“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, late March, 1924, Hotel Unic, 59 Boulevard du Montparnasse, Paris

Robert McAlmon, 29, owner of the small publishing company the Contact Press, has just returned to Paris after a holiday in the south of France with some fellow Americans.

This is not his usual hotel. For the past few years that he’s lived in Paris, he has mostly stayed at the Hotel Foyot, about a 15-minute walk northeast around the Luxembourg Gardens.

Hotel Foyot

However, Sylvia Beach, just turned 37, proprietor of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop, the social center of the Left Bank on the rue de l’Odeon, has booked two of their mutual friends into the Foyot, close to her shop:  McAlmon’s British wife, novelist Bryher (Winifred Ellerman, 29); and her American lover poet HD (Hilda Doolittle, 37).

Hilda Doolittle and Bryher

McAlmon figures he’s better off here, out of their way.

He has already reserved a room at the Unic for his recent traveling companions, poet William Carlos Williams, 40, and his wife Flossie, 33. Williams and McAlmon founded Contact magazine when they were friends back in Greenwich Village. The Williamses are traveling around Europe and plan to come back to Paris in a couple of months.

Dr. William Carlos Williams

Williams went to the University of Pennsylvania with American ex-pat poet Ezra Pound, 38, who is planning to visit from his home in Italy.

While Pound and Williams were at Penn, they were both entranced by a tall redhead who met them while she was commuting to Bryn Mawr—Hilda Doolittle.

McAlmon is anticipating a lot of tension, but figures that, when Bryher and HD leave at the beginning of the summer, things will calm down a bit and he can spend time showing the Williams around Paris.

“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 Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, City Books on the North Side and 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 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.

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, 1924, Restaurant des Trianon, 5 Place de Rennes, corner of Boulevard du Montparnasse, Paris

Once again, everyone’s coming to Paris.

As they have since the beginning of the decade, Americans are still arriving in waves, motivated by three major changes:

• The Great War has made them much more global. Men who were stationed in Europe in 1917 and 1918 want to bring their new wives and girlfriends to the places where they served.

U. S. soldiers arriving in Paris

• The exchange rate is fantastic. Europe has been devastated so the dollar buys much more in Rome, Vienna and Paris. Including alcohol—not currently available back home thanks to Prohibition.
• The cruise companies have come up with a new fare, “Tourist Third,” which makes the trip affordable for almost everyone.

The American Way to Europe brochure

For Dr. William Carlos Williams, 40, and his wife Flossie, 32, all three of these apply. In addition to continual nagging by his old college buddy from the University of Pennsylvania, fellow poet Ezra Pound, 38. Pound helped Williams get his first book of poetry, The Tempers, published in London, and he has been entreating Williams to come to Paris ever since.

So the good doctor has taken a year off from his New Jersey medical practice, spent half of it working on The Great American Novel—no, really, that’s the title—and he and Flossie are going to spend the next three months traveling around Europe.

First stop—Paris.

In addition to Pound, Williams is reuniting with another old friend, Robert McAlmon, 28. They had produced a magazine together, Contact, back in Greenwich Village a few years ago. McAlmon lives here now and has started Contact Publishing, using money from his British-heiress wife, Bryher, 29, to publish the new writers and artists appearing on the Left Bank.

Since the Williams’ arrival a few days ago, McAlmon has booked them into the expensive hotel where he is currently staying, the Lutetia on Boulevard Raspail, and introduced them to some of the leading characters in the Paris literary scene. Williams was pleased to finally meet Sylvia Beach, 35, owner of the Shakespeare and Company English-language bookstore, with whom he has corresponded. A couple of years back, McAlmon had convinced Beach to carry Williams’ books of poetry, and Williams had bought a copy of Ulysses from her—the controversial novel by Irish ex-pat writer James Joyce, 41, which Sylvia published two years ago.

Tonight, McAlmon is hosting a party for Bill and Flossie here at Joyce’s favorite restaurant, the Trianon, so they can meet other Left Bank literati. The crowd nearly fills up half the restaurant. Beach is here with her partner, Adrienne Monnier, 31, who operates the French-language bookstore across the street from Shakespeare and Company. Another American ex-pat, artist Man Ray, 33, whom Williams had known a bit back in Greenwich Village, is here with his chess buddy, French painter Marcel Duchamp, 36.

Rue de Rennes

Joyce has had too much to drink and is starting to loudly sing Irish ditties. His frequent drinking partner McAlmon responds by belting out Negro spirituals and cowboy songs; someone else is singing the blues.

Williams is starting to feel uncomfortable with this crowd. McAlmon asks the guest of honor to make a speech, and Williams feels as if he makes a fool of himself.

Williams thinks both the food and the conversation are disappointing. And that maybe being a pediatrician in Passaic would not be such a bad life after all.

“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 Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, and 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.

Later next month I will be talking about early 20^th century supporters of the arts like McAlmon and Pound 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, June 29, 1923, inside and outside of Shakespeare and Company, 12 rue de l’Odeon, Paris

American ex-pat owner of this bookshop, Sylvia Beach, 36, is writing to her Dad, Rev. Sylvester Beach, 70, back home in New Jersey.

Rev. Sylvester Beach by Paul-Emile Becat

Sylvia updates him on all the Americans who have come to visit—former President Grover Cleveland’s daughter!—as well as the latest gossip from the Left Bank.

One of the most interesting Americans Sylvia has helped recently is pianist George Antheil, 22, also from New Jersey, and his Hungarian partner, Elizabeth “Boski” Markus, 20. On his recent successful concert tour of Germany, George met fellow composer Igor Stravinsky, 41, so George wanted to be sure to be in Paris to see the premier of Stravinsky’s latest ballet, Les Noces, earlier this month.

Sylvia has rented rooms on the mezzanine above her shop to the young couple for 300Fr a month (roughly $17), although she told George that he wouldn’t be able to get a piano in there. Antheil decided it was worth it to have Sylvia as his landlady, and he’ll compose without a piano. But he has been able to make use of one in the French bookshop across the street, La Maison des Amis de Les Livres, owned by Sylvia’s partner Adrienne Monnier, 31

Also helping support Antheil is one of the many American ex-pats who hang around the shop, writer and publisher Robert McAlmon, 28, from Kansas. He has given Sylvia £100 from his wealthy English wife Bryher, also 28, and £50 from his mother-in-law to put into a bank account, trusting Sylvia to distribute it to Antheil as needed.

Sylvia tells her Dad that Antheil’s father owns the Friendly Shoestore in Trenton, where the Beach family used to shop. And that George has developed a technique of climbing up her shop’s sign featuring William Shakespeare to crawl in through the second floor balcony window when he forgets his keys.

Shakespeare and Company

McAlmon has lost one of his drinking buddies for the summer. Irish novelist James Joyce, 41, recovering from eye and dental surgery, has taken his wife and daughter to London and then to Bognor in West Sussex. Sylvia writes to her Dad that the Joyces left Paris on June 16^th, which she and Joyce have dubbed “Bloomsday” because it is the date when the events in Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which Sylvia published last year, happen to the protagonist Leopold Bloom. She notes that Joyce’s son, Giorgio, 17, has been left behind in Paris to find the family a new apartment. And that she thinks Joyce picked the Bognor coast because there are rumored to be giants there that he wants to write about.

In Joyce’s absence, McAlmon has been out drinking with a visiting American, Sinclair Lewis, 38, from Minnesota. His hit novel from last year, Main Street, has just been made into a film by a new Hollywood studio called Warner Brothers.

Sinclair Lewis

In the Left Bank cafes Lewis has been a rather rowdy customer. Drunk one night in the Café du Dome he loudly announced that he is a better writer than France’s beloved Flaubert. Someone shouted back,

Sit down. You’re just a best seller!”

*****

Outside on rue de l’Odeon a new arrival in Paris is making his way up the street toward the theatre at the top.

Archibald MacLeish, 31, originally from Illinois, graduated from law school, taught law for a bit at Harvard, fought in the Great War, published a few collections of his poetry, and then secured a lucrative job at the Boston law firm Choate, Hall and Stewart. This summer, after three years at the company, he quit.

He and his wife, soprano Ada Hitchcock, 30, have moved to Paris so he can work on his poetry. Walking up this street, with Beach’s bookstore to the right, and Monnier’s to the left, MacLeish is enthralled by the magic he feels. Joyce was here last week. Gide was there yesterday. MacLeish can’t believe his luck.

Ada and Archibald MacLeish

“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, early May, 1921, Left Bank, Paris

Everyone’s coming to Paris…

American ex-patriate writer Robert McAlmon, 26, and his new British wife, Bryher, 26, have moved to Paris after visiting her wealthy family in London for their honeymoon.

Bryher

Bob is planning to use his wife’s inheritance, along with the allowance her family is giving him, to start a small publishing company, Contact Press, named after the Contact magazine he founded in New York late last year with a fellow poet.

When they first got to Paris, the McAlmons made a point of visiting the English-language bookstore, Shakespeare & Co. on the Left Bank, and signing up as members of the lending library. They are using the shop as an address and stopping by every day to pick up their mail.

There is a real buzz in the store. The owner, another American ex-pat, Sylvia Beach, 33, is working on a major project. She has offered to publish Ulysses, the latest work by Irish novelist James Joyce, 39, even though excerpts from it were recently ruled obscene in New York City when they appeared in The Little Review there.

Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare & Co.

McAlmon and Joyce have become good friends. In London, Bob had received a letter of introduction from Harriet Shaw Weaver, 44, one of his benefactors and owner of The Egoist Press, to meet the Irish novelist. He and Bryher have been supporting the Joyces with a $150 per month stipend, and McAlmon is helping to type parts of the—very messy—manuscript as Joyce writes it.

At the shop, everyone is pitching in to mail out a prospectus and order forms to potential subscribers to Ulysses, which is planned to come out in the fall. As orders come in, Beach records them in separate green record books for each country. The biggest single order—25 copies—has come from the Washington Square Bookshop in Greenwich Village, one of the original defendants in the obscenity case. Bryher is helping out by setting up a system of alphabetical pigeon holes for the incoming mail.

At night, McAlmon and Joyce, sometimes joined by French writer Valery Larbaud, 39, make the rounds of the clubs and dance halls. They particularly like Gipsy’s on the Boulevard St. Michel. McAlmon staggers from table to table getting drunken patrons to fill out order forms for the novel. He brings what he calls another “Hasty Bunch” of signed forms to the shop on his way home early in the morning, after having been thrown out of the last club along with his two comrades. Sylvia can barely make out the scrawly handwriting.

McAlmon is popular on the Left Bank for his charming personality, of course, but also because he can buy the drinks. Lots of drinks. He and Larbaud had to bring Joyce home one night in a wheelbarrow. Joyce’s partner and mother of his children, Nora Barnacle, 37, admonished him,

Jim, what is it all ye find to jabber about the nights you’re brought home drunk for me to look after? You’re dumb as an oyster now, so God help me.”

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volume 1 covering 1920 is available in print and e-book formats on Amazon. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This summer I will be talking about The Literary 1920s in the Osher Lifelong Learning programs at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon 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, 1921, Mayfair, London

Sitting in his new in-laws’ posh house, American publisher, poet, and general drifter Robert McAlmon, 26, can’t believe his luck.

Back in February he had accepted the offer of a woman he had just met, Annie Ellerman, also 26, always known as Bryher, to get married so she could have access to her family money. Until they came over here to introduce Bob to her parents, he hadn’t realized how much family money there is.

The New York Times broke the story this month that the daughter of Sir John Ellerman, 58, first baronet, owner of British newspapers, breweries and shipping lines and the richest man in the United Kingdom, had married some unknown writer and artists’ model, Robert McAlmon. The family made no comment.

McAlmon is getting along well with his new British in-laws. Bryher’s parents have succumb to his charms and promised him a generous allowance. He even has enjoyed chatting with her younger brother John, 11, a reclusive boy. He writes books about rodents.

Sir John Ellerman with his son, John

The newlyweds had hosted a big party at the Hotel Brevoort before their sailing. His fellow co-founder of Contact magazine, poet Dr. William Carlos Williams, 37, had brought the couple orchids. McAlmon did explain to him later that this is a marriage of convenience only.

And how convenient it has turned out for Bob. Bryher is introducing him to most of the literary lights of London. Writer and painter Wyndham Lewis, 38, has agreed to publish two of McAlmon’s poems in his magazine, Blast. Publisher and philanthropist Harriet Shaw Weaver, 44, will publish some in her magazine, The Egoist, and is talking about bringing out a whole collection. American ex-patriate poet T. S. Eliot, 32, has introduced him to Bloomsbury art critic, Clive Bell, 39, although Eliot doesn’t really take Bell seriously as a writer.

Harriet Shaw Weaver

McAlmon and Bryher agree that one of the best uses of her money is supporting fledgling writers like themselves. She has given funds to Weaver’s Egoist Press to publish new poets. In return, Weaver has given McAlmon a letter of introduction to one of his literary idols, Irish novelist James Joyce, 39. He can’t wait to look him up as soon as they move to Paris.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volume I covering 1920 is available on Amazon in print and e-book versions. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This summer I will be talking about The Literary 1920s in the Osher Lifelong Learning programs at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

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 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and e-book formats.

“Such Friends”: 100 years ago, February 14, 1921, New York City, New York

Margaret Anderson, 34, founder and publisher of the literary magazine The Little Review, is disappointed. As is her partner, the magazine’s editor, Jane Heap, 37.

Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap

They were not happy about being served with papers last year for publishing “obscene” excerpts from Ulysses, the latest work in progress by Irish novelist James Joyce, just turned 39. And they are grateful that their lawyer, art collector John Quinn, 50, is not charging them a fee for all the work he has been doing.

But here they are in the New York City Court of Special Sessions and Quinn’s main argument is that no one would understand Ulysses anyway, so how can it be obscene?!

Quinn started off alright by presenting Joyce’s reputation as a respected man of letters, but when one of the judges asked how that was relevant, Quinn dropped it. He put a few well-known writers on the stand, but they just testified that the novel wouldn’t corrupt readers.

Anderson has called Ulysses “the prose masterpiece of my generation.” She and Heap want the defense to be that it is great literature and should not be suppressed.

Quinn will have none of that. He has already told Anderson that the case is unwinnable and he has no intention of appealing a guilty verdict. And he doesn’t think they should have published such material in a magazine anyway, because it is sent through the mails. Quinn has been trying to convince Joyce to agree to a privately published book, which couldn’t possibly be prosecuted.

Playing to the three-judge panel, Quinn seizes on the anger of the lead prosecutor:

There is my best exhibit. There is proof that Ulysses does not corrupt or fill people full of lascivious thoughts. Look at him! He is mad all over. He wants to hit somebody. He doesn’t want to love anybody. He wants somebody to be punished. He’s mad. He’s angry. His face is distorted with anger, not with love. That’s what Joyce does. That’s what Ulysses does. It makes people angry. They want to break something. They want somebody to be convicted. They feel like prosecuting everybody connected with it, even if they don’t know how to pronounce the name Ulysses. But it doesn’t tend to drive them to the arms of some siren.”

Anderson feels that the whole scene is surreal. When the prosecutor is about to read out one of the main offending passages from Ulysses’ “Nausicaa” section, one of the judges actually says that Anderson (ignoring Heap) should be excused from the room as she is a young woman. Quinn points out that she is the one who published that passage. The judge says that she can’t possibly understand the significance of what she is publishing.

Oh, yes I do, thinks Margaret.

Court is recessed for one week so the judges can read the full “Nausicaa” episode.

*****

In another New York City courtroom, American self-published poet and general drifter Robert McAlmon, 25, is marrying English writer Annie Winifred Ellerman, 26, known by her adopted name, Bryher.

Newlyweds Bryher and Robert McAlmon

The couple met through friends at a Greenwich Village party just recently. Bryher explained to McAlmon that she is from a very well-to-do British family. But they are holding on to her rightful inheritance until she gets married.

So, if they get married, they can take the money and move to Paris! McAlmon figures this sounds like a pretty good deal.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volume I, covering 1920, is available on Amazon in print or e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This summer I will be talking about The Literary 1920s in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute programs at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon in both print and e-book versions. Later this month I will be talking about Perkins, Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the OLLI program at CMU.

 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’: February, 1922

New York City, February, 1922

 

John Quinn, 51, has received a cable from James Joyce, just turned 40, in Paris:

Ulysses published. Thanks.

Bit of an understatement.

James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and John Quinn in Paris

 

Quinn has been supporting Joyce financially, legally, and sometimes emotionally, while he was writing the novel. He’d even gone to court for the right of The Little Review to publish ‘obscene’ chapters. Quinn didn’t win that legal battle, but felt that getting the publishers off with a $100 fine was itself a victory.

He cables back right away,

Congratulations publication Ulysses. Best wishes. Write soon.

Then he starts composing an angry letter to the woman who had taken the risk to publish Ulysses, American ex-patriate Sylvia Beach, 35, owner of the Left Bank bookstore, Shakespeare & Co. He is a bit annoyed that she has written to him about Joyce:

If Joyce wants to write to me at any time it is open to him to do so and not through you.

Sylvia Beach and James Joyce in her bookshop, Shakespeare & Co.

But what has made him even angrier is that in her most recent letter she has asked whether Ulysses’ US copyright is covered by the publication of the chapters in The Little Review.

Quinn reminds her that he has already told Joyce, often, that it is. However, her advertisement for the novel in the magazine might set off the censors again! Now the customs authorities will be watching all the post from Paris to New York.

Quinn paid for his own 14 copies in advance, telling Beach,

They will become my property and then I must be consulted as to how they are to be sent here…[Set them aside] carefully wrapped up, and held subject to my order.

He then suggests ways copies might be smuggled into the US via Canada.

Now Quinn has to focus on his problem right here in New York:  John Butler Yeats, painter and father of his friend, poet William Butler Yeats, 56, whom he has been supporting for the past 14 years of his self-imposed exile in Manhattan, has died, aged 82. Quinn’s ‘assistant’ (and lover), Mrs. Jeanne Foster, 42, has been watching over JB in his lodgings on West 29^th Street the past two days, and he succumb in the night.

W B Yeats by his father John Butler Yeats, 1900

John Butler Yeats’ self-portrait

Quinn and Foster have to deal with the doctor, the friends, the visitors—and what about the funeral? New York or Dublin?

***

Downtown from Quinn’s 11-room Central Park West apartment, lunch is on at The Algonquin Hotel. For the past three years, the writers and freelancers who work for nearby newspapers and magazines—Life, Vogue, the World—come by to have lunch and trade quips.

Dorothy Parker, 28, nee Rothschild, is trying to calculate if she can afford a half-order of the eggs. Her friends are carefully avoiding discussing her recent suicide attempt. The fact that she had ordered dinner to be delivered from the nearby Alps Restaurant just before she tried to slit her wrists with her husband’s dull razor, makes it more drama than tragedy.

The Algonquin Round Table by Al Hirschfeld

Parker’s main supporter, fellow free-lancer and former Vanity Fair writer, Robert Benchley, 32, is one of the few who had come to see her in the hospital. Bench had told her,

Go easy on this suicide stuff. First thing you know, you’ll ruin your health.

Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley

***

Farther down in midtown, in Scribner’s offices on Fifth Avenue, editor Maxwell Perkins, 37, is planning to have a discussion with his current star author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 25.

Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, is about to come out. Perkins feels it is a good follow up to his first, The Far Side of Paradise. Now the editor thinks Fitzgerald could take a different turn, and, discussing the advertising for Damned, Perkins tells him,

We ought to…get away altogether from the flapper idea.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Maxwell Perkins

***

Farther down Manhattan, at JB Yeats’ rooms in Chelsea, Quinn and Foster are beginning to sort through the late painter’s belongings, waiting for instructions as to whether JB should be sent to Ireland or laid to rest here in his adopted home, New York.

Quinn is composing a telegram to the Yeats sisters in Dublin:

Regret your father passed away this morning 7 o’clock…The end came in sleep without pain or struggle. After conference please cable desires about burial…Everything was done for his comfort and peace of mind and he had best possible medical attention.

Next, he sends the details to the painter’s son, Willie, currently in Oxford, adding,

He fought bravely for life but it was almost hopeless since Wednesday. His mind was unclouded and his spirits buoyant until the end.

Jeanne Foster by John Butler Yeats

John Quinn

 

Dublin, February, 1922

 

In Dundrum, south Dublin, Lily, 55, and Lolly Yeats, 53, read the telegram they had been dreading from their American friend, John Quinn.

Lily and Lolly Yeats

They knew that Quinn had worried that the old man would die ‘on his watch.’ Right now, they feel nothing but gratitude for all Quinn has done for him.

Of course, they will need to check with their brother Willie in Oxford, but agree that it is best to advise Quinn to handle the funeral arrangements in New York.

 

London, February, 1922

 

Everyone has the flu.

The Times reports that 13,000 people in England and Wales have died since Christmas. They caution that one of the symptoms is a ‘tendency to “feel the heart”—ie., to palpitations,’ and that anyone suspecting they have contracted the disease should take to their beds at once. Just last month they had reported that Pope Benedict XV, 67, had died from influenza that turned into pneumonia.

Pope Benedict XV

***

T. S. Eliot, 33, is trying to get his new long poem published. As soon as he returned home last month, reinvigorated by a three-month leave spent in Switzerland, he had been laid low with the influenza for a good ten days. At least that meant time away from his dreaded office at Lloyds Bank so he could work on finishing off The Waste Land.

Eliot has been corresponding with The Dial magazine in the States, but is leery about the deal on offer. He feels he had been burned a few years ago by a contract with Alfred Knopf that John Quinn had negotiated for him. Now he is using his friend Ezra Pound, 36, as a go between.

T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound

***

In the southwest suburb of Richmond, Virginia Woolf, just turned 40, is devastated that she is spending the first months of this year as she had the previous summer—in bed. She confides to her diary,

 I have taken it into my head that I shan’t live till 70…Suppose, I said to myself the other day[,] this pain over my heart wrung me out like a dish cloth & left me dead?

The flu had hit her just a few weeks before her 40^th birthday, which made her acutely aware of the passage of time:

I feel time racing like a film at the Cinema. I try to stop it. I prod it with my pen. I try to pin it down.’

Her husband Leonard, 41, however supportive, insists on following the doctor’s instructions that she must stay in bed. But Virginia wants to be out in the cold air, walking, which means writing, because she works out her sentences in her head as she makes her way through the London streets.

Virginia and Leonard Woolf

Virginia is thinking of experimenting with a tale of a woman walking through the city while preparing for a party, the passage of the hours marked by Big Ben’s bongs.

Her sister, painter Vanessa Bell, 42, hasn’t let her children’s flu keep her from her work. She is in Paris, again, for a painting holiday. Virginia writes to her,

For Gods [sic] sake make friends with Joyce. I particularly want to know what he’s like.’

She’d read parts of Ulysses when it had been submitted to her and Leonard for publication by their Hogarth Press. She can’t imagine what kind of working class man could write like that.

Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell

 

Paris, February, 1922

 

Newlyweds Hadley, 30, and Ernest Hemingway, 22, are back from a Switzerland skiing trip and settling in to their new fourth floor walk-up apartment at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine.

Hadley and Ernest Hemingway

Ernest has taken an office on the Rue Mouffetard, a pleasant five-minute walk away. Going there on a regular schedule is the only way he is going to get any writing done.

After all, that’s why they came at the end of last year. Paris is so cheap, the exchange rate so good, and between his salary as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star, and his wife’s family money, they can afford an apartment, a studio, and dinner at local cafes every night. Great French food is 50 US cents for a meal; the wine only 60 centimes for a whole bottle.

Ernest is eager to get started on his writing career, and is planning to make good use of the contacts he had been given last summer back in Chicago by Sherwood Anderson, 45, author of the hit novel, Winesburg, Ohio.

Sherwood and Tennessee Anderson

Anderson and his wife, Tennessee, 48, had just come back to the States from Paris and encouraged the young Hemingways to follow in their footsteps. He gave Ernest an all-important letter of introduction to fellow American writer Gertrude Stein, celebrating her 48^th birthday. Ernest and Hadley are gathering the courage to visit Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, 44, soon.

Alice B. Toklas and her partner Gertrude Stein with Picassos

 

***

Another expatriate, Kansas-born Robert McAlmon, 25, is in Paris, also with his new wealthy wife, Bryher, 27. As well as supporting himself as a writer with her inheritance, McAlmon intends to use her family money to publish other writers on the Left Bank.

Bryher and Robert McAlmon

Soon after he came to Paris two years ago, McAlmon had struck up a close friendship with an Irishman, James Joyce. McAlmon had supported his new friend while he was struggling with his big novel, both financially and practically by helping with the typing of the manuscript.

But now that publication day—and Joyce’s big birthday—is nearing, McAlmon chickens out. He takes off for the Riviera. He figures he’ll just buy Joyce a present.

***

Standing on the platform at the Gare du Lyon, Sylvia Beach is waiting for the Paris-Dijon Express, due in at 7 am.

When she’d told Joyce that her printer in Dijon guaranteed to put the parcel in the post on 1^st February, Joyce was not pleased. He insisted that the package be put on the train so the conductor can hand deliver it to Sylvia personally.

As the train approaches, Beach is working out her next steps in her head. She will get a taxi to Joyce’s apartment, to give him the 40^th birthday present that he wants the most, the first copy of Ulysses. There is a small party planned for tonight at one of Joyce’s favorite restaurants, Ferraris. He and his partner, Nora Barnacle, 37, and a few friends will be celebrating his accomplishment, seven years in the making, the result of his relentless vision and the support of his family, Sylvia Beach…and John Quinn.

American Sylvia and her Irishman on rue de l’Odeon

American Kathleen and her Irishman on rue de l’Odeon