While flipping through the final edition of The Little Review for the second time, one thing that stuck out to me was Margaret Anderson’s seemingly inflammatory nature! Below are some remarks to Sherwood Anderson and Ezra Pound respectively:

(Please just ignore whatever is going on with the formatting here I can’t figure out how to fix it)

However, while trying to read further into this, I found that Margaret considered both Sherwood and Ezra to be good friends of hers – and frequent contributors to The Little Review. These remarks, however scathing, are only Margaret holding her friends and collaborators to a higher standard. While Margaret and Sherwood did allegedly have one major disagreement amidst the Emma Goldman scandal, I couldn’t find half as much info on it as I wanted. That’s neither here nor there. So, naturally, I turned to Margaret’s Wikipedia page to see if she had any notable arguments with other figures in the literary field. Sadly, there wasn’t even a “controversies” tab. So I was at a bit of a dead end until the “1924 France” segment of her life:

So immediately this is all I care about. You adopted your sick sister’s kids and then pawned them off to Gertrude Stein in 1925? The two boys aren’t even mentioned in Gertrude’s poetry foundation bio or her Wikipedia page. However, reading into this further, the curt manner in which the Wikipedia article addresses the two boys doesn’t really do it justice – Anderson and Heap put them up in a boarding school run by George Gurdjieff, who was then the mutual point that connected Anderson and Heap with Stein and Toklas. They were family friends. More info on this could likely be gleaned from Arthur Peters’ book “Boyhood with Gurdjieff”, but I wasn’t able to get ahold of a pdf.

Pictured to the left is George Gurdjieff who I am now terribly interested in. He was acquainted with Anderson, Heap, Stein and Toklas – surely this man must’ve had some tremendous influence on the literary world at the time? Most certainly a name to look for next time I’m at the archives. I am a bit saddened that Margaret Anderson’s controversies weren’t more well-documented, though – I imagine she must have some fun ones that I just couldn’t manage to dig up for today.