“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, March 3, 1924, Abbey Theatre, Lower Abbey Street, Dublin

Abbey Theatre directors and co-founders William Butler Yeats, 58, and Lady Augusta Gregory, about to turn 72, have high hopes for this new kid.

Last April they premiered the first play by Sean O’Casey, 43, The Shadow of a Gunman, about the country’s recent war for independence from the British. A big hit, they have mounted five more productions of it since.

Sean O’Casey

Tonight is the first performance of O’Casey’s latest, Juno and the Paycock, about last year’s Irish civil war. Yeats and Lady Gregory feel this is going to be another winner for O’Casey and the theatre.

Yeats has been impressed with O’Casey’s work. Although, after a reading of this play, when he compared it to a Dostoyevsky novel, Augusta admonished him—in front of the actors—

You know, Willie, you never read a novel by Dostoyevsky.”

Some of the best Abbey theatre regulars are on stage tonight. Sara Allgood, 43, creating the character of Juno; her frequent co-star Barry Fitzgerald, who turns 36 next week, as Captain Jack Boyle, and Fitzgerald’s brother Arthur Shields, 28, as Boyle’s disabled son, Johnny.

Juno and the Paycock program

Fitzgerald gets to sum up the drama with the play’s last line,

Th’ whole worl’s in a terrible state o’ chassis.”

Yeats is already thinking that this is one time they should extend this run well beyond the usual one week.

“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, and about early 20^th century supporters of the arts at Osher in 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, May 28, 1922, London Sunday Express; and New York Times

Two very different reviews of the new novel Ulysses by James Joyce, 40, appear on opposite sides of the pond today:

Ulysses by James Joyce

I say deliberately that it is the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature…All the secret sewers of vice are canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the name of Christ—blasphemies hitherto associated with the most degraded orgies of Satanism and the Black Mass…[Ulysses] is already the Bible of beings who are exiles and outcasts in this and every other civilized country…Our critics are apologizing for his anarchy…[by throwing readers] to the hyenas and werewolves of literature…We must make our choice between the devil’s disciples and the disciples of God, between Satanism and Christianity, between the sanctions of morality and the anarchy of art. The artists must be treated like any lesser criminal who tries to break the Christian code. For this is a battle that must be fought out to a clean finish:  We cannot trust the soul of Europe to the guardianship of the police and the post office.”

—“Beauty and the Beast,” James Douglas, editor, London Sunday Express

Ulysses is the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the 20^th century. It will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais, and The Brothers Karamazof [sic] Dostoyevsky. It is likely that no one writing English today could parallel Mr. Joyce’s feat…His literary output would seem to substantiate some of Freud’s contentions…He holds with Freud that the unconscious mind represents the real man…I have learned more psychology and psychiatry from it than I did in 10 years at the Neurological Institute. There are other angles at which Ulysses can be viewed profitably, but they are not many…[The protagonist Leopold Bloom is] a moral monster, a pervert and an invert, an apostate to his race and his religion, the simulacrum of a man who has neither cultural background nor personal self-respect…[Ulysses will be written about and praised in 100 years, but] not 10 men or women out of a hundred can read Ulysses through.”

                                    —“James Joyce’s Amazing Chronicle,” Joseph Collins, New York Times

“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.

Next 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.

To watch my presentation for the PICT Classical Theatre about the Founding of the Abbey Theatre, click here.

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.