A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories

by Glenway Wescott, Jerry Rosco (Editor), Wendy Moffat (Foreword by)

Overview

Just as E. M. Forster's novel of gay love, Maurice, remained unpublished throughout his lifetime, Glenway Wescott's long story "A Visit to Priapus" was also destined to be a posthumous work, buried from 1938 until this century in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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299296902
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	11/29/2013
Edition description:	1
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	265,977
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

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.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Wendy Moffat             
Acknowledgments                 
Introduction                           
 
Adolescence                           
Mr. Auerbach in Paris                       
The Babe's Bed                      
A Visit to Priapus                  
The Stallions: Pages from an Unfinished Story                     
The Frenchman Six Feet Three                      
The Love of New York                      
An Example of Suicide                       
The Odor of Rosemary                      
 
Appendix: Two Essays and an Experimental Story
The Valley Submerged                       
A Call on Colette and Goudeket                    Sacre de Printemps

Editorial Reviews

"'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

From the Publisher

2013-10-01
A posthumous collection of short stories and essays by Wescott (1901-1987), arranged to reflect autobiographical continuity, includes previously unpublished pieces with explicitly sexual and gay themes. Poet, essayist and acclaimed novelist Wescott (Pilgrim Hawk, 1940, etc.) may not be as familiar to the average reader as many of his contemporaries, but his works live on thanks, in part, to editor and biographer Rosco. The Wisconsin farm boy ascended from humble beginnings to consort with the crème de la crème of literary and political society during the early years of his career. A prolific writer while abroad, Wescott moved comfortably among the expatriate community in Europe during the 1920s and early '30s and published many of his observations in magazines--often using his fictional alter ego, Alwyn Tower, as narrator. In "Mr. Auerbach in Paris," he depicts an elderly, sight-impaired Germanophile who laments Germany's defeat during World War I as he buys copious amounts of French artwork. In the frankly sexual title story, the narrator travels by bus to pursue an encounter with a man who reputedly has physical attributes much like the mythical Greek god Priapus. France's lack of preparedness on the eve of World War II is the subject of "The Frenchman Six Feet Three." After donning an ill-fitting uniform and completing two weeks of reserve military service, Roger Gaumond despairingly tells his friends (who are preparing to leave the country) that France cannot survive the coming war without intervention from the U.S. and Great Britain. Also included in this collection is the heretofore unpublished "An Example of Suicide," a meticulous examination of human thought processes and our belief that, once committed, we must follow through with actions. It's an excellent story and worthy of inclusion in any top-notch anthology. But other pieces disappoint for their disproportionately heavy-handed, elliptical writing, including the tedious "The Odor of Rosemary" and the blurry "Sacre de Printemps." Some pieces are stronger than others. The content of Wescott's previously unpublished stories may be uncomfortable for some.

Kirkus Reviews