Part 1
THE LITTLE REVIEW
Literature Drama Music Art
MARGARET C. ANDERSON EDITOR
SEPTEMBER, 1916
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Light Occupations of an Editor The San Francisco Bomb Case: What Can a Poor Executioner Do? Robert Minor The Labor Farce Margaret C. Anderson And—— New York Letter Allan Ross Macdougall The Reader Critic Facts About the Bomb The Vers Libre Contest
Published Monthly
15 cents a copy
MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher Montgomery Block SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.
$1.50 a year
Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, San Francisco, Cal.
THE LITTLE REVIEW
VOL III.
SEPTEMBER, 1916
NO. 6
Copyright, 1916, by Margaret C. Anderson
_The Little Review_ hopes to become a magazine of Art. The September issue is offered as a Want Ad.
... “The other pages will be left blank.”
[Illustration: _Light occupations of the editor while there is nothing to edit._]
SHE PRACTICES EIGHTEEN HOURS A DAY AND—
—TAKES HER MASON AND HAMLIN TO BED WITH HER
BREAKFASTING
CONVERTING THE SHERIFF TO ANARCHISM AND VERS LIBRE
SUFFERING FOR HUMANITY AT EMMA GOLDMAN’S LECTURES
[Illustration: _(Continued.)_]
GATHERING HER OWN FIRE-WOOD
SWIMMING
THE STEED ON WHICH SHE HAS HER PICTURE TAKEN
THE INSECT ON WHICH SHE RIDES
The San Francisco Bomb Case
What Can a Poor Executioner Do Against a Man Who Is Willing to Die?[1]
ROBERT MINOR
I am glad that it’s Ed Nolan, Tom Mooney, Rena Mooney, Warren Billings, and Israel Weinberg who are in jail at San Francisco, awaiting death—or _friends_. Not that I want such men and women to meet death, but I wish the friends to be able to come to the rescue, knowing that they are worthy of the best effort that rebel ever put forth for an individual. We are so tired of the revolter who whines when his turn comes to pay. So we can almost laugh with an almost glee in the thought that we shall not be cheated this time; these rebels do not whine.
This is not a McNamara case. The prisoners are not going to “confess.” Even if they wanted to, they’d have to get the prosecutor to write their confession for them, for they did not cause the Preparedness Parade explosion. I know they didn’t, as you would know it had you read the transcript of the testimony on which the Grand Jury indicted them, or if you could observe their open efforts to provide every possible light on their actions.
Dirty Hearst tried to lynch them. So did all the rest. All the rats from the cellar of life—Pastors of the Lord, Broadminded Editors, Illustrious Exceptions, etc., turned tail and ran—or helped in the near-lynching. All except _one Catholic priest_!
They all thought it was 1886, that “the anarchists were to be hanged”—and one doesn’t believe in that _kind_ of thing, you know, and can’t sacrifice one’s great opportunity to good in general—and every skunk would stink alike, so all would be well.
But this is _not_ 1886, and there _have_ been some to come forward, and the men and woman are going to be saved. With all Prominent Persons in their holes, a few unimportant workingmen, between announcements of their own hangings to come, have stirred up some of the labor unions to an extent that you would never believe possible, to do the unheard-of thing to be loyal to their fellow members.
The International Workers’ Defense League, thoroughly discredited, as the papers announce, by having defended every labor rebel of recent American history, is taking contributions to the enormously expensive work. Simply to gather evidence and enlighten the few thousand who are not afraid, and to pay a high-priced lawyer to array the evidence—that is what we want your money for. Send it to the International Workers’ Defense League, Robert Minor, Treasurer, Room 210 Russ Building, San Francisco.
And know that if we lose this fight it will be because a horde of “business men” have been judge, jury, and prosecutor against their five rebel enemies. It will not be because our men have flinched. When Ed Nolan says “the fear of death is the beginning of slavery,” he speaks the spirit of the five. We shall not be ashamed of these.
The Labor Farce
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
I really must say what I think about this ridiculous bomb business.
You will find the facts of the case, about the five innocent people who were indicted and why the Chamber of Commerce wanted them indicted, on page twenty-nine. But what happened after the indictment is more interesting and more horrible to me.
The five victims were put into jail. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and a few other anarchists began a fight for them,—raising money for lawyers, etc. The labor unions began to raise money. After about three weeks of argument and hesitation and won’t-it-be-better-to-go-a-little-slow and is-it-advisable-to-distribute-pamphlets, etc., etc., no lawyer had been engaged and none of the “workers” could agree about what “stand” to take: would it be better to express sympathy openly with the anarchists—(none of the five has ever claimed to be an anarchist, I believe)—or would it be wiser to try to prove they were not anarchists, or would it be safer to get a small lawyer who costs little and is worth nothing or a big one who costs too much and might do something, or would it be more expedient to keep out of it altogether, etc., etc., etc.,—or shall we just do the best we can even if it isn’t much? Do you think there was a single worker with the incredible inspiration to “do the most we can and make sure that it is very much”? I saw Emma Goldman and Berkman brooding over this strange and awful spectacle like two prophets whose souls are slowly petrifying under the antics of their disciples.
Just here some one told me a story. Once upon a time Björnstjerne Björnson, up in Norway, heard of a little French seamstress who was accused of murder in Paris. She was poor and quite unbefriended and there was practically no chance of her receiving justice. Björnson hurried to Paris, took her case, and won it in the French courts, in French, for the simple joy of doing something he believed in.
Can you imagine that happening in America? There isn’t a single labor lawyer in the country who ever does it. If there are any who are willing they are not able; if they are able they are not allowed. C. E. S. Wood tried to do it for Caplan and Schmidt, but the workers themselves prevented him from taking the case. They kept him trotting between Portland and Los Angeles while they decided that it would be fatal to have him come straight out with the fact that it was a labor fight. Sometimes I imagine a young god springing up in labor ranks strong enough to rush in and fight the courts for his people, young enough to devote his life to it, naive enough to do it for an idea rather than for a fee, and ironic enough to do it whether his people want it or not.
But to continue about the bomb. Finally a prominent lawyer was found—one whose name carried enough weight to impress even the important and ignorant San Francisco citizens who were howling about “anarchists.” But the fee he charged before even touching the case was so large that Emma Goldman and the unions could raise only half of it, and the rest was supplied by the daughter of a man whom the workers would call a capitalist and whose money they would repudiate as having been drained from the blood of their class. She not only supplied the money; she said she would stand behind the victims if it took the last cent she had—_not merely because they were innocent_; and the only thing she asked was that the money should be used in a direct and active way and not for the pretending and denying and covering up that characterize all labor fights in this country. Well, I wouldn’t get half so disgusted with labor if it would ever acknowledge that vision is not necessarily a matter of class. It is almost terrifying to watch a labor propagandist think. If he is talking about Henry Ford, for instance, he will sketch the picture of a man who has created a $5 a day minimum wage only by such speeding-up of labor that labor is too nerve-racked to benefit by it; so that Ford becomes a clever rascal who makes labor rich only to make himself richer. Of course Ford is an idealist of appalling and marvelous simplicity, in quite the same position that an anarchist would be whose scheme had begun to work, and no more to blame for the spots in which it didn’t work.
The propagandist can’t think. But for that matter only one kind of mind really does _think_, and that is the artist kind. I mean this: only the artist mind sees that this is the way things happen in the world and refuses to sentimentalize over it or _to do nothing about it_. Here are five labor people misunderstood by “society,” unchampioned by “labor,” and rescued by the bloody capitalist who has neither the limitations with which labor endows capital nor the limitations with which capital endows labor. What fun! And some of the propagandists will feel like “Major Barbara” about accepting that money. Only the artist mind knows that it doesn’t matter where the money comes from: money is money, and it is made of slavery whether it comes from a financier or a coal-digger. Only the artist mind....
* * * * *
Of course the point of the whole business is this: the labor farce isn’t confined to labor: it is merely the farce in which all people contentedly luxuriate. It is a matter of rebellions that never become real.
There is the sixteen-year-old girl living in the midst of a typical American family. Now, no one can live long in such a place without losing his mind—unless he has none to lose. But let the girl try to get out of that hideous hell and the family detectives can have her back in a minute and arrest any one who tried to help her as an abductor.
Such a thing happened the other day in Chicago. It happens every few minutes all over the earth. The only way to get out of such a mess is _to get out of it_—detectives, jails, families and friends to boot. Follow through! Make it real! Your friends can’t afford to be very real: one of them probably has a family to support and the others probably couldn’t stand the horror of being in the papers! But a girl or a boy can stand up to _anything_. If they can’t their old age will find them among the rest of the botched and the weak.
Ed Nolan says that the fear of death is the beginning of slavery. I think it may be that the fear of life is the very beginning.
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[1] The facts of the bomb case in detail will be found on page 29.
And——
There is Frank Harris’s _Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions_—a book that will never disturb Wilde’s legend here, his peace of mind where he has gone, nor his reputation as an artist anywhere.
* * * * *
Chicago—always bragging about having a sooner eye for Art.... And Sokoloff out here in San Francisco.... And the Chicago Orchestra being led on to the goal of music by efficiency like the Germany army getting to Paris.
* * * * *
At the Grand Opera in Paris, in the première of _The Miracle_, an opera by two young Swiss, I saw the great Marthe Chenal, who will sing in the Chicago Opera Company this winter. I have had a creative memory of her for five years. But I wonder what will become of it up against that pinnacle of earthly glory, Mary Garden.
* * * * *
A. C. H. in _Poetry_ has done all that can be done for the new quarterly _Form_. “Form”—that’s a name to start hope and the imagination; and then ... we have a story we’ll print sometime called “The Funny Shape.”
* * * * *
Why so much comment on John Cowper Powys’s _One Hundred Best Books_? Powys should never write anything. People like Q. K. in The New Republic come about as near to getting Powys as they would come to catching a comet. Powys is not for culture-snatchers, matinee girls, or glorifiers of the obvious. He is merely for those possessed enough of their imaginations to fall for a miracle when they see one. Who goes to hear a lecture on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky to find out what Powys thinks of those men? You go—hoping through the gloom of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky to catch a flash of Powys. Powys is the best thing that has come to us—that mad wolf! I always feel sorry for Velasquez that he never had a chance at him.
* * * * *
“Everything is just perfect,” as our Editor so ecstatically says: Paderewski will make three concerts in San Francisco this month.
* * * * *
The Roadside Press is to come out with a Chicago Anthology, a hundred and fifty poems, by Chicago authors. As _Poetry_ would say: “Most of these appeared first in _The Little Review_; and will probably be reprinted without any acknowledgment whatever.”
* * * * *
We have been waiting for what we hoped would be a good comment on Sherwood Anderson’s first novel, _Windy McPherson’s Son_. All we will say now is that it’s so much worse than Sherwood should ever be.
* * * * *
A few years ago you couldn’t talk to any one who wasn’t writing a play. Now you can’t talk to any one who isn’t starting a theatre. If everyone is mad for theatres, who are they that aren’t? Or why haven’t we municipal theatres? One, out of all this, and that in the town of Northampton, Massachusetts; and that isn’t what any one but a town would call a municipal theatre. Sometime I’ll write about Donald Robertson’s idea for a municipal theatre. He is always damned for being an idealist—a sure sign that what he has is an idea.
* * * * *
Rabindranath Tagore is coming back to America to lecture. Go, if you have never seen that slight presence with features drawn of air—with eyes that seem never to have looked out—and let him put that white spell of peace upon your complex futility.
You sometimes wonder why men like Dr. Coomaraswamy come telling us border-ruffians of Art about Ajanta frescoes and sculpture and the music of India. Perhaps they know our homesickness and know that alone we can’t even find the road.
* * * * *
Bernhardt is coming again. Well, that’s all right, too. And those who jeer at her age never could have appreciated her youth. But you, young ones, see her; and have the double joy of seeing her now; and, if you have it in you, you will see her then, too.
At bottom everything in literature is useless except literary pleasure, but literary pleasure depends upon the quality of sensibility. All discussions die against the wall of personal sensibility, which is flesh on the inside and on the outside a wall of stone. There is a way to turn it about, but this you do not know.—_Remy de Gourmont._
New York Letter
ALLAN ROSS MACDOUGALL
_A New Playhouse and a New Play_
I have always felt that the hope of a new spirit in the theatre will come not so much from amateurs and their talking organizations as from the rebels within the theatre and the work they can accomplish. I agree with Gordon Craig when he says that no one has any right to meddle with, and potter about, the theatre who does not know it from the inside. In no other field is there such a gang of busy bodies—old women of both sexes, who have the ignorant reformers talking sense developed to such a pernicious degree. The air is dark with the empty words they belch forth, but from their deeds the world remains light and free. If the regeneration of the theatre from the base influences that now possess it, is to take place it will not, I am sure, be by the work of the drama leagues and so-called “art” theatres. The work of such managers as J. D. Williams and producers like Granville Barker and B. Iden Payne does more for the theatre by the working out of certain ideals than all the talk about those ideals and the jumbling with them by the old ladies’ leagues and the “arty” amateurs. A plague on them all!
In New York this season a new theatre is to be opened. Helen Freeman, who for a time was a Belasco star and later the leading woman with William Gillette, is to own and direct this latest attempt to establish a new spirit in the theatre. With Miss Freeman will be associated a group of six professional actors. All of them, like their director, have ideals which they plan to work for. For the first few months they are to produce one-act things. Among them will be plays by Evreinov, a young Russian not yet “discovered” by this rapacious country; two plays by the Spanish dramatist, Jacinto Benveneto, of whose seventy-five excellent plays not one has yet been given here; plays by other unknown European dramatists; new plays by Zoë Akins, Witter Bynner, Rollo Peters, and other American writers.
Miss Freeman has chosen as a name for this interesting theatre the hour of the curtain rise. It will therefore be known as “The Nine o’Clock Theatre.” Much is expected from Miss Freeman and much from her theatre. Success to it, and to her!
_A New Play_
When I heard that a new fantastic play was to be produced by Arthur Hopkins, and that the scenes and costumes were to be designed by Robert Edmond Jones, I booked seats as early as I could. I remembered the work of Jones in Anatole France’s _The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife_ and his work on the inner scenes and costumes of the Shakespeare Masque. Both were the works of a new decorative genius who had much to give to our theatre that is barren of the work of artists. I expected much of the new play, and lo! what was disappointment was waiting there.
The play first. It is the story of a princess of a mythical land, whose lover has been killed in war and who in the last act joins him. (The play is named _The Happy Ending_). The curtain rises on a dark forest, through which the princess is wandering and posing, and mumbling and moaning to herself. Comes then three Maeterlincian maidens also mumbling and playing chorus to themselves. Exit the mumbling maidens and enter the King and Queen of this mythical land. Mumbleth then these two for a while, till, without any warning, the King bluntly asks the Queen for a child! Yes! Right there in the forest he does it. It’s the last thing one expects in a fantasy, this realistic demand for a son and heir. But that’s a minor point. Like many another thing that happened, it had nothing to do with the drama.
After a dreary scene, in which the wandering princess seats herself on some potato sacks and mumbles to the accompaniment of “yes, princess,” “no, princess,” spoken at half minute intervals by a dull-witted woodsman, the curtain rises on a scene, entitled in the programme “The Hereafter.” What a Hereafter! A bank of sunburnt stage grass: a bilious yellow tree: much amber light. Crowds of children with squeaky voices lolled and pranced about the place. The authors seem to have taken their cue from the old hymn:
Little children will be there, Who have sought the Lord in prayer; In Heaven we all shall meet, Oh that will be joyful!
I can assure you that it was anything but joyful. A sort of stagey joy was evident but not a sight of the real spontaneous feeling. There was a sort of Queen-hostess, who welcomed everyone. I have an idea she was Mrs. God or maybe assistant to St. Peter. She wore an elaborate shiny yellow evening gown; and a set smile after the fashion of the ladies in charge of Y. W. C. A. hostels on earth. A nice, well-spoken motherly sort of person this Queen was, who did her best to make everybody feel at home.
When there was a wreck at sea or a railway accident, many male and female supers waddled their bodies in joyous movement across the stage and laughed and made mouthy noises. Oh, so glad they were to be in Heaven after the shocks they had gone through on earth. It was curious to note that they all entered Heaven with whole bodies and unmessed clothes, these merry wreck and collision victims.
When the curtain rings down on the scene of the Hereafter it does so to the sound of cheering. And why? A whole army has just been annihilated, and to the tune of “John Brown’s Body” their spirits are marching toward Heaven. And so the happy inhabitants of the Hereafter must cheer to think of this influx to their land. After the tawdry Heaven one is refreshed by the beauty of the unnecessary scene, “On the way to the islands of sleep.” They still use rowboats in that land it seems, but as they are rowboats with beautifully lighted innards one doesn’t object very much. One does object, however, to the next scene. It is called “Space.” Imagine Space as a back-drop sprinkled with stars like an old-fashioned frosted Christmas Card. In the middle of this a scarlet circle with the continents of North and South America painted in a muddy brown color. A sorry picture of space to come from an imaginative artist.
The last scene, and the best from the scenic and dramatic standpoint, takes place in the palace of the King. Here comes the princess after having wandered through the forest awake and the Hereafter in a dream, and after falling in some queer kind of fit dies and so joins her dead lover and the rest of the cosmopolitan group in Heaven.
A mess by masters! A very messy mess. A sloppy play to start with. Bad acting to carry it along. Mediocre music and stage setting that seem to have been influenced by the play instead of rising above it. I await with interest to see the work that Jones is to do for the Russian Ballet. He will have his chance to re-establish himself. I’m sure he is artist enough to grasp it.
The Reader Critic
Infantile Paralysis
_D. H., New York_: