This is a guest Post by Andrew Guschausky.
The ways that we discover what we read are various. Sometimes we are led to a book by its reference in another book. Sometimes we hear mention of an unfamiliar author on the radio. I’ve heard that there are some brave souls who will pick up a book at a bookshop simply because the cover is too interesting to pass by.
In this case, I happened to be watching a book review on PaperBird’s YouTube channel. The always illuminating reviewer was discussing the works of James Purdy and then mentioned a young Chicago writer, Wendell Wilcox. Wilcox, he said, was “… just starting to find his way, but then in 1957 mysteriously just stopped publishing altogether, which is weird because around that same time is when James Purdy started appearing in print.” Something about the phrase, “mysteriously just stopped publishing,” piqued my interest. Perhaps it was only because, deep down, I love a good mystery. In any case, I decided to seek out Wilcox’s novel, Everything is Quite All Right, thinking that it might lead me down some rabbit hole but would end with me knowing why he stopped publishing.
Bernard Ackerman, Inc. published Everything is Quite All Right in 1945. On the back cover, there is a brief author bio: “Mr. Wilcox was graduated from the University of Chicago in 1929 and he has been married since 1931. He has lived in Chicago since he was five years old, and the scene of EVERYTHING IS QUITE ALL RIGHT is a great unnamed middle western city on the shores of Lake Michigan.”
In the 1930s, Wilcox became a friend of Gertrude Abercrombie, Chicago’s “Queen of the Bohemian Artists.” Abercrombie was an influential Surrealist painter and her vast network of friends and acquaintances included painters like Karl Priebe and Sylvia Fein, jazz musicians such as Charlie “Bird” Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and writers Thornton Wilder and James Purdy. She regularly hosted parties, gatherings, and jam sessions at her house in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, where artists from diverse backgrounds mingled. These gatherings acquired a reputation for attracting the most interesting talent in Chicago and beyond, as many traveling musicians and artists frequently stopped by. As for Abercrombie, she loved being the center of attention. Her gregariousness was legendary and the get-togethers continued even when she was too ill to get out of bed.
Abercrombie was not only a respected painter; she was also a talented jazz pianist. When jazz musicians improvised in her living room, it wasn’t uncommon for Abercrombie to join in on the piano. She had such strong friendships with so many musicians that she even inspired a couple of tunes: Richie Powell’s “Gertrude’s Bounce” and Roy Kral & Jackie Cain’s “Afrocrombie.” She made her home into an environment in which the music never stopped and its halcyon atmosphere was later recalled fondly by Saul Bellow and Studs Terkel. Abercrombie’s wide-ranging bohemian crowd was connected through her prevailing personae. In a way, these gatherings were comparable to the Paris literary salons hosted by another Gertrude.
Gertrude Stein surrounded herself with painters, poets, novelists, composers, and playwrights who visited her and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, at their Paris home on Saturday evenings. Stein also brought together artists who would influence each other and eventually have an effect on the broader culture. Although she is inextricably linked with Paris, Stein did feel the pull towards home. In 1934, she was invited to lecture at the University of Chicago and she returned in 1935. Thornton Wilder was teaching at the school’s English department at the time and he invited his friend Gertrude Abercrombie to attend Stein’s lecture, “Poetry and Grammar.” Abercrombie asked if she could bring along her friend, Wendell Wilcox. And, as Wilder put it, “…so began a romance of Wendell and Miss Stein.”
Wilcox had first read Stein’s work when he was an undergraduate and was quite taken with her poetry collection, Tender Buttons. After attending her lecture, the two writers began a correspondence that lasted until the end of Stein’s life. She was fond of his letters and the celebrated author encouraged the young Chicago writer to pursue his passion.
In her 1937 memoir, Everybody’s Autobiography, Gertrude Stein mentions Wilcox, and writes that he “…has a feeling for meaning that is not beyond what the words are saying and of course that does make more brilliant writing and that is what he is doing.” This take on Wilcox reminded me of the English literary critic Cyril Connolly’s distinction between two styles of literature: vernacular (or, realist) and Mandarin. Of the Mandarin, Connolly says, “It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs….”
After publishing short stories in Harper’s Bazaar (his first story, “England Is in Flames,” appeared in 1941), Story, and The New Yorker, as well as having his stories included in anthologies like, Best American Short Stories and 55 Short Stories from The New Yorker, Wilcox succeeded in having his debut novel accepted for publication.
Hoping to garner attention for the first-time novelist, Wilcox’s publisher asked permission to use the quotation from Everybody’s Autobiography and requested that Stein expand on what she meant by the comment. Ever the supportive friend and mentor, Stein sent a letter stating: “I am genuinely interested in his work. He has perfection, delicacy and persistence … all three good things.”
Everything is Quite All Right does not resemble the modernist writings of Stein. Wilcox’s writing is clear and straightforward and the plot itself is quite simple. As the back cover states, it concerns “…ordinary people living dull, uneventful lives.” We are introduced to the repugnant (and racist) Mrs. Korg as she has fired yet another “girl” that she and Mr. Korg have hired to clean their home, prepare their meals, and care for their baby. They have gone through eleven helpers in the past year.
We then meet the soon-to-be-twelfth, seventeen-year-old Elsie Singer. Elsie’s parents are struggling to provide for their five children on their Michigan farm. With the idea that she might be of some help, Elsie is sent to live with her recently widowed aunt in the city. Elsie is sweet and innocent by nature, but her mere presence grates on her Aunt Norah, who would prefer to remain in her ways. “For her the happy cheerful state was one of soft funereal gloom.” It was in the evenings just as the sun went down that Elsie’s presence was especially unwelcome. Every night, Norah would sit in the dark and, like clockwork, the presence of her late husband would arrive and together they would commune in the empty apartment.
Elsie is not an intellectual (characters refer to her as “slow” and “stupid”), but she is observant and instinctively kind. She cannot help but notice that her aunt does not really want her there. She is also aware that her presence back home was financially trying for her parents. Norah decides Elsie should find a job. So, with some prodding and some assistance from her aunt, Elsie finds work as a maid for Mr. and Mrs. Korg.
The scenes where Mrs. Korg makes impossible demands on her new maid are memorably uncomfortable. Mrs. Korg is perpetually frustrated with Elsie and she feels a sense of superiority which she frequently indulges. Meanwhile, Mr. Korg tries rather awkwardly to soften his wife’s harshness. For the most part, though, he goes about his work and stays out of the way. He is a meek fellow and he is ultimately convinced that life is merely “just doing ordinary things and having good or bad feelings about them.”
The Korgs’s marriage has some noticeable fissures and as the pressure continues to build, it seems that something will soon change:
Every war, they say, has its causes, those stated and those actual, and then there is always some event that precipitates the whole affair. Without this obvious event the war could never begun. The same is true of the main events in the lives of people.
After offering to give her a ride home, Mr. Korg takes Elsie on a drive to Lake Michigan. There, while the two sit on a rock overlooking the water, they share a kiss that inaugurates a love affair. We know, of course, that this cannot end well. And along the way, Elsie learns to follow her own heart. She leaves the Korgs, her aunt, and the city, and moves back to her family’s house in the country. But soon, Elsie finds herself getting to know the young man living just one farm over. At the end, the reader is left thinking things might actually be quite all right.
It seems clear why Stein championed Wilcox’s writing. His sentences move along quickly and, consequently, both humor and pathos are met so suddenly that their effects are just a little bit delayed. That delay often makes the laugh louder and the sigh longer. The novel is also full of irony. Characters are constantly doing things that they just admonished someone else for doing — such as when Mrs. Korg shouts at Mr. Korg that his outburst might wake the baby. Characters do self-serving things that they tell themselves are for the benefit of others: Elsie’s mother suggests that Aunt Norah take in Elsie not because the Singers need one less mouth to feed, but because her lonely, grieving sister needs some company. And the novel’s title, of course, is exactly what one says when everything is not quite all right. It really is no surprise that Wilcox’s writing drew comparisons to James Thurber’s domestic satires. And it is no surprise that his stories were featured in The New Yorker, as his writing has the clean, efficient, neat style that one associates with the magazine.
There’s little information about Wilcox’s life after his novel was published. He contributed a few more short stories to The New Yorker –the last piece I could locate (“No Larger Than Life”) was printed in the November 17, 1956 issue. After that, it appears that he dropped off of the proverbial literary map and that promise that Gertrude Stein saw in him was never fully realized.
The remembrances of Samuel Steward — poet, professor, pornographer, and tattoo artist — offered one clue as to why Wilcox drifted into anonymity. In The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward: Recollections of an Extraordinary Twentieth-Century Gay Life, Steward writes,
In 1945, my good friend Wendell Wilcox had a novel published, Everything is Quite All Right, and planned to write a new novel about his great passion, the Latin poet Catullus. But Wendell made the mistake of detailing his carefully researched plot to Thornton [Wilder], and sometime later, Thornton’s The Ides of March appeared. Therein, alas! Wendell found his plot. After that, Thornton discovered many of his friends in Chicago disappeared or grew cool as the story about Catullus gained wider circulation. I was one of those friends who vanished.
However, Penelope Niven, author of Thornton Wilder: A Life, discredits this claim. Wilder was well established by the time Everything is Quite All Right was released. With four novels and three Pulitzer Prizes to his name, Wilder had little need to resort to plagiarism. Niven adds, “Wilder’s correspondence confirms beyond question that he began conceiving and planning the novel as early as 1922, soon after his first trip to Rome.”
Wilcox visited Paris in 1949, seemingly with the desire to write. In a letter, Alice B. Toklas mentions his visit:
I’d only seen him once at one of the lectures Gertrude gave at the University of Chicago in ’35 and seeing him now has been a pleasure…Wendell wrote a short but not uninteresting novel a few years ago — he cant [sic] get to work easily though writing is as natural as living to him—he wants to stay a bit and get to work here.
Justin Spring, in his biography of Samuel Steward, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Poet, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade, states that Steward and Wilcox reconnected in 1976. Through their correspondence, Wilcox painted a bleak picture. He was struggling with alcoholism, a recent colostomy, and liver cancer. His wife, Esther, was a librarian and the financial provider in their marriage. When she passed away, Wilcox had a tough time making ends meet and he admitted to Steward that he had long since given up writing.
In 1986, The Paris Review printed “Gertrude Stein: Letters to a Friend,” with commentary by Philip Galanes. Stein’s friend was Wendell Wilcox. The article gives us a glimpse into his later life: “… Wilcox settled in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he worked as an archivist at the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina. He died in 1981.”
James Purdy captured those old days of bohemian Chicago in some of his novels. He would occasionally use a friend’s likeness in his works throughout his career. In his 1959 novel, Malcolm, a Gertrude Abercrombie-like character plays a pivotal role and she does again in his 1967 novel, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, and in his 1996 novel, Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue. On James Purdy’s Wikipedia page, his 1977 novel, Narrow Rooms, is referred to as “…a personal communication looking back some 25 years to Wendell Wilcox, a failed writer in the Abercrombie circle. Wilcox, who had once enjoyed a degree of success, stopped publishing at the very moment Purdy began commercial publication.”
When an author gives up writing, it puts their previous work in a peculiar light. One can’t help but see a trajectory of rise and fall. And in that light, we might see the previous work as presaging that failure — as if the works were stepping stones towards a destination that never existed. Should we consider Wilcox a failed author? I think the notion that he failed disregards his achievements. To have his work published in some of the most celebrated literary magazines, to have his novel published, to have the respect of his peers—maybe that was not enough, but all of that was not nothing. The reason for the decline of Wilcox’s writing career is still murky. Personal issues aside, the publishing world can be difficult and sometimes unfair. Most published writers have to live the life of Scheherazade. Sure, maybe your last story was good, but that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to finish telling your next one.
In his final published story, “No Larger Than Life,” recently widowed Mrs. Tanner discovers a letter addressed to her from a cousin that her late husband never delivered to her. The letter was meant to heal a wound in their relationship and the cousin is pleading to just forget about the conflict and make amends. Mrs. Tanner becomes so upset that she is nearly ill with the thought that her cousin waited for a reply and never received one—what if she is seen as stubborn or unforgiving? She can’t bear the thought of her cousin thinking less of her, so she decides to write a letter that will explain why she did not reply and say that she, too, would like to make amends. This decision eases her mind. But, months later, when asked if she sent the letter: “‘No. I put it off, and then I forgot, and then when I remembered again, I got to thinking how mad she’d made me,’ Mrs. Tanner said.”
That Wilcoxian style occurs in the way that a character finds fault in the actions of others yet they are incapable of seeing that same fault in themself. His characters are often blind to their own motivations and so their behaviors contradict their beliefs. The humor emerges when the contradiction is expressed, as it is by Mrs. Tanner.
There are clear connections between his final published story and his novel. Most of the action takes place in dining rooms and living rooms. What we learn of the characters arises from what they say and what others say to them. The domestic settings, the snappy dialogue, the cutting satire, the comedy born of a character’s folly, the spare, colloquial prose, they all formed the hallmark of Wilcox’s fiction.
Returning to Cyril Connolly’s distinction between the vernacular style of writing — simple, terse, and idiomatic — as opposed to the Mandarin. There is nothing in the vernacular, he argues, that we would not find in everyday speech. In other words, it is unadorned writing; as a principle, it avoids ornamentation. Connolly references Samuel Butler’s dictum: “A man’s style in any art should be like his dress—it should attract as little attention as possible.”
Everything is Quite All Right would undoubtedly fall into the vernacular camp. Wilcox had a knack for the realist style. He had an ear for everyday speech. He was talented enough to create work that has a distinctive charm. The interesting thing about the vernacular style is that it often encapsulates the work in its time. Wilcox’s novel is unquestionably of its time.
I was curious if Wilcox continued to write, despite not having anything published after 1956. Although he admits to eventually giving up writing, I wondered how long after publication he made that decision. I was curious if his style evolved. I was also curious if he made peace with writing for his own pleasure or if he only wrote for the purpose of publication. Some of these questions will likely remain unanswered. However, it appears that not all of his unpublished writings have been lost.
The Princeton University Library is home to the Wendell Wilcox Papers. There are decades of letters to and from his wife Esther, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Abercrombie, Thornton Wilder, and other writers and friends included in the collection. His published and unpublished short stories are collected, along with his manuscript of Everything is Quite All Right. And there are also manuscripts of three unpublished novels: The Color of Darkness, Rock Me to Sleep, and Helen.
For anyone interested in the American literary milieu of the 1940s, Everything is Quite All Right might be worth seeking out (although a recent glance at BookFinder.com only revealed four copies for sale). I found Wilcox himself to be more interesting than his novel. I’ve come to think of him as a kind of case study of a writer who once showed promise only to be forgotten in his own time. It was undoubtedly an interesting cultural place that he occupied: his connections with the art scene in Chicago and his bonds with Gertrude Abercrombie and Gertrude Stein. For me, the value of the novel was what it did and did not reveal about its author’s promise.
Andrew Guschausky lives in Boise, Idaho.