“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, July 7, 1922, 5 West 50th Street, New York City, New York

Late on this hot Friday afternoon, Thomas Seltzer, 47, is working at his desk in the office of his publishing company, Thomas Seltzer, Inc.

Signature of Thomas Seltzer

Suddenly, there is noise outside the door and in walks John Sumner, 45, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV). Accompanying him is an officer of the West Side Police Court with a search warrant. They seize almost 800 copies—and also books from other publishers stored in Seltzer’s own locked desk—of three books:  the novella Casanova’s Homecoming by the Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler, 60; A Young Girl’s Diary, by an anonymous author, with a foreword by noted psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, 66: and Women in Love, a novel by one of Seltzer’s star authors, Englishman D. H. Lawrence, 36. Lawrence’s most recent best seller, Aaron’s Rod, is there in plain sight, but Sumner ignores it.

Women in Love, U. S. edition

Unfortunately, there are lots of copies of Women in Love in the office because Lawrence’s novel has not done as well as Seltzer expected.

Sumner informs the publisher that he is being charged under the New York State Penal Code for “the publication and sale of obscene literature.” Sumner says he will have a police patrol car come by and haul away the books. Seltzer decides he will rent a truck to take them to the police station instead, so the books themselves will not appear to be criminals under arrest.

West Side Police Court

Sumner is Executive Secretary of the NYSSV, which is empowered by the city to search and seize any materials the Society deems obscene. But Sumner is just a private citizen, so he issues Seltzer a receipt for the books in the name of the New York District Attorney.

The NYSSV confiscates copies of the Young Girl’s Diary from Brentano’s bookstore and also arrests a clerk at a local circulating library for lending out that book to “diverse persons.”

Seltzer knows that he will need to consult his attorney before he takes any action, but his instinct is to fight these charges and to fight them quite publicly. This is going to be a big financial blow to his three-year-old publishing company, but his wife Adele, 46, a partner in his business, will support his decision. She is an even bigger fan of Lawrence than Seltzer is.

“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.

Later in the year I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes at the University of Pittsburgh and 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 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, mid-June, 1922, Wyewurk, 3 Craig Street, Thirroul, New South Wales, Australia; and Thomas Selzer, Inc., 5 West 50th Street, New York City, New York

When looking for a place to rent for their three-month stay in Australia, English writer David Herbert Lawrence, 36, and his German wife Frieda, 42, found this suburb to be less expensive—but definitely less glamorous—than nearby Sydney. They took this three-bedroom bungalow with a lovely veranda, on the beach outside Thirroul, even though they discovered the previous owner had named it “Wyewurk.” Probably because the house next door was “Wyewurrie.”

Wyewurk

Lawrence had every intention of working. He started his new novel at the beginning of the month and is making great progress, sometimes as many as 3,000 words a day. With the title already decided, Kangaroo is turning out to be more autobiographical and more political than any of his others—and with a lot less sex.

Each day he sits at a big table looking out at the Pacific Ocean, turning the experiences he and Frieda have had since coming here, combined with political news he picks up from the Sydney Bulletin, into his eighth novel. David is incorporating the natural environment as well as the people they’ve met. Although he gives his two main characters a few more friends than he and Frieda actually have.

The ocean in front of Wyewurk

In the mornings while he is writing, Frieda is sewing and keeping house. In the afternoons, David reads out to her what he has written that day. Frieda writes to a friend,

the days slipped by like dreams, but real as dreams are when they come true.”

Of course, sometimes they fight. Or sulk. After all, it is just the two of them out in the middle of nowhere most of the time.

On afternoons like this one, with Frieda napping, David catches up on his correspondence. Earlier in the month he wrote to his American agent, Robert Mountsier, 34, to apprise him of his progress and request another $700 in U. S. royalties. He tells Mountsier he expects to leave Australia for America in early August with a completed manuscript in his luggage.

Now Lawrence is writing to his U. S. publisher, Thomas Selzer, 47, to assure him that this novel won’t have the same censorship problems of his previous ones, like Women in Love. He thinks Selzer, as a founder and former editor of the Socialist magazine The Masses, will appreciate the political nature of Kangaroo. He promises,

No love interest at all so far—don’t intend any—no sex either…Amy Lowell says you are getting a reputation as an erotic publisher:  She warns me. I shall have thought my reputation as an erotic writer (poor dears) was secure. So now I’ll go back on it.”

Of course, he has promised Selzer this before.

*****

In his office across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Selzer is writing to Lawrence’s agent, Mountsier, who is on vacation in Pennsylvania. The agent has been complaining about Lawrence’s slow sales, and Selzer has just paid for some advertising in the New York Tribune for Lawrence’s latest, Aaron’s Rod: 

The work of a great genius and a bestseller. Love and Marriage in our day as Lawrence sees it.”

Logo of Thomas Selzer, Inc.

To impress the agent even more with their author’s reputation, he cites a new revue, The Grand Street Follies, currently playing in lower Manhattan at the Neighborhood Playhouse. In one scene, a young woman ignores her boyfriend while she is reading a book, saying,

Don’t interrupt me…I am in the midst of one of the most passionate passages of D. H. Lawrence.”

Selzer assures Mountsier,

This, they say, always brings the house down.”

“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, March 21, 1922, Kandy, Ceylon

HRH Edward, Prince of Wales, 27, is viewing the parade of 200 elephants from the balcony of the Dalada Maligawa, the Glorious Tooth Temple in the complex of the royal palace. The pachyderms walk over white cloths so their feet will never touch the earth. They are accompanied by fireworks and fast-moving Kandyan dancers.

HRH Edward, Prince of Wales

This perehera, or procession, is being held in Edward’s honor on his state visit as part of his Asian tour of the British colonies. Usually the festival is staged in the summer to celebrate the relic of the Buddha’s tooth that is housed within the temple.

To English novelist David Herbert Lawrence, 37, the prince looks tired. “Twitchy…disheartened…badgered about like a doll” he writes to a friend.

Lawrence has been here in Ceylon with his wife, Frieda, 42, for about two weeks, staying with American friends. Kandy has not been the dream paradise he was hoping for. It’s hot; it’s buggy; he hates the food.

The Lawrences in Ceylon

Watching the prince, Lawrence feels empathy. Edward appears lonely, hated by everyone around, with elephants bowing to him.

Lawrence feels they have both been forced to leave their homeland and are being punished here by the heat and the bugs. Edward, just by nature of being a prince; David, for marrying a German wife during the Great War and writing “dirty” novels.

For just a moment, Lawrence feels homesick. He and Frieda have been traveling throughout Europe for the past three years—Italy, Austria, Germany, Sicily, now Ceylon. Maybe it is time to go back.

But then David thinks of the pitiful sales his books have in England. And the public response to them.

Keep moving. The next ship out is to Australia. It might at least be cooler.

The Kandy Esala perehera

D. H. Lawrence’s experience of the perehera led him to write a poem, “The Elephant is Slow to Mate,” which you can read here.  https://poets.org/poem/elephant-slow-mate 

“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.

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

In June I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after the Great War in the Osher Lifelong Learning 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.

“Such Friends”: 100 years ago, December, 1921, Richmond, London; Lausanne, Switzerland; and Taormina, Sicily

At the beginning of the month, the London Times reports that, because of an increase in

winter sickness…persons with weak hearts or chests must avoid rapid changes of temperature, which severely tax the circulation and which lower bodily resistance to infection.”

The UK is on track for more than 36,000 deaths from influenza this year, mostly women.

*****

In Richmond, southwest London, Virginia Woolf, 39, hangs up the phone after talking to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He wants her to change the word “lewd” in her review of Henry James’ collection of short stories to “obscene.” She says, fine.

She thinks, now that she has enough income from the Hogarth Press to spend her time writing novels, in the new year she won’t have to compromise and write reviews anymore.

Virginia has been relatively healthy these past few months, but now she’s feeling a bit of a cold and tiredness coming on.

London

*****

In Lausanne, Switzerland, T. S. Eliot, 33, recuperating from a nervous breakdown, has to tell his editor at The Dial, Scofield Thayer, just turned 32, that there will be a delay in his next “London Letter” for the magazine. There’s no way it will appear until at least April, meaning a seven-month gap in columns.

Eliot blames it on a bad bout of the flu. He is using any energy he has right now to work on his long poem.

Lausanne, Switzerland

*****

In Taormino, Sicily, English ex-pat David Herbert Lawrence, 36, has sent off to his New York and London agents packets of revised short stories.

Now he’s heading back to bed with an irritating case of the flu which won’t go away.

Lawrence is, however, actually looking forward to spending Christmas sick in bed.

I hate Christmas,”

he writes to a friend.

Taormino, Sicily

“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, Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and in print and e-book formats on Amazon. If they can’t get it to you in time for gift giving, I can. Email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Early in the new year I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses at 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 also available on Amazon in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 years ago, early November, 1921, Corso Umberto, Toarmina, Sicily

Walking back to his rented house, Fontana Vecchia, British ex-pat novelist David Herbert Lawrence, 36, is casually sorting through the mail he just picked up at the local post office.

There is an unusual smell.

Not a bad smell. An exotic, Indian smell.

Corso Umberto

It’s coming from an envelope that has in it, not a letter, but a long scroll. Like a papyrus. From the United States. From a city in New Mexico called “Taos.”

As he walks, Lawrence unfurls the scroll and starts reading. He stops in his tracks.

This unusual package is from an American woman he has never heard of, Mabel Dodge Sterne, 42. She has included a few leaves of local plants, desachev and osha, to entice Lawrence to accept her invitation to move to Taos and live rent-free on her land. And write.

Lawrence can’t believe what he is reading.

Sterne has seen an excerpt of his upcoming travel book, Sea and Sardinia, in last month’s issue of The Dial magazine, and she is impressed. She likes the “queer way…[you give] the feel and touch and smell of places.” She wants him to write about Taos in the same way and is offering him an adobe cottage, filled with furniture handmade in the area, with room enough for his wife and children. Well, if he has any children. [He doesn’t.]

This is exactly the opportunity Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, 42, are looking for. They are thinking of joining some friends to study Buddhism in Ceylon. But this—this. Financial as well as emotional support.

As he heads home to tell Frieda, he nibbles at the osha. It tastes like liquorice and takes him far away from the tacky shops lining the Corso Umberto.

Lawrence can think of a hundred questions he has to ask.

Who is this woman? He will write to his New York agent to find out if he has ever heard of Mrs. Sterne.

Where is this Taos? He will try to find it on a map.

Then he will write back to Mabel with an enthusiastic

Yes!”

Followed by his other questions:  Are there trees? Water?! Maybe a river or a lake. Is it hot or cold there? What type of clothing should they bring?

Lawrence also thinks he needs to assure Mrs. Sterne that he and Frieda will eventually pay rent to her. He doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life being as poor as he has been so far. Writing all these books should pay off some time.

“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 in print and e-book formats on Amazon. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Early next year I will be talking about the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, 100 years ago.

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 versions.

“Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s, Volume II—1921 is now available!

Would you like to find out now how 1921 ends?

You can!

Cover design by Lisa Thomson

You don’t have to wait for this blog to work its way through the year.

Just order “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, Volume II—1921, the second in the series collecting these blog postings about this amazing decade. The print version is available now on Amazon; the e-book will be available in a few weeks.

You’ve certainly put a lot of work into this. It is a panorama of the period…Look forward to reading your future work”—Richard, Hemingway fan

Following less than eight months after the publication of Volume I, this collection of more than 100 vignettes has the same easy to dip in and out of layout. Or you can read straight through from January 1^st to the upcoming December 31^st.

Interior pages of “Such Friends”

Spoiler alert:  It’s got a great ending [and two recipes]!

I have really been enjoying your book…Because of the way it’s set up with episodes corresponding to dates of the year, it’s a great one for reading a bit from on a daily basis.”—Emily, British writer fan

And what about your book-loving friends? You may know which early 20^th century writers they love, but are you sure which works they have read or not read at gift-giving time? The series “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s is the perfect present because they sure haven’t read this! Give them the gift of great gossip about their favorite creative people.

The series “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s is based in part on my research for my Ph.D. in Communications from Dublin City University in Ireland. which focused on the legendary writers and artists who socialized in salons in the early years of the 20^th century—William Butler Yeats and the Irish Literary Renaissance, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, Gertrude Stein and the Americans in Paris, and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table. For the blogs and books I have expanded the cast of characters to also include those who orbited around them such as T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Edna St. Vincent Millay and others.

My investigations into creative writers in the early 20^th century began with Manager as Muse, a case study of Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ work with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, the topic of my MBA thesis at Duquesne University in my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is also available on Amazon in print and e-book formats.

The “Such Friends” book series has been beautifully designed by Lisa Thomson [LisaT2@comcast.net] and produced on Amazon by Loral and Seth Pepoon of Selah Press [loralpepoon@gmail.com].

The cover art on Volume II is a painting by Virginia Woolf’s sister, painter Vanessa Bell, A Conversation.

A Conversation by Vanessa Bell, 1913-1916

If you are in Pittsburgh, and easily accessible by bus, I will hand deliver your personally signed copy!

Everyone is reading “Such Friends”!

I read it in chronological order and found the vignettes most interesting. A sort of behind the scenes look into the thoughts, character, and personalities of the writers and artists affiliated with the individual salons in the beginning of the decade. I do believe the 20s sparked a Renaissance of thought and ideas in the literary and artistic world. I must admit that there were a few of their associates that I was not familiar with which may merit further study.”—Robert, Wisconsin fan

For complimentary review copies of both volumes of “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I will be talking about Writers’ Salons in Dublin and Ireland Before the Great War in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

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

“Such Friends”: 100 years ago, June 10, 1921, Fontana Vecchia, Taormina, Sicily, Italy

Today is the day.

English ex-patriate writer David Herbert Lawrence, 35, on his 20-minute walk from his hilltop house in to town, realizes that today is the day his novel Women in Love is being published in the United Kingdom. What a long and circuitous journey.

Fontana Vecchia

Lawrence had conceived of this novel during the Great War. But then had written and published six years ago what he thought of as part one, The Rainbow, in both the US and the UK.

Well, of course, the Brits had gone ballistic and banned it under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. 1857. Did they realize it is now the 20^th century?!

Angry, Lawrence sat down and wrote Women in Love as a response, telling his literary agent,

You will hate it and no one will publish it. But there, these things are beyond us.”

Actually, his American publisher, Thomas Seltzer, 46, was willing to take a chance and published it last November. But only in a US private edition costing $15 each. Bit of a narrow audience. Lawrence argued that he didn’t want it to be released that way, but eventually gave in. The title page doesn’t even include the publisher’s name. Just “Private Printing for Subscribers Only.”

Seltzer has told Lawrence that his books are selling quite well in the States, even in a bad year for publishing in general. However, after the uproar over The Rainbow in the UK, Seltzer doesn’t want to take any chances bringing out Women in Love over there.

So Martin Secker, 39, has shouldered the burden with his publishing company. Fear of the censors has led Secker to make a few discreet edits. But Women in Love is scheduled to be unleashed on the public today.

Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, 41, have been in self-imposed exile from England for the past four years. Because Frieda is German, their English neighbors had suspected them to be spies. Ridiculous. And also, he writes dirty books.

D. H. and Frieda Lawrence

The couple have been traveling throughout Europe, mostly Germany—which seemed to Lawrence to be “so empty…as if uninhabited…life empty: no young men”—and Italy. Last year they settled in this Sicilian town. At the beginning of this month, visiting Frieda’s family in Germany, he finished Aaron’s Rod, his third novel in the series about his home country, the English midlands. Seltzer feels that right now Lawrence has too many books out in the US market, so he is going to hold publication of Aaron’s Rod until next year.

David and Frieda are getting antsy. In Italy, he has been writing very little. He is hopeful that excerpts from his travelogue Sea and Sardinia will appear in the American Dial magazine later this year.

Their passports will need to be renewed soon. Lawrence feels it is time to move on to the next adventure.

“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.