Kreymborg Bio

Alfred Kreymborg was born in 1883 to a German father and an American mother in New York City. Though he did not go on to inherit the family cigar business, he did inherit his father’s prodigious chess skills. Though he was capable of playing blindfolded and on par with the World Champion, this heritage is not what makes Kreymborg relevant today. Kreymborg went on to become one of the most important figures in the history of the modernist Little Magazine, but in some ways the seeds of his importance came from his other early passion, music.

The world of the avant-garde has a crucial social structure, the salon culture, which, according to Stephen Voyce “often facilitated progressive experiments in community and collective aesthetic exchange” (627). When Kreymborg’s day job selling music collided with this vibrantly daring and daringly social world, a string of meetings—perhaps serendipitous, perhaps fateful—swept Kreymborg into the center of the movement in many ways. While selling music rolls for his day job, Kreymborg met Alanson Hartpence, who convinced him to pursue art full time. As Kreymborg fell deeper into the artist world and began frequenting artist hangouts, he met   Marsden Hartley who invited him to Alfred Stieglitz’s Round Table. At the Round Tables he met Man Ray and Samuel Halpert, with whom he moved to a rural cottage in New Jersey, known as Ridgefield Cottage or the Grantwood Colony, and founded his first Little Magazine, Glebe.

As the editor of Glebe, Kreymborg became very influential, and his zealous protection of this ability to hold influence is arguably the character trait that most shaped his career. He expected to be ““unhampered in his editorial inclinations” at Glebe. When the wealthy backers of the publication became too controlling, Kreymborg resigned, and Glebe could not survive without him.

Kreymborg, however, now entrenched in the world of the avant-garde, was just fine without Glebe. Before long the stars aligned again: Walter Arensberg and Alfred Kreymborg met at a party hosted by Allan Norton, and the Little Magazine Others was born of this partnership. Ultimately, though, the magazine was Kreymborg’s; his ideas about how the Little Magazine should be run were particular and set in cement, leading to the dissolution of his partnership with Arensberg. However, this particular victory of Kreymborg’s need for control did not come at the cost of the Little Magazine. Others thrived despite a rocky beginning.

One of the best examples of the success of Others is, of course, Mina Loy, whose “Love Songs” wound up “on everyone’s coffee table” (Black 22). Seeing as Others was intentionally not well circulated, the ubiquity of the work is very impressive. Others also seems to constitute the majority of the connection between Loy and Kreymborg, though Loy did also play the lead in the Provincetown Player’s production of Kreymborg’s self-directed play “Lima Beans.”

In the great avant-garde mythology that art historians and literary scholars alike are left to sift through, the relationship between Kreymborg and Loy is difficult to get a good handle on. The artists’ world seems enveloped in a sort of magic when one reads about it—evenings of raucous academia, an idea that might have seemed heretofore oxymoronic; cottages by the river where the boldest and finest artists could gather to discuss their latest endeavors; and a sense that fate is building a web by degrees of separation to cause cosmic collisions of artistic potential. In this world, Loy and Kreymborg fall together more regularly than in the real world. When Charles Allen describes the Norton party where Kreymborg and Arensberg met, he reports that Norton was throwing the party for the contributors to his Little Magazine Rogues, a list that included Mina Loy (420). All of a sudden Loy is now present the night that Others was born. Loy was also, according to the autobiographies of both William Carlos Williams and Kreymborg, present at Grantwood Colony. Of course, as Suzanne Churchill points out, when Mina Loy arrived in New York in 1916, Others was approaching the two year anniversary of its inception and the Grantwood Colony had long since disbanded.

On the whole, Kreymborg was a crucial figure to the avant-garde movement. Frank Waldo writes, “He has more claim to be called a founder [Of the American Theater] than Eugene O’Neill” (1). And as for his Little Magazines, Charles Allen said, “Their significance is no greater or no less than the estimate that one places on the desirability of securing the reputations of such poets as Williams, Moore, and Stevens” (423).

Works Cited

“Alfred Kreymborg is Dead at 82; Poet and Playwright in ‘Village’.” New York Times

(1923-Current File), Aug 15, 1966.   http://ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/117695870?accountid=10427.

Allen, Charles. “Glebe and Others.” College English, vol. 5, no. 8,

1944, pp. 418–423. JSTOR, JSTOR www.jstor.org/stable/371453.

Black, Cheryl D. “The Women of Provincetown, 1915-1922.” Order No. 9908923

University of Maryland, College Park, 1998. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. Web. 19 Sep. 2017.

Churchill, Suzanne M. “Making Space for Others: A History of a

Modernist Little Magazine.” Journal of Modern Literature 22.1 (1998): 47-67. ProQuest. Web. 15 Sep. 2017.

Moore, Marianne. “Letters.” Partisan Review 64, no. 4 (Fall, 1997): 597-608. http://ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/237122854?accountid=10427.

SARLOS, ROBERT KAROLY. “THE PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS: EXPERIMENTS IN

STYLE. (VOLUMES I AND II).” Order No. 6605392 Yale University, 1966. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. Web. 19 Sep. 2017.

Voyce, S. “‘Make the World Your Salon’: Poetry and Community at the

Arensberg Apartment.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 15 no. 4, 2008, pp. 627-646. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mod.0.0039

Waldo, Frank. “MR KREYMBORG WOOS AMERICA.” The Dial; a Semi – monthly

Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion, and Information (1880-1929) 07 1925: 72. ProQuest. Web. 19 Sep. 2017

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