SuchFriends Blog
'…and say my glory was I had such friends.' — WB Yeats‘Such Friends’ 100 Years Ago, September 1910
In Ireland
…at his home Ratra Frenchpark, in County Roscommon, the president and founder of the Gaelic League, Douglas Hyde, 50, has put the finishing touches on his introduction to The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries by Tibetan Buddhism scholar W. Y. Evans-Wentz, 32.
In his 50th year, Hyde is able to see his resolution to make study of the Irish language mandatory in Irish schools finally pass. The curriculum change is due to take effect in 1913.
Although Hyde does not often see his friends who founded the Abbey Theatre a few years ago—William Butler Yeats, 45, and Lady Augusta Gregory, 58—his Gaelic League is often linked with them in the ongoing battle for Irish nationalism. But Hyde believes the fight for a national language should be above politics, and eventually resigns as president of the League.
In England
…The Stephens family is traveling and visiting.
Vanessa Stephen Bell, 31, has been with her husband Clive, 29, at Studland beach. Her unmarried sister Virginia, 28, is now well enough to come to London to see the Bells’ second son, Quentin, born just last month.
Virginia had taken a respite from her stay in a Twickenham nursing home to visit Cornwall with her nurse. Back in London she gets into a fight with Clive, who feels his Cambridge friend, Lytton Strachey, 30, has been ignoring him recently. Clive wants to ban Lytton from the Bell home in Gordon Square; his wife Vanessa makes peace.
In France
…at 27 rue de Fleurus, on the Left Bank of Paris, power has shifted.
Leo Stein, 38, who has lived there for almost eight years, and has been buying up art by young painters, is no longer the center of attention. His sister Gertrude, 36, who came seven years ago, has been joined in the apartment by her new best friend, Alice B. Toklas, 33.
The Steins are well known among the Paris art dealers as the crazy Americans who wear sandals and buy art. Leo has decided that he has bought his last painting by Pablo Picasso, 27, but is still a major supporter of Henri Matisse, 40.
Matisse is busily working on the newest version of his large painting, The Dance, due to be exhibited at the Salon d’automne this year.
Gertrude sticks with Picasso; after all, he’s the one who painted her portrait.
In America
…This month’s issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal is the “Paris Fashion Number.” The most stylish looks from France are illustrated in color and black and white drawings.
In New York City, the East River Tunnels have just opened, linking Manhattan and Long Island by subway.
In Boston, Harvard student Robert Benchley turns 21. He is courting his grade school sweetheart, Gertrude Darling, also 21, and has been making a name for himself by doing mock travelogues to local clubs. Chicagoan Ernest Hemingway, 11, is visiting with his mother Grace, 38.
In St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, F. Scott Fitzgerald turns 14. He enjoys playing basketball and football at school, but is more thrilled that he recently had a story published in the school magazine.
On the same day, Anglo-Irish aristocrat Shane Leslie, Cambridge graduate, converted Catholic, and Irish Home Rule supporter, turns 25. In a few more years, when Fitzgerald and Leslie meet at Princeton, Leslie will encourage Scott’s writing aspirations. Eventually Leslie will pass the young Minnesotan’s first novel on to his friends at Charles Scribner’s and Sons.
‘Such Friends’ 100 Years Ago, August 1910
In Ireland
…poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, 45, begins making notes in his diary for a poem that will be about masks. His secretary, Ezra Pound, 25, had introduced him to Japanese Noh drama a few years before, and Yeats has become attracted to the concept of the mask.
This year he has written to his fellow Abbey theatre founder, Lady Augusta Gregory, 58:
“If the masks work right I would put the fool and the blind man in Baile’s Strand [a one-act play which they had written together] into masks. It would give a wildness and extravagance that would be fine. I should also like the Abbey to be the first modern theatre to use the mask.”
The poem The Mask, reads:
“Put off that mask of burning gold
With emerald eyes.”
“O no, my dear, you make so bold
To find if hearts be wild and wise,
And yet not cold.”“I would but find what’s there to find,
Love or deceit.”
“It was the mask engaged your mind,
And after set your heart to beat,
Not what’s behind.”“But lest you are my enemy,
I must enquire.”
“O no, my dear, let all that be;
What matter, so there is but fire
In you, in me?”
In England
…in London, Quentin Bell is born, the second son of painter Vanessa, 31, and art critic Clive Bell, 28.
In the past few months Vanessa has been working on a painting of Quentin’s two-years-older brother, called Julian Bell and Nanny. Her London Morning has recently been in the New England Art Club exhibit, and she is helping her new friend Roger Fry, 43, prepare for his first Post-Impressionist exhibit, scheduled to open in a few months.
Vanessa’s sister Virginia Stephen, 28, has been in Miss Thomas’ private nursing home in Twickenham, and has just left for Cornwall with her nurse to spend time exercising. It will be another month before Virginia is well enough to visit the Bells and meet her newborn nephew.
In later years, Quentin’s summer birthday becomes the occasion for many Bloomsbury parties.
Quentin, an art historian and biographer, out lives almost all of them, dying at the age of 86 where the Bloomsberries flourished, in Sussex.
In France
…on the Left Bank in Paris, the apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus sits empty.
The regular inhabitants are summering in Italy. Gertrude Stein, 36, and her brother Leo, 38, have been going there regularly since they set up housekeeping together about seven years ago. Gertrude and Leo spend time learning about art from their friend Bernard Berenson, 45, and then buy up paintings by young artists when they are back in Paris.
This summer Gertrude and Leo are joined in Perugia by their new housemate, Alice B. Toklas, 33. Like the Steins, Alice is from San Francisco; she came to Paris for a visit three years ago and has now moved in with them at rue de Fleurus.
Leo has been very accommodating, giving Alice his studio to use as her own room. But within a few years, not being the center of attention begins to bother Leo, and he moves out. Alice wins.
In America
…in New York City, the new mayor, William Jay Gaynor, 61, survives an assassination attempt. A disgruntled former city employee shoots the Mayor as he is boarding a cruise ship for a European vacation.
By a fluke, the photographer from the New York World snaps a picture at the exact moment Gaynor is shot in the throat.
Over at the Morning Telegraph, Heywood Broun, 22, has been hired for $20 per week. Having recently flunked out of Harvard, Broun has taken refuge in journalism as the last career open to young men from good families who aren’t able to enter a more respectable profession.
…in Morriston, NJ, Dorothy Rothschild, just turned 17, is enrolled in a Catholic school. She believes that she is the only Jew there, but as her father, not her mother, is Jewish, she’s never quite sure.
Dorothy is eventually kicked out of the school, later claiming,
“I was fired from there finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion…The convent taught me only that if you spit on a pencil eraser it will erase ink.”
‘Such Friends’ 100 Years Ago, July 1910
In Ireland…
…Lennox Robinson, 23, has been manager of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre since late last year, although it is still directed by two of the founders who appointed him, William Butler Yeats, just turned 45, and Lady Augusta Gregory, 58.
It’s been a memorable season. Robinson has staged The Traveling Man by Lady Gregory, The Green Helmet by Yeats, and Deirdre of the Sorrows by the third Abbey director John Millington Synge who had died of cancer the year before, just short of his 38th birthday.
In May Robinson presented Thomas Muskerry at the Abbey, the sixth play by Irish writer Padraic Colum, 28. However, during the run, King Edward VII died and theatres throughout the commonwealth closed in respect—but not the Abbey.
Because of a missed message and a misunderstanding, the Abbey performed Muskerry anyway. This upset their key investor, Englishwoman Anne Horniman, who had bought the theatre building for them. She pulled all her investment. The lawsuits the Abbey has brought to try to buy the building through public subscription are still moving through the courts.
Robinson’s own play, The Harvest, has just been performed at the Abbey and also received good reviews at the London Court Theatre.
To make up for the loss of Horniman’s subsidy, the Abbey’s directors are now considering taking the troupe to America in the following year.
In England…
…Virginia Stephen, 28, is resting in a nursing home in Twickenham, southwest of London.
Virginia understands that her personal physician feels that this is the best treatment for her bouts of mental illness, and her very pregnant sister, painter Vanessa Bell, 31, agrees.
But Virginia resents the interruption to her life. She has been actively volunteering with the Women’s Cooperative Movement in support of women’s suffrage.
This is the first—but won’t be the last—time she stays at this nursing home, operated by Jean Thomas, a committed Christian. She and Virginia become friends and go on a walking tour of Cornwall together.
While Virginia is resting and walking, the rest of the country is fascinated with the search for the accused murderer Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, 47. He is known to have fled the country earlier in the year, with his mistress, after police questioned him about his missing wife, actress “Belle Elmore” Crippen.
Now the police have found Belle’s body buried in the Crippens’ home, and at the end of the month, they catch up with Dr. Crippen in Canada by using new technology—the wireless. Crippen is tried and executed four months later.
In France…
…Sarah Samuels Stein, about to turn 40, has returned to San Francisco, CA, because her father is dying.
Accompanying Sarah is Harriet Levy, 43, one of the California women who have been in Paris at the Steins’ invitation for the past few years.
Once in California, Harriet decides not to return to Paris, and writes to her roommate there, fellow San Franciscan Alice B. Toklas, 33, to close up their flat.
For Alice, this is the opportunity she has been waiting for. She is now free to move in with her lover, Sarah Stein’s sister-in-law, Gertrude, 36. Alice has been cooking and cleaning for Gertrude and her brother, Leo, 38, at 27 rue de Fleurus, almost since the day they met three years before.
Alice is not close to her father and brothers back in San Francisco; she has few friends and no life left there.
And now she’s in Paris! Alice spends her days typing up Gertrude’s writing from the night before. In the evenings she socializes with painters such as Henri Matisse, 40, and Pablo Picasso, 29, and has taken French lessons from Picasso’s mistress, Fernande Olivier, also 29.
Leo Stein welcomes Alice at first, graciously giving her his study as her own room. He has recently begun an affair with an artist’s model.
But the more Gertrude moves to the center of the artists’ salons the Steins host on Saturday evenings, the more Leo feels it is time for him to go. 27 rue de Fleurus will soon belong to Gertrude and Alice alone.
In America…
“Baseball’s Sad Lexicon
These are the saddest of possible words:
‘Tinker to Evers to Chance.’
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double–
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
‘Tinker to Evers to Chance.’”
—FPA, New York Evening Mail
The only work columnist Franklin P Adams [FPA, 28] is possibly remembered for appeared 100 years ago this month. It describes a ground ball hit to Chicago Cubs shortstop Joe Tinker, 30, then thrown to Johnny Evers, 27, at second base, and on to Frank Chance, 33, at first base. Two outs!
All three immortalized players became Hall of Famers in the 1940s.
In addition to his own doggerel, FPA was generous about using work sent in by aspiring writers to his popular column. Just last year he published a poem by George Kaufman, 20, a Pittsburgher living in New Jersey, and invited him over to Manhattan for lunch.
A few years later, FPA starts Kaufman’s writing career by getting him a job on the Washington, DC, Times.
And tonight, as a tribute to both FPA’s verse and my fellow Pittsburgher, Kaufman, I am going to watch the Pirates beat the crap out of the Phillies in PNC Park!
‘Such Friends’ 100 Years Ago, June 1910…
In Ireland…
…The Gaelic League, founded by Douglas Hyde, 50, 17 years ago, is getting mixed reviews.
A few months ago, Irish newspapers are pointing out that membership has declined so much that some branches can’t afford to pay their Irish teachers anymore.
But now, in June, the same papers are announcing the League’s growth. The Roscommon Herald notes that the organization is
‘Getting along wonderfully after all.’
And the Westmeath Independent reports that
‘The advance of the Gaelic League in county Westmeath in the past two years has been phenomenal.’
As proof, the Midland feis, a traditional celebration of Irish culture, is about to be held in Mullingar.
The League’s resurgence can perhaps be attributed to a recent campaign by Hyde and the Irish Nationalist Party to make Gaelic required for entrance to the new national university.
Hyde has recently been made Professor of Modern Irish at University College Dublin, and has distanced his League from the nationalism of the Abbey Theatre. He was one of the theatre’s founders with his friends W B Yeats, just turned 45, and Lady Augusta Gregory, 58, who are still theater directors.
In England…
…In London, Virginia Stephen, 28, is not well. She has recently returned from a holiday in Canterbury with her sister, painter Vanessa Bell, just turned 31, Vanessa’s husband, art critic Clive, 28, and their son Julian, 16 months. Vanessa consults a London doctor about her sister’s health and Virginia is packed off to a nursing home in Twickenham.
Vanessa keeps herself busy with ‘The Friday Club,’ which she and Clive have started to showcase her work and that of her artist friends. This month, she has two still lifes in their exhibit at the Alpine Gallery, along with three by their fellow Bloomsbury, Duncan Grant, 25. Vanessa buys Duncan’s painting, The Lemon Gatherers.
…In Dover, Charles Stewart Rolls, 32, one of the two founders of the Rolls-Royce manufacturing company, becomes the first person to fly round trip—Dover to Sangatte to Dover—across the English Channel. One month later he becomes the first Englishman to be killed in a flying accident.
In France…
…American ex-patriates Gertrude Stein, 36, and Alice B. Toklas, 33, are getting ready to leave Paris with Gertrude’s brother, Leo, 38, to spend the summer in Perugia, Italy.
…The ballet The Firebird premieres, written by composer Igor Stravinsky, 28, commissioned by Serge Diaghilev, 38, for his Ballets Russes. Choreographed by Michel Fokine, 30, Firebird is the first score written totally for the Ballets Russes.
Stravinsky has left his home in Russia to travel to Paris for the first time. At the premiere, no riots break out, but Stravinsky’s score is such a big hit, he becomes Diaghilev’s star composer. Within the next three years they collaborate on Petrushka and The Rites of Spring.
In America…
…In New York City, aviator Charles Hamilton, 24, makes the first round trip flight from New York to Philadelphia to New York.
…Heywood Broun, 21, is hired by the Morning Telegraph for $20 per week. He has been living with his parents since he left Harvard, unable to graduate because he flunked French.
But, like many others, Broun has developed his writing skills at Harvard in the classes of Professor Charles Townsend Copeland, 50. Broun has decided on a career in journalism because it is considered a low paid back up occupation for young men of the upper middle class who haven’t managed to finish college.
…And, for a perfect ending, short story writer O. Henry, 47, dies.
‘Such Friends’ 100 Years Ago, May 1910…
In Ireland…
…The edict has gone out. Because of the death of King Edward VII, 68, officially ending the Edwardian age, all theatres in the Kingdom are to close the following day, 7th May, out of respect.
The edict doesn’t go over so well in one of the ‘lesser colonies,’ Ireland. Specifically, at the Abbey Theatre, manager Lennox Robinson, 23, decides to keep the theatre open.
Unfortunately, Robinson’s edict doesn’t go over so well with the Abbey’s main funder, Englishwoman Anne Horniman, 49. Despite her infatuation with one of the theatre’s founders, poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, 44, Horniman withdraws her financial and emotional support.
This also withdraws the tension that has built up between Horniman and the Abbey’s other founder, Lady Augusta Gregory, 58. But now Willie and Augusta know that they will soon have to take the theatre on the road to America to raise funds.
In England
… Lytton Strachey, 30, has just taken rooms in London.
Since leaving Cambridge about five years before, Lytton has been floating. He spends most Thursday evenings in Gordon Square with his Bloomsbury friends, Vanessa, about to turn 31, and Clive Bell, 28. Usually the party will move on to nearby Fitzroy Square and the house where Vanessa’s sister, Virginia, 28, and brother, Adrian, 27, live.
Lytton had assumed he would be granted a teaching position at Cambridge, but that didn’t happen. In addition, his cousin and former lover, painter Duncan Grant, 25, is now having an affair with his own Cambridge friend and former lover, John Maynard Keynes, 26. They have begun attending the Bloomsbury gatherings as well.
Lytton is concentrating on finishing his dissertation on General Hastings, and has begun work on a book, Landmarks of French Literature.
In France
…Leo Stein has just turned 38.
He has been living in Paris for almost eight years at 27 rue de Fleurus. Shortly after he came, Leo’s sister Gertrude, two years younger than he, came to visit for one year. She’s still living with him.
In the summers Leo travels to Italy to visit his friend and fellow art collector Bernard Berenson, 44. A few years ago, Berenson sent him to the Paris art dealer Ambroise Vollard, now 43, on rue Lafitte to see the Cezannes, and Leo has become one of the foremost collectors and connoisseurs of ‘modern’ art in Paris.
Leo holds forth on his theories about art at his salons in rue de Fleurus where visiting Americans and Brits come to see the Cezannes, Matisses and Picassos, hung two and three deep on the walls.
But now Gertrude’s lover, Alice B. Toklas, 33, from San Francisco like the Steins, has been spending more time with them. She cooks, she cleans and she types up the work that Gertrude stays up late at night writing, under the Cezanne.
No longer the center of attention, Leo is thinking of moving out.
In America
…Hadley Richardson, 18, has just graduated from private school in St. Louis, MO. She is very excited about going to Bryn Mawr College back east in the fall.
Unfortunately, Hadley will feel out of place in Bryn Mawr and return home after only one year. She then decides to visit Paris for the first time.
Eleven years later, Hadley will move to Paris with her new husband, journalist Ernest Hemingway, eight years younger than she. They will live off her trust fund until he can support them with his writing.
‘Such Friends’: 100 Years Ago, April 1910
In Ireland
…poet, playwright and artist George Russell, always known as AE, turns 43.
A childhood friend of fellow Abbey theatre founder William Butler Yeats, 44, AE is one of the few members of any of the four groups who had to have a ‘day job’ while pursuing his art.
Early on, Yeats got him a position with the Ireland Agricultural Organization Society [IAOS], and they made good use of AE’s oratorical skills. AE is sent throughout the west of Ireland to rally farmers to set up their own cooperative banks and therefore be less dependent on the British government.
Now, in his early 40s, AE can point to the 200 cooperative banks in Ireland, as well as the Abbey Theatre and the many plays he wrote for them, as the fruits of his labors over the years.
On Saturday nights he attends the salons of his old friend George Moore, 58, in Ely Place, near Merrion Square, where he meets the movers and shakers of Ireland at the time.
In England
…the writers and artists who frequent the salons in the Bloomsbury section of London are spread out, traveling.
Essayist Lytton Strachey, 30, is off to Dorset with poet Rupert Brooke, 22.
Lytton’s cousin and former lover, painter Duncan Grant, 25, has been in Greece and Turkey with his current partner, Lytton’s Cambridge friend, economist John Maynard Keynes, 26.
The hostesses of the Bloomsbury salons, writer Virginia Stephen, 28, and her sister, painter Vanessa, 30, along with Vanessa’s husband, art critic Clive Bell, 28, have been to the beach at Studland together for a rest.
By the middle of this month Virginia returns to her home in Fitzroy Square, not in good health. In a few months she enters a private nursing home in Twickenham for more rest.
In France
…it has been one year since painter Duncan Grant had come to Paris to attend the Salons des Independents, meet painters Henri Matisse, 40, and Pablo Picasso, 28, and see the paintings displayed at the home of American ex-patriates Gertrude Stein, 36, and her brother Leo, 37, at 27 rue de Fleurus. Later Grant describes the paintings as
‘so beyond anything I was used to.’
Now, in 1910, Gertrude’s partner, Alice B. Toklas, also from San Francisco, turns 33. She has lived in Paris for three years, describing the time later in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:
‘Picasso had just finished his portrait of Gertrude which nobody at that time liked except the painter and the painted and which is now so famous…[Critic Max Jacob called it] the heroic age of cubism…We were young then and we did a great deal in a year.’
In a few months, Alice will officially move in with Gertrude, and eventually Leo will move out.
After the war, when the painters have left, the American writers will come to rue de Fleurus to listen to Gertrude and eat Alice’s little cakes.
In America
…in Manhattan, the Independent Artists’ Exhibit is held in a rented loft at 29 West 35th Street. One of the few non-juried shows in the US, the four-week exhibition is not a hit with the critics. But among the interested young artists who attends is Emmanuel Radnitzky, 19, who soon signs his paintings, Man Ray.
By the 20th of the month Halley’s Comet reaches its perihelion as it travels throughout the solar system.
On the 21st, right on schedule, American writer Mark Twain, 74, dies. In his recent autobiography Twain had written:
‘I came in with Halley’s comet in 1835. It’s coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. The Almighty has said no doubt, “Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”’
‘Such Friends’: 100 Years Ago, March 1910
In Ireland…
…Lady Augusta Gregory turns 58.
Her main focus is on the Abbey Theatre, which she had started with poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, 44, and her neighbor in the west of Ireland, Edward Martyn, 51, 12 years before.
After a lot of fights, feuds, and resignations, the theatre is doing well. Yeats’ school friend, poet, playwright and painter ‘AE’ [George Russell, 42], has recently defected to another theatre group, so things at the Abbey have calmed down a bit.
Yeats and Lady Gregory have had their own disagreements this past year, but they also joined forces to argue for the right of The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet, by Dubliner George Bernard Shaw, 53, to be performed without censorship.
This year, Lady Gregory is working on many plays, including The Full Moon and The Deliverer, which uses the story of Moses in Egypt to show how the Irish people treated the late nationalist Charles Parnell.
In England
…painter Vanessa Bell, 30, is three months pregnant with her second son, Quentin. She and her husband, art critic Clive Bell, 28, have been married for three years and live in Gordon Square in the Bloomsbury section of London.
At the beginning of the year, they re-ignited a friendship with art critic Roger Fry, 43, and he has joined their circle which meets regularly at their home, and at the home of Vanessa’s siblings, Virginia, 28, and Adrian Stephen, 27, in nearby Fitzroy Square. Fry has begun painting a portrait of Vanessa.
One of their Cambridge friends, Lytton Strachey, has just turned 30. He has written a blank verse play, called Essex, for a Stratford-on-Avon competition, and some essays on Rousseau and the women’s suffrage movement. Despite bouts of bad health, Lytton has begun work on his first large work, Landmarks in French Literature.
In France
….Pablo Picasso, 28, is working on a painting of his art dealer, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.
Picasso has been painting musical instruments, still-lifes, and friends. Four years ago he completed a portrait of his benefactor, American ex-patriate writer Gertrude Stein, now 36. She and her brother Leo Stein, 38, had been among the first to buy Picasso’s work. When their fellow San Franciscan Alice B. Toklas, now 32, moved to Paris in 1907, Gertrude had brought her to Picasso’s studio during her first few weeks there. Alice took French lessons from Picasso’s wife.
At that time Picasso had been working on a large work, Demoiselles d’Avignon, and Leo Stein had turned against his art. Leo and his sister had fought about it; Gertrude sided with Picasso. As Leo described the situation later:
‘I bought my last picture from Picasso…and that was one that I did not really want, but I had from time to time advanced him sums of money, and this cleared the account. Picasso was amusing sometimes when he was hard up. At one such moment the pictures of Renoir for the first time brought large prices at an auction, and Picasso, who had no coal and no money to buy it, drew glowing pictures of Renoir’s house with sacks of coal everywhere and some special choice hunks on the mantelpiece. Once when I gave him a 100 Francs to buy coal, he stopped on the way home and spent 60 of it for Negro sculpture.’
In America
…Maxwell Perkins, 25, who had graduated from Harvard three years before in economics, is working as a cub reporter on the New York Times. Perkins is hopeful of getting a job with better hours and pay at the publishers Charles Scribner’s and Sons so he can marry, Louise Saunders, 17.
Perkins has been sent to the Bowery to cover a would-be bank robber who is trapped in the collapsed tunnel he had been digging to get into the bank. To report back to the paper every half hour, Perkins uses the phone in a local saloon, and feels obliged to buy a drink each time he goes in. By dawn, after the robber is arrested, Perkins reels home only to find he has a message to go for his second interview at Scribner’s at 9 am.
Despite his hung over state, Perkins impresses Mr. Scribner, who hires him, for the advertising department.
After four years, Perkins is moved over to editorial where he specializes in spotting new young talent such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, among others.
‘Such Friends’: 100 Years Ago, February 1910
In Ireland…
…in Dublin, the Abbey Theatre premieres the latest Cuchulain play by William Butler Yeats, 44, The Green Helmet, an heroic farce. The program includes Yeats’ poem by the same name, which is collected in The Green Helmet and Other Poems published by his sisters’ Dun Emer Press later in the year.
This volume also includes No Second Troy, one of his many poems inspired by his rocky love affair with the Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, 43. The previous year, Gonne had finally left her husband, the Irish patriot Major John Mac Bride, 44. Yeats and his fellow Abbey founder, Lady Augusta Gregory, 57, had supported Gonne in separating from her husband on grounds of drunkenness, which gave her custody of the MacBrides’ son Sean, 6.
No Second Troy includes the lines:
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways…
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
In England…
…in Weymouth, Dorset, where the Navy’s HMS Dreadnought is docked, six Abyssinian princes come aboard for a royal visit. The captain had received a telegram from the Foreign Office a few days before telling him to prepare for the inspection.
But in reality the ‘princes’ are writer Virginia Stephen, 28, her brother Adrian, 26, painter Duncan Grant, 25, ringleader Horace deVere Cole, 28, and two of his Cambridge friends. They wear blackface, fake beards, and African-looking robes, and are not found out, even by those among the ship’s crew who know them.
To embarrass the Navy, Cole reveals the story to the newspapers, which publishes photos of the entourage. The media delights that the hoaxers had spoken in gibberish the whole time, translated by Adrian, repeatedly shouting, ‘Bunga! Bunga!’
Although this event becomes synonymous with Bloomsbury’s anti-establishment attitudes, for Virginia it merely reinforces her view that most men—particularly those who have the benefit of a formal education, which she hasn’t—are silly.
Duncan, in the meantime, has confessed to his lover, economist John Maynard Keynes, 26, that he is in love with Virginia’s brother Adrian. Grant and Keynes remain close throughout their lives, despite many affairs with others and Keynes’ marriage to ballerina Lydia Lopokova in 1925.
In France…
…on the Left Bank, American writer Gertrude Stein is celebrating her 36th birthday, her seventh since coming to live in Paris with her brother, Leo, 37.
Their apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus has become the center for art and artists among the expatriate community.
In the past year, painter Duncan Grant, 25, and Lady Ottoline Morrell, 36, have come from England to see canvasses by Henri Matisse, 40. In the salon, Leo holds forth on the superiority of the work of Pablo Picasso, 28, to that of James Whistler, 75.
While her brother Leo is recognized as one of the few American connoisseurs of modern art, Gertrude has been trying to replicate with words what the artists are doing with paint. She had finally found a publisher, the Grafton Press, for her Three Lives. But the editor there had corrected her grammar, and one year after publication they had sold only 73 books. Gertrude has sent a copy to her former teacher, William James, 68, but he dies before he can read it.
But this will be the year that Gertrude’s partner since 1907, Alice B. Toklas, 32, from San Francisco like the Steins, will officially move in to rue de Fleurus; eventually Leo will move out. Alice is already there every day, cleaning, cooking, typing whatever Gertrude has written the night before. They even collaborate on one piece, Ada, which clearly shows Alice’s handwriting on the typescript.
As she says later of the early salons, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:
‘Everybody brought somebody…It was an endless variety and everybody came and no one made any difference. Gertrude sat peacefully in a chair and those who could did the same, and the rest stood. There were the friends who sat around the stove and talked and there were the endless strangers who came and went. My memory of it is very vivid.’
In America…
…in the Brooklyn Heights section of New York City, Heywood Broun, 21, is still living with his parents on Pineapple Street. He is enrolled at Harvard University, but is flunking French and won’t be able to graduate. The most important thing Broun has learned from his university education is that the only career left to him, though poorly paid and not what his upper middle class family had in mind, is journalism. This summer Broun gets a job on the Morning Telegraph for $20 per week.
…in Manhattan, already starting his journalism career, Alexander Woollcott, just turned 23, had been hired as a general reporter at the Times the previous year, and now is assigned to cover trials and crimes.
…in New Jersey, George S Kaufman, 20, still living with his family, has had his first poem published in the popular ‘Always in Good Humor’ column by FPA [Franklin Pierce Adams, 28] in New York’s Evening Mail. FPA had invited the younger writer over to New York for lunch to encourage his career.
This year, Kaufman is taking classes once a week at the Alverne School of Dramatic Art in New York, to help his future prospects as a playwright. He also invests $100 in a theatre company in Troy, NY, but his job as manager there doesn’t last. Kaufman cables back to his family in New Jersey:
‘LAST SUPPER WITH ORIGINAL CAST WOULDN’T DRAW IN THIS HOUSE’
‘Such Friends’: 100 Years Ago, January 1910
In Ireland…
…John Millington Synge’s play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, is premiered, posthumously, at the Abbey Theatre.
His fellow Abbey directors, William Butler Yeats, 44, and Lady Augusta Gregory, 57, have completed the unfinished play with the help of Synge’s fiancé, Abbey actress Molly Allgood, 24, who plays the lead.
Synge had died the year before, age 38, two years after the Abbey premiered his Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots in the theatre because of its honest portrayal of Irish people. On his young friend’s death, Yeats had said:
“He was but the more hated because he gave his country what it needed.”
In the coming year, Yeats will take a lesser role in running the Abbey, and a new manager, Lennox Robinson, 24, has been appointed. The Abbey will also revive Playboy, winning over some of Synge’s original critics.
In England…
…early on a Monday morning at the Cambridge railway station, painter and art critic Roger Fry, just turned 43, recognizes two Londoners he had met a few years before, painter Vanessa Bell, 30, and her husband, art critic Clive Bell, 28, and strikes up a conversation.
Fry’s past year has not been a good one. He was rejected for a position at Oxford University, and ended his job at curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. He had to certify his wife, Helen, 45, and commit her to an asylum.
Soon after his train trip to London with the Bells, Fry invites them to his London home and he becomes part of their Bloomsbury salons. The following year, he will begin a love affair with Vanessa, which will end two years later when she leaves him for homosexual painter Duncan Grant, then 27. In the years they are together, Vanessa and Fry influence each others’ work greatly, and she contributes to the running of his Omega Workshops in the years leading up to the war.
Among the other members of Bloomsbury, this January, Vanessa’s sister Virginia Stephen, celebrating her 28th birthday, is actively volunteering for the cause of Women’s Suffrage, and there is standing room only at the lectures about the stock exchange economist John Maynard Keynes, 26, is giving at Cambridge University.
In France…
…on the Left Bank of Paris, at 27 rue de Fleurus, all is not happy. American writer Gertrude Stein, 35, has been living there with her brother, Leo, 37, for the past seven years, and they have hosted salons with the painters whose work they admire and collect such as Pablo Picasso, 28, and Henri Matisse, 40.
In the past few years Gertrude and Leo, along with their brother Michael, 44, and his wife Sarah, 39, have hosted other visitors from their hometown of San Francisco, including a series of young women, especially Alice Babette Toklas, 32.
The others have gone back to California, but Alice has decided to stay. She spends most days at rue de Fleurus, typing up Gertrude’s writings from the night before, shopping for groceries, cooking meals, and dusting the paintings. Leo is beginning to feel marginalized in his own house.
By the end of the month, Paris is flooded. Not yet with Americans, but with water. On the 21st the Seine overflows and doesn’t recede for a week, causing power outages and evacuations. Gertrude and Alice’s friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, 30, writes in Le Petit Journal:
‘On Avenue Montaigne people organize pleasure tours by boat. For two sous, you pass by the smartest hotels and photographers will take your picture as a flood victim for the sum of 50 centimes.’
In America…
…as the decade begins…
…in Washington, DC, President William Howard Taft, 52, opens up the White House to private citizens to visit on New Year’s day.
In Missouri, protégé Virgil Thomson, 13, is the organist at Kansas City’s Calvary Baptist Church, where he astonishes the congregation with his creative improvisations.
In Minnesota, F. Scott Fitzgerald, also 13, is attending St. Paul Academy, plays basketball and footfall, and has had a story in the school magazine. He has finally managed to join the ‘right’ dancing class.
In Massachusetts, Robert Benchley, 20, and Heywood Broun, 21, are at Harvard, although Broun will leave this year without graduating. Benchley has been earning money doing humorous mock travelogues to clubs in Boston.
And in New York City…
…Pittsburgher George S. Kaufman, 20, is taking weekly acting classes and hopes to get a job managing a theatre, in Troy, NY. But he is thinking of giving up and going back to the sales job his father got him at the Columbia Ribbon Manufacturing Co. in New Jersey.
Alexander Woollcott, celebrating his 23rd birthday, is working at the New York Times where he has been making good use of the free play passes But Alex has now been re-assigned to crimes and trials.
Also at the Times is reporter Maxwell Perkins, 25, who recently had a job interview with publisher Charles Scribner’s & Sons. Max is hopeful that he will be offered a position in their advertising department with more regular hours.
To read more about all the groups, click on the pages or categories to the right.
‘Such Friends’: 100 Years Ago, December 1909
In Ireland…
William Butler Yeats’ maternal grandfather, big, bearded William Pollexfen, has died in County Sligo, ending Yeats’ family connections there. Yeats had spent his early years with his mother’s family, and the countryside inspired much of his poetry.
This loss, combined with the recent death of his fellow director of the Abbey Theatre, John Millington Synge, aged only 37, has renewed Yeats’ interest in séances and automatic writing.
Yeats is also concerned about his father, the painter John Butler [J B] Yeats, 70, living in New York City.
J B had gone to America as the guest of their friend, art collector John Quinn, 39, and has refused to return to Ireland.
Quinn eventually commissions J B Yeats to do some paintings, to give him some income while he lives in Manhattan, enjoying Quinn’s social circles of artists and collectors. Back home, Willie is feeling closer to his father from reading his letters, but wants him to come back to Ireland.
J B writes to his son that an American lawyer has described his current situation thus:
“In Dublin it is hopeless insolvency. Here it is hopeful insolvency.”
In England…
The career of painter Duncan Grant, 24, is going well. He has two new pictures exhibited at the New English Art Club, including a portrait of his cousin, James Strachey, 22, brother of Duncan’s former lover, Lytton Strachey, 29.
Over the Christmas holiday, Virginia Stephen, 27, is alone in Cornwall. She lives with her brother Adrian, 26, in Fitzroy Square and is tired of it. She has just inherited a couple thousand pounds from her aunt, and written to Duncan,
“Good God! to have a room of one’s own with a real fire and books…”
Virginia has had a few marriage proposals this year, including one from Lytton, not well thought-out, which they both had the sense to laugh about the next day.
Her sister, painter Vanessa Bell, 30, writes to her husband of two years, Clive, 28, on New Year’s Eve:
“At Fitzroy Square were Pernel [Strachey], [John Maynard] Keynes, Duncan [Grant], [Tudor] Castle and Irene [Noel]. The evening was awkward in the extreme I thought… Noel and Castle talked the whole time to each other. The goat [Virginia] was silent with occasional attempts at an affectionate whispered conversation with me which had to be curbed. Your presence would have been a great help.”
Then the dog threw up.
In France…
American ex-patriates Gertrude Stein, 35, and Alice B. Toklas, 32, living with Gertrude’s brother Leo, 37, at rue de Fleurus, are proud that their friend Guillaume Apollinaire, 29, has had his first book published. L’enchanteur pourrissant is illustrated with primitive woodcuts by Andre Derain, 29.
Gertrude and Leo had met Apollinaire three years before, and, in 1907, along with Alice, newly arrived in Paris, they had attended the legendary “Rousseau’s banquet.” As described in the The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein:
“Picasso had recently found in Montmartre a large portrait of a woman by Rousseau, …This festivity was in honour of the purchase and the painter…It was…Apollinaire, as I remember, who knowing Rousseau very well had induced him to promise to come and was to bring him and everybody was to write poetry and songs and it was to be very rigolo, a favourite Montmartre word meaning a jokeful amusement…At the head of the table was the new acquisition, the Rousseau, draped in flags and wreaths and flanked on either side by big statues…Apollinaire and Rousseau came in which they did very presently and were wildly acclaimed…Apollinaire solemnly approached myself and my [American] friend and asked us to sing some of the native songs of the red indians. We did not either of us feel up to that to the great regret of Guillaume and all the company… And about three o’clock in the morning…we all went out into the street together, Gertrude Stein and her brother, my friend and I, all in one cab, took Rousseau home.”
Farther north in Paris, nine years after his death, Oscar Wilde’s body has been moved to Pere Lachaise cemetery, with Jacob Epstein’s sculpture of an angel on the tomb. Wilde’s epitaph is from his own The Ballad of Reading Gaol:
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity’s long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.
In America…
Maxwell Perkins, 25, has been a reporter for the New York Times for more than two years, a job he got through family connections.
After a few boring months as a cub reporter, Max had been moved up to police work, and then the Times general staff. But this past summer he re-discovered Louise Saunders, whom he had met in dancing class years before. Tiring of the erratic hours of the newspaper profession, Max knows that marriage and a family will require a more stable occupation.
Max has just heard of an opening in the advertising department of the publisher Scribner’s, and finds out that one of his Harvard professors is a friend of the owner, Charles Scribner. Max manages to get an interview, armed with a letter of reference from the professor:
“I knew Perkins’s father well; and you as well, if I am not mistaken, knew his mother years ago—a daughter of Mr. Evarts. And I have known and admired all four of his grandparents. So when he came to college, he had a rather hard record to hold in my esteem; and he held it, happily and pleasantly. He has in him the right stuff. He is really the sort one can depend on.”
On 18th December, after his interview, Max writes to Mr. Scribner to tell him,
“So far, I have said nothing here [at the Times] of my intention to leave the newspaper business. But if things so work out that the want of recommendation from my editors alone stands in my way with regard to this position, I shall ask instantly for it.”
Max and Louise end the year waiting to hear from Scribner’s about their fate.
Outside of Chicago, Ernest Hemingway, 10, receives copies of Ivanhoe and Robinson Crusoe for Christmas. This early interest in books, as well as the Scribner’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, who will publish his first novel in 1926, inspires Hemingway to pursue a full-time career as a writer.
To read more about all the groups, click on the pages and categories to the right.
