No Modernism Without Lesbians

anarchism.
John Quinn was a lawyer, friend and patron to Ezra Pound and a supporter of Joyce’s work. He fought key legal battles to defend modernist writers and artists against censorship laws. A big burly man, an Irish American loyal to his roots, his grandfather, a blacksmith, had emigrated to Ohio from Limerick. Quinn was also an art collector and in 1913 in New York he staged the first large-scale exhibition of modern art in America.
He gave financial backing to The Little Review, arranged the transfer of court charges from the Washington Square Book Shop to Margaret and Jane and took on their legal defence pro bono. But he castigated them for getting into this fix: ‘You’re damn fools trying to get away with such a thing as Ulysses in this puritan-ridden country,’ he told them. He said it was their job to exercise editorial judgement.
An artist might paint a picture of two women doing the Lesbian business, but the owner of a gallery would be an idiot if he hung it.
But Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were unapologetic. They wanted a picture of two women ‘doing the Lesbian business’ judged on artistic merit, not by prejudice against its content. They wanted publication of Ulysses and for the Society for the Suppression of Vice to be demolished. They were fed up with the antics of men like John Sumner.
The trial for the publication of obscenity was held in October 1920 before the Court of Special Sessions. Sumner knew all about Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. They were radical feminists, who supported anarchism and homosexual rights. They were lesbians. They wore trousers. They lived together. Margaret personally confronted him in Eighth Street and
engaged in such a passionate exchange of ideas that we had to go into the Washington Square Bookshop to finish. He was full of quotations from Victor Hugo and other second rate minds…
eat the stars
There was a judge and two prosecutors. Quinn told Margaret and Jane to behave themselves and stand up when these elderly men entered. ‘Why must I stand up as a tribute to three men who wouldn’t understand my simplest remark?’ was Margaret’s response. She said two of the men slept through most of the proceedings. Which did not go well. Joyce was an artist on a par with Shakespeare, Dante and Blake, Quinn told the court. As a witness he called Philip Moeller, co-founder of the New York Theatre Guild. Moeller tried to explain the Freudian subconscious mind so as to help the court realize the intellectual underpinning of Ulysses. The judge asked him to speak in a language the court could understand. One of the prosecutors wanted the obscene bits read out. The judge said that should not happen in Margaret Anderson’s hearing. Quinn explained she was the publisher. The judge replied:
I am sure she didn’t know the significance of what she was publishing. I myself do not understand Ulysses… It sounds to me like the ravings of a disordered mind. I can’t see why anyone would want to publish it.
Though the ostensible aim of these sleepy white-haired old men was to protect the sensibilities of women, of the sort they supposed their wives and daughters to be, in fact theirs was an exertion of male authority and power over women. It had been Joyce’s partner, Nora, who inspired the book, Harriet Weaver who funded it, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap who serialized it. Had the all-male court known that most of the women involved, past and future, in this fraught publishing enterprise were lesbian, it would have further fuelled their intent to suppress publication of the ravings of a disordered mind.
Margaret and Jane were sentenced to either ten days in prison or a fine of $100. They had no money and payment was made by Joanna Fortune, a wealthy customer from Chicago. The two editors were then felons with a criminal record. When their fingerprints were taken, Margaret made a fuss about dipping her fingers into the sticky gum, said she could not use the court soap, insisted on more towels and a nail brush, and told them she would sue if her hands were disfigured.
No New York newspaper came to their defence or spoke out for Joyce. ‘The position of the great artist is impregnable,’ Margaret wrote in the Review’s next edition.
You can no more limit his expression, patronizingly suggest that his genius present itself in channels personally pleasing to you, than you can eat the stars.
She had aspired to make The Little Review the most interesting magazine ever launched. She felt she was done. ‘Ten years of one’s life is enough to devote to one idea – unless one has no other ideas,’ she said. She suffered a depressive breakdown, felt disaffected with America and voiced dislike of intellectuals who learned about life from books rather than experiencing it. She said she knew the difference between life and death in everything and that was all she needed to know.
Then in New York she met the opera singer and actor Georgette Leblanc, who for many years had been the playwright Maurice Maeterlinck’s lover. They fell in love, left for France and lived there together for twenty years. It was as if Margaret Anderson gave up fighting for modernism and lived it. Like Natalie Barney, she wanted her work of art to be her life. She, Georgette, Jane Heap and Solita Solano became followers of the philosopher Gurdjieff at his ‘Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man’ in Fontainebleau. She talked of existing in relation to the mystery of the universe.
In 1930 she published her autobiography, My Thirty Years’ War. In it, she described herself as happy and her perceived hardships as illusions: ‘I have never been too hungry or too tired, too ill or too cold, too ugly or too wrong…’ She spoke of her passion for music, nature and ideas and said her true happiness was founded on her love for Georgette Leblanc. This idyll lasted until June 1939 when, in