World renowned American dancer Isadora Duncan, 45, is once again in the uncomfortable position of having to defend the behavior of her husband, Russian poet Sergei Esenin, 27.
This time he has totally trashed their room at the Hotel de Crillon in Place de la Concorde because he wants to go back home to Russia. And she doesn’t.
Hotel de Crillon
Isadora tells the reporter from The New York Herald European Edition—Paris (the Paris Herald) that Sergei had one of his
momentary fits of madness…He wanted to go back [to Russia]…so I sent him…He can smash things up in Moscow and no one will care because he is a poet.”
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Each excavator carrying an ancient, sacred object from the burial chamber is purposely leaving the artifacts uncovered so they can be seen by the throngs of tourists lurking outside the tomb, straining for a glimpse of something—anything—related to King Tutankhamun, dead these 3,200 years.
Tourists at King Tut’s tomb
The archaeologists are worried that the retaining wall near the tomb’s entrance is going to collapse from those pressing against it.
Some of the visitors are too important or famous to be turned away, including three U. S. Congressmen on their way with 250 other Americans on the SS Adriatic.
Chief archeologist Howard Carter, 48, and the project’s sponsor, George Herbert, Earl of Carnarvon, 56, are sealing up the tomb today and blocking the entrance with debris and sand, to keep it safe until they can resume excavations in the milder weather of autumn.
Ten days ago, with the antechamber nearly cleared out, Carter and Lord Carnarvon, along with 20 guests invited to serve as witnesses, broke the seal on the inner burial chamber and found the young pharaoh’s gold coffin, surrounded by thousands of precious items.
Howard Carter and King Tut
Attached to that room is one they call “the treasury,” where there is a chest holding King Tut’s embalmed organs. Carter has had that entrance closed to keep wandering souvenir hunters away.
Local workmen pack up each object cleared from the burial chamber and send it along a railway track to the Nile River where everything is being shipped to Cairo.
Tourists not engaged in rubber necking at the tomb are in nearby Luxor at the Winter Palace Hotel dancing to the “Tutankhamen Rag.”
*****
In America, those not lucky enough to make the trip to Egypt are creating their own Egyptian atmosphere at home by snapping up all kinds of household goods re-designed with scarabs, obelisks and hieroglyphics—furniture, clothing, fabrics, jewelry, soap. They flock to Egyptian-themed movies and hum along to the hit song, “Old King Tut.”
“Old King Tut” sheet music
*****
“Tutmania” has taken hold of the United Kingdom, too.
The country is so bored with news stories about conferences being held to cement the peace and punish Germany for the Great War, the silly season has taken over the tabloids. Page One: A farmer has grown a gooseberry the size of a crab apple!
As other archaeological teams have done before, Carter signed a contract last month with a London Times reporter to give him exclusive media rights to access the tomb. Not surprisingly, other newspapers are responding with negative stories about Carter, Lord Carnarvon. and the whole project.
These stories don’t stop the British public from buying items like “Egyptian” toffee, a Hunter and Palmer biscuit tin shaped like Tut’s funeral urn, and a “Pharonic” Singer sewing machine.
Someone even suggested that the new Underground line from Tooting to Camden Town be called the “Tutancamden Line.”
Lord Carnarvon, his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, and Howard Carter
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
American ex-pat Gerald Murphy, 34, is looking out the window of his apartment in this dilapidated 16th century building (he and his wife Sara, 39, will renovate as soon as the sale of their Manhattan house goes through), up the Seine, past the Ile St. Louis, over to the Tuileries Gardens on the Left Bank. He really enjoyed the party tonight.
Gerald has been having an awfully good month. He was thrilled to have four of his paintings accepted into the Salon des Independents, which opened at the beginning of February. It’s certainly not selective—Motto: “Neither Jury nor Rewards”—but many good artists are included, such as his own painting teacher, Natalia Goncharova, 41. When the officials told Gerald that his oil Boatdeck was too large, he responded,
If you think mine is too large…I think the others are too small.”
Boatdeck by Gerald Murphy in the Salon des Independents
The Paris edition of the Herald said his work showed, “a very personal point of view in the study of machinery…[revealing] a feeling for mass and a sense of decorative effect.”
Soon after the show opened, Gerald was asked by some friends to design the American booth at a major charity event—the Bal des Artistes Russes, in aid of Russian immigrants in France.
Today was the opening of the four-day festival, and what a party!
Four orchestras! Murphy thought the jazz band was the best. The guests were dressed either as Russian peasants or cubist paintings. The rooms were filled with paintings by artists such as Russian Goncharova and Spaniard Juan Gris, 35.
For entertainment, Romanian-French writer Tristan Tzara, 26, read one of his poems, and the fabulous Fratellini Brothers performed their usual star turn.
The Fratellini Brothers
Goncharova sold her masks in the Russian booth; the Japanese booth had kabuki theatre with dancers.
One of the showstoppers is Gerald’s futuristic American exhibit, featuring a reconstruction of huge skyscrapers with blinking electric lights, recreating New York City’s Great White Way right here in Paris. It is sooo American…
This summer I will be talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Henry R. Luce, 24, knows how this day is going to pan out.
Henry R. Luce
Luce and his partner, fellow Yale alum Briton Hadden, just turned 25, have been planning their magazine for well over a year. Now they are coming down to the deadline to start the presses so the new magazine, Time, will appear on newsstands with a March 3rd cover date.
Serious discussions hadn’t started until Hadden, then learning the publishing ropes from editor Harold Bayard Swope, 41, at the New York World, contacted his old buddy from the Yale Daily News, Luce, who had recently been dumped by the Chicago Daily News. He suggested they both go to work for the Baltimore News.
Briton Hadden
In late night talks they began brainstorming the concept of a weekly magazine called Facts which would condense the important news of the day for busy businessmen. Eventually, they came up with the name Time, and the slogan, “Take Time—It’s Brief.” Hadden thought it should be fun as well as informative, including news, celebrities, politics, culture and sport.
Funded by $100,000 raised from other Yale alumni, and working out of this abandoned brewery, Hadden, as editor, is overseeing the process he and Luce learned in their short publishing careers: Get the flats together. Race over to the printer at 36th Street and 11th Avenue. Stay up all night with the staff writing copy to fill holes and cutting copy to make columns fit. Then write captions for the three-inch square fuzzy photos.
Within the 32 pages—including the cover featuring retiring congressman and former Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives Joseph G. Cannon, 86—were brief pieces on:
The Kansas legislature considering a bill to make smoking illegal;
The wife of the Pennsylvania governor beseeching Congress to put women in charge of enforcing Prohibition, which cost the country $15 million last year;
Charges by muckraker Upton Sinclair, 44, that department stores have too strong an influence over newspapers because of their heavy advertising spends;
Influential British art critic Clive Bell, 41, declaring that cubism is dead;
A review of Black Oxen, the new novel by Gertrude Atherton, 65, which categorizes the writers who lunch regularly at the midtown Algonquin Hotel as “Sophisticates”; and
A review of the hit Broadway play, Merton of the Movies, by two of those Sophisticates, Marc Connelly, 32, and George S Kaufman, 33, calling it a “skillful dramatization” of the original novel.
This month I am talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York City in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute 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.
The last issue of the Pittsburgh Dispatch newspaper has rolled off the presses. The 77-year-old daily has an illustrious history. It was the first to publish a local kid who wrote under the pen name “Lonely Orphan Girl” before she went off to the New York World newspaper and became famous as Nellie Bly, writing about her trip around the world in 72 days. “Nellie Bly” was the pen name for Elizabeth Cochrane, who died just last year at age 57.
Nellie Bly
At the end of the last century, the Dispatch’s sister paper, The Pittsburgh Leader, hired Willa Cather, 49, as a telegraph editor and critic, long before she became the top novelist she is today.
But now both papers have been bought out by a consortium made up of three of their daily competitors—the Pittsburgh Post, the Gazette Times and the Pittsburgh Press—reducing the number of dailies in this major northeastern city from five to only three.
Like most of the consolidation going on in the newspaper industry, the closures are blamed on increasing costs, including the expense of investing in new technology.
Advertisement for the Pittsburgh Dispatch before the city added an “h”
Later this month I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York City in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute 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.
Writer Gertrude Stein, just turned 49, and her partner Alice B. Toklas, 45, are not really surprised that their fellow American friend, Ernest Hemingway, 23, foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and aspiring novelist, has turned up at their door at 10 o’clock this morning.
27 rue de Fleurus
Then he stays for lunch.
Then he stays all afternoon.
Then he stays for dinner.
Then at 10 o’clock at night, when they think he will finally be leaving, he shouts,
My wife is pregnant! I’m too young to be a father!”
Later this month I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York City 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.
Irish poet William Butler Yeats, 57, is having dinner with his doctor—and friend—fellow writer and fellow appointed Senator in the new Irish Free State, Oliver St. John Gogarty, 44.
107 Piccadilly, London
Gogarty is re-telling the story of his recent kidnapping in Dublin by anti-government Republicans who had publicly stated they were going to be targeting Senators.
The good doctor was sitting in the bath in his Chapelizod home when the armed gunmen broke in and led him outside at gunpoint. As they forced him into a car, one pushed a revolver into his back and said,
Isn’t it a good thing to die in a flash, Senator?”
Not wanting to die in any way, Gogarty told them that he urgently needed to relieve his bowels and scampered into the woods. And then jumped into the freezing cold River Liffey and swam away.
As he crawled ashore and headed to the police barracks in the Phoenix Park, Gogarty vowed that he would donate two swans to the Liffey in gratitude.
And he vowed he would move his medical practice and his family to London.
Oliver St. John Gogarty
This month, the same rebels burned to the ground Renvyle, Gogarty’s house in Connemara in the west of Ireland. And even a patriot like Senator Horace Plunkett, 68, is not safe—his house Kilteragh, in Foxrock, County Dublin, was reduced to ruins also.
Firemen hosing what’s left of Kilteragh
Yeats has been following the turmoil back home from the comfort of his club here. The London Times’ headline a few weeks ago read,
Irish Rebel Outrages. Many Houses Burned. Kidnapped Senator.”
The anti-Treaty forces also burned Moore Hall, the family home of Yeats’ former friend, playwright and novelist George Moore, about to turn 71. They were enacting revenge on George’s brother, a former British army officer and current Free State Senator, not knowing the house belongs to George the writer, not his more political brother.
George Moore’s letter to the editor in The Morning Post
Yeats and Moore were among those who founded the Abbey Theatre at the beginning of the century. Despite the ongoing Civil War, the Abbey keeps performing in the heart of Dublin. They are staging Cathleen ni Houlihan, by Yeats and co-founder Lady Augusta Gregory, 70, featuring the new actor Barry Fitzgerald, 34, on a double bill with The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet by Yeats’ fellow Dub, George Bernard Shaw, 66.
Yeats is enjoying his new role as a Senator, representing a small independent political party, and serving on committees dealing with issues related to arts and culture. Leinster House is a short walk from the Yeats home in Merrion Square.
Leinster House
He’s given two speeches so far but feels that he can serve his country better from here in London, putting pressure on old friends like Winston Churchill, 48, former Secretary of State for the Colonies, to ease up on some of the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that was negotiated last year. Also, he finds it easier to write here.
Gogarty is urging Willie to get his family out of harm’s way in Ireland and bring them to England. The shock of the fighting in Dublin could affect his young daughter’s kidneys.
Yeats has been thinking about re-locating his wife and two children to Holyhead, Wales, where he could conveniently commute to Dublin via the ferry. His mother-in-law wants them to move closer to her in Cheshire, England.
But Yeats’ wife Georgie, 30, says no. She thinks this ridiculous war is going to be over soon. The government has already offered amnesty to those fighting, which will cool things down a bit.
Willie has just received a heartfelt letter from her, shaming him for appearing to abandon his needy country at this time. Their daughter Anne, about to turn 4, has recently recovered from scarlet fever and is doing much better now. (Yeats admits that whenever one of the kids gets sick, he moves out of the house to his Kildare Street club. To make things easier for Georgie, of course.)
Her letter convinces him. Willie responds immediately, thanking her for putting pressure on him. There will be no more talk of abandoning Ireland. He’ll come home.
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.
Happy birthday to Ulysses! Published here one year ago this day.
And happy birthday to the novel’s author, Irishman James Joyce, 41 today.
The courageous publisher, American ex-pat Sylvia Beach, 35, has filled the display window of her shop, Shakespeare and Company, with extra copies of the bright blue book.
Ulysses by James Joyce
A small group of friends has gathered to celebrate. Sylvia receives a bouquet of flowers and champagne toasts to her health.
Toasts also to the health of Joyce, who entertains the crowd by singing Irish songs and accompanying himself on the piano.
It’s been quite a year since Beach handed the first copy of Ulysses to Joyce. Her shop has had increased foot traffic, but Sylvia has spent a lot of extra time promoting the book—and arranging to have it smuggled into the United States where it is often confiscated for being declared obscene by the courts.
The fluctuation in exchange rates is also killing her. Beach feels she should have been paying more attention to the political situation in Europe. She thinks she should be reading those reports filed by the Toronto Star foreign correspondent who hangs out in her store, American Ernest Hemingway, 23.
Later this month I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York City 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.
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