After the Two-Eyed Men

Each age leaves unfinished business behind it, and the twenties are part of ours. They will haunt us until we have learned how to take them seriously. “Robert Menzies McAlmon, born in Clifton, Kansas, 1896”: one thread of the twenties begins there, for Me Almon became the intimate of Williams, Joyce, Pound, Hemingway; the proprietor-impresario of Contact Editions, which published Spring and AU, A Draft of XVI Cantos, and Hemingway’s first book; drinking companion to Wyndham Lewis; cold-eyed observer of the great; author of stories to which Pound and Williams have not ceased to refer their visitors and correspondents; a burnt-out case at thirty-eight; a dead man, finally, in a Southwestern desert village at fifty-nine.

It is a classic story of abject failure, and if the hero of a classic story be required to slide from great heights, McAlmon had occupied them. Having married Winifred Bryher in Greenwich Village (1921) without quite grasping the fact that she was traveling under a pseudonym, he was for six years inadvertently the son-in-law of the heaviest taxpayer in England.

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Hugh Kenner

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Each age leaves unfinished business behind it, and the twenties are part of ours. They will haunt us until we have learned how to take them seriously. “Robert Menzies McAlmon, born in Clifton, Kansas, 1896”: one thread of the twenties begins there, for Me Almon became the intimate of Williams, Joyce, Pound, Hemingway; the proprietor-impresario of Contact Editions, which published Spring and AU, A Draft of XVI Cantos, and Hemingway’s first book; drinking companion to Wyndham Lewis; cold-eyed observer of the great; author of stories to which Pound and Williams have not ceased to refer their visitors and correspondents; a burnt-out case at thirty-eight; a dead man, finally, in a Southwestern desert village at fifty-nine.

It is a classic story of abject failure, and if the hero of a classic story be required to slide from great heights, McAlmon had occupied them. Having married Winifred Bryher in Greenwich Village (1921) without quite grasping the fact that she was traveling under a pseudonym, he was for six years inadvertently the son-in-law of the heaviest taxpayer in England.