By David Daniel

This absorbing intellectual study continually underlines the important cultural role little magazines played, and how women were central to their existence as founders, editors, contributors, critics, and patrons.

Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the ‘Little Review’ by Holly A. Baggett. Northern Illinois University Press. 296 pp. $36.95

There have been many “little magazines,” periodicals loosely defined as being noncommercial and known for their avant-garde content. One of the earliest significant examples became a vehicle for the writers and thinkers of the Transcendentalist movement: The Dial, published in Boston in the 1840s and edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller. Iterations of The Dial followed over the years, and it was on one of these that a young and ambitious Margaret Anderson learned the basics of printing, which would be of value to her a few years later when she founded the Little Review. Launched in Chicago in 1914, the publication was the brainchild of Anderson (1886-1973), who served as editor. She was joined two years later by Jane Heap (1883-1964). It was a small magazine with limited resources, but LR quickly became an influential voice, bringing attention to virtually every major artistic movement in the early 20th century. There was bohemianism, Dadaism, Imagism — as well as anarchism, lesbianism, radical feminism, and half a dozen other intellectual and spiritual “isms” to reckon with, of which the overarching one was modernism.

Modernism may be defined (simply) as art that sought to veer from conventional forms, social norms, and the commercialism of the culture that preceded it. In the early ’20s, when Gertrude Stein told Ernest Hemingway, both American expats living in Paris, that “you are all a lost generation,” she was referring to those who came of age during the Great War, the artists traumatized by the mind-numbing physical, social, and psychic devastations of the conflict, deeply shaken by the disillusionment and loss of faith in the norms and forms that came before it. Struggling to make sense of disaster, artists and thinkers turned from what had failed, driven to seek expression in fresh metaphors and symbols, new forms of art and spirituality.

In their embrace of modernism, Anderson and Heap became cultural players actively engaged in promulgating it. Midwesterners — Anderson from Indiana, Heap from Kansas — the pair were transplants to Chicago. Independent, bold-thinking, lesbian lovers for a time, then friends, they challenged social and sexual norms. The duo presented a marked contrast in personalities. Anderson was upbeat, abrim with enthusiasm, “giving the sense of writing with exclamation points”; Heap was downbeat, pessimistic, writing with a cynical humor “that impaled her targets.” In a 2024 interview with Chicago’s Windy City Times, Holly A. Baggett, author of Making No Compromise, described Anderson and Heap as a dynamic couple, the one known as a great beauty, “not afraid of anyone,” and the other “couldn’t care less about anyone.” Their toughness of mind, a quality underscored in Baggett’s book’s title, was tested repeatedly in their days running the LR.

In 1917 they took the magazine from Chicago to NYC, an eastward motion that, over its 15-year run (LR ceased publishing in 1929), would eventually see it relocate to Paris. One constant was the review’s editorial daring and international cross-fertilization, brought about by an ever-expanding network of alliances that included such key creators as Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, Hart Crane, e.e. cummings, Jean Cocteau, T.S. Eliot, Hemingway, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, William Butler Yeats, as well as artists Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, and Joseph Stella. Later the editors had a long and deepening involvement in the mystical philosophy of George Gurdjieff. The pinnacle of their achievement, however, was their decision to publish serially, starting in 1918, James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Unpublished in book form until 1922 in Paris, but banned in the US for its “obscenity” (it was not published here until 1934), Ulysses’s appearance in LR gave American readers their first exposure to Joyce’s masterwork. Following the appearance of the chapter entitled “Nausicaa” — in which protagonist Leopold Bloom furtively masturbates as he watches a woman exposing herself on a beach — New York authorities brought charges against the magazine and its editors for violating obscenity laws. After a much-publicized trial, the unrepentant Anderson and Heap, who continued to defend Joyce’s book as an artistic triumph, were found guilty. Each was required to pay a $50 fine.

Baggett, a professor emeritus of history at Missouri State, is a diligent scholar (the book has 17 pages of bibliography). She continually underlines the important cultural role little magazines played, and how women were central to their existence as founders, editors, contributors, critics, and patrons. As Baggett told the Windy City Times, when she first began thinking about Anderson and Heap’s story, she found other scholars resistant to undertaking it. “It was far too complicated,” she said, “so I decided I had to be the one to deal with it. It only took me twenty-five years.”

The spine of the story is the complex relationship between Anderson and Heap. A warning: anyone looking for salacious gossip or a light read won’t find it here. This is scholarly work of a high level. Drawing on access to troves of personal letters, Anderson’s three volumes of autobiography, and the magazine itself, Baggett fashions a richly detailed cultural history of the period, including photographs and a section devoted to underrecognized women writers whose work was published in LR and are only lately getting a reconsideration.

The book makes good on its promises, to look into how “the concentric rings of modernism, sexuality and spirituality reveal an intriguing and untold story of the journey of Anderson, Heap, their historic journal, and their mysterious search for the sacred.” For those with intellectual curiosity, and patience, Making No Compromise is an absorbing, minutely researched history and analysis of the Little Review and the lives of the two remarkable women who powered it.

David Daniel is a contributor to the Boston Globe’s Ideas section and a contributing editor for the “little magazine” The Lowell Review.