The Unknown

By Lewis Grossberger

As Cranford Glimp's funeral procession wound its way through the musty streets of Plattsburgh, N.Y., in June 1973, a small boy gazed at the burnished casket and the three mourners trudging after it and asked his father, "Papa, who is in that box?" The answer was not long in coming. "I don't know, son," said the father. "But I expect it's somebody who recently died."

It was a response that would have delighted the ethereal yet sarcastic Glimp, and one typical of the mystery and confusion that shadowed him all his life--a life that produced the most innovative works of art of the 20th century yet somehow left its creator unknown to the public.

For Cranford Glimp, the timing was never right. And the location was usually off as well. Early in the century, when young talent such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Henri Matisse, Gertrude Stein and Gene Kelly flocked to Paris, making it the world capital of artistic ferment, Glimp set up his atelier in Helsinki. "The rent's cheap" was his cryptic explanation to friends and admirers who for years vainly urged him to relocate. By the time he did, Paris turned out to be occupied by the Nazis and all the cafes had switched from vin rouge to beer and spaetzle, which Glimp despised.

Despite such crushing disappointments, his output was always prodigious, prolific, protean, profound and even, in his self-portraits, prognathous. An artist of staggering versatility, Glimp refused to be chained to one medium. He turned out paintings, novels, plays, operas, ballets, film scripts, poems, TV commercials, recipes, roadside billboards, monogrammed handkerchiefs, rebuses, a surrealist comic strip titled Emil the Talking Bladder, and the gigantic, brightly colored mounds that he wittily called Alps--so massive that the plaster of Paris used to construct them had to be poured over four-story buildings, often trapping the hapless occupants inside.

Such breakthrough works afford the merest hint of Glimp's startling originality. Given his first showing in 1907 at a gallery in Sardinia, Glimp declared his "revolt against the age-old tyranny of the frame" and produced an oil painting (Nude Stretching) that flowed off the canvas onto the wall and floor and then out the door, continuing some 320 ft. along the sidewalk. In 1911 his atonal lesbian operetta, Gal Crazy, caused a riot in Seville, where audience members mistakenly believed they were about to see a bullfight. His kinetic 1928 novel, Run, Fight, Nap, written using only verbs, anticipated the action films of the '80s.

Glimp's enormous influence on other artists can only be described as enormously influential. Hemingway was suspected of lifting passages in A Farewell to Arms from Glimp's novella Say Goodbye to Your Feet, a tender love story set amid the depravities of the Bulgarian-Estonian war. Visiting Paris one weekend, Glimp told the young Salvador Dali, "I like the watches, but why are they all so hard? A watch should be soft." Later that day, he bumped into Henry Miller and startled him by shouting, "Your stuff is boring! Get some sex into it!" Once asked about Cubism's debt to Glimp, Picasso angrily replied, "No! No! He did rectangles, he did hexagons, maybe once or twice a polyhedron, but he never did a cube!"

The critics were never kind to Glimp. Edmund Wilson dismissed him with the scathing comment "I've read his operas, but I refuse to listen to his paintings." George Bernard Shaw admired Glimp for "the authentic ugliness he could carry from one genre to another." Such remarks never bothered him. "I don't create for the critics," Glimp said with his usual brutal whimsy. "I do it for a tiny cult of neurotic admirers who worship me obsessively and bring me offerings of fruit and incense."

A small, bristling man with a florid mustache and snowy, brushed-back eyebrows, Glimp guarded his privacy so laxly that more than enough is known of his stormy and unconventional personal life. He always denied the rumor circulating in his hometown, Pascagoula, Miss., that he shot his mother and the mailman before departing for foreign shores. He married the same woman, nude composer Lola Plitskaza, five times and divorced her twice. Their only child, Enrico, an embalmer of some promise, died tragically on the Lusitania, though not the voyage on which it sank.

Sadly, Glimp spent his last three decades squandering his creative energies in a legal battle with Alfred A. Knopf; the artist demanded more royalties, while Knopf contended that he was not Glimp's publisher. At 86, death came peacefully to this proud virtuoso as he slept at the wheel of his sports car and drove into a tree. But wherever there are tiny, neurotic cultists with fruit and incense, Cranford Glimp's art will live on.

Lewis Grossberger is a columnist for Mediaweek magazine