BURIED TOGETHER
Partner Monroe Wheeler
Queer Places:
University of Chicago, 5801 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637, Stati Uniti
Stone-blossom, Clinton, NJ 08809, Stati Uniti
410 Park Ave, New York, NY 10022, Stati Uniti
Haymeadows, Raven Rock Rosemont Rd, Stockton, NJ 08559, Stati Uniti
Glenway Wescott (April 11, 1901 – February 22, 1987) was an
American poet, novelist and essayist. Identified with the
Lost Generation. A figure of the American
expatriate
literary community in
Paris during the
1920s, Wescott was openly
gay.[1]
His relationship with longtime companion
Monroe Wheeler lasted from 1919 until Wescott's death.
Wescott and Wheeler were in a menages a trois with George Platt Lynes.
Wescott had also an affair with
Pierre de Massot. When Wescott wrote
The Grandmothers, he created Alwyn Tower in his own queer image.
Truman Capote had received advice
from Glenway Wescott on how to become
‘kept’; one of his eventual keepers was Prince
Paul of Greece, who became King
Paul I in 1947.
Wescott was born on a farm in
Kewaskum, Wisconsin in 1901.[3]
His younger brother,
Lloyd Wescott, was born in Wisconsin in 1907. He studied at the
University of Chicago,[3]
where he was a member of a literary circle including
Elizabeth Madox Roberts,
Yvor Winters, and
Janet Lewis. Independently wealthy, he began his writing career as a
poet, but is best known for his short stories and novels, notably
The Grandmothers (1927), which received the Harper Novel prize,[3]
and
The Pilgrim Hawk (1940).
Wescott lived in Germany (1921–22), and in France (c.
1925–33),[3]
where he mixed with
Gertrude Stein and other members of the
American expatriate community. Wescott was the model for the character
Robert Prentiss in
Ernest
Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises. After meeting Prentiss, Hemingway's narrator, Jake
Barnes, confesses, "I just thought perhaps I was going to throw up."[1]
In the
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Gertrude Stein wrote about
him, "There was also Glenway Wescott but Glenway Wescott at no time interested
Gertrude Stein. He has a certain syrup but it does not pour."
Wescott and Wheeler returned to the United States and maintained an
apartment in
Manhattan
with photographer
George Platt Lynes. When his brother Lloyd moved to a dairy farm in
Union Township near
Clinton in
Hunterdon County,
New
Jersey in 1936, Wescott along with Wheeler and Lynes took over one of the
farmhand houses and called it Stone-Blossom.[4]
by
George Platt Lynes
His novel, The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story (1940), was praised by the
critics. Apartment in Athens (1945), the story of a Greek couple in
Nazi-occupied
Athens who must share their living quarters with a German officer, was a
popular success. From then on he ceased to write fiction, although he
published essays and edited the works of others. In her essay on The
Pilgrim Hawk Ingrid Norton writes, "After...Apartment in Athens,
Wescott lived until 1987 without writing another novel: journals (published
posthumously as Continual Lessons) and the occasional article, yes, but
no more fiction. The Midwest-born author seems to slide into the
golden handcuffs of expatriate decadence: supported by the heiress his
brother married, surrounded by literate friends, given to social drinking and
letter-writing."[5]
In 1959, when his brother Lloyd acquired a farm near the village of
Rosemont in
Delaware Township, Hunterdon County, New Jersey, Wescott moved into a
two-story stone house on the property, dubbed Haymeadows.[4]
In 1987, Wescott died of a stroke at his home in Rosemont and was buried in
the small farmer's graveyard hidden behind a rock wall and trees at
Haymeadows. Later Monroe Wheeler was buried alongside him.[6]
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