Last year, English art critic Clive Bell, 41, published an influential essay, “Since Cezanne,” which discussed Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, also 41:
…Picasso is a born chef d’ecole. His is one of the most inventive minds in Europe…His career has been a series of discoveries, each of which he has rapidly developed.
A highly original and extremely happy conception enters his head, suggested probably by some odd thing he has seen. Forthwith he sets himself to analyze it and disentangle those principles that account for its peculiar happiness. He proceeds by experiment, applying his hypothesis in the most unlikely place.”
Today, Picasso’s first solo show in the United States, “Original Drawings by Pablo Picasso,” opens here, put on by the Arts Club of Chicago in the galleries they lease from the Art Institute.
Catalog for “Original Drawings by Pablo Picasso”
Picasso’s paintings have been exhibited in the States before, as part of the 1913 Armory Show, which opened in New York City but then toured here at the Art Institute, and moved on to Boston. Two years ago the Arts Club included two of his paintings in a group show.
This time, from his home in Paris, Picasso has given specific instructions to the organizers about how to display the 53 original drawings, ranging from 1907 to just last year.
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.
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.
Had he not promised to give the lecture, French writer Andre Breton, 26, and his wife Simone, 25, would head back to Paris today.
But they drove here a few days ago with their friends, painter Francis Picabia, 43, and his mistress, for the opening of an exhibit of Picabia’s work at the Dalmau Gallery, and Breton promised to deliver a lecture about the current state of art in France.
Femme Espagnole by Francis Picabia
It took over a week to get here, in Picabia’s sporty Mercer convertible. Breton wore his leather pilot’s helmet, goggles and his heavy fur coat. In Marseilles they stopped to see a disappointing exhibit with fake African artefacts, where Breton spent 20 francs on a stuffed armadillo. Which woke up and jumped out of his arms.
Mercer touring car
Since they arrived in Barcelona, Simone has been bedridden with salmonella poisoning. The only saving grace has been the Gaudi architecture throughout the town. Andre sent a postcard of the cathedral Sagrada Familia to his Spanish friend back in Paris, painter Pablo Picasso, 41, asking,
Do you know this marvel?”
Sagrada Familia
In his talk Breton is planning to announce, in French to an audience of Spaniards, his belief that the Dada movement is over. He feels that there is a new movement brewing, which involves artists such as Picabia, Picasso, and American Man Ray, 32, but they are so far unorganized and un-named.
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.
Writer Andre Breton, 26, was fascinated by the seances he was introduced to by his friend, poet Rene Crevel, 22.
Crevel had passed out during a séance he took part in when on holiday in Normandy last month. After he told Breton and his wife, Simone, 25, about his experience they were eager to try it themselves and enlisted another young poet Robert Desnos, 22, in their activities.
Here at the Bretons’ fourth floor apartment, the walls covered with paintings and objects by their friends—Francis Picabia, 43, Pablo Picasso, 40, Man Ray, 32—small groups of artists and writers get together almost every evening to play games and practice artistic experiments, such as automatic writing. When their married hosts retire to bed, poet Louis Aragon, just turned 25, and others stay up late and hit the local bars.
Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, and Andre Breton
But now these nightly seances are getting a bit out of hand. The young poets keep fighting, accusing each other of faking their trances, mostly to get Breton’s attention. The neighbors complained about the noise so much, Simone had to bribe the concierge to avoid eviction. Desnos claims he can commune with their friend, painter Marcel Duchamp, 35, in New York City; Crevel says he can predict the future. He predicted that some of the others would get sick—and they did. Picabia and Aragon have decided to stay away.
At another apartment one night, 10 participants go into a trance and try to hang themselves.
Breton figures, enough. He’ll get a good article out of this for the magazine he re-launched earlier this year, Litterature, and then he’ll take off with Simone for a holiday in Spain.
Andre Breton’s studio at 42 rue Fontaine
*****
Near Madrid, about 20 minutes by tram from city centre, at the Residencia de Estudiantes—commonly known as “the Resi”—young male students from the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts who live here walk around in British-style suits with short, trim, haircuts.
Except one.
First year art student Salvador Dali, 18, from Figueres, Catalonia, skinny and five foot seven, walks around in early 19th century English knee breeches, a long velvet coat to his knees and floppy neckties, sporting a wide-brimmed hat and a gilded cane.
Salvador Dali’s student ID card
Despite his unconventional appearance, Dali is accepted into the conversation groups of the clique known as the Ultra. They publish a student magazine of the same name.
Dali has made particular friends with one of the group members, Luis Bunuel, 22, from Aragon, who has been at the Academy for five years now. Luis has bounced around to different universities, taking up various fields of study—Engineering, Agriculture—but is enjoying his time here, wandering the city streets at night and visiting brothels.
Dali on the other hand has religiously been spending his Sunday mornings in the Prado museum, where he uses pencil and paper to sketch and analyse the works of the great masters.
His new friends in the Ultra gossip all the time about another of their number, writer Frederico Garcia Lorca, 24, who is away this semester but will be returning in January.
Bunuel tells Dali that he will definitely be impressed by Lorca and learn a lot of from him. And that he definitely should re-think those clothes.
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.
Olga Picasso, 31, is recuperating at home after an emergency operation.
She and her family—husband Pablo, 40, and their son, Paulo, almost 20 months old—were having a lovely holiday, despite the bad weather, in Dinard on the Brittany Coast.
Suddenly Olga became seriously ill and they had to rush her to the hospital in Paris, 400 km away. The five-hour trip was a nightmare: Paolo was car sick and Pablo kept putting ice packs on Olga’s head.
She’s feeling a bit better now that she is home. But Pablo has gone back to Dinard to retrieve all the paintings and drawings he’s been working on since they arrived there in July.
Women Running on the Beach by Picasso
The Spanish painter has never learned to drive, saying that it would affect his wrists and hands. So he bought a posh new car and has hired a chauffeur to take care of the driving for him. He tells Olga that, back in Dinard, he is quite a celebrity. His arrival is in the local paper and everyone wants to see his new car.
Olga is more concerned about her “woman’s problems.”
*****
Nearby in the city, about 2 km away, American ex-patriate Harry Crosby, 24, is at his desk in the Morgan, Harjes et Cie bank in Place Vendome.
Morgan, Harjes et Cie bank in Place Vendome.
Harry’s not doing much work. He rarely does. His aunt, Jane Norton Morgan, 54, wife of the bank owner, J. P. Morgan, Jr., just turned 55, arranged this job for him. Harry had already walked out on a banking job in Boston, after only eight months of putting up with it and a six-day drinking binge.
But Aunt Jane didn’t send him off to Paris this spring just to restart his career. She wanted to get him away from his mistress, Mrs. Mary “Polly” Phelps Rodgers, 30, with whom he has been conducting a scandalous affair for the past two years. All of Boston is talking.
Didn’t work. Polly finally divorced her husband earlier this year, and at the beginning of this month she finally said yes to Harry’s most recent marriage proposal, via transatlantic cable.
Harry was over the moon. He collected on the $100 bet he’d made with his roommate, raced to Cherbourg to get the next boat, used the money to bribe officials so he wouldn’t have to quarantine, and managed to sail to New York City on the RMSAquitania on September 3rd. He won some money gambling on the ship but used that to buy champagne for his fellow passengers. He dressed up and crashed the posh restaurant on board, but while he was eating caviar, mock turtle soup and hummingbirds on toast, a steerage inspector tossed him out.
RMSAquitania
Harry arrived in Manhattan after six days at sea, broke, and Polly was waiting for him at the dock. They got married that day and made a quick trip to Washington, DC, to try to reconcile with his family. That didn’t work.
Wedding picture of Harry and Polly Crosby
Back in New York City they collected Polly’s two children, and the responsibility of actually being a stepfather sunk in to Harry. He disappeared for a few hours.
But all four members of the newly blended family boarded the RMSAquitania for the trip back to Paris.
Harry returned to this cushy job, and Polly found them an impressive apartment on the Right Bank so they could move out of the hotel they had been living in. And every workday, Polly, in a stunning red bathing suit, rows her new husband—somberly dressed in a business suit, hat, umbrella and briefcase—down the Seine to Place de la Concorde. He disembarks and walks the few blocks to his job here at the family bank. Polly rows back, often to the delight of the Frenchmen who whistle and wave at her and her large breasts. She loves it.
Harry likes this life, too, but not the job. He spends a lot of time reading poetry rather than banking and has even tried writing some himself.
Right now, he thinks it’s time to leave this office and go across the street to the Ritz Hotel Bar.
Later in the year I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes at Carnegie-Mellon University and 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.
If Irish-American lawyer and patron of the arts John Quinn, 52, wants to get out of the city as planned to spend all of August with his sister and niece in the Adirondacks, he has a bit of correspondence to catch up on.
Quinn has been corresponding with his emissary in Paris, Henri-Pierre Roche, 43, about leaving his best French paintings to the government of France, to be cared for in the Louvre. Roche has been negotiating to have Quinn acquire The Circus by Georges Seurat. Roche wrote to him at the beginning of the month about a crazy day when he and Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, 40, went flying around Paris carrying a Cezanne landscape with them in a taxi, stopping at every shop to buy up all the suitable frames they could find.
The Circus by Georges Seurat
One of the writers Quinn supports, American T. S. Eliot, 33, living in London, has written to give him power of attorney when negotiating a contract with Boni and Liveright to publish his latest work, an untitled lengthy poem. They are not sure, however, if it will be lengthy enough to appear as a book. Eliot writes that he is planning to add some notes to make it fatter. Quinn is finally getting around to reading the typescript Eliot has sent and is turning it over to his office secretary to make a copy that can be submitted to Liveright.
Typescript of poem by T. S. Eliot
Quinn is finishing off a lengthy letter to one of his Irish friends, poet and painter AE (George Russell, 55). Their mutual friend, Lady Augusta Gregory, 70, had recently asked Quinn to recommend painters for inclusion in the Hugh Lane Gallery, which she is trying to establish in memory of her nephew who went down with the Lusitania seven years ago. Quinn reports to AE that he told her that of the dead ones he would rank, in order, Cezanne, Seurat (much better than Renoir), and Rousseau. He puts Gauguin and van Gogh a bit farther down.
Of living artists he would include Picasso, Georges Braque, 40; Andre Derain, 42; and Henri Matisse, 52; in the first tier. In the second, Raoul Dufy, 45; Constantin Brancusi, 46—whom he has become good friends with—and Georges Rouault, 51.
Quinn tells AE that he would add a third tier of the living: Juan Gris, 35; Marie Laurencin, 39; and Jacques Villon, about to turn 47, among others.
The Winged Horse by AE
Quinn’s longest letter is to another Irish friend, poet and playwright, William Butler Yeats, 57. He brings Willie up to date on the recent funeral of his father, whom Quinn had taken care of during the past 15 years in New York City. The Yeats family decided it would be better for Dad to be buried in the States, and Quinn arranged a site in upstate New York:
If you and your sisters could see the place, I am sure you would have approved of [our] selection. When Lady Gregory was here the last time, lecturing, she told me one day, half in earnest and half in fun, that if she died in this country she wanted to be buried where she died, unless she died in Pittsburgh. She refused to be buried in Pittsburgh…One day downtown, when I was having coffee after lunch with two or three men, one of them said: ‘Times change. Now there is [famous actress] Lillian Russell. In the old days she was supposed to have had many lovers and she was married and divorced four or five times. But years go by, and she marries again, and settles down, and finally dies in the odor of—’
‘Pittsburgh,’ said I.
Lady Gregory refused to be buried in the odor of Pittsburgh.”
Quinn ends by congratulating Yeats on his honorary degree from Trinity College and asks that Willie’s wife send him some photos of their children and Thoor Ballylee, the tower they are living in.
Now he is ready to pack up and go on a well-earned vacation.
Pittsburgh, 1912, when Lady Gregory visited with The Abbey Theatre
Later in the year I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes at Carnegie-Mellon University and 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.
Sitting on the beach, looking over the water to St. Malo, Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, 40, is thankful that there has been a break in the rain.
Pablo and his family—his wife, Russian-Ukrainian ballerina Olga, 31, and their almost 18-month old son, Paolo, who is teething—came to Brittany from Paris a couple of weeks ago. Pablo would have preferred spending the summer in sunny Midi, but Olga wanted Brittany. After about a week, they moved out of the hotel to this villa on the beach.
Villa Beauregard, Dinard
When the weather is nice, Pablo paints outdoors; he has finished a few paintings and quite a lot of drawings of people on the beach.
But it has been mostly raining, so the tourists crowd the two casinos and the town’s hotel ballrooms. Inside their rented home, Pablo does sketches of Olga and Paolo as well as the exterior and interiors of the villa. Despite his wife’s whining about her “woman problems,” an endless stream of visiting friends, and his screaming son, Pablo has managed to produce a surprising amount of work.
The baby screaming he can understand; but the wife is just plain annoying.
Later in the year I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes at Carnegie-Mellon University and 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.
The Dial magazine has “More Memories” by Irish playwright William Butler Yeats, just turned 57, and two line drawings by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, 40. Its monthly columns include “Paris Letter” by American ex-pat poet Ezra Pound, 36, and “Dublin Letter” by the recently retired Head Librarian of the National Library of Ireland, John Eglinton, 54, actually writing from his home in Bournemouth, England. He reviews the new novel Ulysses by his fellow Dubliner, James Joyce, 40, living in Paris:
The Dial, June 1922
I am by no means sure, however, that I have understood Mr. Joyce’s method, which is sufficiently puzzling even where he relates incidents in which I have myself taken a humble part…There is an effort and a strain in the composition of this book which makes one feel at times a concern for the author. But why should we half-kill ourselves to write masterpieces? There is a growing divergence between the literary ideals of our artists and the books which human beings want to read.”
The New York Times Book Review has a review of The Secret Adversary, the second novel from English writer Agatha Christie, 31:
It is safe to assert that unless the reader peers into the last chapter or so of the tale, he will not know who this secret adversary is until the author chooses to reveal him…[Miss Christie] gives a sense of plausibility to the most preposterous situations and developments…[But she] has a clever prattling style that shifts easily into amusing dialogue and so aids the pleasure of the reader as he tears along with Tommy and Tuppence on the trail of the mysterious Mr. Brown. Many of the situations are a bit moth-eaten from frequent usage by other quarters, but at that Miss Christie manages to invest them with a new sense of individuality that renders them rather absorbing.”
The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie, US edition
Metropolitan magazine has a piece, “Eulogy for the Flapper” by Zelda Fitzgerald, 22, who is considered to be the original flapper, as created in the two recent hit novels by her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 25:
The flapper is deceased…They have won their case. They are blase…Flapperdom has become a game; it is no longer a philosophy.”
The Smart Set has a short story by Zelda’s husband, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”:
[Percy Washington boasts that his father is] by far the richest man in the world and has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.”
The Smart Set, June 1922
The Saturday Evening Post has two pieces by friends who lunch together regularly at the midtown Manhattan Algonquin Hotel: “Men I’m Not Married To” by free-lance writer Dorothy Parker, 28, and “Women I’m Not Married To” by popular newspaper columnist FPA [Franklin Pierce Adams], 40.
Saturday Evening Post, June 1922
The Double Dealer,A National Magazine. from the South, true to its mission to publish new work by new writers has “Portrait,” a poem by recent University of Mississippi dropout, William Faulkner, 24, and “Ultimately,” a four-line poem by Toronto Star foreign correspondent Ernest Hemingway, 22, a Chicagoan currently living in Paris:
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 Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon in both print and e-book versions.
Long shot of the Paris Opera House. The camera moves in to focus on the poster for tonight’s performance:
Then a tight shot of the wording:
RENARD
Première mondiale! Musique et livret d’Igor Stravinsky Chorégraphie de Bronislava Nijinsky
Interprété par Les Ballets Russes, sous la direction de Serge Diaghilev
Réalisé par Ernest Ansermet Avec des décors conçus par Pablo Picasso
The camera pulls back and takes us through the streets of the Right Bank to the entrance of the Hotel Majestic on Avenue Kleber.
We follow the camera inside and up the stairs to a private room. Stravinsky’s music is drowned out by the sounds of about 35 or 40 partygoers, formally dressed, chatting and laughing. Waiters are getting ready to serve dinner.
Speaking in front of the room is Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev, 50.
DIAGHILEV: Thank you to our hosts for the evening, Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Schiff, who have brought together tonight the four living artists Mr. Schiff most admires [gesturing to each]: Monsieur Picasso, Monsieur Stravinsky, Monsieur Joyce [looks around the room] Monsieur Joyce? No? And Monsieur Proust [looks around the room again] Monsieur Proust?!
As he is speaking, the camera moves around the table to give close-ups of some of the dinner guests: Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, 40, with a Catalan sash tied around his head like a turban; his wife Olga, 30; French director Ernest Ansermet, 38; French composer Erik Satie, just turned 56; Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, 39; English patron Sydney Schiff, 53; his wife Violet, 48; and English art critic Clive Bell, 40.
DIAGHILEV: I hope you all enjoy the dinner.
Waiters begin serving. Outside, bells chime midnight.
Camera moves around the room showing the partygoers enjoying the food and each other’s company.
Fade to the same scene showing most of the food eaten and waiters slowly clearing a few plates and starting to serve coffee.
The camera settles on the door to the room and in staggers Irish author James Joyce, 40, looking confused, poorly dressed and a bit drunk. Sydney Schiff motions for a waiter to put a chair next to him, and Joyce sits in it. He puts his head in his hands, and a waiter sets a glass of champagne in front of him.
Panning back to the door, we see Marcel Proust, 50, enter, dressed in evening clothes and wearing white gloves. A chair is placed between Sydney Schiff and Stravinsky; Proust sits there. A waiter brings him some food and drink.
PROUST, turning to Stravinsky: Monsieur Stravinsky, doubtless you admire Beethoven?
STRAVINSKY, barely looking at him: I detest Beethoven.
PROUST: But, cher maitre, surely those late sonatas and quartets…
STRAVINSKY: Worse than all the others.
Ansermet, sitting nearby, leans over to talk to both of them to avoid having this discussion become a fight.
Snoring is heard, and the camera moves to focus on Joyce, who has nodded off.
Hearing the snoring, a posh woman seated next to Clive Bell tugs on his sleeve and whispers in his ear. The two get up, put on their coats and leave together. Sydney Schiff gets up to see them out.
As soon as they leave, Joyce wakes up and Proust leans over to talk to him:
PROUST: Ah, Monsieur Joyce, you know the Princess…
JOYCE: No, Monsieur.
PROUST: Ah. You know the Countess…
JOYCE: No, Monsieur.
PROUST: Then you know Madame…
JOYCE: No, Monsieur.
The camera moves away but we hear the two men still chatting.
People start pushing back their chairs, gathering their coats, getting ready to leave.
Proust turns to Sydney and Violet Schiff, asking if they would like to come to his apartment.
The three leave together, with Joyce following closely behind.
Outside the hotel, a car is waiting and all four wedge themselves in.
The camera follows the car just a few blocks to 44 rue de l’Amiral-Hamelin.
Joyce starts to get out of the car after the Schiffs and Proust, but Proust gestures for him to stay in and signals to the driver to continue on. Proust heads for his building while Sydney gives the driver specific instructions and then turns with his wife to follow Proust inside.
Inside the apartment we see Proust and the Schiffs happily chatting and drinking champagne as the camera pulls back to reveal the sun coming up outside the window.
Next 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.
French writer and Dada co-founder Andre Breton, about to turn 26, had wanted an evening of intellectual debate among his fellow avant-garde artists and writers on the Left Bank. But just by announcing the “International Congress for the Determination and Defence of the Modern Spirit” last month in the magazine Comoedia, he stirred up their passions. So Breton decided that, rather than wait until March as originally planned, he would hold the Congress now, here at the Closerie, one of their favorite cafes.
Closerie des Lilas
His so-called friends have turned this evening into a rant against Breton. He had begged Romanian-French poet Tristan Tzara, 25, to bring his followers in the Dada movement along. Tzara refused.
Breton is pleased with the artists who have come: American painter Man Ray, 31; French artist Jean Cocteau, 32; Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, 40; Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi, about to turn 46; French composer Erik Satie, 55.
But now they have turned against him—just because he criticized Tzara and Dadaism.
Breton has settled into a regular bourgeois lifestyle. He and his wife of four months have rented a flat that has become a gathering place in the evenings for the avant-garde of Paris. He wants to have philosophical debates—Is a top hat more or less modern than a locomotive, for example—but all these people want to do is scream at each other.
Andre Breton by Man Ray
Breton is already planning his next manifesto for Comoedia to be titled“After Dada.”
“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s. Volumes I and II covering 1920 and 1921 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and also in print and e-book formats on Amazon. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.
Tonight! We will be celebrating thebelated148th birthday of my fellow Pittsburgher Gertrude Stein at 7 pm, at Riverstone Booksin Squirrel Hill. You can register to come to this free event or watch it via Zoom, here.
Next week I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses at 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 also available on Amazon in both print and e-book versions.
SuchFriends Blog 