“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, June 11, 1924, Hotel Unic, 59 Boulevard du Montparnasse, Paris

When they came to Paris at the beginning of this year, New Jersey pediatrician William Carlos Williams, 40, and his wife Flossie, 33, felt this would be the way to extend his career as a novelist and poet, and perhaps move permanently to Europe.

Le Dome Café on Boulevard du Montparnasse

Now that they are packing to sail back to the States tomorrow, they are thinking that Bill being a pediatrician at Passaic General Hospital in New Jersey might be a better choice.

Passaic General Hospital

In many ways, they did exactly what they were planning to do. Williams reunited with old American friends like poet Ezra Pound, 38, whom Bill knew back at University of Pennsylvania. Ezra was the one who nagged Williams to come to Paris in the first place. They also spent a lot of time with writer Robert McAlmon, 29, who had started Contact magazine with Williams back in Greenwich Village. Here he has started Contact Press to publish all the hot new writers trying to break through on the Left Bank.

Thanks to McAlmon, Bill and Flossie have met all the right literary people. They hung out at “Sylvia’s,” the Shakespeare and Company bookstore run by fellow New Jersey-ian Sylvia Beach, 37. They went to parties with the avant garde Irish novelist Sylvia had dared to publish, James Joyce, 42, and listened to his drunken singing at parties late into the night.

Dr. William Carlos Williams

The Williamses went to the Riviera with McAlmon and then toured around Europe for three months before coming back here in May.

Williams’ novel, called, really, The Great American Novel, published by another small company, the Three Mountains Press owned by Bill Bird, 36, was reviewed in the Paris Herald by noted British writer and editor Ford Madox Ford, 50. Ford compared Williams’ work unfavorably to the first book of stories, in our time, by the hottest American writer on the Left Bank, Ernest Hemingway, 24. But still—publicity!

The Great American Novel by William Carlos Williams

And Williams was even quoted in an article in Publisher’s Weekly about Sylvia’s influence on literature. He said she created

a sanctuary for all sorts of writers.…the younger Americans found [her shop] a veritable home.”

What didn’t Williams do?! For one thing, he hardly worked at all on his next book, In the American Grain, although he optimistically dragged the manuscript with him on all their travels.

Williams came here so hopeful. But many times, with many of these literary people—he did find the women much more interesting than the men—he just didn’t feel…comfortable. And despite what he had heard before he arrived, the food and the conversation weren’t always that great.

This discontent might be why, just a few weeks ago, when Bill and Flossie finally went to tea with the doyenne of the ex-pat crowd, Gertrude Stein, 50, and her partner Alice B. Toklas, 47, upon reading some of her work he told her to burn everything that wasn’t any good. Stein, aghast, pointed out to him that, being a doctor, perhaps writing wasn’t his “metier.” He asked her,

Dr. Stein, are you sure that writing is your metier?”

and knows he will never be invited back to rue de Fleurus again.

On the plus side, he did perform a circumcision, on Jack, the seven-month-old son of Hemingway and his wife Hadley, 32. Jack’s Mom calls him “Bumby” because he looks like a teddy bear.

Ernest and Jack “Bumby” Hemingway

When they were in Austria in April, Bill wrote to a friend in the States,

I have heavy bones. I am afraid—there is little here for me…only America remains where at least I was born.’”

Time to go home.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through V, covering 1920 through 1924 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, City Books on the North Side and Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Later this month I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.