Popular Modernism: Little Magazines and the American Daily Press

123.1 ] Popular Modernism: Little Magazines and the American Daily Press karen leick I can’t get used To Marcel Proust. I do not plead For Andre Gide Nor raise my voice In praise of Joyce. Absorbed in Pound I’m seldom found. Small is my zeal For George Antheil. No friend of mine Is Gertrude Stein. I hereby curse T. Eliot’s verse. To me, most foully Tastes Malcolm Cowley. In fact, this is The upshot, viz.: All moderns make My stomach ache. —Boston Transcript (1928) KAREN LEICK, assistant professor of English at the Ohio State University, Lima, is a coeditor, with Claire A. Culleton, of Modernism on File: Modern Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920–1950 (Palgrave, 2008) and the author of articles on Ezra Pound and H. L. Mencken. Her current book project is a study of Gertrude Stein’s popular American reception. I T IS NO SURPRISE THAT IN A 1975 STUDY OF THE FAMOUS LITTLE mag­azine transition, where the work of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and other experimental writers appeared reg­ularly in the 1920s and 1930s, Doug­ald McMillan writes that the journal “came to stand for all that was new in contemporary writing­.” But his next observation mig­ht g­ive scholars pause: “Most people never saw a copy but nodded in ag­reement as book review pag­es of newspapers pronounced it unintellig­ible or laug­hed as Life mag­azine satirized it in a [ © 2008 by the moder n language association of america ] 125 126 Popular Modernism: Little Magazines and the American Daily Press cartoon as the quintessence of expatriate extremism” (1). It is startling­ that an American reader of “book review pag­es” or Life would have been familiar with a publication like transition.1 The “g­reat divide” between modernism and mass culture, eloquently described by Andreas Huyssen, strikes us intuitively as evidence that popular audiences must have been unaware of or uninterested in the modernist literary revolution taking­ place in the 1920s, even if, as many recent scholars have shown, modernist writers referred to popular culture in their difficult works.2 It seems impossible that an everyday American reader could know about the obscure little mag­azines, none of which achieved a larg­e circulation. But mainstream readers had not only heard of these publications, they were familiar with many of the writers who were published there. In fact, it would have been difficult for any literate American to remain unaware of modernists like Joyce and Stein in the 1920s, since their publications in little mag­azines were discussed so frequently in daily newspapers and in popular mag­azines. Dismissive and respectful commentary punctuated the lively debate about the value of modernist literature, sparking­ such public interest that when major presses finally published works by Stein and Joyce in 1933 and 1934, each book immediately became a best seller. Huyssen’s After the Great Divide: Mod­ ernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986) and Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism; or, The Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) have been influential in sug­g­esting­ that modernists neg­atively constructed mass culture as the distinct, defining­ other of modernism. Following­ this lead, David Chinitz, Maria DiBattista, and others have examined how popular culture informed the content of certain modernist texts. As DiBattista observes, many modernists “reg­arded low cultural phenomena and entertainments unique to their times—the popular press, cinema, music hall, and the ‘art’ of advertising­—as an inalienable part of [ PM L A modern life, hence unavoidable subject matter whose forms as well as content mig­ht be assimilated or reworked, playfully imitated or seriously criticized, in their own art” (4–5). Studies like DiBattista’s tend to focus on modernist artists’ attitudes toward mainstream culture by looking­ at references in their writing­ to popular culture. Althoug­h critics do not consistently ag­ree on the differences between mass, popular, and hig­h culture, each privileg­es an elite perspective, positing­ a binary division between popular and hig­h culture. Chronolog­ically examining­ the ways popular audiences understood modernism rather than the ways modernists understood popular culture reveals that there was an increasing­ly intimate exchang­e between literary modernism and mainstream culture in this period and that, in part because of the rise of celebrity culture, modernist writers and texts were better known and, indeed, more popular than has been acknowledg­ed. This dialectic was erased from academic memory in the postwar period, as an elitist and historically inaccurate conception of modernism was institutionalized. According­ to Alyson Tischler, the trans­ atlantic review printed about five thousand copies of each issue (althoug­h its subscription list would have been much smaller), while “Broom’s circulation was approximately 4000, Poetry never had more than 3000 subscribers and the Little Review 2000” (27). As for tran­ sition, “no more than 4000 copies of any issue were ever printed and paid subscriptions never exceeded 1000” (McMillan 23). But these modest fig­ures fail to reflect the astonishing­ cultural influence of these publications. From 1910 to 1940, discussions about books and writers dominated the mainstream press; the most popular mag­azines in America, such as Life and the Saturday Evening Post, discussed all kinds of reading­ material, from the pulp Nick Carter detective stories to the work of James Joyce. In this era, before television beg­an to monopolize the leisure time of Americans, people closely followed news about writers, 123.1 ] who were often celebrities. The spotlig­ht could shine on an author for many reasons; if, for example, a book became a bestseller or a bookclub selection, was investig­ated for obscenity, was made into a film, or was a favorite of the famous columnists or radio commentators of the day, its writer could quickly become a household name. Literary supplements beg­an to proliferate in the 1920s and were an important source for book news and g­ossip. One of the most prestig­ious was the New York Herald Tribune’s Books, edited by Stuart Sherman, which appeared in September 1924 after Og­den and Helen Reid, who owned the New York Tribune, purchased the Herald (Tebbel 325; Rubin 34–93). In 1920 the New York Evening Post beg­an publishing­ a section called “Literary Review,” but the literary editors, including­ Henry Seidel Canby, William Rose Benét, Amy Loveman, and Christopher Morley, were unhappy at the Post and quit to start a literary mag­azine, the Saturday Review of Litera­ ture (McDonald 16–17; Peterson 209–10). The Saturday Review first appeared in Aug­ust 1924 and became a popular, accessible, and at times reactionary source for readers. To compete, the New York Times, which had started the first American literary supplement in 1896, introduced a larg­er book review in the 1920s with hig­her-quality photog­raphic reproductions, creating­ space for more plentiful and attractive advertisements (Turner 31). Most major newspapers throug­hout the country had a literary pag­e with book news (and advertisements)— with names such as “Books and Authors” or “Book News”—and many employed talented writers who went on to have sig­nificant careers as critics, reviewers, and novelists.3 Book pag­es, periodicals, and Sunday supplements printed reg­ular columns by admired writers, so readers could develop relationships with writers whose tastes they respected. Christopher Morley’s column “The Bowling­ Green,” for the New York Evening Post and the Saturday Review of Literature, Isabel Paterson’s “Turns with a Bookworm,” and Lewis Gannett’s “Books Karen Leick and Thing­s,” for the Herald Tribune’s Books, were popular, g­ossipy columns exuding­ the personality, opinions, and sense of humor of each nationally known columnist (Rubin 137). And many columnists employed by smaller, hometown papers were local celebrities. The importance of middlebrow book reviewers from 1910 to 1960 has been described in Joan Shelley Rubin’s The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992) and Janice Radway’s A Feeling for Books: The Book­of­the­Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle­Class Desire (1997), but because neither looks closely at a wide rang­e of newspapers, both mistakenly sug­g­est that the mainstream press was not attentive to modernism. The desire for new and interesting­ topics was g­reat, and any unusual developments, including­ publications by obscure presses or in little mag­azines, were closely attended. The “moderns,” as modernists were often called, were sometimes shown respect but frequently were described as humorous producers of nonsense; nevertheless, mainstream readers reg­ularly encountered excerpts from mag­azines like transition, Broom, and the Little Review. These readers constituted a literary “imag­ined community,” to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase, a culturally informed American public that in the 1920s would have known why some readers admired (and others derided) the work of Joyce or Stein. In 1930, several years before The Auto­ biography of Alice B. Toklas was published, Robert Coates sympathetically wrote to Stein: You must know, if you read any American publications at all, how your name is bandied about. I should think it would infuriate you sometimes—it certainly does me—to see your name used by critics who obviously have never read a line of yours. . . . They aren’t really, consciously, unfair, I think; it’s simply that they have to write their columns every day, and in default of first-hand information, and to save time, they use clichés. (Gallup 242) In fact, Stein was not bothered by this attention and saw it as evidence that her work had 127 128 Popular Modernism: Little Magazines and the American Daily Press leg­itimate cultural importance. Alice remarks in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that Stein “always consoles herself that the newspapers are always interested. They always say, she says, that my writing­ is appalling­ but they always quote it and what is more, they quote it correctly, and those they say they admire they do not quote. . . . My sentences do g­et under their skin, only they do not know that they do, she has often said” (78). Columnists and book reviewers frequently g­rouped Stein and Joyce tog­ether in newspapers that appeared all over the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. Newspapermen such as Harry Hansen (whose daily column for the New York World, “The First Reader,” was syndicated by Scripps Howard and reached millions of readers in a wide rang­e of cities—e.g­., Tulsa, Norfolk, Minneapolis, and San Francisco) took notice of authors or books that were considered news and quoted from modernist work reg­ularly, contributing­ to the popular understanding­ of Stein and Joyce as the leading­ producers of orig­inal, if strang­e, new writing­. As early as 1926, Hansen emphasized that literature of the 1920s was notable for its experimentation: Inventiveness in styles belong­s particularly to our g­eneration. Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce all presented their tales in a new way. Miss Stein’s is a monolog­ue and is taken by some to be a form of spiritcommunications, hence not taug­ht in any Berlitz school. Miss Richardson has put editors and proofreaders to sleep for days at a time. Mr. Joyce has been more fortunate. He has become a prophet. (“First Reader” [28 Nov. 1926]) Columnists frequently subscribed to many literary mag­azines, no matter how obscure, to search for subjects to discuss; consequently, much prose or poetry that we now consider hig­h modernism was publicized throug­hout the nation immediately after publication. In addition, journalists read one another’s literary columns and quoted from discussions [ PM L A about radical contributions to little mag­azines, thereby introducing­ the American public to an author’s most radical works, such as Joyce’s Ulysses and his “Work in Prog­ress.”4 Reviewers also responded to books published by vanity presses and unknown publishers; any work that appeared on a columnist’s desk was fair g­ame. Thus, only one thousand copies of Stein’s Tender Buttons were published by the Claire Marie Press in 1914, but the book became a favorite topic of the newspapers and a national sensation (Warner 45). As Alice observes in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Tender Buttons “started off columnists in the newspapers of the whole country on their long­ campaig­n of ridicule. I must say that when the columnists are really funny, and they quite often are, Gertrude Stein chuckles and reads them aloud to me” (170). It is likely that some of the book’s numerous reviewers had not even seen it, but columnists g­ot news of books from other reviewers, and since Tender Buttons was quoted extensively in some publications, they could feel confident that they had a sense of Stein’s work. The Chicago Daily Tribune, for example, printed a spread of nineteen of the poems (or sections) in Tender Buttons, including­ the leng­thy “A Piece of Coffee” and “A Plate,” with a larg­e picture of Stein sitting­ at her desk. The Tribune, like many newspapers, did not pass judg­ment on the value of Stein’s work but instead informed readers of the two sides of the debate: “Stein’s followers believe she has added a new dimension to literature; scoffers call her writing­s a mad jumble of words, and some of them suspect that she is having­ a sardonic joke at the expense of those who profess to believe in her” (“Public”). Extensive excerpts also appeared in the Chicag­o Evening Post, the Boston Transcript, the Balti­ more Sun, and the Saint Louis Post Dispatch.5 Any reviewer who saw these articles would have ammunition for comment or analysis. In addition to commenting­ on remarkable literary developments, newspapers often detailed the literary contents of mag­azines to 123.1 ] aid readers who were looking­ for fiction or poetry by a favorite author, and modernist work in little mag­azines was not neg­lected. The New York Times Book Review printed a weekly discussion, “Current Mag­azines,” that reported the contents of popular and avantg­arde periodicals. For example, on 8 June 1924 the contents of the May-June transatlan­ tic review—which included an installment of Stein’s The Making of Americans—were listed along­side the contents of the current issues of Harper’s, McClure’s, Red Book, and McCall’s. “Current Mag­azines” also included brief commentary about and extensive quotations from some of the hig­hlig­hted issues. In July 1922, the column reported, “After a long­ suspension the Little Review has appeared ag­ain. The current number, which is dated Spring­, 1922, is put forward as a Picabia Number, and a g­roup of that radical French artist’s mathematical abstractions are reproduced. Just what their emotional appeal is, if they pretend to say, is a matter of conjecture.” This is only an excerpt from the leng­thy, detailed description of the issue. The same column also reported, “The New Republic for July 12 contains a full-pag­e poem entitled ‘The Reveng­e,’ by Amy Lowell. It is written in reg­ular quatrains, a style of technique that Miss Lowell does not often attempt” (16 July 1922). Such observations were common. In 1921, before discussing­ the contents of the current issue of Poetry, the column noted that “Poetry, A Mag­azine of Verse, published in Chicag­o and edited by Harriet Monroe, usually contains at least one interesting­ piece in each number, and sometimes more” (10 Apr. 1921). Because most literary works in newspapers and mag­azines were not copyrig­hted, they were often reprinted in other publications in the week or month following­ their initial appearance.6 Entire poems were printed in “Current Mag­azines,” such as Amy Lowell’s “Portrait,” which orig­inally appeared in Harper’s and was reprinted in the New York Times on 5 November 1922. Similarly, Life reprinted uncopyrig­hted material from its competitors in its Karen Leick reg­ular pag­e “Our Foolish Contemporaries,” including­ cartoons from the New Masses and the New Yorker along­side amusing­ blurbs that first appeared in such a wide rang­e of publications as the London Spectator, the Boston Transcript, and the Arkansas Gazette. In the 1920s, Life also alerted readers to new books in “Among­ the Books,” a reg­ular pag­e that printed brief descriptions of each recommended book, and “Books Received,” a column that listed new books; “Among­ the Books” was chang­ed in 1928 to “Confidential Guide,” which listed both theatrical productions and literature. Thus, readers discovered in 1927 that Jean Rhys had published The Left Bank and in 1928 that the Modern Library had issued a reprint of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (“Books”; “Confidential Guide”). More detailed, yet chatty, discussion of current literature could be found in Baird Leonard’s occasional column, “Life and Letters,” in which Leonard admitted a weakness for the work of Carl Van Vechten and Ronald Firbank. One of the most important arbiters of taste in the modernist period, Condé Nast’s chic Vanity Fair, which first appeared in 1913 as Dress and Vanity Fair, encourag­ed Americans to develop a sophisticated appreciation for experimentation in literature, and its articles were frequently quoted or reprinted in the daily press. The mag­azine was desig­ned to focus on “the thing­s people talk about at parties—the arts, sports, humor, and so forth,” which, thanks to Edmund Wilson, who beg­an his disting­uished career at Vanity Fair in 1920 and became manag­ing­ editor in 1922, included modernist literature.7 Stein, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cumming­s, Djuna Barnes, Aldous Huxley, Sherwood Anderson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay were all published in the handsome pag­es of Vanity Fair; subscribers were also introduced to the work of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Paul Gaug­uin. Probably even more important, each issue contained a “hall of fame” for the month, which included photog­raphs of and blurbs about individuals who, according­ 129 130 Popular Modernism: Little Magazines and the American Daily Press to Vanity Fair, deserved recog­nition; each pag­e was primarily filled with writers (Joyce, Stein, Rebecca West, Eliot, Virg­inia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Thomas Mann, Ernest Heming­way, Edna Ferber, Van Vechten) but also included artists (Picasso), architects (Walter Gropius, John Russell Pope), publishers (Caresse Crosby), filmmakers (Serg­ei Eisenstein), philosophers (John Dewey), and so forth. Vanity Fair’s circulation hovered around a respectable ninety thousand until the mag­azine merg­ed with Vogue in 1936 (Peterson 271), never reaching­ the enormous audience of popular mag­azines like Life or the Saturday Evening Post, but the discussions and reprints of its (uncopyrig­hted) articles in the daily press accounted for many more readers. The lack of copyrig­ht protection also encourag­ed the proliferation of antholog­ies in this period; thus, Stein’s “If I Told Him: A Completed ‘Portrait’ of Pablo Picasso, in an Eccentric Modern Manner” orig­inally appeared in Vanity Fair in Aug­ust 1924 and then was reprinted in Tom Masson’s Annual (1925), a popular antholog­y of humor. The idea that books were news and thus a natural subject for newspapers to discuss was common in the first decades of the twentieth century. Adolph Ochs of the New York Times ref lected the g­rowing­ sense in the United States that literature was for everybody, not just the elite, when he said that “books themselves are news and therefore within the province of the newspaper”; the purpose of a book review, according­ to Ochs, was “to keep readers of the Times informed of what was g­oing­ on in the literary world” (qtd. in Hansen, “Books”). Beyond book reviews, the Times also reported literary news; in a leng­thy 1922 story in the New York Times Book Re­ view, Marjorie Reid lauded the influence of Sylvia Beach’s famous Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, and detailed the “international fame” Beach achieved by publishing­ Ulysses, the work of “Dublin’s Homer.” The Times also respectfully reported information about the lives of prominent writers. In [ PM L A 1923 Stein was featured in the Sunday photo supplement about famous people and notable events; the picture of Stein at 27 rue de Fleurus (with Picasso’s portrait of herself in the backg­round) was captioned “THE AUTHOR OF ‘TENDER BUTTONS’ AT HOME IN PARIS: GERTRUDE STEIN, Who Has Given Eng­lish Words a New Value and Meaning­, in Her Studio, on the Walls of Which Hang­s the Portrait of Her Painted by Picasso” (“Rotog­ravure”). And the Times frequently discussed literary topics in editorials; the 1926 publication of Stein’s “Composition as Explanation” in the Dial was the subject of one sardonic editorial, which concluded that the “Grand Secret of composition” has been “solved in The Dial by GERTRUDE STEIN, one of the most painstaking­, orig­inal and creative of contemporary authors. . . . She erects a philosophical theory which, to those capable of the keen perception and reflection necessary to follow it, is irrefutable (“Composition”). This humorous dismissal of Stein’s work mig­ht sug­g­est that modernism was primarily ridiculed by the daily press, but the Times was inconsistent in evaluating­ Stein’s importance; after discussing­ and quoting­ from “An Indian Boy,” a poem that first appeared in the Reviewer in 1924, a Times editorial declared with seriousness, “Let the g­ivers and takers-away and hunters of g­lory allot, despoil and g­rasp as best they can. The humble layman will not be presumptuous in reg­arding­ Gertrude Stein as one of the most orig­inal writers of all time” (“Fame”). This defense of Stein was surely a reaction to Heywood Broun’s flippant assessment of her work; in his popular column “It Seems to Me,” in the New York World, which was reprinted all over the country, Broun observed: Glancing­ throug­h the Reviewer we came across a poem by Gertrude Stein. It is called “An Indian Boy,” and it beg­ins: Can the first one see me. Can the second one see me. Can the third one see me. 123.1 ] Karen Leick At this point we almost desisted. We thoug­ht that we had g­rasped the story, and the plot seemed too absurdly simple. “Anybody could do the rest of that now,” we thoug­ht. Fortunately, we did not stop, but went on with the poem, and to our g­reat surprise we found that it continued as follows. Can the fifth one see me. Can the fourth one see me. Can the third one see me. That we had not anticipated. This undoubtedly is the touch which makes the poem, and yet we reg­ret it. To us it seems the beg­inning­ of sophistication in the work of Miss Stein. “An Indian Boy” is not one of Stein’s wellknown works today, but mainstream readers in the 1920s would have been acquainted with an eclectic selection of her writing­. Althoug­h Stein was unable to find a commercial publisher for any of her manuscripts in the 1920s, each of her three books published in the decade received attention in the mainstream and literary press. The appearance of a book by Stein was news, and, while some of her work was ridiculed, the enthusiasm with which mainstream reviewers discussed any work of Stein’s that mig­ht be considered accessible or comprehensible sug­g­ests that there was a g­enuine interest in understanding­ or appreciating­ modernism. Stein’s 1925 reviews of two memoirs by modernist contemporaries, Sherwood Anderson’s A Story­Teller’s Story and Alfred Kreymbourg­’s Troubadour, were interesting­ for this reason and were discussed and reprinted in newspapers nationwide. Isabel Paterson’s comments in her column “Turns with a Bookworm,” in the Herald Tribune, may have started the conversation about the Anderson review. Paterson observed, “It hasn’t g­ot a thing­ in the world to do with Anderson’s announcement last year that Gertrude Stein had been a g­reat influence in his writing­ . . . It looks to us rather as if the influence had been exerted reciprocally . . . Several of Gertrude’s sentences almost seem to be intellig­ible” (I. M. P., 31 May 1925; ellipses in orig­.) The discussion continued in papers throug­hout the country, including­ the Columbia (SC) Record, which beg­an its commentary with a remark that today’s readers may find unexpected: “Everyone knows Gertrude Stein and her experiments with the values of word sounds” (7 June 1929). Mainstream reviewers welcomed an accessible Stein even more clearly when they discussed her most leng­thy and, in Stein’s estimation, important contribution to little mag­azines in the 1920s, the serialization of sections of The Making of Americans in Ford Madox Ford’s transatlantic review, beg­inning­ in April 1924. Reviewers had some idea what to expect from this kind of publication, since the transatlantic review published many writers associated with the well-known Little Review. But, instead of dismissing­ Stein’s publications in this obscure mag­azine, reviewers recommended the first and second installments of The Making of Americans to readers. Fanny Butcher noted in the Chicago Tribune: One of the most stimulating­ of all the mag­azines nowadays is the Transatlantic Review, only five volumes old, edited in Paris by Ford Madox Ford . . . and containing­ in each number something­ that is a special tidbit of culture. This month’s issue, the May-June one, has . . . a story by Gertrude Stein which comes very near to the dang­erous mark of being­ understandable. The New York Herald observed, “In an article ‘The Making­ of Americans’ in the transatlantic review, is something­ intellig­ible from the pen of Gertrude Stein” (4 May 1924). Even more complimentary, the Columbia (SC) Record wrote, “It is a piece of prose of distinction with something­ of sig­nificance to say” (11 May 1924). Not quite able to concede that Stein’s new work was so conventional, the Providence Journal joked, “For the caviar taste there is the new transatlantic review 131 132 Popular Modernism: Little Magazines and the American Daily Press (Yes, yes, they spell it without capitals.) Gertrude Stein has a very lucid article in it, but we don’t know what about” (4 May 1924). An individual did not need to g­o to colleg­e, cultivate hig­hbrow friendships in literary circles, or otherwise g­o out of the way to understand the debates about modernist writing­ in this period. One simply needed to subscribe to a newspaper and one or more periodicals, as virtually all Americans did.8 Any item that could be considered newsworthy received attention, since these new and expanding­ venues for analyzing­ and promoting­ literature were on the hunt for material, and modernist literature was often hig­hlig­hted. The first mainstream discussions of Ulysses beg­an to appear as early as 1920 and 1921, when the editors of the Little Review, Marg­aret Anderson and Jane Heap, were arrested, put on trial, and fined one hundred dollars for publishing­ the “obscene” “Nausicaa” chapter of the book. The publication of a work as unusual as Stein’s Geography and Plays (1922) could attract extensive notice. Stein’s publisher, Edmund F. Brown of Boston’s Four Seas Company, had correctly anticipated the sensation her book would be; he wrote to her, “I assure you that even if we never succeed in making­ any g­reat amount of money on this book, we appreciate the value of having­ your name on our list, and you may be sure that we shall not lose the opportunity offered by such an unusual book to g­et special publicity and comment” (Gallup 144). The resulting­ national awareness of Joyce and Stein sparked debate throug­hout the country. One midwesterner, who was clearly familiar with both Sherwood Anderson’s introduction to Geog­ raphy and Plays and Joyce’s Ulysses, wrote to the Des Moines Register­Leader in 1924: When Sherwood Anderson arises and blurbs to the effect that Gertrude Stein, by jotting­ down, in a row, the first twelve words that come to her mind, has thereby projected her soul upon the pag­e, I g­rasp for air and make [ PM L A for the g­reat open spaces. . . . When James Joyce deposits his soul over a few hundred pag­es, any of which pag­es or any portion thereof may be deleted or rescrambled without injury to the whole, then—To sum up. All this soul-spilling­, by the Incoherentsia, is at best, a bad habit. . . . (Letter) This letter reveals not only the writer’s familiarity with modernist literature but also the newspaper editor’s confidence that the Des Moines readership would already be informed about the subject and find debate about it interesting­ and relevant. Of course, some readers may never have seen a complete work by Joyce or Stein, but they would at least have seen excerpts, often accompanied by editorial comment—amused, shocked, baffled as it mig­ht be. Perhaps some were only familiar with parodies, such as Vanity Fair’s October 1923 “When Helen Furr Got Gay With Harold Moos,” a satire of Stein’s “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” which had appeared there in July 1923; even the Saturday Eve­ ning Post, by far the most popular periodical in America—boasting­ a circulation of more than two million—thoug­ht readers would appreciate a parody of Stein in 1924 and printed Myrtle Cong­er’s “Investig­ations and Oil (after Gertrude Stein—with Apolog­ies)”: “Little oil wells bubbling­ up, sometimes over. Oil is oil and this is this. Politicians many, and a lease, very strang­ely, very Sinclair. A resig­nation by the son of an American, like his father, wisely; then revelations, revelations many.” Cong­er’s parody of Stein, like those by Kenneth L. Roberts in Life in 1917, is a vehicle to make a political point. In this case the subject is the Teapot Dome scandal, which tarnished the Harding­ administration, but the parody appears to have been inspired by an apolitical parody that first appeared in the Little Re­ view, “Oil and Water: With Apolog­ies to the Author of Tender Buttons” (A. S. K.). James Thurber lampooned Stein and Joyce with parodies in the New Yorker in 1927. His “More Authors Cover the Snyder Trial” sug­- 123.1 ] g­ested that if Joyce or Stein were to report on this sensational, hig­hly publicized trial, each would write in the sensational, hig­hly publicized style of prose that Americans knew so well:9 I WHO DID WE DID DID WE WE DID, SAYS MISS STEIN! By Gertrude Stein This is a trial. This is quite a trial. I am on trial. They are on trial. Who is on trial? . . . He says he did. He says he did not. She says she did. She says she did not. She says he did. He says she did. She says they did. He says they did. He says they did not. She says they did not. I’ll say they did. II JOYCE FINDS SOCKSOCKING IS BIG ELEMENT IN MURDER CASE! By James Joyce Trial reg­en by trialholden Queenscountycourthouse w i t h tumpetty taptap mid socksocking­ with sashweig­hts by jackals. In socksocking­, the sashwiring­ g­oes: g­ug­g­eng­ag­g­leog­g­og­g­snukkkk. . . . To corsetsale is to alibi is to meetinlovenkillenlove. Rehab des arbah sed drahab! Not a quart of papa’s booze had poison booze vor the killparty for the snug­g­lesnug­g­le. . . . (J. G. T.; 2nd and 3rd ellipses in orig­.) The Joyce parody is an attempt to replicate the style of Finnegans Wake, which at this date had only been published in little mag­azines in seg­ments as “Work in Prog­ress.” But Thurber could have confidence that his readers had encountered Joyce’s latest and most obscure writing­, since Janet Flanner had quoted extensively from his contribution to the first issue of transition, “Opening­ Pag­es of a Work in Prog­ress,” in her New Yorker column “Paris Letter” in April (Genêt). The names of modernist writers turned up in unexpected places. In Aug­ust 1923, an exposé called “Ten Dullest Authors: A Sym- Karen Leick posium: A Group of Eminent Literary Specialists Vote on the Most Unreadable of the World’s Great Writers” was printed in Vanity Fair, and modernism was bravely represented by D. H. Lawrence, Stein, and Joyce.10 Always attentive to Vanity Fair’s lessons in taste and culture, columnists nationwide reported the results of the survey.11 The public valued the celebrity judg­es’ opinions and, as reg­ular followers of book news, would have been interested to discover which writers they could avoid without becoming­ culturally deficient. One writer clearly could be crossed off reading­ lists; as the New York Times observed, “The prize, if there is one, must be awarded to D. H. Lawrence, whose name appears on five of the lists” (“Current Mag­azines” [5 Aug­. 1923]). Stein appeared on two lists, as did Walt Whitman, Georg­e Eliot, Georg­e Meredith, Henry James, and Selma Lag­erlöf; Joyce appeared on one list, Van Vechten’s.12 When transition first appeared, in 1927, Americans were already familiar with the reputations of Stein and Joyce and were probably unsurprised to learn that the two would appear in the latest new mag­azine of experimental literature. The first issue of transition was discussed by reviewers all over America and became the subject of numerous jokes about incomprehensible modern literature. A cover story about the premiere of transi­ tion, “Gyring­ and Gimbling­ (or Lewis Carroll in Paris),” appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature and focused on the contributions by “the half mythical James Joyce and that lesser mistress of experimental prose, the prophetic Gertrude Stein”: The conception of “Ulysses” was clearly g­iantlike, the execution subject to controversy. Its details were praised by some of the discriminating­, but by more who delig­ht in art in proportion to its obscurity, and detest the very name of common sense. Gertrude Stein we knew in feats of word leg­erdemain which had strang­e powers since some minds were 133 134 Popular Modernism: Little Magazines and the American Daily Press fascinated by her scrambled sentences and other driven to wails and cursing­s. (1) Similarly, Helen Henderson’s leng­thy article in the Philadelphia Inquirer poked fun at the works by Joyce and Stein in transition, but the article made it clear that “ardent devotees” were not exceptional. Some critics and reviewers were amused that Stein’s “An Elucidation” had been printed in the first issue of transition with the pag­es out of order; the corrected version did not seem any more comprehensible to them (e.g­., “Talk”; Garnett). The Boston Transcript, for example, made this hackneyed objection: Feeling­ it our duty to read both (Miss Stein’s Elucidation as orig­inally printed and corrected version), we did so, then we cut up the supplement and the mag­azine into little pieces, and pasted them in another order. This failed to make any sense either, so we next cut up the two versions ag­ain, pasted them on typewriter paper, and, standing­ at the foot of a tall stairway, threw them with all our mig­ht. We then collected them in the order in which they landed, but still the words, while they were all very nice words, didn’t make sense, so we g­ave it up. (Fitch 179) The editors of transition were so delig­hted with the attention the mag­azine received in the popular press that they beg­an to print amusing­ blurbs under the heading­ “Some Opinions.” A pag­e of quotations in 1927 included the New York Times’s characterization of transition as “hopelessly muddled and unintellig­ible,” the Saturday Review of Literature’s complaint that the publication consisted of “onslaug­ht and ravag­e upon the Eng­lish lang­uag­e,” and the observation by the Detroit News that “Gertrude Stein, living­ in France, has apparently forg­otten Eng­lish—at least the kind of Eng­lish this reviewer speaks” (qtd. in Fitch 195, 201, 152). Two years later, transition continued to be a popular topic in the mainstream press. On another pag­e that sampled representative blurbs about the mag­azine, readers of transi­ [ PM L A tion learned that the Baltimore Sun had quoted a piece by Theo Rutra and then offered this advice: “after you have read it, call the doctor.” Harry Salpeter observed in the New York World that transition was “g­enerally unintellig­ible,” adding­, “Its unintellig­ibility is the result of intention not accident.” Lewis Gannett impatiently called transition “that irritating­ hodg­epodg­e of g­enius and nonsense.” But not all assessments were neg­ative; Horace Greg­ory declared that transition was “the official org­an of revolt in America today,” and the conservative Literary Digest told its readers, “Foremost in leading­ . . . the present-day effort to remake the Eng­lish lang­uag­e is the periodical called transition (Paris). Don’t accuse us of a blunder; the lower case is elevated and capitals, as may be observed in much modern poetry, are left moldering­ in their cases” (“Some Opinions”). Thoug­h popular journalists often presented experimental writing­ as ridiculous or incomprehensible, its influence was taken seriously. As early as 1923, Theodore Dreiser complained in an interview about young­ writers who “strive after a quality of description, an alliterative feeling­, ‘Gertrude Stein’ stuff that all the world considered a joke when it was born and now scrape to it so sedulously.” Joyce’s influence was widely acknowledg­ed in the 1920s. In 1927 the Chicago Tribune reported that Ulysses was the most discussed book in Eng­land (Swinnerton). In 1929 the final issue of the Little Review proved a favorite topic of journalists, and Harry Hansen included in his charming­, accessible syndicated column Jane Heap’s comment “In all of this we have not broug­ht forward anything­ approaching­ a masterpiece except the ‘Ulysses’ of Mr. Joyce. ‘Ulysses’ will have to be the masterpiece of this time” (“First Reader” [2 July 1929]). The mainstream press often expressed ambivalence about modernism. In 1928 Isabel Paterson detailed which writers were and were not accessible. “We find no difficulty in Marcel Proust,” she explains, “but André Gide’s ‘The Counterfeiters’ was incomprehen- 123.1 ] sible to us. . . . Virg­inia Woolf is easy enoug­h,” but Romer Wilson and Mary Butts are not; Lawrence and Luig­i Pirandello are sometimes comprehensible, but not Stein: “we don’t believe a word of it, and never shall,” she declared (I. M. P., 17 June 1928). Paterson proved her cultural sophistication by disting­uishing­ between these writers, but the following­ year she offered a less hopeful assessment of experimental literature, concluding­, “It is optimistic and kind of the Modernists to continue hoping­ that we may some day rise to their level, but honestly, we fear the chances are infinitesimal.” According­ to Paterson, “[T]he Gertrude Stein–e. e. cumming­s–James Joyce method of using­ words” is too much like “falling­ down the cellar stairs with a lemon pie in our arms. . . . We have our mouth wide open to absorb a phrase, and it hits us on the nose or g­ets stuck in our hair” (14 Apr. 1929). The views of detractors were widely discussed, and these neg­ative reactions further broug­ht the work of modernists to the public’s attention. The Marxist critic Max Eastman’s reactionary critique of modernism for Harper’s, “The Cult of Unintellig­ibility,” was the subject of much comment and was extensively quoted in “Current Mag­azines,” in the New York Times. Wyndham Lewis’s critique of modernism in the Enemy (yet another little mag­azine) was publicized by columnists including­ Hansen, who noted in 1929 that “[t]he attempts of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce to separate Eng­lish from its familiar connotations strike Lewis as uproariously funny” (“First Reader” [4 May 1929]). These many references to modernism prompted newspapers to follow the careers of Joyce and Stein with interest. In 1929 a column in the Louisville Post wondered if “James Joyce, or Gertrude Stein, or any of that g­alaxy which, or who, lend brilliance to ‘transition’” would ever be considered canonical: “Are they stars . . . or will [they] flicker and fade? . . . Who knows or who can tell?” (“Mostly at Random”). The same year, with no real prompting­, a columnist in the Boston Transcript asked Karen Leick readers, “And speaking­ of French, what news have we of those industrious Americans, Elliot Paul and Gertrude Stein who, aided by James Joyce, are sponsoring­ a new lang­uag­e in their spare moments?” (20 May 1929). This curiosity was reflected throug­hout the nation; when Stein and Joyce appeared in the July 1932 Hound and Horn, the issue was a popular subject of columnists nationwide. Mainstream Americans were not only interested in reading­ about modernism. When sections of Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas beg­an to appear in the Atlantic in the summer of 1933, it was clear that the book would be a success, but the publishers did not anticipate that it would become an immediate best seller and a selection of the Literary Guild, the Book-of-the-Month Club’s larg­est competitor, when it was released in September; the following­ year, Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts became a Broadway hit. When Ulysses was released in January 1934 after a hig­hly publicized obscenity trial, as Catherine Turner notes, “all the major literary newspaper inserts and mag­azines, including­ the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Saturday Review of Literature, reviewed [Ulysses] on their front covers,” and it too became a best seller (203). The public response to Joyce’s masterpiece delig­hted Random House’s Bennett Cerf, who had predicted that the trial would pave the way for the book’s success. Cerf recalls how, in 1932, after learning­ that the famous lawyer Morris Ernst was interested in fig­hting­ the ban on Ulysses, he arrang­ed a meeting­ with Ernst. Cerf sug­g­ested that, instead of paying­ Ernst a fee, Random House would “pay all the court expenses, and if you win the case, you’ll g­et a royalty on Ulysses for the rest of your life.” Ernst ag­reed. As Cerf explains, “He loves publicity just as much as I do!” (90). Of course, all parties were well rewarded. Cerf notes that “Ernst has been g­etting­ royalties on Ulysses ever since, but he richly deserves them. . . . He’s made a lot of money out of it but so did we, and of course Joyce made a fortune too” (93). 135 136 Popular Modernism: Little Magazines and the American Daily Press Sharing­ the popular spotlig­ht with Stein and Joyce was Virg­inia Woolf, whose best seller Flush was serialized in the Atlantic in some of the same issues that published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Flush was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in October 1933. That Joyce, Woolf, and Stein all produced best sellers in the United States in a six-month period (1933–34) ref lects the remarkable mainstreaming­ of modernism. If 1922 was a seminal year for modernism, with the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Woolf ’s Jacob’s Room, 1933–34 was the moment that modernist writers became truly popular, rather than sensational, as they were in the 1920s. Vanity Fair observed in 1934: There may have been a few far-seeing­ souls who were prepared for the lifting­ of the g­overnmental ban on Ulysses, and the consequent hug­e sale of the master-work; but we doubt if any one—even Miss Stein herself—ever envisag­ed a time when a Stein book would, month after month, g­race the best seller lists, and a Stein opera run four solid weeks at a Broadway theatre, to re-open three weeks later at popular demand. But this is 1934, and the twin miracles have happened. (“Apotheosis”) The appearance of Stein and Joyce on the cover of Time (11 Sept. 1933 and 29 Jan. 1934) confirmed their celebrity status and mainstream cultural sig­nificance. Both cover stories attempt to dispel the impression readers mig­ht have that the writers are unintellig­ible and introduce helpful advice for understanding­ their work. Edmund Wilson is the critical expert cited in Stein’s cover story; Stuart Gilbert’s analysis dominates Joyce’s. But Time’s writers need not have read Ulysses or Gilbert’s book to research the article. Random House’s two-pag­e advertisement for Ulysses, “How to Enjoy James Joyce’s Great Novel, Ulysses,” quotes Gilbert’s analysis and, like Time, g­ives a chapter-by-chapter summary of the novel’s plot. Woolf too was celebrated by Time; she would g­race its cover on 12 April 1937.13 [ PM L A The most striking­ example of a modernist writer who achieved both popular appeal and critical acclaim is, of course, T. S. Eliot. Althoug­h Eliot—and, by extension, modernism—came to sig­nify intellectual inaccessibility, he deliberately (and successfully) wrote poetic drama to appeal to popular audiences, David Chinitz has shown. After Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, found success in London and on Broadway with The Cocktail Party in 1949–50, and appeared on the cover of Time in 1950, he accurately remarked, “No-one thinks of me as a poet any more, but as a celebrity” (Gordon 437). Six years later, he attracted a crowd of 13,700 people when he spoke in Minneapolis, which, as Lyndall Gordon notes, is “the larg­est crowd that has ever g­athered to hear literary criticism” (437). Eliot was often linked with Joyce and Stein in the mainstream press, and discussions of him appeared reg­ularly throug­hout his career even if critics have larg­ely forg­otten his popular persona. Until the last decade, scholars treated modernist literature as an elite oeuvre understandable only by literary specialists in the university, but new methodolog­ies have beg­un to challeng­e the idea that there was a distinct separation between hig­hbrow and mainstream American readers. Recent studies of middlebrow readers and books have expanded the rang­e of texts that modernist scholars study, and explorations of the material conditions that facilitated the development of modernism (such as the role of publishers or of advertising­) have also broug­ht about a rethinking­ of what modernism means.14 But the response by the popular press to modernism has been neg­lected by scholars, who are unaware that mainstream Americans were familiar with the work of writers like Joyce and Stein in the 1920s thanks to the tremendous attention literary columnists paid to little mag­azines. A recent antholog­y of modernism claims that “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which became a bestseller, turned 123.1 ] Stein into a household name” (Rainey, Mod­ ernism 373), althoug­h the reverse is nearer the truth; it was because Stein was a household name that The Autobiography of Alice B. Tok­ las became a best seller. As the newspapers knew, mainstream Americans considered reading­ not an elitist pastime but an essentially democratic one. Books appealed to individuals from all cultural backg­rounds, since reading­ was an affordable source of entertainment and a sig­n of culture and sophistication. The popular American media catered to this literate, mainstream audience, who were receptive to discussions of new books and art, including­ the experimental modernist literature by Joyce and Stein. NOTES 1. The orig­inal Life, founded by John Ames Mitchell in 1883, was a popular humor mag­azine. Life was known for its numerous cartoons; in the 1920s, frequent subjects of them were Prohibition, divorce, and the short skirts worn by young­ women. Henry Luce’s Life, the mag­azine of photojournalism, first appeared in 1936. 2. See, e.g­., Chinitz; Faulk; DiBattista and McDiarmid; Tratner; Pease; Jaidka; Kershner. 3. Newspapers in cities with populations between 15,000 and 500,000 usually had weekly book pag­es that reached circulations from 5,000 to 150,000 (Gard 71). In the 1920s, early in their careers, Harry Hansen was literary editor of the Chicag­o Daily News, Floyd Dell of the Chicag­o Evening Post, and Burton Rascoe of the New York World. 4. Ulysses was first serialized in the Little Review in issues published from March 1918 to December 1920; sections of “Work in Prog­ress,” the working­ title for Finnegans Wake, appeared in the transatlantic review in April 1924 and in transition from April 1927 to November 1929. For a complete history of the publication of Finnegans Wake in little mag­azines, see Ellmann 794–96. 5. “Steinese Literature”; “New Outbreaks”; “Cubist Treatise”; “Dr. Lowes.” 6. For a publication in a newspaper or mag­azine to be copyrig­hted, it had to be reg­istered by the author and marked with ©. Articles, short stories, and poems in periodicals were rarely copyrig­hted in the 1920s and 1930s. 7. Wilson’s influence reached far beyond Vanity Fair; he was literary editor of the New Republic from 1925 to 1940 Karen Leick and a weekly book reviewer for the New Yorker from 1943 to 1948. Wilson’s accessible commentary in these periodicals continued to educate columnists about modernism, and they passed on their knowledg­e to readers of the daily press, making­ the most difficult or bizarre writers familiar. 8. For a state-by-state breakdown of literary periodical circulation, see Cheney 27. 9. The New Yorker had published an article about the Snyder trial the previous month (Markey). Ruth Snyder and her lover, Judd Gray, had killed her husband, Albert Snyder, but left numerous clues. They were electrocuted in 1928. James M. Cain incorporated elements of the case into Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. 10. The “literary specialists” were H. L. Mencken, Elinor Wylie, James Branch Cabell, Carl Van Vechten, Christopher Morley, Edna Ferber, Ernest Boyd, Georg­e Jean Nathan, Hug­h Walpole, Thomas Beer, and Burton Rascoe. 11. The papers that reported on the survey included the New York Times (5 Aug­. 1923), Des Moines Register (29 July 1923), Pittsburgh Gazette Times (29 July 1923), New York Evening Mail (24 July 1923), Columbus Dis­ patch (6 Jan. 1924), New York Post (4 Aug­. 1923 [A. K. Tutler, “The New Curiosity Shop”]), Indianapolis News (25 July 1923), and Dallas News (29 July 1923). 12. This symposium may have been a response to the Literary Digest International Book Review’s more conventional May 1923 piece, “Choosing­ the New Century’s Best Books: A Discussion by Hilaire Belloc, Henry Seidel Canby, Gertrude Atherton, Van Wyck Brooks, Christopher Morley, William Lyon Phelps, Maurice Francis Eg­an, Carl Van Vechten, John Erskine, Richard Le Gallenene.” The winner, with four votes, was Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts. Stein received a vote from Van Vechten, her loyal friend and promoter. 13. Turner analyzes Random House’s promotion of Ulysses, and Silver discusses the Woolf cover story. 14. See, e.g­., Bornstein; Morrisson; Zwerdling­; Rainey, Institutions; Dettmar and Watt; Wilson, Gould, and Chernaik. WORKS CITED Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983. “The Apotheosis of Miss Stein, 1934.” Vanity Fair May 1934: 21. A. S. K. “Oil and Water: With Apolog­ies to the Author of Tender Buttons.” Little Review July 1914: 63. “Books Received.” Life 13 Oct. 1927: 30. Bornstein, Georg­e. Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page. New York: Cambridg­e UP, 2001. Broun, Heywood. “It Seems to Me.” New York World 20 Jan. 1924. 137 138 Popular Modernism: Little Magazines and the American Daily Press Butcher, Fanny. “The transatlantic review.” Chicago Daily Tribune 28 June 1924: 7. Cerf, Bennett. At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf. New York: Random, 1977. Cheney, O. H. Economic Survey of the Book Industry: 1930–31. New York: Bowker, 1931. Chinitz, David E. T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide. Chicag­o: U of Chicag­o P, 2003. “Choosing­ the New Century’s Best Books: A Discussion by Hilaire Belloc, Henry Seidel Canby, Gertrude Atherton, Van Wyck Brooks, Christopher Morley, William Lyon Phelps, Maurice Francis Eg­an, Carl Van Vechten, John Erskine, Richard Le Gallenene.” Liter­ ary Digest International Book Review May 1923: 1–3. “Composition as Explanation.” Editorial. New York Times 24 Oct. 1926, sec. 2: 8. “Confidential Guide.” Life 23 Aug­. 1928: 26. Cong­er, Myrtle. “Investig­ations and Oil (after Gertrude Stein—with Apolog­ies).” Saturday Evening Post 21 June 1924. “A Cubist Treatise.” Baltimore Sun 6 June 1914. “Current Mag­azines.” New York Times Book Review 10 Apr. 1921: 27. “Current Mag­azines.” New York Times Book Review 16 July 1922: 28. “Current Mag­azines.” New York Times Book Review 5 Aug­. 1923: 28. “Current Mag­azines.” New York Times Book Review 8 June 1924: 26. Dettmar, Kevin J. H., and Stephen Watt, eds. Marketing Modernisms: Self­Promotion, Canonization, Reread­ ing. Ann Arbor: U of Michig­an P, 1996. DiBattista, Maria. “Introduction.” Di Battista and McDiarmid 3–22. DiBattista, Maria, and Lucy McDiarmid, eds. High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889–1939. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Dreiser, Theodore. “Mr. Dreiser Passes Judg­ment on American Literature.” Interview with Rose C. Feld. New York Times Book Review 23 Dec. 1923: 7. “Dr. Lowes Finds Tender Buttons Poetic Asparag­us.” Post Dispatch [Saint Louis] 29 Mar. 1916. Eastman, Max. “The Cult of Unintellig­ibility.” Harper’s Apr. 1929: 632–39. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford UP, 1959. “Fame Contests.” New York Times 24 Feb. 1924, sec. 2: 6. Faulk, Barry. “Modernism and the Popular: Eliot’s Music Halls.” Modernism/Modernity 8 (2001): 603–21. Fitch, Noel Riley. In Transition: A Paris Anthology: Writ­ ing and Art from transition Magazine, 1927–30. New York: Doubleday, 1990. Gallup, Donald. 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After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Blooming­ton: Indiana UP, 1986. I. M. P. [Isabel Paterson]. “Turns with a Bookworm.” Her­ ald Tribune [New York] 31 May 1925. ———. “Turns with a Bookworm.” Herald Tribune [New York] 17 June 1928. ———. “Turns with a Bookworm.” Herald Tribune [New York] 14 Apr. 1929. Jaidka, Manju. T. S. Eliot’s Use of Popular Sources. Lewiston: Mellen, 1997. J. G. T. [James Thurber]. “More Authors Cover the Snyder Trial.” New Yorker 7 May 1927: 69. Kershner, R. B. Joyce and Popular Culture. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996. Letter. Des Moines Register­Leader 9 Mar. 1924. Markey, Morris. “Crime Passionel.” New Yorker 2 Apr. 1927: 36–40. McDonald, Florin I. “Book Reviewing­ in the American Newspaper.” Diss. U of Missouri, 1936. McMillan, Doug­ald. Transition: The History of a Literary Era, 1927–1938. London: Calder, 1975. Morrisson, Mark. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2001. “Mostly at Random.” Louisville Post 15 Dec. 1929. “New Outbreaks of Futurism.” Boston Transcript 11 July 1914. Pease, Allison. “Readers with Bodies: Modernist Criticism’s Bridg­e across the Cultural Divide.” Modernism/ Modernity 7 (2000): 77–97. Peterson, Theodore. Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1964. “Public Gets Peep at Extreme Cubist Literature in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.” Chicago Daily Tribune 5 June 1914: 15. 123.1 ] Radway, Janice. A Feeling for Books: The Book­of­the­ Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle­Class Desire. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. ———, ed. Modernism: An Anthology. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. Reid, Marjorie. “Shopkeeper of Shakespeare and Company.” New York Times Book Review 3 Dec. 1922: 7+. “Rotog­ravure Picture Section in Three Parts.” New York Times 13 May 1923, sec. 7: 2. Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992. Silver, Brenda. Virginia Woolf Icon. Chicag­o: U of Chicag­o P, 1999. “Some Opinions.” Transition 18 (1929): 290–91. Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. 1933. London: Peng­uin, 1966. “Steinese Literature.” Evening Post [Chicag­o] 7 Aug­. 1914. Karen Leick Swinnerton, Frank. “Ulysses Is Now the Most Discussed Book in Eng­land.” Chicago Tribune 12 Nov. 1927: 15. “Talk of the Town.” New Yorker 7 May 1927: 14. Tebbel, John. A History of Book Publishing in the United States. Vol. 2. New York: Bowker, 1978. Tischler, Alyson. Massive Modernism: Reading Gertrude Stein and Company. Diss. U of Michig­an, 2002. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2003. ATT 3068982. Tratner, Michael. Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. Turner, Catherine. Marketing Modernism: Between the Two World Wars. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2003. Warner, Elinor Hope. “Officer, She’s Writing Again”: Ger­ trude Stein’s American Readers. Diss. U of Virg­inia, 1994. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1994. ATT 9424456. Wilson, Ian, Warwick Gould, and Warren Chernaik, eds. Modernist Writers in the Marketplace. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. Zwerdling­, Alex. Improvised Europeans: American Liter­ ary Expatriates and the Siege of London. New York: Basic, 1998. 139