“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, April 28, 1923, Empire Stadium, Wembley, London; Yankee Stadium, the Bronx, New York City, New York

This is “a bloody shambles,” in the words of one spectator.

The annual Football Association Challenge Cup—the FA Cup—has been drawing smaller crowds ever since the end of the Great War.

So the Association thought they could hold this year’s final in the new stadium built for next year’s British Empire Exhibition on this site in Wembley. The stadium has been completed ahead of schedule, in only 300 days, just four days before this match, and it holds 125,000. That should be enough capacity. They won’t have to issue advance tickets.

FA Cup program

Boy, were they wrong.

Unusually beautiful weather and the fact that one of the London home teams is playing—West Ham United—combine to bring out over 115,000 local fans. And 5,000 or more supporters of the other side, Bolton Wanderers, take the train from Lancashire. Five more rent a plane and fly in from Manchester.

The gates open at 11:30 a. m. as planned and everything goes smoothly until around 1 p. m. when the crowd starts getting larger.

The roads surrounding the stadium are so filled, the Bolton team players get off their coach and walk the last mile.

The officials consider canceling the match but realize they will then have an angry crowd to deal with. At 1:45 p. m. they decide to close the gates, but after about a half hour of waiting, almost 75,000 fans left outside force their way in. Thousands in the lower tiers spill out onto the pitch.

At 2:45 p. m. King George V, 57, arrives, prepared to present the winning trophy at the end of the game. The crowd breaks into God Save the King and calms down.

King George V

The players finally enter the grounds a bit after 3 p.m. and try to help the police get the spectators off the field.

The local police send out calls for mounted police assistance and here comes off-duty Police Constable George Scorey, 40, astride Billy, a light grey horse. Scorey is concerned he won’t be able to disperse the crowd, but Billy comes to the rescue,

easing them back with his nose and tail until we got a goal-line cleared…He seemed to understand what was required of him,”

says Scorey. The game starts about 45 minutes late.

Billy helping with crowd control

About 1,000 people are injured, including two policemen; more than 20 are taken to hospital.

The police do their job and get the situation under control. The FA—not so much. They will have to refund money to those who were stuck outside.

Bolton beats West Ham, 2 nil. Bolton supporters celebrate in central London, jamming traffic around Piccadilly Circus.

*****

Ten days before, in New York City, at precisely 3 p. m., conductor John Philip Sousa, 68, marches the Seventh “Silk Stocking” Regiment Band, playing The Star-Spangled Banner, on to the brand new field at Yankee Stadium for baseball’s opening day.

John Philip Sousa

The musicians are followed by politicians and players from the Boston and New York teams; Yankee star Babe Ruth, 28, is presented with an over-sized bat. New York Governor Al Smith, 49, throws out the first ball and lands it right in the center of the catcher’s mitt.

Opening day at Yankee Stadium

For the past 10 years the Yankees have been playing at the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan, but they were just leasing that space from their rivals, the New York Giants. Things came to a head last year when the two teams faced each other in the World Series and all the games had to be played there. The Giants won.

Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert, 55, had been looking for a new home for his team for years, and finally decided he would build and pay for it himself. Construction was finished in less than a year, and everything smells like new paint.

Babe Ruth and Jacob Ruppert

Baseball stadiums typically hold about 30,000 spectators; this one holds almost twice that. Today they announce attendance of 60,000, a new major league baseball record. Ruppert is betting that New York City can support three teams—Yankees, Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Ruth, who the Yankees bought from the Boston Red Sox three years ago, hits the first home run in the stadium, a three-run homer to the right field stands.

New York World sportswriter Heywood Broun, 34, quotes Ruth as dubbing the new Yankees home, “Some ball yard.”

Fred Lieb, 35, of the New York Evening Telegram calls it “The House That Ruth Built.”

The Yankees beat the Red Sox 4 to 1.

Yankee Stadium opening day program

To see why the Wembley game is known as the “White Horse Final,” click here.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoMS8Q4XXBo

To see opening day at Yankee Stadium, click here.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZc3_-3cY28

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 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 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.

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

Lying in her sickbed, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, 31, knows she is luckier than she has ever been.

Millay spent the last two years in Paris and rural England, supporting herself with free-lance writing assignments. She thought that, when she came back to New York City at the beginning of the year, her stomach problems would go away once she stopped eating all that rich French food.

But her internal ailments are sometimes worse, and her friends all agree that she looks like hell.

Since her return, Millay has been living at 156 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village in an apartment owned by a wealthy woman she met in England, Esther Sayles Root, 28, who lives upstairs and has been taking care of Millay. Root has also been taking care of Millay’s friend, top Manhattan columnist Franklin Pierce Adams (FPA), 41, who taunts his wife by mentioning his affairs—including Esther—in his column frequently.

156 Waverly Place

Recently, Esther convinced Edna to come up here for a country weekend, with some of their artsy friends from the Village.

Esther Sayles Root

Playing charades during a party one night, Millay was teamed up with one of the neighbors, rich Dutch businessman—and attractive widower—Eugen Boissevain, 43. The two were supposed to act out a young couple falling in love. Everyone in the room could tell that neither of them was acting.

Eugen Boissevain

At the end of the weekend, Esther went back to the Village and Edna moved in here with Eugen, his chauffeured car and house servants.

Boissevain is taking such good care of Millay. He personally drives her into the city when she has a doctor’s appointment, and has his servants wait on her here at home.

Overall, despite her persistent stomach pain, Millay feels that she is on the verge of something bigger and better.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 are available 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 summer I will be talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in 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.ukin 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, March 10, 1923, Time magazine, New York City, New York

Ohioan Sherwood Anderson, 46, had his fourth novel, Many Marriages, published last month. His first appeared seven years ago, around the time he embarked on a second marriage, to sculptor Tennessee Mitchell, now 49.

Many Marriages by Sherwood Anderson

The review in the New York Herald, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 26, currently working on his third novel, was positive. In “Sherwood Anderson on the Marriage Question,” Fitzgerald said he thinks Many Marriages is Anderson’s best work.

Henry Seidel Canby, 44, in the New York Evening Post declares,

if we are to have an American Thomas Hardy, [Sherwood Anderson] is the man.”

Those leading crusades against “dirty books” are not as impressed. Because Anderson’s work deals with sexual freedom, they have linked it with other contemporary novels such as Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence, 37, which they have tried to ban.

However, today’s issue of Time magazine points out that when Many Marriages was serialized in a magazine, there was resounding praise. Now that it is a hardback book, many find it boring—including Edmund Wilson, 27, in The Dial; Burton Rascoe, 30, in the New York Tribune; and the dean of Manhattan columnists, FPA [Franklin Pierce Adams], 41, in the New York World.

Burton Rascoe by Gene Markey

But Sherwood is pleased with a complimentary letter he has received from his mentor and friend in Paris, American ex-pat writer Gertrude Stein, 49, who likes Many Marriages.

Gertrude Stein

Stein has praised him privately and in print before, including her recent piece in The Little Review, “Idem the Same:  A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson,” which says, in the section titled, “A Very Valentine,”:

Very fine is my valentine.

Very fine and very mine.

Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine.

Very fine is my valentine and mine, very fine very mine and mine is my valentine.”

To hear Gertrude Stein read the complete poem, click here.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 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 summer I will be talking about Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in 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.

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, March 3, 1923, The Saturday Evening Post, New York City, New York

Another poem by free-lance writer Dorothy Parker, 29, appears in the Saturday Evening Post:

Saturday Evening Post, March 3

“Song of the Wilderness”

By Dorothy Parker

We’ll go out to the open spaces,

Break the web of the morning mist,

Feel the wind on our upflung faces.

[This, of course, is if you insist.]

We’ll go out in the golden season,

Brave-eyed, gaze at the sun o’erhead.

[Can’t you listen, my love, to reason?

Don’t you know that my nose gets red?]

Where the water falls, always louder,

Deep we’ll dive, in the chuckling foam.

[I’ll go big without rouge and powder!

Why on earth don’t you leave me home?]

We’ll go out where the winds go playing,

Roam the ways of the brilliant West.

[I was never designed for straying;

In a taxi I’m at my best.]

Minds blown clean of the thoughts that rankle,

Far we’ll stray where the grasses swirl.

[I’ll be certain to turn my ankle;

Can’t you dig up another girl?]

We’ll go out where the light comes falling—

Bars of amber and rose and green.

[Go, my love, if the West is calling!

Leave me home with a magazine.]

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 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 summer I will be talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in 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.

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 February, 1923, East 40th Street, New York City, New York

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 3^rd 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 36^th Street and 11^th 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.

Newsstand price is 15 cents.

First issue of Time magazine

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 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 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.

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”: You Didn’t Get What You Really Wanted for Christmas?!

Oh no! All those bookish friends of yours couldn’t figure out that what you were really hankering for was “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, Volumes I through III covering 1920 through 1922!

“Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s—Volume I, 1920

Easily available in print or e-book format on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. However, if you prefer signed copies, wander on over to Riverstone Books on Forbes Avenue in Squirrel Hill. Or contact me directly at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

The reason you are so keen to get your hands on all three volumes of “Such Friends” is clear from what you’ve heard people saying about it:

My wife and I were reading your Such Friends…out loud to each other and laughing a lot.”

–Cliff, Osher Lifelong Learning friend

Everyone is reading “Such Friends”:

Donnelly’s clever day-by-day organization allows her to range widely among many artists while her use of the present tense creates a sense of immediacy—’you are there.’ This book will provide great pleasure to anyone interested in figures of Modernism and of Twenties popular culture:  Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Woolf, Yeats, Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Parker, Benchley, et al.”

—another Kathleen, Facebook friend

Here’s an example of my clever organization:

Sample pages from “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s

Your lovely book arrived yesterday and I’ve already devoured most of it. It’s a very clever way of dealing with so many literary giants in…their most important years. Although ideal for a popular audience there is much that I did not know (and was delighted to learn) even though I spent a wasted youth and much of my dotage studying most of them.”

—Joseph, Australian friend

And my previous offer still stands:  If you are anywhere near a Pittsburgh Regional Transit bus route, I will hand-deliver your signed copies. Get in touch! kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Next month I will be talking about The Literary 1920s in Paris and New York City at the Osher 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.

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-January, corner of Sixth Avenue and West 57th Street, New York City, New York

Free-lance writer Dorothy Parker, 29, is worrying about how to handle the regular book club that she is hosting this evening here at her apartment.

Sixth Avenue and West 57^th Street

They all will have heard; she lunches at the Algonquin Hotel most days with one of the regulars, New York Times reporter Jane Grant, 30, and her husband American Legion Weekly editor Harold Ross, also 30. Parker knows the writers who congregate there have been spreading rumors and trying to figure out why she did it.

Dottie is thinking it will be best to take the direct approach. She’ll greet each guest saying,

I slashed my wrists.”

That should get over some of the awkwardness.

That Sunday she had arrived back here at her apartment feeling really hungry. She called down and ordered delivery from that vile—but convenient—restaurant downstairs, the Swiss Alps.

When she went into the bathroom Parker saw the razor left behind by her estranged husband Edwin Pond Parker III, 29, when he took off to his family back in Connecticut last summer. She hadn’t noticed it before.

Parker took the blade and cut along the vein in her left wrist. Blood spurted all over the room. Her hand was so slippery she had a hard time slitting the other wrist.

And then the delivery boy arrived with dinner.

Call a doctor!”

Dottie shouted. The ambulance took her to Presbyterian Hospital.

Some of her friends’ comments around the lunch table have gotten back to her.

Playwright Marc Connelly, 32, thinks it was “just a bit of theatre.” A few feel Parker was looking for attention, or to have Eddie come back. Jane Grant is suspicious of the fortuitous arrival of the delivery boy.

Dorothy and Eddie Parker

Her family and some of her lunch friends came to visit Parker in the hospital. Dean of the New York columnists Franklin Pierce Adams (FPA), 41, stayed away. Connelly came; as did theatre critic Alexander Woollcott, about to turn 36. Most important of all was the visit from her best friend, Life magazine editor Robert Benchley, 33.

Eddie didn’t even keep his razors sharp,”

she told him.

In the hospital Parker had tied pale blue ribbons into little bows around the scars on her wrists. For the bridge club tonight, Dottie decides to use black velvet ribbons.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 are available 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.

Next 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.

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, December 31, 1922/January 1, 1923, Ireland, England, France and America

At the end of the third year of the 1920s…

In Ireland, despite living in the middle of a Civil War, and the death of his 82-year-old father this past February, poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, 57, has had a pretty good year.

He is enjoying his appointment to the newly formed Senate of the Irish Free State, engineered by his friend and family doctor, Oliver St. John Gogarty, 44, who managed to get himself appointed as well.

Irish Free State Great Seal

Much to Yeats’ surprise, the position comes with an income, making it the first paying job he has ever had. The money, as he writes to a friend,

of which I knew nothing when I accepted, will compensate me somewhat for the chance of being burned or bombed. We are a fairly distinguished body, much more so than the lower house, and should get much government into our hands…How long our war is to last nobody knows. Some expect it to end this Xmas and some equally well informed expect another three years.”

Indeed, although Senator Yeats has been provided with an armed guard at his house, two bullets were shot through the front door of his family home in Merrion Square on Christmas Eve.

82 Merrion Square

A few blocks away the Abbey Theatre, which he helped to found 18 years ago, is still doing well under the director and co-founder Lady Augusta Gregory, 70. John Bull’s Other Island, a play by his fellow Dubliner, George Bernard Shaw, 66, is being performed, starring part-time actor and full-time civil servant Barry Fitzgerald, 34.

George Bernard Shaw

Yeats has been awarded an Honorary D. Litt. From Trinity College, Dublin. He writes to a friend that this makes him feel “that I have become a personage.”

*****

In England, at Monk’s House, their country home in East Sussex, the Woolfs, Virginia, 40, and Leonard, 42, are reviewing the state of their five-year-old publishing company, the Hogarth Press.

The road outside Monk’s House

They have added 37 members to the Press’ subscribers list and have agreed to publish a new poem by their friend, American ex-pat Thomas Stearns Eliot, 34, called The Waste Land early in the new year. Virginia has donated £50 to a fund to help “poor Tom,” as she calls him, who still has a full-time day job at Lloyds Bank. Eliot takes the £50, as well as the $2,000 Dial magazine prize he has been awarded in America and sets up a trust fund for himself and his wife Vivienne, 34.

The Hogarth Press has published six titles this year, the same as last. But most important to Virginia, one of them, Jacob’s Room, is her first novel not published by her hated stepbrother, Gerald Duckworth, 52. She can write as she pleases now.

Most interesting to Virginia at the end of this year is her newfound friendship with another successful English novelist, Vita Sackville-West, 30. The Woolfs have been spending lots of time with Vita and her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, 36.

Sir Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West

Virginia writes in her diary,

The human soul, it seems to me, orients itself afresh every now and then. It is doing so now…No one can see it whole, therefore. The best of us catch a glimpse of a nose, a shoulder, something turning away, always in movement.”

*****

In France, American ex-pats Gertrude Stein, 48, and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, 45, are vacationing in St. Remy. They came for a month and have decided to stay for the duration of the winter.

Stein is pleased that her Geography and Plays has recently been published by Four Seas in Boston. This eclectic collection of stories, poems, plays and language experiments that she has written over the past decade comes with an encouraging introduction by one of her American friends, established novelist Sherwood Anderson, 46. He says that Gertrude’s work is among the most important being written today, and lives “among the little housekeeping words, the swaggering bullying street-corner words, the honest working, money-saving words.”

Geography and Plays by Gertrude Stein

The volume also contains her 1913 poem, “Sacred Emily,” which includes a phrase Stein repeats often,

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”

Alice is thinking of using that as part of the logo for Gertrude’s personal stationery.

Stein and Alice are hopeful that Geography and Plays will help her blossoming reputation as a serious writer. For now, they are going to send some fruit to one of their new American friends back in Paris, foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, Ernest Hemingway, 23, and his lovely wife Hadley, 31.

*****

In America, free-lance writer Dorothy Parker, 29, has had a terrible year.

She did get her first short story published, “Such a Pretty Little Picture” in this month’s issue of Smart Set. After years of writing only the light verse that sells easily to New York’s magazines and newspapers, Parker is starting to branch out and stretch herself more.

However, her stockbroker husband of five years, Edwin Pond Parker II, also 29, finally packed up and moved back to his family in Connecticut.

Dorothy and Eddie Parker

Parker took up with a would-be playwright from Chicago, Charles MacArthur, 27, who started hanging around with her lunch friends from the Algonquin Hotel. He broke Dottie’s heart—and her spirit after he contributed only $30 to her abortion. And made himself scarce afterwards.

On Christmas day there were no fewer than eight new plays for Parker to review. She had to bundle up against the cold and spend the holiday racing around to see as much of each one as she could. And then go home to no one but her bird Onan (“because he spills his seed”) and her dog Woodrow Wilson.

New York Times Square Christmas Eve 1920s by J. A. Blackwell

As she gets ready to jump into 1923, Parker works on the type of short poem she has become known for:

One Perfect Rose

By Dorothy Parker

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet–
One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;
“My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.”
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

To hear Dorothy Parker read her poem, “One Perfect Rose,” click here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMnv1XNpuwM

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Early next year I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, and about The Literary 1920s in Paris and New York City at the Osher program 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 Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald 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, December, 1922, on the newsstands of America

When Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis, 37, was published a few months ago, it was met with mostly positive reactions.

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

H. L. Mencken, 42, literary critic for Smart Set, found the main character to be a symbol of everything wrong with American culture: 

It is not what [Babbitt] feels and aspires that moves him primarily; it is what the folks about him will think of him. His politics is communal politics, mob politics, herd politics; his religion is a public rite wholly without subjective significance.”

In The New Statesman, Rebecca West, just turned 30, declared that Babbitt “has that something extra, over and above, which makes the work of art.”

Fellow novelist H. G. Wells, 56, told Lewis that it is

one of the greatest novels I have read…I wish I could have written Babbitt.”

Somerset Maugham, 48, wrote to say that he felt that

it is a much better book than Main Steet.”

Edith Wharton, 60, to whom the novel is dedicated, wrote from one of her villas in France,

I wonder how much of it the American public, to whom irony seems to have become unintelligible as Chinese, will even remotely feel?…Thank you again for associating my name with a book I so warmly admire and applaud.”

But now in December, Edmund Wilson, 27, has his say in Vanity Fair, comparing Lewis unfavorably to Dickens and Twain, and stating that Lewis’ literary gift “is almost entirely for making people nasty.”

*****

Last month The Dial published “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot, 34, and in this month’s issue the publisher, Scofield Thayer, just turned 33, announces that Eliot is the second recipient of the magazine’s annual Dial Prize of $2,000.

In the same issue, Eliot has a piece about the death of English vaudeville star, Marie Lloyd, aged 52, which depressed Eliot terribly. In October, almost 100,000 mourners attended her funeral in London.

Marie Lloyd

This issue of The Dial also contains Edmund Wilson’s praise of “The Waste Land,” an in-depth piece about Eliot’s importance as a poet:  

He feels intensely and with distinction and speaks naturally in beautiful verse…The race of the poets—though grown rare—is not yet quite dead.”

Eliot is pleased with Wilson’s review, but unhappy that Wilson called his fellow ex-pat Ezra Pound, 37, an “imitator of [Eliot]…extremely ill-focused.” Eliot considers Pound to be the greatest living English-language poet.

*****

In The Nation this month, Dial editor Gilbert Seldes, 29, is also enamored of “The Waste Land,” comparing it to Ulysses by James Joyce, 40, published earlier this year: 

That ‘The Waste Land’ is, in a sense, the inversion and the complement of Ulysses is at least tenable. We have in Ulysses the poet defeated, turning outward, savoring the ugliness which is no longer transmutable into beauty, and, in the end, homeless. We have in ‘The Waste Land’ some indication of the inner life of such a poet. The contrast between the forms of these two works is not expressed in the recognition that one is among the longest and one among the shortest of works in its genre; the important thing is that in each the theme, once it is comprehended, is seen to have dictated the form.”

Eliot sends Seldes a nice note thanking him for the review.

*****

Outlook magazine, on the other hand, features “A Flapper’s Appeal to Parents,” asking parents and society as a whole to be more understanding of these dancing females who spend “a large amount of time in automobiles.”

*****

First described by American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, 26, the flapper grows up in his story in this month’s Metropolitan magazine, “Winter Dreams,” about a midwestern boy in love with a selfish rich girl, who marries someone all wrong for her. When writing the story, Fitzgerald cut some descriptions to save them for his third novel, which he is working on now.

Metropolitan, December

*****

The December Smart Set has the first short story by one of America’s most-published and most popular poets, Dorothy Parker, 29, whose “Such a Pretty Little Picture” describes a man living a monotonous life in the suburbs, just cutting his hedge. Similar to her best friend, fellow Algonquin Round Table member Robert Benchley, 33, who lives in Scarsdale with his wife and two sons.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Early next year I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, and about The Literary 1920s in Paris and New York City at the Osher 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.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”: This Year!

Regular readers of this blog are already tired of me going on about the benefits of “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, Volumes I through III, covering 1920 to 1922 [conveniently available at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book formats].

“Such Friends” volumes I through III

So I thought I’d turn this #shamelessselfpromotion posting over to the fans:

Such Friends: The Literary 1920s presents colourful, diary-like snippets, skillfully woven together, from the daily lives of writers, poets and artists of the Irish Literary Renaissance, the Bloomsbury Group, the Americans in Paris, and the Algonquin Round Table in New York.”

—Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith, “My Books of the Year,”

Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society, 1890-1914;

It’s a lot of fun skipping around to different dates and events to see what was going on at particular times during the year.”

                                                              —Jim, Irish theatre fan

Interior of Volume III

What a treasure-trove this work is. You make it seem alive. The gossip is fresh! These little stories humanize the great geniuses. Thanks for doing this work.”

                                                  —Janie B., Pittsburgh-New York fan

The people are fascinating, of course, and I love the way you’ve woven what else is happening around them into their stories. Love what you do! You find such fascinating goodies to share with the rest of us.”

                                                  —Anne, fellow Pittsburgh writer fan

I look forward to the gossip and insights you have curated about what was going on a century ago.”

                                                  —Hedda, Bloomsbury fan

Love your stuff. I inhale it like…wildflower smells!”

                                                 —Marie, Semester at Sea fan

You have such a nice way of making history feel closer to us—letting us know and care about these people.”

                                                 —Dr. Barry, Ohio academic fan

Such fun! This is eavesdropping across the past century.”

                                                 —Don, James Joyce fan

Thank you, fans! And my previous offer still holds. If you live on any Pittsburgh Regional Transit bus line, I will hand deliver your signed copies to you. Email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Happy holidays!

Fans reading “Such Friends,” Volume II

Early next year I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, and about The Literary 1920s in Paris and New York City at the Osher 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.

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