Richard Le Gallienne Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Richard Le Gallienne

The relative obscurity of Richard Le Gallienne's literary reputation is perhaps due to his excess of romantic sensibility in an age of irony. By the time he got to Paris in 1927, Le Gallienne's heyday had passed.

Born Richard Thomas Gallienne at Liverpool in 1866, he was hailed by members of the Decadent Movement with the publication of Volumes in Folio (1889). Publishing prolifically not only in John Lane's controversial Yellow Book, whose editors included Aubrey Beardsley, but in a dozen other newspapers and magazines, he began, as he tells in The Romantic '90s (1925), to associate with such figures as Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. But Le Gallienne was not primarily of the Decadent spirit which he once called "limited thinking, often insane thinking." He was first and always the romantic author of The Quest of the Golden Girl (1896).

When he moved to the United States in 1903, Le Gallienne exclaimed: "An American writer! Yes! there was my new flag waving over the doorway--the flag under which henceforward ... I am to write my books." Although he made his home in the United States until 1927, his relationship to America, and to the twentieth century, was ambivalent. Having no affinity with either, he clung to old world values which, though still marketable in fashionable publications such as Cosmopolitan or Harper's, were being left behind by writers disdainful of his sort of sentimental meditations upon daintily veiled sensuality. In 1922, the year of The Waste Land , the traditional lyrics of Le Gallienne's A Jongleur Strayed were criticized for evading the problems of modern life. After spending over twenty-three years in New York struggling to support himself at journalism, book publishing, and lecturing, Le Gallienne became disenchanted with his adopted home where he had expected to make his literary fortune. Growing tired of "this humdrum, half-baked, material country," he began to long for "that dear old, human, romantic world"--Paris.

Living in Paris from 1927 to 1935, Le Gallienne mingled with--but was not particularly interested in--the literary vanguard of Paris. He recognized that the Latin Quarter housed "the masters of modern thought and the representatives of modern dreams and modern art." But he did not care to ally himself with this society, preferring to avoid "all that modern nonsense which is as inseparable from 'modernity' nowadays as it was in the days of Abelard." He abhorred Samuel Putnam's New Review and what he called the "dirto-mania" of Joyce and his followers, but liked Joyce the man. He liked F. Scott Fitzgerald as well, but thought Ezra Pound affected and Ernest Hemingway insignificant. Modernism in general he found unpalatable and held to his own "not very 'modern' (thank God!) wares," as he called his work in a letter to American literary critic J. Donald Adams (25 August 1931).

In Paris Le Gallienne found a life style which he could transcribe into a weekly column for the New York Sun called "From a Paris Garret," selections of which were collected under the same title in 1936. For him Paris was a schizophrenic city: at once the modern, unimaginative bureaucracy which he rails against for its materialism and lack of imagination, and the historical, "Symbolic City of human experience" which allowed him to indulge his penchant for reflecting on the many layered romantic past of that much-lived-in city. The second collection of these articles, From a Paris Scrapbook (1938), his last book, won the Commissariat General du Tourisme prize for the best book about France by a foreigner. After 1935, when he moved to Menton, he wrote about Paris from a distance. He spent the years of World War II in neutral Monte Carlo, where his column became tinged with the modern problems he had so consistently evaded in his lyrics and novels of romance. At the age of eighty, having written almost ninety books and innumerable articles, Richard Le Gallienne died at Menton in 1947, survived by his third wife and two daughters, one of whom is the actress Eva Le Gallienne.