Finding Evelyn Scott

on a great American Modernist currently languishing in critical oblivion

“The Wave placed her among the outstanding literary figures of our time… The Sound and the Fury should place William Faulkner in company with Evelyn Scott.”

In July of 1929, Evelyn Scott published The Wave—her massive, kaleidoscopic novel of the Civil War—to popular success and critical acclaim. She tells the story of the war through dozens of intertwined vignettes, from the first shots at Fort Sumter to Lincoln’s assassination and its aftermath. Most of the great battles and events appear, but almost always from an individual perspective, what Henry James would call a “center of consciousness.” We begin with Confederate Dickie Ross watching the attack on Fort Sumter from a rowboat, and we conclude with Union mother Mrs. Deering, who has lost two sons at Gettysburg, cheering Sherman’s triumphal parade through Washington. Along the way, we move between North and South, glimpsing the lives of hundreds upon hundreds of real and imagined persons representing white and Black, men and women, officers and infantry, the war-front and the home-front, abolitionists and planters. The war, Scott writes, “was like the Deluge,” sweeping up everything in its path and reorganizing the world irreversibly for all involved.

In the years after its release, many considered The Wave to be the greatest Civil War novel ever written, though it would ultimately be displaced in the popular consciousness by Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and in the critical canon by Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!.

Scott’s publisher, Cape & Smith, sent her a manuscript of The Sound and the Fury in early 1929. Faulkner was at the time toiling in virtual obscurity. She responded enthusiastically to the work of her fellow Southerner, and she agreed to compose an astute critical essay and endorsement, to be distributed with advance copies of the novel. After Scott’s star soared into the literary stratosphere that summer, Harrison Smith appended the above quotation to promotional material for the novel. Scott’s essay did more than drum up enthusiasm for Faulkner’s work—it gave his early readers some critical tools for decoding it.

When asked his opinion on contemporary women novelists in 1940, Faulkner responded, “Evelyn Scott was pretty good, for a woman.” At that point, Scott had spent a decade fading from public consciousness. She would release her final published novel, The Shadow of the Hawk, in 1941 to poor reviews and negligible sales, before passing the last two decades of her life in obscurity and poverty, suffering from acute physical and mental illness, while her novels, poems, essays, and memoirs disappeared from print.

***

Evelyn Scott was born Elsie Dunn in January of 1893, in her family’s antebellum mansion in Clarksville, Tennessee. The Dunns belonged to a ruined and nostalgic aristocracy, embodied in her propriety-obsessed mother, Maude. The family moved continually throughout her childhood, as her father, Seely, sought more lucrative employment. By her teens, Elsie had lived in Russellville, Kentucky; Evansville, Indiana; and St. Louis, Missouri, before finally settling in New Orleans. She was a lonely child but a precocious student. By her mid-teens, she had read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Marx, and enrolled at the Sophie Newcomb College of Tulane University as its youngest student ever. Before turning twenty, she had advocated the legalization of sex work in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, completed a draft of a novel (now lost), and became the secretary of the Louisiana Woman’s Suffrage Party. The events of her life have been tirelessly reconstructed by a small group of scholars that includes her two biographers, D. A. Callard and Mary Wheeling White, along with Dorothy Scura, Peggy Bach, and Caroline Maun. It is from their work that much of the following is drawn.

Though not without her blindspots, Scott would remain sharply critical of racial, gender, and class prejudice throughout her life. Robert L. Welker, her literary executor and friend, suggests that this stemmed less from an abstract sense of justice or deep understanding of socio-economic history, and more from a profound personal disgust with hypocrisy. In her 1937 memoir, Background in Tennessee, Scott is candid about the role her complex class status and experience as a perpetual outsider played in her political development: “Perhaps if I had inherited the house I was born in, and tradition with it, I would never have learned to be critical.”

At twenty, Elsie Dunn sought a clean break with Southern propriety. She initiated a whirlwind romance with a Frederick Creighton Wellman, a friend of her father who was forty-years-old at the time and serving as the dean of Tulane’s School of Tropical Medicine. He was also married to concert pianist Edna Willis. For Elsie, Frederick represented worldliness, adventure, and a way out of the stifling Southern society into which she was born. For Frederick, Elsie represented a young, beautiful, devoted woman. Moreover, as he admits in his autobiography, she was the only woman in New Orleans willing to join him on a trip to South America.

Around New Years Day of 1914, the pair eloped to Brazil by way of New York with only a change of clothes, a few hundred dollars, and volumes of Shelley, Keats, and Tolstoy. They even left their names in New Orleans, registering at hotels as “Cyril Kay-Scott” and “Evelyn Scott”. This was as much a practical gesture as a symbolic one; the scorned Edna Willis was contacting newspapers and police departments across the country in an attempt to prosecute her husband under the Mann Act. Headlines from California to London reported the story of the Southern Belle and her Seducer. Scott was deeply insulted by this narrative of the affair. In Escapade, her 1923 roman-a-clef about the experience, she writes, “What I resent most deeply is the attempt to deprive me of responsibility for my own acts.”

The Scotts made it to Rio de Janeiro by February. They registered under their new names with the American consulate and discovered almost immediately afterwards that Evelyn was pregnant. Things got worse from there. Evelyn spoke no Portuguese and was already experiencing the first difficulties of a nightmarish pregnancy, so Cyril had to support them both in various odd jobs: day laborer, bell boy, insect specimen collector, bookkeeper. They moved to Paraiba and then Natal as Cyril looked for better work, boarding in cheap hotels and staying at the homes of Anglo-American ex-pats when possible, surviving on a diet of coarse fish and sandy lettuce.

Scott was confined to her room most days by physical ailments, and when she did leave the hotels she was met by the hard stares of men in the street. Her lack of language skills rendered her completely dependent on Cyril, who was often gone days at a time for work at a sewing machine company. If Escapade is to be believed, her social life was restricted to failed communications with resentful servants, a brief flirtation with a concierge, letters to her mother who appeared to be losing her mind under the strain of social disgrace, and care for an adopted marmoset.

In late October of 1914, Scott gave birth to her first and only son, Seely Creighton Scott—affectionately called “Jig” because he was constantly afflicted by lice and needed to be “chiggered”—under the care of a drunken doctor hired by Cyril. The labor was long and painful, a traumatic end to a traumatic pregnancy. But in Escapade, Scott also describes it as a mystical experience, somewhere between those represented by St. Teresa of Avila and Richard Wagner, in which the boundaries between self and other, life and death, are confused, or elided altogether. In one of the most extraordinary passages Scott ever wrote, we find ourselves between existential abjection and absolute rapture:

In suffering intensely one’s being cannot be reduced. And the worst of it is that I cannot even establish relations with my own individuality. My body fades out and becomes one with dark turmoil…

While I struggle I know it is my own being that I am trying to force out of myself. I am certain that my insides are torn out of me, disintegrating, and I wonder at my head which, as I dimly perceive, keeps alive all to itself.

It has to go on. My mind is white, still, and separate. It is conscious of itself but of nothing outside. The pressure against my spine continues. My mind continues forever, parallel to my hurt but unconnected with it. It is terrible to have such a living mind. I hate it. I want it killed, because it goes on and on so brightly and so meaningless.

A few pages later, she wonders “why the birth of a child appealed so little to the imagination of the artist. Why were all the great realistic novels of the world concerned with only one aspect of sex? This surely was the last—the very last—thing one needed to know before one came to conclusions about life.” Towards the end of her life, Scott admitted to Welker that the love-death—or, as they called it in their correspondence, after Wagner, the Liebestod—was a central theme of all her books, and we can read this childbirth as a kind of Ur-scene in her corpus.

***

Scott was torn internally by the birth and suffered a prolapsed uterus that would not be properly repaired until her return to the United States, five years later. Cyril resented her continued weakness, and compared her brutally to a servant girl who recovered from a birth within days. (The servant’s child died soon after.) Decades later, he would write in his autobiography that “civilized women are biologically incompetent.” Perhaps to prove his own competence, Cyril decided to become a rancher, a profession he knew next to nothing about. He claimed one thousand acres of unregistered land in Cercadinho, a remote valley four hundred miles from the coast.

They made plans to set out for the interior as soon as Scott was back on her feet. But Jig was not the only new member of the household. Maude Dunn, Evelyn’s mother, had recently arrived in Brazil to help care of the child. According to both Scotts, she was far more of a hindrance than a help. Maude adapted to this new world even more poorly than her daughter, insisting on wearing a veil in public and white gloves to dinner.

In a twist worthy of Tennessee Williams, Seely Dunn soon stopped responding to Maude’s letters. He had sent his wife south on a one-way ticket, and promised to mail her money for the return trip when it became available. But after fifteen months of radio silence, she instead received word that her husband had filed for divorce, claiming desertion. A few months later, he married a woman barely older than his daughter. This caused a psychological break from which Maude would never recover. Her periods increasingly compulsive and delusional behavior were now interspersed with days or weeks of near-total catatonia. Having nowhere to go and no money to get there, Maude joined Evelyn, Cyril, and Jig on their trek Cercadinho, where they would share a jungle shack for the next three years.

Predictably, the ranch failed, as did a brief foray into diamond mining. But it was in Cercadinho that Evelyn began to write her first mature work—notes towards The Narrow House and Escapade, as well as imagist verse. Trading on her sensational public image as the Southern Belle who escaped to the jungle, she published a sequence titled Tropical Life in Harriet Monroe’s journal Poetry in November of 1919, alongside work by William Butler Yeats and Malcolm Cowley. Her gambit in these early poems was to apply the calm, clarity, and concision of classical imagistic style to the dynamism and overwhelming variety of life in the Amazon. She met with mixed results, as in the amazing first five lines of “Rainy Season,” and its underwhelming, abstracted ending:

A flock of parakeets

Hurled itself through the mist;

Harsh wild green

And clamor-tongued,

Through the dim white forest.

They vanished,

And the lips of Silence

Sucked at the roots of life.

Evelyn’s health grew worse as her writing grew stronger, and a botched operation at a missionary hospital failed to repair her torn ligaments. The family were finally able to secure emergency passports to seek medical treatment for her once World War I ended. They sailed for New York in summer of 1919, immediately settling in Greenwich Village, then the heart of the American avant-garde. Upon arrival, they gave Maude Dunn a one-way ticket to Clarksville, Tennessee. Evelyn would continue to suffer the after-effects of the childbirth complications and clumsy surgeries for the rest of her life.

***

The Scotts fell in quickly with the Village scene, and Evelyn’s poems found homes in the Dial, the Nation, Others, and Playboy (unrelated to the men’s magazine). Her first published volume, Precipitations, followed in late 1920 to the admiration of fellow poets and a few publications. In the Village, she made up for lost time socially and sexually. She began friendships with Lola Ridge and Emma Goldman, had affairs with William Carlos Williams and (possibly) Waldo Frank, and somehow had energy left over to complete her first great novel, The Narrow House.

With the publication of The Narrow House in 1921, Scott went from emerging imagist poet to serious modern novelist almost overnight. In the New York Times Book Review, Sinclair Lewis called it “an event, one of those recognitions of life by which life becomes the greater.” Ludwig Lewisohn declared it “imperishable.” The impossible-to-please H. L. Mencken said it was superior to Theodore Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt in “virtuosity” and “venturesomeness.” But the highest praise, from Scott’s perspective, may have come in a personal letter from D. H. Lawrence, who called it “America’s last word before a cataclysm sets in, or a new start.” Thus began a decade that would see Scott ranked among the great novelists of the 19th and 20th centuries (from Flaubert to Dostoyevsky to Woolf) by the major critics of the English-speaking world.

The Narrow House is a slim volume, the first of a trilogy concerning the Farley family. Its title refers to a literal narrow house in an unnamed city occupied by three generations of Farleys. It was also New Orleans slang for a coffin. Taking Scott’s cue, we can perhaps best describe the novel as a kind of gothic melodrama, populated by emotional vampires. Every character is plagued by some deep dissatisfaction, and each finds what little enjoyment he or she can get by inflicting pain on the others, or themselves.

The novel, like many in the naturalist tradition, is punctuated by grotesque meals. It opens with Mrs. Farley purchasing chickens at the butcher for a meal with her daughter-in-laws parents, which she hopes will patch up a feud between the families—a scene reminiscent of Leopold Bloom’s trip to buy a pork kidney in Ulysses, which Scott would review favorably upon its release:

The meat shop was as white as death. It smelt of blood and sawdust and its tiled interior offered a refuge from the heat without.…

[Mrs. Farley’s] vague, rather squinting eyes traveled undecidedly over the big pieces of meat: the shoulders, the forelegs, the haunches, of different shades of red streaked with tallow or suet, that swung on hooks in the shadow against the gray-white tiling of the walls. The fowls dangled in a row a little to the fore of the meat. The feet of the hens were a sickly bluish yellow, and the toes, cramped together yet flaccid, still suggested the fatigue which follows agony. The eyes bulged under thin blue-tinged lids and on the heads and necks about the close-shut beats bunches of reddish brown feathers had been left as decorations.

Under the bright lights of the butcher shop, nothing escapes the gaze of the novelist, and her imagist command of detail is even more hypnotizing in prose. The chickens are somehow between life and death, fecund in their decay, alien but all-too-human. Here, Scott declares herself a writer who will not look away from cruelty or obscenity. What follows is an unflinching study of family psychology and domestic cruelty, a work that does not simply hold up a mirror to the lower-middle class American family but follows its subjects relentlessly with a magnifying glass, or shoots them with a deep focus lens.

Alice, Mrs. Farley’s daughter, hopelessly falls in love with her employer, a radical writer, but cannot bring herself to reveal it to him. Instead, she berates her passive and masochistic mother for staying with an unfaithful husband, and her father for not pursuing proper happiness with another woman. When her longing and self-loathing combine and reach a fever pitch,—Scott describes her, unforgettably, as “hot and futile”—Alice engages in rituals of self-harm, biting at her forearms or stabbing herself with scissors. Alice’s thoughts in these moments transform from litanies of grievance into strange, gnomic statements that represent the most striking lines of the book: “I shall go out of me in dark blood,” she thinks; “Mary had a little lamb. I’m mad. Washed in the blood of the lamb”; “She was suddenly tired, endless, capable of giving birth to endless selves. She was tired. She could not die. She was like a mother bearing herself forever like endless children.”

Winnie, Laurence’s helpless wife, reads like a portrait of what Scott feared she would become if she had remained in Southern society. Desperate for affection, she spends her days wandering the house asking Mrs. Farley, Laurence, and her children variations on the theme, “Do you love me?”, and remains perpetually unsatisfied by their answers. She corners her oldest child, May, in the foyer, and initiates a strange Oedipal drama, but one perhaps not unfamiliar to many readers:

Winnie wanted to make May cry but hated her for crying.

“You must love me, May! I’m your mamma! You must love me!”

“I do,” May said. Her eyes were black with tears, but because she wanted to cry she could not keep her lips from smiling a little.

“As well as you love papa?”

May felt accused of something. She could not make herself speak. She was sorry and wanted her mother to strike her.

“Then you love Papa best? Oh, May, that’s cruel! You mustn’t love him best!”

The most extraordinary scenes of the novel, as in the case of Escapade, concern conception and birth. Winnie and Laurence were told after the birth of their second child that another pregnancy would put Winnie in grave danger. After months and years of abstinence, she and Laurence begin playing sadistic games of seduction, coming ever closer to the act that could destroy her. When they finally do consummate, at the end of a long and painful scene at the heart of the novel, Scott records the profound ambivalence of both parties at this game they have played to the death:

Winnie felt him yield and was glad, but her triumph congealed in agony. She fell away from him. She was cold. She was still. The throbbing of her body came to her like an echo which she could scarcely hear. She had forgotten the meaning of it. Who was this man? She was afraid.

She waited for him to leave her….

Laurence had been frightened by what they had done. She wanted him to be frightened.

Death. If she had a child she would suffer—not he. White and whole, she felt herself a beautiful stillness in the turmoil of Laurence’s cowardice.

Winnie conceives a child and dies giving birth prematurely. Her child survives. The Farleys feel an intense relief at her death, which none of them has the courage to articulate or avow.

***

The Narrow House was a critical smash and a minor commercial success. But by 1922, Evelyn had already fallen into a cycle of debt that would follow her for the rest of her life. The family decamped for Bermuda, then Algeria, seeking patronage and cheap living. Evelyn feverishly completed the remaining volumes of the Farley trilogy, Narcissus and The Golden Door, as well as Escapade. She and Cyril grew apart. He found a younger woman. She began an intense affair with New Zealand watercolorist Owen Merton, and then a life-long partnership with British writer John Metcalfe.

Through the 1920s and ‘30s, Scott would complete two more trilogies: the first a series of novels around the Civil War (of which The Wave was the second and by far most successful volume, artistically and commercially), and the latter about the struggles of the modern woman artist to remain independent, in body and spirit. She reportedly turned down an offer to write the dialogue for the film version of Gone with the Wind on idiosyncratic feminist grounds, arguing that Mitchell was wrong in positioning the brilliant and willful Scarlett O’Hara as an exceptional woman in Southern society.

Through this whole period, she was also working on the book she thought would be her real masterpiece, a massive novel of the French Revolution called Before Cock Crow, the research for which she tried to fund with a Guggenheim fellowship. According to Welker, she completed the greater part of the novel between 1934 and 1942, at which point the manuscript was stolen. She spent another ten years researching and rewriting until, bizarrely, a large portion of it was stolen a second time in 1954, at which point she abandoned the project. Extensive notes and sections survive in university archives, along with another unpublished work called Escape into Living, which she was working on at the time of her death in 1963.

Scott’s health and financial situation deteriorated significantly in the 1930s, as did the quality of her fiction. Sales of her novels lagged, and she came to suspect and blame a communist conspiracy against her. Though a reader of Marx in her youth and a sympathizer (if not quite a fellow-traveler) with Leftist causes throughout the 1920s, she became a violent anti-communist in the ‘30s, publishing articles and making radio speeches against the Party and its supposed grip on American artistic production. She broke off a friendship with Theodore Dreiser, who was one of the nation’s most famous socialists and at the time preparing to publicly join the CPUSA.

Then things started to get even stranger. Without evidence, she blamed the theft and destruction of her manuscripts on communist agents and claimed she was being regularly threatened and framed for various crimes. She wrote a letter to J. Edgar Hoover himself (as Callard notes, the man whose first order of business as FBI chief was to deport Scott’s longtime friend Emma Goldman), accusing her apartment caretaker of subversive activities. When her career effectively ended in 1941, her political paranoia turned into full-blown delusion and obvious mental illness. She began hearing sub-audible voices that prevented her from working, which she attributed to a communist plot to silence her with some sort of jamming device.

She was, moreover, desperate for contact with her estranged son, Jig, now a painter and writer. He spent much of his youth with Cyril after the divorce before re-entering her life in the mid-thirties and intermittently living with her between 1937 and 1939. When he married, Scott liquidated most of her limited assets to support the young couple and their new child. During World War II, she sent him forty-three unanswered letters. Jig finally cut her off completely around 1949, after a difficult visit in London, and did his best to keep his address secret from her over the following decade. Evelyn, once again, suspected a communist conspiracy keeping them apart.

***

Scott and Metcalfe returned from Europe in the mid-1930s. They spent the next twenty years wandering the United States and Canada, shuffling between various cities and only ever staying in one place for a few months at a time. In 1955, they settled into their last apartment, a studio at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel in New York City. She died there, of lung cancer, in 1963.

In the last years of her life, Scott made contact with Welker, then an enthusiastic graduate student writing a dissertation on her work. He collected her papers and numerous personal items after she died, and gave them to the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in the late 1990s.

In preparation for this essay, I spoke with Paul Jones, a professor of English at the University of Ohio, who was a graduate student at Knoxville when the Welker-Scott collection arrived. He and some others under the advising of Dorothy Scura went through over seventeen feet of files in search of clues to Scott’s life and writing. This produced some dissertation chapters and a 2001 edited volume of essays, but their efforts led to no true resurgence of interest in her extraordinary body of work. Professor Jones left me with an anecdote worthy of a Scott novel: While searching through the disorganized boxes, he noticed something rattling inside a small tobacco tin that had been packed into the trove. He opened it to find the author’s teeth, which had fallen out one by one over the last years of her life.

***

For over a decade, Evelyn Scott was considered one of the brightest lights of her generation by the brightest lights of her generation. The Wave sold over one hundred thousand copies in its first year, and laid the groundwork for future Civil War epics. Like so many writers of the so-called Southern Renaissance, her reputation was dwarfed by the meteoric rise of Faulkner. Her late work saw a steep decline in quality as her mental health deteriorated and she became increasingly consumed by anti-communist paranoia. Though the conspiracy against her was clearly a fantasy, she did manage to alienate nearly every figure in the American literary establishment—publishers, editors, patrons, fellow writers—who might have been inclined to help her recover her career.

Evelyn Scott straddled the line between realism and modernism, between the Southern regionalism that was her birthright and the cosmopolitan Weltliteratur inspired by her lifelong wanderings. Reduced by the end of her life to a footnote in the triumphalist story of Faulkner’s rise to global preeminence, and obscured even further today, she represents not only a missing chapter in the story of American letters, but a crucial hinge point in the global modernist tradition itself.