The hook for the story of Margaret C. Anderson is undeniably her connection to James Joyce’s Ulysses, so we’ll start there. Anderson was the founder and editor of a literary magazine called The Little Review for about 15 years, beginning in 1914, in which she championed controversial art.
In 1918, Anderson and Ezra Pound, who was serving as the Review’s poetry editor at the time, began publishing one chapter of Ulysses per issue. To say the excerpts were unpopular is an understatement. Three issues were seized and burned by the Post Office, which could operate as a federal censor at that time. Many readers hated their first encounter with Ulysses, which would go on to be considered the greatest modernist novel, and begged Anderson to stop serializing it. A bit of a tyrant in terms of taste, Anderson refused.
In fact, she decided to try a new guerrilla marketing tactic. Anderson sent copies of the magazine, including a chapter of Ulysses, to as many New York millionaires as she could, in hopes they would patronize her Little Review. The strategy backfired when a copy scandalized the daughter of a recipient with connections.
Anderson and her longtime partner, Jane Heap, were taken to court under obscenity charges.
This story anchors local journalist Adam Morgan’s new biography of Anderson, A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls. It was inevitable that Ulysses would help sell Anderson’s story. “I was surprised they didn’t put Ulysses in the title or the subtitle,” Anderson joked over a video call from his home just outside Chapel Hill. “I thought they were going to.”
But when he started writing Anderson’s biography, out this month from One Signal Publishers, Morgan didn’t know just how relevant the politics of her story would be.
“I first started writing this about three years ago,” said Morgan, who is a critic and writing professor and is himself the founder of a literary magazine, the Chicago Review of Books. “The number of book bans and challenges to books that have occurred since—because they acknowledge that the sexuality spectrum exists—has been surprising and shocking to me.”
When I ask him about the “parallels” between Anderson’s time and ours, Morgan opts for a stronger word.
“It is sad just to see how this cycle repeats itself over and over again throughout history,” Morgan said. “You talk about parallels, it’s not even a parallel. It’s literally the same subject matter in a lot of cases.”
Anderson had to contend with government censorship, but it was a series of wealthy private citizens who landed her in court, complaining to the district attorney of New York County, with a demand for suppression. The DA gave it to his assistant to deal with, and the assistant gave it to John S. Sumner, the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
“It is funny that it’s a book about how there were these government systems in place to censor books, but that also a lot of it was just random people who were just offended by stuff and wanted to get it banned,” Morgan said. “But when you look at why people were so offended, why was it such a scandal at the time? It’s very racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic.”
That chain of events, from angry citizens to the courts, should sound familiar to anyone following book bans today. Book bans used to come from individual parents, but in the last few years, they’ve become the focus of political leaders or groups of activists. A new state law passed this year requires schools to catalog all books in school and classroom libraries, which led to many teachers pulling the books from their rooms.
The level of fearmongering was also similar. Morgan, who grounded the biography’s focus on arts with extensive historical context, knows offhand that the front page of The New York Times the week of Anderson’s trial was an article in which the NYC Medical Commissioner asserted that the hopeful new Americans landing at the harbor were going to bring STDs into the city.
“They’re afraid that reading books like this would send their sons and daughters running to the house or into the arms of an immigrant,” Morgan said. “They associated books like this with radical thinking, with anarchists, and those were foreigners. I think that’s similar to today.”
Morgan believes the reason these fears are so similar is that they come from exactly the same place as they did over 100 years ago: the absolutist thinking that divides the world into good and bad people.
“That’s where a lot of book bans come from today: ‘We need to protect our children, who are in the good camp with us, from bad people that are in the bad camp. And if they are exposed to how those people live, that might leak into their brains and corrupt them,’” Morgan said. “So, the title, Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, that’s what that’s based on, [this idea] that they would read something like this and turn to the dark side, as they saw it, because black and white thinking lumps everything together. It would lump immigrants from anywhere altogether. It would lump them together with anarchists, and it would lump anyone who’s progressive in with the most radical extremist terrorists.”
Ulysses wasn’t what got Morgan initially interested in Anderson, and his biography covers much more ground, as did The Little Review itself. The magazine offersa stunning portrait of the modernist movement as it came into its own. The magazine published plenty of names familiar to many readers today. Ezra Pound was the poetry editor for a few years, and the magazine collected work from writers like T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein, among plenty of others.
If you want to add some lesser-known modernist artists to your reading list, A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls is a great place to start. Anderson herself doesn’t hold the same cultural prominence as many of the writers she championed, but she was openly lesbian, politically radical, and committed to a DIY method of creation. Morgan first encountered Anderson’s work when he was getting his MFA in creative writing at Roosevelt University and became enamored with the Chicago arts movements. He found so many women like Anderson in that history.
“People who study and read about modernism know so much about the men, but many of the women have just been forgotten or fallen out of print—or if they’re in print, they’re just not talked about as much anymore,” he says. “I was fascinated by all of these really interesting, intelligent women and learning more about their lives and how they were all in love with each other at different points in time.”
Anderson’s concerns, making a living for herself as a countercultural artist and a queer woman running an independent publication, feel so timeless that it’s jarring when Morgan reminds us of some of the particulars. Early editions of her magazine went out by horse and buggy. Margaret herself is on record repeating au courant racism in the early 20th century. The Post Office was reading and destroying any mail they deemed obscene. Morgan wanted the biography to feel “as much like a novel as possible,” which was a challenge as it’s made up of everything from archival research and historical details to the journals and art of Anderson and her contemporaries.
To add to the hurdles of pinning Anderson down, she loved to embellish, according to Morgan.
“She was a very difficult subject for a biography, because she left behind three out-of-print memoirs that are just full of hyperbole, exaggeration, anachronisms,” Morgan said. “She writes in this kind of breathless, ecstatic state, so you can’t really trust most of what she says in terms of details or chronology.”
“One way that being queer impacted the way Margaret operated in the world is that she was used to being in a minority and feeling like a minority. Because of that, she also had this deeply instilled confidence that the majority was wrong.”
Even her connection to Ulysses is overshadowed by Sylvia Beach, another 20th-century American lesbian who published the first complete version of the novel from her bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare and Company. When I ask Morgan why he thinks queer women would be the ones to champion this controversial book, he brings up Anderson’s refusal to drop Ulysses even in the face of her own readers’ demands.
“One way that being queer impacted the way Margaret operated in the world is that she was used to being in a minority and feeling like a minority,” he said. “Because of that, she also had this deeply instilled confidence that the majority was wrong.”
Some of Anderson’s antagonists admitted that other, older novels could be “sanctified” by their age. Her lawyer compared the novel to the Bible and Shakespeare, both of which had occasional objectionable material. Today, Ulysses is firmly canonized as “great literature.”
“I do feel like we have regressed as a country in terms of free speech over the last years,” Morgan continued. “It was wild reading about this and writing about it, because it’s the exact same stuff. It’s the exact same thing people were worried about 100 years ago.”
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