Born April 11: Glenway Westcott

Expat American literary young men colliding in Gertrude Stein's orbit in Paris, Hemingway took an immediate dislike to gay novelist Glenway Wescott for his artificial affectations [from Wisconsin, he acquired an English accent] and his "fake" fiction. In The Sun Also Rises he lampooned Wescott as Robert Prescott until Max Perkins made him change the overly obvious last name to Prentiss. Wescott's major novels, before he ceased writing them at 44, are The Grandmothers, based on his own family, Apartment in Athens [Kindle], about a Greek family forced to host a German officer, of which Susan Sontag said in The New Yorker it is “among the treasures of 20th-century American literature” (and recently was made into a movie), and The Pilgrim Hawk [Kindle], which David Leavitt chose as a favorite of 2011.One area in which Wescott trumped Hemingway: His relationship with MoMA curator Monroe Wheeler lasted 68 years, from 1919 to his death at 85 in 1987. After you read the novels, try Jerry Rosco's Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography.

Reader Daniel recommends the really wonderful When We Were Three: Travel Albums of George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescot 1925-1935.

Comments

[Laurent]

"Apartment in Athens" survives well - the houseguest's suicide succeeds as sad, not as just - and suggests that literature was a refuge from the phoniness deplored by some contemporaries. Alas, Hemingway simply enjoyed deploring a lot of people, and this figures inextricably in his literature, marring it, from "To Have and Have Not" to "The Sun Also Rises."