Gay icon Margaret Anderson was a freethinker whose life echoed the words of Joyce’s Molly Bloom

On an August day in 1915, Margaret Anderson gave Tribune readers an account of the simple life she was experiencing, though not exactly of her own volition.

A landlord had evicted her from the Lake Bluff house where she lived and published The Little Review, an avant-garde literary magazine. Such publications are often financed on a shoestring, and she prioritized keeping hers afloat over paying the rent.

She set up a tent colony on a Lake Michigan beach. A few fellow believers in art for art’s sake and ideas for curious minds joined her.

“We are not odd; it is the common herd who are ‘off,’” Anderson wrote in the Tribune’s pages. “We are trying to lead a natural life. People are generally upside down; they know in their souls what is right, how to live, but they do just the opposite. We are right side up.”

Harriet Dean, a Little Review subscriber, explained why she gave up Vassar College to sleep in a tent on the sands of a beach.

“This life is the essence of the intellectual and social life of college raised to the Nth power,” she wrote in a sidebar to Anderson’s Tribune essay. “Yes, I knew all the conveniences of life, of the pretty little dressing bureau trimmed in pink, of the cozy corner, of the supplying of every artificial want, of all the human perverted ideas of elegance, but this is the real way to live.”

Anderson called her philosophy “applied anarchism.” But she didn’t clothe herself in rags, a uniform favored decades later by the like-minded beatniks.

“During the years I knew her she wore the same suit, a tailored affair in robin’s egg blue,” Ben Hecht wrote about Anderson. “Despite this unvarying costume she was as chic as any of the girls who model today for the fashion magazines.”

Hecht, a reporter in Chicago before becoming a Hollywood screenwriter, added: “I forgave her her chastity because she was a genius.”

That would seem to indicate Anderson did not return Hecht’s affection. If so, he missed the patent fact that Anderson was romantically interested in women, not men.

She had a lifelong commitment to publishing works censors considered obscene, and to “the love that dare not speak its name,” as it was dubbed by a friend of Oscar Wilde, the imprisoned gay dramatist.

In 2006, Anderson and her lover Jane Heap were inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame.

“This couple were key figures in Chicago’s literary renaissance of the early 20th century,” their entry reads. “Their personal and professional partnership was centered in Chicago for only a few years, but their impact was powerful and far reaching and historic.”

Anderson met Heap the year after writing about life on the beach. Heap, a high-spirited art teacher from Kansas, became her lover and co-editor of The Little Review. They moved the magazine to New York where they began publishing chapters of “Ulysses” by James Joyce, a novel that broke the mold of storytelling.

It is a sensitively told tale of a young person exploring the power of her sexuality and a 38-year-old ad salesman seeking solace from life’s disappointments. Written in a style akin to “free association” — the spontaneous recitation of random thoughts psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud urged upon his patients — the novel was destined to become a landmark of English literature, enshrined on university syllabi.

Yet “Ulysses” was initially controversial and branded as obscene. The only copies available in the United States were smuggled past customs inspectors by tourists returning from France, where it was first issued. American publishers wanted no part of the trouble it brought to Anderson and Heap.

They published several excerpts from the novel. In the magazine’s April 1920 edition, they ran an episode called “Nausicaa” in which a 20ish woman teases the protagonist, Leopold Bloom, by leaning back and lifting her skirt. Joyce employs highly metaphorical language to describe how Bloom, watching from a distance, surreptitiously pleasures himself.

An attorney whose daughter received an unsolicited copy of The Little Review was outraged. He contacted the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which went to the New York district attorney. Anderson and Heap were arrested, and a three-judge panel was appointed to hear the case. Heap later wrote the Review’s reaction.

“Mr. Joyce was not teaching early Egyptian perversions nor inventing new ones. Girls lean back everywhere, showing lace and silk stockings; wear low-cut sleeveless blouses, breathless bathing suits; men think thoughts and have emotions about these things everywhere — seldom as delicately and imaginatively as Mr. Bloom — and no one is corrupted.”

An expert witness for the defense explained how “Ulysses” employed Freudian concepts of the unconscious mind. A judge asked him to speak a language the court could understand. When the defense attorney admitted he didn’t understand Joyce’s writing, a judge replied: “Yes, it sounds to me like ravings of a disordered mind.”

The panel found the book violated the prohibition on distributing pornography by mail. Some scholars think the judge’s decision was partially shaped by the Review’s publication of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s homoerotic poetry.

Anderson and Heap were fined $100 and ordered to cease publishing chapters of “Ulysses.”

“Ulysses” remained legally unavailable in the United States until the ban was overturned in a 1933 case poetically titled: “United States v. One Book called Ulysses.” Finding it a legitimate work of art, the trial judge wrote:

“In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of (Joyce’s) characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.”

In 1924, Anderson moved to France to study with George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a Russian-born mystic and spiritual teacher who taught that most people live in a zombielike state. “Man lives in sleep, and man dies in sleep,” Gurdjieff said. His remedy was a mix of physical exercises, hard labor and a quest for inner enlightenment.

Anderson wrote an introduction to Gurdjieff’s ideas. The book’s premise paralleled her magazine’s slogan: “Make No Compromise with the Public Taste.”

“But first, it would have to be understood that these ideas cannot be made available to everyone,” she wrote in “The Unknowable Gurdjieff.”

“The masses don’t want them, and couldn’t understand them. Clergymen, priests, evangelists, Billy Grahams, serve the needs of those whose aspirations are on a different level, and who, in the hierarchy of ‘accident,’ never rise above that level.”

Gurdjieff taught men and women. But Heap, who joined Anderson in Paris in 1925, formed an exclusively female Gudijieff group. Many were gay, like Anderson and Heap. Several were Anderson’s future lovers.

Anderson and Heap separated. Heap put out the last issue of The Little Review in 1929 and moved to England.

By 1942, Anderson needed a place to sit out World War II. On the voyage across the Atlantic, she met the widow of Enrico Caruso, the famed operatic tenor. Anderson and Dorothy Caruso became lovers and lived together in New York until Caruso’s death in 1955.

Anderson returned to France, where she lived in a lighthouse with the opera singer Georgette Leblanc, formerly the lover of Maurice Maeterlinck, a Nobel Prize-winning Belgian dramatist.

There, Anderson wrote a novelistic memoire, “Forbidden Fires.” She died in 1973 and was buried next to Leblanc.

From a beach in Lake Bluff to a lighthouse in the south of France, Anderson echoed in her words and deeds the last lines of “Ulysses.”

It is a soliloquy by the narrator’s wife, Molly Bloom:

“Then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

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