Research Catalog

A scarlet pansy

Title
A scarlet pansy / by Robert Scully.
Author
Scully, Robert.
Publication
New York : W. Faro, 1933, c1932.

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TextPermit needed Berg Coll Scully S33 1932Schwarzman Building - Berg Collection Room 320

Details

Description
370 p. : ill.; 21 cm.
Subjects
Note
  • With frontispiece portrait of wavy-haired young man with eyes closed, and caption "FAY," below, signed "Rohngild"(?).
  • Robert Scully is the pseudonym of Robert McAlmon.
  • Robert McAlmon was born in South Dakota in 1895. He spent three years at the University of Southern California before moving to New York in 1920, where he met William Carlos Williams and worked as a nude artists' model. In 1921 he married the lesbian heiress Winifred Ellerman, better known as the writer "Bryher." The same year he moved to Paris, and by 1922 was working as an assistant to James Joyce, editing and typing up drafts of Ulysses. He used his wife's money to found his own imprint, Contact Editions. Its first book was "A Hasty Bunch" (1922), McAlmon's own collection of short stories, which was quickly followed by Ernest Hemingway's debut, "Three Stories and Ten Poems" (1923). Contact remained in business for nine years and became one of the most important expatriate literary presses of the period, publishing work by, among others, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, Nathaniel West, and William Carlos Williams. In 1938, McAlmon's Being Geniuses Together was published, his acerbic memoir of literary life in 1920's Paris. James Joyce, who was a target, was withering in his criticism, calling the book "the office boy's revenge." But McAlmon's revenge on the Montparnasse literati had already appeared, six years earlier, as A Scarlet Pansy, under the pseudonym Robert Scully. McAlmon's reputation did not endure. He died in 1956 in Desert Springs, California, embittered and forgotten. -- Adapted from description by Neil Pearson Rare Books (London).
  • "A Scarlet Pansy" is the gay high-camp story of Fay Etrange. Born in Kuntsville, Penn., Fay moves to New York and supports herself by working as a nude model. She has a series of sexual encounters with, among many others, an Irish policeman, soldiers on leave, and a polo team. She finds true love during the First World War with a handsome American Army lieutenant, who, in the novel's first pages lies dying in her arms on a French battlefield. Implicit throughout is Fay Etrange's male identity. Among the Paris expatriate figures McAlmon satirized are: William Carlos Williams; McAlmon's wife-of-convenience, Bryher, as "Marjorie Bull-Dike"; the cay poet and artist Marsden Hartley, as "Miss Painter"; and Elisabeth Marbury, a socialite and occasional literary agent to Oscar Wilde, as "Elizabeth 'Clittie' Thorndike." Also present in mocking portraits are Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas. -- Adapted from description by Neil Pearson Rare Books (London).
  • See Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day, Byrne R. S. Fone, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 649-650.
Access (note)
  • Restricted access;
Call Number
Berg Coll Scully S33 1932
OCLC
15612729
Author
Scully, Robert.
Title
A scarlet pansy / by Robert Scully.
Imprint
New York : W. Faro, 1933, c1932.
Edition
First edition.
Access
Restricted access; request permission in holding division.
Local Note
Transferred from the General Collections, November 8, 2012; former call no.: D-17 6698.
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Research Call Number
Berg Coll Scully S33 1932
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