"Mystical and Cool": Scarlett Johansson, David Bowie, and--Margery Latimer?

Tomorrow will bring to fruition a dream 15 years in the making.  I will get to hear the work of Margery Latimer being discussed by graduate students.

I've been working on Margery Latimer since I tripped over her work in grad school.  Researching a paper on her husband Jean Toomer, I started reading the wild, hilarious, moody, beautiful, out-of-control work of his first wife, who died in childbirth at the age of 33.  I fell in love with Latimer's novels and short stories, with her directness, her grace, her rocky sense of humor.  My dissertation scrapped itself and began anew--about her.  Hell-bent on recuperating her for a contemporary readership, I published four articles about her work and gave endless papers at conferences about her. 

And then I got tired.  My own writing started taking off.  And she remained obscure.

At Wabash, where all the students were young men and where the curriculum listed toward the conservative, I occasionally taught one of her short stories--but hesitantly.  Latimer's kind of a weirdo (my favorite kind):  a leftist, a feminist, a mystic intensity-junkie excited about the body and female sexuality, an enthusiastic crosser of class, gender, and racial boundaries, a writer who blends searing poetry with the absurd, a brilliant thinker decades ahead of her time.  And Wabash was a place where students, assigned to read Jean Rhys, asked why they had to bother with "a slut."  Classic.  I once had a summer research assistant there, a bright young thing who openly derided the worth of Latimer's work and questioned the time I was spending time on her.  (Like the whole world wasn't already doing that.)  Even my kindly mother-in-law asks, "Her?  Still?  You're still working on her?"

Now, at long last, here at UNL, in ENGL 810, which is devoted to transatlantic modernist women writers (a category far too small to have ever made Wabash's course catalog), we've spent half the semester reading Stein, Woolf, Mansfield, and Larsen (with Rhys, Hurston, and Le Sueur still to come), as well as Bonnie Kime Scott's, Maureen Honey's, and others' analyses of the obscuration of most women writers of the modernist period.  The class is a lovely, clever, insightful group of students; the context has been built; the stage has been set; my expectations are nervously high.

I've always felt like I'm not quite the scholar to handle Latimer--like I'm just a writer who sometimes writes about writers, not an academic heavyweight, and if some big-deal scholar could just get wind of how great Latimer's work is--some Matthew Bruccoli or Mark Hussey or Bonnie Kime Scott herself--then Latimer's reputation would be off and running.  Sigh.  Need I say that that has yet to happen?   

I did find a reference online to a paper by one Sara Kosiba ("Margery Latimer and the Little Magazines"), but even Kosiba's academic affiliation is mysteriously hard to track down. 

The dearth of scholarship about Latimer sometimes makes me think, Well, maybe I'm the only one.  Maybe I'm the only weirdo in the world who connects with this weirdo's wild work.

But hey, if David Bowie knows who Latimer is--and compares her to Scarlett Johansson (and better yet, Jeanette Winterson), calling them all "mystical and cool," then maybe there's hope. 

Guess I'll find out tomorrow.