Introduction
CoDA showcases a selection of the modernist diaries of American poet and novelist Emily Holmes Coleman (1899-1974). Coleman kept a diary for most of her adult life, beginning about the time of her expatriation to Paris in October 1926. Although she burned these earliest pages, she went on to preserve thousands more, from 1929 to 1970. This extant text is housed in The Emily Holmes Coleman Papers at the University of Delaware Library, Special Collections. CoDA is indebted to both the Delaware Library and to Joseph Geraci, Coleman’s literary executor, for their generous permissions to publish a portion of the diary and accompanying materials online.
As a project grounded in literary history, CoDA is focussed on Coleman’s first expatriate period in Europe, when she immersed herself in modernist art, culture, and communities. Her poems appeared in little magazines like transition, and she was noted for her ground-breaking treatment of postpartum depression in her surrealist novel The Shutter of Snow. Her network of friends, lovers, and acquaintances included pivotal creative and intellectual figures of the day such as George Barker, Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle, T.S. Eliot, Emma Goldman, Peggy Guggenheim, Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Jennings, Dylan Thomas, and Antonia White. From 1929 to 1937 (at which point she returned to the U.S.), Coleman served as an intimate chronicler of the times. She produced about one thousand leaves of her journal in largely typed, single-spaced manuscript pages; it was her habit to type two columns, or leaves, per horizontal letter-sized page, writing by hand in general only if her ribbon was used up or if she could not access a typewriter when travelling. Her method of composition signals her public aspirations for the document, for she came to view it aesthetically and deserving of an audience. Her diary is a testament to her conviction that “Life is the rough draft of art,” and to her ongoing agenda to translate the rough draft of her life into an enduring literary work.
In publishing a sample of 100 pages of this personal record, CoDA illuminates the contributions of Coleman and her circle to transatlantic modernism. The exhibit includes scans of Coleman’s typed diary pages as well as transcribed versions (with footnotes) for comparison. The site also contains a personography and some photographs of those mentioned in the sample text. Our aim, over time, is to publish the complete modernist diary along with related scholarly articles, and to offer a comprehensive encyclopedia and an interactive map. CoDA is based on Rough Draft: The Modernist Diaries of Emily Holmes Coleman, 1929-1937 (Rowman & Littlefield/University of Delaware Press, 2012), edited by CoDA Project Director and Principal Investigator Elizabeth Podnieks.