A scarlet pansy goes to war: subversion, Schlock, and an early gay classic.

The first honest and really complete story of "one of those men." What THE WELL OF LONELINESS did for the man-woman, this most unusual tale does for the woman-man - only that the latter is a so much more wayward and more fascinating creature. This is how an early gay classic was blurbed in advertisements and dust jacket flap by Samuel Roth, its first publisher, in 1933. A Scarlet Pansy, by Robert Scully (possibly a pseudonym), is a skillful and mature American novel, sensationseeking packaging and all. Part of Ch. 19 is anthologized in The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature (1998), which also reproduces the book's frontispiece. The subtlety of "Scully's" observations are those of one well acquainted with modernist writing styles. Hugh Hagius makes a strong case for the author being the poet, short story writer, and chronicler of the European literary scene in the 1920s, Robert McAlmon, who knew and published writers such as Hemingway, Pound, Joyce, William Carlos Williams, and Katherine Anne Porter. Information newly found in the papers of Samuel Roth helps evaluate Hagius' claim.1 That archive also reveals Roth's distribution tactics for the book. That a book like A Scarlet Pansy could be displayed and sold openly to the gay underground in 1933 as well as a general reading public for titillating and prurient novels is especially remarkable. A Scarlet Pansy's narrator is highly approving of the protagonist, Fay Etrange, although he is not fooled by a world frivolous on the surface, but essentially compromised. He has a frame story to tell and begins with Fay dying in the arms of her lover on a World War I battlefield. For once, and due only to the chaos of the Great War, Fay could openly express desire and its spiritual outcome, devotion. The narrator then goes back to Fay's life story, starting with her childhood as a strong and brilliant boy in Kuntzville (pun?), in the hills of Pennsylvania (Kutztown is in Pennsylvania Dutch country). She eventually became a physician especially skilled in obstetrics. Turn-of-thecentury Kuntzville is a place of almost primordial innocence compared with the capitals of America and Europe where the adult Fay displays her hermaphroditic beauty. The feminine pronoun is always used to identify her, and her male friends. The book takes place in the first twenty years of the twentieth century. In New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, London, Berlin, and Paris, Fay, a brilliant cross-dresser, camps it up with a brittle, silver-faceted artificiality, herself an artifact into which is ingested all the wit and fashion of the idle, wealthy, and sophisticated aristocracy. Fay exists in a world that equals in sensuous pleasures the high-hat, black-tie society of many period romance novels. "Scully" deftly implies that the novel's gay protagonists "perform queerness," mimicking and thus belittling the values of those that exclude them, as Queer Theorists have analyzed (Zeikowitz).2 Fay and her friends are endearing, and capable of all the clever dissolution that straight Society's bright young people have mastered. However, the gay set never assume its members are "normal" or that their inclinations are other than to enjoy themselves (for Fay and her friends, even medical school is a breeze). Scully suggests that they are no more capable of confronting a painful self-analysis than their straight counterparts in the chic restaurants, orgiastic parties, famous bars and theaters, or elegant cruise boats where they rub shoulders (and more) with the aristocracy of two continents. Fay's life is a carnival, and the names of her friends are those of a dazzling side show: Billy Pickup, a playboy; Henry Voyeur and Percy Chichi, philosophical observers; Teddy Wemys Cocke, one of Fay's lovers; Bobby Dike, a "collar and tie woman"; the La Butsch family of highliving party animals. They are not ashamed of being gay, transvestite, or lesbian and are as proud of their hedonism as they are of their freedom of expression. …