Edwin Orr Denby (February 4, 1903 – July 12, 1983) was an American writer of dance criticism, poetry, and a novel, but is perhaps now best known for his work with

Orson Welles George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter, known for his innovative work in film, radio and theatre. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential f ...

in translating and adapting the 1851 French comedy '' The Italian Straw Hat'' to the American stage in 1936 in the form of the

farce Farce is a comedy that seeks to entertain an audience through situations that are highly exaggerated, extravagant, ridiculous, absurd, and improbable. Farce is also characterized by heavy use of physical humor; the use of deliberate absurdity o ...

Horse Eats Hat ''Horse Eats Hat'' is a 1936 farce play co-written and directed by Orson Welles (at the time 21 years of age) and presented under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project. It was Welles's second WPA production, after his highly successful ''Voo ...

''.

Early life, education and early career

The son of Charles Denby, Jr. and Martha Dalzell Orr, Edwin was born in

Tientsin Tianjin (; ; Mandarin: ), alternately romanized as Tientsin (), is a municipality and a coastal metropolis in Northern China on the shore of the Bohai Sea. It is one of the nine national central cities in Mainland China, with a total popul ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

, where Charles had been appointed as chief foreign advisor to Yuan Shi Kai a year earlier. Edwin's grandfather,

Charles Harvey Denby Colonel Charles Denby (June 16, 1830 – January 13, 1904) was a U.S. Union officer in the Civil War and diplomat. He was the father of Edwin C. Denby, a U.S. Representative from Michigan, and later Secretary of the Navy, and Charles Denby ...

, who had served as the

United States Ambassador to China The United States Ambassador to China is the chief American diplomat to People's Republic of China (PRC). The United States has sent diplomatic representatives to China since 1844, when Caleb Cushing, as commissioner, negotiated the Treaty of W ...

for an unprecedented 13 years, died when Edwin was age one. Denby spent his childhood first in

Shanghai Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flow ...

, China, then in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

, Austria, where his father served as

consul general A consul is an official representative of the government of one state in the territory of another, normally acting to assist and protect the citizens of the consul's own country, as well as to facilitate trade and friendship between the people ...

from 1909 to 1915, before coming to the United States in 1916. He was educated at the

Hotchkiss School The Hotchkiss School is a coeducational University-preparatory school#North America, preparatory school in Lakeville, Connecticut, United States. Hotchkiss is a member of the Eight Schools Association and Ten Schools Admissions Organization. It i ...

in Lakeville,

Connecticut Connecticut () is the southernmost state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. Its cap ...

; and attended

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

, in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett language, Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut assachusett writing systems, məhswatʃəwiːsət'' English: , ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous U.S. state, state in the New England ...

, but failed to graduate. He also attended classes at the

University of Vienna The University of Vienna (german: Universität Wien) is a public research university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. With its long and rich histor ...

, before obtaining a diploma in gymnastics (with specialty in

modern dance Modern dance is a broad genre of western concert or theatrical dance which included dance styles such as ballet, folk, ethnic, religious, and social dancing; and primarily arose out of Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th ...

) at the Hellerau-Laxenburg school in Vienna in 1928. He performed for several years, notably with the Darmstadt State Theater and celebrated triumphs alongside

Claire Eckstein Claire (Cläre) Eckstein (8 July 1904 – 25 September 1994) was a German modern dancer and choreographer. Life Born in Allendorf (Hesse) the daughter of a Protestant pastor, Eckstein received her early training at Lucy Heyer's school of rh ...

, a German ballerina and choreographer. Looking for someone to take his passport photo, he encountered photographer and filmmaker

Rudy Burckhardt Rudy Burckhardt (April 6, 1914 – August 1, 1999) was a Swiss-American filmmaker, and photographer, known for his photographs of the hand-painted billboards that began to dominate the American landscape in the 1940s and 1950s. Life Burckhardt was ...

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

in 1934, and the two remained inseparable for the rest of Denby's life. The following year, they returned to

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

, New York, and rented a loft for eighteen dollars a month in a five-story walk-up building on West 21st Street in

Chelsea Chelsea or Chelsey may refer to: Places Australia * Chelsea, Victoria Canada * Chelsea, Nova Scotia * Chelsea, Quebec United Kingdom * Chelsea, London, an area of London, bounded to the south by the River Thames ** Chelsea (UK Parliament consti ...

. Denby's friendship with painter

Willem de Kooning Willem de Kooning (; ; April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter El ...

, who lived one floor below in the adjacent building, began shortly thereafter when de Kooning's kitten turned up on the fire-escape outside of Denby's window one evening.

Writing

Horse Eats Hat by Edwin Denby after Eugène Labiche

In 1935, soon after Denby's return to New York City,

and John Houseman asked him to help translate and adapt '' The Italian Straw Hat'', by Eugene Labiche and

Marc-Michel Marc-Antoine-Amédée Michel, known as Marc-Michel (22 July 1812 in Marseille – 12 March 1868 in Paris) was a French poet, playwright and journalist. He is perhaps best known today for the 1851 farce he co-wrote with Eugène Marin Labiche, ''The ...

, for the

Broadway Broadway may refer to: Theatre * Broadway Theatre (disambiguation) * Broadway theatre, theatrical productions in professional theatres near Broadway, Manhattan, New York City, U.S. ** Broadway (Manhattan), the street **Broadway Theatre (53rd Stree ...

stage. The resulting play, titled ''

'', was scored by

Paul Bowles Paul Frederic Bowles (; December 30, 1910November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with the Moroccan city of Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his ...

, and was performed as a

Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, i ...

Federal Theatre Production in 1936. Denby also appeared in the play, playing one half of "The Horse". During his lifetime, being ambivalent about the publication of his poetry, he was known primarily as a dance critic. At the behest of

Aaron Copland Aaron Copland (, ; November 14, 1900December 2, 1990) was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later a conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as "the Dean of American Com ...

and

Virgil Thomson Virgil Thomson (November 25, 1896 – September 30, 1989) was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music. He has been described as a modernist, a neoromantic, a neoclass ...

, he began writing a dance column for the magazine '' Modern Music'' in 1936. In 1943, Thomson drafted Denby as the dance critic for the ''

New York Herald Tribune The ''New York Herald Tribune'' was a newspaper published between 1924 and 1966. It was created in 1924 when Ogden Mills Reid of the ''New-York Tribune'' acquired the ''New York Herald''. It was regarded as a "writer's newspaper" and competed ...

''.

Works

His dance reviews and essays were collected in ''Looking at the Dance'' (1949, reprinted 1968), ''Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Streets'' (1965) and ''Dance Writings'' (1986). Denby's works of poetry include ''In Public, In Private'' (1948), ''Mediterranean Cities'' (1956), ''Snoring in New York'' (1974), ''Collected Poems'' (1975) and ''The Complete Poems'' (1986). His English translation of

Lao Tze Laozi (), also known by numerous other names, was a semilegendary ancient Chinese Taoist philosopher. Laozi ( zh, ) is a Chinese honorific, generally translated as "the Old Master". Traditional accounts say he was born as in the state of ...

Chinese classic text Chinese classic texts or canonical texts () or simply dianji (典籍) refers to the Chinese texts which originated before the imperial unification by the Qin dynasty in 221 BC, particularly the "Four Books and Five Classics" of the Neo-Confucian ...

Tao Te Ching The ''Tao Te Ching'' (, ; ) is a Chinese classic text written around 400 BC and traditionally credited to the sage Laozi, though the text's authorship, date of composition and date of compilation are debated. The oldest excavated portion d ...

'' from a German edition was published as ''Edwin's Tao'' in 1993. Denby's only novel, ''Mrs. W's Last Sandwich'' (also released as ''Scream in a Cave'') was published in 1972.

Guggenheim Fellow

In 1948, he was awarded a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

grant in poetry and dance criticism.

Death and legacy

On July 12, 1983, at the summer house he maintained with Burckhardt in Searsmont

Maine Maine () is a state in the New England and Northeastern regions of the United States. It borders New Hampshire to the west, the Gulf of Maine to the southeast, and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec to the northeast and north ...

, he committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills;

. he had been ill and increasingly concerned about the loss of his mental powers. Denby was inducted into the National Museum of Dance's Mr. & Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Hall of Fame in 2002.

References

External links

*
Jacket Magazine's Edwin Denby feature

{{DEFAULTSORT:Denby, Edwin 1903 births 1983 suicides 20th-century American novelists 20th-century American poets 20th-century American dramatists and playwrights 20th-century translators American expatriates in Austria American expatriates in China American dance critics American male journalists 20th-century American journalists American magazine writers American male novelists American newspaper writers American translators Chelsea, Manhattan Dance writers Drug-related suicides in Maine English-language poets German–English translators Harvard University alumni Hotchkiss School alumni New York Herald Tribune people People from Searsmont, Maine Poets from Maine Poets from New York (state) University of Vienna alumni Novelists from Maine Writers from Manhattan American male poets American male dramatists and playwrights Novelists from New York (state) People from Chelsea, Manhattan 1983 deaths 20th-century American male writers