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CJnaJian Review of Amenc1n Stud1e~/ Revue mnad11•nm'd'hud1•.,a11u,11c,11111 ,~ \'olume 2S, Number 1, 1998, pp. 43-61 The Moral of Glenway Wescott: The Closet and The Second Act Kegan Doyle ''Since I can't think when, I have wanted to give some account of myself as a lover and a loved one, of the plot of my life replete with coincidences and influences, ~1onroe's influence especially, but not solely, and now of that triumvirate in which I figure in the third place, perhaps more governed than governing; who knows? Surely it constitutes a theme or set of themes less hackneyed and possibly more significant than any other thing experienced or observed by me. But how, how, can it be dealt with clearly and interestingly and enjoy.1bly except in ,111 autobiography , p,1infully encroaching upon the others' lives?" (Glenway Wescott 1990, 9) ''There are no second acts in Americ,111lives." (F. Scott Fitzgerald 19411 189) 4J Who was Glenway \'Xlescott? And why have so fewpeople ever heard of him? (I know this from the blank stares I get whenever I mention his n.mw.) I first happened upon his work in Paris in the early nineties. I \\'.ls work111g 44 C.rnad1an Review of American Smd1es Revue ca11adie11ne d'etudes lllll(>rtC11111e_.:: on a thesis on some more famous members of the "Lost Generation" and found a well-thumbed copy of Edmund Wilson's 1945 edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up in the bookstore Shakespeare and Company. After once more reading Fitzgerald's apologia for his dissipated ways, I came upon an essay entitled "The Moral of F. Scott Fitzgerald." Here was ,1. piece of well-chiselled prose that brilliantly captured the ambivalences and contra.dictions of Fitzgerald's career and personality. Why had I never heard of its author, Glenway Wescott? After that, however, Wescott was suddenly everywhere. In Tlw Autobiography a/Alice B. Tokli1s(1966), I found Gertrude Stein's caustic dismissal of him: "he has a certain syrup, but it does not pour" (Stein 1966, 236). I then learnt that the lispy, pretentious young writer from Chicago in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), Robert Prentiss, was based on none other than Glenway Wescott. (In fact, he was called Prescott in an earlier draft [Wescott 1990, xii]). ( then read F. Scott Fitzgerald expressing his admiration for Hemingway to Max Perkins in terms of the following rate of exchange : "He's worth 100 Wescotts" (Kuehl and Bryer 1971, 137). What I could not find anywhere in La Ville Lumiere was anything either by or specifically about Wescott, somewhat ironic given that he was an expatriate m France through much of the twenties and thirties. The Lost Generation, indeed. The fact that he provoked so much loathing amongst his modernist contemporaries only piqued my curiosity. When I returned to Canada, I found most of Wescott's oeuvre in my university library, although a great deal of 1t was being kept in storage. "Underuse," I was told. Over the next few weeks, I ploughed through the Wescott canon. What I discovered was a writer who could at times be moist and ponderous, but who had crafted some of the most polished American fiction of the first half of our century. I also discovered that as a young man in the twenties he had been deemed one of American literature's most likely to succeed. Indeed, in 1927, at the age of twenty-six, he won the prestigious Harper Prize for his novel The Grandmothers , a work described by Louis Bromfield as "one of the most beautiful books" he had ever read (Wescott 1990, xiii). Most of his books, in fact, save for a couple of strange texts of the thirties, had received positive and sometimes adulatory notices. By the fifties, even the academy had taken notice of Kt ',Ill Do,·le / ·15 this Midwest wordsmith. In his important work The Tuieuties (1951), for example, Frederick Hoffman prniscd the depth and sensitivity of Wescott's depiction of rural life. In the sixties, three books on \'v'escott were publishl'd. Rut since 1970, the flow of commentary on \Xles,.:ott has...

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