“Such Friends”: Today! Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Littsburgh is a locally-run website devoted to all things literary in Pittsburgh. They host a directory of author’s biographies, and also invite us to submit interviews about our latest works. So I did…

Q&A:  Kathleen Dixon Donnelly, author of “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Thanks to Littsburgh for the opportunity to tell you about my paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. The series is based on blogs I’ve been posting at www.suchfriends.wordpress.com, chronicling what was happening in the literary and artistic world 100 years ago. The title comes from a poem by William Butler Yeats, “…say my glory was I had such friends.” Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923, are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, and on Amazon in both print and e-book formats, or from me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

As an author I jumped at the chance to interview myself, but, I have to say—that felt a bit narcissistic. So I enlisted the help of one of my best friends, Liz, to do the honors over glasses of chardonnay in her back garden.

Three volumes of “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s

LIZ BFF:  So what’s this obsession you have with the 1920s?

KDD:  My Mom always talked about the 20s in a good way. She was born in 1920, one month to the day after Prohibition went into effect (I snuck her into Volume I). And your first nine years are usually remembered fondly.

My mother talked a lot about Dorothy Parker—

Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses”

—and her friends who lunched together as the Algonquin Hotel Round Table throughout the 20s.. For example, I remember she told me that the humorist Robert Benchley—we read his essays in 9^th grade English—instructed his wife to have him cremated and go to the cemetery in a taxi with his ashes in his briefcase next to her on the seat. Imagine my surprise to find out when doing my academic research that my mother was right—the story is true.

LIZ BFF:  That’s right—your research. This all started with your academic research.

KDD:  Yes—but these books aren’t academic! My Ph. D., from Dublin City University in Ireland, was about writers and artists who hung out together. How did these friendships affect their creativity? I looked at four main “salons,” two before and two after World War I:  Yeats and the Irish Literary Renaissance who founded Dublin’s Abbey Theatre; Virginia Woolf and the writers and artists in the Bloomsbury group in London; our fellow Pittsburgher Gertrude Stein and the Americans who came to Paris in the 1920s; and, of course, Parker and the Round Table. 31 creative people all together. For the books I’ve expanded a bit to include others who weren’t in the groups, and important world events going on during the decade.

LIZ BFF:  That’s a lot of creative people. Who are your favorites?

KDD:  Well, Parker for one. I feel as though she was doing a lot of the same things all my friends and I were doing in our 20s—free-lance writing, whining about our relationships with men. But she paid a higher price—back alley abortions, for example.

But my other favorite would be Virginia Woolf’s sister, painter Vanessa Bell. She’s often overlooked, even by British feminists. She was a terrific painter; I use one of her works, A Conversation, on the cover of Volume II, 1921. And she was the earth mother for the Bloomsberries. Everyone came to her houses, in London and Sussex. One of their friends described the sisters this way: 

People admired Virginia; they adored Vanessa.”

“Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, Volume II–1921

LIZ BFF:  Those are the kinds of stories and descriptions I’ve really enjoyed reading in your books. How do Gertrude Stein and W. B. Yeats fit in?

KDD:  Gertrude’s relationships with writers like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald are probably the best known. She and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, were the most committed couple of all my 31 writers. In the words of one of their biographers, Diana Souhami, from the day they met they were together; they

never traveled without each other or entertained separately, or worked on independent projects.”

Of course, Gertrude and her family left Pittsburgh when she was only six months old. But we ‘burghers are quite proud.

As for Yeats and the Irish, I’ve found that they illustrate a big contrast between Ireland and the rest of the world in the 1920s. Once the Irish won their war for independence from the British, they started shooting each other in their Civil War, while people in London, Paris and New York were doing the Charleston. However, the Irish did manage to keep their theatre going.

LIZ BFF: You’ve got so many great stories about all these people. But how do you think they compare with today? I mean, stories are nice, but what’s the point? What can we learn from looking back at that decade?

KDD:  Good question! I think the main lesson I’ve come away with is that the good old days weren’t. Alcoholism, depression—particularly in men—gambling addiction, suicide, eating disorders:  These are issues that have always been with us but were not discussed then. The early biographies I read laughed off the addictions and depression: 

She was sooo drunk! Ha ha.”

“He gambled away his apartment! Ha ha.”

“He just got up and walked away from his job! Ha ha!”

In reality, not so funny.

LIZ BFF:  Well, I’ve certainly enjoyed reading them. I dip in and out because they’re short and the layout makes the books easy to read. At the end of each one I’m thinking, I can’t wait to find out what happens next.

Easy-to-read layout of “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s

KDD:  Thank you! That’s the effect I’m going for. There is an awful lot of foreshadowing. Every vignette is related to another one.

LIZ BFF:  I noticed that.

KDD:  For example, in 1920 an armed burglary in Massachusetts will culminate in the executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927—which Parker and others protested. Hemingway goes to a party and meets Hadley Richardson; a year later they get married and move to Paris. In 1921 excerpts from James Joyce’s Ulysses are found to be obscene by a New York court, and the following year Sylvia Beach’s bookstore in Paris publishes the whole book, on Joyce’s 40^th birthday. Meanwhile, in London, Virginia Woolf can barely force herself to read it, but she and her husband publish T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land the next year. So if you’ve never gotten through Ulysses, don’t feel bad. Sometimes I think most of the vignettes should end with “Stay tuned…”

LIZ BFF:  I’m tuned. I can’t wait to read Volume V, 1924.

KDD:  Great. I’m working on it. In the meantime, remember—they make great gifts!

LIZ BFF:  That chardonnay was really nice.

“Such Friends” at the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books, 2023

“Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923, are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, and on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book formats. There is a discount for reading this far and ordering directly from the publisher (me), and if you live on a Pittsburgh Regional Transit bus route, I will hand deliver your signed copy. Email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I will be talking about the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

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, mid-August, 1921, Virginia Hotel, 78 Rush Street, Chicago, Illinois

Hadley Richardson, 29, visiting from St. Louis, feels that last night, at this posh hotel, for the first time, she “really got to know” her fiancé, free-lance journalist Ernest Hemingway, 22.

Virginia Hotel, Chicago, Illinois

Hadley and Ernest had only seen each other twice before they got engaged this spring. But they write lots of letters to each other. And her Ernesto writes great letters.

When she came to Chicago earlier this year to meet his parents, Hadley had to bring a chaperone. Now that they are engaged, she has booked herself into the Virginia Hotel.

Hadley’s sister, and quite a few of Ernest’s friends, don’t think this marriage is a good idea. But Hadley does. She has her own inheritance so doesn’t have to depend on her family’s good wishes.

Earlier this summer, she was trying to get Hemingway to tell her exactly how old he is and what exactly he did during the Great War. Hadley was putting together an announcement for their engagement party and told him to come up with

a magnificent lie about your age in case anyone is curious enough to inquire—also tell me what events I can brag of without being a perfect fool about you.”

Ernie says that he served in the Italian Army, and she is guessing that he turned at least 23 in July, when she gave him a typewriter for his birthday.

Ernest’s day job involves editing a house organ, but he is trying to sell enough of his free-lance work to support himself without that income. Earlier this year he had a piece published about the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, building on his knowledge of boxing, but his poetry is continually rejected. He has stopped sending poems to Poetry magazine, hoping he will fare better with The Dial. They often publish poems by his friend and mentor, successful novelist Sherwood Anderson, 44. But—no luck.

Despite Ernest’s evasiveness, and although he didn’t come to visit her in St. Louis as he promised last New Year’s Eve, Hadley is confident in his talent and is convinced that they are right for each other.

They were introduced at a party last fall by Ernest’s friend, advertising copywriter Y. Kenley Smith, 33, and Hadley’s friend, Smith’s sister Kate, 29. But Ernie hasn’t been getting on so well with Kenley these days. He and Hadley have decided that they are not going to move in with Smith and his wife after their wedding in a few weeks. And Kenley has been disinvited from the reception to be held at the Hemingway home in nearby Oak Park.

Hemingway family home, Oak Park, Illinois

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volume I, covering 1920, is available in print and e-book formats on Amazon. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I will be talking about Writers’ Salons in Dublin and London Before the Great War 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 available on Amazon in both print and e-book versions.

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

“Such Friends”: 100 years ago, Spring, 1921, Chicago, Illinois

Would-be novelist Ernest Hemingway, 21, is feeling unsure about what direction he is going.

He has a job paying $40 a week editing the Co-Operative Commonwealth, a house organ supposedly devoted to spreading the word about the co-operative movement. But Ernie is starting to have doubts about the ethics of the publisher, the Co-Operative Society of America, as well as the trustees. He’s thinking he could do some investigative digging for the Chicago Tribune, even though that would probably cost him this job.

More encouraging is his growing relationship with Hadley Richardson, 29, the lovely redhead whom Hemingway met last year at a party.

Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson

They’ve been corresponding almost daily, and Ernie has told her about how he was injured in Italy during the Great War. He embellished the truth a bit. And lied about his age.

After Hemingway visited the Richardson family in St. Louis, Hadley came to Chicago for a few weeks. She and her chaperone stayed at the posh Plaza Hotel, and Ernie took her to meet his parents in nearby Oak Park. His Mom invited them to Sunday dinner—but they forgot to go! Hadley wrote the Hemingways a lovely apology, but Ernie didn’t bother to give it to them.

Lobby of Plaza Hotel, Chicago

Now that Hadley has gone home, he’s been spending his time working on the newsletter, submitting some free-lance pieces to the Toronto Star, doing lots of reading. And writing Hadley almost every day.

Hemingway is thinking that it might be time to leave this job. Even this country. And probably time to marry Hadley.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volume I covering 1920 is available in both print and e-book versions on Amazon. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This summer I will be talking about The Literary 1920s in the Osher Lifelong Learning programs at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

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 formats.

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, January, 1921, 100 East Chicago Street, Chicago, Illinois

Would-be novelist Ernest Hemingway, 21, currently working as editor of a house organ, has been hanging out here at “the Domicile” with a friend, Y. Kenley Smith, 33, who works at the Critchfield Advertising Agency. Smith has brought around one of the other Critchfield copywriters, Sherwood Anderson, 44, to meet Ernest.

Sherwood Anderson

Hemingway likes Anderson, and he’s pleasantly surprised that the feeling is mutual. But his fiancee, Hadley Richardson, 29, whom he regularly writes to in St. Louis, isn’t surprised at all.

Of course he likes you!”

she said.

Anderson, a bit older and a lot more experienced as a writer, has had short stories published in national magazines and just had a big success last year with his fourth book, Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of related stories about the residents of one town.

The young writer feels that he’s been learning a lot from the older novelist. He has introduced him to magazines such as The Dial, American Mercury, Poetry, and is turning Ernie on to contemporary writers such as Floyd Dell, 33, Waldo Frank, 31, Van Wyck Brooks, 35. All real American writers. Through Sherwood, Ernest has even met the Chicago poet, Carl Sandburg, just turned 43, who won a special Pulitzer Prize two years ago.

Carl Sandburg

Anderson has advised Hemingway to set aside a room just for writing, as Sherwood has done. Ernest is learning how to become a writer.

Anderson is tired of writing ad copy for tractors and hopes to soon be able to make a living as a full-time fiction writer. This summer, a benefactor has offered to finance his first trip to Europe. Sherwood just has to find the money to bring along his wife, Tennessee, 46.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series of books, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, very soon to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions. Early this year I will be talking about Perkins, Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

My “Such Friends” presentations, The Founding of the Abbey Theatre and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, are available to view for free on the website of PICT Classic Theatre.

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, December, 1920, 1230 North State Street, Chicago, Illinois

Ernest Hemingway, 21, is settling in to his new job as editor—and primary writer—of Cooperative Commonwealth, the house organ of the Cooperative Society of America.

Ernie isn’t quite sure how the Society operates, but “cooperative” sounds good enough to him. And he gets $40 a week.

Although the job gets heavy around deadline, the rest of the time he can make his own schedule. Most days Hemingway comes home here for lunch and gets a lot of the copy writing done for the 100-page issue in the afternoon.

Today at lunch he has received a picture card from the St. Louis woman he met at a party a few months ago, Hadley Richardson, 29, inscribed on the back,

Most awfully lovingly, Ernestonio from your Hash. December, 1920.”

Hadley Richardson picture card

Ernest and his roommates, who work in advertising, all have ambition to become more than just hired hacks. Among their role models are “real” writers who are still doing some advertising copy to keep afloat.

For example, Sherwood Anderson, 44, had a huge hit last year with his first novel, Winesburg, Ohio, which scandalized middle America—including Ernest’s parents—with its frank discussions of sex. Anderson hasbeen contributing to Cooperative Commonwealth, and still does some work for his former ad agency, Critchfield.

Ernie and his fellow writers buy copies of radical magazines like The Little Review at their local bookstores, and know that their current writing for hire is a necessary evil until some major publisher recognizes their true talents for writing fiction.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, soon to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@ gypsyteacher.com.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions. Early next year I will be talking about Perkins, Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

My “Such Friends” presentations, The Founding of the Abbey Theater and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, are available to view for free on the website of PICT Classic Theatre.

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, October, 1920, 100 East Chicago Street, Chicago, Illinois

This’ll be another great party.

Free-lance journalist Ernest Hemingway, 21, and his roommate are headed to their friends’ apartment—which they call “The Domicile”—for one of their regular Sunday parties.

Chicago, 1920

Ernest has had a really good year. It began with him entertaining a local women’s group with stories of his experiences and injuries in the Great War [he embellished them just a little]. He was so impressive that a wealthy couple hired him to live in their Toronto, Canada, mansion as a companion to their disabled teenaged son.

The kid was a bore. But through connections, Ernie managed to get a position writing for the Toronto Star Weekly magazine. And after some unsigned pieces of his were published, he finally got a byline! In “Taking a Chance for a Free Shave” by Ernest M. Hemingway he told the tale of his trip to a local barber college.

Even when he went for his usual trout fishing trip up in Michigan this past spring, he was still able to have bylined pieces most weeks in both the Star and the Chicago Tribune. His parents weren’t happy that Ernest had no plans, and after a raucous beach party at the family lake cottage last summer—the neighbors complained—his mother had thrown him out, hand delivering to him a lengthy, nasty letter which said in part,

Stop trading your handsome face to fool little gullible girls and neglecting your duties to God and your Saviour…Do not come back until your tongue has learned not to insult and shame your mother.”

A bit harsh.

Ernest Hemingway and friends at the lake in Michigan

Soon after, Hemingway went out one night with his last $6 in his pocket to a high class, although illegal, gambling house in Charlevoix, Michigan, and walked out at 2 am with $59 from the roulette tables. That was enough to keep him going without having to ask his parents for money. Ernie packed up some of his things from home and moved here to Chicago with a friend from his days when he served in the Red Cross ambulance corps in Italy during the War.

Hemingway is getting by with free-lance work; although his journalism is selling better than the short stories he’s been submitting.

As he walks into the apartment of advertising guy Y Kenley Smith, 32, Ernest sees a tall, auburn-haired woman across the room.

After striking up a conversation with Hadley Richardson, 28 [he lies to her about his age], he learns that she lives in St. Louis, plays the piano, and is here for a few weeks visiting Kenley’s sister. She reminds him a bit of the nurse who took care of him when he was injured in Italy, who was also a bit older than he was. But, despite a year at Bryn Mawr College, and a trip to Paris, “Hash” as her friends call her, seems a bit younger than her age.

When he leaves the party, Ernest knows that he really wants to go back to live in Europe. And he knows that he is going to marry Hadley Richardson.

Hadley Richardson

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I am talking about writers’ salons in Paris and New York after the Great War in the Osher Lifelong Learning programs at University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.

My “Such Friends” presentations, the Founding of the Abbey Theatre and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table are available to view on the website of PICT Classic Theatre.

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