Description
Book SynopsisRough Draft: The Modernist Diaries of Emily Holmes Coleman, 1929-1937 is an edited selection, published here for the first time, of the diaries kept by American poet and novelist Coleman during her years as an expatriate in the modernist hubs of France and England. During her time abroad, Coleman developed as a surrealist writer, publishing a novel, The Shutter of Snow, and poems in little magazines like transition. She also began her life’s work, her diary, which was sustained for over four decades. This portion of the diary is set against the cultural, social, and political milieu of the early twentieth century in the throes of industrialization, commercialization, and modernization. It showcases Coleman’s often larger-than-life, intense personality as she interacted with a multitude of literary, artistic, and intellectual figures of the period like Djuna Barnes, Peggy Guggenheim, Antonia White, John Holms, George Barker, Edwin Muir, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Waley, Humphrey Jennings, Dylan Thomas, and T.S. Eliot. The book offers Coleman’s lively, raw, and often iconoclastic account of her complex social network. The personal and professional encouragements, jealousies, and ambitions of her friends unfolded within a world of limitless sexual longing, supplies of alcohol, and aesthetic discussions. The diary documents the disparate ways Coleman celebrated, just as she consistently struggled to reconcile, her multiple identities as an artistic, intellectual, maternal, sexual, and spiritual woman. Rough Draft contributes to the growing modernist canon of life writings of both female and male participants whose autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries offer diverse accounts of the period, like Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, and Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle’s Being Geniuses Together.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction The Diary PART ONE Section one: Paris: October 30-December 17, 1929 Section two: St. Tropez: December 17, 1929-February 15, 1930 PART TWO Section one: Gloucestershire: August 9-August 25, 1932 Section two: Devonshire: August 26-September 9, 1932 Section three: Gloucestershire: September 23-October 9, 1932 Section four: London: October 11-October 29, 1932 Section five: Paris: November 30-December 23, 1932 PART THREE Section one: London and Devonshire: March 22-July 24, 1933 Section two: Yorkshire: June 8-July 3, 1934 Section three: London: July 5-September 1, 1934 PART FOUR Section one: London: January 16-March 13, 1936 Section two: London and Petersfield: March 16-May 28, 1936 Section three: London: May 29-June 12, 1936 Section four: Glyndebourne, London, and Yorkshire: June 23-July 21, 1936 PART FIVE Section one: London: November 14-December 31, 1936 Section two: London, Gloucestershire, and Petersfield: June 10-October 5, 1937 Omissions Bibliography Editor Bio Index
