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My Thirty Years' War; An Autobiography,
Good Paperback New Horizon Press, 1982. Published 1982. Externally rubbed but otherwise very good. Illustrated in black and white. Softcover, 278 pages. Covers scuffed with some shelf soil, firm binding, clean pages, no names or other markings.. Soft Cover. Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.
278 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1969
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About the author
Margaret Anderson
128 books9 followersMargaret Caroline Anderson, an American, in 1914 founded The Little Review, an influential literary magazine, and edited it to 1929.
She published of the art collection of modern English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929. The most noted periodical introduced Ezra Pound, Thomas Stearns Eliot, and many prominent British writers of the 20th century in the United States and published the first thirteen chapters of Ulysses , novel of James Joyce.
Beinecke rare book and manuscript library at Yale University now preserves a large collection of her papers on teaching of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margare...
She published of the art collection of modern English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929. The most noted periodical introduced Ezra Pound, Thomas Stearns Eliot, and many prominent British writers of the 20th century in the United States and published the first thirteen chapters of Ulysses , novel of James Joyce.
Beinecke rare book and manuscript library at Yale University now preserves a large collection of her papers on teaching of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margare...
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 4, 2008
This is the autobiography of Margaret Anderson, who ran a literary zine called The Little Review for 30 years...from 1899 to 1929. She is abrasive, headstrong, petulant, and pretty much the most fabulously outspoken radical American literary voice I've come across.
It's inspiring, because she lived in gross and utter destitution, and poured every cent that came in to the Little Review. There are some great scenes where she describes having dinner parties with no food and no furniture, ways she and her literary entourage made fun on zero means.
She also describes in detail her encounters with now-famous authors. Hemingway (who she calls Hems), Pound, Gertrude Stein, Carl Sandburg, EMMA GOLDMAN (who adored Margaret Anderson, btw). It's really interesting to read her descriptions of them, how they sounded when they spoke, what they are, how they acted when they were drunk, etc. She provides a portrait of each as a person, which is great to have since most of these authors have since become so famous that they're regarded as being disembodied, mythical "great" authors. She describes how Hemingway was, after all the hype, sort of a wuss - great stuff.
On a personal note, I was first assigned to read this book as part of a class called "American Genre: The Little Magazine" at Vassar. I found it on Amazon but the guy never sent it to me. I got a refund, but I never got the book - so I just bullshitted (bullshat?) my way through class the week it was due.
One of the first issues my professor raised with the book was M.A.'s utter lack of sex and romance in the book. Although M.A. meets a woman named Jane Heap and becomes fascinated by her and obsessed by her, and even though M.A. and Jane live together and run the Little Review for decades, she never explicitly states that they're in a relationship. Nor does she include in her autobiography any scenes of romance or sexual encounter, not even in adolescence. She presents herself as unsexed, a purely intellectual person. My professor wanted to know what we made of this.
At the time, being that I hadn't read it, I sort of went into a "so what? would we care about the lack of relationship details if this was a man writing, or a woman writing about a hetero relationship? are we demanding that she acknowledge her status as Other or else we're not comfortable" blah blah etc. You know. Vassar.
Having read the book now, though, my professor's question echoed in my mind. Was she in a relationship with Jane Heap, and intentionally avoiding discussing it in her autobiography? Once you've read the book, and you've endured her forthrighteness and attitude for nearly 300 pages, it seems unfathomable that she would ever avoiding discussing anything, even if it was a social taboo. In fact, she spends most of the book expounding on social taboos!
So what's the deal, then? My take is that Margaret Anderson truly wanted to be a purely intellectual entity - a person that exists not physically, but in reputation and in conversation. Her prose features endless pontification, philosophizing, pithiness. She talks about ideas first and foremost, and any description of the physical world is in terms of the material's relevance to her ideas. She describes her environment insofar as she considers her poverty necessary to her vision of art. She describes people insofar as their ideas interest her. She resists physicality on every plane. And being that sex and sexuality are one of the most physical realms one can explore in literature, it makes sense that she would omit any details of her sexual relationships... whether with Jane Heap, or anyone else.
It's inspiring, because she lived in gross and utter destitution, and poured every cent that came in to the Little Review. There are some great scenes where she describes having dinner parties with no food and no furniture, ways she and her literary entourage made fun on zero means.
She also describes in detail her encounters with now-famous authors. Hemingway (who she calls Hems), Pound, Gertrude Stein, Carl Sandburg, EMMA GOLDMAN (who adored Margaret Anderson, btw). It's really interesting to read her descriptions of them, how they sounded when they spoke, what they are, how they acted when they were drunk, etc. She provides a portrait of each as a person, which is great to have since most of these authors have since become so famous that they're regarded as being disembodied, mythical "great" authors. She describes how Hemingway was, after all the hype, sort of a wuss - great stuff.
On a personal note, I was first assigned to read this book as part of a class called "American Genre: The Little Magazine" at Vassar. I found it on Amazon but the guy never sent it to me. I got a refund, but I never got the book - so I just bullshitted (bullshat?) my way through class the week it was due.
One of the first issues my professor raised with the book was M.A.'s utter lack of sex and romance in the book. Although M.A. meets a woman named Jane Heap and becomes fascinated by her and obsessed by her, and even though M.A. and Jane live together and run the Little Review for decades, she never explicitly states that they're in a relationship. Nor does she include in her autobiography any scenes of romance or sexual encounter, not even in adolescence. She presents herself as unsexed, a purely intellectual person. My professor wanted to know what we made of this.
At the time, being that I hadn't read it, I sort of went into a "so what? would we care about the lack of relationship details if this was a man writing, or a woman writing about a hetero relationship? are we demanding that she acknowledge her status as Other or else we're not comfortable" blah blah etc. You know. Vassar.
Having read the book now, though, my professor's question echoed in my mind. Was she in a relationship with Jane Heap, and intentionally avoiding discussing it in her autobiography? Once you've read the book, and you've endured her forthrighteness and attitude for nearly 300 pages, it seems unfathomable that she would ever avoiding discussing anything, even if it was a social taboo. In fact, she spends most of the book expounding on social taboos!
So what's the deal, then? My take is that Margaret Anderson truly wanted to be a purely intellectual entity - a person that exists not physically, but in reputation and in conversation. Her prose features endless pontification, philosophizing, pithiness. She talks about ideas first and foremost, and any description of the physical world is in terms of the material's relevance to her ideas. She describes her environment insofar as she considers her poverty necessary to her vision of art. She describes people insofar as their ideas interest her. She resists physicality on every plane. And being that sex and sexuality are one of the most physical realms one can explore in literature, it makes sense that she would omit any details of her sexual relationships... whether with Jane Heap, or anyone else.
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January 12, 2026A Book Owned by F. Scott Fitzgerald: https://static-prod.lib.princeton.edu...
November 7, 2018
An amazing book--there is something astonishing on virtually every page. This is Margaret Anderson's memoir (the first of three, this one written in 1930) of her relentless pursuit of art and meaning as founder and co-editor of the influential Modernist journal The Little Review (1914-1929). Anderson's voice is passionate, charming, judgmental, and funny. She and her partner Jane Heap published--and loved, criticized, and defended--important avant-garde literary and artistic works by a host of international contributors and acquaintances including Emma Goldman, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, and, most famously, James Joyce (the magazine serialized "Ulysses," for which they were tried and found guilty of promulgating obscenity).
Always broke, they sometimes were barely able to get out the magazine, let alone pay rent and eat. Based in, serially, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, and Paris, they relied on good will and intermittent artistic patronage. But they surmounted, and even thrived, on the adversity, cobbling homes out of odd old residences. Anderson even talked her partners and friends into moving into tents on a Lake, Bluff, IL, beach:
"I remember I sat gazing at the camp site and wondered if I had the strength to return to Lake Bluff, present the idea, hear the thud that follows non-acceptance, carefully pull the slower brains into my momentum--argue, explain, illustrate, stimulate, excite, until (after hours thus vividly spent) the "family" would begin to concede that I wasn't crazy. if anyone should ever ask me what I consider the most wearing experience known to mankind--which no one will, knowing that I lie in wait for such questions--I will answer: waiting for other people to act on what I see."
She finally won the argument: "We did it. We were established by the middle of May and we stayed (some of us) until the middle of November.... The next six months were among the most lyrical of my life. I was at my worst--loving nature. The days came and went.... For the first time I could employ this cliche with meaning. The days really did come and go. I watched them." While they lived there, they commuted by train to the city, and contributors like Ben Hecht would come out to visit them in their tents.
Anderson is so exuberant (rambunctious, even) and uncompromising in her enthusiasms and opinions that she's exhilarating but also she must have been maddening, exhausting. She and Heap thrived on arguing. ("By five o'clock in the morning we were unconscious but still talking. Chiefly we talked about ART--not 'aesthetically' (no talk is so callow) but humanely.") In one event, Anderson crossed swords with some guests:
"Everyone was disgusted with me that evening. Even Jane wouldn't rescue the soiree from disaster. Your technique is too infantile, she complained later. I decided to become mature. I would be calm, careful, contained. I would proceed henceforth by the time-honored methods of exposition and comparison, of reason and logic. I decided this, and gave up after the first attempt. The reasonable and convincing procedure gave me no emotional recompense. And since my object in talking is neither to learn nor to convey but to enter into new emotional states, since I can't produce ideas unless they are forced out of me by an emotional explosion, I have gone on all my life being infantile."
Anderson's compatriot writers, artists, and musicians come alive as fascinating people, long before they became icons, as she describes their tussles. Such huge personalities! Some of the most amusing sections describe the outlandish costumes and behavior of the Dadaist artist and poet Elsa Hildegard Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven. She seems to have been quite the show-stopper.
This book has joined the pantheon of my favorite memoirs by people whose creative and critical energy is so intense that they seem slightly insane: Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography, Madge Jenison's memoir of her New York bookstore Sunwise Turn (would she have known Anderson? they were contemporaries--wow, what a meeting that would have been), and Viv Albertine's Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.
I could go on quoting this book for days and days. But here's one last excerpt, as Anderson considers ending The Little Review: "...But I also loved ecstasy. It is well to know your own limitations. For years I would probably not enter that cycle of life in which one puts away childish things. Ecstasy is the best prelude to development--just as Blake was right in calling excess the road to wisdom. It might be five years before I would become an interesting person--that is, one who has emerged from her adolescent admirations. Cleaning the house and addressing envelopes no longer left me feeling unconquerably lyric. People had always said I looked as if I were on a secret errand. (What do you mean--secret, laughed Jane.) But I believed in my errand if not in its obviousness. I also believed in 'the broad and ample movement of life.' Movement implies change."
One more note: I read the 1930 hardback version of this book, which is beautiful and a pleasure to hold.
Always broke, they sometimes were barely able to get out the magazine, let alone pay rent and eat. Based in, serially, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, and Paris, they relied on good will and intermittent artistic patronage. But they surmounted, and even thrived, on the adversity, cobbling homes out of odd old residences. Anderson even talked her partners and friends into moving into tents on a Lake, Bluff, IL, beach:
"I remember I sat gazing at the camp site and wondered if I had the strength to return to Lake Bluff, present the idea, hear the thud that follows non-acceptance, carefully pull the slower brains into my momentum--argue, explain, illustrate, stimulate, excite, until (after hours thus vividly spent) the "family" would begin to concede that I wasn't crazy. if anyone should ever ask me what I consider the most wearing experience known to mankind--which no one will, knowing that I lie in wait for such questions--I will answer: waiting for other people to act on what I see."
She finally won the argument: "We did it. We were established by the middle of May and we stayed (some of us) until the middle of November.... The next six months were among the most lyrical of my life. I was at my worst--loving nature. The days came and went.... For the first time I could employ this cliche with meaning. The days really did come and go. I watched them." While they lived there, they commuted by train to the city, and contributors like Ben Hecht would come out to visit them in their tents.
Anderson is so exuberant (rambunctious, even) and uncompromising in her enthusiasms and opinions that she's exhilarating but also she must have been maddening, exhausting. She and Heap thrived on arguing. ("By five o'clock in the morning we were unconscious but still talking. Chiefly we talked about ART--not 'aesthetically' (no talk is so callow) but humanely.") In one event, Anderson crossed swords with some guests:
"Everyone was disgusted with me that evening. Even Jane wouldn't rescue the soiree from disaster. Your technique is too infantile, she complained later. I decided to become mature. I would be calm, careful, contained. I would proceed henceforth by the time-honored methods of exposition and comparison, of reason and logic. I decided this, and gave up after the first attempt. The reasonable and convincing procedure gave me no emotional recompense. And since my object in talking is neither to learn nor to convey but to enter into new emotional states, since I can't produce ideas unless they are forced out of me by an emotional explosion, I have gone on all my life being infantile."
Anderson's compatriot writers, artists, and musicians come alive as fascinating people, long before they became icons, as she describes their tussles. Such huge personalities! Some of the most amusing sections describe the outlandish costumes and behavior of the Dadaist artist and poet Elsa Hildegard Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven. She seems to have been quite the show-stopper.
This book has joined the pantheon of my favorite memoirs by people whose creative and critical energy is so intense that they seem slightly insane: Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography, Madge Jenison's memoir of her New York bookstore Sunwise Turn (would she have known Anderson? they were contemporaries--wow, what a meeting that would have been), and Viv Albertine's Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.
I could go on quoting this book for days and days. But here's one last excerpt, as Anderson considers ending The Little Review: "...But I also loved ecstasy. It is well to know your own limitations. For years I would probably not enter that cycle of life in which one puts away childish things. Ecstasy is the best prelude to development--just as Blake was right in calling excess the road to wisdom. It might be five years before I would become an interesting person--that is, one who has emerged from her adolescent admirations. Cleaning the house and addressing envelopes no longer left me feeling unconquerably lyric. People had always said I looked as if I were on a secret errand. (What do you mean--secret, laughed Jane.) But I believed in my errand if not in its obviousness. I also believed in 'the broad and ample movement of life.' Movement implies change."
One more note: I read the 1930 hardback version of this book, which is beautiful and a pleasure to hold.
November 7, 2021
*chefs kiss*
June 17, 2008
Margaret Anderson was a firecracker, there is no doubt about it. Starting out life as a Midwesterner, transplanted to New York, starting the Little Review with Jane Heap, being arrested for sending ponography through the mails for serializing James Joyce's Ulysses in The Little Review, moving to Paris, becoming a member of The Rope - G.I. Gurdjeff's hand-picked group of bi- and lesbian women who were devoted to working on themselves... Whew!
One of the reasons for the book's title, has got to be Anderson's pitiless self-examination of herself and others. Her reactions, whether to the famous artists and writers she met, or to a detective story she read, are wholly her own. This is the story of an adventuress, a true seeker, and a helluva woman who fought to remain an original voice in an increasingly homogenized world. Very highly recommended.
One of the reasons for the book's title, has got to be Anderson's pitiless self-examination of herself and others. Her reactions, whether to the famous artists and writers she met, or to a detective story she read, are wholly her own. This is the story of an adventuress, a true seeker, and a helluva woman who fought to remain an original voice in an increasingly homogenized world. Very highly recommended.
February 21, 2016
The whiny Ezra Pound letters - where he flat-out tells Margaret Anderson that he wants to become a Little Review editor just so he and TS Eliot will have a place to publish their work - were my favorite part of the book. But the end also got me a little teary.
March 10, 2023
This autobiography is a tribute to the lengths Margaret Anderson went to in order to found and then keep afloat her influential literary magazine, THE LITTLE REVIEW. It is an important record of its time as well as an entertaining read.
August 11, 2011
One can't really "rate" this as you would rate anything else--Anderson is a singular figure in American Literary History.
May 20, 2012
See my review of Fiery Fountains, the second book of her trilogy, of which this is the first.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews