*Glenway Wescott Personally by Jerry Russo (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002)

 

Wescott, a writer I have long admired, apparently lived a charmed, productive, creative, satisfying, golden and long life.  Russo's biography, which repeats much of the information contained in Wescott's journals (Continual Lessons, FSG, 1997) elegantly and succinctly details that life, from cradle to grave.  The journals end in 1955; Wescott lived for 30 more (less creative but eventful) years, and a second volume of journals has recently been published.

Born to a farming family in Wisconsin in 1901, Wescott went to the University in Chicago, and from there to New York City, and from there to Europe, spending most of the 1920s and 30s in England and France.  He met his life-long partner, Monroe Wheeler when they were both young men in Chicago, and the two remained together, devoted partners, in a sort of open -- in all senses -- marriage that accommodated many affairs, including a years-long menage-a-trois with George Platt Lynes.  The years after the war were mostly spent in New York City, where Wheeler worked as director of publications at the Museum of Modern Art, and Wescott devoted much time and energy working with the American Academy of Arts and Letters and with the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana.

Wescott's fiction, which was predominately autobiographical, was greeted enthusiastically by both reviewers and readers early on -- both his novels The Grandmothers (1927) and Apartment in Athens (1945) were bestsellers, and his novella, The Pilgrim Hawk (1940), was heralded as a contemporary classic.  But he struggled to write fiction in the second half of his life, turning instead to perceptive and appreciative literary essays about Colette, Katherine Anne Porter, E. M. Forster, W. S. Maugham, and many of the other writers he befriended and admired.

Russo's portrait of Wescott is extremely flattering, and deservedly so: he was a brilliant  writer and conversationalist, a generous and loving friend and devoted partner, civic-minded about democracy and literature, humble, hard-working, and handsome.