A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories

Literature & Fiction

Wescott, Glenway

United States

University of Wisconsin Press

Glenway Wescott’s poignant story of nineteenth-century Wisconsin was first published in 1927 as the winner of the prestigious Harper Prize. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Wescott left the Midwest behind to live as a writer in 1920s Paris. In this novel, based on Wescott’s own life and family, the young Alwyn Tower leaves Wisconsin to travel in Europe, but finds himself haunted by a family of long-dead spirits—his grandparents and great-uncles and aunts, a generation whose young adulthood was shattered by the Civil War. Their images were preserved in fading family albums of daguerreotypes and in his own fragmented memories of stories told to him by his strong and enduring grandmothers. To disinter and finally lay to rest the family secrets that lingered insistently in his mind, Wescott writes, Alwyn was “obliged to live in imagination many lives already at an end.”    The Grandmothers is the chronicle of Alwyn’s ancestors:  the bitter Henry Tower, who returned from Civil War battlefields to find his beautiful wife Serena lost in a fatal fever; Rose Hamilton, robust and eager, who yearned to leave the cabin of her bearded, squirrel-hunting brothers for the company of courteous Leander Tower; the boy-soldier Hilary Tower, whose worship of his brother made him desperate; fastidious Nancy Tower, whose love for her husband Jesse Davis could not overcome her disgust with the dirt under his fingernails; Ursula Duff, proud and silent, maligned among her neighbors by her venal husband; Alwyn’s parents, Ralph Tower and Marianne Duff, whose happiness is brought about only by the intervention of a determined spinster.

Grandmothers: A Family Portrait (A North Coast Book)

Glenway Wescott’s poignant story of nineteenth-century Wisconsin was first published in 1927 as the winner of the prestigious Harper Prize. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Wescott left the Midwest behind to live as a writer in 1920s Paris. In this novel, based on Wescott’s own life and family, the young Alwyn Tower leaves Wisconsin to travel in Europe, but finds himself haunted by a family of long-dead spirits—his grandparents and great-uncles and aunts, a generation whose young adulthood was shattered by the Civil War. Their images were preserved in fading family albums of daguerreotypes and in his own fragmented memories of stories told to him by his strong and enduring grandmothers. To disinter and finally lay to rest the family secrets that lingered insistently in his mind, Wescott writes, Alwyn was “obliged to live in imagination many lives already at an end.” The Grandmothers is the chronicle of Alwyn’s ancestors: the bitter Henry Tower, who returned from Civil War battlefields to find his beautiful wife Serena lost in a fatal fever; Rose Hamilton, robust and eager, who yearned to leave the cabin of her bearded, squirrel-hunting brothers for the company of courteous Leander Tower; the boy-soldier Hilary Tower, whose worship of his brother made him desperate; fastidious Nancy Tower, whose love for her husband Jesse Davis could not overcome her disgust with the dirt under his fingernails; Ursula Duff, proud and silent, maligned among her neighbors by her venal husband; Alwyn’s parents, Ralph Tower and Marianne Duff, whose happiness is brought about only by the intervention of a determined spinster.

Charm, wit, compassion, wisdom, literature, nature, sex, humor, politics, sorrow, love: these themes fill the late journal pages of enigmatic American writer Glenway Wescott. From humble beginnings on a poor Wisconsin farm, Wescott went on to study at the University of Chicago, narrowly survive the Spanish flu pandemic, and eventually emerge as an influential poet and novelist. A major figure in the American literary expatriate community in Paris during the 1920s and a prominent American novelist in the years leading up to World War II, he spent a decade living abroad before relocating permanently to New York and New Jersey with his partner, Museum of Modern Art publications director and curator Monroe Wheeler. Together they mixed with such intellectual and creative greats as Jean Cocteau, Colette, George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Somerset Maugham, Christopher Isherwood, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Truman Capote, Joseph Campbell, and scores of other luminaries. During the second half of his life, Wescott wrote nonfiction essays and worked for the Academy Institute of Arts and Letters, all the while keeping journals in which he recorded the experiences that fostered his love of life, literature, the arts, and humanity. A Heaven of Words looks back on Wescott's entire fascinating life and reveals the riveting narrative of his last decades. Winner, Gay Memoir/Biography, Lambda Literary Awards

A Heaven of Words: Last Journals, 1956–1984

Biographies & Memoirs

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

From Library Journal\nAuthor of the minor classic The Grandmothers (1927) and the later wartime bestseller Apartment in Athens , Wisconsin-born Wescott, a self-proclaimed perfectionist, opted for a career as impresario of the arts. In 1937, he settled with his lovers Monroe Wheeler and George Platt Lynes in rural New Jersey. Widely traveled and extraordinarily well read, he recorded his thoughts and activities in these journals, whose frankness made them unpublishable until now. Unless bored by Wescott's daily agonizing over a host of homosexual relationships, readers will find here some exquisite insights into subjects ranging from the Kinsey studies to Frost to Djuna Barnes to the antics of resident squirrels. 
- Charles C. Nash, Cottey College, Nevada, Mo. 
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.\nFrom Publishers Weekly\nWritten in the tell-all spirit of Rousseau, and with considerable literary flair, these journals by one of America's most notable modern writers offer a sprightly melange of daily events; sophisticated judgments of literature, painting and classical music; telling portraits of a wealth of fellow writers including Maugham, Katherine Anne Porter, Forster, Auden and Janet Flanner ("dear little old cold volcano"); and a goodly sprinkling of bons mots, e.g., "The thought of an artist has to be running water." Wescott (1901-1987) found fame early, with such works as his novella The Pilgrim Hawk (1940) and the bestselling Apartment in Athens (1945); thereafter, as though he enjoyed life too much, most of his major novel projects remained at the starting stage. A man of intense homoerotic sensibility, his hallmarks as a writer were incisiveness and honesty. Rosco completed this book after the death of Phelps. Both had been friends of Wescott. Photos. 
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Continual Lessons: The Journals of Glenway Wescott, 1937-1955

Essays & Correspondence

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

A visit from the Cullens, a wealthy Irish couple, who bring with them a tame falcon, alters Alwnyn Tower's perception of his relationship with Alexandra Henry, a fellow expatriate

The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story

Moss, Howard

Noonday Pr

Images Of Truth: Porter, Maugham, Colette, Dinesen, Mann, Wilder by Westcott, Glenway. 8vo. 1st ptg.

Images of Truth: Remembrances and Criticism

History & Criticism

Ayer Co. Pub

Black cloth with gold titles, gold on spine is quite dull, front is bright. head of spine is slightly pulled and tail is bumped. Cloth is a little spotty. Decorative endpapers. Slight water stain to top edge of pages. Foxing to leading edge. 362p.

Good-Bye, Wisconsin (Short Story Index Reprint Series)

Short Stories & Anthologies

Apartment in Athens

Greenwood Press

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Books by Wescott, Glenway

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wescott, Glenway. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories

Grandmothers: A Family Portrait (A North Coast Book)

Grandmothers: A Family Portrait (A North Coast Book)

A Heaven of Words: Last Journals, 1956–1984

A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories

Continual Lessons: The Journals of Glenway Wescott, 1937-1955

The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story

Images of Truth: Remembrances and Criticism

Good-Bye, Wisconsin (Short Story Index Reprint Series)

Apartment in Athens