“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, April through May, 1922, Hogarth House, Richmond; Tidmarsh, Berkshire; and Garsington, Oxfordshire

April.  Novelist Virginia Woolf, 40, writes to her friend, Lady Ottoline Morrell, 48, to arrange a visit to the Morrell’s country home, Garsington. Virginia suggests the last weekend in May, writing,

It’s such an age since I was at Garsington, and it never seems to me a house on the ground like other houses, but a caravan, a floating palace.”

Garsington

April.  Ottoline writes to their mutual friend, novelist Edward Morgan Forster, 43, just back from India, inviting him to Garsington for the last weekend in May, telling him that Virginia as well as American ex-pat poet Thomas Stearns Eliot, 33, are invited for that weekend also.

Mid-May.  Forster responds to Ottoline’s invitation, saying that he can’t come that weekend because he will be visiting their mutual friend, writer Lytton Strachey, 42, in Tidmarsh, Berkshire, where Lytton is renting a house owned by economist John Maynard Keynes, 38. Forster apologizes to Ottoline, explaining,

My future is as an uncharted sea, except where it is crossed by Lytton’s system of soundings.”

(Morgan has been reading a lot of Proust lately.)

Mid-May.  Virginia writes to Ottoline canceling her Garsington visit for the last weekend in May. She’s had three teeth pulled and can’t shake off the flu. Maybe late June or early July?

Saturday, May 27. Forster is enjoying his weekend in Tidmarsh, chatting with Lytton and others. The surprise guests are Virginia and her husband Leonard, 41. Weren’t they supposed to be at Garsington this weekend?

Ottoline sends a wire to Morgan and Lytton imploring them both to come to her garden party, about an hour away, which will go on all day. She wants them to visit with Tom Eliot. Carrying the Woolfs’ secret with them, Morgan and Lytton set off.

E. M. Forster at Garsington

At Garsington, the party is in full swing. Everyone is swimming in the pond and Ottoline is holding court, dressed in a picture hat and bright yellow satin top.

Forster always enjoys the gossip at these get-togethers but feels that a lot of the chatter when he’s not in the room is about him.

Ottoline Morrell, standing, with her guests at Garsington

“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.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

In June I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after The Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in 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.com and Amazon.co.uk. in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, May 28, 1922, London Sunday Express; and New York Times

Two very different reviews of the new novel Ulysses by James Joyce, 40, appear on opposite sides of the pond today:

Ulysses by James Joyce

I say deliberately that it is the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature…All the secret sewers of vice are canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the name of Christ—blasphemies hitherto associated with the most degraded orgies of Satanism and the Black Mass…[Ulysses] is already the Bible of beings who are exiles and outcasts in this and every other civilized country…Our critics are apologizing for his anarchy…[by throwing readers] to the hyenas and werewolves of literature…We must make our choice between the devil’s disciples and the disciples of God, between Satanism and Christianity, between the sanctions of morality and the anarchy of art. The artists must be treated like any lesser criminal who tries to break the Christian code. For this is a battle that must be fought out to a clean finish:  We cannot trust the soul of Europe to the guardianship of the police and the post office.”

—“Beauty and the Beast,” James Douglas, editor, London Sunday Express

Ulysses is the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the 20^th century. It will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais, and The Brothers Karamazof [sic] Dostoyevsky. It is likely that no one writing English today could parallel Mr. Joyce’s feat…His literary output would seem to substantiate some of Freud’s contentions…He holds with Freud that the unconscious mind represents the real man…I have learned more psychology and psychiatry from it than I did in 10 years at the Neurological Institute. There are other angles at which Ulysses can be viewed profitably, but they are not many…[The protagonist Leopold Bloom is] a moral monster, a pervert and an invert, an apostate to his race and his religion, the simulacrum of a man who has neither cultural background nor personal self-respect…[Ulysses will be written about and praised in 100 years, but] not 10 men or women out of a hundred can read Ulysses through.”

                                    —“James Joyce’s Amazing Chronicle,” Joseph Collins, New York Times

“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.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Next month I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after The Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Carnegie-Mellon University.

To watch my presentation for the PICT Classical Theatre about the Founding of the Abbey Theatre, click here.

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.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, May 25, 1922, Brook Farm, 845 North Salem Road, Ridgefield, Connecticut

Just a few days ago, Irish-American playwright Eugene O’Neill, 33, was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for Anna Christie which premiered last year. His first Pulitzer was for his first full-length play staged on Broadway, Beyond the Horizon, back in 1920. In addition to the awards, both plays received good reviews from the New York Times drama critic, Alexander Woollcott, 35, who told theatregoers that Anna Christie is

a singularly engrossing play…[that you] really ought to see.”

Other critics agreed.

Pauline Lord in Anna Christie

His most recent, The Hairy Ape, started out with his Greenwich Village theatre troupe The Provincetown Players, but has just been transferred to the Plymouth Theater on Broadway. With the playwright’s name in lights on the marquee, instead of any actors’ names. Quite a tribute.

Although Woollcott likes the Hairy Ape as well, calling it “vital and interesting and teeming with life,” the New York Police Department has deemed the play “obscene, indecent, impure.” Because of its themes of working class rebellion, the mayor wants to shut it down to avoid labor riots. Really.

His success has enabled O’Neill and his wife, English writer Agnes Boulton, 28, and their son Shane, 3, to move to this 31-acre Connecticut country house, with a library, a sun-room, four master bedrooms and servants’ quarters. As well as an Irish wolfhound Eugene has named Finn MacCool.

Eugene O’Neill with his dog and his farm  

He is also $40,000 in debt.

Today he is writing to a friend,

Yes, I seem to be becoming the [Pulitzer] Prize Pup of Playwrights—the Hot Dog of the Drama. When the Police Department isn’t pinning the Obscenity Medal on my Hairy Ape chest, why, then it’s Columbia [University] adorning the brazen bosom of Anna with the Cross of Purity. I begin to feel that there is either something all wrong with me or something all right…’It’s a mad world, my masters.’”

“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.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Next month I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after The Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in 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.

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, late May, 1922, Los Angeles, California

Where were they, he wonders? Where was his studio, Famous Players-Lasky? Where was his patron and supposed-supporter, producer Jesse Lasky, 41?

Rudolph Valentino, just turned 27, is their top movie star. He’s already had two big hits released this year and what promises to be an even bigger smash, Blood and Sand, due out this summer.

Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino in one of this year’s hits, Beyond the Rocks

But when he was thrown in prison a few days ago, on a felony charge of bigamy no less, Valentino had to raise bail from his friends. Lasky let him sit there and refused to come up with the cash.

Earlier this year, after his divorce was final, Valentino had announced his engagement to Natascha Rambova [really Winifred Shaughnessy Hudnut], 25, who had been the art director on one of his early films. This month they went to Mexicali, Mexico, and were legally married.

Rudolph Valentino and his new family, the Hudnuts

About a week after they returned to Los Angeles, a warrant was issued for Valentino’s arrest! He and his lawyer went to the LA’s District Attorney’s office so Rudolph could turn himself in and he was thrown in jail. Turns out California law requires both sides in a divorce to wait one year before re-marrying. Who knew?! Well, not Valentino or his lawyers apparently.

Rudolph has been told that there’s a good chance these charges will be thrown out by the court because he hasn’t even lived with his new wife yet. Oh, great. Valentino knows that once that story gets into the papers, the public will think that he’s homosexual.

“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.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Next month I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after The Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in 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.

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, May 20-21, 1922, Gordon Square, Bloomsbury; and Hogarth House, Richmond, London

In the Bloomsbury section of London, economist John Maynard Keynes, 39, is writing to his friend, painter Vanessa Bell, 42, about the living arrangements in Gordon Square for his current partner, Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, 30, and his former lover [and Vanessa’s current partner] painter Duncan Grant, 37.

46 Gordon Square, Londres, Royaume-Uni

No. 46 Gordon Square

If [Lydia] lived in 41, [Duncan] and I in 46, you and family in 50, and we all had meals in 46 that might not be a bad arrangement…We all want both to have and not have husbands and wives.”

*****

The next day, in Richmond, southwest London, Vanessa’s sister, novelist Virginia Woolf, 40, is writing to a friend describing a conversation she and her husband Leonard, 41, had recently:

Hogarth House

Leonard says we owe a great deal to [George Bernard] Shaw. I say that he only influenced the outer fringe of morality…Leonard says rot; I say damn. Then we go home. Leonard says I’m narrow. I say he’s stunted.”

Now that’s a marriage…

“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.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Next month I will be talking about the Stein family salons in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute 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.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, May 18-19, 1922, Hotel Majestic, Avenue Kleber; and 44 rue de l’Amiral-Hamelin, Paris

THE AFTER-THEATRE DINNER PARTY:

A Teleplay

SFX:  Renard by Stravinsky

Long shot of the Paris Opera House. The camera moves in to focus on the poster for tonight’s performance: 

Then a tight shot of the wording:

RENARD

Première mondiale! Musique et livret d’Igor Stravinsky  Chorégraphie de Bronislava Nijinsky

Interprété par Les Ballets Russes, sous la direction de Serge Diaghilev

Réalisé par Ernest Ansermet  Avec des décors conçus par Pablo Picasso

The camera pulls back and takes us through the streets of the Right Bank to the entrance of the Hotel Majestic on Avenue Kleber.

We follow the camera inside and up the stairs to a private room. Stravinsky’s music is drowned out by the sounds of about 35 or 40 partygoers, formally dressed, chatting and laughing. Waiters are getting ready to serve dinner.

Speaking in front of the room is Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev, 50.

DIAGHILEV:  Thank you to our hosts for the evening, Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Schiff, who have brought together tonight the four living artists Mr. Schiff most admires [gesturing to each]:  Monsieur Picasso, Monsieur Stravinsky, Monsieur Joyce [looks around the room] Monsieur Joyce? No? And Monsieur Proust [looks around the room again] Monsieur Proust?!

As he is speaking, the camera moves around the table to give close-ups of some of the dinner guests:  Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, 40, with a Catalan sash tied around his head like a turban; his wife Olga, 30; French director Ernest Ansermet, 38; French composer Erik Satie, just turned 56; Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, 39; English patron Sydney Schiff, 53; his wife Violet, 48; and English art critic Clive Bell, 40.

DIAGHILEV:  I hope you all enjoy the dinner.

Waiters begin serving. Outside, bells chime midnight.

Camera moves around the room showing the partygoers enjoying the food and each other’s company.

Fade to the same scene showing most of the food eaten and waiters slowly clearing a few plates and starting to serve coffee.

The camera settles on the door to the room and in staggers Irish author James Joyce, 40, looking confused, poorly dressed and a bit drunk. Sydney Schiff motions for a waiter to put a chair next to him, and Joyce sits in it. He puts his head in his hands, and a waiter sets a glass of champagne in front of him.

Panning back to the door, we see Marcel Proust, 50, enter, dressed in evening clothes and wearing white gloves. A chair is placed between Sydney Schiff and Stravinsky; Proust sits there. A waiter brings him some food and drink.

PROUST, turning to Stravinsky:  Monsieur Stravinsky, doubtless you admire Beethoven?

STRAVINSKY, barely looking at him:  I detest Beethoven.

PROUST:  But, cher maitre, surely those late sonatas and quartets…

STRAVINSKY:  Worse than all the others.

Ansermet, sitting nearby, leans over to talk to both of them to avoid having this discussion become a fight.

Snoring is heard, and the camera moves to focus on Joyce, who has nodded off.

Hearing the snoring, a posh woman seated next to Clive Bell tugs on his sleeve and whispers in his ear. The two get up, put on their coats and leave together. Sydney Schiff gets up to see them out.

As soon as they leave, Joyce wakes up and Proust leans over to talk to him:

PROUST:  Ah, Monsieur Joyce, you know the Princess…

JOYCE:  No, Monsieur.

PROUST:  Ah. You know the Countess…

JOYCE:  No, Monsieur.

PROUST:  Then you know Madame…

JOYCE:  No, Monsieur.

The camera moves away but we hear the two men still chatting.

People start pushing back their chairs, gathering their coats, getting ready to leave.

Proust turns to Sydney and Violet Schiff, asking if they would like to come to his apartment.

The three leave together, with Joyce following closely behind.

Outside the hotel, a car is waiting and all four wedge themselves in.

The camera follows the car just a few blocks to 44 rue de l’Amiral-Hamelin.

Joyce starts to get out of the car after the Schiffs and Proust, but Proust gestures for him to stay in and signals to the driver to continue on. Proust heads for his building while Sydney gives the driver specific instructions and then turns with his wife to follow Proust inside.

Inside the apartment we see Proust and the Schiffs happily chatting and drinking champagne as the camera pulls back to reveal the sun coming up outside the window.

FIN

“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.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Next month I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after The Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in 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.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, May 17, 1922, New York City, New York

American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, 58, has sent a questionnaire to other noted artists: 

Can a photograph have the significance of art?”

Alfred Stieglitz

French painter Marcel Duchamp, 34, living in New York, replies:

Dear Stieglitz,

Even a few words I don’t feel like writing.

You know exactly what I think of photography.

I would like to see it make people despise painting until

something else will make photography unbearable—

There we are.

Affectionately

Marcel Duchamp”

Marcel Duchamp by Man Ray

“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.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Next month I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after The Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in 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.

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, week of May 14, 1922, The Saturday Evening Post, New York City, New York; and Murray Avenue, Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

America’s two most popular pastimes:

Old Couple Listening to Radio by Norman Rockwell

In the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Manor Theatre opens with a showing of Hail the Woman starring Florence Vidor, 26, wife of noted film director King Vidor, 28. Piano accompaniment is included.

Article in the local newspaper announcing the opening of the Manor Theatre

“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, a few blocks from the Manor Theatre, and also in print and e-book formats on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Next month I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after The Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in 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.

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, May 13, 1922, Toronto Daily Star, Toronto

Today, the last article by the Star’s European correspondent, ex-pat American Ernest Hemingway, 21, covering the International Genoa Conference appears in the paper. Hemingway writes a glowing profile of the UK Prime Minister and organizer of the conference, David Lloyd George, 59. He ends with the anecdote of an Italian boy presenting the PM with a portrait he had drawn of him, and Lloyd George being gracious enough to sign it:

I looked at the sketch. It wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t Lloyd George. The only thing that was alive in it was the sprawled-out signature, gallant, healthy, swashbuckling, careless and masterful, done in a moment and done for all time, it stood out among the dead lines of the sketch—it was Lloyd George.”

David Lloyd George’s signature

“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.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

In June I will be talking about the Stein family salons before and after the Great War in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

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

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

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, Mid-May, 1922, Hotel Venetia, Boulevard du Montparnasse, Paris

Having her Mom, Cora, 58, here for the past month or so has been a great distraction for American ex-pat poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, 30.

Cora and Edna are having a great time. Attending the Russian Ballet at the Opera House. Eating in the local cafes. Dancing at Zelli’s, the Montmartre Club. Mom is a big hit.

Cora Millay

Edna has moved them here from the original hotel she booked. As she explains in a letter to her sister,

because it [was] so cust expensive, and [we] are now in a cheap but not a very clean hotel…Two minutes from this bleeding kafe [the Rotonde] and just around the corner from the beautiful Luxembourg Gardens.”

Since Cora’s arrival, Edna has started seeing a Frenchman—whom Mom does not like. Not only does he borrow money, he shows up unexpectedly and takes Edna away from Cora. And he looks too much like her ex-husband.

Edna’s love life has been on the skids so far this year.

Millay spent the first part of the year in Vienna, living with a former boyfriend, only because he could split expenses. She’d gone through her income from the poems and Nancy Boyd stories she is sending back to Vanity Fair and the $500 advance from Boni and Liveright for a raunchy novel she can’t write.

Edna St. Vincent Millay poem in Vanity Fair, May, 1922

One of her beaus, fellow poet Arthur Ficke, 38, back in America, asked her why she hadn’t responded to the marriage proposal sent to her in a letter from Hal, writer Witter Bynner, 40, another of her conquests. She didn’t even remember a marriage proposal?! Hal is good-looking, well-traveled, a Harvard grad, rich. She wrote to him to ask if he wants to get married, and when she didn’t hear back right away she cabled him, “Yes!” She even told her sister that she was “sort of engaged.”

When Edna finally does get a letter from Hal, now living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, exhausted from a recent cross-country lecture tour, he explains that of course she must know the whole marriage thing was a joke.

Edna wrote back instantly,

Oh, Lord—oh, Lord—Oh. Hal!”

Of course she knew it was a joke. Ha ha. The letters and cables she sent must have really frightened him. Thank God he hadn’t taken her seriously! Ha ha.

Bastard.

Then came the crushing blow. Arthur writes to say that he is finally leaving his wife. For his girlfriend. Not Edna.

Millay is thinking she might as well marry the French guy.

Arthur Ficke

“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.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

In June I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after The Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in 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.

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