Name/Title
Evelyn ScottEntry/Object ID
2012.634Description
Mixed-Media collage about a woman from Tennessee named Evelyn Scott
Evelyn Scott (born Elsie Dunn)
1893-1963
Elsie Dunn was born in Clarksville, and grew up in a house on Madison Street. In 1907, the family moved to New Orleans, where Elsie attended Sophie Newcomb Preparatory School and College. There she met Frederick Wellman, a friend of her father's and Dean of Tulane University's School of Tropical Medicine. The forty year-old Wellman and his wife, the concert pianist Edna Willis, were prominent members of New Orleans society; it caused quite a scandal when Wellman and the 20 year-old Elsie disappeared together, having caught a freighter from London. There they changed their names, she to Evelyn Scott, in an effort to avoid the lawsuit promised by Edna and the horsewhipping threatened by Evelyn's father. When news of their scandal made the British papers, she and Wellman, now Cyril Kay Scott, sailed for Brazil, ostensibly to collect beetles for the British Museum.
Scott eventually became an acclaimed novelist, publishing twelve works of fiction, a memoir about growing up in Clarksville, two books of poetry and four children's books. She relocated often, living for a time in, among other places, Greenwich Village, Bermuda, Bou Sadda (Algeria), Paris, London, and Santa Fe. IN the last years of her life she lived in relative obscurity in the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, in New York City, where she died in 1963.
"I do know this: expatriotism is a myth. During twenty-three years, I have not spent a quarter of the time in America, and my sojourns in Tennessee have been limited to a few days or a few weeks together; yet, though I possessed the genius for disguises attributed to the late Lon Chaney, I could not successfully camouflage my Americanism to the foreigner, who, just because he is detached from the scene, recognizes the embodiment of the indigenous character. And I remain, also, more specifically, a Tennessean... And though, at this moment, if I were to walk down Franklin Street, in Clarksville, and ask, consecutively, of each person I met, an opinion on the weather, I should probably find not one who would not prophesy clear skies where I anticipate rain, still I should be speaking the language of my background, to which could be traced influences responsible for my present disparate opinions...
"Once, while we were living in Russellville, my mother, who had been out afternoon-calling, entered our yard (she was looking so pretty in her grey broadcloth gown with her ostrich-plumed hat and her furs and violets, that I remember it still), and discovered me squatting in the grass, digging violently and laboriously with a large tin spoon. Questioned on my preoccupation, I explained to her that I did not like Russellville and was digging to reach China, which I understood to be at the other side of the world. I think this began an adventure, which has always had a somewhat desperate character, and is not yet done. I was like a trapped rat, forging a way through obstacles with a new burrow! Like a convict frenziedly employing a pocketknife as he seeks for freedom through ten yards of solid masonry with a guarded continent beyond! I wanted to get out, and be able to arrive somewhere else - on the other side of the strange taboos and inscrutable injunctions which hedged and hemmed me in."
- Evelyn Scott, "Background in Tennessee", 1936Artwork Details
Medium
Mixed-Media, CollageCollection
APSU Permanent CollectionMade/Created
Artist
Susan Bryant & Billy RenklDate made
1997