Robert McAlmon was an American publisher, author, and poet. He was best known for his novel "Village: As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period".
Background
Robert McAlmon was born on March 9, 1895 in Clifton, Washington County, Kansas, United States. He was the youngest of ten children of John Alexander McAlmon, an itinerant Presbyterian minister, who was an Irish immigrant, and Bess (Urquhart) McAlmon.
Education
Through 1912 Robert McAlmon attended high school. In 1916 he studied one semester at the University of Minnesota. From 1917 to 1920 McAlmon attended University of Southern California.
From 1912 to 1916 Robert McAlmon was employed in diverse menial jobs. In 1918 he enlisted in the newly-formed Air Corps and was an editor of a San Diego camp newspaper there. When he returned to Los Angeles and the university, he worked briefly as an editor at the aviation magazine "The Ace" for a year.
In 1919 McAlmon made his literary debut in "Poetry" magazine, which printed six of his poems about flying. In correspondence with the editorial staff, he encountered the poet Emanuel Carnevali, and the two began to exchange letters. In 1920 McAlmon left home to visit Carnevali at a private sanitarium in Chicago, hoping to find some means of ingress into the literary life. While he and Carnevali remained fast friends, McAlmon found Chicago disappointing and relocated to New York a few months later.
McAlmon’s New York years were as colorful and ultimately promising as could be desired. He lived in a garbage scow moored in the Hudson River, and earned pocket money modeling nude for art students at the Cooper Union in the East Village. While serving in this capacity, he met and was befriended by the painter Marsden Hartley, who introduced him to other New York bohemians: Lola Ridge, Marianne Moore, Djuna Barnes, and the poet Hilda Doolittle, best known as H. D., Hartley also introduced him to William Carlos Williams, and the two became fast and dedicated friends. Despite McAlmon’s straitened circumstances, he and Williams established a poetry magazine called "Contact".
After marriage, he moved with wife to Paris. The McAlmons paid a visit to the Ellerman family in London shortly after the wedding, and from there Robert McAlmon went on alone to Paris. Although his French was poor and his interest in French culture was small, he would be inextricably linked to Paris for the rest of his life, even long after he himself had abandoned the city. Much as he had done in New York, he immersed himself in the society of Parisian literati, most notably the sizable expatriate communities there. McAlmon and James Joyce were close friends almost from the moment they met.
After publishing a book of his short stories, A Hasty Bunch (1922), at his own expense, he founded his own publishing company. Under the name Contact Editions, he published his short-story collection A Companion Volume (1923) and his loosely organized autobiographical novel Post-Adolescence (1923), as well as works by Williams, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Bryher. In 1925 Contact published an anthology of contemporary writing, edited by McAlmon, featuring his wife’s poems as well as entries by Djuna Barnes, Havelock Ellis, Ford Madox Ford, Ernest Hemingway, Marsden Hartley, H. D., James Joyce, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, Edith Sitwell, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams, among others. As time passed McAlmon’s interest returned to poetry, collected in Portrait of a Generation in 1926. It was his first book to be reviewed in the United States — and the review was bad. He also wrote an open-ended, 1,200-line poem titled North America, Continent of Conjecture, which did not find a publisher until 1929.
During these later years, McAlmon travelled to New Mexico and into Mexico itself, and while he was initially as taken with the wide-open spaces and the simple lives of the natives as was D. H. Lawrence during his sojourn there, he eventually lost interest and returned to New York. His ties to Williams and now-returned expatriates were effortlessly restored, and he soon returned to Paris. The old life he had known there, however, was coming unraveled, and he began wandering in Europe. In Monte Carlo, he rencountered Kay Boyle, and thenceforth the two were lifelong friends. While McAlmon’s work appeared in the prestigious magazine transition, his abilities were beginning to fail him, and he became increasingly dependent on drink. In 1929, Contact released its last books and shut its doors in a relentless stream of bad press, highly critical of McAlmon’s editorial decisions.
Again, McAlmon travelled. He continued to submit his now increasingly rare work and received nothing but rejections, although Williams featured some of his work in a revived Contact magazine. In 1937, Not Alone Lost appeared from New Directions press and sank into complete oblivion, their worst-selling title. The following year he found an English publisher for his bitter memoir. Being Geniuses Together, which also failed to make much impression, and which had undergone heavy editing to avoid libel suits. McAlmon’s resources dwindled, and he finally returned to his family, first working for his brothers in Phoenix, selling medical undergarments, and later, having been diagnosed with tuberculosis, moving to Hot Springs in California. He died there, after a long decline, on February 2, 1956.
On February 14, 1921 Robert McAlmon married Annie Winifred Ellerman. This marriage was the cause of some controversy both at the time and among critics subsequently. Many critics believed that McAlmon had married Annie Ellerman only for her substantial fortune, which was to maintain him for much of his life. Others allege that the marriage was a double-blind, acting to disguise the homosexuality of one or both of them. Ellerman herself characterized their five-year union as a marriage of convenience, designed to free her from the influence of her overbearing family. They led separate lives and had no children together.
Adrift Among Geniuses: Robert McAlmon, Writer and Publisher of the Twenties
Adrift Among Geniuses, the only biography of McAlmon, offers a comprehensive picture of McAlmon's dealings with the geniuses of modern literature. The author explores the life of Robert McAlmon through his own writing; through the memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies of his contemporaries; and through his correspondence with such figures as Ezra Pound, Kay Boyle, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Katherine Anne Porter, and Sylvia Beach, including a number of previously unpublished letters. The photographs, some never before published, also present a fascinating view of Europe in the twenties.