Minor author, major life. (Books).

Capozzola, Christopher

Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography

Jerry Rosco

University of Wisconsin Press. 306 pages, $29.95

GLENWAY Wescott was once a household name. Writing from Paris in the 1920's, he was one of the first expatriate American authors to gain attention at home. Apart from that brief moment, though, Wescott never achieved the renown of many of his contemporaries. He has since been overshadowed by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, who ridiculed Wescott in a homophobic passage of The Sun Also Rises. Wescott was long considered a minor author, a writer's writer cherished by only a handful of admirers who marveled at his jewel-like prose. In recent years, however, a new interest in Glenway Wescott has emerged, a revival that's due more to the achievements of his life than of his work.

From 1920 until his death in 1987, Wescott lived openly as a gay man in a relationship with Monroe Wheeler, a publisher and museum administrator, In the first full-length biography of Wescott, Jerry Rosco tells the story of an artist whose literary talent was exceeded only by his greatest creation: his own life. Born in 1901 on a Wisconsin farm, the precocious Wescott found his way to the University of Chicago in 1917, where he mingled with poets and artists and first met Monroe Wheeler. Funded by wealthy patrons, the two spent the 1920's in Paris and the south of France, where Wescott built his literary reputation with epic accounts of the American experience in books like The Grandmothers (1927) and Good-bye, Wisconsin (1928). The couple returned to New York in 1934, where Wescott's productivity declined markedly. Apart from his masterpiece, the short novel The Pilgrim Hawk (1940), and the mid-career best-seller Apartment in Athens (1945), Wescott published little else.

Critics have suggested that this silence reveals Wescott to be a victim of homophobia. As a young man, he sought in writing an outlet for his emerging sexuality, and subtly wove in threads of gay experience. (Monroe Wheeler once urged him, "if you will be a poet ... they will let you alone.") Later, he may have been frustrated that he was unable to express himself more openly in the conservative culture of mid-century America. But Rosco offers an alternative, and what seems to me a more plausible, explanation. Much of Wescott's creative energy in the second half of his life went into negotiating his personal and sexual relationships. Wescott and Wheeler remained emotionally committed for their entire lives, and Rosco gives a heart-warming account of what Wescott once described as America's oldest gay married couple. But the two also made their own way in the world sexually. Rosco chronicles the secondary lovers that each man took--including Wescott's relationship with the renowned photographer George Platt L ynes--and details the important role of female friends in Wescott's literary and personal life.

Glenway Wescott Personally draws heavily from interviews that Rosco conducted with Wescott himself in the 1980's. Wescott spoke candidly of his constant struggles with his writing, his sexual enthusiasms, and the emotional complexities of his relationship with Wheeler. The book educes a wealth of new material, the most important of which is undoubtedly the recounting of Wescott's involvement in the 1950's with Alfred Kinsey's Institute for Sex Research. Wescott arranged for Kinsey to interview dozens of his friends and in this way gave Kinsey access to the social and sexual lives of a large number of self-identified gay men.

But despite this book's title, we somehow never do get to know Glenway Wescott "personally." Because of Rosco's dependence on his interviews with Wescott, he takes the author far too easily at his word. There are no personal failures in Wescott's character, no weaknesses in his literary craft. For example, Rosco frequently mentions Wescott's meetings with Gertrude Stein, but never mention's Stein's famously cutting evaluation of Wescott: "He has a certain syrup but it does not pour." Wescott's involvement with the CIA-funded Congress of Cultural Freedom in Paris in the 1950's is analyzed, not as a moment in Cold War literary politics, but instead as an opportunity to list Wescott's dinner companions in Europe. Indeed throughout the book Rosco reveals much more about Wescott's social engagements and sexual liaisons than about his inner life.

But if Rosco has paid too much attention to Wescott's oral account, he's paid too little attention to his subject's writings. Wescott was profoundly interested in the emotional density of everyday life, and at its best his fiction unfolds the human condition in all its complexity over the course of a single lunch. But readers are treated here to mere plot summaries. Nor does Rosco draw very much from Wescott's journals, published in 1990 as Continual Lessons: The Journals of Glenway Wescott, 1937-1955, which is perplexing, since Rosco himself helped edit them with Robert Phelps.

Readers looking for gay literary gossip and Vanity Fair-style name-dropping will delight in this book and its tantalizing stories. But Glenway Wescott deserves to be taken seriously for his work. His fiction and journals remain a place for readers to turn to understand the inner workings of a man who tried to make his life into a work of art.

Christopher Capozzola is an assistant professor of history at MIT.