Florence Gilliam Biography

Florence Gilliam, journalist and theatre critic, visited France in 1913 and again in 1919, but it was not until after she had left her high-school teaching job in Columbus, Ohio, and met editor Arthur Moss, whom she later married, that she decided to settle in Paris. Gilliam had spent her summers studying acting and attending the theatre in New York City before she moved there in the summer of 1920. She soon met Moss and went to work briefly for his Greenwich Village magazine the Quill. The September 1920 issue lists Gilliam as managing editor.

Early in 1921, Moss and Gilliam left Greenwich Village--and the Quill--for Europe, and they settled in Paris in February. They became involved in the intellectual atmosphere of the Left Bank, and in August 1921, they founded Gargoyle, the first English-language review of arts and letters to appear in Continental Europe during the period between the two World Wars. Among the Americans who contributed to the magazine were Malcolm Cowley, Laurence Vail, Hart Crane, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Coates, Matthew Josephson, Stephen Vincent Benet, Sinclair Lewis, Gorham Munson, John Reed, and Hilda Doolittle. Gargoyle lasted slightly more than a year, during which Gilliam covered theatre and musical events while Moss wrote book reviews and humorous essays.

The magazine never made money, and it had no outside financial backing, so Moss and Gilliam also worked as free-lance writers for various American publications. At one time, Gilliam was writing for all three American newspapers in Paris. She wrote "Round the Studios" and "Latin Quarter Notes" for the Paris Herald (the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune ), a "window-shopping" column for the Paris Times, and feature articles for the Sunday edition of the Paris Tribune (the European edition of the Chicago Tribune). Besides working as one of the Tribune's theatre critics and serving as Paris correspondent for the New York publications Theatre Magazine and Theatre Arts, she also edited a monthly bulletin for the American Women's Club in Paris until 1926 when she took an editorial job in the Paris office of Fairchild Publications. After Moss became editor for Erskine Gwynne's Boulevardier, Gilliam joined the staff as stage critic, writing the column "And So To the Theatre" until July 1931.

Gilliam and Moss were divorced in 1931. Gilliam remained in Paris until 1941, when, after living for eight months in German-occupied Paris, she returned to the United States. During World War II, she wrote France A Tribute by an American Woman (1945) in which she calls her adopted country "the stage as limited as a sonnet, on which the drama of Western Man is played out." After the war, Gilliam went back to France and worked with various relief organizations. In gratitude for her work as director of American Aid in Paris, the French made her a chevalier in the Legion of Honor and awarded her the Medaille de la Reconnaissance Francaise.

An admirer of all aspects of French culture, Gilliam praised the Paris of the twenties and thirties for providing the necessary environment in which influences from other countries could spark new creativity: "Once Diaghilev with Fokine and Bakst came smashing into [French] consciousness at the beginning of the twentieth century, Paris became the garden spot for the flowering of all the arts into a theatrical spectacle such as had never been seen." The ballet brought together writers, composers, painters, choreographers, and dancers of all nationalities working together to create a "transcendent type of theatre." For Gilliam, France provided both a link with tradition and a point from which she could observe human experience objectively, freed from the strictures of her native country. As she sailed into New York Harbor in 1941, she sensed the end of an era: "I felt something like the snapping of a continuity. Life had always seemed a chain ... or quicksilver perhaps, which defies sharp beginnings and endings. Never was there a point at which to stop and look back, or peer ahead. That day, time seemed for once to stand still."