Virginia Woolf, 42, settles into the big old armchair in the corner of the room, positions herself beside the gas fire to get the best morning light through the skylight, and pulls the three-ply board on to her lap to continue working on her novel, The Hours.
Tavistock Square
A couple of weeks ago Virginia and her husband Leonard, 43, moved themselves and their business, the five-year-old Hogarth Press, into the basement of this three-story building.
The Press’s offices, printing press, storage room and a shop for the booksellers’ representatives who call on them are adjacent to Virginia’s room. Above, on the ground floor are the offices of Dollman and Pritchard, solicitors; the Woolfs live on the second floor.
They have asked Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell, 44, and her partner, Duncan Grant, 39, to decorate their rooms.
Sitting room in 52 Tavistock Square
Of necessity, Virginia’s studio is turning into a storage room also. As she works, she is surrounded by piles of books and piles of papers. Pen nibs, paper clips, buttons, ink bottles, stationery and cigarette butts have already begun to accumulate.
But, in all the years the Woolfs have been sharing their private lives with their working life—the Hogarth Press—this is the first time they think they have enough room for both.
Virginia feels she has a space she can call her own. She decides she will finish this novel in the next four months.
Mark your calendars! The Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books will take place Saturday, May 11, at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Stop by the “Such Friends” table 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.
Novelist Virginia Woolf, 41, is feeling quite proud of herself.
Of course she is proud of her most recent novel, Jacob’s Room, which has gathered good reviews as well as strong sales. And she’s proud of her short story in last year’s Dial magazine, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” which she is now expanding into a novel.
But today she’s feeling particularly proud of her skill negotiating a lease for a new home in Bloomsbury’s Tavistock Square for herself, her husband Leonard, 43, and their publishing company, Hogarth Press.
Tavistock Square
Nine years ago the Woolfs bought a printing press, with the idea of publishing Virginia’s works along with those of some of their friends out of their home here in Richmond, southwest London. Two years later they got started and have been expanding ever since.
In the past seven years they have produced 18 handset and hand-printed books and 18 set by commercial printers. They’ve added—and subtracted and added again—staff and filled up Hogarth House with books, books and books.
Their new home, No. 52 Tavistock Square, has a law firm, Dollman and Pritchard, on the ground floor, so Virginia and Leonard will occupy the top two floors. Hogarth Press’ equipment, office and inventory will be set up in the basement, a former kitchen, scullery and pantry. The large back room with a skylight, formerly used for billiards, will become Virginia’s studio, where she can write. Although part of this room will probably fill up with books as well.
Despite Leonard’s role as the businessman on the team, Virginia has usually handled the details of any leases they have signed in the past. She admits she has sometimes enjoyed playing the naive, unwitting female to get what she wants.
This will be a good move for the Woolfs and the Press. But there is emotion wrapped up in leaving their Richmond home, where Virginia found relative “stability and calm” during the Great War. She writes in her diary,
nowhere else could we have started the Hogarth Press, whose very awkward beginning had risen in this very room, on this very green carpet. Here that strange offspring grew & throve; it ousted us from the dining room, which is now a dusty coffin; & crept all over the house.”
On Saturday, February 3rd, we will be celebrating Gertrude Stein’s 150th birthday at City Books, 908 Galveston Avenue, north side, Pittsburgh, a five-minute walk from where Stein was born. For more details, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.
Early this year, I will be talking about early 20th century supporters of the arts such as 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.
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 85th 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.
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 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 Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Leonard Woolf, 42, co-owner of the Hogarth Press with his wife, novelist Virginia, 41, has been pleased with all the titles they have published over the past six years. But this latest, The Waste Land, an epic poem by their friend, American ex-pat Thomas Stearns Eliot, 34, has been a real challenge.
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, published by the Hogarth Press
Virginia handset the type, and Tom had extremely specific ideas about the spacing of the lines. Plus detailed footnotes. At one point this summer, the 12-point type got mixed in with the 14-point. That set them back at least a week. They used beautiful, blue-marbled boards for the inside covers, and Leonard did the actual printing.
Hogarth Press printing press
Virginia used the text from the original appearance of the poem in the first issue of Eliot’s own magazine, Criterion, almost a year earlier. The footnotes she had to copy out of the first book version, published by Boni and Liveright in the States the previous December.
The Woolfs’ subscription strategy—where A-list members pay an annual fee to get first dibs on new titles, and B-list members receive preference after that—is paying off. They’ve already pre-sold 47 copies of The Waste Land out of the 460 they’ve printed.
Virginia and Leonard agreed from the beginning that the content of the books they publish will always be of paramount importance. They don’t want Hogarth to be a specialty publisher that turns out works of art to be admired but never read.
But when the content and the production work together like this, it is something to be proud of.
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.
Sitting on the beach outside Knoll House, Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, 31, is watching her lover, John Maynard Keynes, 40, in deep conversation with a few of his friends from Bloomsbury.
Knoll House
Maynard has rented this stately seaside house and invited his intellectual London friends to come stay. Lydia has just finished a three-week run in a ballet in the London Coliseum’s summer season and has joined Maynard for a much-needed rest.
Lydia finds Keynes’ friends to be intimidating. They are mostly writers and editors for the magazine Keynes has recently acquired, the Nation and Athenaeum. For example, Leonard Woolf, 42, one of Keynes’ friends from his days in Cambridge, is its literary editor. And Raymond Mortimer, 28, is a former Oxford student who writes for the magazine and other prestigious publications in the UK and U. S.
But the guest who makes Lydia feel the most uncomfortable is Leonard’s wife, novelist Virginia Woolf, 41. Lydia knows Virginia makes fun of her broken English behind her back. And when they do chat, Lydia feels as though her character is being analyzed by the novelist.
At least Leonard has always been nice to Lydia. And Virginia is only staying here for three days. Lydia lies back on the beach and determines that she’s going to try to enjoy the holiday.
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.
Julian Bell, 15, and his brother Quentin, turning 13 this summer, have become publishers. Their project while staying at their family’s country home, Charleston farmhouse, is to publish a family newspaper they’re calling the Charleston Bulletin.
Julian Bell at Charleston
This is great fun. They can write and draw their impressions of their relatives, the domestic help, and various guests.
Best of all, they have roped into their project Aunt Virginia, 41. As she is a writer herself they thought they’d ask her. She really seems to be enjoying this new style as well as Quentin’s drawings to illustrate the gossip. Aunt Virginia has contributed a complete short story, “The Widow and the Parrot,” which her nephews almost rejected but decided to accept.
Here is an excerpt from one of their vignettes of “Eminent Charlestonians,” about the household cook:
When in a good & merry mood, Trisy would seize a dozen eggs & a bucket of flour, coerce a cow to milk itself, & then mixing the ingredients toss them 20 times high up over the skyline, & catch them as they fell in dozens & dozens & dozens of pancakes.”
“Eminent Charlestonians” in the Charleston Bulletin
*****
Aunt Virginia is a publisher herself. She and her husband, Leonard Woolf, 42, started their own Hogarth Press about five years ago. Currently they are having a difficult time hand printing an epic poem called The Waste Land, by their friend, American ex-patriate Tom Eliot, 34. Some 14-point letters have been tossed into boxes with 12-point letters and they’ve had to delay publication by a whole week.
Back in her own East Sussex home, Monk’s House, in nearby Rodmell, Aunt Virginia is working on her writing. Virginia’s latest short story, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” is appearing in the July issue of the American literary magazine The Dial, along with a positive review of her latest novel, Jacob’s Room, which the Hogarth Press published last fall.
This short story has evolved into her next novel, The Hours, which she is working out now. Virginia confides to her diary that she is afraid it may be
sheer weak dribble…so queer & so masterful…I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its most intense…Am I writing The Hours from deep emotion? Of course the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squirt so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it…I daresay it’s true, however, that I haven’t that ‘reality’ gift. I insubstantise, willfully to some extent, distrusting reality—its cheapness. But to get further. Have I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays about myself?”
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
They all make fun of her. The group of writers and artists who live in Bloomsbury have not been welcoming to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, 31, current lover of their friend, economist John Maynard Keynes, 39.
Lydia Lopokova
Novelist Virginia Woolf, 41, has mocked Lydia’s broken English, in a letter to her sister, painter Vanessa Bell, 43:
Maynar like your article so much, Leonar,”
referring to Virginia’s husband Leonard, 42.
Lydia has been annoying Vanessa by stopping by on Sunday afternoons just to chat. Vanessa doesn’t have time to chat. She has two sons, ages 15 and 12; an estranged husband; and her partner, Duncan Grant, 38, to look after.
Vanessa has painted a not particularly flattering portrait of Lydia, which is included with Vanessa’s work in this month’s London Group Show. She knows that Duncan is also working on one.
At least Vanessa got good reviews for the show. Her other Bloomsbury friend, art critic Roger Fry, 56, has a one-man show at the Independent Gallery and his portrait of Lydia has been chastised. The London Observer criticized its “cloying prettiness.”
Vanessa did the portrait of Lydia so Maynard would buy it, but he refused. Vanessa feels that Maynard has never really liked her painting.
Lydia Lopokova by Duncan Grant
N.B.: Duncan Grant’s portrait of Lydia Lopokova was bequeathed to King’s College, Cambridge, by John Maynard Keynes in his will. The whereabouts of the other two portraits are unknown.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.ukin both print and e-book versions.
English novelist Virginia Woolf, 40, has just come down to breakfast, when her maid gives her some startling news,
Mrs. Murry’s dead! It says so in the paper,”
exclaims Nellie Boxall, 31.
Confused, Virginia reads the obituary in the Times, which describes her friend, New Zealand-born Katherine Mansfield, 34, as having “A career of great literary promise…[Her] witty and penetrating novel reviews…A severe shock to her friends.”
Katherine Mansfield
This is definitely a severe shock to Virginia. Last year she turned down Katherine’s invitation to visit her in France, and last fall passed up an opportunity to see Katherine when she was visiting London. She always thought that she’d see her again this summer.
Katherine’s book, Prelude, was one of the first Virginia and her husband Leonard, 41, published when they started their Hogarth Press about five years ago.
More deeply, Virginia is feeling the loss of one of the few writers she felt truly close to. Katherine won’t be there to read what Virginia writes. Her rival is gone.
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.
Parties given by the friends who live in the Bloomsbury section of London are always great. And this one is no exception.
46 Gordon Square
The host, economist John Maynard Keynes, 39, is mostly occupied by his work in Cambridge and the City of London, traveling to Germany to advise the government there, taking over the failing Liberal magazine The Nation and Athenaeum and working out the economic theory for his next book, A Tract on Monetary Reform.
So it’s time to throw a party! Let’s celebrate “Twelfth Night,” the traditional end to the Christmas season.
Over in the corner English novelist Virginia Woolf, 40, who used to live in Bloomsbury but is now in Richmond with her husband, Leonard, 42, is deep in conversation with German-British painter Walter Sickert, 62. He has entertained the crowd with a one-man performance of Hamlet.
Walter Sickert
On the other side of the room is writer and suffragist Marjorie Strachey, 40. Her brother Lytton, 42, was with Leonard and Maynard in the secretive group at Cambridge, The Apostles. Marjorie has been reciting obscene versions of children’s nursery rhymes to the assembled partygoers.
But the star of the evening is Maynard’s lover, Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, 31, currently in stressful rehearsals for a ballet she is producing and appearing in as part of a revue, You’ll Be Surprised, with her choreographer and dancing partner, Leonide Massine, 26, in Covent Garden later this month. Tonight, Lydia has performed a dance that impressed everyone.
Lydia Lopokova
Keynes has given Lydia the ground floor apartment in #41, just a few doors away. Lydia understands that his schedule is busy, but she often is lonely and depressed because Maynard’s Bloomsbury friends haven’t really welcomed her into their group. This party is one of the first times she has felt a bit more accepted.
However, Lydia and Maynard are about to have their first real fight. If he’s too busy to spend time with her, how come he’s planning to spend the Easter holiday in North Africa with his other lover, another Apostle, English writer Sebastian Sprott, 25?!
Later this month I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York City in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse,about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with 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.
SuchFriends Blog 