Jane Heap

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Jane Heap
Little Review reunion, with Jane Heap, Mina Loy, and Ezra Pound in Paris (1921)
Born(1883-11-01)November 1, 1883
Topeka, Kansas
DiedJune 18, 1964(1964-06-18) (aged 80)
OccupationPublisher
Known forPromotion of literary modernism

Jane Heap (November 1, 1883 – June 18, 1964) was an American

publisher and a significant figure in the development and promotion of literary modernism. Together with Margaret Anderson, her friend and business partner (who for some years was also her lover), she edited the celebrated literary magazine The Little Review, which published an extraordinary collection of modern American, English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929. Heap herself has been called "one of the most neglected contributors to the transmission of modernism between America and Europe during the early twentieth century."[1]

Life

Janet Flanner-Solita Solano Collection/LOC ppmsca.13300. Jane Heap, John Rodker, Martha Dennison, Tristan Tzara, Margaret Anderson, ca. 1920s

Heap was born in

Lewis Institute
.

It was while working at the Lewis Institute, in 1908, that she first met Florence Reynolds, a student and the daughter of a prosperous Chicago businessman. Reynolds and Heap became lovers, in 1910 travelling together to Germany, where Heap studied tapestry weaving. They remained friends throughout their lives, although they often lived apart, and despite the fact that Heap formed romantic attachments with many other women. From the late 1930s, Heap became the companion of the founding editor of British

Vogue and head designer at Worth London Elspeth Champcommunal.[2][3]

In 1912, Heap helped found Maurice Browne's Chicago Little Theatre, an influential avant-garde theatre group presenting the works of Chekhov, Strindberg and Ibsen and other contemporary works.

The Little Review

In 1916, Heap met Margaret C. Anderson, and soon joined her as co-editor of the groundbreaking Modernist magazine, The Little Review. Although her work in the published magazine was relatively low profile (she signed her pieces simply "jh"), she was a bold and creative force behind the scenes.[4]

In 1917, Anderson and Heap moved The Little Review to New York. With the help of poet and critic

William Butler Yeats. The magazine's most published poet was New York dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, with whom Heap became friends on the basis of their shared confrontational feminist and artistic agendas.[5] Other notable contributors included Sherwood Anderson, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Malcolm Cowley, Marcel Duchamp, Ford Madox Ford, Emma Goldman, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Francis Picabia, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Arthur Waley, and William Carlos Williams
. Even so, however, they once published an issue with 12 blank pages to protest the temporary lack of exciting new works.

In March 1918, Ezra Pound sent Heap and Anderson the opening chapters of James Joyce's

Dadaists.[8]

Gurdjieff

Heap met

Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, where Margaret Anderson had moved the previous year alongside her new lover, soprano Georgette Leblanc
. Although they now lived separately, Heap and Anderson continued to work together as co-editors of The Little Review until deciding to close the magazine in 1929. Heap also at this time adopted Anderson's two nephews, after Anderson's sister had had a nervous breakdown, and Anderson herself had shown no interest in becoming a foster mother.

Heap established a Paris Gurdjieff study group in 1927, which continued to grow in popularity through the early 1930s, when Kathryn Hulme (author of The Nun's Story) and journalist Solita Solano (Sarah Wilkinson) joined the group. This developed into an all-women Gurdjieff study group known as "the Rope", taught jointly by Heap and by Gurdjieff himself.

In 1935, Gurdjieff sent Heap to London to set up a new study group. She would remain in London for the rest of her life, including throughout The Blitz. Her study group became very popular with certain sections of the London avant-garde, and after the war its students included the future theatre producer and director, Peter Brook. Heap also became friends with the concert pianist and composer Helen Perkin during this period.[9]

Work

Apart from her Little Review work, Heap never in her lifetime published an account of her ideas, although both Hulme and Anderson published collections of memoirs, and particularly their memories of working with Gurdjieff. After Heap's death from diabetes in 1964, former students put together a collection of her aphorisms (both her own and Gurdjieff's) and, in 1983, some notes reflecting her expression of some of the key Gurdjieff ideas. Some of her aphorisms are given below:[10]

  • Never oppose someone with the same center, always offer another one.
  • Do not sit too long in the same place.
  • You are responsible for what you have understood.
  • Little steps for little feet.
  • Suppress natural reaction and pay for it later.
  • We never refuse in the Work.
  • Animals are nature's experiments and embody all the emotions.
  • A cat is all essence. Essence remembers.
  • All that falls from the wagon is lost.

Other

In 2006 Heap and

Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame.[11]

References

  1. ^ Baggett, Holly. Dear Tiny Heart : The Letters of Jane Heap & Florence Reynolds. New York, NY, USA: New York University Press, 1999. p 2. Susan Noyes Platt." The Little Review: Early Years and Avant-Garde Ideas,” in Sue Ann Prince, ed, The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde, Modernism in Chicago 1910- 1940, University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp. 139-154.
  2. ^ "Florence Heap collection related to Jane Reynolds and The Little Review". lib.udel.edu. University of Delaware. Retrieved 17 August 2014.
  3. ISBN 0814712460.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
    )
  4. ^ Jane Heap was "a spellbinding talker…expressing ideas effortlessly and creatively as she went along." Hugh Ford, Four Lives in Paris (North Point Press, San Francisco, 1987)
  5. ^ Gammel, Irene. "The Little Review and Its Dada Fuse, 1918 to 1921." Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, 241.
  6. ^ Gammel, 253.
  7. ^ Freytag-Loringhoven, Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Ed. Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011, 185.
  8. ^ Baggett, Holly, ibid. p. 4
  9. ^ Foreman, Lewis (ed.), The John Ireland Companion (2011), p. 145
  10. ^ "Jane Heap". gurdjieff.org.
  11. ^ "Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame". glhalloffame.org. Archived from the original on 2015-10-17.

Further reading

Bibliography

  • Dear Tiny Heart: The Letters of Jane Heap and Florence Reynolds, edited by Holly A. Baggett, (New York University Press., 1999)

External links
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