A piece by American poet Ezra Pound, 36, currently living in Paris, titled “Credit and the Fine Arts: A Practical Application,” appears in The New Age magazine:
[Democracy] has signally failed to provide for its best writers…That is to say, the worst work usually brings the greatest financial reward…We can’t expect illiterate, newly rich millionaires to pay for things they have not the taste to enjoy.”
The New Age, January-December 1920
Pound goes on to outline his proposed scheme to collect small donations from subscribers to fund 20 or 30 writers “who have definitely proved they have something in them and are capable of expression.” The best gift to an artist “is leisure in which to work,” he writes.
Then Pound makes clear to the reader who he has in mind:
Rightly or wrongly some of us consider [poet T. S.] Eliot’s employment in a bank the worst waste in contemporary literature. During his recent three-months’ absence due to complete physical breakdown, he produced a very important sequence of poems: one of the few things in contemporary literature to which one can ascribe permanent value.”
Pound makes it clear that the wishes of Mr. Eliot “have not been consulted.”
Ezra and his wife then leave to go on vacation in Italy.
In June I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after the Great War 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.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
At the Shakespeare and Company bookstore on rue de l’Odeon, the American owner Sylvia Beach, 35, is sending out copies of the new novel Ulysses, by Irish ex-pat James Joyce, 40, which she published last month.
Sylvia is able to fill orders from countries all over the world—except the United States.
Because excerpts from the novel, which appeared in The Little Review there a few years ago, were determined to be obscene by a New York state court, U. S. Customs officials are on alert.
Oh, she has plenty of orders. One of the largest—25 copies—is from the Washington Square Bookshop in Greenwich Village, where The Little Review was first confiscated.
Washington Square Bookshop stationery
Sylvia is determined. One of Joyce’s many benefactors, Irish-American attorney John Quinn, 52, who unsuccessfully argued the case for the Ulysses excerpts in court, has suggested smuggling copies in to some northern city from Canada. Sylvia asked one of the young American would-be novelists who frequent her store, Ernest Hemingway, 22, if he knew anyone back home in Chicago who could help. The next day he gave Sylvia contact details of a friend and Sylvia shot off a letter to him.
But that was in the beginning of February. She didn’t hear anything until last week when he sent a brief telegram:
SHOOT BOOKS PREPAID YOUR RESPONSIBILITY
ADDRESSING SAME TO ME CARE DOMINION EXPRESS COMPANY,”
with a Canadian address.
Not very promising.
Sylvia is thinking of giving up on Hemingway’s friend and exploring one of Quinn’s contacts, a good friend of his, Mitchell Kennerley, 43, who has a successful Park Avenue auction house. Kennerley imports books and other items from the UK all the time. Quinn says Mitch is personal friends with the captain of a transatlantic liner who could bring Ulysses over from London, slowly, in batches of 25 or 30 copies per month.
That might be the best option.
*****
In his law office, John Quinn is catching up on his correspondence. He is updating Sylvia Beach on the fate of Ulysses in New York. Copies have started to appear in bookshops here. One of his favorites, Drake’s on 40th Street, is selling her $12 non-deluxe copies for $20; Brentano’s for $35, even $50.
Brentano’s logo
How did they get a hold of the books?! Traveling Americans might have brought them back in their luggage. But Quinn advises Sylvia that the authorities will soon start confiscating any that they find. Some returning tourists have already had their copies destroyed at the Port of New York.
Quinn is willing to make an arrangement with Kennerley.
Beach would have to ship the books in large quantities from Paris to London. They would enter the U. S. as freight, so customs would probably overlook them; they are more intent these days on catching bootleggers. Even if the books were found, they would probably be returned to London rather than burned.
Kennerley would collect the cash from the American buyers, have the copies delivered by private carriers—thereby avoiding sending “obscene” material through the mail—and pass the profits on to Sylvia. Retaining a commission of 10% of the retail price.
Quinn emphasizes to her that Kennerley is willing to break the law and, if he were arrested,
There wouldn’t be a ghost of a shade of a shadow of a chance of acquitting Kennerly.”
In fact, Quinn tells her, hold on to the 14 copies he ordered for now, until he comes up with a definitive plan to receive them.
*****
In Windsor, Ontario, Barnet Braverman, 34, is wondering why he hasn’t heard anything from that American woman in Paris who wants him to smuggle books across the border.
When her initial letter finally caught up to him a week or so ago—he had moved from Chicago to Toronto and is now packing to move to Detroit—he was intrigued.
Miss Beach said a mutual friend had recommended him and that she needs to get copies of James Joyce’s new novel, Ulysses, to Americans—particularly New York publishers like Knopf and Huebsch who are too yellow to publish it themselves.
Braverman really wants to have a part in sticking it to the publishing establishment. His new ad agency job here in Windsor means he will be taking a short boat ride from and to Detroit across Lake St. Clair every day as part of his commute.
The Detroit and Windsor Ferry
Barnet is thinking he should write Miss Beach a detailed letter so she knows how eager he is to help out.
In June I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after the Great War in the Osher Lifelong Learning program 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.
The Ford Motor Co. announces that it will reduce its workweek to 40 hours, five days, eliminating work on weekends.
Edsel Ford, 28, president of the company, says,
Every man needs more than one day a week for rest and recreation. The Ford Co. always has sought to promote ideal home life for its employees. We believe that in order to live properly every man should have more time to spend with his family.”
The entry level pay stays the same, $6 per day, effectively reducing the worker’s pay from $36 to $30 per week.
In June I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after the Great War 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.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
HRH Edward, Prince of Wales, 27, is viewing the parade of 200 elephants from the balcony of the Dalada Maligawa, the Glorious Tooth Temple in the complex of the royal palace. The pachyderms walk over white cloths so their feet will never touch the earth. They are accompanied by fireworks and fast-moving Kandyan dancers.
HRH Edward, Prince of Wales
This perehera, or procession, is being held in Edward’s honor on his state visit as part of his Asian tour of the British colonies. Usually the festival is staged in the summer to celebrate the relic of the Buddha’s tooth that is housed within the temple.
To English novelist David Herbert Lawrence, 37, the prince looks tired. “Twitchy…disheartened…badgered about like a doll” he writes to a friend.
Lawrence has been here in Ceylon with his wife, Frieda, 42, for about two weeks, staying with American friends. Kandy has not been the dream paradise he was hoping for. It’s hot; it’s buggy; he hates the food.
The Lawrences in Ceylon
Watching the prince, Lawrence feels empathy. Edward appears lonely, hated by everyone around, with elephants bowing to him.
Lawrence feels they have both been forced to leave their homeland and are being punished here by the heat and the bugs. Edward, just by nature of being a prince; David, for marrying a German wife during the Great War and writing “dirty” novels.
For just a moment, Lawrence feels homesick. He and Frieda have been traveling throughout Europe for the past three years—Italy, Austria, Germany, Sicily, now Ceylon. Maybe it is time to go back.
But then David thinks of the pitiful sales his books have in England. And the public response to them.
Keep moving. The next ship out is to Australia. It might at least be cooler.
The Kandy Esala perehera
D. H. Lawrence’s experience of the perehera led him to write a poem, “The Elephant is Slow to Mate,” which you can read here. https://poets.org/poem/elephant-slow-mate
In June I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after the Great War 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.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Toronto Star Weekly foreign correspondent Ernest Hemingway, 22, has finished polishing the lead on his article, “American Bohemians in Paris”:
The scum of Greenwich Village, New York, has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladlesful on that section of Paris adjacent to the Café Rotonde. New scum, of course, has risen to take the place of the old, but the oldest scum, the thickest scum and the scummiest scum has come across the ocean, somehow,…and has made the Rotonde the leading Latin Quarter show place for tourists in search of atmosphere.”
La Rotonde
Since December Ernest and his new wife, Hadley, 30, have been living in Paris on his Toronto Star salary and her family trust fund. The exchange rate is so favorable that, after they moved from their hotel to a cramped fourth-floor walk-up, he was able to rent this office around the corner, on the top floor of an old hotel where French poet Paul Verlaine died back in the 19th century. Hemingway keeps regular writing hours daily.
The editor back in Canada uses almost everything Ernie sends, about two articles a week, and he has traveled to Switzerland to file stories about the decline of the tourist trade there, and to Spain to write about tuna fishing.
Finishing up this piece, Ernest writes,
The fact that there are twelve francs for a dollar brought over the Rotonders, along with a good many other people, and if the exchange rates goes back to normal they will have to go back to America. They are nearly all loafers expending the energy that an artist puts into his creative work in talking about what they are going to do and condemning the work of all artists who have gained any degree of recognition. By talking about art they obtain the same satisfaction that the real artist does in his work. That is very pleasant, of course, but they insist upon posing as artists.”
Loafers at La Rotonde
Next month, the Toronto Star is sending Hemingway to Italy to cover the Genoa Economic and Financial Conference.
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.
In June I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after the Great War in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Two playwrights from western Pennsylvania, Marc Connelly, 31, from McKeesport, and George S Kaufman, 32, from Pittsburgh, have a second hit on Broadway. Last year their Dulcy with Lynn Fontanne, 34, did well; this season, their three-act comedy To the Ladies!, starring Helen Hayes, 21, has been doing even better for the past month at the Liberty Theatre on West 42nd Street.
Helen Hayes and Otto Kruger in To the Ladies!
Truth is, Connelly and Kaufman finished writing the play just the day before rehearsals started. On opening night, when there were calls for “Author!,” they wheeled a mannequin out on to the stage.
The reviews have been good, with most critics preferring it over Dulcy. Their Algonquin Hotel lunch buddy Alexander Woollcott, 35, wrote in the New York Times that To the Ladies! provided “an occasion of genuine and quite uproarious jollification.”
*****
A 10-minute walk away, the first show presented in the Shubert organization’s new 49th Street Theatre, the revue Chauve Souris is Connelly and Kaufman’s main competition.
Produced by a troupe originally from Moscow, the evening of songs and sketches is hosted by the Turkish-Russian Nikita Balieff, 49, an émigré from the Bolshevik Revolution, like a lot of the members of his company.
Nikita Balieff
On stage Balieff speaks a combination of broken English, French and Russian while wildly gesticulating, but off stage the theatre world knows that he speaks perfectly good English.
Chauve Souris, or the “flying bat,” named for the original variety company Balieff put together back in Russia, has been a touring hit—Paris, London, South Africa. The tune in the show that sends the audience home humming is The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers.
Connelly, Kaufman, and the other writers they lunch with regularly at the Algonquin are thinking that Chauve Souris is ripe for parody.
*****
Today, Woollcott has sent a note to Kaufman and his wife, publicist Bea Kaufman, 27, on the occasion of their 5th wedding anniversary:
I have been looking around for an appropriate wooden gift, and am pleased hereby to present you with Elsie Ferguson’s performance in her new play.”
In June I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after the Great War 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.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Former film star Roscoe Arbuckle, about to turn 35, is in court for his third trial. There have been two mistrials already, back in December and again last month.
Charges had been brought against him in September after a young actress, Virginia Rappe, 26, died two days after passing out at a Labor Day party Roscoe was attending. He’d tried to help her, but her friends at the party accused him of killing her. Killing?! Roscoe just can’t believe it. He’s a comedian! Not a murderer.
Virginia Rappe
In the second trial, Roscoe’s lawyer convinced him to enter into evidence lurid stories about Rappe’s past, although Arbuckle felt uncomfortable about that. “Fatty,” as his movie character is known, didn’t take the stand in his own defense last time. He and his lawyers have decided that this time he will.
One of his loyal friends, Hollywood star Buster Keaton, 26, is in the courtroom to testify in Roscoe’s defense. But this past year, one of the prosecution’s witnesses, Rappe’s friend and Arbuckle’s chief accuser, Maud Delmont, 35, a convicted fraudster, has been traveling all over the country giving one-woman shows about the evils of Hollywood. Really.
Buster Keaton in Cops
Arbuckle knows that his once successful career as an actor is over. But he wants to clear his name. Let’s hope the third time is the charm.
In June I will be talking about the Stein family salons 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.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Last night New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott, 35, saw the premier of TheHairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill, 33, at the Provincetown Playhouse on McDougal Street in Greenwich Village, and his review runs in the paper today:
Provincetown Playhouse, Greenwich Village
A bitter, brutal, wildly fantastic play of nightmare hue and nightmare distortion…[The auditorium was] packed to the doors with astonishment…as scene after scene unfolded…[Although the script was] uneven, it seems rather absurd to fret overmuch about the undisciplined imagination of a young playwright towering so conspicuously above the milling mumbling crowd of playwrights who have no imagination at all…A turbulent and tremendous play, so full of blemishes that the merest fledgling among the critics could point out a dozen, yet so vital and interesting and teeming with life that those playgoers who let it escape them will be missing one of the real events of the year.”
O’Neill is already established as a playwright, with two Pulitzer Prizes under his belt—for Beyond the Horizon and Anna Christie. And his play The First Man just opened a few days ago at The Neighborhood Playhouse in Midtown. When the company, which O’Neill has been associated with for the past five years or so, did its first reading of The Hairy Ape, he proudly proclaimed,
This is one the bastards [uptown on Broadway] can’t do!”
Last night the auditorium was packed and the audience enthusiastic. The lead actor, Louis Wolheim, almost 42, got a standing ovation, and there were cries of “Author!”
But O’Neill wasn’t in the theatre.
The Hairy Ape
His mother had died while on a trip to the West Coast about a week ago, from a brain tumor at the age of 64. The opening night of The Hairy Ape coincided with the arrival of her body at Grand Central Station. A friend went looking for O’Neill to bring the good news of the play’s success. But the hit author was too depressed to be interested.
The two friends spent the night walking around Central Park.
In June I will be talking about the Stein family salons 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.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Virginia Woolf, 40, is watching her husband, Leonard, 41, walk their guest for today’s tea, fellow novelist Edward Morgan Forster, 43, to the bus stop. Forster is heading out to visit his favorite aunt in Putney, just a few miles away.
Hogarth House
Virginia is so pleased that Morgan has come back to England—just last week—after almost a year away in India. But he seems depressed. He’s back living with his Mum and cat in Weybridge, in an ugly old house far from a train station, and hasn’t published a novel in a dozen years.
They discussed their recent mutual discovery of the work of Marcel Proust, 50. Forster started reading him on the boat back home; Virginia has been reading the Frenchman while working on a short story, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” Both admire the way he uses memory to define characters.
Two days ago the Woolfs hosted another writer-friend for tea, American ex-pat T. S. Eliot, 34. He too seems a bit distracted by his current situation, working all day in a bank and coming home to a wife who is ill. Virginia has always been intimidated by him. Forster she thinks of as a friend, someone whose opinions she values. Eliot she sees as a competitor.
E. M. Forster and T. S. Eliot
Tom told them about a long poem, about 40 pages and as yet untitled, that he’s working on. He says it is his best work and the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press has agreed to publication in the fall. He has also received funding to start a quarterly literary magazine, also untitled.
There was something about Eliot that Virginia thought she had noticed before. He wears a thin dusting of face powder. Sort of a purplish color. The gossip is that he wants to make himself look even more stressed than he is.
After two months of sickness herself, being bed-ridden and unable to write, Virginia is now feeling her energy returning. The doctor has allowed her to get out and walk—which is how she writes, working out the text in her head. And she can now receive guests such as Morgan and Tom.
She still doesn’t understand Eliot’s enthusiasm for the new novel by Irishman James Joyce, 40, Ulysses. Virginia and Leonard rejected it for their press a few years ago. Now a little bookstore in Paris has published it. The way Eliot talks about the novel, Virginia feels that Joyce has done what she is trying to do—maybe even better?
Virginia decides she needs to go back and read Ulysses again.
This June I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after the Great War at 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.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 25, hopes that his recently launched second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, will do at least as well as his first, This Side of Paradise, published two years ago.
Of course this one is based on his relationship with Zelda Sayre, 21, their romance, their marriage. After all, look at the picture on the cover…
The Beautiful and Damned
But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily “blubberingly sentimental” as one early reviewer called it.
Fitzgerald still owes his publisher, Scribner’s, almost $6,000, but early sales seem to be going well. He just wasn’t prepared for the hostility of some of the critics who had praised him last time.
Scott and Zelda have come to New York for the launch party—well, parties, actually—leaving their four-month-old daughter. Scottie, with Fitzgerald’s parents back in St. Paul, Minnesota, where they have been living for the past year or so.
Scott is excited to be back in Manhattan, but Zelda seems out of sorts.
*****
Fitzgerald’s classmate from Princeton, critic Edmund “Bunny” Wilson, 26, was quite impressed with The Beautiful and Damned when Scott asked him to read it in manuscript. But now he is a bit disappointed with the finished product. Who cares about the newlyweds’ fights back in Westport, Connecticut, last summer?
Edmund Wilson
When they first arrived back in New York City, Wilson was pleased to see Scott and Zelda again. But it has become clear that there is a lot of tension between the two. Motherhood has robbed Zelda, the original “flapper,” of a lot of her jazz. Wilson thinks she’s looking matronly, and, frankly, fat.
*****
Zelda is pissed off. It’s not just that she doesn’t want to be pregnant again. Scott is totally indifferent to their first child—what will he be like with a second? She’s solving that problem with a pill some New York friends have given her.
She’s also angry about the way her husband has portrayed her in this new novel. Spoiled brat. Selfish bitch. And to top it off, he has stolen some of her writing. Zelda used to enjoy playing the role of muse. But this time Scott has used her diaries and letters word for word—there are three pages in the novel labeled “The Diary.” It’s her diary!
Zelda knows one thing for sure. She’s not going to have this baby.
*****
On the train from New Haven, Connecticut, into Manhattan, New York City’s top columnist, FPA [Franklin Pierce Adams], 40, of the World newspaper, is reading his review copy of The Beautiful and Damned. He falls asleep.
“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 June I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after the Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.
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.
SuchFriends Blog 