Thomas P. Kelley - Modernist?

"It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. ... Grammar and style! To me they have become ... irrelevant."

The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume One: 1929 - 1940, Cambridge University Press, 2009

From Thomas P. Kelley's The Gorilla's Daughter (Toronto: Export Publishing Enterprises, 1950). 

"Naked and defenceless, the blond and beautiful Diana Lynn was now at the complete mercy of the shaggy one! And that shaggy one was none other than Bontu – the giant gorilla!"

Was Kelley a modernist?