Highsmith, Patricia | "...a serious and grim book..."

Highsmith, Patricia
The Blunderer. New York: Coward-McCann, 1954

8vo. Original red-lettered black cloth in dustjacket. Top edge spotted, one corner bumped, jacket extremities a little chipped.

A lengthy inscription on this association copy of the first edition: "To Jose. A serious and grim book. I hope you will enjoy some parts of it. In memory of an important caesura in my life, and you are an anhydrate in my life.... Pat Highsmith"

The rather cryptic inscription from Highsmith likely refers to a rather messy period in her romantic life. She was involved with separate, impossible affairs with a man and woman in the year preceding this books publication and such might have influenced its "grim" tone.

José García Villa, to whom the book is inscribed, was born in Manila in 1908, before moving to New Mexico to pursue his studies, and ultimately to Greenwich Village in New York City. There, he joined a community of modernist poets, including e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, among others, and was affectionately known as "The Pope of Greenwich Village." He wrote his poems under the pseudonym Doveglion (a composite of dove, eagle, and lion) and was admired, according to Marianne Moore, for "the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems." His 1933 story collection, Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others, was "the first work of fiction by a Filipino writer published by a major United States-based press."

Villa received “numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Philippines Heritage Award, a Poetry Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and a Shelley Memorial Award. In 1973 he was named a National Artist of the Philippines, and he also served as a cultural advisor to the Philippine government. He died in New York City on February 7, 1997.”

REFERENCE
Academy of American Poets; Villa, Doveglion: Collected Poems, ed. John Edwin Cowen

PROVENANCE
José García Villa (inscription)

Condition Report:
Condition as described in catalogue entry.