“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, early February, 1923, Savile Club, 107 Piccadilly, London

Irish poet William Butler Yeats, 57, is having dinner with his doctor—and friend—fellow writer and fellow appointed Senator in the new Irish Free State, Oliver St. John Gogarty, 44.

107 Piccadilly, London

Gogarty is re-telling the story of his recent kidnapping in Dublin by anti-government Republicans who had publicly stated they were going to be targeting Senators.

The good doctor was sitting in the bath in his Chapelizod home when the armed gunmen broke in and led him outside at gunpoint. As they forced him into a car, one pushed a revolver into his back and said,

Isn’t it a good thing to die in a flash, Senator?”

Not wanting to die in any way, Gogarty told them that he urgently needed to relieve his bowels and scampered into the woods. And then jumped into the freezing cold River Liffey and swam away.

As he crawled ashore and headed to the police barracks in the Phoenix Park, Gogarty vowed that he would donate two swans to the Liffey in gratitude.

And he vowed he would move his medical practice and his family to London.

Oliver St. John Gogarty

This month, the same rebels burned to the ground Renvyle, Gogarty’s house in Connemara in the west of Ireland. And even a patriot like Senator Horace Plunkett, 68, is not safe—his house Kilteragh, in Foxrock, County Dublin, was reduced to ruins also.

Firemen hosing what’s left of Kilteragh

Yeats has been following the turmoil back home from the comfort of his club here. The London Times’ headline a few weeks ago read,

Irish Rebel Outrages. Many Houses Burned. Kidnapped Senator.”

The anti-Treaty forces also burned Moore Hall, the family home of Yeats’ former friend, playwright and novelist George Moore, about to turn 71. They were enacting revenge on George’s brother, a former British army officer and current Free State Senator, not knowing the house belongs to George the writer, not his more political brother.

George Moore’s letter to the editor in The Morning Post

Yeats and Moore were among those who founded the Abbey Theatre at the beginning of the century. Despite the ongoing Civil War, the Abbey keeps performing in the heart of Dublin. They are staging Cathleen ni Houlihan, by Yeats and co-founder Lady Augusta Gregory, 70, featuring the new actor Barry Fitzgerald, 34, on a double bill with The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet by Yeats’ fellow Dub, George Bernard Shaw, 66.

Yeats is enjoying his new role as a Senator, representing a small independent political party, and serving on committees dealing with issues related to arts and culture. Leinster House is a short walk from the Yeats home in Merrion Square.

Leinster House

He’s given two speeches so far but feels that he can serve his country better from here in London, putting pressure on old friends like Winston Churchill, 48, former Secretary of State for the Colonies, to ease up on some of the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that was negotiated last year. Also, he finds it easier to write here.

Gogarty is urging Willie to get his family out of harm’s way in Ireland and bring them to England. The shock of the fighting in Dublin could affect his young daughter’s kidneys.

Yeats has been thinking about re-locating his wife and two children to Holyhead, Wales, where he could conveniently commute to Dublin via the ferry. His mother-in-law wants them to move closer to her in Cheshire, England.

But Yeats’ wife Georgie, 30, says no. She thinks this ridiculous war is going to be over soon. The government has already offered amnesty to those fighting, which will cool things down a bit.

Willie has just received a heartfelt letter from her, shaming him for appearing to abandon his needy country at this time. Their daughter Anne, about to turn 4, has recently recovered from scarlet fever and is doing much better now. (Yeats admits that whenever one of the kids gets sick, he moves out of the house to his Kildare Street club. To make things easier for Georgie, of course.)

Her letter convinces him. Willie responds immediately, thanking her for putting pressure on him. There will be no more talk of abandoning Ireland. He’ll come home.

Yeats family home in Merrion Square

“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 County 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.

Later this month I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York City in 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, April 16, Easter, 1922, Thoor Ballylee, near Gort; Dominick Street, Galway City; and Rutland Square, Dublin

Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, 56, and his family are settling in nicely to their new country home in the west of Ireland. Well, not a traditional “country home.” A Norman tower, actually. Which Yeats has renamed Thoor Ballylee.

Thoor Ballylee

From the top of his tower he can see the Aughty Mountains to the east and the hills of the Burren to the West.

He writes to friends,

All we can see from our windows is beautiful and quiet…Everything is so beautiful that to go elsewhere is to leave beauty behind.”

*****

Yet, about 20 miles away in Galway City, Nora Barnacle, 38, home from Paris on a family visit, is staying in her uncle’s house with her two children, Giorgio, 16, and Lucia, 14.

Galway City

Insurgents from the Irish Republican Army [IRA], fighting against the right of the newly declared Irish Free State to uphold the Anglo-Irish Treaty, burst into the house.

They demand to use the bedroom as a base to fire on their enemies out the window.

Nora is appalled. And panicked. Her partner, the father of her children, Irish novelist James Joyce, 40, had begged her to not come here. He knows there is a Civil War raging throughout the country and he fears for their safety. He has been writing her anguished letters from their home in Paris ever since she left.

I am like a man looking into a dark pool,”

Joyce writes to her.

She and the children arrived a few weeks ago, coming over via London, which Nora really enjoyed. She might try to convince Jim to move there, rather than continue to live in Paris. At least they’d be surrounded by the English language.

But right now, Nora is thinking that she needs to get herself and her kids on a train to Dublin as fast as she can.

*****

Michael Collins, 31, recently named Chair of the Provisional Government of the pro-Treaty Irish Free State, gets out of his car at Vaughan’s Hotel in Rutland Square, followed by other members of the National Army. A group of 12 anti-government, armed IRA men rush by him and start shooting at his entourage. Collins fires at them with his revolver and disarms one of the younger men. The boy admits he didn’t realize that he had just shot at the leader of the Irish Free State. Good thing he missed.

Vaughan’s Hotel

My thanks to Rena McAllen, member of the board of directors of the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society, for assistance with details of Thoor Ballylee, and Neil Weatherall, author of the play, The Playboy Riots, for assistance with details of the Irish Civil War.

“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 before and after The Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in 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, March 13, 1921, Shillingford, Berkshire, England

Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, 55, is writing to his friend and fellow founder of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, Lady Augusta Gregory, about to turn 69, back in her home in Coole Park in the west of Ireland.

Yeats wants to explain to her why he and his pregnant wife, Georgie, 29, and their two-year-old daughter Anne, have moved from the place they had rented in Oxford to this cottage in Berkshire.

Shillingford Bridge, Berkshire

Mainly, to save money. Not only is there a baby on the way [Yeats is hoping for a boy], but Willie is still sending money to New York to support his father, painter John Butler Yeats, almost 82. Thankfully, Dad is being watched over by their friend, Irish-American lawyer and art collector, John Quinn, 50. Quinn often buys some of Willie’s manuscripts, giving the money to JB to keep him going.

But Yeats and his sisters are pressuring Dad to move back home. To no avail.

The Yeatses also considered moving back to Ireland. But their tower in the west of the country, Thoor Ballylee, has been terribly flooded by the recent rains. And living there, near Galway, is too dangerous now with the Civil War raging.

So Willie and Georgie found this cottage in Shillingford, about ten miles south of Oxford, which will reduce their expenses. And it is within walking distance of the town’s Catholic Church. Of course, the Yeatses are Protestants. But the proximity makes it more convenient for their maids.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volume I covering 1920 is available in both print and e-book formats on Amazon.

This summer I will be talking about The Literary 1920s in the Osher Lifelong Learning programs 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 available on Amazon in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, June 1, 1920, Sirmione, Lago di Garda, northern Italy

American poet Ezra Pound, 34, looking out on a lake in northern Italy, is writing to his benefactor, American lawyer and art collector, John Quinn, 50, in New York City.

He thanks Quinn for having negotiated a deal for Pound to serve as foreign editor for the American literary magazine, The Dial. He mentions that the magazine had already sent him a check for 2,050 lire, about $100, drawn on a Genoa bank. But no one in this part of the country wants to cash it.

Then he writes about their mutual friend, Irish poet William Butler Yeats, 54, recently returned from his third American lecture tour, which had problems with the tour promotion agency:

—Poor W. B. Y. perhaps he’ll now settle down & lead an honest life—Am sorry for his ill fortune but can’t feel he’s wholly spotless, he that went forth to gall the ignorant…Besides he’ll have made enough to buy a few shingles for his phallic symbol on the Bogs. Bally phallus or whatever he calls it with the river on the first floor.”

Yeats’ tower in the west of Ireland, Thoor Ballylee, flooded

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gpysyteacher.com.

In 2020 I will be talking about writers’ salons before and after the Great War in Ireland, England, France and America in the University of Pittsburgh’s Osher 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 and his relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.

“Such Friends”: 150 Years Ago, April 24, 1870, Tiffin, Ohio

Happy birthday, John Quinn!

We interrupt our usual posting of events that happened 100 years ago with a momentous event of 150 years ago.

Regular readers of this blog [you know who you are] will have wondered who this John Quinn fellow is, supporter of art and artists, who keeps popping up 100 years ago. Hosting Irish poet William Butler Yeats and his wife in New York. Writing and receiving letters to and from American ex-patriate poet Ezra Pound. Buying manuscripts of works by writers like Yeats, Joseph Conrad and James Joyce.

Below is a posting I wrote in 2003 about Quinn in my weekly blog, “Every Wednesday:  The Journal of a Teacher in Search of a Classroom,” chronicling my year of unemployment in south Florida. [#shamelessselfpromotion: Available in paperback on Lulu.com,  Or on Amazon combined with my other Gypsy Teacher blogs.]

“Every Wednesday:  I Want to Tell You About an Amazing Man”

When I was doing my research for my dissertation on early 20^th century writers’ salons—W B Yeats and the Irish Literary Renaissance, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, Gertrude Stein and the American expatriates in Paris, and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table—there was this character who kept popping up. Like Woody Allen’s Zelig he appeared in biographies, memoirs and letters of the time, as well as in group photos of people like Yeats, Picasso, Matisse, Ezra Pound, James Joyce. Who was this guy? He certainly had “such friends.”

James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford,  and John Quinn

When I first came across Quinn, I checked the bibliographies and saw that there was one biography about him, B. L. Reid’s The Man from New York:  John Quinn and His Friends (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1968). Earlier this year I began doing some research on the 1913 New York Armory Show to include in my work-in-progress about the writers’ salons, “Such Friends.” There was John Quinn again, buying art in Paris, organizing the first exhibition of international modern art in the United States, writing to Conrad and other struggling writers of the time.

Jealous that someone else had written the definitive history of this intriguing creature, I broke down and took the biography out of the library. I discovered that it’s not great—good research but not well-presented, hard to read. And, worst of all, the author makes this fascinating man’s life seem boring.

So here is the John Quinn I discovered. I’m still working on some of the details.

He was born in Tiffin, Ohio, on this date in 1870 of Irish immigrant parents; his father was a baker. He grew up in middle-class Fostoria, Ohio, and attended the University of Michigan. A family friend who became Secretary of the Treasury under President Benjamin Harrison offered Quinn a job with him in Washington, D.C. While working full-time in the federal government, he went to Georgetown University law school at night. After receiving his law degree, he earned an advanced degree in international relations from Harvard University. Not bad for the son of a shanty-Irish baker.

Quinn then moved to New York City, which was to be his home for the rest of his life. He predictably got a job with a major New York law firm and worked on a lot of high profile corporate cases. During a two-year period there were a lot of deaths in his family—parents, sisters, etc.—and he began to explore his Irish roots.

Right after the turn of the century he went to Ireland and, while attending a Gaelic language festival in the west, near Galway, met Lady Augusta Gregory and other friends of Yeats involved in the Irish Literary Renaissance. While helping them found the Abbey Theatre, he started his own law firm in 1906. As you do.

His successful firm was supported by retainers from major corporations, and he became involved in New York’s Tammany Hall politics. But when his candidate didn’t get the nomination at the 1912 Democratic Party convention, he got disgusted with the whole system (go figure). After that he turned his considerable energies to art and literature.

Quinn did delegate a lot of the work in his law firm when he was away, but, like a true control freak, he was always unhappy with the way his employees handled everything. During the first two decades of the 20^th century he managed to:

• Help organize the Armory Show,
• Fight Congress to have a tariff on contemporary art changed,
• Bail out the Abbey Theatre after they were arrested for performing John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in Philadelphia,
• Have an affair with Lady Gregory and a number of other much younger women, some of whom he “shared” with Yeats,
• Support Yeats’ father in New York City by buying his paintings and Yeats’ manuscripts,
• Support James Joyce in Paris by buying his manuscripts as he wrote them,
• Argue the original case to have excerpts of Ulysses published in the Little Review magazine in the United States, and
• Amass an incredible collection of modern art, focused primarily on European painters.

During that time he kept up a detailed correspondence with all of the above as well as Maud Gonne, Augustus John and many other cultural luminaries of the early 20^th century. Quite a guy. I get tired just thinking about all he accomplished.

Quinn died of intestinal cancer at the age of 54, and, having no children, was generous to his sister and niece, but willed that his art collection be sold off and dispersed among museums and collectors around the world. And it was.

John Quinn and William Butler Yeats

Yesterday I gave my first presentation about the Armory Show to a group of art collectors at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. I tried to communicate to them John Quinn’s enthusiasm for supporting the living artist as well as the art.

Currently I am doing more research about Quinn and plan to write an article about him. Eventually I would like to give him the decent biography he deserves. I’ll keep you posted.

See you next Wednesday.

Thanks for reading. You can e-mail me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gpysyteacher.com.

In 2020 I will be talking about writers’ salons in Ireland, England, France and America before and after the Great War in the University of Pittsburgh’s Osher Lifelong Learning program.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins and his relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle 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’: 1897, summer, the West of Ireland

In the next few weeks I will be posting vignettes about how each of the four writers’ salons came together. This is the beginning of W B Yeats and the Irish Literary Renaissance:

After being in the center of the Dublin riots that greeted the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, poet W B Yeats, 32, is happy to spend the rest of his summer traveling throughout the west of Ireland with a friend.

Yeats is invited by the Baron de Basterot to stop by his home, Duras, in Co. Galway. By chance the other guests that day are Lady Augusta Gregory, 45, from nearby Coole Park, and her neighbour from Gort, Edward Martyn, 38. Yeats and Lady Gregory had crossed paths a few times before, at her salons in London, but this is the first time they actually get to know each other.

The three are getting along famously and lamenting the fact that there is no theatre in Ireland to produce plays, such as the ones Martyn is writing, about Irish people.

As Lady Gregory remembers it later,

We went on talking about it, and things seemed to grow possible as we talked, and before the end of the afternoon we had made our plan.”

Lady Gregory invites Yeats and Martyn to come to Coole Park where they can embark on their plan to start a theatre for the Irish, with plays by and about the Irish.

Lady Gregory’s Coole Park

What is left of Coole Park today

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

To read about American writers, Manager as Muse explores Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ work with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe and is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.