Turlington, Henry

Henry E. Turlington (b. 1945), a used and rare books dealer based in North Carolina, sold his collection of materials pertaining to Cyril Kay-Scott and Evelyn Scott to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in 1990.

Frederick Creighton Wellman, later known as Cyril Kay-Scott (1879-1960), was a self-described explorer, anthropologist, bacteriologist, journalist, linguist, economist, and latter-day Renaissance man.

In 1912, while Wellman was working in Honduras, he met Seely Dunn. The following year when they both returned to New Orleans, Dunn introduced Wellman to his daughter Elsie, later known as Evelyn Scott (1893-1963), who would become a literary force during the 1920s and 1930s. Wellman had four children (Frederick, Manley, Paul, and Alice) with his first wife, but was married to his second wife when he began a clandestine courtship with twenty year old Elsie. On December 26, 1913, Wellman and Dunn eloped to New York City, and due to the scandalous nature of their affair, changed their names to Cyril Kay-Scott and Evelyn Scott. Shortly after arriving in New York, they took a boat to London and then settled as husband and wife in Bloomsbury.

Cyril made arrangements with the British Museum to collect entomological specimens in Latin America after realizing that he and Evelyn might be discovered in England. Soon after arriving in Brazil he found that collecting specimens was unrealistic and since he was unable to use credentials that would betray his past to obtain work, he was forced to work as a manual laborer. Eventually he obtained a job as a bookkeeper in a Singer Sewing Machine store, where he would be promoted to auditor and then superintendent, requiring the couple to move to Natal. In Natal, the couple's only child, Creighton Jigg Scott, was born on October 26, 1914.

In 1916 Kay-Scott moved his family, which now included Evelyn's mother, to Cercadinho, Brazil, an isolated valley four hundred miles inland in Bahia province, to become a rancher. Here both Cyril and Evelyn began to write both poetry and prose. In 1917 they abandoned the ranch and moved to Villa Nova where Cyril took a position with the International Ore Corporation.

In 1919, the family returned to New York so Evelyn could receive medical treatment. Cyril, Evelyn, and Creighton lived in Greenwich Village for the next two years. During this period Evelyn began writing for The Dial, reviewing work by James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence.

Evelyn's novel The Narrow House and Cyril's novel Blind Mice were published in spring 1921. Their novels received critical acclaim rather than commercial success. Cyril's stressful job and monetary woes caused him to suffer a nervous breakdown, which served to reunite him with Evelyn after an estrangement due to Evelyn's infidelities with Waldo Frank and William Carlos Williams.

In Bermuda in 1922, Evelyn and Cyril met Owen Merton, a painter, who eventually moved into their house accompanied by his son Thomas. Owen Merton became Evelyn's lover without apparent animosity on Cyril's part; in fact, it was Owen who encouraged Cyril to begin a new career as a watercolorist. Meanwhile, Evelyn completed The Golden Door and began work on Escapade . During 1923-24 the group traveled together and separately throughout Europe.

Cyril returned to America with Creighton in 1928, the same year he filed for divorce from his common-law marriage to Evelyn, and decided to pursue a career as an art teacher, setting up an art school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1931, Cyril gave up running the art school and became director of the Denver Art Museum. He retired from this position in 1934. Cyril worked for a time with Creighton on a Works Progress Administration project, but soon afterwards settled into retirement. In 1943, Cyril's autobiography, Life Is Too Short, was published.

In 1925, back in New York, Evelyn and Owen split due in part to Thomas Merton's disdain for Evelyn. Evelyn escaped to London where she would find her next lover, John Metcalfe; he became her husband in 1930. Evelyn's novel, The Wave (1929), sold well and received critical acclaim, but her next publication, a volume of poetry titled The Winter Alone (1930), received almost unanimously unfavorable reviews. Evelyn and John arrived in Santa Fe in 1929 to join Cyril and Creighton. In Santa Fe Evelyn worked on A Calendar of Sin (1931), a work based almost solely on her family history. In June of 1931 Evelyn and John accepted an invitation to work at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs. They spent three months in Yaddo and Evelyn was able to finish a substantial part of her new novel Eva Gay. They received a second invitation to stay at Yaddo and returned from England in 1933.

Evelyn accepted a teaching position at Skidmore College in 1939. Her career as an author ended in 1941, when The Shadow of the Hawk did not find success. In the fall of 1943 Evelyn traveled to Tappan, New Jersey, where Creighton and his wife Paula were living. This stay was fraught with tension since Evelyn's emotional state had deteriorated. The only other time she saw Creighton was in 1949 during a brief stopover he made in London. Evelyn returned to London in 1944 and until 1947 little is known of her activities. Evelyn's last appearance in print was a postwar contribution of a poem and three articles on American poetry in the Poetry Review .

In 1951, Evelyn's friend Margaret DeSilver established a fund to allow Evelyn and John to return to America. The original signatories on the draft appeal were: Waldo Frank, Dawn Powell, Allen Tate, Lewis Gannett, John Dos Passos, and Edmund Wilson. Sufficient money was raised for the couple's return passage in 1953. They arrived in California and for a year stayed at the Huntington Hartford Foundation at Pacific Palisades. They left California in 1954 for New York where they took up residence in the Benjamin Franklin Hotel on the upper West Side. John found work teaching at a boys' prep school only to lose this job a few years later due to his increasingly evident drinking problem. Evelyn fell ill in 1963 and was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was operated on, released on August 3rd, and died later that night in her sleep.

From the guide to the The Henry E. Turlington Collection of Cyril Kay-Scott and Evelyn Scott Materials TXRC97-A6., 1881-1987, (bulk 1920-1957, 1983-1985), (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)