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

Sir Francis Cyril Rose

The Artwork of Sir Francis Cyril Rose

Born at the grand English estate of Moor Park, Hertfordshire in September of 1909, Sir Francis Cyril Rose, 4th Baronet of the Montreal Roses, was an English painter who received strong support throughout the 1930s from his patron, American novelist and art collector Gertrude Stein. Although he created many works of art, Rose’s artistic output was as erratic as his lifestyle was audacious and extravagant. Despite Stein’s endeavors to generate a sustained interest in his work, Francis Rose remained one of the more obscure artists of his generation.

Descended from Spanish nobility, Francis Rose inherited his British baronetcy while still a child. He received his initial education from the Jesuits at Beaumont College in Old Windsor, Berkshire, as well as lessons from private tutors abroad. In 1926 at the age of seventeen, Rose relocated to Paris where he resided as an expatriate until 1936. He studied under avant-garde painter and typographic artist Francis Picabia, an early figure in the Dada Movement, and Spanish muralist and theater set designer Josep Maria Sert.

In 1930, Rose had his first exhibition, alongside Salvador Dali, at the Paris gallery of modern art patron Marie Cuttoli. By this time, he had already designed costumes and scenery for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, some of which were in collaboration with artist Christopher Wood. Rose would design theater sets and costumes again in 1939 for Lord Berners’s ballet production “Cupid and Psyche” at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theater. During the 1930s, he spent several years studying Chinese poetry and art in China; he later traveled extensively in Europe and North Africa with his future wife, Frederica Dorothy Carrington.

While traveling in France in his early twenties, Francis Rose became a close acquaintance of author Gertrude Stein who helped launch his painting career by commissioning several of his works, including a portrait of herself, for her own art collection. Stein had discovered Rose’s paintings in a Parisian gallery in the late 1920s and eventually bought one hundred-thirty of his works. Through Stein’s support, Rose was able to exhibit his work in Paris, London and New York. He also created illustrations for “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook”, a publication by Stein’s lifetime partner, Alice Babette Toklas. Although the friendship between the three personalities wavered at times, Alice Toklas asked Rose to design Gertrude Stein’s grave site memorial.

In 1938, Rose completed what is considered one of his most successful paintings, “L’Ensemble”, an oil on canvas mural that depicted his circle of friends which included Jean Cocteau, Gloria Stein, Alice Toklas, Christian Bérard, Pavel Tchelitchev and Natalie Barney, among others. This mural was exhibited in the following year at the Petit Palais Musée des Beauz Arts in Paris. Called to military service at the beginning of World War II, Rose served as a disciplinary sergeant in the Royal Air Force. In 1942, Francis Rose exhibited his work at the “Imaginative Art Since the War” exhibition held in London’s Leicester Galleries; this exhibition was organized by Frederica Dorothy Carrington, one of two daughters to Sir Frederick Carrington.

Francis Rose and Dorothy Carrington were married in 1942; however, as Rose was a noted homosexual, the marriage eventually ended. By 1954, Carrington had permanently settled, without Rose, on the Corsican island of Ajaccio; their divorce was finalized in 1966. Carrington became one of the twentieth-century’s leading scholars on the island’s culture and history. In 1971, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and, in the next year, a member of the Royal Society of Literature. Carrington became a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1995.

In 1938, Rose gave an American stockbroker the power of attorney to manage his fortune; however, this stockbroker was involved in, and later convicted of, an embezzlement scheme. Rose lost most of his fortune and was nearly destitute by the end of the second World War. He spent his final years in a state of poverty, helped financially by friends foremost among whom was photographer Cecil Beaton. In an attempt to achieve some financial success, Rose published a memoir in 1961 entitled “Saying Life: The Memoirs of Sir Francis Rose”. This memoir discussed both his exploits, many which had factual issues, and his associations with the famous and artistic personalities of the time. “Saying Life”, however. was not the financial success that he needed.

Sir Francis Cyril Rose died in London on the nineteenth of November in 1979 at the age of seventy. He had exhibited in London and Paris in the 1950s and 1960s with major retrospective in London and Brighton in 1966. Another third retrospective of Rose’s work was given at London’s England & Co in 1988. In addition to private collections, his work is included in London’s England & Co Gallery, the Stein-Tolkas Collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Notes: The Nick Harvill Libraries has a biographical article with quotes entitled “Lord Chaos: The Life of Sir Francis Rose” at: https://www.nickharvilllibraries.com/blog/lord-chaos-the-life-of-sir-francis-rose

Time Magazine has an archive review of Sir Francis Roses’s July 1949 exhibition of new work at London’s Gimpel Fils Gallery. The review is located at; https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,888553,00.html

Top Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Sir Francis Rose”, Date Unknown, Bromide Print, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Second Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Cecil Beaton, Gertrude Stein, Sir Francis Rose”, 1939, Bromide Print, 24 x 23.8 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London, England

Third Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Sir Francis Rose and Gertrude Stein, Bilignin”, 1939, Gelatin Silver Print from Original Negative, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Bottom Insert Image: Francis Goodman, “Emma Tollemache and Sir Francis Rose”, 9 December 1947, Gelatin Silver Print from Original Negative, National Portrait Gallery, London, England

Emma Tollemache (née Manasseh) wrote the poetry collection “In the Light”. A limited edition of 250 copies with illustrations by Sir Francis Rose was published by Marlowe Galleries.

Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia, “Pierrot”, 1932-1937, Oil on Canvas, 196 x 130,5 cm, Private Collection

Francis-Marie Martinez de Picabia was born in Paris to a French mother and a Cuban father of an aristocratic Spanish descent. Financially independent, Picabia studied under Fernand Cormon and others at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in the late 1890s. Fernand Cormon, one of France’s leading historical and portrait artists, took Picabia into his Atelier Cormon, where Vincent van Gough and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had also studied.

After shortly experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism at the initial stage of his career, Francis Picabia became associated with Cubism as his highly abstract compositions were colorful and rich in contrasts. He was also in his early career between 1903 to 1908 influenced by the impressionsit paintings of Alfred Sisley.

After short stints with Fauvism and Neo-Impressionism, Picabia became the major artist of the Dada movement. He was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon turn his back on the art establishment as a whole. Despite the association with so many movements, Picabia managed to leave a strong mark on all of them and it is fair to say that the entire outlook of the modern art would not be quite the same if Picabia was never a part of its crucial early-twentieth century stage.