SOURCE: “Europe at Large,” in McAlmon and the Lost Generation, University of Nebraska Press, 1962, pp. 221-25.

In the following essay, Knoll comments on the Berlin stories in McAlmon's Distinguished Air (Grim Fairy Tales).

McAlmon was no more able to stay put in Europe than in America. He moved restlessly about from country to country, from city to resort, with Paris as his point of departure and return. Life was a succession of “migrations” whose “essential record” can be found in his short fiction. In the early twenties he made several trips to Berlin. Postwar inflation had encouraged an astonishing wantonness, and the night life in the German capital was more dissolute than anywhere on the continent. McAlmon described it as a world of total abandon where nothing remained stable, not even gender. His Berlin stories were collected in Distinguished Air (Grim Fairy Tales) (1925) which William Bird brought out...