“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, Spring, 1924, 3 rue Gounod, Saint-Cloud; and 23 Quai des Grand-Augustins, Paris

This beautiful home, overlooking the city of Paris from one of its posh suburbs, is owned by the heirs of the late French opera composer, Charles Gounod. As they are experiencing some financial difficulties, the heirs are delighted to rent the three-story, rosy brick, walled property to the American ex-patriates Gerald, 36, and Sara Murphy, 40.

3 rue Gounod, Saint-Cloud, Paris

The Murphys are just as delighted to move in. They fell in love as soon as they saw it.

On Easter Sunday, they are hosting a luncheon and competitive Easter egg hunt on the broad lawn, under the oak trees. Their three children are hunting with both their grandfathers, visiting from America:  Sara’s father, Frank Bestow Wiborg, about to turn 69, co-creator of the printers’ ink manufacturer Ault & Wiborg Company; and Gerald’s father Patrick Murphy, about 66, owner of the Mark Cross retail chain. Both children and adults are all dressed in their Sunday best.

Baoth, almost five, easily beats his brother, Patrick, three; their sister Honoria, six, is much more interested in the tin whistle from Grandfather than looking for eggs with her stupid brothers.

Gerald has been making quite a name for himself lately in Paris with his painting. In February, his 18-foot by 12-foot Boatdeck caused quite a stir in the Salon des Independents at the Grand Palais. There were so many complaints about its size, the organizing committee called a special meeting to toss it out, but a majority voted to keep it in. Two members of the committee resigned! (But were talked in to coming back the next day.)

Boatdeck by Gerald Murphy in the Salon des Independents

In one of the many newspaper interviews he has given, Gerald is quoted as saying that he is

truly sorry to have caused such a bother with my little picture.”

After all, he points out, Boatdeck is smaller than an actual boat deck. The pieces he’s working on now, Razor and Watch, are not quite so large.

Razor by Gerald Murphy

The Murphys have welcomed friends new and old to this house on the hill overlooking Montmartre, with a view of the Eiffel Tower. Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, 42, has brought some British artists. Painters Vanessa Bell, 44, and Duncan Grant, 39, along with Vanessa’s husband, art critic Clive Bell, 42, came and all dined outside. The Murphys played Chinese music on the gramophone, and Picasso began sketching pictures of Chinese dancers’ feet, as he imagined them.

One of the main attractions of this home is the easy access to Paris city center. The train trip on the line from Versailles-Rive-Droite is only 15 minutes, and there are more than 50 trains each day. This makes it easy for the Murphys to go back and forth from their pied a terre on quai des Augustins.

*****

In their city apartment—with its view up and down the Seine, and large black and white vases holding flowers as well as stalks of light green celery—the Murphys have been meeting some more new friends.

23 quai des Grands-Augustins

American writer Donald Ogden Stewart, 29, comes by for dinner almost every night and reads aloud pieces of the comic novel he’s working on, Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad, which has Sara in stitches. Sometimes he brings along novelist John Dos Passos, 28, and former Dial managing editor Gilbert Seldes, 31, who know each other from Harvard.

Stewart has also introduced the Murphys to an American couple whom he met at Yale, poet Archibald MacLeish, turning 32, and his wife, concert singer Ada Hitchcock MacLeish, 31. Mutual friends had helped the MacLeishes find a fourth floor walk up with no heat or hot water on Boulevard St. Michel where they’ve been living since arriving last fall.

When in the city, all these ex-pats pay late night visits to Zelli’s Royal Box in Montmartre. The jazz and the pretty young women are better than what you’ll find at last year’s hotspot, Le Boeuf sur le Toit. And arriving with the Murphys gets you a special seat.

Montmartre jazz clubs

“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 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 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, end of March, 1924, Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, London

Virginia Woolf, 42, settles into the big old armchair in the corner of the room, positions herself beside the gas fire to get the best morning light through the skylight, and pulls the three-ply board on to her lap to continue working on her novel, The Hours.

Tavistock Square

A couple of weeks ago Virginia and her husband Leonard, 43, moved themselves and their business, the five-year-old Hogarth Press, into the basement of this three-story building.

The Press’s offices, printing press, storage room and a shop for the booksellers’ representatives who call on them are adjacent to Virginia’s room. Above, on the ground floor are the offices of Dollman and Pritchard, solicitors; the Woolfs live on the second floor.

They have asked Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell, 44, and her partner, Duncan Grant, 39, to decorate their rooms.

Sitting room in 52 Tavistock Square

Of necessity, Virginia’s studio is turning into a storage room also. As she works, she is surrounded by piles of books and piles of papers. Pen nibs, paper clips, buttons, ink bottles, stationery and cigarette butts have already begun to accumulate.

But, in all the years the Woolfs have been sharing their private lives with their working life—the Hogarth Press—this is the first time they think they have enough room for both.

Virginia feels she has a space she can call her own. She decides she will finish this novel in the next four months.

A portion of the manuscript of The Hours

“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 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 calendars! The Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books will take place Saturday, May 11, at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Stop by the “Such Friends” table in Writers’ Row.

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

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.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“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”: Today! Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Littsburgh is a locally-run website devoted to all things literary in Pittsburgh. They host a directory of author’s biographies, and also invite us to submit interviews about our latest works. So I did…

Q&A:  Kathleen Dixon Donnelly, author of “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Thanks to Littsburgh for the opportunity to tell you about my paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. The series is based on blogs I’ve been posting at www.suchfriends.wordpress.com, chronicling what was happening in the literary and artistic world 100 years ago. The title comes from a poem by William Butler Yeats, “…say my glory was I had such friends.” Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923, are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, and on Amazon in both print and e-book formats, or from me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

As an author I jumped at the chance to interview myself, but, I have to say—that felt a bit narcissistic. So I enlisted the help of one of my best friends, Liz, to do the honors over glasses of chardonnay in her back garden.

Three volumes of “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s

LIZ BFF:  So what’s this obsession you have with the 1920s?

KDD:  My Mom always talked about the 20s in a good way. She was born in 1920, one month to the day after Prohibition went into effect (I snuck her into Volume I). And your first nine years are usually remembered fondly.

My mother talked a lot about Dorothy Parker—

Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses”

—and her friends who lunched together as the Algonquin Hotel Round Table throughout the 20s.. For example, I remember she told me that the humorist Robert Benchley—we read his essays in 9^th grade English—instructed his wife to have him cremated and go to the cemetery in a taxi with his ashes in his briefcase next to her on the seat. Imagine my surprise to find out when doing my academic research that my mother was right—the story is true.

LIZ BFF:  That’s right—your research. This all started with your academic research.

KDD:  Yes—but these books aren’t academic! My Ph. D., from Dublin City University in Ireland, was about writers and artists who hung out together. How did these friendships affect their creativity? I looked at four main “salons,” two before and two after World War I:  Yeats and the Irish Literary Renaissance who founded Dublin’s Abbey Theatre; Virginia Woolf and the writers and artists in the Bloomsbury group in London; our fellow Pittsburgher Gertrude Stein and the Americans who came to Paris in the 1920s; and, of course, Parker and the Round Table. 31 creative people all together. For the books I’ve expanded a bit to include others who weren’t in the groups, and important world events going on during the decade.

LIZ BFF:  That’s a lot of creative people. Who are your favorites?

KDD:  Well, Parker for one. I feel as though she was doing a lot of the same things all my friends and I were doing in our 20s—free-lance writing, whining about our relationships with men. But she paid a higher price—back alley abortions, for example.

But my other favorite would be Virginia Woolf’s sister, painter Vanessa Bell. She’s often overlooked, even by British feminists. She was a terrific painter; I use one of her works, A Conversation, on the cover of Volume II, 1921. And she was the earth mother for the Bloomsberries. Everyone came to her houses, in London and Sussex. One of their friends described the sisters this way: 

People admired Virginia; they adored Vanessa.”

“Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, Volume II–1921

LIZ BFF:  Those are the kinds of stories and descriptions I’ve really enjoyed reading in your books. How do Gertrude Stein and W. B. Yeats fit in?

KDD:  Gertrude’s relationships with writers like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald are probably the best known. She and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, were the most committed couple of all my 31 writers. In the words of one of their biographers, Diana Souhami, from the day they met they were together; they

never traveled without each other or entertained separately, or worked on independent projects.”

Of course, Gertrude and her family left Pittsburgh when she was only six months old. But we ‘burghers are quite proud.

As for Yeats and the Irish, I’ve found that they illustrate a big contrast between Ireland and the rest of the world in the 1920s. Once the Irish won their war for independence from the British, they started shooting each other in their Civil War, while people in London, Paris and New York were doing the Charleston. However, the Irish did manage to keep their theatre going.

LIZ BFF: You’ve got so many great stories about all these people. But how do you think they compare with today? I mean, stories are nice, but what’s the point? What can we learn from looking back at that decade?

KDD:  Good question! I think the main lesson I’ve come away with is that the good old days weren’t. Alcoholism, depression—particularly in men—gambling addiction, suicide, eating disorders:  These are issues that have always been with us but were not discussed then. The early biographies I read laughed off the addictions and depression: 

She was sooo drunk! Ha ha.”

“He gambled away his apartment! Ha ha.”

“He just got up and walked away from his job! Ha ha!”

In reality, not so funny.

LIZ BFF:  Well, I’ve certainly enjoyed reading them. I dip in and out because they’re short and the layout makes the books easy to read. At the end of each one I’m thinking, I can’t wait to find out what happens next.

Easy-to-read layout of “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s

KDD:  Thank you! That’s the effect I’m going for. There is an awful lot of foreshadowing. Every vignette is related to another one.

LIZ BFF:  I noticed that.

KDD:  For example, in 1920 an armed burglary in Massachusetts will culminate in the executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927—which Parker and others protested. Hemingway goes to a party and meets Hadley Richardson; a year later they get married and move to Paris. In 1921 excerpts from James Joyce’s Ulysses are found to be obscene by a New York court, and the following year Sylvia Beach’s bookstore in Paris publishes the whole book, on Joyce’s 40^th birthday. Meanwhile, in London, Virginia Woolf can barely force herself to read it, but she and her husband publish T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land the next year. So if you’ve never gotten through Ulysses, don’t feel bad. Sometimes I think most of the vignettes should end with “Stay tuned…”

LIZ BFF:  I’m tuned. I can’t wait to read Volume V, 1924.

KDD:  Great. I’m working on it. In the meantime, remember—they make great gifts!

LIZ BFF:  That chardonnay was really nice.

“Such Friends” at the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books, 2023

“Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923, are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, and on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book formats. There is a discount for reading this far and ordering directly from the publisher (me), and if you live on a Pittsburgh Regional Transit bus route, I will hand deliver your signed copy. 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.

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, April, 1923, Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London

They all make fun of her. The group of writers and artists who live in Bloomsbury have not been welcoming to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, 31, current lover of their friend, economist John Maynard Keynes, 39.

Lydia Lopokova

Novelist Virginia Woolf, 41, has mocked Lydia’s broken English, in a letter to her sister, painter Vanessa Bell, 43: 

Maynar like your article so much, Leonar,”

referring to Virginia’s husband Leonard, 42.

Lydia has been annoying Vanessa by stopping by on Sunday afternoons just to chat. Vanessa doesn’t have time to chat. She has two sons, ages 15 and 12; an estranged husband; and her partner, Duncan Grant, 38, to look after.

Vanessa has painted a not particularly flattering portrait of Lydia, which is included with Vanessa’s work in this month’s London Group Show. She knows that Duncan is also working on one.

At least Vanessa got good reviews for the show. Her other Bloomsbury friend, art critic Roger Fry, 56, has a one-man show at the Independent Gallery and his portrait of Lydia has been chastised. The London Observer criticized its “cloying prettiness.”

Vanessa did the portrait of Lydia so Maynard would buy it, but he refused. Vanessa feels that Maynard has never really liked her painting.

Lydia Lopokova by Duncan Grant

N.B.:  Duncan Grant’s portrait of Lydia Lopokova was bequeathed to King’s College, Cambridge, by John Maynard Keynes in his will. The whereabouts of the other two portraits are unknown.

“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 F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

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 Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.ukin both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, October 27, 1922, Hogarth House, Richmond, London

The Hogarth Press, founded and operated by Virginia Woolf, 40, and her husband Leonard, 41, has just published its first full-length work, 290 pages, 60,000 words, Virginia’s third novel, Jacob’s Room.

Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf

In its past five years, the Press has successfully produced and marketed collections of short stories, poetry and smaller works. Until now, Virginia’s novels have been published by her stepbrother, Gerald Duckworth, 51, so they had to get his permission to break the contract. Good riddance.

With a cover by Virginia’s sister, painter Vanessa Bell, 43, the Woolfs are pleased with the finished product. Virginia’s American publisher, Donald Brace, 40, is eager to bring it out there, telling Virginia how much he admires her work. This has at least made her feel, as she writes in her diary, that the novel “cannot be wholly frigid fireworks.”

Advance copies have been sent to their Bloomsbury friends, who tell her it is her best work. Essayist Lytton Strachey, 42, is the first to mention the main character’s similarities to Virginia and Vanessa’s brother, Thoby Stephen, who died 16 years ago from typhoid at the age of 26. Lytton writes to Virginia,

How you manage to leave out everything that’s dreary, and yet retain enough string for your pearls I can hardly understand.”

Lytton Strachey’s signed copy of Jacob’s Room

Virginia is thinking sales might hit 800 copies by June. When they get to 650 they’ll order a second edition. About 30 of the thousand or so they’ve printed have sold before publication day, today.

The Woolfs are counting on the success of Jacob’s Room to help their fledgling publishing company. They’ve hung on so far, but they feel as though Leonard’s assistant, Ralph Partridge, 28, is holding them back. He and Leonard fight constantly, and Ralph has screwed up some of the promotion for previous books. They’ve met a few young people recently who might be better at the role but haven’t chucked Partridge out yet.

They’re hoping for good reviews in major publications. Virginia is most concerned about The Times Literary Supplement, as she writes in her diary,

not that it will be the most intelligent, but it will be the most read & I can’t bear people to see me downed in public.”

Virginia has already begun her next novel, concurrently with writing essays to be published as The Common Reader. She noted a few weeks ago that her short story, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” has “branched into a book.” She hasn’t decided on a title yet, but she is working out passages and making detailed notes in a journal labeled, “Book of scraps of J’s R. & first version of The Hours,” some in brief lines down the side of the page.

*****

completely separately…some sort of fusion…”The Prime Minister”…must converge upon the party at the end…ushers in a host of others…much in relief…interludes of thought, or reflection, or short digressions…related, logically, to the rest?…all compact, yet not jerked…At Home:  or The Party…the 10^th of June or whatever I call it…& I adumbrate here a study of insanity & suicide:  the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side—something like that…Septimus Smith? is that a good name…a possible revision of this book:  Suppose it to be connected in this way:

Sanity and insanity.

Mrs. D. seeing the truth. S. S. seeing the insane truth…

The contrast must be arranged…

The pace is to be given by the gradual increase of S’s

Insanity. On the one side; by the approach of the party on the other.

The design is extremely complicated…

All to take place in one day?”

Virginia Woolf’s manuscript

“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 as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

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.

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.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, July, 1922, Independent Gallery, 7a Grafton Street, Mayfair, London

The one-person show at the Independent Gallery is going well. Painter Vanessa Bell, 43, has wanted to have her own show for many years now. She was jealous when her partner, painter Duncan Grant, 37, had his first solo exhibit about two years ago. Last winter, when they were in St. Tropez together, she produced several still lifes and interiors which are included here.

7a Grafton Street

There are works by a former member of the Fauve movement, French painter Orthon Friesz, 43, in the next room. But she’s got this one all to herself.

The day after the show opened in May, she wrote to her husband, art critic Clive Bell, 40: 

I am astonished that I have already sold seven pictures and drawings—so at any rate I shan’t be out of pocket over it—[Gallery owner Percy Moore] Turner is very much pleased.”

Last month, her Bloomsbury friend, Roger Fry, 55, gave her a glowing write up in New Statesman. He felt the portrait Woman in Furs, which Vanessa painted three years ago at her East Sussex home, Charleston Farmhouse, is “perhaps the most brilliant thing in the exhibit.”

Woman in Furs by Vanessa Bell

But this month, she received an even more significant review in The Burlington Magazine from the influential painter Walter Sickert, 62: 

Instinct and intelligence and a certain scholarly tact have made her a good painter. The medium bends beneath her like a horse that knows its rider. In the canvas The Frozen Pond…the full resources of the medium in all its beauty have been called in to requisition in a manner which is nothing less than masterly.”

Sickert has praised her work before. But this feels even more satisfying than Roger’s compliments.

After all, she never slept with Sickert.

“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.

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.

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.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: Five years ago, June, 2017, London

We interrupt the usual chronicle of what was happening 100 years ago to commemorate “Dalloway Day.”

Yes. Not “Bloomsday” which celebrates tomorrow, June 16^th as the day on which James Joyce set his novel Ulysses [1922]. Virginia Woolf wasn’t specific about the date on which the events of Mrs. Dalloway [1925] take place beyond referring to it as a Wednesday in mid-June.

Below is a blog I wrote about the Dalloway Day events in London that I attended in 2017, when we were living in Birmingham UK. If you are interested in the celebrations being held this year, click here.

“Such Friends”: Dalloway Day, Blogging Woolf, and me

I said I would buy the lunch myself.

As I recommend to all my visiting American friends, when in the UK, time your train trip so you can take along some lunch from M&S Simply Food, ubiquitous in train stations here. My preference is carrot sticks with reduced fat humous and salmon pasta salad. Yum.

So I stocked up and took off for London a few Saturdays ago to take part in my first “Dalloway Day,” commemorating the day on which Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is set. The Irish all over the world have been celebrating “Bloomsday” based on James Joyce’s Ulysses for over 50 years. Now it’s Virginia’s turn.

Original cover of Mrs. Dalloway, designed by Vanessa Bell

This year, the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain is sponsoring this day, which includes a walk through some of the novel’s settings, a discussion of the book, and a 1920s party at the Bloomsbury Waterstones. I signed up for the whole package.

On one of the hottest days of the year, I took the train from Birmingham New Street to Euston station, and then the Underground to the appointed meeting place, outside the Regent’s Park Tube.

Waiting for the Underground lift, literally a breath of fresh air came wafting through. The woman next to me, about my age, said,

Oh! That feels great. It’s so hot.”

I nodded in agreement.

Watching her walk up the stairs in front of me, I realized she was wearing a blue flower print dress and lovely straw hat. Aha. Another Dalloway Day participant, I surmised.

As we reached the street at the top, we both laughed. Standing just a few feet away was a gaggle of Dalloway Day fans. About 20 women “of a certain age” in flowered dresses or skirts, straw hats—they all looked just like me! No trouble finding this group.

The walk was led by Jean Moorcroft Wilson, who obviously was a lot more familiar with the book and Virginia than I am, having read it years ago as part of my research. I actually have much more vivid memories of the Vanessa Redgrave film, which I’ve used in my presentations.

Jean was dressed in the full Dalloway, including a vintage dress and hat, complemented by darling low-heeled black shoes with straps. Very 1920s. She’d obviously done this many times before.

Jean pointed out that there is debate as to when Dalloway Day actually is. Whereas Joyce clearly set Ulysses on 16^th June, 1904, the day of his first date with his eventual wife, Nora Barnacle, Woolf‘s novel says “mid-June.” However, by lining up events in the book with cricket games and the Ascot races, most scholars have settled on the third Wednesday in June. But—this year, it’s Saturday, 17^th June. So more of us can come.

The unusually warm weather—it’s actually been hot; Miami hot, not just England hot—didn’t slow us down a bit. After a stop in Regent’s Park, Jeanne walked us over to Fitzroy Square, where Virginia lived from 1907 until 1911 with her brother Adrian. Their sister Vanessa had married art critic Clive Bell and kicked the siblings out when the newlyweds took over the Gordon Square house, where we headed next.

My own Bloomsbury walk actually takes the reverse route, starting in Gordon Square and then over to Fitzroy Square.

Your host leading a walk in Fitzroy Square where Virginia lived.

At Waterstone’s we sat in a circle, sipping refreshing flavoured ice water. Jean and Maggie Humm of the Woolf Society led us through an interesting discussion of the book. My research was on the relationships among the creative people in the Bloomsbury group, but wasn’t focused on their works—books, paintings, etc. This discussion brought new insights about the connections for me to incorporate into my future presentations.

And I learned that there is a website that maps all the walks of the characters in the book—Clarissa, Peter, Septimus and Rezia—showing how they interconnect.

For the 1920s party, I was planning to switch to Dorothy Parker mode, and so had tucked my red feather boa into my travel bag. But not many others were quite so dedicated to the flapper look, so I decided to stay in Bloomsbury garb.

*****

Just this past week, I had another tax-deductible reason to go to London. Paula Maggio, better known to many of you as “Blogging Woolf,” was visiting from the States to attend the 27^th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. We made plans to meet up and she wanted to try the Dalloway Terrace at the Bloomsbury Hotel. We had a fabulous lunch of pasta and prosecco, treated ourselves to dessert, and took a peek at the 1920s-style Bloomsbury Club downstairs.

Dalloway Terrace at the Bloomsbury Hotel, photo by Paula Maggio

Paula had also heard about a life-size statue of Virginia at Kings College, where Woolf had studied classics in her early days. A bit of Googling and walking led us to the Woolf Building. A sign said it was locked due to increased security, but when the guard saw our noses pressed against the glass, he let us in.

There she was, encased behind plexiglass, big as life, holding a copy of A Room of One’s Own, in a wardrobe that was, as Paula said, “a closet of her own.”

Surrounded by large quotes from Virginia’s works, and photos of her, it makes a fitting entrance for the College’s School of English.

Virginia Woolf statue, Kings College, photo by Paula Maggio

I would definitely add both of these places—Dalloway Terrace and the Kings College statue—to my Bloomsbury walk.

Heading back towards Euston station, Paula and I stopped by Woburn Walk, where the Irish poet William Butler Yeats lived at the same time that Virginia and her siblings were moving into Gordon Square, just a few blocks away.

These intersections of time, place and characters are what interest me most. I can picture an aerial view of north London in 1907, as the Irish poet walks past the Stephens sisters, on their way over to enjoy a stroll through Regent’s Park.

The usual blog series that appears here, “Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago…, is the basis for the book 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.

This month I am talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after The Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Carnegie-Mellon University.

In the fall I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in the Osher programs at CMU and the University of Pittsburgh.

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.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, May 20-21, 1922, Gordon Square, Bloomsbury; and Hogarth House, Richmond, London

In the Bloomsbury section of London, economist John Maynard Keynes, 39, is writing to his friend, painter Vanessa Bell, 42, about the living arrangements in Gordon Square for his current partner, Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, 30, and his former lover [and Vanessa’s current partner] painter Duncan Grant, 37.

46 Gordon Square, Londres, Royaume-Uni

No. 46 Gordon Square

If [Lydia] lived in 41, [Duncan] and I in 46, you and family in 50, and we all had meals in 46 that might not be a bad arrangement…We all want both to have and not have husbands and wives.”

*****

The next day, in Richmond, southwest London, Vanessa’s sister, novelist Virginia Woolf, 40, is writing to a friend describing a conversation she and her husband Leonard, 41, had recently:

Hogarth House

Leonard says we owe a great deal to [George Bernard] Shaw. I say that he only influenced the outer fringe of morality…Leonard says rot; I say damn. Then we go home. Leonard says I’m narrow. I say he’s stunted.”

Now that’s a marriage…

“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.

Next month I will be talking about the Stein family salons in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

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.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 years ago, October, 1921, Hotel La Maison Blanche, 3 Traverse des Lices, Saint Tropez, France

The friends from London’s Bloomsbury neighborhood are settling into this hotel on the French Riviera.

Hotel La Maison Blanche

As soon as painter Vanessa Bell, 42, arrives, she writes to their friend, economist John Maynard Keynes, 38, back home, asking him to send them a dozen packages of oatmeal, 10 seven-pound tins of marmalade, four pounds of tea, and “some potted meat.”

Vanessa is here with her former lover, art critic Roger Fry, 54, who has received a letter from Vanessa’s sister, novelist Virginia Woolf, 39, reporting on a recent evening at her country home in Sussex: 

T. S. Eliot says that [James Joyce’s novel Ulysses] is the greatest work of the age—Lytton [Strachey] says he doesn’t mean to read it. Clive [Bell, Vanessa’s husband] says—well, Clive says that [his mistress] Mary Hutchinson has a dressmaker who would make me look like other people.”

Also here for the winter is Vanessa’s partner, painter Duncan Grant, 36, who has arrived via Paris.

Visitors or not, Vanessa intends to spend her time here working on still lifes and interiors, in preparation for her first solo show next spring.

Vanessa Bell’s Interior with a Table

“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 in print and e-book formats on Amazon. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I will be talking about Writers’ Salons in Dublin and London Before the Great War in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

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 available on Amazon in both print and e-book versions.