'…and say my glory was I had such friends.' — WB Yeats
The Bloomsbury Group
Virginia Woolf and her friends…
Vanessa Bell, painter
Lytton Strachey, biographer, critic
Duncan Grant, painter
Leonard Woolf, editor, critic, political writer
Clive Bell, art critic
Roger Fry, painter, art critic
John Maynard Keynes, economist
When he moved here almost two years ago, to have psychoanalytic treatment from world-renowned doctor Sigmund Freud, 66, American publisher Scofield Thayer, 33, decided he could still oversee his literary magazine in the States, The Dial, from afar.
Scofield Thayer
To do so he has depended on unofficial “agents” in European capitals who are on the lookout for talent, such as the American ex-pat poets Ezra Pound, 37, in Paris and T. S. Eliot, 34, in London.
Also in the UK, Thayer has relied on a British writer, Raymond Mortimer, about to turn 28, who has a large circle of literary friends. Through the aristocratic hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, 49, Mortimer has met many writers, including novelist Virginia Woolf, 41.
Raymond Mortimer
Recently Mortimer told Thayer that he was expecting to get a short story from Woolf, titled “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” She doesn’t want it to be published in Britain,
probably because she has done a portrait of someone in it, at least that is my guess,”
Mortimer writes. Maybe Ottoline?!
Virginia Woolf, taken by Ottoline Morrell
Thayer has received the story, with Mortimer’s note,
I enclose Mrs. Woolf’s story (very badly typed, as she said)…I think it is most exquisite, & hope you will like it. I am coming to think her the best writer we have.”
After reading it, Thayer totally agrees. Today he sends the story on to the New York office of TheDial so they can calculate and issue the correct payment. Probably about £60. “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” should appear in the magazine this summer.
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.
They all make fun of her. The group of writers and artists who live in Bloomsbury have not been welcoming to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, 31, current lover of their friend, economist John Maynard Keynes, 39.
Lydia Lopokova
Novelist Virginia Woolf, 41, has mocked Lydia’s broken English, in a letter to her sister, painter Vanessa Bell, 43:
Maynar like your article so much, Leonar,”
referring to Virginia’s husband Leonard, 42.
Lydia has been annoying Vanessa by stopping by on Sunday afternoons just to chat. Vanessa doesn’t have time to chat. She has two sons, ages 15 and 12; an estranged husband; and her partner, Duncan Grant, 38, to look after.
Vanessa has painted a not particularly flattering portrait of Lydia, which is included with Vanessa’s work in this month’s London Group Show. She knows that Duncan is also working on one.
At least Vanessa got good reviews for the show. Her other Bloomsbury friend, art critic Roger Fry, 56, has a one-man show at the Independent Gallery and his portrait of Lydia has been chastised. The London Observer criticized its “cloying prettiness.”
Vanessa did the portrait of Lydia so Maynard would buy it, but he refused. Vanessa feels that Maynard has never really liked her painting.
Lydia Lopokova by Duncan Grant
N.B.: Duncan Grant’s portrait of Lydia Lopokova was bequeathed to King’s College, Cambridge, by John Maynard Keynes in his will. The whereabouts of the other two portraits are unknown.
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.
Last year, English art critic Clive Bell, 41, published an influential essay, “Since Cezanne,” which discussed Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, also 41:
…Picasso is a born chef d’ecole. His is one of the most inventive minds in Europe…His career has been a series of discoveries, each of which he has rapidly developed.
A highly original and extremely happy conception enters his head, suggested probably by some odd thing he has seen. Forthwith he sets himself to analyze it and disentangle those principles that account for its peculiar happiness. He proceeds by experiment, applying his hypothesis in the most unlikely place.”
Today, Picasso’s first solo show in the United States, “Original Drawings by Pablo Picasso,” opens here, put on by the Arts Club of Chicago in the galleries they lease from the Art Institute.
Catalog for “Original Drawings by Pablo Picasso”
Picasso’s paintings have been exhibited in the States before, as part of the 1913 Armory Show, which opened in New York City but then toured here at the Art Institute, and moved on to Boston. Two years ago the Arts Club included two of his paintings in a group show.
This time, from his home in Paris, Picasso has given specific instructions to the organizers about how to display the 53 original drawings, ranging from 1907 to just last year.
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.
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.
Boni and Liveright has taken an ad in the New York Tribune to promote one of the books they are most proud of publishing late last year, The Waste Land, by American poet living in London, Thomas Stearns Eliot, 34.
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
When it was published last month, Boni and Liveright’s ad said,
The contract for The Waste Land, Mr. Eliot’s longest and most significant poem, which we have just published, was signed in Paris on New Year’s Eve and was witnessed by Ezra Pound and James Joyce. A good time was had by one and all—even the publisher.”
Not strictly true; but they did all have dinner together in Paris.
This month, the copy reads:
…probably the most discussed poem that has been written since Byron’s Don Juan…[CliveBell], the distinguished English writer, [has called Eliot] the most considerable poet writing in English.”
However, back in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London, Clive, 41, has told his mistress, writer Mary Hutchinson, 33, that he is sure Eliot uses violet face powder to make him look “more cadaverous.”
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.
English novelist Virginia Woolf, 40, has just come down to breakfast, when her maid gives her some startling news,
Mrs. Murry’s dead! It says so in the paper,”
exclaims Nellie Boxall, 31.
Confused, Virginia reads the obituary in the Times, which describes her friend, New Zealand-born Katherine Mansfield, 34, as having “A career of great literary promise…[Her] witty and penetrating novel reviews…A severe shock to her friends.”
Katherine Mansfield
This is definitely a severe shock to Virginia. Last year she turned down Katherine’s invitation to visit her in France, and last fall passed up an opportunity to see Katherine when she was visiting London. She always thought that she’d see her again this summer.
Katherine’s book, Prelude, was one of the first Virginia and her husband Leonard, 41, published when they started their Hogarth Press about five years ago.
More deeply, Virginia is feeling the loss of one of the few writers she felt truly close to. Katherine won’t be there to read what Virginia writes. Her rival is gone.
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.
Parties given by the friends who live in the Bloomsbury section of London are always great. And this one is no exception.
46 Gordon Square
The host, economist John Maynard Keynes, 39, is mostly occupied by his work in Cambridge and the City of London, traveling to Germany to advise the government there, taking over the failing Liberal magazine The Nation and Athenaeum and working out the economic theory for his next book, A Tract on Monetary Reform.
So it’s time to throw a party! Let’s celebrate “Twelfth Night,” the traditional end to the Christmas season.
Over in the corner English novelist Virginia Woolf, 40, who used to live in Bloomsbury but is now in Richmond with her husband, Leonard, 42, is deep in conversation with German-British painter Walter Sickert, 62. He has entertained the crowd with a one-man performance of Hamlet.
Walter Sickert
On the other side of the room is writer and suffragist Marjorie Strachey, 40. Her brother Lytton, 42, was with Leonard and Maynard in the secretive group at Cambridge, The Apostles. Marjorie has been reciting obscene versions of children’s nursery rhymes to the assembled partygoers.
But the star of the evening is Maynard’s lover, Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, 31, currently in stressful rehearsals for a ballet she is producing and appearing in as part of a revue, You’ll Be Surprised, with her choreographer and dancing partner, Leonide Massine, 26, in Covent Garden later this month. Tonight, Lydia has performed a dance that impressed everyone.
Lydia Lopokova
Keynes has given Lydia the ground floor apartment in #41, just a few doors away. Lydia understands that his schedule is busy, but she often is lonely and depressed because Maynard’s Bloomsbury friends haven’t really welcomed her into their group. This party is one of the first times she has felt a bit more accepted.
However, Lydia and Maynard are about to have their first real fight. If he’s too busy to spend time with her, how come he’s planning to spend the Easter holiday in North Africa with his other lover, another Apostle, English writer Sebastian Sprott, 25?!
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.
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.
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 Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Virginia Woolf, 40, is looking forward to dinner tonight with her new friend, fellow author Vita Sackville-West, 30, at Vita’s posh home in Belgravia.
Virginia and her husband Leonard, 42, met the Nicholsons—Vita and her husband Sir Harold Nicholson, 36—just a few days ago at a party hosted by Virginia’s brother-in-law, art critic Clive Bell, 41, at his Gordon Square house.
46 Gordon Square
Clive had arranged the get-together specifically so the two couples could meet. Clive had passed on to Virginia Vita’s comment that she feels Woolf is the best female writer in England. This from an already established British writer is encouraging to Virginia, who just published her third novel, Jacob’s Room, this time with the Woolfs’ own Hogarth Press.
After their meeting, Virginia noted in her diary,
the lovely gifted aristocratic Sackville West…is a grenadier; hard, handsome, manly, inclined to a double chin. She is a pronounced Sapphist and [Vita] may, thinks [English composer] Ethel Sands, have an eye on me, old though I am.”
*****
Meanwhile. A bit less than an hour away on the District Line, Vita has been telling Harold how impressed she is by Virginia:
I’ve rarely taken such a fancy to anyone…I have quite lost my heart…I simply adore Virginia…She is both detached and human, silent till she wants to say something and then says it supremely well. She dresses quite atrociously.”
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.
SuchFriends Blog 