The Wave: Evelyn Scott's Civil War
1985; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoIn 1929 appeared three great American novels, two of them southern: Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, and Faulkner's Sound and the Fury. Also published in 1929 was Evelyn Scott's Wave, which Carl Van Doren called the novel on the American Civil War. (1) Scribner's faced no special problem in presenting Wolfe's first novel and Hemingway's second, but Jonathan Cape recognized that the public would need an introduction to a book as experimental as Sound and the Fury by a virtually unknown writer. An eminent novelist with five novels to her credit, and also published by Cape and Smith, Evelyn Scott was sent the Faulkner manuscript for comment. She wrote a letter to her publisher praising the book; Cape and Smith asked her to expand her letter into a critical essay which would accompany advance copies of Sound and the Fury. Claiming that Scott's recent novel Wave placed her among the outstanding literary figures of our time, and that The Sound and the Fury should place William Faulkner in the company of Evelyn the publishers offered Scott's essay as a valuable and brilliant reflection of the philosophies of two important American authors.... (2) In Faulkner, Joseph Blotner says that Cape could hardly have chosen a more intelligently sympathetic reader, and gives a full account of Scott's promotion of Faulkner's novel. (3) irony in this meaningful support of Faulkner by an intellectual, successful southern writer is that although Scott, from 1920 to 1941, published twenty books, she fell from prominence while today Faulkner is considered the South's greatest novelist. (4) I Evelyn Scott was born Elsie Dunn in 1893 to a socially, economically, and politically prominent aristocratic family in Clarksville, Tennessee, where she spent her first sixteen years. In 1909 her family moved to New Orleans, where Scott became the youngest student to enroll at Sophie Newcomb College. Three years later, she and Creighton Wellman, the then married Dean of the School of Tropical Medicine at Tulane University, ran away to Brazil, first changing their names to Evelyn Scott and Cyril Kay Scott. This escapade cost Scott much personal grief, not only because of the years of poverty, illness, and misery in Brazil, but because she felt a personal rejection by her beloved Tennessee for her adjudged illegal and immoral act as well as for the memoir, Escapade (1923), a conceptualization of the six horrendous years in Brazil. (5) After much difficulty in making financial and passport arrangements, the Scotts returned to America in 1919 and settled for a time in Greenwich Village. Scott became an integral part of one of the most exciting eras of change in American literary history, the era of the lost generation. She published regularly in Dial, Others, Poetry, Nation, and London Outlook. She moved among many of the major poets and writers of that period and of the thirties: William Carlos Williams, Sinclair Lewis, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Lola Ridge, and others. Lola Ridge, an admirer of Scott's poetry, introduced Scott to Kay Boyle and this introduction led to Scott's subsequent involvement with the expatriate group of artists in Paris that included, along with many of those from New York, Robert McAlmon, Ford Madox Ford, Isadora Duncan, Djuna Barnes, and Harry Crosby. Although she was a major contributor to the literary scene of the 1920s, moving among artists and intellectuals in every field, Scott, perhaps because of her extreme individualism, never was a continuous member of any group. In March 1921, her one act play Love was performed for fourteen days by the Provincetown Players. (6) In 1934, she contributed A Note on the Esthetic Significance of Photography to America and Alfred Stieglitz, Collective Portrait. Inclusion of her essay in this collection suggests that Scott was closely aligned with and respected by those who knew Stieglitz and met at An American Place--Waldo Frank, William Carlos Williams, Sherwood Anderson, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Lewis Mumford. …
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