A(braham) Lincoln Gillespie, Jr. Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on A(braham) Lincoln Gillespie, Jr.

Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, Jr., known to his friends as "Linky" or "Link," was part of the group of revolutionary writers who contributed to the Paris-based literary magazine transition during the twenties and thirties. Although his work was far from the most significant to appear in transition, his experiments with language were so flamboyant that they were often singled out for ridicule by the magazine's critics. A native of Philadelphia, Gillespie received a B.S. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1918 and taught high school mathematics for several years until an automobile accident in 1922 left him with serious injuries from which he never fully recovered. Hoping that travel would improve his health, Gillespie and his wife went to Paris.

Even among the nonconformist Left Bank artists and writers, Gillespie was considered an eccentric, and a number of stories about him--some true and some apocryphal--began to circulate. The tales of Gillespie's exploits which have been verified are just as fantastic as those which have been disproved, and in many cases it is impossible to separate fact from fiction. Kay Boyle says that Gillespie decided to become a writer after someone told him he looked like James Joyce and that he once gave a lecture to the American Women's Club of Paris in which he explained that until after his accident, he did not understand Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Gillespie frequented the cafes of Montparnasse explaining his theories about writing to anyone who would listen, and in 1927, after he decided that he had perfected his style, he took his work to Elliot Paul, one of the transition editors. Dougald McMillan says that "Paul's acceptance of Gillespie's work was more an act of bravado than a serious assessment of its lasting literary worth and his pieces were generally considered a joke." Gillespie, however, evidently decided that publishing in transition made him an established writer. One anecdote about him which McMillan believes to be true is Samuel Putnam's claim that after Gillespie's first piece appeared, he separated from his wife because he no longer considered her his intellectual equal.

One of Gillespie's early enthusiasms was the polyphonic music of George Antheil, whom he had known in Philadelphia, and his 1927-1928 pieces in transition espouse similar innovations in the written word. As McMillan points out, Gillespie wanted writing to "contain indications of what the mind had gone through in the process of forming an utterance." He believed that grammar, syntax, and vocabulary not only limit the writer's ability to express his ideas, but that they actually distort his thoughts by forcing them into conventional forms. Only by ignoring grammar, leaving out unnecessary words, and inventing new words can one truly communicate. "A Past Doggerel Growth of the Literary Vehicle: Language's Relapproach Music and Plastic" in the Fall 1928 issue of transition ends with a call to other writers: "TO WORK THEN, Gang, Miss Stein's & Mr. Joyce's peal clearly that the Vehicle is now The exrudimentablising CreateConcern, a now-yawning DisHibernial plasticklable at least. To furth-pursue Thought Context at neglexpense of VehiFormConcomitent will be ludisastrous." In June 1929 Gillespie was one of the signers of transition's "Revolution of the Word Proclamation" which asserted, among other things, that "NARRATIVE IS NOT MERE ANECDOTE, BUT THE PROJECTION OF A METAMORPHOSIS OF REALITY" and that "THE LITERARY CREATOR HAS THE RIGHT TO DISINTEGRATE THE PRIMAL MATTER OF WORDS IMPOSED ON HIM BY TEXTBOOKS AND DICTIONARIES." Some of the signers of the proclamation signed more out of friendship for the editor, Eugene Jolas, than because they subscribed to its contents, but Gillespie's writing follows its prescription quite closely.

Also in 1929, Gillespie joined a colony of expatriates at Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera; at various times, its residents included Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, George Antheil, Hilaire Hiler, Peter Neagoe, Bob Brown, and briefly, Harry and Caresse Crosby. At Cagnes-sur-Mer, Gillespie came under the influence of Bob Brown, the inventor of the Reading Machine in which the reader turned a crank so that words moved past his eyes. Gillespie began to include visual effects in his writing, and in 1931 he contributed two pieces to Brown's anthology, Readies for Bob Brown 's Machine. Brown had asked for contributions as different from conventional prose as sound motion pictures were from stage plays, and Gillespie's "Readie-Soundpiece" combines visual effects with musical cues in an attempt to evoke the atmosphere of a college campus in the fall. The poem was reprinted in Peter Neagoe's Americans Abroad An Anthology in 1932.

In early April 1932, Gillespie returned to the United States, where he frequented literary circles in Philadelphia and New York City's Greenwich Village. The injuries from his 1922 automobile accident continued to plague him, and he was hospitalized with tuberculosis for much of the time during the last few years of his life. He died in Philadelphia at the age of fifty-five.