Writer Gertrude Stein, just turned 49, and her partner Alice B. Toklas, 45, are not really surprised that their fellow American friend, Ernest Hemingway, 23, foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and aspiring novelist, has turned up at their door at 10 o’clock this morning.
27 rue de Fleurus
Then he stays for lunch.
Then he stays all afternoon.
Then he stays for dinner.
Then at 10 o’clock at night, when they think he will finally be leaving, he shouts,
My wife is pregnant! I’m too young to be a father!”
Later this month I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York City in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Happy birthday to Ulysses! Published here one year ago this day.
And happy birthday to the novel’s author, Irishman James Joyce, 41 today.
The courageous publisher, American ex-pat Sylvia Beach, 35, has filled the display window of her shop, Shakespeare and Company, with extra copies of the bright blue book.
Ulysses by James Joyce
A small group of friends has gathered to celebrate. Sylvia receives a bouquet of flowers and champagne toasts to her health.
Toasts also to the health of Joyce, who entertains the crowd by singing Irish songs and accompanying himself on the piano.
It’s been quite a year since Beach handed the first copy of Ulysses to Joyce. Her shop has had increased foot traffic, but Sylvia has spent a lot of extra time promoting the book—and arranging to have it smuggled into the United States where it is often confiscated for being declared obscene by the courts.
The fluctuation in exchange rates is also killing her. Beach feels she should have been paying more attention to the political situation in Europe. She thinks she should be reading those reports filed by the Toronto Star foreign correspondent who hangs out in her store, American Ernest Hemingway, 23.
Later this month I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York City in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
The article, “Europe’s Prize Bluffer”appears in the Daily Star, the third piece about Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, 39, written by the Star’s foreign correspondent, American ErnestHemingway, 23. After describing some of the other world leaders he has observed at the Lausanne Peace Conference in Switzerland, Hemingway reports,
Benito Mussolini
Mussolini is the biggest bluff in Europe. If Mussolini would have me taken out and shot tomorrow morning, I would still regard him as a bluff. The shooting would be a bluff. Get hold of a good photograph of Signor Mussolini some time and study it. You will see the weakness in his mouth which forces him to scowl the famous Mussolini scowl that is imitated by every 19-year-old Fascisto in Italy…Study his genius for clothing small ideas in big words…And then look at his black shirt and his white spats. There is something wrong, even histrionically, with a man who wears white spats with a black shirt.”
Hemingway describes the beginning of the press conference Mussolini held, where he was
registering Dictator. Being an ex-newspaperman himself he knew how many readers would be reached by the accounts the men in the room would write of the interview he was about to give. And he remained [seated], absorbed in his book…I tiptoed over behind him to see what the book was he was reading with such avid interest. It was a French-English dictionary—held upside down.”
*****
In Munich, 6,000 members of the National Socialist German Workers Party attend their first party conference, presided over by their leader, Adolf Hitler, 33.
Next month I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York City in the Osher program at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Today’s Sunday paper in Ogden, Utah, carries a feature story about a young American entrepreneur, native New Jersey-ian Sylvia Beach, 35, and the glamorous life she and her actress sister Cyprian, 29, are living in Paris.
The “brilliance” of their careers shines through in the English-language bookshop Sylvia runs on the Left Bank, and the films Cyprian has appeared in.
Almost a year ago, Sylvia published the avant-garde novel Ulysses by ex-patriate Irish writer James Joyce, 40, which has scandalized literary circles in the United States and abroad.
According to the article, the Beach sisters, daughters of a Presbyterian minister, are living in Paris, “riding in luxury on the crest of a wave of fame and fortune.”
*****
Meanwhile, in Paris, business is brisk in Sylvia’s shop, Shakespeare and Company. The publication of Ulysses has definitely increased foot traffic. And those who come in to buy Ulysses usually leave with some of Joyce’s other works, as well as books by new authors they’ve discovered.
But her young Greek shop assistant has been ill for weeks, so Sylvia’s on her own most days. Joyce comes in almost every day to read sections of Ulysses to her and is planning a dinner party so he can “see” his close friends before he goes into the hospital for much-needed eye surgery.
Sylvia Beach and James Joyce
Ulysses sells well here in France, but in the UK copies have been confiscated and burned. Bookstores in the US, where excerpts from Ulysses have been declared obscene by a court, are getting impatient to receive their copies.
Through a connection with one of the young American wanna-be novelists who hang out at Shakespeare and Company, Toronto Star foreign correspondent, Ernest Hemingway, 23, Sylvia has arranged for copies to be smuggled into the US from Canada. But soon she will have to pay the expenses of the advertising guy who has been taking them into Detroit on the ferry from his office in Windsor, Ontario.
Cyprian’s film career is actually now non-existent. Being around her increasingly famous sister makes her miserable and she is thinking of permanently moving back to the States this year.
Next month I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York City in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
In Ireland, despite living in the middle of a Civil War, and the death of his 82-year-old father this past February, poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, 57, has had a pretty good year.
He is enjoying his appointment to the newly formed Senate of the Irish Free State, engineered by his friend and family doctor, Oliver St. John Gogarty, 44, who managed to get himself appointed as well.
Irish Free State Great Seal
Much to Yeats’ surprise, the position comes with an income, making it the first paying job he has ever had. The money, as he writes to a friend,
of which I knew nothing when I accepted, will compensate me somewhat for the chance of being burned or bombed. We are a fairly distinguished body, much more so than the lower house, and should get much government into our hands…How long our war is to last nobody knows. Some expect it to end this Xmas and some equally well informed expect another three years.”
Indeed, although Senator Yeats has been provided with an armed guard at his house, two bullets were shot through the front door of his family home in Merrion Square on Christmas Eve.
82 Merrion Square
A few blocks away the Abbey Theatre, which he helped to found 18 years ago, is still doing well under the director and co-founder Lady Augusta Gregory, 70. John Bull’s Other Island, a play by his fellow Dubliner, George Bernard Shaw, 66, is being performed, starring part-time actor and full-time civil servant Barry Fitzgerald, 34.
George Bernard Shaw
Yeats has been awarded an Honorary D. Litt. From Trinity College, Dublin. He writes to a friend that this makes him feel “that I have become a personage.”
*****
In England, at Monk’s House, their country home in East Sussex, the Woolfs, Virginia, 40, and Leonard, 42, are reviewing the state of their five-year-old publishing company, the Hogarth Press.
The road outside Monk’s House
They have added 37 members to the Press’ subscribers list and have agreed to publish a new poem by their friend, American ex-pat Thomas Stearns Eliot, 34, called The Waste Land early in the new year. Virginia has donated £50 to a fund to help “poor Tom,” as she calls him, who still has a full-time day job at Lloyds Bank. Eliot takes the £50, as well as the $2,000 Dial magazine prize he has been awarded in America and sets up a trust fund for himself and his wife Vivienne, 34.
The Hogarth Press has published six titles this year, the same as last. But most important to Virginia, one of them, Jacob’s Room, is her first novel not published by her hated stepbrother, Gerald Duckworth, 52. She can write as she pleases now.
Most interesting to Virginia at the end of this year is her newfound friendship with another successful English novelist, Vita Sackville-West, 30. The Woolfs have been spending lots of time with Vita and her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, 36.
Sir Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West
Virginia writes in her diary,
The human soul, it seems to me, orients itself afresh every now and then. It is doing so now…No one can see it whole, therefore. The best of us catch a glimpse of a nose, a shoulder, something turning away, always in movement.”
*****
In France, American ex-pats Gertrude Stein, 48, and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, 45, are vacationing in St. Remy. They came for a month and have decided to stay for the duration of the winter.
Stein is pleased that her Geography and Plays has recently been published by Four Seas in Boston. This eclectic collection of stories, poems, plays and language experiments that she has written over the past decade comes with an encouraging introduction by one of her American friends, established novelist Sherwood Anderson, 46. He says that Gertrude’s work is among the most important being written today, and lives “among the little housekeeping words, the swaggering bullying street-corner words, the honest working, money-saving words.”
Geography and Plays by Gertrude Stein
The volume also contains her 1913 poem, “Sacred Emily,” which includes a phrase Stein repeats often,
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”
Alice is thinking of using that as part of the logo for Gertrude’s personal stationery.
Stein and Alice are hopeful that Geography and Plays will help her blossoming reputation as a serious writer. For now, they are going to send some fruit to one of their new American friends back in Paris, foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, Ernest Hemingway, 23, and his lovely wife Hadley, 31.
*****
In America, free-lance writer Dorothy Parker, 29, has had a terrible year.
She did get her first short story published, “Such a Pretty Little Picture” in this month’s issue of Smart Set. After years of writing only the light verse that sells easily to New York’s magazines and newspapers, Parker is starting to branch out and stretch herself more.
However, her stockbroker husband of five years, Edwin Pond Parker II, also 29, finally packed up and moved back to his family in Connecticut.
Dorothy and Eddie Parker
Parker took up with a would-be playwright from Chicago, Charles MacArthur, 27, who started hanging around with her lunch friends from the Algonquin Hotel. He broke Dottie’s heart—and her spirit after he contributed only $30 to her abortion. And made himself scarce afterwards.
On Christmas day there were no fewer than eight new plays for Parker to review. She had to bundle up against the cold and spend the holiday racing around to see as much of each one as she could. And then go home to no one but her bird Onan (“because he spills his seed”) and her dog Woodrow Wilson.
New York Times Square Christmas Eve 1920s by J. A. Blackwell
As she gets ready to jump into 1923, Parker works on the type of short poem she has become known for:
One Perfect Rose
By Dorothy Parker
A single flow’r he sent me, since we met. All tenderly his messenger he chose; Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet– One perfect rose.
I knew the language of the floweret; “My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.” Love long has taken for his amulet One perfect rose.
Why is it no one ever sent me yet One perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get One perfect rose.
Early next year I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, and about The Literary 1920s in Paris and New York City at the Osher program at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
She knows the porter put it right there. And she went to get a bottle of water. She’s come back. And now it’s gone.
American ex-pat Hadley Hemingway, 31, is traveling to Lausanne, Switzerland, to visit her husband, American foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, Ernest Hemingway, 23, who is covering the Lausanne Peace Conference.
Ernie’s been there for about a week; he’d begged her to come with him, but Hadley hadn’t been feeling well. When she received his letter yesterday saying how much he missed her, she threw together some skiing clothes and stuffed a small valise full of the fiction stories he’s been working on. Hadley figured he’d want to show them to his friend, American investigative reporter Lincoln Steffens, 56.
Lincoln Steffens and Ernest Hemingway in Lausanne
And now they’re gone.
She finds the porter who helped her and they search the whole train. Nada.
Hadley is devastated. How is she going to tell Ernie?! All his hard work. His first novel. The writing that is so much more important to him than the journalism he’s being paid for.
All the carbons were in the valise too.
*****
In Lausanne, Hemingway is filing story after story about the conference which brings together leaders from Great Britain, France, Greece, Italy and Turkey.
Lord Curzon, Benito Mussolini and Raymond Poincare in Lausanne
For the Toronto Star. But also for the American Hearst publications. And the International News Service (INS), using the name “John Hadley,” so the Star won’t catch him.
But the INS has become suspicious. They have asked for some more details about the expense claims Hemingway has been turning in. That just makes Ernie angry, so he sends them a cable:
SUGGEST YOU UPSTICK BOOKS ASSWARD.”
Today Hemingway is looking forward to seeing his wife, Hadley, just arriving from Paris. At the train station he sees her step out onto the platform. He can’t believe the look on her face. She’s obviously been crying for hours.
What on earth could have happened to upset her so much?!
Early next year I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, and about The Literary 1920s in Paris and New York City at the Osher program at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Barnet Braverman, 34, former radical newspaper editor turned boring advertising guy, has just crossed the border from Canada into the United States carrying one copy of the recently published novel Ulysses by Irishman James Joyce, 40, which has been banned in this country for being obscene.
Detroit-Windsor Ferry
If he’d been caught, he faced a $5,000 fine and up to five years in prison.
Earlier this year Barnet had been contacted by the publisher of the controversial novel, American Sylvia Beach, 35, who operates a bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare and Company. One of the young aspiring novelists who hangs out in her store, Ernest Hemingway, 23, had suggested Braverman, whom he’d known when they both worked in advertising in Chicago.
Braverman is excited and proud to take part in this international literary smuggling ring. He wants to stick it to the short-sighted American publishers who refused to publish Ulysses and also put one over on the censors he refers to as “Methodist smut hounds.”
So far everything has gone to plan. For $35 a month Braverman rented a small room near the office where he works in Windsor, Ontario. He told the landlord that he’s in the publishing business.
Sylvia then shipped 40 copies of the book to his Canadian address. That’s when he had to deal with the Canadian customs officials.
Canada hasn’t gotten around to banning Ulysses yet. But their duty is 25% of the value of any printed material, which would mean $300. With some fast talking, Braverman convinced the customs officer that these 700-page books, printed on fine paper, are only worth 50 cents each. So he only had to pay $6.50 for the lot and then stored the books in his rented room.
Once he gets them into the States, Braverman will send Ulysses to American customers COD so that the private express messenger company has to deliver them to get paid. And this plan avoids sending “obscene” material through the U. S. mail.
After work today, Braverman picked up one copy, wrapped it, and carried it under his arm onto the ferry. When he got off in Detroit, he unwrapped it for the border officer there, who waved him through with no problem.
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 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.
“A Veteran Visits the Old Front” by the paper’s foreign correspondent, American Ernest Hemingway, just turned 23, appears in the Toronto Daily Star:
PARIS.—Don’t go back to visit the old front. If you have pictures in your head of something that happened in the night in the mud at Paschendaele or of the first wave working up the slope of Vimy, do not try and go back to verify them. It is no good…
Ernest Hemingway in Italy during the Great War
Go to someone else’s front, if you want to. There your imagination will help you out and you may be able to picture the things that happened…I know because I have just been back to my own front…
I have just come from Schio,…the finest town I remember in the war, and I wouldn’t have recognized it now—and I would give a lot not to have gone…
All the kick had gone out of things. Early next morning I left in the rain after a bad night’s sleep…
I tried to find some trace of the old trenches to show my wife, but there was only the smooth green slope. In a thick prickly patch of hedge we found an old rusty piece of shell fragment…That was all there was left of the front.
For a reconstructed town is much sadder than a devastated town. The people haven’t their homes back. They have new homes. The home they played in as children, the room where they made love with the lamp turned down, the hearth where they sat, the church they were married in, the room where their child died, these rooms are gone…Now there is just the new, ugly futility of it all. Everything is just as it was—except a little worse…
I had tried to re-create something for my wife and had failed utterly. The past was as dead as a busted Victrola record. Chasing yesterdays is a bum show—and if you have to prove it, go back to your old front.”
*****
This same day, “Welcome Home” by New York free-lance writer Dorothy Parker, 28, appears in the Saturday Evening Post:
If at any time you happened to be hunting around for an average New York couple you couldn’t make a better selection than my friends [Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Watson Lunt]…
Saturday Evening Post, July 22
Once a year, however, the Lunts lay aside the cloistered life, and burn up Broadway. This is on the occasion of the annual metropolitan visit of Mr. Lunt’s Aunt Caroline, from the town where he spent his boyhood days…
The moment she sets foot in the Grand Central Terminal she compares it audibly and unfavorably with the new railroad station back home, built as soon as a decent interval had elapsed after the old one burned to the ground…
In the short ride to the Lunt apartment she manages to work in at least three times the line about ‘New York may be all right for a visit, but I wouldn’t live here if you gave me the place.’…
Dorothy Parker
Once a year, when advertising in America can manage to stagger along without Mr. Lunt for three or four days, the Lunts do their share in the way of tightening up the home ties by paying a visit to Aunt Caroline…She meets them at the train, beaming with welcome and bubbling with exclamations of how glad they must be to get out of that horrid old New York…
And so the time goes by, till the Lunts must return to New York. Aunt Caroline is annually pretty badly broken up over their leaving for that awful city…
The only thing that keeps her from going completely to pieces is the thought that she has again brought into their sultry lives a breath of real life.
The Lunts blow the annual kisses to her from the parlor-car window…As Mr. Lunt sums it up, it’s all right for a visit, but he wouldn’t live there if you gave him the place.”
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 Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
The newspaper’s freelance foreign correspondent, Ernest Hemingway, 22, former Chicago-an now living in Paris, has been getting his bylined pieces in the paper fairly regularly. Today there are two—his interview with the head of Italy’s National Fascist Party, Benito Mussolini, 38, in the Daily Star, and a more in-depth “think” piece about the impact of the strongman’s actions in the Star Weekly.
Benito Mussolini
Getting the interview involved more luck than planning. Hemingway was in Milan for a belated second honeymoon with his wife, Hadley, 30, so he could show her where he had served in the Red Cross ambulance corps during the Great War.
When Ernest heard that Mussolini was in town, he whipped out his press credentials and blagged his way into the offices of Popolo d’Italia, the newspaper which Mussolini founded eight years ago and still edits.
Hemingway was impressed with his fellow journalist/war veteran’s strength. In “Fascisti Party Half-Million,” he leads his profile with a description,
Benito Mussolini, head of the Fascisti movement, sits at his desk at the fuse of the great powder magazine that he has laid through all Northern and Central Italy and occasionally fondles the ears of a wolfhound pup, looking like a short-eared jack rabbit, that plays with the papers on the floor beside the big desk. Mussolini is a big, brown-faced man with a high forehead, a slow smiling mouth, and large, expressive hands…Mussolini was a great surprise. He is not the monster he has been pictured. His face is intellectual, it is the typical “Bersagliere” [Italian Army infantry] face, with its large, brown, oval shape, dark eyes and big, slow speaking mouth.”
Toronto Star building, 18-20 King Street
In his complementary commentary in the Star Weekly, Ernest focuses more on the dangers of the Fascisti’s rise. He points out that the Blackshirt movement “had a taste for killing under police protection and they liked it.” The lira is tanking; the Communists have formed an opposition movement called the Redshirts; and many Italian mafioso are rushing to emigrate to the States.
Hemingway concludes his piece:
The whole business has the quiet and peaceful look of a three-year-old child playing with a live Mills bomb.”
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
The Dial magazine has “More Memories” by Irish playwright William Butler Yeats, just turned 57, and two line drawings by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, 40. Its monthly columns include “Paris Letter” by American ex-pat poet Ezra Pound, 36, and “Dublin Letter” by the recently retired Head Librarian of the National Library of Ireland, John Eglinton, 54, actually writing from his home in Bournemouth, England. He reviews the new novel Ulysses by his fellow Dubliner, James Joyce, 40, living in Paris:
The Dial, June 1922
I am by no means sure, however, that I have understood Mr. Joyce’s method, which is sufficiently puzzling even where he relates incidents in which I have myself taken a humble part…There is an effort and a strain in the composition of this book which makes one feel at times a concern for the author. But why should we half-kill ourselves to write masterpieces? There is a growing divergence between the literary ideals of our artists and the books which human beings want to read.”
The New York Times Book Review has a review of The Secret Adversary, the second novel from English writer Agatha Christie, 31:
It is safe to assert that unless the reader peers into the last chapter or so of the tale, he will not know who this secret adversary is until the author chooses to reveal him…[Miss Christie] gives a sense of plausibility to the most preposterous situations and developments…[But she] has a clever prattling style that shifts easily into amusing dialogue and so aids the pleasure of the reader as he tears along with Tommy and Tuppence on the trail of the mysterious Mr. Brown. Many of the situations are a bit moth-eaten from frequent usage by other quarters, but at that Miss Christie manages to invest them with a new sense of individuality that renders them rather absorbing.”
The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie, US edition
Metropolitan magazine has a piece, “Eulogy for the Flapper” by Zelda Fitzgerald, 22, who is considered to be the original flapper, as created in the two recent hit novels by her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 25:
The flapper is deceased…They have won their case. They are blase…Flapperdom has become a game; it is no longer a philosophy.”
The Smart Set has a short story by Zelda’s husband, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”:
[Percy Washington boasts that his father is] by far the richest man in the world and has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.”
The Smart Set, June 1922
The Saturday Evening Post has two pieces by friends who lunch together regularly at the midtown Manhattan Algonquin Hotel: “Men I’m Not Married To” by free-lance writer Dorothy Parker, 28, and “Women I’m Not Married To” by popular newspaper columnist FPA [Franklin Pierce Adams], 40.
Saturday Evening Post, June 1922
The Double Dealer,A National Magazine. from the South, true to its mission to publish new work by new writers has “Portrait,” a poem by recent University of Mississippi dropout, William Faulkner, 24, and “Ultimately,” a four-line poem by Toronto Star foreign correspondent Ernest Hemingway, 22, a Chicagoan currently living in Paris:
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.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon in both print and e-book versions.
SuchFriends Blog 