Glenway Wescott, the least known of the famous “lost” generation of expatriate American writers that included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, wrote three great works, two novels re-published by New York Review Books Classics in 2001 and 2004, The Pilgrim Hawk, and Apartment in Athens, and The Grandmothers, ostensibly a novel but with no traditional plot, and clearly autobiographical, re-published in 1996 by the University of Wisconsin Press.
Though all three are thankfully making their way back into the American literary conscience, The Grandmothers, perhaps because of its unusual form, or perhaps because it was re-published by a university press, appears to be the least talked about. That’s a shame. It is one of the supreme examples of American prose writing in the 20th century.
From Wisconsin to the Austrian Alps
The opening two chapters of the novel, originally published by Harper and Brothers in 1927, brilliantly establishes two dimensions. First, a young Alwyn Tower wanders through his grandmother’s house in Wisconsin (where Wescott was born in a town called Kewaskum), looking at the objects and pictures, and musing on “the long series of passions which had in the end produced himself.” Then the book cuts to Alwyn as a young man, staying for a time in the Austrian Alps, thinking back to his boyhood home and all the details he had absorbed about the myriad lives of his relatives, as well as thinking ahead to trying to paint in words a small portrait of his family that would be something like a large portrait of America.
And that is what follows: vignettes of the sometimes ordinary, sometimes dramatic, and sometimes dramatically ordinary lives of his mother and father before they were married, his Grandfather Tower, his Great Aunt Mary Harris, his Uncle Evan, and others, culminating in the last days of his Grandmother Tower, when Alwyn is in his late teens.
Described in basic detail, The Grandmothers can sound like a basic family memoir, and because it was re-published by the University of Wisconsin Press, it can also sound like a book that has purely local interest.
Far From Basic
Nothing could be further from the truth. Wescott was an absolute expert at universalizing average lives, rewarding any reader who’s delighted by the sheer power of original imagery and phrasing, no matter what the reference points are, and consistently infusing the presentation of details with the play of ideas. As a result, readers can absorb pure meaning at the same time they are getting general information. Few memoirs in this memoir-heavy publishing era can match Wescott’s artistry in terms of creating and maintaining an outside reader’s interest.
And if that weren’t enough, Wescott ends the book with a meditation on memory (the imaginative artistry it takes to make a full circle out of linear, transpired time) that rivals Marcel Proust in its wisdom and richness, as well as a wonderfully complex and intensely moving sense of how the lives of one’s forbearers intertwine with one’s yet to be lived future.
Douglas Nordfors - Douglas Nordfors grew up in Seattle and graduated from Columbia University (BA) and The University of Virginia (MFA). Before going on to ...
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