased the magazine’s size and tightened the layout, and even then some issues topped sixty pages. They tracked down the cheapest printer in New York, a Serbian immigrant named Popovitch, and on the Sundays before an issue was scheduled to go out they rushed to his shop on Twenty-third Street to help set the type, correct the proofs and prepare pages for the binder.

The editors were optimistic. At the end of 1917, they announced wartime price increases and planned to double their subscription list while shedding political affiliations. In the August 1917 issue, Anderson casually referred to “the simple and beautiful but quite uninteresting tenets of anarchism. I have long given them up.” That was news to her subscribers, but
The Little Review
was willing to alienate readers. The magazine had a new motto emblazoned across its title page: “Making No Compromise with the Public Taste.”

For the first time, Margaret Anderson felt as she had when she was making speeches in front of her family in the hopes of conquering the world. “I want to absorb everything,” she wrote to Pound. He wrote back, “I don’t want to sleep until we can steam-roller over the
Century
in a magazine using just as much paper.”

The tension within modernist magazines was that while they coveted the freedom that smallness gave them—independence from both conflict-averse advertisers and the moderating influence of large readerships—they really wanted to be big magazines, and the industry seemed to offer ample opportunities for aggressive visionaries. In the late nineteenth century, magazines began slashing their prices to increase their circulation. Monthlies that cost twenty-five to thirty-five cents in the United States began selling for less than half that price. Higher advertising revenues outweighed the money they lost on sales because businesses paid more to reach readerships that grew to the hundreds of thousands.

Press advertising, virtually nonexistent before the Civil War, became a billion-dollar industry by World War I. Magazine circulation tripled in the United States between 1890 and 1905. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were thirty-five hundred different magazines with an aggregate circulation of sixty-five million—about one for every American who could read. As the magazines grew, so did the businesses that advertised in them. Lower prices, expanding ad revenues and wider audiences became a feedback loop. The print industry invented mass culture.

The modernist magazines tried to imitate the mass-market model of heavy advertising, posters, circulars, branding slogans and publicity stunts—Anderson’s encampment on Lake Michigan was, to some degree, a media event. To publicize
The Egoist
, Harriet Weaver hired two “sandwichmen,” men with billboards strapped to their shoulders, to sell the magazine on the streets. But experimental magazines would never get the readership of
Cosmopolitan
or
McClure’s
(both in the hundreds of thousands). From 1916 until the magazine’s demise,
The
Egoist
averaged sales of two hundred copies per issue, and advertisers fled
The Egoist
and
The Little Review
in a matter of months. Modernist magazines were the misfit pieces of mass culture’s engine. Patronage was their only option.

—

IN MAY 1917, John Quinn invited Anderson and Heap to dine at his penthouse apartment on Central Park West. A French manservant led them down a long, high corridor squeezed tight with six or seven thousand books, and in the drawing rooms overlooking the park there were paintings covering every inch of space. Manet’s
L’Amazone
, which Quinn had just purchased for four thousand dollars, enjoyed prominent real estate, but probably not for long. The apartment was an overgrown museum. Paintings were standing in disorderly ranks in corners and alcoves. They were piled up in the bedrooms, in closets and under beds. Anderson recognized the Van Gogh self-portrait and Cézanne’s portrait of his wife from the Armory Show. In fact, the excitement surrounding the Amory Show—the sense that something special was happening in the American art world—was partly why she began
The
Little Review
in the first place. Four years later, she was dining with the three men who had orchestrated the show, for John Quinn’s other guests that evening were Walt Kuhn and Arthur Davies, the show’s organizers.