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A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories, by Glenway Wescott
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Just as E. M. Forster's novel of gay love, Maurice, remained unpublished throughout his lifetime, Glenway Wescott's long story "A Visit to Priapus" was also destined to be a posthumous work, buried from 1938 until this century in Wescott's massive archive of manuscripts, journals, notebooks, and letters. The autobiographical story is about a literary man, frustrated in love, who puts aside his pride and makes a date with a young artist in Maine. Lavishly rendered in Wescott's elegant prose, the tale is explicit where it needs to be, but—as is typical of Wescott—it is filled with descriptive beauty and introspective lessons about sex and sexuality, love and creativity. Previously published in anthology form in the United Kingdom, "A Visit to Priapus" is presented for the first time in book form in America, containing previously uncollected stories, including three never before published. The result is a candid portrayal of the gifted but enigmatic writer who was famous in youth and remained a perceptive and compassionate voice throughout his long life. Drawn together from midcentury literary journals and magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as from Wescott's papers, the stories were inspired by his life, from childhood to old age, from Wisconsin farm country to New York, London, Germany, and Paris.
Finalist, Gay General Fiction, Lambda Literary Awards
- Sales Rank: #1083642 in Books
- Published on: 2013-11-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x .80" w x 5.50" l, .78 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 208 pages
Review
"'A Visit to Priapus' is a meditation on desire and art, a rueful, comic, brutally honest consideration of sex and its human limitations."—From the foreword by Wendy Moffat, author of A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster
"'A Visit to Priapus' is not only a lost story—and one with a scandalous, sexy theme—but also a perfect example of the lost art of storytelling itself. Wescott's observations are so beautifully rendered you'll never forget them."—Matthew Rettenmund, author of Boy Culture
“These pieces are concerned with the timeless tide of humanity—the characters lose something of themselves as they encounter the inexorable, shared experience of birth, reproduction, and mortality, yet the focus on their interior lives allows them to remain individuals. In thrall to the animal laws of sex and death, Wescott’s work is also a meditative affirmation of our mystic, fragile sentience.”—Rain Taxi
About the Author
Glenway Wescott (1901–87) is well remembered for his Midwest novels, The Apple of the Eye and The Grandmothers, as well as his story collection Goodbye, Wisconsin. He is the author of the classic short novel The Pilgrim Hawk and of the World War II bestseller Apartment in Athens, in addition to two volumes of essays and two volumes of journals. Jerry Rosco is the author of the biography Glenway Westcott Personally and the editor of A Heaven of Words: Last Journals, 1956–1984, both published by the University of Wisconsin Press. He lives in New York City.
Most helpful customer reviews
34 of 34 people found the following review helpful.
"Waiting to be a Good Place"
By Eclectic Reader
The famous creator of A Room with a View (1908), Howard's End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924), E. M. Forster, kept his homosexuality a public secret and a classic novel of his, Maurice (written in 1913-1914) which dealt with the love between two men from different classes was also kept from the public until its posthumous publication in 1971. The manuscript was circulated among Forster's friends who knew of Forster's sexuality and one of those friends was fellow writer Glenway Wescott (1901-1987). Like Forster, Wescott was a successful novelist with works such as The Apple of the Eye (1924), The Grandmothers (winning him the Harper Book Prize in 1927), The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story (considered to be his masterpiece; 1940), Apartment in Athens (1945), essays, memoirs, and a series of short stories, Goodbye, Wisconsin (1928). Also like Forster, Wescott was secretly gay with a long-time partner, Monroe Wheeler. Wescott, too, wrote a story, "A Visit to Priapus," which he kept purposely unpublished because of the gay content until after his death. Ironically, it was Wescott and writer Christopher Isherwood who saw to it that Forster's hidden masterpiece, Maurice, finally saw publication.
A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (with a Foreword by Wendy Moffat and an invaluable Introduction by the editor, Jerry Rosco) has just been given its first U.S. publication. Some of the stories have been published in various publications (mainly in the UK), but some of the material has never been printed before. All of the pieces are very autobiographical in nature with gay content that varies from subtle to explicit to non-existent. The stories reflect a very complex style of writing most immediately comparable to the later works of William Faulkner (1897-1962).
The first two stories in the collection are mere vignettes. "Adolescence" describes the joy of "two youngsters" getting ready for a masquerade party in which one, fifteen-year-old Philip, a somewhat naïve and innocent farm boy, is convinced to dress up as a girl. At the party he doesn't know if his convincing disguise is responsibility for the shunning he receives or if others have guessed his identity and are shocked by what he has done. His loneliness and humiliation apparently is a preview of things to come in his life as a gay man. "Mr. Auerbach in Paris" is a mere shadow of a story telling about a young male secretary working for an elderly, wealthy, and philanthropic man who "little by little" is going blind. The story reveals the gullibility so many in Europe and America in the late 1930s had in regards to Germany and the force that was soon to descend upon the world.
It isn't until the third story, "The Babe's Bed" (1930) that readers get a much more full-bodied tale which tells of a young writer returning from Europe to visit his impoverished family in the United States. Wescott fills the pages of his story with more descriptive gloom about life during the Great Depression than one is likely to find in any other work aside from the far lengthier and better known The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck.
The collection's title story, "A Visit to Priapus" is close to novella length and certainly the most sexual tale in the collection. Distraught with the threesome in which he lives because he is receiving the least love and sexual attention, Alwyn Tower, thirty-eight and "sex-starved," is encouraged to visit a closeted, gay artist by the name of Hawthorne on a trip to a small New England Town. The mediocre (at best) artist is infamous for two things: desperately wanting critical attention (and praise) for his paintings and "the phallus of a demi-god, [a] nightmarish bludgeon." In lesser hands than Wescott's, the story would simply have descended to the level of pornography. Instead, the author gives readers an intense psychological tale and by the story's end, the narrator has learned as much about himself as he has the peculiar Hawthorne.
"The Stallions: Pages from an Unfinished Story" is another piece of autobiography in which Wescott in startling lyrical prose details the mating of two sets of stallions and mares for mating--hardly an everyday topic or depiction. "The Frenchman Six Feet Three" has Wescott once again calling upon his pre-WWII experiences in Europe. The narrator meets a tall Frenchman by the name of Roger Gaumond who is "summoned to do reserve military service for a fortnight." The utterly ill-fitting uniform he receives to wear when he reports to duty serves as a both a metaphor and foreshadowing of the lack of readiness and competence of the French military in face of the soon to be all too apparent military might of the Third Reich.
"The Love of New York" is the best example from A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories of how closely related Wescott's fiction can be from his non-fiction in both tone and substance with the story reading much more like an essay than a story. The tale extolling the beauty of Manhattan in the 1940s, in particular, contains an ominous, prophetic reference: "If anyone wanted to alter the country at one fell swoop, let us say by bombing, this would be the place to swoop." "An Example of Suicide" is likewise as much an essay as a work of fiction. Wescott creates a frame, coming across a crowd of "upward-gazing people" spending hours watching a young man on the edge of a seventeenth floor of Hotel Gotham trying to decide whether or not to jump to his death. Wescott cuts away from the action to deliberate on the topic of suicide and only after giving voice to his ruminations on suicide does Wescott return to the fate of the young man on the ledge.
"The Odor of Rosemary" has an elderly Wescott reminiscing about a 1935 ocean voyage and may be the most lyrical story in the collection.
Rosco includes two genuine essays in the collection: "The Valley Submerged" about Wescott's home being buried under water to make way for a reservoir which includes additional text that Wescott added when he was seventy-seven years old and a very intriguing (and moving) essay about Wescott meeting the French writer Colette in "A Call on Collette and Goudeket."
Throughout the tales in A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories Wescott utilizes contradictory images; sometimes involving the characters of people and frequently using vastly contrasting adjectives to describe the very same thing. Interestingly, throughout A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories Wescott is the thorough, keen observer of others and of life, but for such autobiographical works, the reader never really gets a good portrayal of Wescott himself. There is a certain air of mystery to the world of Glenway Wescott. It is as if in nothing is a given; no beauty without a taint of some sort. It may not be reading too much into his descriptions to state that his hidden sexual orientation led to the formation of such a worldly outlook and to the hidden Wescott of his autobiographical works.
A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories includes material written from when Wescott was only twenty-two up to the seventies. His youthful, "experimental story" entitled "Sacre de Printemps" in which he visits a gay male couple is written in the same complex style that makes the story instantly recognizable as coming from Wescott.
Wescott's writing is much like that of a poet. Every word used appears carefully chosen. Every detail and description, filled with as many paradoxical words as they may be, are as carefully chiseled as a block of marble under the hands of a sculptor. A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories is like a fine wine--meant to be sipped and not consumed in one sitting and contains a wealth of riches for the thoughtful reader.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Surprisingly topical
By john francis leonard
More than one of these stories have a gay sensibility of sorts, but it is A Visit to Priapus that rings exceptionally true to the modern reader. To put it bluntly the gay protagonist (clearly Westott himself) goes in search of a man. Specifically one with an exceptional member. In his day,without grinder and the internet or even really gay bars, it took a recommendation, a written invitation, and long bus trip to meet this man, but needs must. And what rings true to me in a topical fashion this "trick" turns out to be more work than pleasure. And really can't all of us identify? It is the exceptional prose, it is the vivid description of time and place that sends this this modern fable into the extraordinary. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
20th Century Excellence
By T. Scott White
Glenway Wescott is one of the most under-appreciated writers of the 20th Century. His writing is like poetry with a sensibility matched by few others.
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