“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, April, 1924, the transatlantic review and the Three Mountains Press offices, 29 Quai d’Anjou, Ile Saint-Louis, Paris

English author Ford Madox Ford, 50, is pleased with Volume I, Issue 4, of his magazine, the transatlantic review.

Ford was able to start publishing in January with funding he secured last fall when American lawyer John Quinn, 54, was visiting and they got together with American ex-patriate poet, Ezra Pound, 38.

James Joyce, Ezra Pound, John Quinn and Ford Madox Ford in October of last year

Quinn had sent $500 and promised he would chip in another $500 if necessary, as well as approach some of his wealthy New York friends for additional help.

Pound has also been instrumental in recommending up and coming writers for the literary magazine. The first issue had some of his own work, and a short story by another American ex-pat small publisher Robert McAlmon, 29.

The second issue was so good it was banned by the American Women’s Club of Paris!

Pound also secured a piece from the Irish ex-pat James Joyce, 42, whose novel Ulysses caused such a stir when it was published here two years ago. His “Work in Progress” was supposed to appear in the transatlantic review in January, but the proofs he received were in such bad shape he asked for more time to go over them.

the transatlantic review, April

Actually Joyce has confided to his drinking buddy, McAlmon, that he thinks the magazine is “very shabby.”

A few months ago, Pound introduced Ford to yet another American trying to make a living as a writer, former Toronto Star foreign correspondent Ernest Hemingway, 24, who moved back to Paris from Toronto with his wife and new baby at the beginning of the year.

Ford has hired Ernie to be the magazine’s commissioning editor. Well, “hired” is a bit much. He can’t actually pay him anything. Ford is thinking he may have to make a trip to New York City to beg for more money in person from Quinn, whom he’s heard is quite ill.

Ernie finally convinced Ford to include work in this issue by one of Hemingway’s recent American mentors, Gertrude Stein, 50. He told Stein to give him her epic novel, The Making of Americans, for Ford to serialize. The only copy she had was one that she and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, about to turn 47, had had bound and she didn’t want to let it out of her sight. So Ernie and Alice copied out the first 50 pages in time for the first instalment to appear in this issue. Gertrude and Alice are so excited that this huge work is finally appearing in print somewhere.

Ernest has advised Gertrude in her dealings with Ford: 

Be haughty but not too haughty. I made it clear it was a remarkable scoop [getting Making]…obtained only through my obtaining genius. [Ford] is under the impression that you get big prices when you consent to publish…Treat him high, wide and handsome…They are going to have Joyce in the same number.”

Hemingway has one of his own stories in this issue too, “Indian Camp.”

*****

That story is also included in in our time, one of the first volumes published by Three Mountains Press, founded by American journalist Bill Bird, 36, who owns this office space. Ford leases his small share for the magazine from Bird.

Six vignettes and 12 stories by Hemingway appear in in our time—Bird wants to signal how modern it is by not capitalizing the title. Last year Hemingway’s Three Stories & Ten Poems, was published by McAlmon’s Contact Press, and Pound had managed to get six of the stories published in The Little Review’s special “Exiles” issue in the U. S. last October.

in our time by Ernest Hemingway

Bird designed the dust jacket for in our time himself, to make the whole volume seem newsworthy. He also printed it on a handpress with high quality handmade paper. 18 vignettes (six are about bullfighting, Ernie’s latest interest) spread over 31 pages left lots of white space in the layout to make the simple declarative sentences stand out even more.

Ernest Hemingway

The woodcut of the author bled through the paper, so, instead of the 300 copies they printed, they’ve ended up with about 170 good ones to sell. Ernie’s parents back in Oak Park, Illinois, have bought 10.

Ford has been kind enough to give Hemingway’s book an early review in the Paris Herald, praising his “minute but hugely suggestive pictures.”

Hemingway’s work is getting to be known among the literary crowd; he knows he won’t get any payment for any of these publications. He and his wife Hadley, 32, have been living off her trust fund. Although, because it has not been invested well, the fund is starting to decrease, and Ernie has taken some work doing gardening for Parisians.

But Ernie’s not worried. Eventually, there will be money.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, City Books on the North Side and 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.

Mark your calendar! The Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books returns to the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Highland Park on Saturday, May 11. Stop by the “Such Friends” booth in Writers’ Row.

This summer I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

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, early February, 1924, 58 Central Park West, New York City, New York; and Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise-Desgoffe, Paris

Corporate lawyer John Quinn, 53, is in the process of selling off his massive collection of books and manuscripts. The star of the series of auctions is the original manuscript of the controversial novel Ulysses. He describes it in the catalogue as, “THE COMPLETE MANUSCRIPT of this remarkable work, one of the most extraordinary produced in modern times and hailed by critics as epoch-making in modern literature….on over 1,200 pages,” in four blue Morocco slip cases.

A portion of the Ulysses manuscript

A few weeks ago, Quinn wrote to the author of the novel, James Joyce, just turning 42, living in Paris, reminiscing about his early years as a teen-age book collector:

This collection of books goes back to 1887, when I bought $237 worth of books with money that my Mother gave me, among them Walter Pater’s first edition and a first edition of Hardy. She came into the room while I was on my hands and knees gloating over the treasures, and I can see her smile yet as she said, ‘Well, how long will they last you?’”

They’ve lasted him 36 years. And now Quinn is selling them all off. For disappointing prices. One manuscript by Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith didn’t even make the minimum Quinn had set. He has told Joyce that he will split the profit—a little more than $400—with him on the sale of the Ulysses manuscript. But the buyer, A. S. W. Rosenbach, 47, of Philadelphia, has asked to delay payment for six-months.

Quinn tells Joyce that, even though he made money on some sales but lost on others,

I am damned glad to get rid of the mountain of books that covered my apartment on the walls and shelves and in the halls and closets, till they were like an incubus.”

*****

In Paris, Joyce is livid.

Victoria Palace Hotel

When he writes to Quinn he emphasizes that his gripe is with the low dollar amount ascribed to his handwritten work. He asks Quinn to,

Please cancel the amount you kindly promised me out of the proceeds of the sale. You have had outlay enough already on account of me—cables, correspondence, defence of The Little Review [magazine], binding, etc.”

However, that same day Joyce writes to other friends about how angry he is with Quinn. Not only for letting the Ulysses manuscript go for just under $2,000, but for selling those worthless sheets by Meredith for almost the same amount. To one he writes,

I consider such a sale now and by a wealthy man (who had made me part owner of the MS before the sale) a grossly stupid act which is an alienation of valuable property. It is a pity that I was obliged to write such a letter [to Quinn] but what is one to do when a MS of 500,000 words is sold by an admirer who on the same day buys back a few pages of not very meritorious verse by a prose writer [Meredith] for almost the same sum?”

Originally, Joyce had planned to tell Quinn not to auction it at all. But, legally, the document is owned by Quinn, so that would go nowhere.

Joyce now feels that he must get his manuscript back from the buyer. He asks Quinn,

Can you find out, directly or indirectly, for what figure Mr. (or Dr.) Rosenbach will relinquish his grip on his (or my) MS?…[As Rosenbach had asked for six months] to fumble in other people’s trousers to find the money.”

Joyce wants his manuscript back. Even if he has to buy it himself.

Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach 

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, City Books on the North Side, and 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 this month I will be talking about early 20^th century supporters of the arts such as John Quinn 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, February 2, 1924, Shakespeare and Company, 12 rue de l’Odeon; and Three Mountains Press, 29 Quai d’Anjou, Ile Saint Louis, Paris

In what is becoming an annual tradition, this English-language bookstore is celebrating the anniversary of its publication of the controversial novel, Ulysses, on this date in 1922.

Shakespeare and Company

This morning, the author, Irish ex-patriate James Joyce, 42 today, sends flowers to the shop and its owner, American ex-pat Sylvia Beach, 36, who took on the role of publisher when no publishing company would touch his novel.

She has filled the shop windows with copies of the latest edition, and this evening there will be a party.

Truth be told, neither Sylvia nor any of Joyce’s benefactors are impressed with his latest work, so far just called “Work in Progress.” Joyce says he’s experimenting, and that he’s finished with the English language.

*****

About a 20-minute walk north of the shop. British ex-pat Ford Madox Ford, 50, is still settling in to the new offices he is sharing with the Three Mountains Press, a small publishing venture started by American journalist Bill Bird, 35.

Quai d’Anjou, Ile Saint Louis

Ford is bringing out the second issue of his new literary magazine, the transatlantic review, funded by a generous American patron of the arts, New York lawyer John Quinn, 53.

The first issue of the magazine included works by some of the most talked-about American writers on the Left Bank:  poems by Ezra Pound, 38, and E. E. Cummings, 29; and a short story by Robert McAlmon, 28, whom Pound had recommended.

Ford Madox Ford

A couple of weeks ago Quinn sent Ford an additional $500, but promised he would only contribute one more instalment if necessary, but then that would be it. Grateful for any help. Ford offered Quinn a life mask of Pound but Quinn cringed at the thought. The only thing worse, he told Ford, would be a death mask.

Ford has just “hired”—for no money—one of the other young Americans making a name for himself around the Left Bank, former Toronto Star foreign correspondent Ernest Hemingway, 24, just arrived back in Paris with his wife and new baby after a four-month stay in Toronto.

The Hemingways are getting ready to move into a second-floor walk-up apartment at 113 rue Notre Dame des Champs, close to where Pound lives, overlooking a sawmill and a lumber yard.

Ernie’s job at the transatlantic review is to scout out new material from the ex-pat authors on the Left Bank. He is trying to convince Ford that he should serialize a work by Gertrude Stein, turning 50 tomorrow, The Making of Americans. Hemingway is quite keen on it; Ford thinks it’s some kind of experimental short story.

Today, the second issue of the transatlantic review has been banned by the American Women’s Club of Paris. Ford is thinking he may need to hit on Quinn for more cash.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, and Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Don’t forget! Tomorrow, Saturday, February 3, we will be celebrating the 150^th birthday of my fellow Pittsburgher Gertrude Stein, from noon to 4 pm at City Books on the North Side, a five-minute walk from where she was born. Details are here.

Later this month I will be talking about early 20^th century supporters of the arts like the Stein family 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-January, 1924, Restaurant des Trianon, 5 Place de Rennes, corner of Boulevard du Montparnasse, Paris

Once again, everyone’s coming to Paris.

As they have since the beginning of the decade, Americans are still arriving in waves, motivated by three major changes:

• The Great War has made them much more global. Men who were stationed in Europe in 1917 and 1918 want to bring their new wives and girlfriends to the places where they served.

U. S. soldiers arriving in Paris

• The exchange rate is fantastic. Europe has been devastated so the dollar buys much more in Rome, Vienna and Paris. Including alcohol—not currently available back home thanks to Prohibition.
• The cruise companies have come up with a new fare, “Tourist Third,” which makes the trip affordable for almost everyone.

The American Way to Europe brochure

For Dr. William Carlos Williams, 40, and his wife Flossie, 32, all three of these apply. In addition to continual nagging by his old college buddy from the University of Pennsylvania, fellow poet Ezra Pound, 38. Pound helped Williams get his first book of poetry, The Tempers, published in London, and he has been entreating Williams to come to Paris ever since.

So the good doctor has taken a year off from his New Jersey medical practice, spent half of it working on The Great American Novel—no, really, that’s the title—and he and Flossie are going to spend the next three months traveling around Europe.

First stop—Paris.

In addition to Pound, Williams is reuniting with another old friend, Robert McAlmon, 28. They had produced a magazine together, Contact, back in Greenwich Village a few years ago. McAlmon lives here now and has started Contact Publishing, using money from his British-heiress wife, Bryher, 29, to publish the new writers and artists appearing on the Left Bank.

Since the Williams’ arrival a few days ago, McAlmon has booked them into the expensive hotel where he is currently staying, the Lutetia on Boulevard Raspail, and introduced them to some of the leading characters in the Paris literary scene. Williams was pleased to finally meet Sylvia Beach, 35, owner of the Shakespeare and Company English-language bookstore, with whom he has corresponded. A couple of years back, McAlmon had convinced Beach to carry Williams’ books of poetry, and Williams had bought a copy of Ulysses from her—the controversial novel by Irish ex-pat writer James Joyce, 41, which Sylvia published two years ago.

Tonight, McAlmon is hosting a party for Bill and Flossie here at Joyce’s favorite restaurant, the Trianon, so they can meet other Left Bank literati. The crowd nearly fills up half the restaurant. Beach is here with her partner, Adrienne Monnier, 31, who operates the French-language bookstore across the street from Shakespeare and Company. Another American ex-pat, artist Man Ray, 33, whom Williams had known a bit back in Greenwich Village, is here with his chess buddy, French painter Marcel Duchamp, 36.

Rue de Rennes

Joyce has had too much to drink and is starting to loudly sing Irish ditties. His frequent drinking partner McAlmon responds by belting out Negro spirituals and cowboy songs; someone else is singing the blues.

Williams is starting to feel uncomfortable with this crowd. McAlmon asks the guest of honor to make a speech, and Williams feels as if he makes a fool of himself.

Williams thinks both the food and the conversation are disappointing. And that maybe being a pediatrician in Passaic would not be such a bad life after all.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, and Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Later next month I will be talking about early 20^th century supporters of the arts like McAlmon and Pound 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, December 31, 1923/January 1, 1924, Ireland, England, France and America

In Ireland, poet, playwright and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, William Butler Yeats, 58, is still basking in the glow of his recently awarded Nobel Prize for Literature.

Each time he responds to a friend’s congratulatory message, he makes sure to include,

I consider that this honor has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe’s welcome to the Free State,”

of which he is a Senator.

The night after the prize was announced—when he and his wife Georgie, 31, celebrated by cooking sausages—there was a posh dinner held at the Shelbourne Hotel in St. Stephen’s Green. The first cable of congratulations came from Yeats’ countryman living in Paris, James Joyce, 41.

Shelbourne Hotel

With the 115,000 Swedish Kroner from the prize, equal to more than £6,000, Yeats is able to help out his sister Lily, 57, who had been admitted to a north London nursing home last summer. Willie’s American friend, lawyer and supporter of the arts John Quinn, 53, had advised him to use the money this way. However, Quinn also strongly advised Yeats to move Lily out of unhealthy London, and not to donate the money or use it to pay off any debt: 

Properly invested in good American securities [it] would bring you in 8 % income or $3,200 a year. You ought not to touch the principal under any circumstances.”

Yeats appreciates the advice. But after he has Lily taken care of, he is going to pay off his debts. And those of his father, who died early last year.

*****

In England, the Hogarth Press, operated by Virginia, 41, and Leonard Woolf, 43, has been growing well.

This past year they published 11 titles; five of those were hand-printed on fine paper using their Minerva treadle platen press. That is the largest number they have ever hand-printed in one year, and they will probably not produce that many next year. The Woolfs are primarily interested in publishing books with outstanding content, not works of art that people only look at and admire.

This holiday they are at their country home, Monk’s House in East Sussex. Just about 10 miles away, at Charleston Farmhouse, Virginia’s sister, painter Vanessa Bell, 44, is spending the holiday with her children—Julian, 15, Quentin, 13, and Angelica, just turned five—and, oddly enough, her husband, art critic Clive Bell, 42. The kids have created a special issue of their Charleston Bulletin, featuring, “A life of Vanessa Bell dictated by Virginia Woolf, pictures and spelling by Quentin Bell.”

Charleston Bulletin, Christmas

Angelica’s father, the painter Duncan Grant, 38, is spending the holidays with his parents.

At midnight on New Year’s Eve, the new radio service, the British Broadcasting Corporation, broadcasts the chimes of Big Ben for the first time.

*****

In France, American ex-pat writer Gertrude Stein, 49, and her partner Alice B. Toklas, 46, are pleased that Gertrude’s work has been published more this past year.

She was included in the “Exiles” issue of the American literary magazine, The Little Review, which finally came out this fall. But Gertrude did notice that first place in that issue was given to the young Ernest Hemingway, 24, whom she considers to be one of her proteges. She even agreed to write a review of his Three Stories & Ten Poems, something she never does.

Three Stories & Ten Poems by Ernest Hemingway

Gertrude and Alice receive letters regularly from Hemingway, who is in Toronto where he and his wife went for the birth of their first child in October.

It is clear that the Hemingways are really hating being away from Paris, and he has written to Stein and Toklas that

It was a bad move to come back.”

Ernie asked for tips on where to live in Paris when they return early in the new year.

*****

In America, New York World columnist Heywood Broun, 35, and his wife, journalist Ruth Hale, 36, are throwing their annual New Year’s Eve bash at their brownstone on West 85^th Street.

They invite all the literary friends they lunch with regularly at the Algonquin Hotel in midtown:  free-lance writer Dorothy Parker, 30; magazine illustrator Neysa McMein, 35; novelist Edna Ferber, 38; fellow World columnist Franklin Pierce Adams, (FPA) 42.

Neysa McMein, left, in her studio with a model

Thanks to her association with the “Round Table,” Neysa recently made it into the papers for her Christmas project delivering toys and turkeys to families on the Lower East Side. She convinced her successful friends, including composer and Broadway producer Irving Berlin, 35, and World editor Herbert Bayard Swope, 41, to donate chauffeured limos to the cause.

Ferber sent her most recent novel, originally called Selina, but changed to So Big, off to her publisher with trepidation a few weeks ago. He wrote back immediately that it was so good he had cried while reading it! It’s going to be serialized in the Woman’s Home Companion.

FPA has been confiding in Edna for months that he is thinking of divorcing his wife. In his column he has even admitted that he was “as low-hearted as ever I was in my life.”

Tonight, he seems to Ferber to be downright giddy and boyish, not feeling guilty at all about the affair he’s been having with English socialite Esther Root, 29. Ferber tells FPA that in his tuxedo he looks as though he is a young boy who has just been confirmed.

I am a confirmed admirer of you,”

he tells her.

This year Broun and Hale have put their five-year-old son Heywood Hale Broun—“Woody”—in charge of the punch bowl, filled with Orange Blossoms–equal parts gin and orange juice with powdered sugar thrown in.

Orange Blossom Cocktail 

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, and Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Early in the new year I will be talking about the literary summer of 1923 at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, and early 20^th century patrons of the arts 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.

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, 1923, Paris

On the Left Bank, inside the English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company on rue de l’Odeon, there are festive decorations, including a lit Christmas tree perched on a table.

The shop owner, American ex-patriate Sylvia Beach, 36, had been planning to spend the holiday with her mother, who is visiting Sylvia’s sister in Florence for her birthday.

Shakespeare and Company

However, Sylvia has decided that, before the end of the year, she needs to bring out another edition of Ulysses by Irish novelist James Joyce, 41, which she first published early last year. The second edition didn’t include all the necessary corrections. Another edition, published in Paris by the London-based Egoist Press, had almost all of its 500 copies destroyed by UK customs last year. The owner of the Egoist, Harriet Shaw Weaver, 47, has suggested that Sylvia call this latest edition—which will include all the corrections—the fourth version. So the ones destroyed will not be forgotten.

This newest Ulysses will have a cover the reverse of the others, this time white paper with blue type. Sylvia wants to send one to her mother as a birthday present, and personally deliver one to Joyce at home for Christmas, the way she did on publication day last year, his 40^th birthday.

Ulysses, fourth edition

This year has been hectic for Beach.

In the fall, she had a visit from the American writer living in London, T. S. Eliot, 35, whose poem The Waste Land, published last year, greatly impressed her. Sylvia wrote to her mother,

He is such a charming fellow and so interesting…the old fashioned sort of American and very good looking. I only wish he lived in Paris. He is our only modern writer I like after Joyce. Everyone that he was exhibited to was carried away with Eliot.”

Another American who came to visit early this month was Barnet Braverman, 35, an advertising man who successfully smuggled illegal copies of Ulysses from his Ontario office to his Michigan apartment. He brought along a copy for Joyce to sign.

A French tax man showed up the other day, requesting to see her company books. Sylvia sent him on his way, promising to have one of her assistants bring a set of accounts to his office.

All this activity has left Sylvia exhausted. But she and her partner Adrienne Monnier, 31, who owns the French-language bookstore across the street, have still managed to go out to the theatre most nights.

*****

Map to help find your way around Paris

On the Ile St. Louis, about a 20-minute walk north of rue de l’Odeon, another small American publisher is winding up a successful year. The Three Mountains Press, run by Bill Bird, 35, has brought out a series of six books by ex-patriates, edited by poet Ezra Pound, 38. The most promising is in our time, a group of 10 vignettes by the foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, Ernest Hemingway, 24. Ernie is currently back in Toronto where he and his wife moved for the birth of their first child, John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, now two months old. Bird has heard that they are not happy in Canada and will be moving back to Paris soon in the new year.

Ile St. Louis

*****

Up in Montmartre, Ezra’s mistress Olga Rudge, 28, recently performed a concert with American composer George Antheil, 23, who is renting an upstairs room at Shakespeare and Company. Ezra is tone deaf; but Olga jumped right in for the challenge of Antheil’s experimental Three Violin Sonatas, commissioned by her friend, French writer Jean Cocteau, 34. The first sonata is a dramatic piece which ends with the composer-pianist literally hammering out the notes.

Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique, Montmartre

*****

Across the Right Bank, in mid-December there is a dramatic funeral procession from the church of Saint Honoré d’Eylau in the west to Pere Lachaise Cemetery in the east. Raymond Radiguet had died at the age of 20. His first novel, Le Diable du Corps, was such a big hit, all his fans had been hopeful for his second, which will now be published posthumously.

Saint Honoré d’Eylau church

Cocteau was so affected by his young friend’s death, he hasn’t been out to see anyone since. All the funeral arrangements were handled by designer Coco Chanel, 40. To emphasize Radiguet’s youth, the coffin, hearse, flowers and horses are all white. Marching with the mourners, who include Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, 42, and one of Radiguet’s former lovers, Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, 47, is a jazz band from the club Le Boeuf sur le Toit, fronted by bandleader Vance Lowry, 34, the African-American “Banjo King.”

*****

Across the Seine, back on the Left Bank, another club is drawing in the ex-pats and the French as well. The Jockey on Boulevard Montparnasse, about a 20-minute walk south of Sylvia’s shop, has recently been bought and totally redecorated by American designer Hilaire Hiler, 25. He has used a cowboy motif, which appeals to locals as well as tourists.

The Jockey, 146 Boulevard Montparnasse

Radiguet and Cocteau frequented the bar, along with American publisher Robert McAlmon, 28. Painter Marcel Duchamp, 36, who recently returned to his native Paris after a few years in New York City, comes often with his American friend, Man Ray, 33, and his partner, Kiki of Montparnasse, 22. Man and Kiki have just moved into the nearby Istria Hotel, where Duchamp is staying, to be closer to Ray’s studio on rue Campagne-Premier. Ray has hired his first assistant, a sculptor he knew back in New York, Berenice Abbott, 25, whom he found almost starving on the streets of Paris. Ray is having more success with photography now, rather than the painting and sculpting he used to do.

*****

About a 15-minute walk east of the Jockey, other ex-pats are changing their living arrangements as well.

English editor Ford Madox Ford, just turned 50, has come to stay with his brother and brought along his Australian partner, artist and writer Stella Bowen, 30, and their three-year old daughter Julia. His sister-in-law has become annoyed with this intrusion, so she has rented the Ford-Bowen family a cottage behind their house on the Boulevard Arago for only 200Fr a month. They are near the tennis courts where Hemingway and Pound often play. Unfortunately, when Ford wants to give one of his frequent parties, he has to rent out a local bal musette.

65 Boulevard Arago

A few weeks ago, a friend, West Indian writer Ella Gwendoline Rees-Williams, 33, moved into the cottage with Ford and Stella. Rees-Williams’ husband was recently extradited to Holland for being in France illegally, and she is grateful to have a place to stay. Stella doesn’t seem to mind the attention Ford pays to their new roommate.

*****

All predictions are that, by the end of the year, the Seine will rise and overflow its banks, spreading itself throughout the Left and the Right Banks.

River Seine flooding

N. B.: Thanks to Lisa Thomson (LisaT2@comcast.net) for the wonderfully helpful map of Paris.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923, are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, and Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Early in the new year I will be talking about the literary summer of 1923 at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes at the University of Pittsburgh, and early 20^th century patrons of the arts 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.

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 12, 1923, the back garden of 70 bis, rue de Notre-Dame-des-Champs, Paris

James Joyce, Ezra Pound, John Quinn, Ford Madox Ford

Irish novelist James Joyce, 41, hates these staged photographs. He wonders why the photographer has to take so many of them?

American poet Ezra Pound, about to turn 38, is glad he was able to get all three of these characters together at his studio to make plans for a new magazine.

American art collector and patron of the arts John Quinn, 53, doesn’t mind pitching in $2,000 to get this venture off the ground, but he hasn’t mentioned his stomach cancer to them. He knows he is going to have to tell Joyce that he is selling off his collection of manuscripts. Quinn plans to give Joyce half the price he gets for the Ulysses manuscript.

English editor and writer Ford Madox Ford, 49, is hoping he can get Quinn to cough up a couple of thousand for the transatlantic review. Ford is glad Pound let them meet here at his studio. These four would never fit in Ford’s tiny office.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, and at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, where, as part of their sixth anniversary celebration, I will be signing copies from 4 to 5 p.m. tomorrow, Friday, October 13th. 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 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, and about John Quinn at the Tiffin-Seneca Public Library, co-sponsored by the Heidelberg University English Department, in Quinn’s hometown of Tiffin, OH.

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, early October, 1923, Theatre des Champs Elysees, 15 Avenue Montaigne, Paris

Another riot! Is this what Parisians do every time they are confronted with something new?!

However, this time there might have been a bit more planning than pure spontaneity.

American composer George Antheil, 23, was offered the honor of having his Paris premiere as part of the opening of the Ballets suédois, a major event on the Paris cultural and social calendar, held at the city’s largest theatre, Theatre des Champs Elysees.

Theatre des Champs Elysees

French director Marcel L’Herbier, 35, was filming the performance as a scene for his science fiction drama, L’Inhumaine (The Inhuman Woman). Antheil still claims he didn’t know he was being filmed.

Antheil performed three of his pieces, “Airplane Sonata,” the “Sonata Sauvage.” and “Mechanism,” and was pounding away on the piano in his usual forceful style.

The movie was supposedly about a pretentious opera singer, a character designed to make the audience angry. She was being played by Georgette Leblanc, 54, who had agreed to do it because she had heard good things about Antheil from her partner, magazine editor Margaret Anderson, 36, who recently moved to Paris from New York to be with Georgette.

Georgette Leblanc

Antheil’s avant-garde music provided the catalyst to allow L’Herbier to film scenes of an actual riot to use in his movie.

The Surrealists in the audience rose up to brawl with anyone who expressed displeasure with the music or characters on stage. American artist Man Ray, 33, punched someone in the first row. Just behind him, French painter Marcel Duchamp, 36, got into a loud argument. From a box above, French composer Erik Satie, 57, was applauding and shouting,

What precision! What precision!”

Somebody up in the tech area turned the spotlight on the audience and managed to hit Irish novelist James Joyce, 41, right in his extremely sensitive eyes. A big burly guy stood up in one of the boxes and shouted, “

You are all pigs!”

The police were called and started arresting artists, writers, society people—anyone throwing a punch.

Now, a few days later, Antheil admits he is glad that Satie liked his music. And he thinks Paris hasn’t had that much fun since the premier of Sacre du Printemps by his friend, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, 41, 10 years ago.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, and at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. where, as part of their sixth anniversary celebration, I will be signing copies from 4 to 5 p.m. on Friday, October 13th. The books are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I will be talking about the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University, and about art collector John Quinn at the Tiffin-Seneca Public Library, co-sponsored by the Heidelberg University English Department, in Quinn’s hometown of Tiffin, OH..

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.ukin 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, late September, 1923, 65 Boulevard Arago, Croulebarbe, Paris

She’s glad she decided to keep a diary.

Mrs. Jeanne Foster, 44, is serving as social secretary to her…er, really good friend, American lawyer and art collector, John Quinn, 53, on his latest trip through Europe.

John Quinn and Mrs. Jeanne Foster on their European trip

A lucrative corporate case he is working on requires Quinn to take depositions from people in Paris, and he welcomed the opportunity to meet up again with his avant-garde artist friends. Quinn recently unloaded a lot of his paintings by English artists and is now focusing on his love for the French.

Mrs. Foster arrived before him to make arrangements and set up appointments. They’ve met American ex-pat poet Ezra Pound, 37, and his wife; they are looking forward to a dinner cooked by Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, 47, one of Quinn’s favorites. Jeanne is recording all of their visits to studios and art galleries, as well as other meetings with interesting people.

Today they are here at the home of English writer Ford Madox Ford, 49, to talk about the new literary magazine he is planning, along the lines of the English Review which he edited back in the UK. Quinn is helping with some of the much-needed funding, and Mrs. Foster will serve as American editor. Ford, whose surname was Hueffer before the Great War, plans to run the publication from here, his brother’s apartment which he shares with his Australian common-law wife, painter Stella Bowen, 30, and their daughter Julia, age three.

65 Boulevard Arago

Before Quinn arrived in Paris, Jeanne had spoken to Ford to prepare him for the visit. John has been out-of-sorts lately, and, although he is excited about this Paris trip, he is in great pain from internal stomach problems.

Jeanne discussed with Ford one of the recent incidents which is contributing to Quinn’s foul moods—the New York visit this summer of one of the writers he generously supports, Joseph Conrad, 65. Quinn had been eager to get together with Conrad, but the Polish-British novelist totally ignored his benefactor’s phone calls and requests for a meeting. While being seen all over town partying with the literati.

Ford is friends with Conrad and had spoken to him about Quinn. Conrad had been told that Quinn had a violent temper, and, as Conrad was not feeling well himself, decided to just avoid him. He has regretted this since.

Mrs. Foster asked Ford not to bring this up when he meets with Quinn, as it will only upset him. But she keeps detailed notes of her conversation with Ford in her diary.

*****

Ford, Stella and Julia had arrived in Paris at the beginning of September. He had been here at the end of last year, but just for about a month, so was eager to come back and work on the magazine which his friend, Ezra Pound had proposed. They thought of calling it Paris Review but have decided on the name transatlantic review.

Stella is a skilled hostess at the parties she and Ford throw at the apartment. The first one they gave was for the ex-pats who spend their time on the rue de l’Odeon, including Sylvia Beach, 36, the owner of the popular English-language bookstore there, Shakespeare and Company. There was accordion music, a variety of cheeses and lots of wine.

Ford Madox Ford

Great, big, walrus-like Ford had kicked off his shoes and instructed Sylvia to do the same so they could dance. While Ford was bouncing and prancing with Sylvia, she looked across the room and saw her friend, Irish writer James Joyce, 41, looking on with great amusement.

Beach is making good use of Ford’s literary connections. She keeps urging him to write positive reviews of Joyce’s novel which Shakespeare and Company published last year, Ulysses, to overcome the bad press Joyce has been getting in England. In return, she has introduced Ford to the creative people of the Left Bank, and also listens to Ford drone on, reading her his latest poetry. Sylvia confesses she nodded off during one of these recitals. She suspects Ford wants her to publish his writings, but he’s never asked.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, 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.

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, and about art collector John Quinn at the Tiffin-Seneca Public Library, co-sponsored by the Heidelberg University English Department, in Quinn’s hometown of Tiffin, OH.

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”: 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.