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My research focuses on the American modernist
Margery Latimer (1899-1932), who is remembered today—if remembered at all—only
as the first wife of Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer. Her death in childbirth at the
age of thirty-three cut short her brief but extremely successful career as the author of
two novels, two volumes of short fiction, and numerous uncollected essays.
Reviewers compared her work to
that of Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce, yet she has
been almost entirely forgotten today. Her work, however, blends an experimental modernist
aesthetic with her own brand of feminist critique, warranting our renewed interest.
During her own time, Latimer
was clearly regarded as an active progenitor of the new writing, as is evident from the
journals, anthologies, and presses whose editors chose to feature her work. Latimer’s
short story "Grotesque," for instance, originally appeared in the Paris-based
journal transition in 1927 together with Stein’s "As a Wife Has a
Cow" and an installment in the serial publication of Joyce’s Work in Progress,
which would later become Finnegans Wake. Transition, begun by
Eugene Jolas and Elliot Paul as "a linguistic and creative bridge between the
countries of the Western World," provoked controversy in 1929 with Jolas’s
famous "Manifesto: The Revolution of the Word," which declared, among other
things, "LET THE PLAIN READER BE DAMNED." During its run between the
world wars, the journal featured the work of Katherine Anne Porter, Laura Riding, Dylan
Thomas, Andre Breton, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Caresse and Harry
Crosby, Robert Graves, Anais Nin, Antonin Artaud, and Henry Miller. Hemingway’s
"Hills Like White Elephants" first appeared in its pages; its covers were
designed by such artists as Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky, Duchamp, and Man Ray.
Another journal that featured
Latimer’s fiction, Pagany, flourished between 1929 and 1932 and was one of the
most important literary magazines of the depression era. Launched by Richard Johns in
consultation with William Carlos Williams, Pagany showcased the work of Stein, Ezra
Pound, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, H. D., Erskine Caldwell, Mary Butts, and Tess
Slesinger. Two of Latimer’s stories, "Monday Morning" and "The Little
Girls," first appeared in its pages. The socialist journal New Masses,
the first magazine to publish work by Richard Wright, was the original venue for
Latimer’s story "Picnic Day." Along with journalism, fiction,
and poetry by socialist writers such as Mike Gold and Jack Conroy, New Masses published
Hemingway, Dos Passos, Muriel Rukeyser, Dorothy Parker, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Wolfe,
and Langston Hughes. Latimer, whose work also appeared in more mainstream
publications such as The Century, The Bookman, and Scribner’s,
was in good company.
In 1927, when editors Van Wyck
Brooks, Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Rosenfeld assembled The American
Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature—dedicated to Alfred Stieglitz as
"a yearbook conducted by literary men in the interests of a growing American
literature"—they made sure to include Latimer’s story "Penance"
in conjunction with pieces by Hemingway, Stein, Dos Passos, Louise Bogan, Robert Penn
Warren, Hart Crane, Eugene O’Neill, and William Carlos Williams. A later
volume in the series, The New Caravan, includes Latimer’s posthumously
collected "Letters to Georgia O’Keeffe" alongside the work of Wallace
Stevens, Sherwood Anderson, Richard Wright, and Jean Toomer.
Latimer’s books found
homes with presses similarly dedicated to advancing the new writing. New York editor
Harrison Smith formed the publishing house of Cape and Smith in order to print avant-garde
works such as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in 1929; the following year,
Smith chose to publish Latimer’s novel This Is My Body. His subsequent
publishing partnership, Smith and Haas, brought out both Faulkner’s Light in
August and Latimer’s collection Guardian Angel and Other Stories in 1932.
Mentored by the Pulitzer
Prize-winning playwright Zona Gale, Latimer belonged to a coterie of artists and writers
that included Georgia O’Keeffe, Walt Kuhn, Meridel Le Sueur, and poet Kenneth
Fearing. Moving between Greenwich Village and her hometown of Portage, Wisconsin, Latimer
recorded her vision of the modernist milieu and of small-town America; both are
depicted—ironically, tenderly, savagely—in her groundbreaking work.
Latimer’s writing is
unique, important, and compelling. My two book projects, currently underway, restore her
considerable talent to critical view.
Notes
1 Eugene Jolas,
"Transition: An Occidental Workshop (1927-1938)," transition workshop,
ed. Eugene Jolas (New York: Vanguard, 1949) 13; Jolas 174.
2 Archive of Pagany, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library,
Newark.
3 Latimer, "Monday Morning" Pagany 1 (1930): 82-87;
"The Little Girls" Pagany 1 (1930): 66-74.
4 Latimer, "Picnic Day: A Story," New Masses 1 (1926).
5 Joseph North, ed., New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties
(New York: International Publishers, 1969).
6 Van Wyck Brooks, Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Rosenfeld,
eds., The American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature (New York: Literary
Guild of America-Macaulay, 1927) ix.
7 Alfred Kreymborg, Louis Mumford, and Paul Rosenfeld, eds., The New
Caravan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1936).
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