Tag: annie winifred ellerman

Robert McAlmon: “The Possibility of All Things”

Photographers Unknown, The Possibily of All Things

Almost every night, Joyce and I met for apéritifs, and although he was working steadily on Ulysses, at least one night a week he was ready to stay out all night, and those nights he was never ready to go home at any hour. We talked of the way the free mind can understand the possibility of all things: necrophilia and other weird rites. We agreed in disliking mysticism, particularly the fake and sugared mysticism of many poets and writers. We spoke of what a strange man Robert Burton must have been to have compiled his Anatomy of Melancholy. and he didn’t know in the end a bit more about it than we did. Sir Thomas Browne, not to speak of Ezra Pound and Eliot and Moore and Shaw, we discovered, but sooner or later Mr. Joyce began reciting Dante in sonorous Italian. When that misty and intent look came upon his face and into his eye I knew that friend Joyce wasn’t going home till early morning. 

Wyndham Lewis arrived for a stay in Paris and he was a different man from the Lewis of London. He was free and easy and debonair. Indeed, too many Englishmen will do on the continent what it does not do to do in London. Lewis was intent upon going to the Picasso exhibition; he must meet Picasso and Braque and Derain, although these painters of Paris were cagey and suspicious about English painters of talent. Picasso at the time was doing his pneumatic nudes, which always made me want to stick a pin in them to see if they would deflate. 

Lewis was most gracious and jovial and instructed me with a constant flow of theories on abstraction and plastic values. It would not have done to let him know that I had heard most of what he was saying before, in New York. Somehow there was no wonder in Lewis’ discovery that the engineering demand of structures often give them an aesthetic value. The Egyptians, Greeks and Mayans seemed to have known that before Lewis.

Robert McAlmon, Don’t Be Common, Being Geniuses Together 1921-1927, McAlmon and the Lost Generation: A Self Portrait, 1962, Edited by Robert E. Knoll, University of Nebraska Press

Born at Clifton, Kansas in March of 1895, Robert Menzies McAlmon was an American modernist poet, novelist and publisher who, as an important expatriate in the 1920s, founded the Parisian publishing house Contact Editions. This avant-garde press published the works of such influential writers as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. 

The youngest of ten children born to traveling minister John Alexander McAlmon and Bessie Urquhart, Robert McAlmon grew up in several rural mid-western towns. In 1916, he studied briefly at the University of Minnesota before his 1918 enlistment with the United States Army Air Corps. Upon military discharge from his San Diego, California station, McAlmon studied intermittently at the University of Southern California. His first poems, inspired by his fellow Army Air Corps team members, were published in the March 1919 issue of “Poetry”.

After a brief stay in Chicago where he met Italian-American writer Emanuel Carnevali, McAlmon relocated in 1920 to New York City where he was hired as an art school’s nude model. He quickly became acquainted with Greenwich Village’s literary circle, including artist and poet Marsden Hartley with whom he formed a life-long friendship. Along with physician and writer William Carlos Williams, McAlone founded the literary magazine “Contact” in 1921. Although never financially successful in its short life, the magazine’s four issues published early works from such modernist writers as Hilda Dolittle, Glenway Wescott, Wallace Stevens and Mina Loy. 

On February 14th of 1921, Robert McAlmon entered into a marital arrangement with English writer Annie Winifred “Bryher” Ellerman, the heiress of a vast fortune and lover of Hilda Dolittle. This arrangement, which inspired much gossip, lasted four years and enabled Ellerman to receive control of her inheritance and gave McAlmon financial independence. In 1922, McAlmon moved to Paris where he founded the influential literary press Contact Editions. In addition to his own writings, McAlmon published Hemingway’s first work, “Three Stories and Ten Poems” (1923) and  Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans” (1925).  He also provided financial support to James Joyce and assisted in the revision and typing of the Penelope section of Joyce’s “Ulysses”. 

McAlmon published his first book of short stories, the 1922 “A Hasty Bunch”, with James Joyce’s printer Maurice Darantière in Dijon, France. Contact Editions published his second volume of short stories “Distinguished Air” (1925); two collections of poetry, “Portrait of a Generation” (1926) and “North America, Continent of Conjecture” (1929); and an experimental novel on a North Dakota prairie farm community, “Village: As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period” (1924). Two collections of McAlmon’s poetry were printed through other presses: “Explorations” (1921) was published by London’s Egoist Press, and “Not Alone Lost” (1937) by New Directions in Connecticut. 

Robert McAlmon, who had openly stated his bisexuality, officially divorced Annie Winifred Ellerman in 1927. He closed Contact Editions and left Paris in 1929. McAlmon traveled over the next fifteen years, with visits to the United States, Mexico and Europe during which he drank heavily and, although he wrote, published little. McAlmon was a friend and a drinking buddy with James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, whom he introduced to the spectacle of bullfighting. He knew artist Jean Cocteau, surrealist writer René Crevel, novelist Raymond Radiguet, surrealist poet Louis Aragon and many others from the parties, bars and cafés he attended. McAlmon’s closer ties, however, were with avant-garde painter Francis Picabia and modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi. 

After 1935, McAlmon wrote very little. He was interested in radical politics but his views were not supported by the expatriates in Paris. After the German occupation of France, McAlmon was trapped in Paris and eventually stricken with tuberculosis. In 1940, he was able to escaped France through Spain and returned to the United States where joined his brothers in El Paso, Texas. McAlmon sought treatment for his ailment in El Paso and worked with his brothers in a local surgical supply house.

Despite his many published works, Robert McAlmon died almost an unknown writer in his own country. He passed away, at the age of sixty, in February of 1956 at Desert Hot Springs, California. His body was interred at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the 1990s, the first American editions of “Village”, “Post-Adolescence”, and “Miss Knight and Others” were published by the University of New Mexico Press. McAlmon’s memoir “Being Geniuses Together”, first published 1938 in London, was reprinted by Doubleday, New York in 1968.  

Notes: The Internet Archive’s Open Library site has several books by Robert McAlmon that can be read online after free registration: https://openlibrary.org/search?q=robert+mcalmon&mode=everything

Top Insert Image: Berenice Abbott, “Robert McAlmon”, 1925-1930, Gelatin Silver Print, 24 x 19.4 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Robert McAlmon with Canadian Poet John Glassco and His Partner Graeme Taylor in Nice, France”, 1929, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Ernest Hemingway and Robert McAlmon, Ronda, Spain”, 1923, Ernst Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Robert McAlmon”, circa 1930s, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Jimmy Daniels

Carl Van Vechten, “Jimmy Daniels”, July 11th 1940, Gelatin Silver Print, Library of Congress

Born in Laredo, Texas in November of 1907, James Lesley Daniels was an actor, cabaret singer and nightclub host during the Harlem Renaissance that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. He spent his early years in Little Rock, Arkansas, before moving to New York City in the 1920s. Daniels studied at Bird’s Business College in the Bronx and became acquainted with many members of the Harlem Renaissance, particularly jazz and blues singer Alberta Hunter, whom he assisted in her elder years.

After graduating, Jimmy Daniels returned to Little Rock where he became the secretarial assistant to Aldridge E. Bush, the founder and president of Little Rock’s Century Life Insurance Company. Desiring a career in acting, he returned to New York in 1928. Through noted stage actress Katherine Cornell’s stage manager, Daniels was able to get a part in Cornell’s 1930 Broadway hit “Dishonored Lady”. Following this role, Daniels performed in the 1931 ”Savage Rhythm” at Broadway’s Elysee Theater and in productions staged by the Chamberlain-Brown Stock Company in Mount Vernon, New York.

Leaving Broadway theater, Daniels found his first professional singing position at Hot Cha, a Harlem nightclub on 7th Avenue where Billie Holiday often performed. He quickly achieved recognition and soon became part of the European music scene. By the summer of 1933, Daniels was performing in Monaco at Monte Carlo’s Summer Sporting Club. At the end of 1933 and into 1934, he accompanied British jazz pianist Reginald Foresythe at the Ciro’s nightclub in London. 

Jimmy Daniels, upon his return to New York, became the premier entertainer at Marian Cooley’s Sunday night suppers at Le Ruban Bleu, a Parisian-styled nightclub on 56th and Fifth Avenue. In 1935, he sponsored, for three seasons, a series of parties at the Bronze Studio Catering Hall on Lenox Avenue in Harlem. During these parties, Daniels met Herbert Jacoby who convinced him to perform in his Paris nightclub, Reuban Bleu, in 1936 and 1937. Daniels later performed at Jacoby’s newly opened New York City nightclub and, in 1938, sang for a second time at the Parisian club

Established as a singer in both New York and Europe, Daniels opened the Jimmy Daniels’ Nightclub in 1939 at 114 West 116th Street in Harlem. An instant hit, the nightclub attracted a long list of both black and white, gay and straight, notables, including European royals and aristocrats. Among the clientele were British society photographer Olivia Wyndham; actors Burgess Meredith and Diana Barrymore; British art patron Harold Jackman; photographer Carl Van Vechten; sculptor Richmond Barthé; poet Claude McKay; and heavyweight champion Joe Louis. Daniels owned and operated the nightclub until 1942 when he entered military service for World War II. 

Returning to New York, Jimmy Daniels became the host in 1950 at the chic supper club Bon Soir on West 8th Street. Known as a place where everyone was welcome regardless of race or sexual orientation, Bon Soir was a balance of elegant, intimate, risqué and respectable ambiance. As host, singer and emcee, Daniels was a popular figure at Bon Soir for ten years. The club hosted a variety of rising entertainment stars, including Phyllis Diller, Kaye Ballard and Barbara Streisand; the Bon Soir was Streisand’s first New York engagement. Bon Soir actually lost business when Daniels left in 1960 after his ten year stay.

Beginning in 1960, Daniels hosted a series of “supper soirees” at Lower Manhattan’s L’Etang Supper Club. Real estate owner Jimmy Merry hired Daniels at this time to manage the Tiffany Room, now the Ice Palace, in Cherry Grove, Fire Island. He also performed briefly at the Blue Whale Bar in Fire Island Pines. Daniels continued to perform at various New York City parties, festivals and clubs until his death. After suffering a stroke, James Lesley “Jimmy” Daniels died at the age of seventy-six in June of 1984 just a few days after performing at the Kool Jazz Festival’s “Evening of the Music of Harold Arlen” at Carnegie Hall.

Notes: In 1934, Jimmy Daniels met prominent architect Philip Johnson and began a relationship, his first serious one, that lasted from 1934 to 1936. He later met filmmaker Kenneth Macpherson who at that time was married to English heiress and novelist Annie Winifred Ellerman, known by her pen name Bryher. She commissioned sculptor Richmond Barthé, a regular patron of the Jimmy Daniels’ Nightclub, to create a marble bust of Daniels. In the 1950s, Daniels shared a home with award-winning fashion designer Rex Madsen.

The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project has an 2023 article written by project manager Amanda Davis on the Jimmy Daniels’ Nightclub. The article is located at: https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/jimmie-daniels/

On the “Medium” story site, writer Michael Henry Adams has an article on the lives of historic, gay African-American artists and performers, a section of which discusses Jimmy Daniels. The  article also covers the intolerance shown to LBGTQ people despite the apparent advancement in legislation. Michael Adams’s article is located at: https://medium.com/@michaelhenryadams/raising-the-questions-who-is-gay-who-cares-why-it-still-matters-4166a5442ec8

Top Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Jimmy Daniels”, 1933, Color Print, Van Vechten Trust

Second Insert Image: George Platt Lynes, “James Leslie Daniels”, 1937, Duotone Photo Engraving, 22.9 x 27.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Jimmy Daniels with Bust by Richmond Barthé”, December 21st 1938, Gelatin Silver Print, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Bottom Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Jimmy Daniels”, circa 1933, Color Print, Van Vechten Trust