Modern Memoir and Esoteric Aesthetics: The Inauthentic Context of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Ring of Thieves”

Abstract

Cecily Swanson argues that “modernism’s Gurdjieff craze in fact played a surprising role in the development of an overlooked canon of popular autobiographies: Muriel Draper’s memoir, Music at Midnight; Margaret Anderson’s memoir, My Thirty Years’ War; and Kathryn Hulme’s autobiographical novel, We Lived As Children.” Swanson reads Draper, Anderson, and Hulme because they wrote as esotericists, while she divorces the memoirs from any overt esoteric influences, contents, or aesthetics. There is no need to search further for the source of the mode of the popular autobiographies by Anderson and Draper than what of Loos’s novel comes through the Peggy Hopkins Joyce/Zora Neale Hurston memoir. Marriage, Men, and Me appears near the commencement of a line of esoteric memoirs that becomes visible in the best-selling works by Draper and Anderson but then continues expansively.