Eugene Walter (3)

The most interesting thing about reading The Untidy Pilgrim, is that my discovery of its author was more interesting than reading the book.  Wikipedia tells me that Eugene Walter (1921-1998) was an American screenwriter, poet, short-story author, actor, puppeteer, gourmet chef, cryptographer, translator, editor, costume designer and well-known raconteur.  After a dreadful childhood spent partly on the streets, he seems to have become a free spirit, gadding about and living a "pixilated wonderland of a life". 

Born in Mobile Alabama, he was fending for himself in his late teens when WW2 broke out and he became an army cryptographer in the Aleutian Islands (off the coast of Alaska or Russia depending on exactly where he was).  He then pitched up in Greenwich Village in New York City and pioneered spontaneous performance art at the Museum of Modern Art.  He got himself to Europe on a cargo ship and lived in Paris during the 1950s, where he helped launch the Paris Review, which published his short story 'Troubadour' in the first issue. He interviewed people like Isak Dinesen and Gore Vidal, and went on to edit a multilingual literary journal called Botteghe Oscure in Rome.  And after that, he acted in the films of Federico Fellini and translated Italian films into English. His dinner parties were legendary, with guests who included T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Judy Garland, Anaïs Nin, Gore Vidal and Richard Wright (whose biography by Hazel Rowley in on my TBR). That's an astonishing CV for a street kid.  How did he get an education, I wonder?

Anyway, Walter returned to Mobile in 1979, and that's where The Untidy Pilgrim is set.  It's a coming-of-age novel, deliberately comic, so they say, and it won the Lippincott Fiction Prize for Young Novelists in 1954.  Kirkus found that it had a vernal, rollicking charm that will seduce even the moral-minded and the University of Alabama saw fit to reissue it (with a terrible cover) in 2001, but it didn't do much for me.

According to the description at Goodreads, Walter's lightweight style may have been what charmed the judges because of its contrast with the southern literary tradition. That tradition was my first serious introduction to American literature at university: it was established by William Faulkner, (Light in August, The Sound and the Fury) Truman Capote (In Cold Blood, and Summer Crossing) and Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Clock without Hands and The Member of the Wedding).  Yes, it's generally cheerless, but exploring significant themes in memorable novels often is.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/04/23/the-untidy-pilgrim-by-eugene-walter/… (més)