Our King, George V, 58, and his lovely wife, Queen Mary, 55, dining in a private home?! Even if the home is in St. James’s Square. It’s not the same as entertaining His Majesty at your country pile for tea or a weekend. That’s perfectly fine. But in a London home?!
No. 4 St. James’s Square
But what can you expect from two Americans? Even if they are the Second Viscount and Viscountess Astor, Lord Waldorf, 43, and Lady Nancy, also 43.
Particularly her. An MP! Well, she’s not the first woman to be elected to the British Parliament. That was Constance Markievicz, 55, but she’s Irish and you know how they are. Refusing to take their seats and all that.
Oh, but Lady Astor definitely took her seat—the one previously held by her husband, until he ascended to the House of Lords so had to give it up.
And she hasn’t sat there quietly like a decent lady should. She actually introduced a bill that will be voted on tomorrow. It probably is a good idea to raise the minimum age for children to be allowed to drink alcohol. But still.
Inviting the King and Queen to your own home?! Even if the purpose is to have a business meeting with labor union executives. What on earth will happen next?!
Ridiculous Americans.
Cartoon of Lady Astor in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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.
Irish poet William Butler Yeats, 57, is having dinner with his doctor—and friend—fellow writer and fellow appointed Senator in the new Irish Free State, Oliver St. John Gogarty, 44.
107 Piccadilly, London
Gogarty is re-telling the story of his recent kidnapping in Dublin by anti-government Republicans who had publicly stated they were going to be targeting Senators.
The good doctor was sitting in the bath in his Chapelizod home when the armed gunmen broke in and led him outside at gunpoint. As they forced him into a car, one pushed a revolver into his back and said,
Isn’t it a good thing to die in a flash, Senator?”
Not wanting to die in any way, Gogarty told them that he urgently needed to relieve his bowels and scampered into the woods. And then jumped into the freezing cold River Liffey and swam away.
As he crawled ashore and headed to the police barracks in the Phoenix Park, Gogarty vowed that he would donate two swans to the Liffey in gratitude.
And he vowed he would move his medical practice and his family to London.
Oliver St. John Gogarty
This month, the same rebels burned to the ground Renvyle, Gogarty’s house in Connemara in the west of Ireland. And even a patriot like Senator Horace Plunkett, 68, is not safe—his house Kilteragh, in Foxrock, County Dublin, was reduced to ruins also.
Firemen hosing what’s left of Kilteragh
Yeats has been following the turmoil back home from the comfort of his club here. The London Times’ headline a few weeks ago read,
Irish Rebel Outrages. Many Houses Burned. Kidnapped Senator.”
The anti-Treaty forces also burned Moore Hall, the family home of Yeats’ former friend, playwright and novelist George Moore, about to turn 71. They were enacting revenge on George’s brother, a former British army officer and current Free State Senator, not knowing the house belongs to George the writer, not his more political brother.
George Moore’s letter to the editor in The Morning Post
Yeats and Moore were among those who founded the Abbey Theatre at the beginning of the century. Despite the ongoing Civil War, the Abbey keeps performing in the heart of Dublin. They are staging Cathleen ni Houlihan, by Yeats and co-founder Lady Augusta Gregory, 70, featuring the new actor Barry Fitzgerald, 34, on a double bill with The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet by Yeats’ fellow Dub, George Bernard Shaw, 66.
Yeats is enjoying his new role as a Senator, representing a small independent political party, and serving on committees dealing with issues related to arts and culture. Leinster House is a short walk from the Yeats home in Merrion Square.
Leinster House
He’s given two speeches so far but feels that he can serve his country better from here in London, putting pressure on old friends like Winston Churchill, 48, former Secretary of State for the Colonies, to ease up on some of the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that was negotiated last year. Also, he finds it easier to write here.
Gogarty is urging Willie to get his family out of harm’s way in Ireland and bring them to England. The shock of the fighting in Dublin could affect his young daughter’s kidneys.
Yeats has been thinking about re-locating his wife and two children to Holyhead, Wales, where he could conveniently commute to Dublin via the ferry. His mother-in-law wants them to move closer to her in Cheshire, England.
But Yeats’ wife Georgie, 30, says no. She thinks this ridiculous war is going to be over soon. The government has already offered amnesty to those fighting, which will cool things down a bit.
Willie has just received a heartfelt letter from her, shaming him for appearing to abandon his needy country at this time. Their daughter Anne, about to turn 4, has recently recovered from scarlet fever and is doing much better now. (Yeats admits that whenever one of the kids gets sick, he moves out of the house to his Kildare Street club. To make things easier for Georgie, of course.)
Her letter convinces him. Willie responds immediately, thanking her for putting pressure on him. There will be no more talk of abandoning Ireland. He’ll come home.
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.
Percy Moore Turner, 45, owner of the Independent Gallery, is pleased with how the pre-sales are going for this upcoming show.
Percy Moore Turner
When one of his best clients, Irish-American attorney John Quinn, 52, decided to sell off most of his paintings by British artists—particularly Welsh Augustus John, 45—he chose Turner because he was the easiest to work with. Other dealers here and in New York City were quite disappointed.
Turner and Quinn came to an agreement on the terms of the sale at the end of last year. Quinn didn’t want his name officially connected to the show, but once the press and public inevitably identify him as the collector, Quinn has advised Turner that he can just explain that Quinn feels the paintings should be back home in England, and that,
I am disposing of my English and certain American works and centering my purchases upon French works.”
At the beginning of this year, Quinn had turned down Turner’s offer of Vincent Van Gogh’s Asylum at St. Remy because he felt £4.000 was a “rather steep price.” Quinn has started to tighten up his buying, after over-spending a bit last year.
Asylum at Saint Remy by Vincent van Gogh
Just yesterday, Turner had written to Quinn about the pre-sale orders. Of the 65 Augustus John works, two have sold for £350 each and the Tate Gallery has reserved his Portrait of a Woman for £500.
Portrait of a Woman by Augustus John
As to Quinn’s concern that Augustus would not be happy about so many of his works being dumped on the market at once, Turner was able to report that
This morning I had the visit of John himself, who took the matter very well, and liked the hanging of the pictures…and incidentally gave me permission to photograph what I wanted.”
Truth be told, Quinn’s just not interested in Augustus’ work anymore. And he feels that the painter has been selling some of his best works to Quinn’s competitors.
However, Quinn is keeping four of Augustus’ paintings for himself, including the portrait the Welshman did of his benefactor, although Quinn never much liked it.
Next 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.
Boni and Liveright has taken an ad in the New York Tribune to promote one of the books they are most proud of publishing late last year, The Waste Land, by American poet living in London, Thomas Stearns Eliot, 34.
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
When it was published last month, Boni and Liveright’s ad said,
The contract for The Waste Land, Mr. Eliot’s longest and most significant poem, which we have just published, was signed in Paris on New Year’s Eve and was witnessed by Ezra Pound and James Joyce. A good time was had by one and all—even the publisher.”
Not strictly true; but they did all have dinner together in Paris.
This month, the copy reads:
…probably the most discussed poem that has been written since Byron’s Don Juan…[CliveBell], the distinguished English writer, [has called Eliot] the most considerable poet writing in English.”
However, back in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London, Clive, 41, has told his mistress, writer Mary Hutchinson, 33, that he is sure Eliot uses violet face powder to make him look “more cadaverous.”
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.
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.
Rumors are flying around New York City that a group of con men are planning to print cheap, bootleg copies of the scandalous new novel Ulysses by Irish writer James Joyce, 40.
These literary pirates plan to take advantage of the fact that 400 copies of the banned book were destroyed when they arrived in this country from the publisher in Paris, American bookstore owner Sylvia Beach, 35. Booksellers here would love to get their hands on some copies, which are going for as much as $100 each on the black market. Some are even being smuggled over the border by an American book lover who commutes to work in Canada.
Ulysses by James Joyce, first edition
One of Beach’s American friends has written to her, lamenting,
It is too absurd that Ulysses cannot circulate over here. I feel a bitter resentment over my inability to read it.”
In his law offices, attorney John Quinn, 52, who has helped to fund the publication and promotion of Ulysses, knows that getting an injunction against these literary thieves would be too expensive. They’d pass the printing plates on to more thieves in a different state and he’d spend all his time getting injunctions, state after state.
Quinn does have a creative solution, however. If he were to alert his nemesis, John Sumner, 46, the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice [NYSSV], that copies of the book that Sumner himself—and the court—have deemed obscene are indeed circulating, Sumner would put the time and effort into tracking down the gangs and stopping publication before the counterfeit copies hit the streets.
John Sumner
How ironic. Sumner was the guy Quinn fought in court to keep Ulysses legal.
The U. S. Customs authorities are trying to confiscate every copy of the novel that enters the country and then store them in the General Post Office Building. The local officials appeal to the Post Office Department in Washington, D. C., for instructions about what to do with the 400 copies of this 700-page book they are storing. The Feds respond that the book is obscene and all copies should be burned.
So they are.
New York General Post Office
*****
Some copies of Ulysses do make it safely into the States, shipped from London where they had been taken apart and wrapped in newspapers. These are from the second edition, published this fall in Paris by the Egoist Press, owned by Joyce’s patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, 46.
Ulysses by James Joyce, second edition
When Harriet learned that at least 400 copies had been burned in New York, she simply ordered up 400 more.
Back in March, when the first major review of Ulysses appeared in The Observer—which considered the novel a work of genius, but concluded,
Yes. This is undoubtedly an obscene book.”
—a concerned citizen passed the clipping on to the Home Office, which contacted the undersecretary of state requesting the names and location of any bookstores selling Ulysses. Weaver also thinks they have sent a detective to follow her as she personally makes deliveries to each shop which has ordered copies to be sold under the counter only to special customers.
The Home Office also became aware of much more negative reviews of Ulysses, which led the undersecretary to call it “unreadable, unquotable, and unreviewable.” He issued instructions that copies entering the country should be seized, but his order is only provisional, and he doesn’t have a copy himself to read. So the Home Office requests an official opinion from the Crown Protection Service (CPS),
In the meantime, a British customs officer, doing his duty, takes a package from a passenger who landed at Croydon Airport in London, and, recognizing it as the banned Ulysses, flips to page 704 to see why. He confiscates the book on orders from His Majesty’s Customs and Excise Office, but the passenger complains that it is a work of art, praised by many reviewers, and on sale in bookshops in London as well as Paris.
Croydon Airport
Customs and Excise keeps the book but sends it on to the Home Office for a ruling.
This copy of Ulysses makes its way through the bureaucracy and finally lands on the desk of Sir Archibald Bodkin, 60, Director of Public Prosecutions at the CPS and scourge of the suffragettes whom his officers had routinely arrested and abused.
Sir Archibald Bodkin
Bodkin only had to read the final chapter to issue his decision. Which he did two days before the end of 1922:
I have not had the time nor, I may add, the inclination to read through this book. I have, however, read pages 690 to 732. I am entirely unable to appreciate how those pages are relevant to the rest of the book, or, indeed, what the book itself is about. I can discover no story, there is no introduction which might give a key to its purpose, and the pages above mentioned, written as they are as if composed by a more or less illiterate vulgar woman, form an entirely detached part of this production. In my opinion, there is…a great deal more than mere vulgarity or coarseness, there is a great deal of unmitigated filth and obscenity…It is filthy and filthy books are not allowed to be imported into this country.”
End of.
*****
In Paris, at the bookstore where it all began, Sylvia Beach is selling increasing numbers of Ulysses every day. Customers who come in asking for it leave with copies of all Joyce’s books.
By the end of the year, James Joyce is her best seller, beating out William Blake, Herman Melville, and, one of Sylvia’s favorites, Walt Whitman.
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 Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
In Paris, the Ballets Russes is performing Parade, which they premiered here five years ago with music by Erik Satie, 56, and a scenario written by Jean Cocteau, 33. The scenery, curtains and costumes are all created in a Cubist style by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, 41, who gets his own ovation when the audience stands up to cheer, and faces the box he is seated in.
A costume for Parade designed by Pablo Picasso
But the big success of the season is Cocteau’s production of Antigone, his “contraction” of Sophocles’ original, as Cocteau calls it.
Picasso also received a round of cheers during the rehearsals for the play, when Cocteau brought him to an almost bare set, with just some masks and a violet-blue and white backdrop, and told the painter to create a hot, sunny day.
Picasso paced the stage. Picked up a piece of red chalk. Rubbed the white boards with it until they looked like marble. Dipped a brush in a bottle of ink. Drew some lines on the background and blackened in a few spaces.
Three Doric columns appeared. All those watching applauded.
Cocteau also persuaded Coco Chanel, 39, to design the heavy Scotch woolen costumes for Oedipus’s daughters.
Antigone is packing them in at the 100-year-old Théâtre de l’Atelier, owned by the actor and drama teacher Charles Dullin, 37, who directed the production and appears in it as well. Dullin’s mother pawned the family’s furniture and silverware to get enough money for Charles to buy and renovate this theatre.
Cocteau himself is playing the part of the Chorus, and also in the cast is one of Dullin’s students, Antonin Artaud, 26. The music for the play has been written by Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, 30, and the lead is played by a Romanian dancer, Génica Athanasiou, 25, who speaks so little French she had to learn her lines syllable by syllable. As a reward for her efforts, Cocteau has dedicated the production to her.
Génica Athanasiou by Man Ray
Each evening begins with a short curtain-raiser by Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, 55, who had success last year with his Six Characters in Search of an Author.
The names Picasso, Chanel and Pirandello are what initially drew the crowds. However, now that Antigone is a big hit, Cocteau is becoming a cult figure among young men who show up in large groups to applaud each night. Some have even been hanging around outside Cocteau’s house and climbing up the lamp post just to get a look at him.
Jean Cocteau by Man Ray
*****
In London’s West End, German Count Harry Kessler, 54, is enjoying theatre while visiting the city for the first time since the Great War broke out. He confides his impressions to his diary,
Not much change in the shops. They are as good class and as elegant as they used to be. But there is no longer the astounding amount of hustle and luxury as in 1914 and which is still to be met in Paris. It can be sensed that the country has become poorer and the shoppers rarer…[At the theatre] to my astonishment, at least half the men in the stalls were in lounge suits, the rest in dinner jackets, and only five or six in tails. A real revolution or, more accurately, the symptom of such.”
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 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available d on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Virginia Woolf, 40, is looking forward to dinner tonight with her new friend, fellow author Vita Sackville-West, 30, at Vita’s posh home in Belgravia.
Virginia and her husband Leonard, 42, met the Nicholsons—Vita and her husband Sir Harold Nicholson, 36—just a few days ago at a party hosted by Virginia’s brother-in-law, art critic Clive Bell, 41, at his Gordon Square house.
46 Gordon Square
Clive had arranged the get-together specifically so the two couples could meet. Clive had passed on to Virginia Vita’s comment that she feels Woolf is the best female writer in England. This from an already established British writer is encouraging to Virginia, who just published her third novel, Jacob’s Room, this time with the Woolfs’ own Hogarth Press.
After their meeting, Virginia noted in her diary,
the lovely gifted aristocratic Sackville West…is a grenadier; hard, handsome, manly, inclined to a double chin. She is a pronounced Sapphist and [Vita] may, thinks [English composer] Ethel Sands, have an eye on me, old though I am.”
*****
Meanwhile. A bit less than an hour away on the District Line, Vita has been telling Harold how impressed she is by Virginia:
I’ve rarely taken such a fancy to anyone…I have quite lost my heart…I simply adore Virginia…She is both detached and human, silent till she wants to say something and then says it supremely well. She dresses quite atrociously.”
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 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.
After nearly a year of negotiating, between the publisher, Horace Liveright, just turned 38, in New York; the author, T. S. Eliot, 34, in London; and the author’s representative, lawyer John Quinn, 52, in New York, Eliot’s epic poem, The Waste Land, is finally published in book form.
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
Eliot has added extensive academic-style annotations to increase the number of pages to a more traditional book size.
According to the agreement worked out by Quinn, the complete poem appeared in the American literary magazine The Dial in November, and Eliot was awarded the magazine’s annual prize of $2,000. The Dial agreed to buy 350 copies of the hardback book from Boni and Liveright, and the book’s cover and advertising tout the Dial prize.
On the suggestion of The Dial editor, Gilbert Seldes, 29, Liveright has numbered the 1,000 copies of the first edition to give them more value and lowered the retail price from $2 to $1.50.
*****
In London, the author is pleased by the praise he is receiving in print and in letters from friends, for his poem as well as his own literary magazine which he has started, The Criterion.
The Criterion, October
After receiving the first issue, Quinn wrote to him,
It’s a beautiful thing, beautiful printing and on good paper. That first number will be memorable. I hope you can keep it up.”
In the midst of all this success, Eliot is still rankled by an anonymous letter he has received. Signed “Your Wellwisher,” it contained four three-halfpenny postage stamps.
Eliot knows that this is an insulting reference to his financial situation, and the effort by some of his friends to set up a trust, Bel Esprit, to give him extra income so he can leave his day job at Lloyds Bank.
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 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.
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