At the Abbey Theatre, one long block away from O’Connell Street—up until five days ago known as Sackville Street—the second run of Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey, 44, is coming to an end.
Juno and the Paycock program
When the theatre premiered this, O’Casey’s second play, back in March, theatre director LadyAugusta Gregory, 72, told her co-founder, poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, 59, “this is one of the evenings at the Abbey which make me glad to have been born.”
Now, after its second successful two-week run, in addition to her feelings of pride in the theatre and O’Casey, Augusta is also feeling that this will be a great money-spinner for the Abbey.
The premiere, starring their reliable company regulars—Barry Fitzgerald, 36, as Captain Jack Boyle; Sara Allgood, 43, as his long suffering wife Juno; and Fitzgerald’s brother Arthur Shields, 28, as their disabled war veteran son Johnny Boyle—was such a hit Yeats and LadyGregory doubled its scheduled one-week run, the first time the Abbey had ever done this.
Arthur Shields
Last month they repeated O’Casey’s first play, The Shadow of a Gunman, for the fifth time.
The Shadow of a Gunman program
Willie and Augusta have no qualms about bringing Juno back again now for another full two-week run—two Saturday matinees!—with the original hit cast. And once again the audiences are packing in.
Lady Gregory wants to have a long chat with young Sean about the possibility of his writing future plays for the Abbey.
Tomorrow, Saturday, May 11, is the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Highland Park. 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 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.
Abbey Theatre directors and co-founders William Butler Yeats, 58, and Lady Augusta Gregory, about to turn 72, have high hopes for this new kid.
Last April they premiered the first play by Sean O’Casey, 43, The Shadow of a Gunman, about the country’s recent war for independence from the British. A big hit, they have mounted five more productions of it since.
Sean O’Casey
Tonight is the first performance of O’Casey’s latest, Juno and the Paycock, about last year’s Irish civil war. Yeats and Lady Gregory feel this is going to be another winner for O’Casey and the theatre.
Yeats has been impressed with O’Casey’s work. Although, after a reading of this play, when he compared it to a Dostoyevsky novel, Augusta admonished him—in front of the actors—
You know, Willie, you never read a novel by Dostoyevsky.”
Some of the best Abbey theatre regulars are on stage tonight. Sara Allgood, 43, creating the character of Juno; her frequent co-star Barry Fitzgerald, who turns 36 next week, as Captain Jack Boyle, and Fitzgerald’s brother Arthur Shields, 28, as Boyle’s disabled son, Johnny.
Juno and the Paycock program
Fitzgerald gets to sum up the drama with the play’s last line,
Th’ whole worl’s in a terrible state o’ chassis.”
Yeats is already thinking that this is one time they should extend this run well beyond the usual one week.
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, and about early 20th century supporters of the arts at Osher in the University of Pittsburgh.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
William Butler Yeats, 58, poet, playwright, and now Nobel laureate, is about to take the stage to give his Nobel lecture on “The Irish Theatre.”
Nobel Prize medal
Yeats feels confident about the speech. Last month, two days after the prize was announced, he gave a talk on the same topic to the Elizabethan Literature and Debating Society of Trinity College at the Café Ritz on Grafton Street. A friend of his sisters’ had asked him to address the young women—who formed the group because none of the university’s debating societies would allow women members—and it was a good opportunity to try out his lecture.
Grafton Street
Yeats gave full credit to his friends in the Irish dramatic movement, who contributed to the founding of the Abbey Theatre. For example, Douglas Hyde, 63, and his Gaelic League; Edward Martyn, who recently died, and his generous funding. The late playwright John Millington Synge and of course, Lady Augusta Gregory, 71, who is still running the Abbey.
Augusta did object to one line in the speech. Where he said that two forms should have stood on either side of him to accept—”an old woman, Lady Gregory, sinking into the infirmity of age, and the ghost of a young man, John Millington Synge…”—she had asked that he change “old” to “living,” and he obliged. Although too late to change the version which appeared in the newspapers.
Since arriving in Stockholm last week, Yeats and his wife Georgie, 31, have been learning about Swedish culture and enjoying the formalities of the celebrations. The King bestowed the diplomas and medals on the recipients on Monday, and this coming Saturday there will be a performance of Yeats’ play, written with Lady Gregory, Cathleen ni Houlihan. He is looking forward to seeing the differences between the Irish and Swedish theatre companies’ interpretations.
Yeats arriving in Stockholm
In his speech, Yeats will decry the violence that his country has experienced in the past 10 years, including a successful fight for independence followed by a civil war, as well as the obstacles he and his friends had to overcome to establish a national theatre like the Abbey.
In this version, Yeats is planning to end by saying that he had “seen little in this last week that would not have been memorable and exciting to Synge and to Lady Gregory, for Sweden has achieved more than we have hoped for our own country.”
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 20th century patrons of the arts in the Osher program 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.
In Tullira, his family estate, Irish playwright and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, Edward Martyn, 64, is dying.
Tullira
One of the only wealthy Catholics in the country, throughout his life Martyn served as the sponsor of many Irish organizations, including the nationalistic political party Sinn Fein, Palestrina boys choirs at Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral, and the Abbey.
The theatre continues under the direction of the co-founder, Lady Augusta Gregory, 71, this week presenting one of their popular standards, The Building Fund by William Boyle, who recently passed away.
Martyn has been ill with rheumatism and osteo-arthritis for a while now, so has had time to plan. He has willed his extensive library and a painting by his Abbey friend AE [George Russell], 56, to the Carmelite order of nuns he has supported. Any other paintings will go to the National Gallery in Dublin. The rights to his plays he has bequeathed to his long-time friend, playwright George Moore, 71, despite their constant bickering.
The Abbey Theatre
Martyn has also left money to support the training of Irish teachers, and some to his male nurse.
Because he has no spouse or children, Tullira will go to distant cousins.
Martyn has requested that his body be dissected for science and then buried in a pauper’s grave.
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 20th century arts patrons in the Osher program 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.
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.
The Yeats family is settling in nicely to their new home in the west of Ireland, a 15th century Norman tower they have re-named Thoor Ballylee.
The poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, about to turn 57, is impressed by the way his wife Georgie, 29, not only takes care of their two children, Anne, 3, and Michael, almost 10 months old, but has also decorated their home to look like a 14th century painting.
Interior of Thoor Ballylee
Uncharacteristically, Willie has been thinking a lot about family. He has just sent off to his publisher the second volume of his Autobiographies, titled The Trembling of the Veil. His father, the painter John Butler Yeats, died about four months ago at age 83, in New York City. Willie and his sisters are thinking of bringing out a volume of their father’s memoirs.
His friend and mentor, Lady Augusta Gregory, 70, has been at her home, Coole Park, about four miles down the road from Thoor Ballylee, working on her own memoirs about their days founding The Abbey Theatre together. She’s been reading out sections to Willie and incorporating many of his suggestions. Their writing styles are very different—Augusta is trying to remain objective; Yeats favors a more impressionistic interpretation.
Coole Park, drawing by W. B. Yeats
Now that The Trembling of the Veil is completed, today Willie is writing to his friend in New York, the Irish-American lawyer and patron of the arts, John Quinn, 52.
He brings Quinn up to date on the family living arrangements and tells him that his godson, Michael, now has eight teeth! Anne has invented her own version of The Lord’s Prayer, which includes, “Father not in heaven—father in the study,” and “Thine is the Kitten, the Power, and the Glory.”
W. B. and Georgie Yeats
Quinn had expressed his concern about how Ireland’s political turmoil is impacting the west of the country. Yeats assures him that there hasn’t been much trouble here:
There was what seemed a raid at Coole, men came and shouted at night and demanded to be let in, and then went away either because the moon came out or because they only meant to threaten.”
Most importantly, Willie wants his friend’s permission to dedicate his latest volume to Quinn.
If you violently object you must cable…for [Werner Laurie, the publisher] is in a devil of a hurry.”
The dedication reads,
To John Quinn my friend and helper and friend and helper of certain people mentioned in this book.”
This month I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after The Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with 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.
Way back at the beginning of the century, when the Abbey Theatre was in its planning stages, the co-founder, poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, then 39, commissioned his friend and fellow Dubliner George Bernard Shaw, almost 10 years older than Willie, to write a play for the opening.
George Bernard Shaw by Alvin Langdon Coburn
Shaw gave the Abbey John Bull’s Other Island, a long political comedy about an Irishman and his English business partner who come to Ireland to look in to developing some land. Yeats rejected it. The official reason was that he felt they wouldn’t be able to find any actors to do the British characters justice. The real reason was that Yeats couldn’t stand Shaw’s argumentative style of playwriting.
An edited version of the play premiered in London at the Royal Court Theatre that same year, 1904, and made Shaw a big hit with the Brits. Reports are that the king laughed so hard during a performance that he fell off his chair.
Royal Court Theatre, London
John Bull’s Other Island was performed at another theatre in Dublin a few years later. And in 1909, when Abbey co-founder John Millington Synge died at age 37, both Yeats and his other Abbey cofounder, Lady Augusta Gregory, then 52, asked Shaw to step into the vacancy and help guide their theatre. He declined.
Now here is Lady Gregory to guide, what is basically her Abbey, 17 years after its opening. Tomorrow night they are putting on their seventh run of Shaw’s political play.
Abbey Theatre, Dublin
Performances will be this Thursday and Saturday nights, and a Saturday matinee. In the cast is one of their new stars, Barry Fitzgerald, 33, in the role of Tim Haffigan, which he has done six times already.
Barry came to the Abbey a few years ago through his younger brother, who is both actor and stage manager for this production. Despite his breakthrough success last year in one of Lady Gregory’s own plays, Barry still works his full-time civil service job. Where he is known by his given name, William Shields. Just to be safe.
In addition to his day job, Fitzgerald is appearing tonight and Friday in a new play by Lady Gregory,Aristotle’s Bellows, and Bedmates by George Shiels, 40, his first play produced here.
Augusta feels that the theatre has reached a stable point in its history. But she is always on the lookout for new blood, both actors and playwrights.
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 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and e-book versions.
Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, just turned 56, living in Berkshire, England, with his pregnant wife, is convinced that he has finally gotten his father to agree.
His Dad, painter John Butler “JB” Yeats, 82, has been living in New York City for 13 years. He went over on holiday and just decided to stay. Despite constant entreaties from his son and daughters.
Yeats’ friend, Irish-American lawyer John Quinn, 51, has been looking out for JB, but he’s running out of patience with the older man’s demands. And, with a baby on the way, Willie can’t afford to keep covering Dad’s expenses.
Willie has issued an ultimatum and Quinn is booking JB passage back to Ireland for this fall.
*****
Yeats’ sister Lolly, 53, a publisher and teacher, is thrilled that Dad will be coming to live with her and her sister Lily, 54, an embroiderer, in the Dundrum suburb of south Dublin. They have painted his room and bought him a new bed and mattress.
Lily Yeats at Bedford Park by JB Yeats
Yesterday Lolly wrote to assure her father that in the intervening 13 years, his daughters have changed. They’re no longer irritable and over-tired, and they look forward to just sitting and chatting with him. Their brother, Willie, however, is wondering whether Dad will be able to stick to a curfew.
*****
However.
In Manhattan, JB Yeats is in no humor to go back to his family.
He has just read parts of Willie’s family memoir, “Four Years,” scheduled to appear in TheDial literary magazine. Dad has a big problem with at least one item in the text. Back when the family lived in the Bedford Park neighborhood of West London, young Willie left for two weeks to do some research in Oxford. In the memoir he describes the family as “enraged” at his absence.
Yeats’ family home in Bedford Park
Not the way Dad recalls it. He remembers the loving family being supportive of this overgrown teenager.
Yesterday he wrote to Willie,
As to Lily and Lollie, they were too busy to be ‘enraged’ about anything. Lily working all day…, and Lolly dashing about giving lectures on picture painting and earning close on 300 pounds a year…while both gave all their earnings to the house. And besides all this work, of course, they did the housekeeping and had to contrive things and see to things for their invalid mother…”
He admonishes his son for choosing a career writing plays and establishing Dublin’s Abbey Theatre with Lady Augusta Gregory, 69, and other friends. If he were a good son he would have collaborated with his artist-father, and thereby helped both their careers.
And by the way, Dad isn’t coming back.
The W. B. Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project, a community-led arts/education charity, is working to install a major contemporary sculpture, the first ever honouring Yeats in Britain, at the former Yeats family home. Find out more here.
This summer I am talking about The Literary 1920s in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at the University of Pittsburgh. This fall, at the Osher program at Carnegie-Mellon University, I will be talking about Writers’ Salons in Dublin and London before the Great War.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and e-book formats.
About 100 Irish Republican Army [IRA] Volunteers who have been milling around outside the Custom House, on the Liffey in Dublin City Centre, rush the building and herd the staff into the main hall. A truck loaded with supplies pulls up, and members of the IRA Dublin Brigade scatter oil and cotton all over the building and set it on fire.
The Custom House on fire
Within about ten minutes, British police arrive in three trucks and exchange fire with the IRA Volunteers inside the building. After about a half hour, the IRA’s ammunition runs out. The rebels are shot by the British as they run away.
Staff inside who have been held hostage by the Volunteers walk out of the building, hands raised, waving white handkerchiefs.
Seven civilians are killed and 11 wounded. 100 people are arrested, mostly IRA members.
The Fire Brigade arrives late because they have been held at their station by other IRA bands. Local government records from throughout the country, dating back to 1600, had been transferred to the Custom House for safekeeping. They are all destroyed.
Tonight, the building, one of the most beautiful in Ireland, called by the IRA the “seat of an alien tyranny,” is still burning.
*****
Six miles south, in the Dublin suburb of Dundrum, Lolly Yeats, 53, co-owner of Cuala Press with her brother, poet William Butler Yeats, 55, is disgusted by this War of Independence raging all around.
Just yesterday she had written to her father in New York City about the horrible IRA ambush ten days ago outside of Galway, of British officers and their friends, which left three dead. The only survivor is Margaret Gregory, 37, widowed daughter-in-law of Lady Augusta Gregory, 69, co-founder with Willie of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.
Margaret and her British friends were leaving a tennis party when the IRA jumped out and began shooting at their car. Lolly can’t understand why on earth Margaret had been keeping company with British military officers?! Might as well wear a target on her back.
Re-enactment of the Ballyturn ambush
Lady Gregory was in England at the time of the ambush, but returned to the west of Ireland as soon as she heard. When the police questioned Margaret about the identity of the attackers, Augusta had cautioned them that Margaret doesn’t recognize any of the local country folk.
Lolly has heard about the IRA’s burning of the Custom House today. What a waste. The IRA calls it a victory but what about the loss of all those killed and arrested?!
She wrote to her father that what upsets her most is her women neighbors having their houses raided by the British, searching for their sons who have supposedly joined the IRA.
And the damned military curfew that the Brits have imposed has totally ended any social life. No more evenings in the theatre.
“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s. Volume 1 covering 1920 is available in print and e-book formats on Amazon. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and e-book versions.
Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, 55, is writing to his friend and fellow founder of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, Lady Augusta Gregory, about to turn 69, back in her home in Coole Park in the west of Ireland.
Yeats wants to explain to her why he and his pregnant wife, Georgie, 29, and their two-year-old daughter Anne, have moved from the place they had rented in Oxford to this cottage in Berkshire.
Shillingford Bridge, Berkshire
Mainly, to save money. Not only is there a baby on the way [Yeats is hoping for a boy], but Willie is still sending money to New York to support his father, painter John Butler Yeats, almost 82. Thankfully, Dad is being watched over by their friend, Irish-American lawyer and art collector, John Quinn, 50. Quinn often buys some of Willie’s manuscripts, giving the money to JB to keep him going.
But Yeats and his sisters are pressuring Dad to move back home. To no avail.
The Yeatses also considered moving back to Ireland. But their tower in the west of the country, Thoor Ballylee, has been terribly flooded by the recent rains. And living there, near Galway, is too dangerous now with the Civil War raging.
So Willie and Georgie found this cottage in Shillingford, about ten miles south of Oxford, which will reduce their expenses. And it is within walking distance of the town’s Catholic Church. Of course, the Yeatses are Protestants. But the proximity makes it more convenient for their maids.
“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 formats on Amazon.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and e-book versions.
SuchFriends Blog 