What the Public Doesn’t Want

Margaret Anderson

America is a confounding place.

About four years ago I wanted to start a magazine. Two things in life interest me more than other things: Art and good talk about Art. The Little Review was launched as an organ of those two interests.

For three years, at irregular intervals, it reflected my concern about various other matters. When I got incensed over the sufferings of what is called the proletariat I preached profound platitudes about justice and freedom. I had always had the sense to know that all people can be put into two classes: the exceptional and the average. But when I decided that the only way to prevent the exceptional from being sacrificed to the average was for everybody to become anarchists, I preached the simple and beautiful but quite uninteresting tenets of anarchism. I have long given them up. I still grow violent with rage about the things that are “wrong”, and probably always shall. But I know that anarchism won’t help them. I have known good anarchists who are as dull as any other good laymen. And I have no interest in laymen. Only sensibility matters.

I had always known that education doesn’t produce sensibility, but I came to think that something could produce it. Now I know that nothing under the heavens will make any one sensitive if he is not born that way.

I had always known that people didn’t want Art, but I imagined that they would be glad to be made to want it. Now I know that they are “not merely indifferent to it: they hate it malignantly”.

Therefore, to sum up: all these ideas were not interesting enough to have bothered about.

But the curious thing about America is that while she thinks such insipid and pleasant and harmless ideas are abominable and dangerous, she also thinks they are interesting!

Any magazine that concerns itself with such ideas is sure to get an audience. Your audience will think that you are crazy or that you want a sensation, or, what is worse, that you are a sort of “Pollyanna” throwing sunshine and optimism into dark places in order to help the world. But it will be interested in reading you for one reason or another.

And now after working through unbelievable aridness The Little Review has at last arrived at the place from which I wanted it to start. At last we are printing stuff which is creative and inventive, and, thank heaven, not purely local. The audience mentioned above, in the aggregate, resents it. We no longer interest that audience. The layman says that we are now given over to the bizarre and the “aesthetic” (that adjective which in America means something vaguely inconsequential, if not something shameless and immoral). People who like to “help” magazines with “artistic” leanings are not to be allured by Art. People who can’t prove that they know anything about good letters dare to tell us that we don’t know anything about them. Editors who make it a point of honor to discover artistic value in the work of their contemporaries feel that we are meticulous and too “arty”. And the writers themselves are the most absurd. Maxwell Bodenheim writes that he “knows” Ezra Pound judges poetry on the basis of his personal dislikes. That is as necessarily untrue as anything can be. Any one who is unwilling to praise what seems to him unworthy of praise, anyone whose interest in a poet’s work abates when the work shows no signs of further progress—any such critic will come in for this kind of slander. Any such critic will get himself talked about the way people love to talk in New York: if you try to discuss a man’s work with them they say “that man is my enemy”, or “that man is my friend”. It’s very puzzling: they seem to think their remarks have something to do with literature.

Another remarkable thing that happens in New York: if you walk upon the street with a sensitive and rare and distinguished person you will find that he attracts more curious and resentful attention than the most badly-made, the most atrociously dressed, or the most grotesquely deformed human beings who surround him.

But this is the attitude of all America.

I have made several thoughtless statements about “Help us to make The Little Review a power”, etc. I know that nothing on earth will do that except our own contents. They tell me that Henley was a power in England with The National Observer when its circulation had shrunk to eighty subscribers. I should be willing to pursue dominion even to that point, but it will probably not be necessary. Our circulation grows in spite of criticism and misunderstanding.

You can help us to give you more each month by subscribing for your friends who are interested in a magazine which is not interested in the public taste.