Pretty Good for a Woman

by D.A. Callard

A portrait of a literary enigma and her generation focuses on her radicalism which extended to almost every strand of American intellectual life in the interwar years

Genres: Nonfiction

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

David Arthur Callard (1949-2006) was a Welsh-born poet and biographer.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

I had uncovered a story of failure, and American literature is hard on its failures. In illuminating aspects of the concealed underbelly of American cultural life in this century, I hoped to expose the lie that literary history consists of a number of critically erected giants towering above a deserted landscape. The failures were a surer link to the past than those who self-consciously occupy central roles in their lifetimes, assured of posterity. --D.A. Callard

So, pretty good for a biography. You kind of have to read it to know what it’s like. I really only have this to say though, or rather, these two things. Like any bio, it provides the occasional nugget for uses of identifying certain biographical backgrounds to the fictions. But like many biographies of literary figures, it doesn’t properly dive into any serious literary questions { ETA: but now there is Evelyn Scott: Recovering a Lost Modernist }. ------

The most we get in serious terms of literary salivation, is the all too brief accounting of the method employed in her Bread and a Sword , which is a book entirely absent from the gr db.

Material in ordinary type represented conscious conclusions. Italicized type and type in parentheses indicated internal conflict. Italics without parentheses represented thought which arose by association and italics within parentheses represented conflicts and decisions which had been determinedly ignored.

This then yields something that looks like ::

The stony corridor was chill and quiet ... (like Napoleon’s fort... Kate screaming somewhere in the blackness when she touched damp masonry.) ... It terminated in a long apartment, like a sort of undenominational chapel, in which prophylaxis rather than adornment had preoccupied the decorator. Strips of fiber matting had been laid between the rows of folding, varnished chairs, like seats in movie theatres. The company faced a glass partition, which allowed a prospect of dour, enigmatic metal doors beyond, like doors of ovens or furnaces ...
across the night, a line of fire sprang luridly ... stokers, disembarking, wore their overcoats -- thermometer said ninety eight! ... The temperature is frigid here ... the management is saving coal! .. tin mouth .. tin windows ... He was dimly conscious of the wild, subhuman leap of his expectant nerves ...

In sum though, Evelyn Scott was kind of an ass. Like hundreds of other creatives and geniuses. And it’s true, her behavior alienating nearly everyone sooner or later, is partially to blame for her never having made it, schmoozed it. But she’s been dead for a long time. So today it is only ourselves who are to blame should she remain BURIED.

Back when Virago Press was wielding the SPADE (today those green covers recommend themselves to every conscientious SPADE=WIELDER!!!!) those good folks failed to BREATHE a resuscitating breath for our Evelyn. Nevertheless, seeing so much unREADness when we see those green covers, I can’t but not post THAT LINK to the 552+ titles which the Press itself has already abandoned for to be reINter’d.

And if I return to that opening quote which is the closing thought of this biography, I should say, I have no (little) objection to those critical giants which shape the landscape. By their lights we first learn to see. For the most part, whether they be a Jane Austen or a James Joyce, they deserve their status. Occasionally we find a McElroy who ought also be counted among their number. But the landscape which Dallard is painting in that image should draw your attention to the fact that the landscape below those giants is anything but empty. For those with eyes to see there is a desert blooming.

Find her books.

[Francisco Reivax · Rating 3 out of 5]

D.A. Callard should be thanked for writing, and publishing in 1985, the first comprehensive biography of this amazing but forgotten American novelist. Callard's writing style is not that crisp, but his research on Evelyn Scott's life and work make this book a worthy read.

If you want to read about the true bohemian life of a very gifted American writer, here you have it, for that wild story is all recalled in this book !

Callard re-discovers Evelyn Scott's life story - I should be saying "stories", to be truly honest - by accidentally finding boxes of her personal papers in a storage facility in England. He then does a lot of additional research to unearth Scott's lively narrative from about 1908, when she is 16 years old and met and fall in love in Tennessee with a medical doctor 20 years her senior, until her death in NYC in 1963.

They elope to NYC, change their names, and sail to England. They then sail to Brazil and become settlers. During the 1910th, Evelyn Scott writes poems that she mail, unsolicited, to The Nation in NYC, from Brazil ... The Nation eventually publishes some of her poems. Back in the States, Scott became a critically successful poet and novelist from the late 1910th through the early 1940's. The economic Depression of the 1930's hits her book sales drastically, marking the beginning of a long and sad professional and personal decline until her passing in NYC in 1963.

When I read this bio around 2012, I was unaware of this 2000 publication on Scott's writings: Evelyn Scott: Recovering a Lost Modernist and of that 1998 other biography "Fighting the Current: The Life and Work of Evelyn Scott, by Mary Wheeling White. Louisiana State University Press, 1998 (280pp) ISBN 978-0-8071-2201-3"

[Annabelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

what a life…! haven’t read a good old fashioned biography in so long and this was a treat. my favorite chapter was the coda (lol) and i wish we’d gotten more meta reflections about the meaning of this project throughout. but evelyn scott’s life was so wild and so interesting that i think this still largely succeeds as a straight up biography of a life that is at once totally singular and also a window into hugely influential parts of american life in the early 20th century (and thank you again to vivian gornick who is unwittingly designing my 2025 reading syllabus)