“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, Ireland, England, France and America, December 31, 1920/January 1, 1921

What a year.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s predicted “greatest, gaudiest spree in history” hasn’t materialized—yet. At the end of the first year of the new decade and the beginning of the second:

Irish poet and playwright W B Yeats, 55, and his wife Georgie, 28, are at home, still resting up, after an extensive and successful American lecture tour. They are pleased to be back with their daughter, Anne, almost two years old, and Yeats is continuing to work on his autobiography. He has finally admitted to himself that his father, painter John Butler Yeats, 81, is never going to leave the comfortable life he has in New York City to come back to Ireland. His father had told him that one of his New York friends commented,

In Dublin it is hopeless insolvency. Here it is hopeful insolvency”

John Butler Yeats self-portrait, 1919

English novelist Virginia Woolf, almost 39, and her husband, Leonard, 40, are spending the holidays at their Sussex home, Monk’s House near Rodmell. Their almost six-year old project, the Hogarth Press, has lost one of its authors, Katherine Mansfield, 31, to a more established publisher because they had neglected to contract her for more than one book.

Katherine Mansfield

And their latest assistant, Ralph Partridge, 26, has only earned £56 as his share of the company yearly profits. But they have printed and published four titles—including Virginia’s story, Kew Gardens, which has sold 620 copies—and earned £68 19s 4d.

In Paris American ex-patriate writer Gertrude Stein, 46, and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, 43, have recently welcomed a new member of their household on the Left Bank—Godiva, their new Ford touring car. Their previous auto, “Auntie Pauline,” which took them all over France as they volunteered for the Fund for French Wounded during the Great War, had finally died right in front of the Luxembourg Palace, the 17^th century government building. The replacement arrived and Alice remarked that it was naked—no clock, no cigarette lighter, no ashtray. So Gertrude promptly named her Godiva.

1920 Ford Model-T

Free-lance New York writer Dorothy Parker, 27, is floating. She’s getting plenty of her articles and poetry published in magazines, and lunching most days with her fellow writers at the midtown Manhattan Algonquin Hotel. Two of her lunchmates, and former Vanity Fair colleagues, Bob Benchley, 31, and Robert Sherwood, 24, are willing to accept silly pieces she submits to their monthly humor magazine, Life; the Saturday Evening Post is willing to buy the same kind of fluff. Dottie knows that it is not her best work. But it pays the bills.

Robert Sherwood

What will the new year bring?

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, soon to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

My “Such Friends” presentations, The Founding of the Abbey Theatre and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, are available to view for free on the website of PICT Classic Theatre.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions. Early in the new year I will be talking about Perkins and his relationships with Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

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

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, December 29, 1920, 38 West 59th Street, Central Park South, New York City, New York

Scribner’s Sons’ hit novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 24, has had a good year, his first as a successful writer.

His income from writing totals $18,850. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, was both a financial and critical success, with sales at over 40,000 copies. His follow-up short story collection, Flappers and Philosophers, is also doing quite well.

And he married the woman of his dreams, Zelda Sayre, 20. This is as happy as he has been since he was 18.

Now that he has just about finished his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, Scott and Zelda are pleased to be out of Westport, Connecticut, where they spent the summer. They are back in Manhattan, in this brownstone near their favorite hotel, The Plaza. The Fitzgeralds have dinner sent over from there often. Other nights, they just dine on olive sandwiches and Bushmill’s. (Zelda isn’t much of a cook.)

Plaza Hotel interior

However, Scott’s bank has informed him that they can no longer lend him any money against the security of the stock he holds. He has $6,000 in bills piled up, and he will have to pay back his agent the $600 advance he got for a short story he can’t write. Scott feels he just can NOT do another flapper.

At the beginning of this month, Fitzgerald had written to ask his very understanding Scribner’s editor, Max Perkins, 36,

Can this nth advance be arranged?”

Now he is planning to write to Max again to see if he can get a loan as an advance on this second novel. Zelda wants a new squirrel coat.

Advertisement for coats with squirrel fur

Farther down Manhattan, in the Scribner’s offices, the president, Charles Scribner II, 66, is catching up on his correspondence with an old friend, Sir Shane Leslie, 35, Irish writer and diplomat, who first brought the unpublished Scott Fitzgerald to Scribner’s attention.

Earlier in the year he had written to Leslie: 

Your intro of…Fitzgerald proved to be an important one for us; This Side of Paradise has been our best seller this season and is still going strong.”

Today, Scribner writes to Leslie that he does not like the choice of title for Fitzgerald’s collection, Flappers and Philosophers, but he’s willing go with Perkins’ recommendation—the editor has usually been right about these things.

Scribner goes on to say that Fitzgerald,

is very fond of the good things of life and is disposed to enjoy it to the full while the going is good. Economy is not one of his virtues.”

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Manager as Muse, about Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions. Early next year I will be talking about Perkins, Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

My “Such Friends” presentations, The Founding of the Abbey Theatre and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, are available to view for free on the website of PICT Classic Theatre.

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

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, Christmas Eve, December 24, 1920, 8 rue Dupuytren, Left Bank, Paris

It’s been a good year for American ex-patriate bookstore owner Sylvia Beach, 33.

Her shop, Shakespeare & Co., has been open here for more than a year now, despite economic uncertainty in the city. She wrote recently to her sister back in New Jersey:

My business is maintaining itself in spite of crashes all about. The Bon Marche, the Louvre, the Printemps, different automobile manufacturers and other goods are tottering on the brink. The Galeries [Lafayette] are very low indeed they do say. No one will buy anything till the prices drop and the manufacturers and shops are left with floods of stuff on their hands which they would rather hold on to than sell at a sacrifice—naturellement.”

Galeries Lafayette Catalogue

She has seen an increase in both the subscribers to her lending library and the other American and British ex-patriates who gather in her shop.

Beach has taken on one particular Irish writer, James Joyce, 38, as a special project. She loved his novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and has been supporting him now that he is working on a formidable opus, Ulysses.

This year it has been serialized in a “little mag” in New York City, The Little Review, but issues have been confiscated by the authorities and the publisher and editor are awaiting trial on obscenity charges!

From talking with Joyce, Sylvia knows that the magazine’s lawyer, John Quinn, 50, who buys up pieces of the original manuscript as Joyce writes it, is trying to convince the stubborn Irishman to withdraw his novel from The Little Review, and have a legitimate American publisher—like Huebsch or Boni and Liveright—bring out a private edition of the whole work when it is finished. This would be treated differently under the law, as it wouldn’t be sent through the mail, as the magazine is.

Joyce is having none of it. He sends cryptic cables to Quinn, written in code, and Quinn telegraphs back, exasperated.

Today, Beach has arranged a special meeting for Joyce.

Sylvia and her partner, Adrienne Monnier, 28, who owns the nearby French language bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres, have been trying to introduce Joyce into the literary life of Paris. Today they have invited Valery Larbaud, 39, the posh French poet, who recently gave a talk in Adrienne’s store, to meet Joyce. Larbaud was impressed by Portrait, which he read on Sylvia’s recommendation, and has expressed a desire to meet the author.

James Joyce, Sylvia Beach, and Adrienne Monnier in Shakespeare & Co.

Larbaud has many influential friends in the French literary establishment, and Sylvia and Adrienne think the two men will hit it off.

Tomorrow, they are going with Larbaud to an elegant midnight Christmas party with some of their other French friends, including the well-known poet Leon-Paul Fargue, 44, and the novelist Luc Durtain, 39.

Sylvia has already made her New Year’s resolutions which will make 1921 even better:  No more coffee, tea or cigarettes. Lots more nights at the Ballets Russes and Comedie Francaise.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, soon to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions. Early next year I will be talking about Perkins, Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

My presentations, The Founding of the Abbey Theatre and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, are available to view for free on the website of PICT Classic Theatre.

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

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, December 20, 1920, West 12th Street, Manhattan, New York City, New York

Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, 28, is writing to her mother in Massachusetts, who is still lingering in the Cape Cod cottage they shared for a time this summer.

Just last week, Edna had gone to the wedding of her sister Kathleen, 23, here in New York at the Hotel Brevort. Her sister looked uncomfortable; probably because she was regretting giving up a modelling opportunity to marry this guy. Edna had been feeling weak; mostly because of the botched abortion she had a few weeks before.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

But Edna just tells her mother that she had bronchitis and been

quite sick…[from] a small nervous breakdown.”

The good news is that Vanity Fair, where Edna has been having her poems published quite regularly, is going to pay her a good price for the stories she has been selling to rival magazine Ainslee’s under her pseudonym, Nancy Boyd. Ainslee’s had offered to double her fee if they could use her real name, but she wants to keep a distance between that popular trash she writes and her more serious poetry.

Ainslee’s magazine, April 1920

Better yet, Vanity Fair is making her a foreign correspondent and sending her to Paris in the beginning of the new year. She writes to her mother that she desperately needs to get away from New York.

She tells one of her beaus, Vanity Fair managing editor Edmund “Bunny” Wilson, 25,

I’ll be 30 in a minute!”

Edna finishes the letter to her mother and starts packing a trunk for France:  Her blue silk umbrella. A pair of velvet galoshes with fur trim. And, of course, her portable Corona typewriter.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

My “Such Friends” presentations, The Founding of the Abbey Theatre and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, are available to view on the website of PICT Classic Theatre.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions. Early next year I will be talking about Perkins, Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

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

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, December, 1920, Greenwich Village, New York City, New York

The most recent issue of The Little Review—the September-December number, just out now—is finally on the desk of the publisher Margaret Anderson, 34.

September-December 1920 issue of The Little Review

Anderson is proud of the mix of the 90 pages of content:  Work by emerging American talents such as Man Ray, 30; Ben Hecht, 27; Djuna Barnes, 28; Robert McAlmon, 25. Five pages of poems by the German avant-garde artist Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, 46. Several reviews and discussions of recent literature.

The jewel in the crown is the 11-page excerpt from Episode XIV of Ulysses, the ongoing novel by Irishman James Joyce, 38, living in Paris and submitting his work via The Little Review’s foreign editor, Ezra Pound, 35, in London.

But there are two long essays in the front of the magazine of which Anderson is particularly proud:  The lead article, “The Art of Law,” by Jane Heap, 37, the magazine’s editor—and Anderson’s partner; and her own piece defending their publication of sections of Ulysses. Anderson remembers that she was so exasperated when she was finishing the essay, she titled it “An Obvious Statement (for the millionth time).”

Margaret Anderson’s editorial

Jane is much better at being witty and pithy. She makes the points that the courts are not qualified to judge works of art, and that the real problem is that sex education is almost unheard of for the “young girls” who are supposedly being protected by the censors, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice [NYSSV].

In her own piece, Anderson describes her and Heap’s recent arrest and preliminary hearing on obscenity charges. She then alerts the reader to their upcoming trial, scheduled for the early part of next year. Anderson states,

I know practically everything that will be said in court, both by the prosecution and the defense. I disagree with practically everything that will be said by both. I do not admit that the issue [of obscenity] is debatable.”

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions. Early next year I will be talking about Perkins, Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

My “Such Friends” presentations, The Founding of the Abbey Theatre, and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, are available to view for free on the website of PICT Classic Theatre.

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

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, December 12, 1920, 5 boulevard Raspail, Quartier Saint Germain, Paris

Irish novelist James Joyce, 38, and his family are pleased to finally be settling in to this posh apartment near Saint Sulpice.

5 boulevard Raspail, Quartier Saint Germain, Paris

One of their benefactors, American ex-patriate poet Ezra Pound, 35, has helped the Joyces with everything since they moved here to Paris in the summer, including getting a friend to let them rent this fabulous place for only £300 for six months.

Today he is writing to Ezra, in London, to tell him how sick and cold he had been in the previous, dark hotel. He was suffering from iritis again, and it was so cold there, he had to wrap a blanket around his shoulders and a shawl around his head to work on his novel, Ulysses, expanding the section known as “Circe.”

Since he moved his family up to this posh flat, he wrote to another friend,

By the way, is it not extraordinary the way I enter a city barefoot and end up in a luxurious flat?”

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@ gypsyteacher.com.

My “Such Friends” presentations, The Founding of the Abbey Theatre and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, are available to view for free on the website of PICT Classic Theatre.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions. Early in the new year I will be talking about Perkins, Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

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

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, December, 1920, 1230 North State Street, Chicago, Illinois

Ernest Hemingway, 21, is settling in to his new job as editor—and primary writer—of Cooperative Commonwealth, the house organ of the Cooperative Society of America.

Ernie isn’t quite sure how the Society operates, but “cooperative” sounds good enough to him. And he gets $40 a week.

Although the job gets heavy around deadline, the rest of the time he can make his own schedule. Most days Hemingway comes home here for lunch and gets a lot of the copy writing done for the 100-page issue in the afternoon.

Today at lunch he has received a picture card from the St. Louis woman he met at a party a few months ago, Hadley Richardson, 29, inscribed on the back,

Most awfully lovingly, Ernestonio from your Hash. December, 1920.”

Hadley Richardson picture card

Ernest and his roommates, who work in advertising, all have ambition to become more than just hired hacks. Among their role models are “real” writers who are still doing some advertising copy to keep afloat.

For example, Sherwood Anderson, 44, had a huge hit last year with his first novel, Winesburg, Ohio, which scandalized middle America—including Ernest’s parents—with its frank discussions of sex. Anderson hasbeen contributing to Cooperative Commonwealth, and still does some work for his former ad agency, Critchfield.

Ernie and his fellow writers buy copies of radical magazines like The Little Review at their local bookstores, and know that their current writing for hire is a necessary evil until some major publisher recognizes their true talents for writing fiction.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, soon to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@ gypsyteacher.com.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions. Early next year I will be talking about Perkins, Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

My “Such Friends” presentations, The Founding of the Abbey Theater and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, are available to view for free on the website of PICT Classic Theatre.

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

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, December, 1920, Greenwich Village, New York City, New York

Robert McAlmon, 25, met Dr. William Carlos Williams, 37, at a lower East Side party shortly after re-locating here to New York from Chicago earlier this year. They are both having some of their poetry accepted in small magazines, but have decided that the best way to get published is to start their own.

Dr. William Carlos Williams

They have just finished producing their first issue of Contact. Mimeographed on paper donated by Bill’s father-in-law; filled with typos; no table of contents or advertising. They’ve lined up about 200 subscribers to provide some income. Dr. Williams, of course, is still earning money in his medical practice during the day and working on the publication in the evenings.

McAlmon, on the other hand, has been scraping along doing some nude modelling for art classes at nearby Cooper Union.

Their manifesto in this first issue states,

We are here because of our faith in the existence of native artists who are capable of having, comprehending and recording extraordinary experience…We are interested in the writings of such individuals as are capable of putting a sense of contact, and of definite personal realization into their work.”

Robert McAlmon

Contact includes the first bibliography of all the “little mags” that have been published in the US in the new century.

Williams and McAlmon feel strongly that American writers need a publication such as Contact, as there are plenty of opportunities for writers from abroad, like The Little Review.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@ gypsyteacher.com.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions. Early next year I will be talking about Perkins, Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

My “Such Friends” presentations, The Founding of the Abbey Theatre and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, are available to view for free on the website of PICT Classic Theatre.

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