About six weeks in to his third American lecture tour, Irish poet William Butler Yeats, 54, is in Chicago, at a banquet given in his honor by Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, and its founder-editor, Harriet Monroe, 59.
Yesterday, the Chicago Tribune interviewed him over the phone when the reporter woke him in his hotel room after midnight. Yeats was quoted as saying,
I like Chicago, but Prohibition’s hell, isn’t it?”
The Yeatses in the Chicago Tribune
Monroe had come right over to his room with
a flagon of…surcease for your sorrow…I read in the Tribune this morning of your unpreparedness.”
Harriet Monroe
Yeats’ talk at the banquet on “Poetic Drama” goes well. Arguing for smaller theatre companies and more intimate venues, he tells the crowd,
I am trying to create a form of poetical drama played by one company, all of whom could ride in one taxicab and carry their stage properties on the roof.”
Afterwards, back at the Auditorium Hotel, a group of reporters wake Yeats up and bring him down to their party in one of the private dining rooms. Willie perks up as soon as they offer him a glass of whiskey. And a second. And a third. His wife, Georgie, 27, soon shows up to drag him back to bed. On his way out, Yeats proclaims to the group,
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree…”
“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gpysyteacher.com.
In 2020 I will be talking about writers’ salons before and after the Great War in Ireland, England, France and America in the University of Pittsburgh’s Osher Lifelong Learning program.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins and his relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle 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.
SuchFriends Blog 