“Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s, Volume III—1922 is now available!

The blog postings about 1922, 100 years ago, continue here. But now you can skip ahead to the end of this landmark year with “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, Volume III—1922 available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book formats.

Cover design by Lisa Thomson

Bookended by the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in February, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in the autumn, 1922 is often thought of as, not just the most important year in “the literary 1920s,” but the most important year in modernism.

For this reason, Volume III is 30% longer than the first two volumes—almost 130 vignettes full of great gossip about your favorite writers. There’s a beheading, a public suicide, and a celebrity sighting.

Volume III has the same informal layout as the first two, allowing you to dip in and dip out of this story-filled year, or start on January 1^st and discover how it develops over 12 months. All three volumes are available on Amazon as print and e-books.

Example of layout

Designed by Lisa Thomson [LisaT2@comcast.net] and created on Amazon by Loral and Seth Pepoon of Selah Press Publishing, Volume III will soon also be available at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and at Thoor Ballylee, William Butler Yeats’ home in Co. Galway in the west of Ireland.

Free-lance writer Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith, recipient of the Women’s History Network Independent Researcher Award 2021-22, and author of the blog Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society, 1890-1914, chose “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, as one of her “Books of the Year,” saying that the series

presents colourful, diary-like snippets, skilfully 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.”

So get your copy now—if you live near any Pittsburgh Regional Transit bus line, I’ll come sign it personally. Just email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Two are just a coincidence—but three are a trend. Seven more to go!

Later in the year I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes 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.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 21, 1922, 31 Nassau Street, New York City, New York

About three years ago, New York lawyer John Quinn, 51, had helped to negotiate a contract for an American poet living in London, T. S. Eliot, then 30, with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. for the publication of his Poems. Eliot had felt that the original contract advantaged the publisher more than the published. Quinn was glad to do it; he advised Eliot that he was well-known enough now to secure the services of a literary agent and hadn’t heard from him since.

Poems by T. S. Eliot, UK edition

Through their mutual friend, another American poet living abroad, Ezra Pound, 36, Quinn knows that Eliot is working on a “big” poem, probably his best work.

Today, Quinn receives a telegram from Eliot in London: 

DISSATISFIED LIVERIGHTS CONTRACT POEM

MAY I ASK YOUR ASSISTANCE APOLOGIES WRITING ELIOT”

Quinn cables back right away:

GLAD TO ASSIST EVERY WAY POSSIBLE YOUR CONTRACT”

The second cable he sends today is to his Irish friend, poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, just turned 57, who has written to ask if he may dedicate his memoirs to Quinn:

Yeats

Ballylee

Gort

County Galway

Ireland

GREATLY TOUCHED AND DELIGHTED YOUR SUGGESTION

DEDICATION MEMOIRS.

GLADLY ACCEPT THO PERSONALLY FEEL LADY GREGORY DESERVES

THAT HONOR MUCH MORE THAN I.

(Signed)

QUINN”

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I and II covering 1920 and 1921 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and also in print and e-book formats on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This month I am talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after The Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Carnegie-Mellon University.

In the fall, I will be talking about the centenary of The Waste Land in the Osher programs at CMU 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 also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, June 5, 1922, Thoor Ballylee, Co. Galway, Ireland

The Yeats family is settling in nicely to their new home in the west of Ireland, a 15^th century Norman tower they have re-named Thoor Ballylee.

The poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, about to turn 57, is impressed by the way his wife Georgie, 29, not only takes care of their two children, Anne, 3, and Michael, almost 10 months old, but has also decorated their home to look like a 14^th century painting.

Interior of Thoor Ballylee

Uncharacteristically, Willie has been thinking a lot about family. He has just sent off to his publisher the second volume of his Autobiographies, titled The Trembling of the Veil. His father, the painter John Butler Yeats, died about four months ago at age 83, in New York City. Willie and his sisters are thinking of bringing out a volume of their father’s memoirs.

His friend and mentor, Lady Augusta Gregory, 70, has been at her home, Coole Park, about four miles down the road from Thoor Ballylee, working on her own memoirs about their days founding The Abbey Theatre together. She’s been reading out sections to Willie and incorporating many of his suggestions. Their writing styles are very different—Augusta is trying to remain objective; Yeats favors a more impressionistic interpretation.

Coole Park, drawing by W. B. Yeats

Now that The Trembling of the Veil is completed, today Willie is writing to his friend in New York, the Irish-American lawyer and patron of the arts, John Quinn, 52.

He brings Quinn up to date on the family living arrangements and tells him that his godson, Michael, now has eight teeth! Anne has invented her own version of The Lord’s Prayer, which includes, “Father not in heaven—father in the study,” and “Thine is the Kitten, the Power, and the Glory.”

W. B. and Georgie Yeats

Quinn had expressed his concern about how Ireland’s political turmoil is impacting the west of the country. Yeats assures him that there hasn’t been much trouble here:

There was what seemed a raid at Coole, men came and shouted at night and demanded to be let in, and then went away either because the moon came out or because they only meant to threaten.”

Most importantly, Willie wants his friend’s permission to dedicate his latest volume to Quinn.

If you violently object you must cable…for [Werner Laurie, the publisher] is in a devil of a hurry.”

The dedication reads,

To John Quinn my friend and helper and friend and helper of certain people mentioned in this book.”

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I and II covering 1920 and 1921 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and also in print and e-book formats on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This month I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after The Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Carnegie-Mellon University.

In the fall I will be talking about the centenary of The Waste Land in the Osher programs at both Carnegie-Mellon University and at 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.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’: 1897, summer, the West of Ireland

In the next few weeks I will be posting vignettes about how each of the four writers’ salons came together. This is the beginning of W B Yeats and the Irish Literary Renaissance:

After being in the center of the Dublin riots that greeted the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, poet W B Yeats, 32, is happy to spend the rest of his summer traveling throughout the west of Ireland with a friend.

Yeats is invited by the Baron de Basterot to stop by his home, Duras, in Co. Galway. By chance the other guests that day are Lady Augusta Gregory, 45, from nearby Coole Park, and her neighbour from Gort, Edward Martyn, 38. Yeats and Lady Gregory had crossed paths a few times before, at her salons in London, but this is the first time they actually get to know each other.

The three are getting along famously and lamenting the fact that there is no theatre in Ireland to produce plays, such as the ones Martyn is writing, about Irish people.

As Lady Gregory remembers it later,

We went on talking about it, and things seemed to grow possible as we talked, and before the end of the afternoon we had made our plan.”

Lady Gregory invites Yeats and Martyn to come to Coole Park where they can embark on their plan to start a theatre for the Irish, with plays by and about the Irish.

Lady Gregory’s Coole Park

What is left of Coole Park today

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

To read about American writers, Manager as Muse explores Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ work with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe and is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.