FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS deserves our gratitude for making available the original 1932 version of A Scarlet Pansy, a minor classic of Modernism attributed to “Robert Scully.” Editor Robert J. Corber stresses in his introduction the novel’s importance for both transgender and gay literature. Reviewed in these pages in 2010 (September–October issue), the story is a campy Bildungsroman following the life of one Fay Estrange from his youth in small-town Pennsylvania through a series of manual jobs, before being rescued in Horatio Alger fashion by rich men. He goes to medical school, travels a bit, and eventually lands on a French battlefield in World War I. There he dies in battle in the arms of a soldier with whom he has fallen in love.
In his G&LR review, Jay A. Gertzman discussed Hugh Hagius’ theory that the novel’s author was actually the popular writer Robert McAlmon. By the time Gertzman wrote his biography of its publisher, Samuel Roth (Infamous Modernist, 2013), he had discovered that a Robert Emmet Scully, MD, not only existed but had been associated with sites where he could have become acquainted with Roth. While Gertzman was plainly reluctant to give up McAlmon as the probable author, he noted that a comparison of the signature on the contract with McAlmon’s is inconclusive and acknowledged that McAlmon was in Europe from 1931 to ’34. He also reported that, although Roth’s daughter said the name was a pseudonym, she indicated that the author was a doctor. Corber rejects the idea that he could have been McAlmon on stylistic grounds. Comparing McAlmon’s 1925 short story “Miss Knight” to A Scarlet Pansy, he focuses on how McAlmon’s “treatment of the queer world contrasts markedly with Scully’s. … It is difficult to imagine that he could have written A Scarlet Pansy’s florid, campy prose. … McAlmon’s short stories also differ from A Scarlet Pansy in that they make no attempt to queer or destabilize the binary construction of gender and sexual identities.”
Thus “Robert Scully” just may be Robert E. Scully. The 1932 contract gives his address as a Charlottesville post office. Apparently, this led Gertzman to look to the University of Virginia medical school, where he found Scully received his MD. He appeared in the American Medical Association records beginning in 1918 and “was commissioned into the Navy’s Medical Reserve Force in 1921. Subsequently, he practiced in U.S. veteran hospitals in Newark and … Somerset Hills, New Jersey.” Corber reports Gertzman’s findings but does not seem to have pursued Scully’s biography. My quick search turned up fascinating material. A call to Emily Bowden at UVA’s Health Science Library pulled in more information. Putting what I have learned together reveals an unusual figure. Whether the results help build a case for this man being the author, however, remains unsettled in my mind.
Robert Emmett Scully was born in Neshanic, N.J., on April 6, 1875, the fifth of seven children, to an Irish immigrant father and an American-born mother. He grew up in Somerset, suffering typhoid fever as a child. He worked as a stenographer for the U.S. Leather Company and as a Richmond, Virginia, florist. Coming under the influence of New York City spiritualists, in March 1897 the Spanish-speaking youth traveled to Philadelphia and then embarked to Havana to join the insurgent army there; but he was quickly returned to his alarmed family. He attended Columbia University without taking a degree. In 1912, he sailed to Europe (France and Italy). From 1914 until 1918 he was in the UVA medical school, receiving his MD at the age of 43. In 1930, while working as a medical examiner for the Veterans Bureau, he was unmarried and living with a widowed sister and her son in Somerset. Why he would have a Charlottesville address is mysterious. In 1937, Scully visited Havana and other Gulf coast ports. Then, on January 11, 1940, he was granted the right to practice medicine in Louisiana, probably in New Orleans. He died after November 1952, when he applied for Social Security. There are obviously huge gaps in this biography and strange changes of fortune—though none stranger than those of Fay Estrange.
Ultimately, the author is not as important as the audacious work itself. Corber deftly describes the three different versions of the book—issued in at least five editions—and explains plausible reasons behind textual changes. Finally, he has given us an authentic text to supplant forever, one hopes, the bowdlerized second version and the travesty that Badboy put out in the early 1990s. One would now expect to see serious discussion of the novel for its literary, cultural, and historical values.
Drewey Wayne Gunn’s latest book is Gay American Novels, 1870-1970: A Reader’s Guide.
