The Reader Critic

William Thurston Brown, Chicago:

I have just read your article on Mrs. Ellis’s lecture, and I wish to congratulate you upon its sentiments. Although I did not hear Mrs. Ellis, some of my friends did, and their report quite agrees with your judgment.

I must confess I did not expect much from her to begin with. From interviews and quotations it seemed clear that she was simply one who had never faced realities frankly. Besides, her rather mawkish “religiousness” betrayed a mind unfitted to deal adequately with such a problem.

I wish also to congratulate you upon your recognition of the genuine worth of Emma Goldman. I had thought you were in danger of making a fetich of her, but this article shows that you appreciate the things for which she stands.

I cannot believe that the superiority of Emma Goldman to such people as Mrs. Ellis—I mean in the discernment of real values—is due to a difference of psychology, or rather of temperament, but rather to the difference of point of view from which Miss Goldman has seen the problems of human life. Her experience as a protagonist of Labor in its struggle for freedom from exploitation has been a vital factor, I think, in her development.

All good wishes to The Little Review.

Albrecht C. Kipp, Indianapolis:

Some time ago a friend of yours, and mine, under guise of a Yuletide remembrance, innocently and unapprehensive of the consequences no doubt, presented me with a year’s subscription to the magazine which you purport to edit. Our mutual acquaintance made some point of the fact that you were, as I aspire to be, a Truth-Seeker, and also alluded, in passing, to a feminine pulchritude which you possessed, not ordinarily a concomitant of an intellectual curiosity sufficiently keen to delve to the bottom of things material and spiritual. I therefore looked forward with undeniable expectation to a gratification of an insatiable desire to view the remains of many idols and statues still unbroken, which have been laboriously erected by the prejudice, credulity and ignorance of mankind for eons. Permit me to apprise you of my keen disappointment in perusing what I have found ensconced between the covers of your magazine.

I was given to understand that you were a quasi-missionary, in the most elastic sense of that word, and as one who is sincerely trying to fathom your mission, if one you have, I am writing to ascertain what it may be, because, owing either to an utter failure of a somewhat impoverished sense of humor or a too ordinary quantum of common sense, I seem to miss what you are driving at. If your magazine is designed to interest a coterie of semi-crazed, halfbaked, “fin de siècle” ideologists, I would appreciate a recognition of your object. To be quite frank with you, however, I do not yet consider myself in the proper frame of mind to be classified in that category of readers without demur. I am only a humble Searcher for the Truth in Life in all its phases and being congenitally opposed to the baleful spreading of “Buschwa,” I seem to find my mental equipoise disturbed by an attempt to diagnose by any rational standard most of the alleged literary ebullitions which find place in your Review.

If we were still living in the Stone Age and reading matter of any sort were still a scarce article, it might be necessary to put up with the poetical balderdash which you publish. But having the daily newspapers to contend with and other pernicious thiefs of valuable time, it seems a heinous offense to a perfectly respectable mind to offer it, the unripe or overripe, mayhap, products of insane mentalities.

No doubt the fault is entirely that of an unschooled intellect, but at that, I have to take my mind as it is. Just as it is unable to fathom this Christian Science drivel, in that same measure does it utterly fail to be touched by what has appeared in The Little Review of the past four months.

Let me assure you that I have made an honest effort to understand your viewpoint. Unless, however, I am cleared up as to what your aim and goal may be, I am compelled, in self defense, to request you to kindly discontinue sending your magazine to me. It may deflour my joy of life and ruin a saving and virtuous sense of the funny. You are too kindhearted, I am sure, as our mutual acquaintance informs me, to be an accessory before the fact to such an ungracious crime.

Sada Cowan, New York:

Your article on Mrs. Havelock Ellis was wonderful! Mrs. Ellis failed here ... just as in Chicago. I admire the clear and concise way in which you illumined the reason of her failure.

There is so much work to be done it seems wicked that a woman, to whom the world is so ready and willing to listen, who has the gift of poetic expression and direct logical thinking, should waste her powers. It is as though she held understanding and wisdom in her hands—tightly clenched—then when she should hold out those gifts to the world, she opened wide her fingers ... here a flash—there a glimmer!—And all vanishes!

E. C. A. Smith, Grosse Ile, Michigan:

I was delighted with your critique on Mrs. Ellis, not that I feel she fell as short as you seem to think, but because your own article made a beginning on things which must be said. I also emphatically endorse your views on enabling the poor to restrict their birthrate, not on sentimental grounds, but because I know by experience it would be a wise economy for the state. It is natural for wholesome people to want children; the rise in the labor market caused by the dropping off in production by the cowardly and incompetent would be amply compensated by the reduction in the ranks of economically valueless dependents. It would take less, per capita, to support orphan and insane asylums, dispensaries, and jails—not to speak of the wasteful drain of unestimated sporadic charity. The contention that it would contribute to immorality is absolutely absurd to anyone who has tried rescue work—girls have child after child, undeterred by pain or shame, just as the mentally deficient in other lines injure themselves in their frenzies.

The only way one has a right to judge life is to look at it from the inside. Before I read Havelock Ellis I was unable to take this view of the subjects you so sanely and clearly project on our imaginations. After laying down his book I found my only shock came from some of the methods employed in “curing” these unfortunates. From the histories of cases he cites, I should consider it fair to conclude that the nervous organization of inverts tended to average below par—as is the usual medical view. This may be a psychic, not physical, result. Personally, I cannot see any effect the reading of that material has had on me except to make me more wisely charitable in my views. It has broadened my ideals, without weakening them. It has put a new value on normality. It has not modified my personal theory of love any more than the not-entirely aesthetic conditions of carrying and bearing my children did. There are points about that sort of experience—especially the attitude of the inexperienced—which makes the prude’s attitude to the whole broad question ridiculous. Another generation will regard ours as we do the Victorians—my shade will grind its spirit teeth to hear them laugh.

I am not sure your point of view as a writer rather than a speaker does not make you overlook legitimate limitations in Mrs. Ellis’s position. A speaker can often suggest far more than she actually utters; the conclusions people are inspired to make for themselves are of far greater value than if they were cast forth with inspired eloquence. To antagonize an audience by forcing your point is to lose efficiency. In print one has not the personal element so strongly and immediately to consider. Perhaps she was subtler than Emma Goldman, but not so much weaker as you think.

The Little Review is the most satisfactory source of mental stimulation I have yet discovered. If I do not always agree with it I at least have the sense of arguing with a friend whose intellect I respect—never did I feel that for any other publication. And I love freshness and freedom and enthusiasm as I love youth itself—they’re the qualities that promise growth.

Stella Worden Smith, Monte Vista Heights, Cal.:

For six months or so I have been blessed with the presense of your Little Review. Many times I have wanted to tell you so. It is a matter of deep gratitude that at last one can open the pages of a magazine and feel that sense of freedom and incomparable beauty that one does in, say, looking out at a sunset across the mountains—and no more hampering! You give new horizons, fresh inspiration, and revive the creative impulse that is more likely to be snuffed out than stimulated when one peruses the majority of our “best” magazines. Forgive me if I seem over enthusiastic, but it springs from a gratitude born of great need. And you have filled it.

Your review of Mr. Powys’s lectures have carried me back four years into a period when I was studying music in New York with a Norwegian singer, and she and I listened to him at the Brooklyn Institute week by week! Never will I forget it. And she—well, she is a genius herself, an interpreter of Norwegian folk songs—and Powys lit her soul until it flamed forth like a beacon! If you heard his Shelley, I think you saw the veritable incarnation of that transcendent spirit....

Then I listened to him again in Buffalo, last year, on Keats. And the audience, mostly women (God forgive them!) seemed like school children—no, I will not confound such innocent souls with the inert mass that confronted him! And this is our culture!

I think the spirit of your magazine is to other magazines what Powys is to other lecturers. He makes you forget that he is such. You become part of his theme, or is it, himself? And so it is I seem both to lose and find myself when I read the pages of The Little Review.

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Transcriber’s Notes

Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect correctly the headings in this issue of The Little Review.

In “Extreme Unction”, the line “[The Girl. You don’t know?]” was obviously duplicated. After comparison with another edition, the second occurrence was removed.

In the letters to the Editor (“The Reader Critic”), the Editor seems to have left spelling variations uncorrected. They are not corrected here either.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here (before/after):