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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the transatlantic review, April

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

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

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

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

Ernest has advised Gertrude in her dealings with Ford: 

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

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

*****

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

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

in our time by Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, early February, 1924, 58 Central Park West, New York City, New York; and Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise-Desgoffe, Paris

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

A portion of the Ulysses manuscript

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

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

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

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

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

*****

In Paris, Joyce is livid.

Victoria Palace Hotel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach 

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

Later this month I will be talking about early 20^th century supporters of the arts such as John Quinn at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, December 31, 1923/January 1, 1924, Ireland, England, France and America

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

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

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

of which he is a Senator.

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

Shelbourne Hotel

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

Charleston Bulletin, Christmas

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

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

*****

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

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

Three Stories & Ten Poems by Ernest Hemingway

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

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

It was a bad move to come back.”

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

*****

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

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

Neysa McMein, left, in her studio with a model

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

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

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

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

I am a confirmed admirer of you,”

he tells her.

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

Orange Blossom Cocktail 

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

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

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, late October, 1923, Apt. 19, 1599 Bathurst Street, Toronto, Ontario

You can take this job and shove it.

That’s basically what Toronto Daily Star reporter, American Ernest Hemingway, 24, told his boss, city editor Harry C. Hindmarsh, 36.

Harry C. Hindmarsh

Hemingway didn’t like being stuck behind a desk,and was pleased to have the opportunity to interview the former UK Prime Minister David Lloyd George, 60. But in New York City?! When Ernest’s wife was about to give birth?!

Hemingway had raced back to Toronto by train and went straight to the hospital to see his wife Hadley, 31, and their beautiful new baby boy, John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway. Ernie burst into tears when he got there because he hadn’t arrived before the birth.

Ernest Hemingway and his son John

That was the last straw. Back in the office, Hemingway and Hindmarsh got into a shouting match, ending with Hemingway yelling at his boss that any work he would do would be with “the most utter contempt and hatred.”

Ernest was re-assigned to the Toronto Star Weekly and told Hadley,

It was a bad move to come back. If I have to stay with him [Hindmarsh], I’ll go crazy.”

Hadley said,

Let’s leave.”

Leaving means breaking their one-year lease on this $85 a month apartment. But the new parents both know that it will be better to move back to Paris than to stay here.

Despite Hindmarsh killing Hemingway’s stories, Ernie has had a few nice pieces published, particularly about his experiences in Spain last summer:  “Bull Fighting a Tragedy:  Bull Fighting Is Not a Sport—It Is a Tragedy” and “Pamplona in July:  World’s Series of Bull Fighting a Mad, Whirling Carnival,” both running this month.

But he’s also having some stories published in the US magazine, The Little Review, and brought out in book form by a small publisher back in Paris.

Ernie turns in his resignation, effective January 1^st. He writes to friends back in Paris that Canada is “a fistulated asshole” and that

It was a mistake to come back.”

1599 Bathurst Street

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

Next month I will be talking 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. That talk will be livestreamed; email me a kaydee@gypsyteacher.com for details of how you can sign on to watch.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, October, 1923, The Little Review, New York City, New York

The Little Review, Spring “Exiles” issue

The Spring issue of The Little Review has finally arrived, in the fall, but it is worth the wait. The editor, Margaret Anderson, 36, explains that the idea for the issue came from her foreign editor, an American ex-pat himself, poet Ezra Pound, about to turn 38, and that

all of the contributors are at present pleasantly exiled in Europe.”

The cover art is by Fernand Leger, 42, and inside the reader finds:

• Seven more works by Leger as well as the text of his lecture, “The Esthetics of the Machine”;
• Six prose pieces entitled “In Our Time” along with a story, “They All Made Peace—What Is Peace?” by Ernest Hemingway, 24;
• “Idem the Same—A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson” and “Bundles for Them” by Gertrude Stein, 49;
• “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” by Mina Loy, 40;
• “Airplane Sonata (Section 3)” by George Antheil, 23;
• “Poems” by E. E. Cummings, just turned 29;
• “Comments” by Margaret’s co-editor, Jane Heap, 39, identified only as “jh”;
• “At Croton” by H. D., Hilda Doolittle, 37
• Ornament from “Le Grand Ecart,” by Jean Cocteau, 34;
• Four reproductions of works by Joan Miro, 30;
• “What Is Left Undone” by Robert McAlmon, 28; and
• “Design” by Dorothy Shakespear, 37

A single issue costs $1; a yearly subscription, $4.

Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap

N.B. Thanks to Ben at Shakespeare and Company and Agnes at the Yale University Library for their help in researching this blog.

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

Next month I will be talking 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. That talk will be livestreamed; email me a kaydee@gypsyteacher.com for details of how you can sign on to watch.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, August 26, 1923, boarding the SS Andania, to sail from Paris to Montreal

The Hemingways are planning to be in Toronto before their first child is due in October, so the baby will be born in North America.

Ernest and Hadley Hemingway

Ernest, 24, originally from Chicago, and his wife Hadley, 31, originally from St. Louis, have been living in Paris for the past three years while he has been the European correspondent for the Toronto Star. They decided Ernie could work for the Star in their offices until after the baby is born.

Although Hemingway has enjoyed traveling around, reporting on stories for the paper, lately he’s been having good luck with his first love, his fiction writing.

This past spring, one of the other American ex-pats he has met in Paris, poet Ezra Pound, 37, commissioned Ernie to write some short pieces for a special edition of a New York magazine, The Little Review. Hemingway turned in six vignettes, which are set to appear in this “Exiles” issue under the overall title, “In Our Time.” The magazine was supposed to be out in April, but now it is set for fall. Go figure.

Pound hasn’t been able to get any of Hemingway’s poems in the American magazine The Dial; however, he had better luck with Poetry, published in Chicago.

Poetry, January issue

Pound is going to use the six vignettes in a book series he is editing for an American publisher in Paris, Bill Bird, 35. His Three Mountains Press will be bringing out in our time this fall as part of Pound’s series, “Inquest into the State of the Modern English Language.”

But Ernest’s first book has already appeared. One of his American drinking buddies, Robert McAlmon, 28, started Contact Publishing Company with his rich English wife’s family money. He brought out Hemingway’s Three Stories and Ten Poems just two weeks ago. The stories are “My Old Man,” “Out of Season,” and “Up in Michigan.” Luckily enough, Ernie had stuck that last one in a drawer when his mentor, Gertrude Stein, 49, advised him that it would be unprintable. So it wasn’t in the suitcase containing all of his written work that Hadley lost last December. Let’s not bring that up.

Three Stories and Ten Poems by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest had stopped writing fiction after that fiasco, but Pound and McAlmon’s interest got him working again.

And, on Gertrude’s advice to go to the bullfights in Spain, he and Hadley, Bird and McAlmon had spent July at the San Fermin festival in Pamplona. Fabulous time. Ernie has written a couple of pieces for the Star about the “tragedy” of the bullfights.

Robert McAlmon and Ernest Hemingway at the bullfights

Hemingway is not making any money from these shoestring publishers. The young couple have been living on his Star salary and Hadley’s trust fund. But when they come back to Paris, Ernest is hoping that he can give up newspaper work and get started on a novel.

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

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

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, May, 1923, Hotel Beaujolais, 15 rue de Beaujolais, Paris; and 24 East 11th Street, New York City, New York

American publisher and entrepreneur Margaret Anderson, 36, has found the love of her life. Again.

For the past six years, Anderson has been partners with Jane Heap, 39, both in life and in producing the magazine The Little Review. They met in Chicago when Anderson invited Heap to join her in editing the magazine, which was designed to present the cutting edge of what is going on in literature today.

Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap

They moved The Little Review to Greenwich Village in 1917 and stayed together through their trial for daring to publish the first excerpts from Ulysses, the new novel by Irish ex-pat James Joyce, 41. They were fined $50 each for that by a Manhattan court but got off with no jail time.

But their relationship was starting to unravel even then. Margaret adored and admired Jane, but she felt she couldn’t put up with her partner’s depression and empty suicide threats anymore. Margaret was tired of the magazine. Jane wasn’t.

What brought things to a head was Margaret meeting the next love of her life, French opera singer Georgette Leblanc, 54, former partner of Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlink, 60.

Georgette Leblanc

Margaret finally decided to leave New York City, The Little Review, and Jane Heap behind. She and Georgette have moved here to Paris, along with thousands of Americans arriving on ocean liners this month, to start a new life together. Technically, Anderson is still co-editor of The Little Review, but she is giving full responsibility to Heap, back in New York.

*****

Back in the Little Review’s Greenwich Village offices, Jane is thinking of opening a Little Review art gallery to present works by European Dadaist artists to Americans.

East 11^th Street, Greenwich Village

Heap is struggling to keep the publication going on her own. She’s added more color to the magazine, especially to its covers, but the issue planned for April probably won’t come out until fall.

This will be a special issue featuring the newest work by ex-pat writers and artists in Paris, to be called the “Exiles” issue. Heap already has lined up pieces by writer Gertrude Stein, 49, poet Edward Estin Cummings, 28, and composer George Antheil, 22.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

“Such Friends” will have a booth (No. 22) at the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books this Saturday, May 13^th, at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Highland Park. Stop by and receive a special Festival discount on your purchase of any “Such Friends” books!

This summer I will be talking F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

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.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, March 10, 1923, Time magazine, New York City, New York

Ohioan Sherwood Anderson, 46, had his fourth novel, Many Marriages, published last month. His first appeared seven years ago, around the time he embarked on a second marriage, to sculptor Tennessee Mitchell, now 49.

Many Marriages by Sherwood Anderson

The review in the New York Herald, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 26, currently working on his third novel, was positive. In “Sherwood Anderson on the Marriage Question,” Fitzgerald said he thinks Many Marriages is Anderson’s best work.

Henry Seidel Canby, 44, in the New York Evening Post declares,

if we are to have an American Thomas Hardy, [Sherwood Anderson] is the man.”

Those leading crusades against “dirty books” are not as impressed. Because Anderson’s work deals with sexual freedom, they have linked it with other contemporary novels such as Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence, 37, which they have tried to ban.

However, today’s issue of Time magazine points out that when Many Marriages was serialized in a magazine, there was resounding praise. Now that it is a hardback book, many find it boring—including Edmund Wilson, 27, in The Dial; Burton Rascoe, 30, in the New York Tribune; and the dean of Manhattan columnists, FPA [Franklin Pierce Adams], 41, in the New York World.

Burton Rascoe by Gene Markey

But Sherwood is pleased with a complimentary letter he has received from his mentor and friend in Paris, American ex-pat writer Gertrude Stein, 49, who likes Many Marriages.

Gertrude Stein

Stein has praised him privately and in print before, including her recent piece in The Little Review, “Idem the Same:  A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson,” which says, in the section titled, “A Very Valentine,”:

Very fine is my valentine.

Very fine and very mine.

Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine.

Very fine is my valentine and mine, very fine very mine and mine is my valentine.”

To hear Gertrude Stein read the complete poem, click here.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This summer I will be talking about Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

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.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, April, 1922, England, America, France, and Ireland

Comment continues to come in reacting to the new novel Ulysses, by Irishman James Joyce, 40, published two months ago by a small bookshop in Paris, Shakespeare and Company, owned by American ex-pat Sylvia Beach, 35.

SCANDAL OF JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES

After a rather boresome [sic] perusal of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in Paris for private subscribers at the rate of three guineas in francs, I can realize one reason at least for Puritan America’s Society for the Prevention of Vice, and can understand why the Yankee judges fined the publishers of The Little Review $100 for the publication of a very rancid chapter of the Joyce stuff, which appears in to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a specialty of the literature of the latrine…Joyce is a writer of talent, but in Ulysses he has ruled out all the elementary decencies of life and dwells appreciatively on things that sniggering louts of schoolboys guffaw about.

Sporting Times

“In addition to this stupid glorification of mere filth, the book suffers from being written in the manner of a demented George Meredith. There are whole chapters of it without any punctuation or other guide to what the writer is really getting at. Two-thirds of it is incoherent, and the passages that are plainly written are devoid of wit, displaying only a coarse salacrity [sic] intended for humour…The main contents of the book are enough to make a Hottentot sick…[However] there are quite a number of the New York intelligentsia who declare that Joyce has written the best book in the world.”—”Aramis,” Sporting Times, England

[Joyce is] Rabelais after a nervous breakdown.”—Sheffield Daily Telegraph, England

[Ulysses] has nothing at all to do with Homer…The book itself in its blue paper cover looks at first glance like nothing so much as a telephone directory…It seems a pity that Mr. Joyce, who might be a universally admired writer, restricts the appeal of his work by so many Zolaesque expressions, which are, to say the least, disfiguring.”—“Diary of a Man About Town,” London Evening News

[Joyce is] an intensely serious man [with] the mind of an artist, abnormally sensitive to the secret of individuality of emotions and things…A genius of the very highest order, strictly comparable to Goethe or Dostoevsky…Ulysses is, fundamentally (though it is much else besides), an immense, a prodigious self-laceration, the tearing away from himself, by a half-demented man of genius, of inhibitions and limitations which have grown to be flesh of his flesh…Mr. Joyce has made the superhuman effort to empty the whole of his consciousness into it…[But he has become] the victim of his own anarchy….[Joyce] is the man with the bomb who would blow what remains of Europe into the sky…This transcendental buffoonery, this sudden uprush of the vis comica into a world where in the tragic incompatibility of the practical and the instinctive is embodied, is a very great achievement.”—“Mr. Joyce’s Ulysses,” John Middleton Murry, Nation and Athenaeum, England

The Nation and Athenaeum

[Joyce’s vision of human nature is] mean, hostile, and uncharitable,…a very astonishing phenomenon in letters. He is sometimes dazzlingly original. If he does not see life whole he sees it piercingly. His ingenuity is marvelous. He has wit. He has a prodigious humor. He is afraid of naught…It is more indecent, obscene, scatological, and licentious than the majority of professedly pornographic books…He says everything—everything…The code is smashed to bits…[The Nighttown episode has] the richest stuff, handled with a virtuosity to match the quality of the material…I have never read anything to surpass [Molly Bloom’s soliloquy], and I doubt if I have ever read anything to equal it…[Joyce] apparently thinks that there is something truly artistic and high minded in playing the lout to the innocent and defenseless reader…He has made novel reading into a fair imitation of penal servitude. Many persons could not continue reading Ulysses; they would be obliged, by mere shock, to drop it.”—“James Joyce’s Ulysses,” Arnold Bennett, The London Outlook, England

The London Outlook

Amused, stimulated, charmed, interested (through the first three chapters only to be) puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples (by the end of chapter 6)…It was an illiterate, underbred book (by a) self-taught working man”—Virginia Woolf, in her diary, England

*****

[Ulysses is] a step toward making the modern world possible for art. [It gives] a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history…[Joyce has replaced narrative with] the mythical method…[It is] a book to which we are all indebted and from which none of us can escape”—T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” The Dial, America

*****

[Molly Bloom’s soliloquy is a feat of] diabolic clairvoyance, black magic.”—Paris edition of New York Herald, France

Take this Irishman Joyce, a sort of Zola gone to seed. Someone recently sent me a copy of Ulysses. I was told I must read it, but how can 1 plow through such stuff? I read a little here and there, but, oh my God! How bored I got! Probably Joyce thinks that because he prints all the dirty little words he is a great novelist. You know, of course, he got his ideas from Dujardin?…Joyce, Joyce, why he’s nobody…from the Dublin docks:  no family, no breeding. Someone else once sent me his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a book entirely without style or distinction; why, I did the same thing, but much better in The Confessions. of a Young Man. Why attempt the same thing unless you can turn out a better book?…Ulysses is hopeless, it is absurd to imagine that any good end can be served by trying to record every single thought and sensation of any human being. That’s not art, that’s attempting to copy the London Directory….He lives here in Paris, I understand. How does he manage to make a living? His books don’t sell. Maybe he has money?”—Irish critic George Moore, in conversation in France

A welter of pornography (the rudest school-boy kind), and unformed and unimportant drivel.”—Edith Wharton, France

It bursted over us like an explosion in print, whose words and phrases fell upon us like a gift of tongues, like a less than holy Pentecostal experience”—Young American in France

Sylvia Beach and James Joyce in front of headlines at Shakespeare and Company

*****

I should think you would need something to restore your self-respect after this last inspection of the stinkpots…Everything dirty seems to have the same irresistible attraction for you that cow-dung has for flies.”—The author’s brother, Stanislaus Joyce, Ireland

I’ve always told him he should give up writing and take up singing.”—The author’s partner, Nora Barnacle, visiting her mother in Ireland

“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.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

In June I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris just before and just after the Great War, at Carnegie-Mellon University’s Lifelong Learning program.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

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.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, April, 1922, Vanity Fair magazine

American writer Djuna Barnes, 29, arrived in Paris a few months ago with a letter of introduction to one of the ex-patriate writers she most admires, James Joyce, 40. This month, her profile of the Irishman appears in Vanity Fair magazine.

A PORTRAIT OF THE MAN WHO IS, AT PRESENT,

ONE OF THE MORE SIGNIFICANT FIGURES IN LITERATURE

BY DJUNA BARNES

…Of Joyce, the man, one has heard very little. I had seen a photograph of him, the collar up about the narrow throat, the beard, heavier in those days, descending into the abyss of the hidden bosom. I had been told that he was going blind, and we in America learned from Ezra Pound that ‘Joyce is the only man on the continent who continues to produce in spite of poverty and sickness, working from eight to sixteen hours a day.’…

James Joyce

“And then, one day, I came to Paris. Sitting in the café of the Deux Magots, that faces the little church of St. Germain des Près, I saw approaching, out of the fog and damp, a tall man, with head slightly lifted and slightly turned, giving to the wind an orderly distemper of red and black hair, which descended sharply into a scant wedge on an out-thrust chin.

“He wore a blue grey coat, too young it seemed, partly because he had thrust its gathers behind him, partly because the belt which circled it, lay two full inches above the hips…

“Because he had heard of the suppression of The Little Review on account of Ulysses and of the subsequent trial, he sat down opposite me, who was familiar with the whole story, ordering a white wine. He began to talk at once. ‘The pity is,’ he said, seeming to choose his words for their age rather than their aptness, ‘the public will demand and find a moral in my book—or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.’

“For a moment there was silence. His hands, peculiarly limp in the introductory shake and peculiarly pulpy, running into a thickness that the base gave no hint of, lay, one on the stem of the glass, the other, forgotten, palm out, on the most delightful waistcoat it has ever been my happiness to see. Purple with alternate doe and dog heads…

James Joyce by Djuna Barnes

“He saw my admiration and he smiled. ‘Made by the hand of my grandmother for the first hunt of the season’ and there was another silence in which he arranged and lit a cigar…

“’In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying does, to what you Freudians call the subconscious,—but as for psychoanalysis,’ he broke off, ‘it’s neither more nor less than blackmail.’

“He raised his eyes. There is something unfocused in them,—the same paleness seen in plants long hidden from the sun,—and sometimes a little jeer that goes with a lift and rounding of the upper lip…

“If I were asked what seemed to be the most characteristic pose of James Joyce I should say that of the head; turned farther away than disgust and not so far as death…After this I should add—think of him as a heavy man yet thin, drinking a thin cool wine with lips almost hidden in his high narrow head, or smoking the eternal cigar, held slightly above shoulder-level, and never moved until consumed, the mouth brought to and taken away from it to eject the sharp jets of yellow smoke…

“It has been my pleasure to talk to him many times during my four months in Paris. We have talked of rivers and religion, of the instinctive genius of the church which chose, for the singing of its hymns, the voice without ‘overtones’—the voice of the eunuch. We have talked of women, about women he seems a bit disinterested. Were I vain I should say he is afraid of them, but I am certain he is only a little skeptical of their existence. We have talked of Ibsen, of Strindberg, Shakespeare. ‘Hamlet is a great play, written from the standpoint of the ghost,’ and of Strindberg, ‘No drama behind the hysterical raving.’

“We have talked of death, of rats, of horses, the sea; languages, climates and offerings. Of artists and of Ireland…

“Sometimes his wife, Nora, and his two children have been with him. Large children, almost as tall as he is himself, and Nora walks under fine red hair, speaking with a brogue that carries the dread of Ireland in it; Ireland as a place where poverty has become the art of scarcity. A brogue a little more defiant than Joyce’s which is tamed by preoccupation.

“Joyce has few friends, yet he is always willing to leave his writing table and his white coat of an evening, to go to some quiet near-by cafe, there to discuss anything that is not ‘artistic’ or ‘flashy’ or ‘new.’ Callers have often found him writing in the night or drinking tea with Nora. I myself once came upon him as he lay full length on his stomach poring over a valise full of notes taken in his youth for Ulysses…

“However it is with him, he will come away for the evening, for he is simple, a scholar, and sees nothing objectionable in human beings if they will only remain in place…”

Vanity Fair, April

“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.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

In June I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris just before and just after 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 also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.