“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, last weeks of July, 1923, en route from Pamplona, Spain, back to Paris

Festival of San Fermin, Pamplona

Pamplona.  Festival of San Fermin.  Six days.  World Series of bullfighting.  Sombreros, straw hats, Basque caps.  Beautiful girls.  Black lace mantillas.  Cafes.  Dancers.  Military bands.  Fireworks.  No room.  Fight with landlady.  Music all night.  5 am.  People racing down the streets. 

Wife needs coffee.  Yellow and red Spanish flag.  Bulls racing down the streets.  Every morning.  Bulls racing into the ring.  Packed amphitheatre.  Home talent.  Crowd roars.  Ineffectual cape waving.  Small earthquakes.  Pouring rain.  Baking sun.  Three matadors.  Picadors on horses.  Death thrust.  Mules drag dead bull out.  Flopping capes.  Matadors make 20,000 pesetas a year.”

*****

If there’s anything you want to know about bull fighting ask me,”

Toronto Star foreign correspondent Ernest Hemingway, just turned 24, writes to his mentor and fellow American Gertrude Stein, 49, who recommended the bullfights to him a few months ago.

Hemingway writes to other friends,

Gee I’d love to take you to a bull fight…A mile and a half run—all the side streets barred off with big wooden gates and all this gang going like hell with the bulls trying to get them…You see it isn’t sport. It’s a tragedy. A great tragedy. And God how it’s played!”

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, Ohio, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I will be talking about the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at 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, July, 1923, Great Neck, Long Island, New York

On the advice of his most successful novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 26, Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, 38, had contacted Fitzgerald’s neighbor out in Great Neck, Long Island, sports columnist Ring Lardner, also 38.

Ring Lardner 

Perkins wrote to Lardner at the beginning of this month, proposing the idea of collecting Lardner’s essays and stories into one book, saying,

I would hardly have ventured to do this if Scott had not spoken of the possibility, because your position in the literary world is such that you must be besieged by publishers, and to people in that situation their letters of interest are rather a nuisance.”

Fitzgerald cajoled Perkins to come out to Great Neck so the three could have dinner together. Ring was open to Perkins’ idea but confessed that he hadn’t kept copies of any of his work, so would have to contact each of the publications that ran them individually.

After quite a few drinks, Lardner went home, and Fitzgerald insisted on driving Perkins around Long Island, despite having too much alcohol in him. Max told his wife that Scott

was saying what a good egg I was, and what a good egg Ring was, and what a good egg he was, and then, without thinking, as though it was something one good egg did to another good egg, he just drove me into the damned lake!”

Lake in Great Neck

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I will be talking about the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Perkins’ relationships with 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, July, 1923, Left Bank, Paris

This month the New York Times carried an interesting report about the unruly behavior of some American ex-patriates currently frequenting the cafes and bars on the Left Bank of Paris.

Apparently three of America’s well-known writers—Dial magazine managing editor Gilbert Seldes, 30; poet E. E. Cummings, 28; and novelist John Dos Passos, 27—were involved in what became known as the “Battle of Montparnasse” during France’s celebration of its independence, Bastille Day, July 14. Supposedly, all three came running in to La Rotonde on the Boulevard Montparnasse. One of them slugged the proprietor and was arrested.

La Rotonde

Except they didn’t.

None of the three was in Paris on Bastille Day. Poet and Harvard alumnus Malcolm Cowley, 24, was arrested for assaulting the proprietor, and was immediately declared by the French locals to be a hero because they didn’t like the café owner anyway.

Malcolm Cowley

However.

On another night out on the Left Bank, around 3 am, three men walked into a bar—an editor (Seldes), a poet (Cummings), and a novelist (dos Passos). The bar was Bol de cidre, down a narrow alley off Git le Coeur, famous for its small back room where other writers, including Oscar Wilde and Paul Verlaine, had gathered to drink bowls of cider spiked with Calvados, drawn from barrels kept in a 12^th century cellar.

Git le Coeur

As the three buddies, who had become good friends when they were at Harvard together, left the establishment, Cummings relieved himself against a convenient wall. Police appeared, arrested him and took him to their nearby headquarters, despite Dos Passos’ and Seldes’ protests.

E. E. Cummings

The arresting office told the clerk that Cummings was “un Americain qui pisse,” to which the clerk replied, “Encore un pisseur Americain?!” Cummings was told to return the next day to be arraigned.

In the meantime, Seldes got in touch with a close friend in the Ministre des Affaires Etrangeres and had the charges dropped. Unbeknownst to Cummings.

The next day, the three Americans returned to the police station and, while Cummings went in to learn his fate, Seldes and dos Passos rounded up some locals and threw together signs that said, “Reprieve Le Pisseur Americain!” When Cummings came out of the station, relieved that he only received a suspended sentence, he was touched to see the show of support his friends had arranged for him. Until he was told that it was all a joke.

So that’s what really happened.

Or did it?!

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I will be talking about the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at 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.

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, July 18, 1923, Mt. Airy Road, Croton-on-Hudson, New York

What a year she is having. First, the Pulitzer Prize for poetry And now this.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 31, is getting married.

The bride is just as surprised as her family. She only met wealthy Dutch businessman Eugen Jan Boissevain, 43, a widower, a few months ago. By the end of May Edna wrote to her mother,

I love him very much & am going to marry him. There!”

Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eugen Jan Boissevain

But they didn’t tell Edna’s sister Norma, 29, that there was actually going to be a wedding until yesterday. No other family members were here! Norma went beserk. Gene screamed at Norma,

I’m not marrying the family, you know!”

And Norma screamed at Edna,

Are you really going to marry this low, cheap son of a bitch?!”

Edna hasn’t been well since she came back to the States at the beginning of the year. Since they met, Gene has been taking excellent care of her. Today, she didn’t feel well enough to really pay attention to what clothes she would wear. Her dark green silk peasant dress looks more like a Halloween costume; Norma tried to help by taking some white mosquito netting she found on the porch and turning it into a veil and train.

As soon as the Justice of the Peace is finished, Gene and the other guests get Edna into his Mercer car and drive her to New York City to have surgery on her inflamed intestines.

Gene tells the papers that it’s appendicitis.

Mercer touring car

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I will be talking about the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at 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.

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, July 13, 1923, Hollywoodland, California

Finishing work on the Hollywoodland sign

The sign erected earlier this year by a local real estate company to promote their new development, Hollywoodland, is officially dedicated. Taken together, the 13 wooden letters are 30 feet wide and 50 feet high, with over 4,000 light bulbs blinking “HOLLY,” then “WOOD,” then “LAND,” then “HOLLYWOODLAND.” The developers are planning to leave it up for about a year and a half.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I will be talking about the the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at 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.

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, early July, 1923, Hotel du Cap, Cap d’Antibes, Riviera, France

Sitting on the beach, about a half mile from the hotel, Russian ballerina Olga Picasso, 32, is watching her two-year-old son, Paolo, playing with their American friends’ children.

Portrait of Olga by Pablo Picasso

Shortly after Olga arrived here with Paolo; her husband, Spanish painter Pablo, 41, and his mother, Maria Ruiz, 68, the Murphys, a family they’ve gotten to know back in Paris, showed up at the same hotel. Gerald, 35, has worked on some theatre projects with Pablo, and the Picassos have attended many of the fabulous parties Gerald and his wife Sara, 39, have given.

What’s odd is to be here on the Riviera in the summer! The French won’t come near the place after May. But Gerald and Sara enjoyed the remote quiet so much last summer, they vowed to keep coming back. The Hotel du Cap owner agreed to keep the place open; he’s hoping that the damp, cold weather up north this year will lead many more Parisians to give the south a try.

At first, communication between the two couples was a bit formal. Olga received a note from Sara, in French, saying,

Cher Mme. Picasso…Our children are going to the beach at 945 and will return at 1130 (they eat lunch at 12). We would be so happy if your baby could accompany them, with his nurse. Would you and M. Picasso come swimming with us later, at 11? The beach is really very nice and we have an American canoe.”

The hotel is so empty, the two families have taken to having dinner together in the big dining room, with a kids table for Paolo and the Murphys’ Honoria, 5, Baoth, 4, and Patrick, 2. The only other guest is a Chinese diplomat and his family, who decided to stay on when they found out the hotel would remain open.

Baoth, Sara, Patrick and Honoria Murphy

The Murphys are getting along just great with Pablo’s mother, who is on her first trip to France from Spain to see her grandson, even though she speaks no English or French. She’s trying to teach the Murphys Spanish.

Olga is watching Pablo and Gerald rake seaweed in the sand. He is interested in Gerald’s unique style, but they rarely talk about art.

She turns her gaze to Sara, sitting on a small rug, her linen dress blowing in the warm Mediterranean breeze, her string of pearls running down her back.

Sara makes motherhood seem so effortless. She enjoys her children.

Olga is a wreck. She and Pablo have been growing apart. They fight more often. And he has been doing many more drawings of Sara than he is doing of his own wife. In some, he incorporates sand from the beach. In one he is depicted as Mars and Sara is Venus. There is even one nude portrait—it must be of Sara. The figure is wearing her pearls draped down her back.

Oil and pencil drawing for Woman in White by Picasso

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I will be talking about the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at 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.

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, July 6, 1923, Theatre Michel, 38 rue des Mathurins, Paris

Yesterday, at the Soirée du coeur à barbe (Evening of The Bearded Heart),held at this lovely 350-seat theatre, the audience reacted wildly to the first showing of a three-minute film by ex-pat American artist Man Ray, 32, titled Le Retour à la raison (Return to Reason),

Images from Le Retour a la raison by Man Ray

The organizer of this Dada Gala, Romanian-born Dadaist Tristan Tzara, 27, had demanded that Ray produce a movie to be included on the evening’s program, and even advertised the showing before Ray created the film.

Pushed for time, Ray relied on techniques he has been using to create what he calls “rayographs,” which sell well. He threw thumbtacks and screws on movie film, sprinkled more film with salt and pepper and exposed the frames in his studio darkroom. He added some footage he’d been playing around with and projected images on to the naked breasts of his partner, Kiki (actually Alice Prin), 21. Voila!

Kiki in Le Retour a la raison by Man Ray

During the showing, the projection equipment broke down twice. (Ray realized he should have used cement to edit, not glue.) And rival groups of Dadaists started to fight.

Ray figures he’ll be able to sell the still shots he can print from the film frames.

*****

Tonight, Tzara’s own short play Le Coeur a gaz (The Gas Heart) is being performed at the same theatre as part of Soiree du Cœur à barbe. This isn’t a premier, but the only other performance was during last year’s Dada Gala when audience members walked out in protest. Tzara has tweaked the text since then.

Tristan Tzara by Robert Delaunay

Tzara has referred to his absurdist dialogue among various body parts as “a hoax,” and a critic called the play “the greatest three-act hoax of the century.”

This production is more professional than the first, with trapezoid costumes designed by Sonia Delaunay, 37, based on Cubist images, which trap the actors between sheets of thick cardboard, restricting their movements.

Le Coeur a gaz by Tristan Tzara

This becomes a problem when Dada writer Andre Breton, 27, Tzara’s nemesis in the Dada movement, storms the stage in a fit of rage, attacking the trapped actors with his walking stick. Cardboard-clad actors are toppling over like flies. Breton manages to break one man’s arm before he returns to his seat. The audience is shouting at Breton and Tzara calls in the police.

The brawl continues outside, leaving the theatre’s manager, looking at the rows of ripped seats, to cry, “My lovely little theatre!”

Breton declares that tonight marks “the death of Dada.”

Poster for Soirée du coeur à barbe

To watch Man Ray’s three-minute film, Le Retour a la raison, click here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PNWJsr7hOU

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I will be talking about the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at 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.

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, Fourth of July, 1923, Melfalfa Park, Kokomo, Indiana

Attracting an estimated 200,000 people to rural Kokomo, this is the largest one-day event they’ve ever held anywhere in the U. S.

Downtown Kokomo celebration

The organization uses this park two or three times each week for initiation ceremonies and regular meetings, so locals are familiar with it. But people are coming on special trains from other states; the boys’ bands have been performing during their 300-mile trip from Ohio to arouse more interest.

Some nasty protestors manipulated road signs outside of town to divert would-be attendees to Bluffton, some 65 miles away, but that didn’t stop the crowds.

Even though the organizers have arranged for 250 pounds of coffee, thousands of cases of soda, hundreds of pounds of hamburger, six tons of beef, thousands of pies and seven wagonloads of watermelons, members have been advised to bring their own food as well.

There are pie-eating contests, a boxing exhibition, stilt walkers, and a fantastic parade of 10,000 men and 500 women, all in uniform, featuring American flags, floats made by the women and their daughters, and electric fiery crosses.

Emerging from a plane emblazoned with the organization’s letters is their new leader, failed Congressional candidate David Curtis Stephenson, 31, wearing purple robes and the traditional pointed white hood.

David Curtis Stephenson

Kokomo is celebrating being elevated from a “Province” to a “Realm,” and inaugurating Stephenson as the new Indiana Grand Dragon. The organization is proud to count the state’s governor, senators and half of Kokomo’s residents as members, The leaders decided to hold the rally here because they own the park—and some of them really like that “Kokomo” has two K’s in it.

After dark there will be a traditional firework display, including elaborate scenes showing members on horseback in full regalia, surrounded by fiery crosses, followed by a huge cross burning right here in the park.

Other Klan rallies are planned for the rest of the summer—later this month in state capital Topeka, Kansas, followed in August by industrial Steubenville, Ohio; strongly Catholic Carnegie, Pennsylvania; and little Perth Amboy, New Jersey.

Poster for rally in Kokomo, Indiana

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

In the fall I will be talking about the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at 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.

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