Solita Solano Biography

Solita Solano was born in New England in 1888. Both in youth and maturity she was strong-willed, inquisitive, and independent. Expressing her dislike for educational systems and her love of travel early in life, she spent three years in the Philippines instead of going to college. There she helped to survey and build coral roads. After her return to America, she began her writing career in 1914 as a cub reporter for the Boston Herald-Traveler, where she was soon promoted to the post of drama editor and critic (becoming the first woman to hold that position on a major daily U.S. newspaper). Five years later Solano went to work for the New York Tribune , where she served as drama editor for one year before departing in 1921 for Europe and the Near East with her friend Janet Flanner.

Solano spent time traveling in Greece, Crete, Turkey, and Vienna before settling in Paris in 1922. Once settled in Paris she mingled freely with the literary vanguard and was acquainted with many of its luminaries, including Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, Margaret Anderson, the Fitzgeralds, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. Her closest and longest friendships, however, were with Nancy Cunard, British poet and founder of the Hours Press, and with Flanner, who in 1925 became Paris correspondent for the New Yorker. Their enduring friendship she later described as "a fixed triangle ... forty-two years of modern female fidelity." Solano lived with Flanner for twenty years.

Solano was not a prolific writer: she published only three novels and one book of poetry,Statue in a Field (1934"), all within the first twelve years of her life in Paris. Her fiction is best characterized as psychological realism, but it also displays a somewhat romantic affinity for the exotic, the Oriental, and the flamboyant in her choice of image, metaphor, and minutely detailed description. She seems obsessed with the failures of human relationships. Her three novels explore unrequited love and distraught marriage relationships and involve strong-willed characters (the men often neurotic and the women raffish) whose obsessions and self-indulgences result in self-destruction and whose stormy affairs end in bitterness and disillusionment.

The Uncertain Feast (1924), her first novel, is set in New York and is about Daniel Greer, a man whose hard work and determination in the face of extreme odds win him the editorship of a thriving newspaper, but whose weak, neurotic personality results in the failure of his much longed-for marriage to Amy Fiske, a socialite from Boston. She becomes indifferent and lazy; he selfish and even brutal. His efforts to get from life all that he can without regard for others result in bitter triumphs and successes without rewards. He seems, paradoxically, both a giant and a pygmy.

The Happy Failure (1925) repeats the themes of a sour marriage and the misfit personality. Its hero, Timothy Doan, struggles between the conflicting influences of his money-making father, his society-loving mother and sister, his wife's wish that he go into business, and his own dream to live a secluded life in the country where he would have time to write. An irreparable gulf widens between father and son and between husband and wife. The couple separates after one year of marriage. The hero, however, sees his failure as the beginning of a new freedom.

The third novel, This Way Up (1927), involves yet another bad marriage and a childish, self-centered character. Anthony, an American architect, returns to Paris ostensibly to study but actually to pursue Rosario, a pert Catalonian dancer who has led him on for two years. When in Paris she flaunts a new lover in his face, he, in a fit of anger and despair, marries a girl whom he met on the liner. The marriage ends in heartbreak; Rosario alone remains untouched by the havoc she has helped to create.

Solano's work, in the words of transition's editors (who published an excerpt from This Way Up in the September 1927 issue), "had the honor of not pleasing" most American critics, who criticized her "sophisticated" use of classical allusions, her stark amorous detail, and her "execrable" and "abhorrent" style. A few critics, however, lauded her fictional realism for its "impeccable psychology" and "absolute ruthlessness," comparing her to Theodore Dreiser and Ben Hecht. Reviewer Lillian Hellman appreciated This Way Up for its acute observations and intelligence and admired its young author for treating Paris not with "that palsy of admiration which strikes so many American writers" but "as if it were founded by human beings." Solano's prose is frequently over detailed, but it does convey with fidelity and vigor what she perceived as a fundamental ugliness and decay in the hearts and minds of modern human beings.

Solano's feelings about the Paris literary scene and her own career were ambivalent. In her response to the questionnaire that appeared in the final issue of the Little Review (May 1929), she said that she considered art "pleasant but unimportant" and that she disliked "the stupidity and vileness of human relations" as well as "stories (both dirty and clean), what passes for art, reality (except for laboratory data) ... the theatre, novels" and "banal conversation." After 1930 her literary output declined, and she led an increasingly quieter life. In the mid-thirties she, along with Margaret Anderson and her friend Georgette Leblanc, became a disciple of the Russo-Greek mystic George Gurdjieff who had established a spiritual retreat at Fontainebleau-Avon, and for five years she served as Gurdjieff's secretary. In her later years she worked at times as an editor and involved herself in her special interest, etymology. She died at the age of eighty-six in the Paris suburb of Orgeval.