Little Review reunion, with

Jane Heap, Mina Loy, and

Ezra Pound in Paris (1921)
Jane Heap
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jane Heap (1883 1964) was an American
publisher and a signicant gure in the
development and promotion of literary modernism.
Together with Margaret Anderson, her friend and
business partner (who for some years was also her
lover), she edited the celebrated literary magazine
The Little Review, which published an
extraordinary collection of modern American,
English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929.
Heap herself has been called "one of the most
neglected contributors to the transmission of
modernism between America and Europe during
the early twentieth century."
[1]
Contents
1 Life
2 The Little Review
3 Gurdjie
4 Work
5 References
6 Further reading
7 Bibliography
8 External links
Life
Heap was born in Topeka, Kansas, where her father was the warden of the local
mental asylum. After completing her high school education, she moved to
Chicago, where she enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago, and continued to take
night school classes there even after she became an art teacher at the Lewis
Institute.
It was while working at the Lewis Institute, in 1908, that she rst met Florence
Reynolds, a student and the daughter of a prosperous Chicago businessman.
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Reynolds and Heap became lovers, in 1910 travelling together to Germany, where
Heap studied tapestry weaving. The two women remained friends throughout
their lives, although they often lived apart, and despite the fact that Heap formed
romantic attachments with many other women.
In 1912, Heap helped found Maurice Browne's Chicago Little Theatre, an
inuential avant-garde theatre group presenting the works of Chekhov,
Strindberg and Ibsen and other contemporary works.
The Little Review
In 1916, Heap met Margaret Anderson, and soon joined her as co-editor of The
Little Review. Although her work in the published magazine was relatively low
prole (she signed her pieces simply "jh"), she was a bold and creative force
behind the scenes.
[2]
In 1917 Anderson and Heap moved The Little Review to New York, and with the
help of critic Ezra Pound, who acted as their foreign editor in London, The Little
Review published some of the most inuential new writers in the English
language, including Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce,
Pound himself, and William Butler Yeats. The magazine's most published poet was
New York dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, with whom Heap
became friends on the basis of their shared confrontational feminist and artistic
agendas.
[3]
Other notable contributors included Sherwood Anderson, Andr
Breton, Jean Cocteau, Malcolm Cowley, Marcel Duchamp, Ford Madox Ford,
Emma Goldman, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Francis Picabia, Carl Sandburg,
Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Arthur Waley, and William Carlos Williams. Even
so, however, they once published an issue with 12 blank pages to protest the
temporary lack of exciting new works.
In March 1918, Ezra Pound sent them the opening chapters of James Joyce's
Ulysses, which The Little Review serialized until 1920, when the U.S. Post Oce
seized and burned four issues of the magazine and convicted Anderson and Heap
on obscenity charges. Although the obscenity trial was ostensibly about Ulysses,
Irene Gammel argues that The Little Review came under attack for its overall
subversive tone and, in particular, its publication of Elsa von Freytag-
Loringhovens sexually explicit poetry and outspoken defense of Joyce.
[4]
The
Baroness paid tribute to Jane Heaps combative spirit in her poem To Home,
which is dedicated to Fieldadmarshmiralshall/ J.H./ Of Dreadnaught:/ T.L.R.
[5]
At
their 1921 trial, they were ned $100 and forced to discontinue the serialization.
Following the trial, Heap became the main editor of the magazine, taking over
from Anderson, and introducing brightly coloured covers and experimental poetry
from surrealists and Dadaists.
[6]
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Gurdjie
Heap met G. I. Gurdjie during his 1924 visit to New York, and was so impressed
with his philosophy that she set up a Gurdjie study group at her apartment in
Greenwich Village. In 1925, she moved to Paris, to study at Gurdjie's Institute
for the Harmonious Development of Man, where Margaret Anderson had moved
the previous year alongside her new lover, soprano Georgette Leblanc. Although
they now lived separately, Heap and Anderson continued to work together as
co-editors of The Little Review until deciding to close the magazine in 1929. Heap
also at this time adopted Anderson's two nephews, after Anderson's sister had
had a nervous breakdown, and Anderson herself had shown no interest in
becoming a foster mother.
Heap established a Paris Gurdjie study group in 1927, which continued to grow
in popularity through the early 1930s, when Kathryn Hulme (author of The Nun's
Story) and journalist Solita Solano (Sarah Wilkinson) joined the group. This
developed into an all-women Gurdjie study group known as "the Rope", taught
jointly by Heap and by Gurdjie himself.
In 1935, Gurdjie sent Heap to London to set up a new study group. She would
remain in London for the rest of her life, including throughout The Blitz. Her
study group became very popular with certain sections of the London avant-
garde, and after the war its students included the future theatre producer and
director, Peter Brook.
Work
Apart from her Little Review work, Heap never in her lifetime published an
account of her ideas, although both Hulme and Anderson published collections of
memoirs, and particularly their memories of working with Gurdjie. After Heap's
death from diabetes in 1964, former students put together a collection of her
aphorisms (both her own and Gurdjie's) and, in 1983, some notes reecting her
expression of some of the key Gurdjie ideas. Some of her aphorisms are given
below:
Never oppose someone with the same center, always oer another
one.
Do not sit too long in the same place.
You are responsible for what you have understood.
Little steps for little feet.
Suppress natural reaction and pay for it later.
We never refuse in the Work.
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Animals are nature's experiments and embody all the emotions.
A cat is all essence. Essence remembers.
All that falls from the wagon is lost.
[7]
References
^ Baggett, Holly. Dear Tiny Heart : The Letters of Jane Heap & Florence Reynolds.
New York, NY, USA: New York University Press, 1999. p 2.
1.
^ Jane Heap was "a spellbinding talkerexpressing ideas eortlessly and creatively
as she went along." Hugh Ford, Four Lives in Paris (North Point Press, San
Francisco, 1987)
2.
^ Gammel, Irene. The Little Review and Its Dada Fuse, 1918 to 1921. Baroness
Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, 241.
3.
^ Gammel, 253. 4.
^ Freytag-Loringhoven, Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-
Loringhoven, Ed. Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2011, 185.
5.
^ Baggett, Holly, ibid. p. 4 6.
^ Jane Heap (http://www.gurdjie.org/baker1.htm) 7.
Further reading
Barnet, Andrea (2004). All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich
Village and Harlem, 19131930. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.
ISBN 1-56512-381-6.
Bibliography
Dear Tiny Heart: The Letters of Jane Heap and Florence Reynolds, edited by
Holly A. Baggett, (New York University Press., 1999)
External links
Potted biography of Jane Heap by Rob Baker for the Gurdjie International
Review (http://www.gurdjie.org/baker1.htm)
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Categories: 1883 births 1964 deaths People from Topeka, Kansas
People from Chicago, Illinois School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni
Illinois Institute of Technology faculty American magazine publishers (people)
American magazine editors Fourth Way Modernism
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