The Ulysses Trials E-Book

Joseph M. Hassett

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 333

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

"Hassett's combination of literary insight and legal dexterity...makes his book ...an original and subtly entertaining contribution to the history of modernist culture.' -Roy Foster The publishers of Ulysses by James Joyce were brought to trial and convicted of obscenity in the USA in 1921. The immortal prose, ultimately recognized as the greatest English language novel of the twentieth century, was first published by the pioneering literary magazine The Little Review. Its founder Margaret Anderson along with her publishing partner and lover, Jane Heap, were famously convicted of a crime for their extraordinary contribution to society. From then until its eventual publication in the US in 1934 the book ran the gamut of legal obstruction. The Ulysses Trials chronicles that progress and adds not only to the understanding of Joyce but also to the history of the laws of obscenity, censorship and freedom of speech. Its appeal is to Joyceans, all those interested in modernism and to the legal community and students of literature and law.

Leseprobe

THE ULYSSES TRIALS

Beauty and Truth Meet the Law

Joseph M. Hassett

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

DUBLIN

Contents

Foreword by Roy Foster

Introduction

1. Margaret Anderson’s Gospel of Beauty Meets John Quinn

2. Beauty and Truth Ignored: Quinn’s Defence of ‘Cantleman’s Spring-Mate’ and Early Skirmishes Over Ulysses

3. The Importance of Pairing Truth with Beauty in Defending Ulysses

4. John Quinn: The Advocate as Cynic

5. Between the Trials: Ulysses Wanders

6. Ernst, Woolsey and the Hands: Ulysses Unbound

7. The Impact of the Ulysses Decisions

Postscript: The Afterlives

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Copyright

Foreword by Roy Foster

‘Books register the ideas of an age; that is perhaps their chief claim to immortality.’ The statement by one of the heroines of this book, Margaret Anderson, might also be applied to the law: which, in key confrontations, can exemplify and clarify a historical moment. This is what happened when James Joyce’s great leviathan of a novel, destined to alter the course of literature, came up against the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and the US Post Office, which literally consigned Joyce’s text to the flames. The story has been told before, but never in the way it unfolds on these pages. This is because Joseph Hassett is both a gifted literary critic and a brilliant lawyer. In The Ulysses Trials he has succinctly and elegantly revised our understanding of what went wrong in the first trial of Ulysses, after Anderson and Jane Heap published extracts in their Little Review. And he also demonstrates, with forensic panache, the way it was put right.

Nor is this all. Hassett’s previous books have dealt authoritatively with the life and work of W.B. Yeats, and this book provides an important addition to the biography of Yeats’s friend and patron, the New York lawyer John Quinn. Subtle and often hilarious layers are added to the portrait of this irascible, talented, well-meaning but often obtuse Irish American, showing that his extraordinary ability to appreciate the coming vogue in art and literature was not always the same thing as understanding it. In this telling, Quinn’s own oddly puritanical prejudices, and his ‘complicated attitude to sex and secrecy’, infused and derailed his attempted defence of Anderson, Heap and Joyce. Hassett’s evaluation is in marked contrast to previous treatments, and is powerfully bolstered by the author’s knowledge not only of the law, but of the social mores and practices of the contemporary world of lawyers (and of Irish-Americans).

Here we are led deftly and enlighteningly through the nuanced definition by Judge Learned Hand of obscenity, the aesthetic and moral arguments advanced by the advocate Morris Ernst in the later trial involving Random House, and the complicated issues of copyright following the first publication of Ulysses by the redoubtable Sylvia Beach. But these arguments never become abstract or obtuse; Hassett has the exceptional lawyer’s gift of relating principles and precedents to real people and personal passions, and the astute literary critic’s ability to seize the thought behind an author’s words. This matters all the more when we are dealing with a writer who opens the English language, in Seamus Heaney’s words, like a pack of cards in the hands of a magician. Key Joycean passages are illuminated here, and the elusive figure of Shem the Penman, ‘piercing the barrier between private and public’, shown in a new though characteristic light.

Above all, this is a story of remarkable people: Anderson and Heap, ecstatically engaged on their mission of truth and beauty; John Butler Yeats, living merrily in New York’s Bohemia at Quinn’s expense, while offering him – unrecognized – the key to arguing Joyce’s case, and concluding regretfully that the lawyer had ‘brains but no intellect’; his son, the poet W.B. Yeats, equally astutely noting his friend Quinn’s shortcomings, and sharply intuiting the real importance of his one-time protégé Joyce’s great novel. But above all, the lawyers steal the show: from puritanical servants of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and colourful and sometimes dubious Irish Americans, to perceptive interpreters of the intellectual zeitgeist such as Woolsey and the Hand cousins – ‘judges of robust intellect and trenchant pen’. Robustness and trenchancy are evident in every page of this book. Looking back on the saga much later, Learned Hand reflected that for a judge to be ‘literary’ was ‘a very dangerous thing’: but danger could be averted if the judge in question was perceptive enough to ‘exhibit a complete aptness for the occasion’. Joseph Hassett evinces exactly this combination of literary insight and legal dexterity, which is what makes his book such an original and subtly entertaining contribution to the history of modernist culture.

Roy Foster

Carroll Professor of Irish History,

Hertford College, Oxford

Introduction

The struggle of writers to free themselves from government control over the content of their writing is never-ending. It is at least as old as Plato, who banished poets from his Republic because he thought their seductive verbal pictures harmed society. Oscar Wilde flatly challenged this line of thinking in his famous pronouncement that ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.’1 Plato’s ideas prevailed over Wilde’s in this round of the long struggle. Wilde was imprisoned and effectively banished following a prosecution that started out as an attack on his aesthetic ideas.

The law of obscenity figures prominently in the war between law and literature. An obscenity trial, to borrow Arthur Miller’s vivid metaphor, is a crucible for testing the relationship between these mighty cultural engines in which each confronts the other head-on. Literature, by its very existence, asserts a primal right to be heard. The law of obscenity seeks to silence a category of books and threatens to imprison their authors and publishers. Margaret Anderson, founder of The Little Review, and her lover and co-editor Jane Heap, faced just such a threat in 1921 in the form of a criminal trial for publishing an episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Heap saw the charges as an attack by the law on an eternal work of art. She maintained that ‘Art is and always has been the supreme Order,’ and thus is the only human activity ‘that has an eternal quality’. Standing defiantly on this platform, she greeted her trial with the derisive exclamation: ‘What legal genius to bring Law against Order!’2 Heap and Anderson were convicted of a crime for being the first publishers of the immortal prose of what was ultimately recognized as the greatest English-language novel of the twentieth century.

Anderson and Heap urged their lawyer, John Quinn, to argue that Joyce’s prose could not be obscene because it was beautiful literature, and Quinn’s friend John Butler Yeats outlined an argument based on the societal value of Joyce’s ‘terrible veracity’.3 Unfortunately, Quinn, a man of enormous ability and generosity, but hobbled by a mind filled with prejudice and closed to opinions that differed from his own, failed to advance these potentially winning arguments. Instead he made a series of unworthy and cynical points addressed to what he chose to call the ‘ignorance’ of the ‘stupid judges’. After his clients were convicted, he failed to seek an appellate ruling on the important legal issues presented by the criminalization of an innovative piece of writing by a master stylist. Thus Ulysses was silenced after the serialization of fourteen of the eighteen episodes contemplated by Joyce.

Although the powerful ideas urged on Quinn about the value of literature’s beauty and truth never even made it to court in the 1921 Little Review trial, they ultimately prevailed a dozen years later when the completed novel faced obscenity charges in federal court in New York. Responding to arguments by a new lawyer that were similar to those that Quinn ignored, United States District Judge John Munro Woolsey found that Ulysses was not obscene because the American public should not be denied exposure to ‘an honest effort’ by ‘a great artist in words’ to ‘show exactly how the minds of his characters operate’.4 In affirming Woolsey’s decision on appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overruled a long-standing precedent barring publication of books that contained any passage tending to excite sexual desire. Persuaded by arguments grounded in the truth and beauty of Joyce’s novel, the court decided that Ulysses, although sexually exciting, was not obscene because literature that was ‘written with such evident truthfulness’ that is relevant to the subject and ‘executed with real art’ was immune from the law of obscenity.5 These federal decisions permanently altered the grounds of future obscenity trials in the United States and had significant repercussions elsewhere.

Ulysses is so much a product of its struggle to be born that many readers know it primarily as a once-banned book that reached the public only after a long voyage through the courts. Indeed, generations of readers first encountered Ulysses through the prism of Judge Woolsey’s decision, which was published as a preface to the Random House edition of Ulysses until 1986 and the Bodley Head edition until 1960. Moreover, as Joyce completed the novel with the result of the Little Review trial in mind, he both thumbed his nose at the legal process by incorporating incidents from the prosecution into the text, and helped shape the early critical response to the completed novel with an eye to impressing the courts with the book’s literary pedigree. The judicial decisions involving Ulysses were not only essential to the novel finding its audience, but are also a part of the text and its reception.

In addition to their inherent historical significance, the two obscenity trials involving Ulysses are important because their differing approaches and results make them fertile sources of insight into how battles in the long war for freedom of expression are won or lost. There can be no doubt that the war is never over. The legal precedents that governed, and were changed by, the Ulysses cases could be changed again. Given the recurring appearance of political candidates who promise more prosecutions of literature, the emergence of misguided criticism of the bases for the Ulysses decisions, and the willingness of courts to overrule settled precedents, Judge Richard Posner’s suggestion that ‘maybe Joyce will be too bawdy for the second half of the twenty-first century’ cannot be ignored.6

The long-standing need for a comparative study of the two Ulysses cases has been obscured by the fact that biographers of both Joyce and Quinn have erroneously and uncritically accepted Quinn’s view that the Little Review case was unwinnable. The necessity of careful attention to the legal arguments and judicial rationales in the two cases has been brought into sharp focus by a recent book that goes beyond the traditional grudging approbation of Quinn’s performance, and lauds it as ‘sophisticated legal creativity’ by a ‘savvy’ defence attorney.7 Quinn, in fact, advanced arguments that were unworthy of Joyce and Ulysses, and failed to pursue a strategy that could have brought the novel to the American public a decade before it was finally published in the United States in 1934.

Another critical trend reinforces the timeliness of a comparative study of the two Ulysses cases. Proceeding from the erroneous premise that the winning arguments in federal court were based on a so-called ‘esthetic theory’ that literature has no effect on the reader, this critique argues that the courts have exonerated Ulysses at the cost of robbing literature of its power, and thereby failed to ‘provide a lasting foundation for freedom of speech’, and encouraged ‘a dangerous indifferentism’.8 This critique is based on a misunderstanding of what was actually decided in the federal Ulysses decisions, and the nature and context of the arguments that led to an important and enduring victory for freedom of expression.

This backdrop of misunderstanding about the legal decisions involving Ulysses invites a book that explores what can be learned from the process by which these epoch-transforming cases were decided. If, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said in the same year as the first Ulysses decision, ‘a page of history is worth a volume of logic’,9 the important history here is biography – the life stories of the intriguing cast of characters involved in the struggle of Ulysses to find an audience. Those life stories show that the quality of the arguments and the subtlety and wisdom of the judicial decisions were heavily influenced by the personalities and educational backgrounds of the publishers, lawyers and judges. The seemingly quotidian experiences of the actors in these great dramas informed their devotion to great ideas like beauty and truth that can make law a profoundly humanizing cultural force.

1 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of DorianGray, 1891, in Joseph Bristow, ed., The Complete Works of OscarWilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) Vol. 3, 167.

2 Jane Heap, ‘Art and the Law’, The Little Review (‘LR’) (September–December 1920) (‘Art and the Law’) 5.

3 See Chapter 3.

4 United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses”, 5 F. Supp.182 (S.D.N.Y. 1933).

5 United States v. One Book Entitled UlyssesBy James Joyce, 72 F.2d 705 (2d. Cir. 1934).

6 Richard A. Posner, Law and Literature (3rd edn, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009) (‘Posner’) 505.

7 Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Penguin, 2014) (‘Birmingham’) 168, 194.

8 John Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship (New York: New York University Press, 1998) (‘Vanderham’) 11–12, 167.

9 New York Trust Co. v. Eisner, 256 U.S. 345 (1921).

1. Margaret Anderson’s Gospel of Beauty Meets John Quinn

Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were extraordinary women. Together they were the high-octane fuel that powered one of the early twentieth century’s most influential journals for avant-garde literature and art. Anderson was hooked by the genius of Ulysses from the moment she read Joyce’s description of the way Stephen Dedalus processes his view of Dublin Bay: ‘Ineluctable modality of the visible … Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide.’ She immediately told Heap, ‘This is the most beautiful thing we’ll ever have … We’ll print it if it’s the last effort of our lives.’1 Her comment was eerily prophetic. The effort would exhaust Anderson and Heap and drive them from publishing, largely because their lawyer, John Quinn, the Ohio-born son of Irish immigrants, did not believe in their enterprise and was unpardonably prejudiced against them.

There was nothing particularly literary or artistic about the circumstances into which Anderson was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1886. Nonetheless, she was so thoroughly and instinctively committed to the importance of aesthetic experience, and believed so strongly in her own judgment, that at the age of five she refused to ‘correct’ her handwriting because she knew it was beautiful, and ‘was glad to make a conversation’, as she later wrote, ‘in which I could use the word beautiful’.2 After three years at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, she departed for a brief stint at home before concluding, ‘I really couldn’t see this as my life, which was to be beautiful as no life had ever been.’3 She moved to Chicago and employment as a book reviewer for a religious magazine founded by Cyrus McCormick, neatly transforming profit from the mechanical harvester into her words of appreciation for literature.

In 1914, at the age of twenty-seven, Anderson founded The Little Review in order to satisfy her need for what she described as ‘inspired conversation’.4 Conversation was no idle pastime for Anderson and her circle. Rather, it was exercise of the human mind at its creative heights. Anderson’s description of how and why she conjured this remarkable magazine out of her own imagination tells much about her devotion to conversation. Awakening in the night feeling depressed because life was not satisfying her demand that it ‘be inspired every moment’, she divined the need to ‘have inspired conversation every moment’. Most people, she felt, lacked the stamina and time for conversation. The solution came in a flash: ‘If I had a magazine I could spend my time filling it up with the best conversation the world has to offer.’ Her immediate decision to start such a magazine was rewarded with deep sleep.5

An essay she wrote a year later explained that the impetus to this almost mystical experience was a lecture at Maurice Browne’s Little Theatre by John Cowper Powys, a British-born novelist, critic and lecturer, who was descended from the poet William Cowper. Powys’s lecture drew Anderson’s attention to the writings of Walter Pater, founder of the Aesthetic Movement that grew up around his famous dictum that ‘success in life’ is to achieve ‘some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement that is irresistibly real and attractive’ and ‘to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame’.6 Pater’s ideas infused popular lectures in the United States by Oscar Wilde and William Butler Yeats, both of whom emphasized the role of the arts in inspiring a life lived consciously as a performance. Drawing on Wilde, Yeats proclaimed that ‘Active virtue, as distinguished from the passive acceptance of a current code is … theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask.’7 For Yeats, performance of an imagined self was ‘the condition of arduous full life’. These ideas were alive in the creatively fertile atmosphere of Chicago as Anderson’s concept of her magazine percolated. Her memoir tells of conversations about ‘living like the hard gem-like flame’ at soirées attended by Floyd Dell, later the influential editor of The Masses, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and Powys himself.8

Her editorial in the debut issue of The LittleReview, entitled ‘Announcement’, expressly invokes Pater as an exemplar of the creative character of criticism, and is itself an instance of Pater’s aesthetic.9 Addressing her reader as someone who has ‘read poetry with a feeling that it was your religion, your very life’, Anderson presents her magazine as an antidote to a materialistic society in which ‘we live too swiftly to have time’ to appreciate the ‘glorious performance’ of life. Anderson espouses the idea of life as a performance in which people can transform themselves if inspired to do so. She argues that ‘everybody is given at least his chance to act’, and we have the power to choose how to approach the role: we may do our simple best with the part we are assigned, or ‘change our “lines” if we’re inventive enough to think of something better’, or even ‘boldly accost the stage manager, hand back the part he’d cast for us, and prove our right to be starred’. The impetus to rewrite one’s part in life, she says, is ‘eager panting Art’, which, ‘treading on Life’s heels … shows us the wonder of the way as we rush along’. Sounding the note that her publishing partner Jane Heap would later echo on the eve of their trial, Anderson declares that the magazine will find life-enhancing art in books because ‘Books register the ideas of an age; that is perhaps their chief claim to immortality.’ These foundational convictions will turn out to have real consequences: when Anderson and Heap risk jail to publish Ulysses, they will not be courting some ephemeral notion of beauty, but embracing art as the path to lives performed with depth and intensity.

Aware of the risks she was taking by publishing cutting-edge literature in a society still dominated by Victorian sexual mores, Anderson declares in her opening salvo that because the magazine ‘is the personal enterprise of the editor, it shall enjoy that untrammeled liberty which is the life of Art’. Expressing pride in ‘our youth’, enthusiasm and courage, she proclaims an editorial philosophy ‘that all beautiful things make a place for themselves sooner or later in the world’, and hopes aloud that the magazine will ‘be very beautiful!’

The spirit that marked the beginning of TheLittle Review was captured by one of the poets it published, Eunice Tietjens, who wrote that the ‘adventure’ in Chicago’s art scene was Margaret Anderson:

In her severe black suit and little black hat, under which her blonde hair swept like a shining bird’s wing, she stood pouring out such a flood of high-hearted enthusiasm that we were all swept after her into some dream of a magazine where Art with a capital A and Beauty with a still bigger B were to reign supreme, where ‘Life Itself’ was to blossom into some fantastic shape of incredible warmth and vitality.10

Anderson was able to accept her own beauty unreservedly: ‘It would be unbecoming of me’, she later wrote, ‘not to know that I was extravagantly pretty in those days …’11 She could recognize that her beauty was extravagant – even disgusting12 – because she realized it was the outer garment of her inner resolve. Her friend Janet Flanner captured this dynamic years later in an elegiac New Yorker obituary, recalling:

Her profile was delicious, her hair blonde and wavy, her laughter a soprano ripple, her gait undulating beneath her snug tailleur. The truth was that within her lay the mixture and mystery of her real consistence, in no way like her exterior. Her visible beauty enveloped a will of tempered steel, specifically at its most resistant when she was involved in argument which was her favorite form of intellectual exercise …13

This potent combination served Anderson well as she embarked on the daunting task of raising capital for a magazine that existed only in her nocturnal imagination. On a train trip to New York she improbably raised $450, securing ads from Houghton Mifflin and Scribner’s, and enjoying a chance encounter at Scribner’s with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who ‘regretted with blushes that his stuff was too popular to be solicited by a magazine of the new prose’.14 Back in Chicago she garnered a $100 contribution to the magazine from Frank Lloyd Wright.15

It was Anderson’s signal achievement to raise sufficient money to fund a magazine that not only served as a vehicle for conversation about beauty in literature and art, but also had what she called in her initial editorial an ‘ardent’ commitment to feminism. An article in the inaugural issue insisted that ‘we feel able to decide for ourselves what we most want and need’ and will no longer let ‘husbands, fathers and brothers decide for us just what it was best for us to do’.16 In addition, Anderson, who had studied emerging literature about sexuality by Havelock Ellis and others, was an early advocate of equal rights for homosexuals and lesbians. Her review of a lecture by Ellis’s lesbian wife Edith points out that, ‘With us love is just as punishable as murder or robbery. Mrs. Ellis knows the workings of our courts; she knows of boys and girls, men and women, tortured or crucified every day for their love – because it is not expressed according to conventional morality.’17 Anderson sharply contended that Mrs Ellis’s failure to say this was a failure of responsibility.

Anderson’s fundraising prowess was challenged when, in the magazine’s third issue in May 1914, she praised ‘the anarchist religion’ after hearing a lecture by Emma Goldman.18 True to her own religion of making her life a theatrical event, Anderson enacted the magazine’s financial crisis by living in a tent on the shore of Lake Michigan from May to November with her friend and assistant Harriet Dean, and Dean’s divorced sister and her two young boys. A story in the Chicago Tribune about the ‘Nietzsche colony’ – TheLittle Review was then running an article about the philosopher – generated a stream of contributions.

A surge of unconventional energy flowed into the magazine in early 1916 when a friend of Anderson’s brought Jane Heap to its offices. Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1883, Heap, as Flanner put it, was ‘an impressive-looking woman of Norwegian ancestry, whose father had been an alienist and the head of an asylum in the Middle West’. Heap found the company of the insane ‘instructive’ and was deeply interested in their ‘irrationalities and imaginations’.19 She had come to Chicago to enroll in the Art Institute, then taught at the Lewis Institute, and became a member of Browne’s Little Theatre, another manifestation of the idea that amateurs pursuing their love of the arts could perform their lives more intensely and with a greater sense of fulfillment.20 Heap was every bit as committed as Anderson to the idea of beauty as an essential component of a life well lived. ‘I know that if everyone felt Beauty strongly,’ she wrote to a lifelong friend, ‘felt that everything beautiful was god [sic] and all things not beautiful not God. That woman was the nearest Symbol for Beauty. If one could see this – there would be no sin, or squalor, or unhappiness in the whole world.’21

The theme of ‘conversation’ that had engendered Anderson’s magazine also served as a metaphor for her relationship with Heap, which she explained by saying she enjoyed one of Heap’s caustic remarks so thoroughly that ‘I felt that I could never henceforth dispense with Jane Heap’s frivolity.’22 They became partners in living and publishing, with Heap contributing idiosyncratic essays and trenchant reviews of books, plays and art under her distinctive and diminutive ‘jh’ by-line. Anderson later singled out the last lines of the first paragraph of Heap’s review of Joyce’s play Exiles as an example of Heap’s lucidity, commenting that it showed an understanding of the play superior to Joyce’s:

Margaret Anderson. (Attributed to E.O. Hoppé. Courtesy Curatorial Assistance, Inc./E.O. Hoppé Estate Collection and Professor Mathilda Hills for the Anderson Estate, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Archives Department)

There are people, a few, always the artist I should say, who inspire such strong love in all who know them that these in turn become inspired by love for one another. The truth of the matter is that such a person is neither loved nor lover but in some way seems to be an incarnation of love, possessing an eternal element and because of it a brooding, a clairvoyance of life, and a disdain. In other people he breeds a longing akin to the longing for immortality. They do not love him: they become him. Richard is one of these.23

Jane Heap. (Copyright 2015 Curatorial Assistance, Inc./E.O. Hoppé Estate Collection, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Archives Department)

Anderson explained the core of her relationship with Heap by saying that ‘Jane and I began talking. We talked for days, months, years,’ forming a ‘consolidation that was to make us much loved and even more loathed.’24 The magazine’s pages were replete with conversation. One of its distinctive features was the written conversation Anderson and Heap carried on with each other. For example, the Winter 1922 issue, adorned with photographs of Anderson and Heap by Victor Georg and E.O. Hoppé, contained a ‘Dialogue’ between the editors that included Heap’s insistence that ecstasy was not enough:

M.C.A. If we didn’t waste so much time in good conversation we might at least be self-supporting!

jh. Be self-supporting – and take the conversation that goes with it.

M.C.A. Well … it might be called an impasse …

jh. (allows her hand to droop from the wrist in the manner she is glad to know terrorizes her companion)

M.C.A. But thank heaven I can still get some ecstasy out of life!

jh. Why limit me to ecstasy?25

In a section captioned ‘The Reader Critic’, the editors regularly opened the conversation to their readers, whose comments were often met with ripostes from the editors. For example, when a reader complained about the ‘obs[cen]e commonplaces’ of an episode of Ulysses, Heap responded that ‘it is impossible for Joyce to be obscene. He is too concentrated on his work. He is too religious about life.’26

In the same issue, Heap delivered an uncompromising rebuff to a reader who, announcing that ‘I consider myself fairly intelligent’ and ‘have read more than most’, proclaimed, ‘There are some few things I expect of a writer. One of them is coherence. Joyce will have to change his style if he wants to get on.’ Heap’s take-no-prisoners response began: ‘You consider yourself an intelligent, “well-read” person. Did it ever occur to you to read anything on the nature of writers?’ Such reading, she insisted, ‘would help to remove from the mind of the reading public … some of its superstition of being able to put any compulsion upon an artist. All compulsion exists within the artist. … The only concern of the artist is to try in one short lifetime to meet these inner compulsions. He has no concern with audiences and their demands.’27

Anderson was equally uncompromising, but more politic than Heap, meeting an attack on the magazine’s disparagement of ‘all the things I like best’ by inviting further dialogue with the observation that ‘Art is a challenge to life.’28 This craving for self-creation through the art of conversation explains Anderson’s efflorescence into the creator of an immensely influential cultural force. Janet Flanner suggested in her New Yorker profile that Anderson was born ‘a feministic romantic rebel with an appetite for Chopin and for indiscriminate reading’, but that ‘conversation was her real passion’, and the impetus to her becoming an ‘addicted listener’ and gifted editor.29

Anderson’s insistence on a superior level of conversation in the magazine led her to warn readers in August 1916 that publication of the journal would cease if there was no improvement in the quality of manuscripts submitted. Astonishingly, to illustrate the seriousness of her editorial dictum, the first thirteen pages of the September issue were left blank as a ‘Want Ad’, a stratagem that caught the eye of Ezra Pound. The expatriate poet, who had arrived in London in 1908 at age twenty-two, was acting as foreign editor for another Chicago-based magazine, Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, as part of his goal of creating a new Renaissance by melding European and American culture. Pound had already taken note of the daring nature of The Little Review. He had asked Anderson in June to publish two long poems by the Belgian-French poet Jean de Bosschère because they were too long for Monroe and it would be ‘very difficult to find anybody else sporting enough to print them in french [sic]’.30 After reading the sporting Anderson’s blank pages ‘Want Ad’, Pound, already one of the singular voices in modern poetry, was sufficiently impressed that he wrote Anderson asking whether there was any use in his trying to help The LittleReview.31

Pound followed up with a specific proposal that arrived at about the same time that Anderson, Heap, and The Little Review moved their conversation to New York at the start of 1917. Presenting an opportunity whose extraordinary nature can be appreciated only in retrospect, Pound suggested that he be given ‘a place where I and T.S. Eliot can appear once a month (or once an issue) and where James Joyce can appear when he likes, and where Wyndham Lewis can appear if he comes back from the war’.32Stirring beneath the surface of this letter are two extraordinary aspects of Pound’s personality: he was one of the first to recognize the genius of Joyce and Eliot, and he selflessly devoted his tremendous energy to promoting their work and the work of other emerging writers, often to the detriment of his own. Joyce’s work had come to Pound’s attention at the instigation of W.B. Yeats. While the young Pound was staying with the older poet in Sussex during the winter of 1913, and the 31-year-old Joyce was teaching English in Trieste, Yeats recommended a poem from Joyce’s Chamber Music for inclusion in Pound’s anthology Des Imagistes.33 Pound promptly became so vigorous a supporter and promoter of Joyce that even the self-focused Joyce recognized that Pound was a ‘large bundle of unpredictable electricity’, and ‘a miracle of ebulliency, gusto and help.’34

These qualities prompted Pound’s letter to Anderson seeking a place to showcase the work of the writers he was promoting. In exchange for Anderson’s providing such a forum, Pound offered a ‘prospective guarantor’, a ‘Mr X’ who would donate money to pay the contributors that Pound would secure. Mr X was John Quinn, who had offered to pay Pound $750 a year to support himself and pay for manuscripts of writers whose work he sought to promote.35 Quinn was an Ohio-born baker’s son who, after a year at the University of Michigan and law studies at Georgetown and Harvard, became a successful New York attorney with a high-powered corporate and finance practice. Quinn’s progress to the bar navigated a period of great change in American legal education. When he left the University of Michigan to go to Washington as private secretary to President Harrison’s Secretary of the Treasury, a former Ohio governor and family friend, a college degree was not required for admission to most law schools, which functioned primarily as alternatives to apprenticeship for practical training in legal skills.36 Thus Quinn was able to enroll in Georgetown’s two-year night school while employed in the Treasury Department.37 When he arrived at Harvard for additional legal studies after earning a law degree at Georgetown in 1893, he found an institution that had been leading the reform of American legal education since 1869, when the university’s new president, Charles W. Eliot, set out to transform Harvard Law School into an academically rigorous part of the university.38 The dean appointed by Eliot in 1870, Christopher Columbus Langdell, did just that.39 By the time of Quinn’s matriculation, the standard Harvard Law School education consisted of a three-year programme, for which a college degree was a prerequisite, although admission by examination could be permitted.40 Perhaps because he already held a law degree, Quinn, who was admitted in 1893, graduated two years later.41

He quickly developed a successful practice in New York. The most formative experience in the eleven years he spent working for others was his six years as an associate with the firm of Alexander & Colby from 1900 to 1906, during which time he developed a reputation as an able practitioner in corporate, finance, insurance and banking law. He took maximum advantage of an opportunity that presented itself in 1905 as adviser to financier Thomas Fortune Ryan in a contest for control of The Equitable Life Assurance Society of America, whose senior officers included members of the Alexander family. Ryan obtained control of Equitable, and Quinn acquired a lifelong client.42 Quinn struck out on his own the following year, and by 1910 was Ryan’s chief counsel, and counted the National Bank of Commerce, which Ryan controlled, among his clients.

Although Quinn had a number of colleagues over the years, his office was essentially a one-man band. He often had somewhere between one and three colleagues – variously denominated associates or partners – who served at his pleasure. As his biographer put it, Quinn was ‘reluctant to delegate labor or trust, and almost never satisfied by the way a job was done by anyone but himself’.43 As a result, his office remained small and its composition was constantly changing. He was famous for having fired five partners in a single year.44

While making his way in the legal community, Quinn also established himself as a force in New York Democratic politics, particularly within a circle of successful Irish Americans, including, for example, Judges Daniel Colahan and Martin Keough.45 He was an elected delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1908 and again in 1912. Although Quinn distanced himself from the taint of corruption sometimes associated with the New York’s Democratic Tammany Hall political machine, his biographer describes him as a ‘Tammany stalwart’, and he certainly was in the good graces of politicians and judges associated with Tammany Hall.46 This was, of course, natural for an Irish-American Democrat in New York, and there has never been any suggestion of corrupt activity by Quinn himself.

By temperament unable or unwilling to build a large organization around his many talents, Quinn never amassed anything like the large fortunes built by contemporaries in the business world, and had no source of income other than his law practice and the return on invested earnings.47 He devoted the bulk of his income to building an amazing collection of cultural artefacts, including most of Joseph Conrad’s manuscripts, many of W.B. Yeats’s, the draft of Eliot’s The Waste Land bearing Pound’s shape-changing emendations and, not least, the manuscript of Ulysses. Quinn’s cultural interests were not limited to literature. After being introduced to French art by Augustus John during a 1909 visit to Europe, and with his curiosity piqued by reports of Roger Fry’s groundbreaking exhibition of Manet and the Post-Impressionists in London in 1910, Quinn became a major art collector and patron. He bought more than 2500 paintings, drawings, and sculptures, including twelve Picassos, twenty Matisses, and works by Brâncuși, Cezanne, Braque, Rouault, Dufy and Van Gogh. He lunched with Picasso, dined on meals prepared by Brâncuși in his studio, visited Derain, Dufy, and Matisse, and went motoring with Braque. In the judgment of the organizer of the Hirshhorn Museum’s 1978 partial re-constitution of his collection, Quinn had assembled ‘one of the greatest modern art collections of the twentieth century’.48 Because he was buying the new while it was new, and had an astonishing eye for recognizing the promise of modern art in its infancy, Quinn acquired this impressive collection solely with the income from his own work as a lawyer. The cost of his collection was comparable to the approximately $600,000 ($8.1 million in today’s dollars) for which it was sold following his death.49

Quinn was also, as scholar Stanley Sultan put it, ‘an industrious and highly talented sponsor, promoter, unpaid lawyer, agent, and editor’ for a distinguished roster of writers and artists.50 Merging his persuasive powers with his collector’s impulse, he successfully lobbied Congress to eliminate customs duties on contemporary works of art, thereby according them the same duty-free status as old masters. Energetic and connected, he was widely recognized as ‘a moving spirit’ of the New York Armory Show of 1913, technically known as the International Exhibition of Modern Art.51 He was counsel to the organizers of the exhibition, and was ‘the single biggest lender to and buyer from’ the show.52 He was ‘in the thick’ of the organizers’ plans, ‘gave interviews and speeches, sponsored a dinner, [and] stopped by the show almost daily …’53

Henri-Pierre Roché, Constantin Brâncuși and John Quinn, Paris 1921. (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Aline Saarinen papers)

Henri-Pierre Roché, Mme Picasso, Jeanne Robert Foster, and John Quinn lunching at Picasso’s summer home. (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Aline Saarinen papers)

Introducing such experimental forms of painting as cubism, fauvism and futurism, the Armory Show was a transformative event that, as art critic Aline Saarinen put it, ‘jolted the American public as no other artistic event has before or since’.54 When the show moved to Chicago, Margaret Anderson’s mentor Floyd Dell captured its effect on the circle that included Anderson by writing in the Chicago Evening Post that it ‘exploded like a bombshell’ that was not only an aesthetic experience, but ‘an emotional experience which led to a philosophical and moral revaluation of life’.55 Quinn’s enthusiastic involvement with the Armory Show is particularly interesting because of his later ambivalent reaction to Joyce’s innovative prose, which was part of the same modern revolt against Victorianism. The affinity between Joyce’s stylistic revolution and the Armory Show is apparent in both negative and positive comment on the show. On the negative side, the New York Times’ editorial about the exhibition no doubt had in mind the movement in which Joyce would feature prominently when it placed modern art in a ‘general movement, discernible all over the world, to disrupt and degrade, if not to destroy, not only art, but literature and society too’.56 On the positive side, proponents of the show praised it in terms similar to Anderson’s view of the role of art and literature in fostering a life lived with greater understanding and satisfaction. Hutchins Hapgood, a journalist and anarchist, wrote that the virtue of the Armory Show was that it ‘makes us live more abundantly’ and thus ‘will help us all to understand more deeply what happens to us in life – to understand our love and our work, our ambitions and our antipathies, and our ideals in politics and society’.57