Sylvia Beach, far right, with her copains at the fun fair, left to right: poets Valery Larbaud and Leon-Paul Fargue; Marie Monnier Becat and her sister Adrienne Monnier
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.
Two days ago, the London Times newspaper, under the headline, “The Mount Everest Tragedy: Message from the King,” carried the contents of a letter that King George V, 59, wrote to the Mount Everest Committee.
His Majesty wanted to convey “an expression of his sincere sympathy” to the families and to the committee about the tragic deaths of “two gallant explorers,” George Mallory, who would have turned 38 last week, and Andrew Irvine, 22. They have not been seen on the mountain since 8 June 1924.
King George V
*****
Reading the confirmation in the Times that his Cambridge University friend, George Mallory, has been lost forever on Mount Everest, Edward Morgan Forster, 45, remembers the beautiful young man he and many of his Bloomsbury friends were so attracted to many years ago. Forster tried to capture some of Mallory’s allure in the character of George Emerson in his 1908 novel, A Room with a View.
George Leigh Mallory by Duncan Grant
Since his next novel, Howard’s End, came out two years later, Forster has had a difficult time completing any work worth publishing. Last year, his friends Virginia, 42, and Leonard Woolf, 43, did bring out a piece of his travel writing, Pharos and Pharillon (A Novelist’s Sketchbook of Alexandria Through the Ages), which made a small profit.
Morgan started a major fictional work before the Great War and had been struggling to finish it ever since. A Passage to India has finally been published, just three weeks ago, by Edward Arnold. In the initial drafts he had emphasized a much stronger sexual attraction between the two main characters, but he toned that down when he returned to the manuscript a few years ago.
Forster has been receiving a good response from his friends about the novel. Many have asked him whether the heroine was actually attacked in the Marabar Caves. One friend has written asking Forster to explain not just what happened but why the novelist chose to make the scene so ambiguous in the novel.
Today, Morgan writes back to him,
In the cave it is either a man, or the supernatural, or an illusion…And even if I know! My writing mind therefore is a blur here —i. e., I will it to remain a blur, and to be uncertain, as I am of many facts in daily life.”
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.
Time magazine cover, June 23, featuring KKK Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans
In an article headlined, “Ku Klux Klan Kleveland Konvention,” Time magazine reports that the Republican Party National Convention in Cleveland—which ended two weeks ago after taking only three days to re-nominate President Calvin Coolidge, 52—voted down a party platform which would have condemned organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.
Tomorrow, the Democratic Party National Convention begins in Madison Square Garden, New York City. Delegates hope to accomplish their business within a similar time frame.
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.
He’s only been here 10 minutes and already he feels at home.
Playwright Sean O’Casey, 44, is so pleased to be invited by the co-founder and director of the AbbeyTheatre, Lady Augusta Gregory, 72, to spend time here at her home, Coole Park. As he anticipated, the food is lovely and the conversation is about books and theatre and Ireland.
Coole Park house
Lady Gregory met O’Casey at the Athenry train station, and they took a third-class carriage to nearby Gort, where the Coole “side car” picked them up. Upon arriving at the house, Augusta said to him,
One and twenty welcomes, Sean, to the House of Coole.”
As she has with so many who have spent summers at Coole before him—fellow Abbey founder WilliamButlerYeats, about to turn 59; playwright and politician DouglasHyde, 64; the late writer JohnMillingtonSynge—Augusta sensed that Sean needs extra care for his digestion and his eyesight.
Two of his plays have premiered at the Abbey, The Shadow of a Gunman last year, and Junoandthe Paycock just this March. Both have been such big hits for the theatre that they have already been repeated.
LadyGregory is hoping that, with a bit of rest out here away from Dublin, O’Casey can maybe come up with a third tragi-comedy about Dublin tenement life, to round out a trilogy of plays about the horrible effects of the Irish War for Independence and the Civil War.
O’Casey is hoping that he can have a much-needed rest, walk down by the lake to see the “mysterious and beautiful” swans Yeats wrote about, and join his predecessors in carving his initials into her copper beech “Autograph Tree.”
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 was the much-anticipated premier of the ballet Mercure: Plastic Poses in Three Tableaux, as part of the first season of Soirees de Paris, produced by patron of the arts Count Etienne de Beaumont, 40, and Russian choreographer Leonide Massine, 27.
La Cigale Theatre
De Beaumont’s coup was to reunite for the first time most of the talent that produced the revolutionary ballet Parade seven years ago. He already had Massine, so he commissioned Erik Satie, 58, to write the music, and Pablo Picasso, 42, to design the sets and costumes. Left out was the fourth talent from the previous production, writer Jean Cocteau, 34.
Costume for Parade by Pablo Picasso
The others have resented how much credit Cocteau has taken for the success of Parade. The extremely moral Satie was particularly upset about Cocteau introducing two young composers to opium in Monte Carlo—and said so in print.
Self-portrait by Jean Cocteau
So instead of inviting him to collaborate, they decided to get back at Cocteau by making a ballet about the Roman god Mercury, Cocteau’s favorite character, and having Massine dance Mercury as a scheming, scenery chewing bombast. They also parodied Cocteau in the second tableaux, “Characters of the Three Graces,” which features three men in drag with huge papier-mache breasts sharing a tub together.
Satie has felt that Massine rushed him on the music, and what was planned as an eight-minute piece has now doubled in length.
Mercure score by Erik Satie
At the premier last night, all of cultural Paris was there, including Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, 32, who should have been on stage dancing. She’s been with Soirees de Paris since it started in mid-May and was supposed to perform in Mercure.
But Lydia couldn’t take it anymore. She’s been fighting with de Beaumont, Massine, the lighting designer and the rest of the company. Lydia thinks all this Surreal twaddle is ridiculous. She drew her line at performing with the three men in drag in what she called this “stupid fake,” and stormed out of rehearsal just a few days ago.
There was a lot of tension in the theatre last night, mostly pitting supporters of Satie against the Surrealist fans of Picasso, led by writer Andre Breton, 28, who kept chanting,
Bravo Picasso! Down with Satie!”
until the performance had to be temporarily stopped. Someone cried out from the crowd,
Only Picasso lives, down with Beaumont’s garçons and the whole Soirées de Paris!” ”
Andre Breton
The Satie supporters yelled insults up at Picasso’s box in the theatre.
Police arrived. One of the Surrealist Picasso supporters jumped on the stage and shouted,
In the name of God, down with the cops!”
who then dragged him off.
When things calmed down, the ballet continued.
Today, the consensus seems to be that Picasso’s designs were the real star of the show, and that, artistically, there really wasn’t much to be upset about.
*****
On the other side of town, ex-patriate Irish novelist James Joyce, 42, is recuperating from surgery, yet again, with bandaged eyes in this clinic. Joyce notes that he set his novel, Ulysses, published two years ago, on this date in 1904. He writes in his notebook,
Today 16 of June 1924. Twenty years after. Will anybody remember this date?”
Ulysses by James Joyce
N. B.: Thanks to Marie-Chantal Douine for help in identifying locations in Paris.
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.
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.
When they came to Paris at the beginning of this year, New Jersey pediatrician William Carlos Williams, 40, and his wife Flossie, 33, felt this would be the way to extend his career as a novelist and poet, and perhaps move permanently to Europe.
Le Dome Café on Boulevard du Montparnasse
Now that they are packing to sail back to the States tomorrow, they are thinking that Bill being a pediatrician at Passaic General Hospital in New Jersey might be a better choice.
Passaic General Hospital
In many ways, they did exactly what they were planning to do. Williams reunited with old American friends like poet Ezra Pound, 38, whom Bill knew back at University of Pennsylvania. Ezra was the one who nagged Williams to come to Paris in the first place. They also spent a lot of time with writer Robert McAlmon, 29, who had started Contact magazine with Williams back in Greenwich Village. Here he has started Contact Press to publish all the hot new writers trying to break through on the Left Bank.
Thanks to McAlmon, Bill and Flossie have met all the right literary people. They hung out at “Sylvia’s,” the Shakespeare and Company bookstore run by fellow New Jersey-ian Sylvia Beach, 37. They went to parties with the avant garde Irish novelist Sylvia had dared to publish, James Joyce, 42, and listened to his drunken singing at parties late into the night.
Dr. William Carlos Williams
The Williamses went to the Riviera with McAlmon and then toured around Europe for three months before coming back here in May.
Williams’ novel, called, really, The Great American Novel, published by another small company, the Three Mountains Press owned by Bill Bird, 36, was reviewed in the Paris Herald by noted British writer and editor Ford Madox Ford, 50. Ford compared Williams’ work unfavorably to the first book of stories, in our time, by the hottest American writer on the Left Bank, Ernest Hemingway, 24. But still—publicity!
The Great American Novel by William Carlos Williams
And Williams was even quoted in an article in Publisher’s Weekly about Sylvia’s influence on literature. He said she created
a sanctuary for all sorts of writers.…the younger Americans found [her shop] a veritable home.”
What didn’t Williams do?! For one thing, he hardly worked at all on his next book, In the American Grain, although he optimistically dragged the manuscript with him on all their travels.
Williams came here so hopeful. But many times, with many of these literary people—he did find the women much more interesting than the men—he just didn’t feel…comfortable. And despite what he had heard before he arrived, the food and the conversation weren’t always that great.
This discontent might be why, just a few weeks ago, when Bill and Flossie finally went to tea with the doyenne of the ex-pat crowd, Gertrude Stein, 50, and her partner Alice B. Toklas, 47, upon reading some of her work he told her to burn everything that wasn’t any good. Stein, aghast, pointed out to him that, being a doctor, perhaps writing wasn’t his “metier.” He asked her,
Dr. Stein, are you sure that writing is your metier?”
and knows he will never be invited back to rue de Fleurus again.
On the plus side, he did perform a circumcision, on Jack, the seven-month-old son of Hemingway and his wife Hadley, 32. Jack’s Mom calls him “Bumby” because he looks like a teddy bear.
Ernest and Jack “Bumby” Hemingway
When they were in Austria in April, Bill wrote to a friend in the States,
I have heavy bones. I am afraid—there is little here for me…only America remains where at least I was born.’”
Later this month I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York 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.
Noel Odell, 33, oxygen officer for the third British Mount Everest Expedition, has just reached this ridge. His job is to prepare camp for two of his fellow mountaineers, George Mallory, 37, and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, 23, who are making the team’s third attempt to be the first to scale the peak, now just hundreds of meters away.
The third British Mount Everest Expedition
Noel can see clearly the summit of the ridge way up ahead, and a tiny figure moving toward the Step. Probably George, the more experienced Everest climber. Another figure, Sandy, follows him as George reaches the Second Step.
Then a cloud comes over and obscures Noel’s view. When the cloud passes by, they’re gone.
Later this month I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York 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.
Inspired by 19th century painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, American ex-pat artist Man Ray, 33, photographed his partner, known as Kiki of Montparnasse (actually Alice Prin, 22), and then painted f-holes on her back on one of the prints. In French slang, “le violon d Ingres” means an amateur hobby. The picture appears in this month’s special issue of Litterature magazine, edited by Andre Breton, 28.
Later this month I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York 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.
The youngest ever graduate of the University of Michigan (then age 17), currently a constitutional history student at the University of Chicago Law School, Richard Loeb, 18—quickly followed by his best friend, University of Chicago Phi Beta Kappa graduate, who speaks five languages fluently, an ornithologist with an offer from Harvard Law School, Nathan Leopold, 19—confesses to having brutally murdered Loeb’s second cousin, Bobby Franks, 14, nine days ago.
Richard Loeb, Nathan Leopold, and onlookers
For fun. To see what it felt like. To plan and carry out the perfect crime. To prove that they were superior human beings—Ubermenschen—above the law.
Leopold and Loeb also confess that they were disappointed that it didn’t feel like much. They played cards after.
Next month I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York 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.
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