Virgil Geddes | Biography

Although Virgil Geddes was financial editor of the Paris Tribune (the European edition of the Chicago Tribune ) from 1924 to 1928, he was already a published poet and later became known as a playwright. In Paris he was acquainted with such writers as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Horace Gregory, Padraic Colum, and E. E. Cummings. Among his friends on the staff of the Tribune were Elliot Paul and Eugene Jolas, the founders of transition magazine in 1927, as well as William L. Shirer and James Thurber.

Geddes was born on a farm in Dixon County, Nebraska. Although his formal schooling ended after the eighth grade, he read widely. He served in the United States Navy from 1918 to 1921, first in an officers' training school at Newport, Rhode Island, and then in the Naval Reserve. In the early twenties he held various newspaper and stage jobs in Boston and Chicago. Before going to work for the Paris Tribune, Geddes traded on his experience in burlesque to get his first job in Paris. Because he spoke English, he was hired by a French stagehand to assist Josephine Baker backstage at the Folies Bergere, where, Geddes writes, she "was cavorting, clad only in a string of bananas fastened around her waist. My job was to clasp the bananas from behind her on two hooks before the stage curtain parted for her act out front." In France Geddes met Minna Besser, a dancer who worked with Isadora Duncan. They were married in 1927.

Geddes's own poems had appeared in Poetry, Modern Review, Voices, Prairie, Caprice, Forum, Art Review, and other magazines before they were collected in Forty Poems (1926) and Poems 41 to 70 (1926). The first volume contains a preface by Elliot Paul, who provided Geddes a place to write at the Hotel du Caveau de la Terreur. Paul says of Geddes's poetry: "Geddes has many rare qualities, but none of them are acquired.... His art does not intrude itself upon the unwilling. Like the old Chinese philosopher, he fishes with a straight hook, so that the fish may remain in the water if they choose.... His greatest joy is to escape for a moment from his loneliness, to catch a reflection or response in another's soul which betrays that men are not destined to wander eternally alone." Geddes's sense of solitude is tempered by his hope for communication:

Ideas exist
As bleak, conceited hopes within the mind.
The will to cast themselves
Upon the outer visage of some form
Gives way to talk of semblance,
Or of friends.

Reviewing Forty Poems in the Paris Tribune for 7 May 1926, Paul Shinkman wrote: "Geddes, one suspects, from no more than a casual survey of his works, is a wanderer, one of those wanderers in the realm of fancy who senses poignantly the tremors of emotional experience, who now smiles faintly at its whirligigs and arabesques, now cries out at the rumblings of its divine tympani." Geddes later contributed several poems to the first issue of transition (April 1927) and another poem and three short stories to later issues. The stories, in contrast to the sensuous imagery of the poems, are written in simple, realistic prose. Brief in form, they contain little overt action, but examine the tangle of emotion and motivation in relationships between men and women. In his foreword to the 1978 collected edition of Geddes's poetry, Louis Untermeyer calls him: "Not a conventional or complacent poet. On the contrary, his lines are a continual challenge. Far from pretty, they quiver with problems, bristle with protests, luxuriate in complexities." Untermeyer concludes: "All of this resuscitated collection was written more than half a century ago. It is good to see that time has not silenced what Geddes had to say."

In 1926 Edward Titus's Black Manikin Press published The Frog A Play in Five Scenes, Geddes's first play, which was successfully produced in Boston in 1927 by the Boston Stage Society. The characters in The Frog are circus clowns. Hugo, a compliant clown, is led by the more persuasive Bob to assume the role of a frog. As the play progresses, Hugo takes on more froglike characteristics until he seems finally to have submerged his human personality completely in his new identity. Hugo and another clown, Glory, die as a result of Bob's manipulation and the jealousy of a fourth clown, Oscar. The play stresses the idea that true humor is based on sadness; in Scene I Oscar says: "Hugo makes them really laugh, deeply, because he makes them weep." Of further interest are the Freudian implications of the play: hypnotic suggestion, the death wish, and the power of the unconscious mind.

Barrett H. Clark, in An Hour of American Drama, quotes Geddes on playwriting: "My first effort in playwriting ... came about in a rather curious manner. While riding on a bus with my friend Eliot [sic] Paul, I happened to say to him, 'There can't be anything to the notion that only people connected with the theater can write good plays.' 'No,' he answered. 'It is just the opposite.' And I immediately began writing my first play, The Frog." Subsequent plays made him a controversial dramatist in the United States. The Earth Between, Geddes's first play to open in New York, was produced by the Provincetown Players in 1929 and provided the vehicle for Bette Davis's first appearance on the New York stage. It dealt with the theme of incest from a Freudian point of view. Native Ground (1932) explored adultery as a theme and thus violated another taboo. Horace Gregory commented on this play: "Here are no experiments in verbal technique but the mature developments of a genuine style." Geddes said of his subject matter: "I took to writing plays because it seemed to me the most direct means of getting down in black and white the feelings and thoughts of ... people.... Through my plays I have endeavored to present phases of American life not heretofore seen on the stage." The content and starkness of Geddes's plays continued to provoke controversy.

In 1932 Geddes founded The Brookfield Players in Brookfield, Connecticut, one of the earliest summer theatres. From 1935 to 1937 he was managing producer of Unit A of the New York City branch of the Federal Theatre. Also the author of several critical books on theatre, Geddes was an objective defender of Eugene O'Neill's work in such books as Beyond Tragedy Footnotes on the Drama (1930), The American Theatre What Can Be Done" (1933), and The Melodramadness of Eugene O'Neill (1934).

From 1941 until 1960 Geddes worked as postmaster of Brookfield. He recorded some of his experiences on the job in Country Postmaster (1952). Geddes lived at Swans Island, Maine, from 1964 until his death in 1989.