Rough Draft: The Modernist Diaries of Emily Holmes Coleman, 1929-1937 is
an edited selection, published here for the first time, of the diaries
kept by American poet and novelist Coleman during her years as an
expatriate in the modernist hubs of France and England. During her time
abroad, Coleman developed as a surrealist writer, publishing a novel,
The Shutter of Snow, and poems in little magazines like transition. She
also began her life's work, her diary, which was sustained for over four
decades. This portion of the diary is set against the cultural, social,
and political milieu of the early twentieth century in the throes of
industrialization, commercialization, and modernization. It showcases
Coleman's often larger-than-life, intense personality as she interacted
with a multitude of literary, artistic, and intellectual figures of the
period like Djuna Barnes, Peggy Guggenheim, Antonia White, John Holms,
George Barker, Edwin Muir, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Waley, Humphrey
Jennings, Dylan Thomas, and T.S. Eliot. The book offers Coleman's
lively, raw, and often iconoclastic account of her complex social
network. The personal and professional encouragements, jealousies, and
ambitions of her friends unfolded within a world of limitless sexual
longing, supplies of alcohol, and aesthetic discussions. The diary
documents the disparate ways Coleman celebrated, just as she
consistently struggled to reconcile, her multiple identities as an
artistic, intellectual, maternal, sexual, and spiritual woman. Rough
Draft contributes to the growing modernist canon of life writings of
both female and male participants whose autobiographies, memoirs, and
diaries offer diverse accounts of the period, like Ernest Hemingway's A
Moveable Feast, Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,
Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company, and Robert McAlmon and Kay
Boyle's Being Geniuses Together.
