“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, January 30, 1922, Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise-Desgoffe, Paris

Posted by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly

New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, 33, is concerned that she really can’t afford to stay in this hotel that she has just checked in to.

Victoria Palace Hotel

Separated, once again, from her English husband, writer John Middleton Murry, 32, she is quite broke, even though her short stories are being published fairly regularly.

But she can’t afford the treatments she has come to Paris for either, at 300francs a session.

Mansfield heard about this Russian doctor, Ivan Manoukhin, 33, during the past few months when she was receiving treatments in Switzerland. She decided it would be worth a try to come here to Paris before returning to England.

Manoukhin uses low dose radiation of the spleen. She’ll find out more tomorrow when she goes to his clinic. Nothing else has worked to cure the tuberculosis she has been fighting for the past four years.

Katherine Mansfield

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s. Volumes I and II covering 1920 and 1921 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and also in print and e-book formats on Amazon. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This coming Thursday, February 3, 2022, we will be celebrating the 148^th birthday of my fellow Pittsburgher Gertrude Stein, at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill. You can register for this free event, or sign up to watch it via Zoom, here.

At the end of February I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses at 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.

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

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, January 27, 1922, American Art Galleries, American Art Association, Midtown Manhattan, New York City, New York

Posted by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly

What a lovely day.

Irish-American lawyer and art collector, John Quinn, 51, has some business at the American Art Galleries, where the Kelekian Collection is about to go on sale. He has invited along Irish painter John Butler “JB” Yeats, 82, father of Quinn’s friend, Irish poet William Butler Yeats, 56.

Since Yeats’ Dad has been living in New York for the past few years, Quinn has basically been taking care of him.

Quinn has arranged for a Packard touring car and driver and had his assistant [and mistress], Mrs. Jeanne Foster, 42, go on ahead to pick up JB. She has wrapped him up nice and warm against the bright chilly day, and they have met John at the gallery.

Packard touring car

The three are having a great time looking at the paintings. Quinn is interested to see how the sale goes overall, because it will be an indication of the worth of his own similar—but much superior, in his view—collection.

Mr. Yeats and Mrs. Foster are both just enjoying being surrounded by such works of art. Corots! Courbets! Cezannes!

Quinn admires the self-portrait by Toulouse Lautrec. JB says that, the way that man looks, he should be guillotined. They make fun of a pastel by Degas. JB calls it “the washer woman exposed.” Quinn asks their opinion of the Seurat, La Poudreuse. They both agree that it is lovely.

Quinn can tell that the old man is starting to tire, and his cough is getting more distressing. But he is definitely enjoying Jeanne’s company.

Quinn bundles them both into the Packard to have a restful lunch, do some shopping, then end up back at JB’s rooms. Quinn goes back into the galleries to determine how much to bid for La Poudreuse at the upcoming auction.

La Poudreuse by Seurat

On February 3, 2022, we will be celebrating the 148^th birthday of my fellow Pittsburgher Gertrude Stein, at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill. You can register for this free event, or sign up to watch it via Zoom, here.

At the end of February I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses at 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, before January 25, 1922, Hogarth House, Richmond, London

Posted by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly

Virginia Woolf is about to turn 40. And she’s not taking it well.

She is pleased to find out that her friend and fellow novelist, E. M. Forster, 43, is on his way back to England after spending almost a year in India. She writes to him,

I was stricken with the influenza, and here I am, a fortnight later, still in bed, though privileged to take a stroll in the sun for half an hour—after lunch…
Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall;…I should like to growl to you about all this damned lying in bed and doing nothing, and getting up and writing half a page and going to bed again. I’ve wasted five whole years (I count) doing it; so you must call me 35—not 40—and expect rather less from me.”

Leading up to the big day, in her diary she writes,

[Life] consists of how many months? That’s what I begin to say to myself, as I near my 40^th birthday…
The machinery for seeing friends is too primitive: 1 should be able to see them by telephone—ring up, & be in the same room…[But too many visitors leave her] in tatters…my mind vibrates uncomfortably…

Virginia Woolf’s diary

I have made up my mind that I’m not going to be popular, & so genuinely that I look upon disregard or abuse as part of my bargain…I’m to write what I like; & they’re to say what they like. My only interest as a writer lies, I begin to see, in some queer individuality; not in strength, or passion, or anything startling; but then I say to myself, is not ‘some queer individuality’ precisely the quality I respect?…
I feel time racing like a film at the Cinema. I try to stop it. I prod it with my pen. I try to pin it down.”

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

In late February I will be talking about the 100^th Anniversary of the Publication of Ulysses in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

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

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, January 20, 1922, 9 Clarence Gate Gardens, Marylebone, London; and 70 bis, rue Notre Dame-des-Champs, Paris

Posted by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly

Tom Eliot, 33, part-time poet, full-time Lloyds bank clerk, has been putting off writing this letter to Scofield Thayer, 32, editor of the American literary magazine, The Dial.

Clarence Gate Gardens

Eliot didn’t want to write more excuses why he can’t submit his “London Letter” column again. So Tom wants to suggest that he will continue the column, but, rather than reviewing specific books, that he will write about life in England in general.

Eliot has been back in colder, more expensive London for just a few days, and he is missing Paris. He was supposed to return to his job at Lloyds this week. But he’s come down with [luckily!] a serious case of the influenza that’s spreading around the country. And with his wife Vivien, 33, still in France, Eliot is working hard on finishing up his still untitled epic and would like to get it published as soon as possible. This forced isolation is a godsend.

Last fall, he’d been granted a three-month leave of absence from his job at Lloyds. They agreed when, not only Viv, but also one of London’s leading nerve specialists said Tom was having a breakdown. Tom spent part of his leave receiving treatment in Switzerland—which helped a bit—and the past two weeks in Paris working hard on the poem, collaborating [which he really enjoyed] with fellow American ex-pat poet Ezra Pound, 36, to cut it to the bone. Now Tom feels much more confident that this is his best work.

In his letter to Thayer, he assures the editor that he will be able to send the finished poem along soon:

It has been three times through the sieve by Pound as well as myself so should be in final form.”

At 450 lines, in four sections, it can easily be spread across four issues of the magazine. Eliot also tells Thayer that the poem will not be published in England until he hears back from The Dial. Quickly, he hopes.

And, Eliot adds, he is curious as to “approximately what The Dial would offer.”

Eliot doesn’t mention that, at a particularly drunken dinner in Paris with Pound and Horace Liveright, 37, the American publisher expressed interest in having his firm, Boni and Liveright, bring out the poem in book form. If it is long enough.

The Dial

*****

Meanwhile, back in Paris, Pound has also been writing to Thayer, telling him to overlook Eliot’s annoying characteristics and constant excuses. Pound really wants The Dial to publish this major poem, and he is trying to find other ways to get Eliot some income so he can leave that godawful desk job at the bank.

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

At the end of February I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses at the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, January 17, 1922, Oak Park, Illinois

Posted by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly

Grace Hall Hemingway, 49, and her husband, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, 50, are eagerly reading the latest letters from one of their sons, Ernest, 21, currently living in Paris with his new wife, Hadley, 30, from St. Louis.

Hemingway home in Oak Park, Illinois

The Hemingways are at least glad that Ernest has decided what he wants to do with his life. Before the newlyweds left for Paris in December, he had a job, editing some company newsletter, but he was hanging out with his young friends a bit too much for Grace’s taste.

Ernie and Hadley were eager to move to Europe—first they planned on Italy but decided on France. She has a trust fund to supplement his income as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star.

Ernest writes to his parents that he and Hadley have moved out of the hotel they were staying in and now live in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment. Rent, food and drink are, thanks to a terrific exchange rate, really cheap. Dinner for both of them for 12 francs with a glass of wine! Grace hopes they don’t spend too much of their money on that cheap wine.

*****

Elsewhere in Oak Park, another couple, the Whites, are welcoming their first child, Betty, born today.

The Whites’ new baby, Betty

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

At the end of February I am talking about the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses at 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, January 13, 1922, Bombay, India

Posted by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly

Edward Morgan Forster, 43, can’t wait to get on that ship tomorrow to begin his long journey home to England. Not because he is so looking forward to going back to living with his mother, Lily, 66, and his cat back in Weybridge, but because he can’t wait to get out of here.

Last year Morgan accepted the bizarre job as personal assistant to his old friend Sir Tukoji Rao IV, 34, the Maharajah of Dewas state—always known as “HH”—in a spirit of adventure. Not only would he be away from Weybridge, but also he could finally finish his India novel, which he started before the Great War.

Sir Tukoji Rao IV

Well, Dewas, where he has been living for the past year, sure wasn’t Weybridge. But he hasn’t written anything except journals; he has published no new novels for a decade.

Every New Year’s Eve—the day before his January 1^st birthday—Morgan has made it a habit to write in his diary, summing up the previous year. This past New Year’s he wrote,

India not yet a success, dare not look at my unfinished novel…how unsuitable were my wanderings at Dewas, where everyone laughed at my incompetence …My desire for self-expression has slackened along every line…Slowness and apathy increase…I can’t go on any more here.”

In a letter home, Forster describes to his Mum the celebrations his friends arranged in Hyderabad for his birthday, filling his rooms with flowers.

It was roses all the way,”

he writes to her, always giving her the impression that he is happy here.

Morgan’s plans for his journey home included a visit to the Ajanta caves, which he’d always wanted to see. Then he fell and hurt his wrist and elbow so badly he couldn’t even feed himself, let alone go hiking through caves. Another disappointment in India.

From Hyderabad to Bombay is 435 miles, and now he is more than ready to set sail on the RMS Kaisar-i-Hind tomorrow. Rather than plan the shorter but more expensive trip back on land through Europe, he is going by sea to Port Said, Egypt, and then on to London. With the money he saves, Forster will spend a full month in Egypt. He explains to Lily that when he gets to Egypt he will be “nearer Mummy.”

But his real incentive is that, in Port Said, he will spend the month with his lover Mohammed el Adl, 22. The last time they saw each other was for four stolen hours on a beach when Forster was on his way to India last spring. Now they will have much more time together.

Mohammed el-Adl

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

At the end of February I am talking about the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses at 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, January 10, 1922, 28 Rue Boissy d’Anglas, Right Bank; and 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Left Bank, Paris

Posted by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly

French writer and artist Jean Cocteau, 32, has planned this terrific grand opening for the cabaret he is fronting, Le Boeuf sur La Toit [The Ox on the Roof], on the Right Bank. He and his business partners took the name from a ballet Cocteau had written a few years ago, to a catchy tune by French composer Darius Milhaud, 29.

Le Boeuf sur le Toit

Cocteau’s own paintings are on the walls, along with others lent by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, 40. However the centerpiece is the stunning work behind the bar, L’oeil Cacodylate, by French painter Francis Picabia, about to turn 43.

L’oeil Cacodylate by Francis Picabia

It’s almost midnight and the party is going strong. Picasso is here with his young Russian ballerina wife, Olga, 30. Welsh painter Nina Hamnett, 31, has arrived late.

Cocteau looks for his friend, French writer Raymond Radiguet, 19, and finds him at the bar chatting with Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, 45. The two men aren’t enjoying the party and, to Cocteau’s dismay, grab Nina and take off to find a bouillabaisse.

To Hamnett’s dismay, Radiguet and Brancusi abandon her at the Gare de Lyon to continue their search by hopping a train to Marseilles.

Le Boeuf sur La Toit publicity card

*****

Over on the Left Bank, American ex-pats Ernest Hemingway, 22, and his wife of four months Hadley, 30, are settling in to their cramped, fourth-floor apartment above a bal musette, a bar with a dance floor presided over by the chain-smoking, accordion-playing owner.

The Hemingways arrived in Paris just a few weeks ago and have been staying at the nearby Hotel Jacob. An American friend found this apartment for them, with a mattress on the floor, no running water, and a toilet on each landing that they can smell when they climb the stairs.

The Hemingways are astounded by how cheap it is to live in Paris. In little neighborhood restaurants you can get dinner for two for 12 francs (about $1) and a bottle of wine for 60 centimes (50 cents). Hadley’s trust fund gives them $3,000 a year, and Ernest is working as the foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. They can afford to hire a maid to clean and cook them meals and can even afford to go on skiing vacations.

Today they are off to Chamby sur Montreux, Switzerland, for two weeks so Ernest can research a piece about the Swiss tourist trade for the Star.

74 rue de Cardinal Lemoine

If you now have Milhaud’s catchy tune going through your head, you can hear the whole piece here.

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

At the end of February I am talking about the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses at 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, January 6, 1922, Scribner’s, 153-157 Fifth Avenue, New York City, New York

Posted by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly

Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, 37, is thinking about how to word this letter to one of his star authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 25, currently with his wife and newborn daughter in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Maxwell Perkins

Scott’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, is set to be published this spring. Max believes it will do at least as well as his first, This Side of Paradise, which was a Scribner’s best-seller of 1920.

Fitzgerald is also continually publishing short stories in widely read magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Metropolitan.

Perkins likes following a hit novel with a collection of stories by the same author, feeling that the sales of each will help both. This was true of Paradise.

For the follow up collection, Fitzgerald suggested a number of titles: We Are Seven. A La Carte. Journeys and Journey’s End. Bittersweet. Or Flappers and Philosophers.

Flappers and Philosophers

Perkins has chosen the last one, although Charles Scribner II, 67, president of the company, was aghast.

Like Scribner, Perkins doesn’t want to mess with success. Nevertheless, he wants to suggest to Fitzgerald that it might be time to take a different turn.

He knows Scott is in the beginning stages of thinking about his third novel. And Max is also concerned that his own four daughters might want to become flappers.

Perkins writes,

We ought to…get away altogether from the flapper idea.”

Early in the new year I am talking about the Centenary of the Publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the Osher Lifelong programs at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon 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.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, first week in January, 1922, Left Bank, Paris

Posted by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly

When New York publisher Horace Liveright, 37, planned his month-long European trip, this is exactly the kind of evening he had hoped for.

Horace Liveright

His host and facilitator is American ex-pat poet Ezra Pound, 36, whom Liveright has never met. Through correspondence, Pound has been keeping Liveright abreast of all the latest publishers and writers working in Paris and London, and this trip is Ezra’s chance to introduce them to Horace.

Liveright had predicted correctly to his wife that this time in Paris with Ezra would be the “best of all” the trip.

Their companions for tonight are two of the ex-pat writers Liveright most wants to meet. American Thomas Stearns Eliot, 33, living in London but visiting Paris for two weeks, and Irishman James Joyce, 39, whose much talked about novel, Ulysses, declared obscene by the courts in the US, is nevertheless due to be published here early next month.

T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound

Liveright wants to sign up all three, and firmly believes in mixing contracts with cocktails. It is rumored that the bootleggers visiting his Manhattan office often outnumber the writers. Eliot’s favored tipple is gin, but the other three are not particularly selective.

Liveright would like to publish some of Pound’s poetry, and he trusts Ezra’s high opinion of Eliot’s work.

Pound would like to see Eliot published more broadly, to get him enough income so he can leave his godawful bank clerk’s job in London. In the two weeks they are here together in Paris, they are going to work intensively revising Eliot’s untitled latest long poem. Pound tries pitching that one to Liveright, who is concerned it might not be long enough to be book-length.

Joyce would like to see Ulysses published in America but seems unimpressed with Liveright’s offer of $1,000 upfront. Pound is aghast. Why wouldn’t Joyce want that kind of money?

Pound is not aware that Liveright had offered to publish Ulysses once before. But he wanted to make changes; Joyce refuses to let anyone change even one word. For now, he will stick with the deal he has in Paris. American bookstore owner Sylvia Beach, 34, is bringing out Ulysses in a few weeks, word for word, the way Joyce wrote it.

On February 3, 2022, we will be celebrating the 148^th birthday of my fellow Pittsburgh native Gertrude Stein, at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill. You can register for this free event, or sign up to watch it via Zoom, here.

Early in the new year I am talking about the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses at the Osher Lifelong Learning programs at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

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

SuchFriends Blog

'…and say my glory was I had such friends.' — WB Yeats

Month: January 2022

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, January 30, 1922, Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise-Desgoffe, Paris

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, January 27, 1922, American Art Galleries, American Art Association, Midtown Manhattan, New York City, New York

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, before January 25, 1922, Hogarth House, Richmond, London

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, January 20, 1922, 9 Clarence Gate Gardens, Marylebone, London; and 70 bis, rue Notre Dame-des-Champs, Paris

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, January 17, 1922, Oak Park, Illinois

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, January 13, 1922, Bombay, India

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, January 10, 1922, 28 Rue Boissy d’Anglas, Right Bank; and 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Left Bank, Paris

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, January 6, 1922, Scribner’s, 153-157 Fifth Avenue, New York City, New York

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, first week in January, 1922, Left Bank, Paris

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