Queer Places:
University of Minnesota, 231 Pillsbury Drive SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455 and 1117 University Dr, Duluth, MN 55812
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90007, Stati Uniti
Lakewood Cemetery, 3600 Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55408, Stati Uniti
Robert Menzies McAlmon (also used Robert M. McAlmon, as his signature name,
March 9, 1895 – February 2, 1956) was an American author, poet and publisher.[1]
As Robert Scully he published A Scarlet Pansy, first
published in 1932, a vivid depiction of American queer life in the early
twentieth century. Djuna Barnes
wrote a lively bagatelle called Ladies Almanack in 1928.
Natalie Barney
featured here as Dame Evangeline Musset;
Romaine Brooks as Cynic Sal;
Lily de Gramont as the
Duchesse Clitoressa of Natescourt;
Una Troubridge
as Lady Buck-and-Balk; Radclyffe Hall as
Tilly Tweed-in-blood; Mina Loy as
Patience Scalpel; Mimì Franchetti
as Senorita Fly-About; and Janet
Flanner and Solita Solano as Nip and
Tuck. The book was privately published by
Robert McAlmon.
McAlmon was born in Clifton, Kansas, the youngest of 10 children of an
itinerant Presbyterian minister. He died in Desert Hot Springs, California, at
the age of 60.
McAlmon was admitted to the University of Minnesota in 1916, but only spent
one semester there before enlisting in the United States Army Air Corps in
1918. At the conclusion of World War I, he returned to university (1917–1920),
this time at the University of Southern California. He attended classes
intermittently until 1920, when he moved to Chicago and then New York City,
where he worked as a nude model at art school. Once in New York, he
collaborated with William Carlos Williams on the Contact Review, which
did not last for long, but published poetry by
Ezra Pound,
Wallace Stevens,
Marianne Moore,
H. D., Hilda Doolittle, Kay Boyle and
Marsden Hartley.
The next year, he moved to Paris after marrying the wealthy and lesbian
English writer Annie Winifred Ellerman, better known as
Bryher. McAlmon typed and edited the
handwritten manuscript of Ulysses by James Joyce, with whom he had a
friendship.
McAlmon became a prolific writer after the move, with many of his stories
and poems based on his experiences as a youth in South Dakota.
Having published his book of short stories A Hasty Bunch with James
Joyce's printer Maurice Darantière in Dijon in 1922, he founded the Contact
Publishing Company in 1923 using his father-in-law's money. Lasting until
1929, Contact Editions brought out books by Bryher (Two Selves), H.
D.'s Palimpsest, Mina Loy's Lunar Baedecker,
Ernest Hemingway's
first book Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923), poems by Marsden Hartley,
William Carlos Williams (Spring and All, 1923), Emanuel Carnevali's
only book during his lifetime (The Hurried Man), prose by
Ford Madox
Ford, Gertrude Stein
(The Making of Americans, 1925), Mary Butts (Ashe of Rings),
John Herrmann (What Happens), Edwin Lanham (Sailors Don't Care),
Robert Coates (The Eater of Darkness), Texas schoolteacher Gertrude
Beasley's My First Thirty Years and Saikaku Ihara's Quaint Tales of
Samurais. McAlmon paid for the publication of The Ladies Almanack
by Djuna Barnes.
One of McAlmon's most important and best-received works is Village: As
It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period (1924) which presents a bleak
portrait of an American town. The book shows his love for Eugene Vidal (Eugene
Collins in the book), Gore
Vidal's father, with whom he grew up in Madison, South Dakota, which is
documented in Gore Vidal's mid-90s memoir, Palimpsest.
Other works include the short story collection A Companion Volume
(1923), the autobiographical novel Post-Adolescence (1923),
Distinguished Air (Grim Fairy Tales) (1925), the poetry collections The
Portrait of a Generation (1926) and Not Alone Lost (1937), the
1,200 line epic poem North America, Continent of Conjecture (1929), and
his memoir Being Geniuses Together: An Autobiography (1938).
McAlmon returned to the United States in 1940, residing in El Paso, Texas,
where he sought treatment for a pulmonary ailment. He died at Desert Hot
Springs, California, almost unknown in his native country sixteen years later.
In the 1990s, Edward Lorusso brought out three volumes of McAlmon's fiction
(many were first American publications), Village (1924, 1990),
Post-Adolescence (1923, 1991), and Miss Knight and Others (1992),
all through University of New Mexico Press.
McAlmon is heavily featured in the book Memoirs of Montparnasse by
John Glassco about the golden age of Paris in the 1920s when writers and
artists flocked to the city.
His social circle and friendship with
Ernest Hemingway
is discussed in the novel The Paris Wife by Paula McLain.
In 2007, his fictionalized memoir The Nightinghouls of Paris was
published, based on the experiences of Glassco and his friend Graeme Taylor
with McAlmon in Paris. The previously unpublished book was based on a
typescript held by Yale's archives.[2]
An epistolary novel about McMalmon and his expatriate adventures and final
years in California, Letters from Oblivion, was published by Edward
Lorusso in 2014.
My published books:
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