“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, late December, 1922, Montmartre, Paris; and West End, London

In Paris, the Ballets Russes is performing Parade, which they premiered here five years ago with music by Erik Satie, 56, and a scenario written by Jean Cocteau, 33. The scenery, curtains and costumes are all created in a Cubist style by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, 41, who gets his own ovation when the audience stands up to cheer, and faces the box he is seated in.

A costume for Parade designed by Pablo Picasso

But the big success of the season is Cocteau’s production of Antigone, his “contraction” of Sophocles’ original, as Cocteau calls it.

Picasso also received a round of cheers during the rehearsals for the play, when Cocteau brought him to an almost bare set, with just some masks and a violet-blue and white backdrop, and told the painter to create a hot, sunny day.

Picasso paced the stage. Picked up a piece of red chalk. Rubbed the white boards with it until they looked like marble. Dipped a brush in a bottle of ink. Drew some lines on the background and blackened in a few spaces.

Three Doric columns appeared. All those watching applauded.

Cocteau also persuaded Coco Chanel, 39, to design the heavy Scotch woolen costumes for Oedipus’s daughters.

Antigone is packing them in at the 100-year-old Théâtre de l’Atelier, owned by the actor and drama teacher Charles Dullin, 37, who directed the production and appears in it as well. Dullin’s mother pawned the family’s furniture and silverware to get enough money for Charles to buy and renovate this theatre.

Théâtre de l’Atelier,

Cocteau himself is playing the part of the Chorus, and also in the cast is one of Dullin’s students, Antonin Artaud, 26. The music for the play has been written by Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, 30, and the lead is played by a Romanian dancer, Génica Athanasiou, 25, who speaks so little French she had to learn her lines syllable by syllable. As a reward for her efforts, Cocteau has dedicated the production to her.

Génica Athanasiou by Man Ray

Each evening begins with a short curtain-raiser by Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, 55, who had success last year with his Six Characters in Search of an Author.

The names Picasso, Chanel and Pirandello are what initially drew the crowds. However, now that Antigone is a big hit, Cocteau is becoming a cult figure among young men who show up in large groups to applaud each night. Some have even been hanging around outside Cocteau’s house and climbing up the lamp post just to get a look at him.

Jean Cocteau by Man Ray

*****

In London’s West End, German Count Harry Kessler, 54, is enjoying theatre while visiting the city for the first time since the Great War broke out. He confides his impressions to his diary,

Not much change in the shops. They are as good class and as elegant as they used to be. But there is no longer the astounding amount of hustle and luxury as in 1914 and which is still to be met in Paris. It can be sensed that the country has become poorer and the shoppers rarer…[At the theatre] to my astonishment, at least half the men in the stalls were in lounge suits, the rest in dinner jackets, and only five or six in tails. A real revolution or, more accurately, the symptom of such.”

A West End theatre audience

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

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.

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 d on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, mid-September, 1922, Monk’s House, Rodmell, East Sussex; and Garsington, Oxfordshire, England

Looking back, the weekend was a bit awkward.

Novelist Virginia Woolf, 40, and her husband Leonard, 41, hosted their last house guests for this summer.

Fellow novelist Edward Morgan Forster, 43, arrived on Friday evening, carrying only a fraying backpack for luggage and dressed in old clothes.

American ex-pat poet Thomas Stearns Eliot, about to turn 34, didn’t come until Saturday afternoon, after finishing his day job at Lloyds Bank in the morning. He was dressed a bit more formally.

E. M. Forster and T. S. Eliot at Monk’s House

Morgan kept to himself most of the weekend, writing in his room. Virginia realized that he does better when he is the only weekend guest, not having to mix too much with others he’s not comfortable around.

What was most interesting about the weekend was what was not talked about.

Eliot never mentioned the long poem he’s been working on, which he had read to the Woolfs a few months ago.  Although they did talk about a fund that fellow American ex-pat poet Ezra Pound, 36, living in France, is trying to set up for Eliot so he can leave his bank job. Eliot seems a bit embarrassed by the effort.

Virginia is also a bit envious of Morgan’s confidence over the novel he’s been working on.

He is happy in his novel, but does not want to discuss it,”

she writes in her diary.

And no one mentioned the recent coverage of an extensive report by the War Office Committee which, for two years, has been looking into “shell shock” in veterans from the Great War. It is causing quite a stir. One recommendation is that the medical term be changed to “war neurosis” as some who served never really heard shells.

On Sunday afternoon, after tea, Eliot leaves. The whole atmosphere changes. As Virginia records in her diary, she, Leonard and Morgan, “snuggled in & Morgan became very familiar; anecdotic; simple, gossiping about friends & humming his little tunes,”

*****

Meanwhile, one of Virginia’s Bloomsbury friends, biographer Lytton Strachey, 42, has written to her about a “not very stimulating” weekend he is having at Garsington, the country home of former Liberal MP Philip Morrell, 52, and his wife Ottoline, 49. Lytton describes his hostess to Virginia in less than flattering terms: 

Ottoline was dreadfully degringole [tumbling down in his opinion]…:  her bladder has now gone the way of her wits—a melancholy dribble; and then, as she sits after dinner in the lamplight, her cheek pouches drooping with peppermints, a cigarette between her false teeth, and vast spectacles on her painted nose, the effect produced is extremely agitating. I found I want to howl like an Irish wolf—but perhaps the result produced in you was different.”

Lady Ottoline Morrell

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 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.

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.

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, September, 1922, Café de Flore, corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue Saint-Benoit, Paris

Three American women are seated at the little marble-topped tables in front of the café. Each is wearing a black tailored suit, a white satin scarf, and white gloves. One wears a black cloak.

Each has a martini on the table in front of her. All three are writers.

Djuna Barnes, 30, from Croton-on-Hudson, New York, wearing her signature cloak, has been living in Paris since last year. Her lengthy profile of Irish writer James Joyce, 40, caused quite a stir when it was published in Vanity Fair a few months ago.

Solita Solano, 33, born Sarah Wilkinson in Troy, New York, also an established writer, has just moved to the city with her lover, Janet Flanner, 30, from Indianapolis, Indiana, so they both can work on their novels.

Solita Solano and Djuna Barnes 

When they first arrived earlier this month, Solano and Flanner took rooms in a small pension on rue de Quatrefages. But the constant noise was annoying. Drowning out the dedicated piano student practicing down the hall was the construction crew renovating a mosque down the street.

Janet Flanner

They have now moved to two small fifth-floor rooms, Nos. 15 and 16, in the Hotel Napoleon Bonaparte, 36 rue Bonaparte, each paying one dollar a day for the relative quiet. They are near the cafés and L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

In addition to the Flore, one of their other regular haunts is a neighborhood restaurant, La Quatrieme Republique, named in anticipation of a fourth French Republic following the current one. A few doors from their hotel, the restaurant’s food is interesting and affordable. However, they have nicknamed their usual waitress “Yvonne the Terrible” for her shrewish demeanor, despite their generous tips.

Solano and Flanner met after the Great War back in New York City. Flanner and her husband discovered after they had moved there that they had nothing in common, so they separated. He was happy with his boring bank; Janet hung out in Greenwich Village with bohemians, in Harlem with jazz musicians, and in midtown with writers and artists. At parties in the studio owned by illustrator Neysa McMein, 34, Flanner became friends with a young couple, magazine editor Harold Ross, 29, and his wife New York Times reporter Jane Grant, 30.

And she also met Solita.

They fell in love and when Solano, the drama critic for the New York Tribune, was offered a commission from National Geographic to tour the Mediterranean and Middle East, sending back stories, she brought Janet along.

After a year of travel, they have now decided to settle here in Paris, living off their writings and a bit of money Flanner’s father left her, and begin serious work on their novels.

Janet sends letters from Paris back to Grant in New York, chronicling the daily life of the ex-pats in the City of Light.

“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 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, August 30, 1922, RAF Recruiting Office, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London

A young blonde man walks into the recruiting office and fills out an application to enlist in the Royal Air Force. John Hume Ross, 28.

Except he isn’t.

He is Thomas Edward Lawrence, just turned 34, former colonel in the British Army, known for his role in the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the Great War, and until recently a bored bureaucrat in the government’s Foreign Office.

T. E. Lawrence during the Great War

Even though his supervisor there, Winston Churchill, 47, head of the Colonial Office and MP for Dundee, sent him back to the Middle East several times, Lawrence found the administrative work stultifying. Churchill finally accepted his resignation last month.

Since the end of the War, Lawrence has been working on his memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and privately published, at his own expense, a few copies with the Oxford Press this summer.

During his service he realized how important air power now is in battle; he wants to re-enlist, this time with the RAF.

Anticipating problems if he tries to sign up at his age, earlier this year Lawrence met with Sir Hugh Trenchard, 49, the “father” of the RAF, at the Air Ministry to tell him of his plan. Trenchard agreed.

Now, at the recruiting office, Flying Officer W. E. Johns, 29, is suspicious of “Ross” and his fitness for service. Lawrence admits that he gave false information and Johns rejects him.

Lawrence contacts Trenchard who sends a message that Officer Johns must accept Lawrence.

He’s in. Again.

T. E. Lawrence in the RAF

“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 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.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, July 22, 1922, Toronto Daily Star, Toronto; and Saturday Evening Post magazine, New York City, New York

“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.”

You can read the full Hemingway article here,  file:///C:/Users/Kathleen%20Donnelly/Desktop/KD’S%20STUFF/such%20friends%20good/PARIS/Hemingway_Old_Front.pdf

And the full Parker essay here.  https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112041727428&view=1up&seq=283&skin=2021&q1=dorothy%20parker

“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 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.

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 24, 1922, Toronto Daily Star and Toronto Star Weekly, Toronto, Canada

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.”

You can read more of Hemingway’s Mussolini profile here.  https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/fascisti-party-now-ten-million-strong

“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.

In the fall, I will be talking about the centenary of The Waste Land in the Osher programs 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.

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, May 6, 1922, Hogarth House, Richmond, London

Facing serious dental work, including three extractions, and her inability to fight off this influenza that has had her in and out of bed for the past few months, the spring of novelist Virginia Woolf’s 40^th year is not going well.

Today, she and her husband Leonard, 41, were able to go for a walk. Hoorah! But then her temperature went up over 101 degrees, and they had to call the doctor.

The one bright spot is that, confined to bed, again, she now has time to delve back into the writing of Marcel Proust, 50.

Swann’s Way

She’d been introduced to his work during the Great War by her Bloomsbury friend, art critic Roger Fry, 55, whom she’s writing to today. She tells Roger that, although she has the

most violent cold in the whole parish,…Proust’s fat volume comes in very handy…to sink myself in it all day…Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures—theres [sic] something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me:  It becomes an obsession.”

At the beginning of the year she had first taken up Swann’s Way, and written to her fellow novelist E. M. Forster, 43, then in India,

Everyone is reading Proust. I sit silent and hear their reports. It seems to be a tremendous experience, but I’m shivering on the brink, and waiting to be submerged with a horrid sort of notion that I shall go down and down and down and perhaps never come up again.”

Forster was so impressed by Virginia’s reaction that he bought a copy of Swann’s Way on board the ship back home to England. He has found that Proust’s technique of revealing character through inner thoughts is influencing the Indian novel he is finally getting around to finishing.

Reading Proust is also helping Woolf with her work, a long short story, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” And it is keeping her from what she feels she is supposed to be reading, that vile tome, Ulysses by James Joyce, also 40.

Virginia is thinking that she also needs to write to her friend Ottoline Morrell, 48, to cancel her planned visit to the Morrells’ country pile, Garsington, at the end of the month. June or July might be better. This flu is just not going away.

Garsington

“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.

In June 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.

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, April, 1922, Palazzo San Giorgio, Genoa, Italy; and 50 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London

The Genoa Economic and Financial Conference is underway.

British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, 59, instigated this conference of delegates from selected European countries, to plan for the “reconstruction of economic Europe, devastated and broken into fragments by the desolating agency of war,” as he told the UK House of Commons. They gave him a rousing vote of confidence.

Rotogravure of the Palazzo San Giorgio

Over 700 journalists applied for the 200 ticketed slots to cover the four-week get together. Some of them have to sit on the floor.

The correspondent for the Toronto Star, American Ernest Hemingway, 22, arrived early in the month and began filing stories. His first description of the setting:

Genoa is crowded, a modern Babel with a corps of perspiring interpreters trying to bring the representatives of 40 [sic] different countries together. The narrow streets flow with crowds kept orderly by thousands of Italian troops.”

The troops in their black fezzes are visible to discourage violent outbreaks by Communists or anti-Communists in this city which is one-third “Red.” The best way to keep the peace seems to be closing the cafes, Hemingway observes.

The tension is exacerbated by Britain’s insistence, over France’s objection, that both Germany and Soviet Russia attend. France doesn’t want to invite their main debtor, the Weimar Republic, nor any representatives of the new Bolshevik government in Moscow.

America has declined to participate at all.

Living in Paris with his new wife since late last year, Ernie is happy to be covering his first major political event for the Star. He is getting used to filing his copy by cable, and a few of the more experienced journalists here have given him some tips. Muckraking investigative reporter Lincoln Steffens, just turned 56, showed him how to run words together—“aswellas”—to save money. Hemingway loves this.

It’s wonderful! It’s a new language. No fat, all bones and structure,”

he exclaims to his colleagues over chianti.

During the opening ceremony, the arrival of Lloyd George is met with a loud ovation. The other delegations enter, and, as Hemingway describes the scene:

When the hall is nearly full, the British delegation enters. They have come in motor cars through the troop-lined streets and enter with elan. They are the best dressed delegation…The hall is crowded and sweltering and the four empty chairs of the Soviet delegation are the four emptiest looking chairs I have ever seen. Everyone is wondering whether they will not appear. Finally they come through the door and start making their way through the crowd. Lloyd George looks at them intently, fingering his glasses…A mass of secretaries follow the Russian delegates, including two girls with fresh faces, hair bobbed in the fashion started by [American dancer] Irene Castle, and modish tailored suits. They are far and away the best-looking girls in the conference hall. The Russians are seated. Someone hisses for silence, and Signor Facta starts the dreary round of speeches that sends the conference under way.”

*****

Economist John Maynard Keynes, 38, is one of the many Brits attending. He represented his government in Versailles at the Paris Peace Conference three years ago—when Germany and Russia were definitely not invited. But now he is here as General Editor of a special 12-part series, “Reconstruction in Europe” by the Manchester Guardian Commercial. These supplements are being translated into five languages and include contributions from leading statesmen and businessmen, along with 13 pieces by Keynes.

First Manchester Guardian supplement

The Guardian approached Maynard last year to take on this role, and he agreed only when they assured him he would be able to closely supervise the writers who would be chosen. Keynes is using this medium to get across his opinions of the steps being taken to rebuild a Europe which has been so devastated by the Great War.

Throughout the conference, Keynes keeps up a steady correspondence with his friends back home. Particularly his most recent lover, Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, 30.

*****

Back in Bloomsbury, Lydia is enjoying settling into her new home in 50 Gordon Square, where Maynard installed her before he left, surrounded by his artsy Bloomsbury friends and just a few doors away from his residence in number 46.

Lydia has left the Ballets Russes, where she was a principal dancer for many years, and is now dancing in Covent Garden with the company led by fellow Russian Leonid Massine, 25, former choreographer with the Ballets Russes.

Since Maynard left for Italy, Lydia has been writing to him almost every day about the details of her new London life; commenting on his articles in the Guardian—

Your expression in the end give me nice tremblings”—

and how much she misses him—

I place melodious strokes all over you. Maynard, you are very nice.”

Lydia Lopokova

Thanks to Dr. Marie Hooper for assistance in understanding European history.

“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.

In June 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.

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

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, April 22, 1922, 2:30 pm, Piccadilly Circus, London

On the birthday of his older brother John, who was killed at the end of the Great War, Martin Bateson, 22, son of renowned Cambridge University biologist William, 60, and older brother of Gregory, 17, his girlfriend having recently rejected the play he wrote about their relationship, walks up to the Eros statue, puts a white glove on his right hand, takes a .25 caliber automatic pistol out of his pocket, places it next to his right ear, and pulls the trigger.

Bateson suicide in Piccadilly Circus

“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.

In June 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.

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, February 8, 1922, 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris

The young newlyweds, about to knock on this door, are filled with nervous anticipation.

Toronto Star European correspondent and would-be novelist Ernest Hemingway, 22, and his new wife, Hadley, 30, moved to Paris in December. But they have waited until now to make use of one of the letters of introduction given to Ernie by his mentor, successful novelist Sherwood Anderson, 45, back home in Chicago.

27 rue de Fleurus

When the couple told him they were planning to move to Europe—where Ernest had served in an ambulance corps during the Great War—Sherwood convinced them to choose Paris. They should join the other ex-patriates here, taking advantage of the great exchange rate. And he gave them letters of introduction to the creative people he had met here last summer, none more important than the woman who lives at this address, Gertrude Stein, just turned 48.

Stein is already legendary for the salons she and her brother Leo, almost two years older, had hosted here before the War, with the most cutting-edge painters of the time. Gertrude has said that she wants to do with words on the page what those artists are doing with paint on the canvas.

Sherwood is a huge fan of hers, so Ernest is eager to meet this woman and learn more about writing from her. But he is a bit intimidated too.

*****

Gertrude is impressed with the young American writer she has just met. Very good-looking. Stein’s partner, fellow American Alice B. Toklas, 44, had taken Hadley to another room to chat, so Gertrude didn’t get to know much about her. But she did offer to teach Ernest how to cut his wife’s hair.

Stein is thinking she will take the Hemingways up on their offer to come round to their flat and read some of Ernest’s fiction. He seems to be a good listener. Someone Gertrude could easily influence.

Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein at home with their paintings

“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. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Due to the horrible winter weather, we have postponed our celebration of the 148^th birthday of my fellow Pittsburgher Gertrude Stein to Thursday, February 17, at 7 pm, at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill. You can register for this free event, or sign up to watch it via Zoom, here. 

At the end of the month I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses at 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 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.