This happy troupe of ex-pat Americans is making their way from their homes in Paris to see their first bullfights in Spain.
Bill Bird, 35, from Buffalo, New York, started his own small company last year, Three Mountains Press, in offices on quai d’Anjou on the Ile Saint Louis. He handprints his own books as well as those written by his Left Bank friends. Bird also lends his office space to other publishers, such as…
Ile Saint Louis
Robert McAlmon, 28, from Clifton, Kansas, who recently started the Contact Press, using his wealthy British father-in-law’s money and the name from a magazine he founded in Greenwich Village a few years ago. Before leaving on this trip, McAlmon sent out an announcement that Contact Press is soliciting unpublished manuscripts. He has been inundated with work, both from writers he specifically targeted—Gertrude Stein, 49, Ezra Pound, 37, James Joyce, 41, Wyndham Lewis, 40 (only Wyndham turned him down)—and others he’s never heard of.
In his upcoming Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers, McAlmon plans to include the best work. He is also thinking of publishing a separate book with just stories and poems by one of his fellow travelers….
Ernest Hemingway, 23, from Oak Park, Illinois.
Robert McAlmon and Ernest Hemingway
As the European correspondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway has been traveling all over Europe filing stories. He really needs this break from cold, rainy Paris. Ernest and his wife Hadley, 31, had planned to go to Norway for the excellent trout fishing. But his friend Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, 46, convinced Hemingway to go see the Spanish bullfights, and pregnant Hadley decided to stay in Paris. Stein and Toklas were quite enthusiastic. Ernest has also gotten some travel tips from other friends about where to go and where to eat.
The train has stopped. They all look out the windows to see what the problem is and catch sight of a dead dog on the side of the track.
McAlmon instinctively looks away. Hemingway scolds him for trying to avoid reality.
In June I will be talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
The Toronto Star’s European correspondent, American ex-pat Ernest Hemingway, 23, has been traveling and sending back reports about the current state of Europe. Today, the paper runs his piece about the difficulties of getting into Germany:
German embassy in Paris
Offenburg, Baden—In Paris they said it was very difficult to get into Germany. No tourists allowed. No newspaper men wanted. The German consulate will not visa a passport without a letter from a consulate or chamber of commerce in Germany saying, under a seal, it is necessary for the traveler to come to Germany for a definite business transaction…
“’We must preserve the utmost strictness,’ said the German consul and reluctantly and suspiciously after much consultation of files gave me a visa good for three weeks.
“’How do we know you will not write lies about Germany?,’ he said before he handed me back the passport.
“’Oh, cheer up,’ I said…
“Germany did not look very cheerful…”
Ernest Hemingway’s passport
Hemingway has to take a train and a tram through Strasbourg, France, to catch a military train to Offenberg. After he crosses the border into Germany, he stops at a hotel buffet and talks to one of the waiters, who tells him,
All the people you say you saw in July cannot come now. The French will not give them passports to come into Germany…All our factories here are shut down. No coal. No trains. This was one of the biggest and busiest stations in Germany. Now nix…We haven’t had any fun since 1914…’
“I looked up at the wall where the prices were:
Beer, 350 marks a glass
Red wine, 500 marks a glass
Sandwich, 900 marks
Lunch, 3,500 marks
Champagne, 38,000 marks
“I remembered that last July I stayed at a de luxe hotel with Mrs. Hemingway for 600 marks a day.
“’Sure,’ the waiter went on, ‘I read the French papers. Germany debases her money to cheat the allies. But what do I get out of it?’”
“Such Friends” will have a booth at the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books on Saturday, May 13th, at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Highland Park. Stop by and receive a special Festival discount on your purchase of any “Such Friends” books!
In June I will be talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
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.
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.
“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.
Toronto Star Weekly foreign correspondent Ernest Hemingway, 22, has finished polishing the lead on his article, “American Bohemians in Paris”:
The scum of Greenwich Village, New York, has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladlesful on that section of Paris adjacent to the Café Rotonde. New scum, of course, has risen to take the place of the old, but the oldest scum, the thickest scum and the scummiest scum has come across the ocean, somehow,…and has made the Rotonde the leading Latin Quarter show place for tourists in search of atmosphere.”
La Rotonde
Since December Ernest and his new wife, Hadley, 30, have been living in Paris on his Toronto Star salary and her family trust fund. The exchange rate is so favorable that, after they moved from their hotel to a cramped fourth-floor walk-up, he was able to rent this office around the corner, on the top floor of an old hotel where French poet Paul Verlaine died back in the 19th century. Hemingway keeps regular writing hours daily.
The editor back in Canada uses almost everything Ernie sends, about two articles a week, and he has traveled to Switzerland to file stories about the decline of the tourist trade there, and to Spain to write about tuna fishing.
Finishing up this piece, Ernest writes,
The fact that there are twelve francs for a dollar brought over the Rotonders, along with a good many other people, and if the exchange rates goes back to normal they will have to go back to America. They are nearly all loafers expending the energy that an artist puts into his creative work in talking about what they are going to do and condemning the work of all artists who have gained any degree of recognition. By talking about art they obtain the same satisfaction that the real artist does in his work. That is very pleasant, of course, but they insist upon posing as artists.”
Loafers at La Rotonde
Next month, the Toronto Star is sending Hemingway to Italy to cover the Genoa Economic and Financial Conference.
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 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.
In newspapers and correspondence in England and France, the reviews are coming in…
Ulysses by James Joyce
No book has ever been more eagerly and curiously awaited by the strange little inner circle of book lovers and litterateurs than James Joyce’s Ulysses…Mr. James Joyce is a man of genius…I cannot, however, believe that sex plays such a preponderant part in life as Mr. Joyce represents…[Molly Bloom’s soliloquy is] the vilest, according to ordinary standards, in all literature…[But] there are phrases in which the words are packed tightly, as trim, as taut, as perfect as these things can be. There are fine ellipses in which a great sweep of meaning is concentrated into a single just right sentence. There is a spot of colour which sets the page aglow…And yet its very obscenity is somehow beautiful and wrings the soul to pity…Has he not exaggerated the vulgarity and magnified the madness of mankind and the mysterious materiality of the universe?”
—Sisley Huddleston, LondonObserver
LondonObserver, March 5, 1922
It took, I understand, nearly six years of Mr. Joyce’s life to write, and it will take nearly six of ours to read…The book is a staggering feat which, once attempted and more than half achieved, may never be attempted again.”
—George Slocombe, LondonDaily Herald
George Slocombe
“An Irish Revel: And Some Flappers”
Our first impression is that of sheer disgust, our second of irritability because we never know whether a character is speaking or merely thinking, our third of boredom at the continual harping on obscenities (nothing cloys a reader’s appetite so quickly as dirt)…Reading Mr. Joyce is like making an excursion into Bolshevist Russia: all standards go by the board…The maddest, muddiest, most loathsome book issued in our own or any other time—inartistic, incoherent, unquotably nasty—a book that one would have thought could only emanate from a criminal lunatic asylum…[Joyce is] the man with the bomb who would blow what remains of Europe into the sky…His intention, so far as he has any social intention, is completely anarchic.”
—S. P. B. Mais, LondonDaily Express
S. P. B. Mais
I’m reading the new Joyce—I hate it when I dip here and there, but when I read it in the right order I am much impressed. However I have but read some thirty pages in that order. It has our Irish cruelty and also our kind of strength and the Martello Tower pages are full of beauty. A cruel playful mind like a great soft tiger cat—I hear, as I read, the report of the rebel sergeant in 1898: ‘O he was a fine fellow, a fine fellow. It was a pleasure to shoot him.’”
—William Butler Yeats, near Oxford,
letter to a friend in London
*****
Joyce has a most goddam wonderful book. It’ll probably reach you in time. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving but you can find the whole crew of them every night in Michaud’s where Binney [his wife Hadley] and I can only afford to go about once a week. Gertrude Stein says Joyce reminds her of an old woman out in San Francisco. The woman’s son struck it rich in the Klondyke and the old woman went around wringing her hands and saying, ‘Oh my poor Joey! My poor Joey! He’s got so much money!’ The damned Irish, they have to moan about something or other, but you never heard of an Irishman starving.”
—Ernest Hemingway, Paris,
letter to a friend in Chicago
By the end of the month the $12 copies of Ulysses have sold out.
“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.
This June I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after the Great War 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.
The young newlyweds, about to knock on this door, are filled with nervous anticipation.
TorontoStar 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, GertrudeStein, 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 148th birthday of my fellow Pittsburgher Gertrude Stein to Thursday, February 17, at 7 pm, at Riverstone Booksin 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.
SuchFriends Blog 