'Such Friends'

Thank you for visiting ‘Such Friends’!

2009-10-02T10:10:00.000-07:00

But we've moved to www.suchfriends.wordpress.com

There you'll find lots more information about the writers of the Irish Literary Renaissance, the Bloomsbury group, the Americans in Paris and the Algonquin Round Table, including what they were doing on this date.

Below there are still postings about what was happening in the salons 100 years ago this month, but that is also on the Wordpress site.

So come visit with the friends over at Wordpress, and let me know what you think: kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

100 Years Ago: October 1909

2009-09-01T02:34:00.000-07:00

In Ireland:

All those in the Abbey theatre are still struggling to get over the death from lymphoma earlier in the year of one of their three directors, playwright John Millington Synge, at age 39.

His fellow director Lady Augusta Gregory, 57, dealt with the Synge family and the executors, but decided that she didn’t want to write about him. However, the third member of the triumvirate, William Butler Yeats, 44, is writing an introduction to a collection of Synge’s essays. Lady Gregory sent him this advice:

“I would like you to give some impression of…the theatre years in Dublin when none of us saw anyone from outside, we just moved from the Abbey [Theatre] to the Nassau [Hotel] and back again, we three always...We can’t say and don’t want to say what was true, [Synge] was ungracious to his fellow workers, authors and actors, ready in accepting praise, grudging in giving it. I wonder if he ever felt a moment’s gratitude for all we went thru fighting his battle over Playboy [of the Western World]? On tour he thought of his own plays only, gave no help to ours, and if he repeated compliments they were to his own...Those who attacked him didn’t know him at all…We who are his friends and know him could find more…to say against him but we won’t.”

Douglas Hyde, 49, founder of the Gaelic League, one of the founding playwrights of the Abbey, has been named Professor of Modern Irish at University College Dublin, and he has taken a house in the city.

James Joyce is also still living in Dublin, and world renowned tenor, Enrico Caruso, performed there at the Theatre Royal that summer.

In England:

Virginia Stephen, 27, has been at Studland Beach near her sister, Vanessa, 30, and her husband Clive Bell, 28, since mid-September. They had all traveled together in Italy earlier in the year, but Virginia tired of the married couple and came home early. Now they were all ready to go back to London and start up their weekly salons in Bloomsbury again.

Artist Duncan Grant, 24, is sharing rooms in Belgrave Road, St. John’s Wood, with his lover, economist John Maynard Keynes, 26. He has painted a portrait of his cousin, Lytton Strachey, 29, and then turned it over and painted Lytton’s sister Marjorie in Le Crime & le Chatiment.

Lytton is heading off to Cambridge for the rest of the year. He is working on a blank verse play, called Essex, he hopes to enter in a Stratford-on Avon competition.

In France:

Ireland’s La Passionara, and Yeats’ lover, Maud Gonne, is living in France, separated from her abusive husband Sean MacBride. Yeats and Lady Gregory are both supportive of her bringing charges of drunkenness against MacBride so she can have sole custody of their son. The French call her “La belle Irlandaise”

Roger Fry, 43, based in London but serving as curator of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, has met both Henri Matisse and Edgar Degas in Paris.

At 27 rue de Fleurus, Alice B. Toklas, 32, has moved in with her lover and fellow Californian, Gertrude Stein, 35. After the publication of Stein’s Three Lives, Alice was able to fulfill one of her childhood “romances”—subscribing to the clipping service, Romeike, which she had seen advertised in the San Francisco Argonaut when she was a child. “Soon the clippings began to come in,” she wrote in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

In America:

In Minnesota, F. Scott Fitzgerald, just turned 13, has one of his mystery stories published in the St. Paul Academy magazine.

The Fitzgeralds had moved back to St. Paul the year before, after his father lost his job with Procter & Gamble in Buffalo. They are living with his mom’s family, the McQuillan’s, in the Summit Hill neighborhood, where hundreds of well-preserved 19th and 20th century grand homes stand to this day.

Scott is active in the dancing classes, but also enjoys football and baseball.

George S Kaufmann, 19, is living in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburg, as it was then spelled, although his mother and sister had moved to New Jersey when Mr. Kaufman got a job with the Columbia Ribbon Manufacturing Co. He’s trying to get his son George a sales job there, but George is more interested in working on the poems he is sending to FPA’s column in Manhattan’s Evening Mail.

The Pittsburg Pirates beat the Detroit Tigers 8-0 in the seventh game to win the World Series.

100 Years Ago: September 1909

2009-09-01T02:28:00.000-07:00

In Ireland:

This is a year of loss for the directors of the Abbey Theatre. Playwright and co-director John Millington Synge dies of Hodgkin’s disease at the age of 38. Fellow director William Butler Yeats, 44, loses his grandfather, ending his connections with his mother’s family in Sligo, where he had spent summers as a child.

Lady Augusta Gregory, 57, is thrilled with the birth of her first grandchild, but now that her son has an heir, the house she has lived in since her early marriage, Coole Park, will probably pass to him.

This September, Augusta’s friend Violet Martin writes to her that “there was a curious enchantment over all...I think the constant output of spirit and mind at Coole creates a very special atmosphere.”

In England:

Although the Bloomsbury group still gets together most Thursday evenings in Gordon Square and Fitzroy Square for whiskey, buns and cocoa, they travel around quite a bit.

Virginia Stephen, 27, and her younger brother Adrian, who live in Fitzroy Square together, have been touring Europe. They visit their older sister, Vanessa and her husband, Clive Bell, turning 28 this month, at Studland Beach in mid-September. Virginia has been working on her first novel, Melymbrosia, and given it to Clive to critique.

Lytton Strachey, 29, working on a blank verse play, Essex, for a competition in Stratford-on-Avon, has returned to London from a rest in a sanatorium in Sweden, paid for by his mother. He’s been corresponding with his Cambridge friend Leonard Woolf, serving in the Civil Service in Ceylon and ready to come home.

Lytton’s cousin, Duncan Grant, 24, is sharing rooms with his lover John Maynard Keynes, 26, in St. John’s Wood, London, and they get away together for some time alone in the Cotswolds. Keynes has recently been named a Fellow of King’s College Cambridge.

In France:

At 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris, Alice B. Toklas, 32, has officially moved in with Leo and Gertrude Stein, 35. Stein’s Three Lives has been published that year, and Alice signed up to a clipping service to keep track of its publicity.

The other young women who came from San Francisco to visit the Steins had all gone home, and Alice had made it clear to them that they did not need to come back to Paris.

Gertrude isworking on “Ada,” and the manuscript shows almost as much in Toklas’ handwriting as Stein’s.

In America:

In New York City, Alexander Woollcott, 22, fresh out of Hamilton College, has just been hired as a reporter at the Times. He’s thrilled to discover he can get free theatre tickets.

Emmannuel Radnitzky, 20, is taking in art shows such as “The 8,” and starts recording his paintings—signed Man Ray—with a Brownie camera, a service he offers to collectors such as John Quinn.

In Boston, MA, Robert Benchley, celebrating his 20th birthday, is giving mock travelogues around town. He started at Harvard University the year before, although he would have preferred Yale.

In St. Paul, MN, Frances Scott Key Fitzgerald, 13, plays basketball and football, but is really pleased that he has finally managed to join the “right” dance class.

100 Years Ago: August 1909

2009-07-30T07:13:00.000-07:00

In Ireland:

W B Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory acquire the rights to present G B Shaw’s The Showing-Up of Blanco Posnet, recently banned in England, at their Abbey Theatre. Lady Gregory stands up to the British government, and the production goes on without fines. They also revive John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, after the author’s untimely death.

In England:

Lytton Strachey writes in response to a query from his Cambridge friend Leonard Woolf, serving in Ceylon: ‘You must marry Virginia [Stephen]. She’s sitting waiting for you, is there any objection? She’s the only woman in the world with sufficient brains; it’s a miracle that she should exist; but if you’re not careful you’ll lose the opportunity. At any moment she might go off with heaven knows who—Duncan [Grant]? Quite possible. She’s young, wild, inquisitive, discontented, and longing to be in love. If I were you I should telegraph.”

Meanwhile, Virginia is writing to Duncan: “Good God! to have a room of one’s own with a real fire and books and tea and company, and no dinner-bells and distractions, and little time for doing something!—It’s a wonderful vision, and surely worth some risks!”

In France:

Bloomsbury friend Ottoline Morrell, married to MP Phillip Morrell, and fresh off her affair with Augustus John, is in Paris visiting American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. Gertrude’s first book, Three Lives, has recently been published and her partner Alice B. Toklas has moved in with them at 27 rue de Fleurus. Ottoline also meets one of the Steins’ favorite painters, Henri Matisse, who is working on The Dance.

In America:

Heywood Broun, recent outstanding Harvard graduate who always looks like an unmade bed, is working on the Morning Telegraph where he is a frequent contributor to the continuing poker game. On some of the other 2600 dailies in America at the time, Marc Connelly is a reporter for the McKeesport, PA, Daily News, FPA [Franklin P. Adams] has a regular column in New York’s Daily Mail, and Alexander Woollcott has had his first interview for a job at the New York Times.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and me

2009-07-25T08:57:00.000-07:00

Almost 70 years after his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda still command attention.

In my first 'Such Friends' gig here in the UK, I will be doing a talk on Fitzgerald and his editor, Maxwell Perkins, for the Birmingham & Midlands Institute this October.

Thank you, Lewis, for serving as my agent!

This past April, 2009, Broward County, Florida, my old hometown, did The Big Read: The Great Gatsby. My friends at the Florida Center for the Book invited me to come talk about Scott Fitzgerald, his life and loves.

Thanks to all who came to the sessions at the libraries. You asked great questions! For those of you who gave me your e-mail addresses, there will soon be a 'Such Friends' e-mail coming, so just hang in there.

Thank you all for your support.

If you would be interested in having me give a presentation about any of the writers and artists in the early 20th century salons who I have studied, or just would like more information about them, send me an e-mail at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com and I'll send you a list of topics. I'll go anywhere! [And I'm a cheap date.]

'Such Friends': Early 20th Century Writers' salons

2009-02-22T06:50:00.000-08:00

Below are pieces I've written about the early 20th century writers' salons I studied:

W B Yeats and the Irish Literary Renaissiance,
Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group,
Gertrude Stein and the American ex-patriates in Paris, and
Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table.

Watch this space for some exciting information about the much awaited 'Such Friends' book.

In the meantime, check out my other blogs, and my 'blooks' about my travels and teaching with My Irish Husband Tony on Semester at Sea and elsewhere: www.lulu.com/gypsyteacher. I'd love to know what you think! E-mail me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

On Seeing Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein for the Second Time, June 9, 2002

2009-02-22T06:45:00.000-08:00

I had seen it once before.

Teaching full time, but immersed in my dissertation research on early 20th century writers’ salons, I went to New York City to take in the Lincoln Center production of Four Saints in Three Acts and stay at the Algonquin Hotel, thereby killing two writers’ salons with one tax-deductible research trip. My New York friend told me not to miss the Picasso Portraits exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, and rent the audio tour by comedian Steve Martin. I figured it would be a nice complement. Only while waiting in line did it occur to me that Pablo’s portrait of Gertrude would probably be included.

Just a few feet in—there she was. She took me by surprise. After three years of reading and writing about her and her friends, knowing every intimate detail of their lives, seeing the reproduction in so many ways in so many different books, and then—there she was. But the difference between seeing it in her living room and here at MoMA was that at the end of the 20th century there was a line of people eager to get through the exhibit to the gift shop, so I had to keep moving.

This time, six years later with the Ph.D. behind me, I am at the end of a summer London trip with my college students. Before we left, I had found a review of the Tate Modern’s Matisse-Picasso exhibit in the Wall Street Journal, and I put it high on my “to do” list while here.

So many things seem like such a priority when you arrive in a new city; most of them fade into, “You know what we haven’t done yet…” The three days my husband came to visit, he was tired from traveling. We went to the Tate Modern, but Matisse-Picasso was sold out, so we wandered through the free galleries. Better to tackle the big one when we have the energy.

By the end of the two weeks, when my husband had gone on to Dublin and the students to their next adventure, I found the energy, but I was short on cash. Ah, two days by yourself in London. Just relax, save some money, do laundry.

But thanks to a last minute bit of largesse from my brother in Ohio, I was able to rally my forces and plan the Last Day in London that I had dreamt of. What to do first? Wait in the TKTS line? Go for high tea? Why not get to the Tate first thing and see whether tickets will be available?

Arriving at 10:30 am I get a ticket for the 11:45 entry time with no problem. After scouring the bookshop, I line up with the others and decide once again to indulge myself in the audio tour. We walk around with our long gray plastic sticks up to our ear, taking in the British interpretation of the complex relationship between these two giants of 20th century art. What a nice touch to have the actual authors read the quotes from their works; what an interesting touch to have Picasso and Matisse’s quotes read with British accents.

Once again, it is not until I enter that it occurs to me that I might get the chance to see Pablo’s interpretation of Gertrude up close. We start with 1904 when she supposedly introduced the two, although they probably met on their own earlier. Paris in the twenties was a small town.

I make my way through the first room. There is a huge brown-gray Picasso of a boy and a pony. The description next to it says that it was one of the first paintings Gertrude and her brother Leo bought from the struggling Spaniard. In those days, he couldn’t give them away; now people pay ten pounds a head just to walk by them.

It’s not one of my favorite Picassos. But it occurs to me that Gertrude probably loved the joke of a having a young male’s exposed genitalia hanging in her salon.

And the frame. This is probably the original frame. Her partner Alice B. Toklas said she learned about the paintings by dusting them. She dusted this frame. I’m close enough to touch 27 rue de Fleurus. But in a 21st century museum—no touching. Alice got to touch them every day.

I continue through the years of the Matisse-Picasso friendship. I make my way into the room where Gertrude will be. I flirt with her at first, walking around the room to see the paintings in the order they are discussed on the tape. I listen to the audio description of all the rest, watching her out of the corner of my eye. I make my way over to read the description next to her on the wall. It gives a slightly different version of Picasso’s summing up of his masterpiece. When their friends claimed it didn’t look like her, he said, “It will.” And it does.

Eventually I maneuver over to her corner. I stare at her for a while. I try to remember if this feels and looks the same as it did in MoMA. This is less rushed. I have nowhere to go; no commitments. I find an empty spot on the bench a few feet away and sit. She watches me. Her big dark Spanish eyes, the ones he couldn’t get right at first and only painted in when he returned from a trip to Spain, look at me.

I decide I will leave, because I will come back. I continue with the tape, and the descriptions on the wall, wallowing in the early 20th century, the birth of modernism, the tension between two great talents trying to outdo each other. Matisse paints a nude. Picasso paints a bigger nude. Touché!

By the last room, they have become friends. Matisse has died, leaving behind his odalisques for Picassos to paint. The room is full of Picasso’s acrobats, performing feats not possible in nature, and Matisse’s cut outs, blue shapes floating off the white pages.It is like entering the rehearsal room for a circus.

I get to the end of the exhibit and tape, saunter past the door that says “Exit. No re-entry,” and double back around to see her again. Back through the years, through the nudes, the mistresses, the African art. Back to the beginning, in Paris, when “everybody was so young,” as Sara Murphy said. Past the paintings inspired by the theatre sets both Matisse and Picasso designed for Diaghilev’s ballet with Sara’s husband, Gerald Murphy.

There she is. Once again she is at the center, just the way she was always described in her salon at rue de Fleurus. The others buzz around her, looking at the paintings, waiting for a word of wisdom, some insight into the craft of writing, the creative process. Only now there is no Alice to decide who will be allowed into the inner circle and who will be kept away. No Alice to sit with the wives. Anyone can come, anyone with ten pounds. They all circle around her, and then move on.

I stand close, along with others, still hooked to their gray plastic sticks. There’s the frame that Alice dusted every day. When she looked at the painting, did she think of her soul mate, still asleep upstairs, having stayed up late the night before re-inventing American literature? Or did she think of art?

I wait until a seat opens up on the bench again and sit down. I can’t tear myself away from her. Her red brooch is nestled in her white scarf; a gesture to femininity. Her hair is piled high on her head. In a few decades she will tell Alice to cut it short and she will look like a Roman emperor.

Why can’t I leave? Is it because she was born in Pittsburgh too? Although she was only there for the first six months of her life, we Pittsburghers are very proud. Was it because my mother, who never even went to college, used to tell me about her? “She said ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’ and she became famous.” “Why would someone become famous for saying that?” I asked. The book I found in our basement, The Third Rose by John Malcolm Brinnin, became part of my bibliography for my dissertation, long after my mother had died.

Behind me I hear two young children coming with their mother—God bless her for bringing (well-behaved) two and three year olds to a Matisse-Picasso exhibit. As they approach, the boy says in a clipped British accent, “Look at the man.” “It’s a woman,” says the mother. “What makes you think it’s a man?” “It looks like a man,” he says, pointing out the obvious to us adults.

When Gertrude and Alice visited the Stein cousins in Baltimore on their triumphant American tour in 1934, after they left, her nephew asked his mother, “I liked the man but why did the woman have a moustache?”

I look up and notice that the ceiling surveillance camera is trained on my spot. Is there a British minimum-wager sitting up there wondering why this American has been sitting in one place for so long? If the painting is stolen tomorrow, will they try to find me?

I look back at the painting. The large right hand, so strong, so muscular. It’s about to rise from her knee. In about 15 years she will raise this hand and point to Ernest Hemingway and say, “Begin over again and concentrate.” He will toss out all he was working on and begin to write about the young people he knows in Paris. A year later he will write a devastating parody of her work, making them contestants in the same ring as Matisse and Picasso.

She leans forward, about to instruct.

Tell them, she says.

You have to tell them. Get to work. No more excuses. Begin over again and concentrate. Find a way to tell them.

Tell them that art is not a frill. Tell them why I am important; why Picasso is still important. Make them understand. Find the right words, the way I did. Find the way to tell them what I was trying to tell them. Get going.

She looks as though she is tired of trying to get people to understand.

I sit a while longer. I know if I look at my watch the spell will be broken, so I just sit. I look at the frame. I wonder who dusts it now?

Eventually I get up to leave. Her eyes follow me. When I’m flush with the wall, exiting the room, I glance back. I can only see a bit of her.

Tell them, she says.

I walk back again through the years, through the First Great War, then the occupation of Paris in the Second. Picasso stayed; Matisse went to the South of France, Gertrude and Alice to Bilignin in the west. Past the cancer and the odalisques. Past the dancers, the bathers, and the acrobats. I hand in my gray plastic stick—should I thank him? The young Londoner in the orange shirt, surrounded by the great art of the mid-20th century, whose job it is to collect gray plastic sticks?

I go to the gift shop. I buy the postcard. I treat myself to the fudge brownie with ice cream and fudge sauce in the cafe.

After a while I went out and left the museum and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

How Could Gertrude Stein Write The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and What’s with Those Brownies?

2009-02-22T06:41:00.000-08:00

This was originally sent to Mental Floss magazine. They didn't print it, but they did ask me to write a set of pieces on D H Lawrence which were published in the summer of 2004.

If an “autobiography” is someone’s own life story, how can one person write an autobiography of someone else? Did Gertrude Stein goof in her title?

Don't be afraid--go ahead and read it. It’s a great, fun read.

And besides, Gertrude could do anything she wanted. She was a genius. And Alice knew it.

Gertrude Stein was an American writer who spent almost her entire adult life living in Paris with her partner—Yes, they were gay!—Alice B. Toklas, also an American. They were so close that their joint biographer Diane Souhami says that from the day they met, “they were together until Gertrude’s death. They never traveled without each other or entertained separately, or worked on independent projects.”

Like me, Gertrude was born in Pittsburgh, PA, although Alice always said she should have been born in Oakland, CA. Her family moved west to the Bay area when Gertrude was only a baby. Dad made a bunch of money on the San Francisco trolley car system and then died. Her oldest brother Michael was such a good money manager that she and her other brother, Leo, were able to move to Paris right after the turn of the last century, live pretty well and collect art. They were known around town as the crazy Americans who wore sandals and bought weird paintings by unknown artists—Picasso, Braque, Matisse.

Alice also grew up in San Francisco, although the two did not meet until she came to visit friends in Paris in 1907, the year after the San Francisco earthquake. When she was introduced to Gertrude, she says she heard bells ring. She always heard bells ring when she met a genius, and Gertrude was her first genius. The second was Picasso, whom Gertrude introduced Alice to the next day.

After Alice moved in, Leo felt it was getting pretty crowded in their apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus on the Left Bank of Paris, so he moved out soon after.

Gertrude would sit up late at night at her writing table, under a Cezanne, trying to do in written portraits what Cezanne had done on canvas. Alice would get up early the next morning, type up the copy, note some changes in the margin, plan the meals and chores for the day, and dust the paintings. She said she learned all about the paintings by dusting them. In the evenings they would host salons and invite the artists to come see their paintings, hanging two deep on the walls.

During World War I Gert and Alice ordered a car from the States and volunteered for the Red Cross ambulance service. They were both honored for their work by the French government after the war.

When the war ended in 1918, the GIs came back to the States with tales of the beauties of France and were slapped in the face with Prohibition. What better plan than to go right back Paris where it was really cheap to live and you could drink? As a result, Americans flooded Paris in the 1920s. They sat around drinking in cafes, got into brawls on the street, and were the subject of nasty letters to the editors by the French. No wonder they hate us now.

Some of Gertrude’s avant-garde writings were being published back home in the States, so the American writers came to her house to listen to her expound on her theories of modernistic writing and eat Alice’s little cakes.

Novelists Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, the photographer/painter Man Ray, and the composer Virgil Thomson were among the creative people who would come to the Saturday night salons. Alice would answer the door, ask who had sent you, and, if she let you in, she might allow you to sit within the “charmed circle” around Gertrude. But your wife would be ushered into a separate corner of the large room to sit and chat with Alice. “I had often said that I would write, The wives of geniuses I have sat with,” says Alice/Gertrude, in the Autobiography.

At the end of the 1920s, Alice got tired of cleaning up after the messy writers. Some of them, like Virgil Thomson, received Gertrude’s personal engraved cards with a note from Alice: “Miss Stein declines further acquaintance with Mr. Thomson.” That was that.

Gert kept badgering Alice to write the story of her life, because she had had the privilege of spending most of it with geniuses, but Alice was much too busy taking care of Gertrude. So in 1932, at their summer home in the French countryside, in six weeks Gertrude sat down and wrote her most popular book.

Some friends of hers in the States arranged to have it published by Harcourt Brace and, at the age of 58, Gertrude Stein was a huge hit. Her friends convinced her and Alice to come on a triumphant tour of the country they had both left behind almost 30 years before. When they arrived in New York, Gertrude’s name was up in lights in Times Square and the newspaper headlines read: “Gerty Gerty Stein Stein Is Back Home Home Back,” parodying her style. She introduced Alice as “my secretary” everywhere they went, although Alice ran all the details of the tour like the control freak she really was.

Back in Paris during World War II, they invited American soldiers to come to their salon. They got to know a lot of writers and painters who turned out to not be as talented or famous as the ones who had come earlier.

After World War II, the US government sent Gert and Alice on a tour of American bases in Europe but towards the end, Gertrude became really ill. Rushed to the American Hospital in Paris, she was operated on but they found that her cancer was too far along. Before she died, she turned to Alice and said, “What is the answer?” Alice didn’t say anything. “In that case,” Gertrude said, “what is the question?"

Alice was devastated but devoted the rest of her life to guarding Gertrude’s memory. In her old age Alice began doing some writing herself, mostly memoirs. Neither she nor Gertrude had ever been devout Jews, and Alice started practicing Catholicism with the rationale that she would be reunited with Gertrude in heaven. When she checked in for a retreat at a convent, at the age of 83 still chain-smoking Pall Malls, a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita fell out of her suitcase.

Alice finally died at the ripe old age of 90 and is buried in Pere Lechaise cemetery. She’s not anywhere near Jimi Hendrix; she’s right where she always was—directly behind Gertrude, for eternity.”

Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein

2009-02-22T06:38:00.000-08:00

This was originally written for, but never included on, a literary travel website.

Sherwood Anderson was a businessman in Elyria, Ohio, with a wife, three children, and a membership in the local country club. He operated his own business, the American Merchandise Company.

On the side, he did a little writing. When he’d worked in an advertising agency, he had a column in the Agricultural Advertiser. But by the age of 36 all he had published was a roofing catalogue.

And then, on a Thursday morning in late November 1912, Sherwood Anderson walked out.

Sitting in his office, unable to work, he wrote a note to his wife. “Cornelia: There is a bridge over a river with cross-ties before it. When I come to that I’ll be all right. I’ll write all day in the sun and the wind will blow thru my hair.”

Then he walked out the door.

Three days later he walked into a pharmacy in Cleveland, 30 miles away, disheveled, but still wearing his business suit. He asked the druggist to help him figure out who he was and was admitted to the hospital back in Elyria.

Anderson later referred to his breakdown as a “fugue state,” explaining, “I cannot keep my footing on the side of the bowl of life.”

But after that point, no matter what else he did, he knew he was a writer.

Cornelia took him off to her family in Toledo to recuperate, and the advertising agency he had worked for took him back because he was so colorful.

He started hanging out with writers like Floyd Dell in Chicago, where he would read out passages of his work in progress. He met Ben Hecht, Burton Rascoe, Alfred Kreymbourg; had some short stories published; lived with a group of bohemians called “the little children of the arts.” He divorced the first wife and married the second.

Four years after his epiphany, Anderson’s first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, was published, followed by Marching Men and a book of poetry, Mid-American Chants, in the next two years.

Sherwood tried to get out of the advertising business, even suggesting to his bosses that they fire him. He preferred to begin each day “by shoveling mud out of the temple,” he said, preparing to write.

Anderson finally hit his stride with his third novel. Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of short stories about a small, fictional town, connected by the character of a young reporter. Five years after James Joyce’s Dubliners, it too captures the personality of one city by describing the people in short stories. One year before Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, it propelled Anderson into the role of spokesperson for provincial America. More prolific than his contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anderson averaged one novel per year throughout the twenties.

Anderson was now sought out by other writers in both New York and Chicago. 1921 began with an artsy party in Chicago where he befriended a young reporter, Ernest Hemingway. The famous writer gave the aspiring novelist advice and invited him to salons where the younger listened to the older expound on obscure modern writers who were worth reading.

One of his New York contacts, music critic Paul Rosenfeld, told Anderson of the growing literary scene in Paris, and offered to finance his first trip. So in May of that same year, Paul, Sherwood, and second wife Tennessee set sail, like thousands of other Americans, talented and untalented, for France. They toured cathedrals, saw a Picasso exhibit, met other writers.

A few weeks after their arrival, Anderson was on the rue de l’Odeon, looking at the English-language books in the window of Shakespeare & Co. The American owner, Sylvia Beach, came out to chat and found that he was a fan of Paris’ most well-known “unknown” American writer, Gertrude Stein. He had been greatly influenced by her Tender Buttons and Three Lives, both published in limited runs in 1914, while he was working on Winesburg. Beach wrote a letter of introduction, and Sherwood and Tennessee soon presented themselves at the door of 27 rue de Fleurus.

Anderson later described the scene inside: “Imagine a strong woman with legs like stone pillars sitting in a room hung with Picassos…The woman is the very symbol of health and strength. She laughs. She smokes cigarettes. She tells stories with an American shrewdness in getting the tang and the kick into the telling.”

Stein always admired those who were wise enough to admire her, and a life-long friendship began that day. When her partner Alice B. Toklas met the Andersons soon after, she readily approved, ushering Tennessee away from the fascinating conversation, as Alice did with all “the wives of geniuses.” This was the beginning of the writers’ salons at rue de Fleurus that were a magnet for the American ex-patriates in Paris throughout the 1920s.

Gertrude was two years older and had only been published by small publishers in America. She needed a link to the mainstream media, someone who appreciated what she was trying to do and was appreciated by those who mattered. Her new best friend Sherwood was that link.

By the time the Andersons left Paris that summer, he had agreed to write an introduction to a collection of her work, Geography and Plays. Her editor had advised that the preface by the more well-known writer would be very helpful, “not only as an aid to the general reader but also to us in marketing.”

Back in Chicago, Sherwood had dinner with his young admirer, Hemingway, and regaled him with stories of Paris life. Ernest and his new wife, Hadley, were planning a trip to Italy to live off her inheritance in the country he knew from the war. Anderson convinced them to go to France instead.

While Anderson published another successful novel, The Triumph of the Egg, and an important essay, “The Work of Gertrude Stein,” over 6,000 Americans had flooded into Paris, including the Hemingways.

Arriving in December 1921, with a letter of introduction to Stein from Anderson, the young marrieds lived on the Left Bank above a saw mill and sat in cafes drinking bottles of wine that cost 10 cents each.

By March Hemingway had gathered up enough courage to write to Stein, sending along Anderson’s letter. Any friend of Anderson was a friend of Stein’s, so he was invited to present himself at the door of rue de Fleurus the next day.

Back in the US, Sherwood had given up his advertising accounts, roamed the country, and settled in New Orleans to write the promised preface for Gertrude. Hemingway wrote enthusiastically to him, “Stein and me are just like brothers, and we see a lot of her”; Gertrude sent Anderson a premature thank you note.

Before the end of 1922, Sherwood had divorced Tennessee, explaining to Stein, “have run away from all my friends, including friend wife.” Hanging out at New York writers’ parties that included Theodore Dreiser and Fitzgerald, he met wife number three. When he received the first Dial magazine award of $5000, Anderson was able to go back to New Orleans to write some more. Gertrude returned the favor of his glowing preface by publishing an essay, “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson” in the Little Review. This literary lovefest continued in print and private letters throughout their friendship.

Their protégé, meanwhile, had been published by independents in the Left Bank and by Liveright & Co. in America. Every reviewer compared him to his older mentors, even suggesting that the three formed a “school.” Anderson and Stein had both struggled to be recognized by major publishers; Hemingway was now being pursued by them.

Imagine Sherwood and Gertrude’s surprise in 1926 when their “good pupil,” as they called him, turned against them with Torrents of Spring. A fierce parody of their style, Hemingway had tossed it off in ten days to get out of his contract with Liveright. Anderson was puzzled; Stein was infuriated. That was the end of her closeness with Hemingway. She went on to trash him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and he responded in kind decades later in A Moveable Feast.

In December of that year, Sherwood made his second trip to Paris, eager to introduce his third wife and kids to his literary friends. He was feted at salons and was one of the first to see Gertrude’s new short hair cut, proclaiming that it made her look like a monk.

He had his last meeting with Hemingway during that trip. As Anderson described it later: “He stood in the doorway. ‘How about a drink,’ he said, and I followed him down a stairway and across a street. We went into a small bar. ‘What will you have?’ ‘Beer.’ ‘And you?’ ‘A beer.’ ‘Well, here’s how.’ ‘Here’s how.’ He turned and walked rapidly away.”

The annual rue de Fleurus Christmas party that year was held in his honor, but there is some question as to whether Anderson showed up. Alice claims in her autobiography that he and Stein talked endlessly on two of their favorite subjects, Ulysses S Grant and Hemingway. Other sources claim Sherwood was too depressed to come, and Gertrude told him that she understood.

When the Anderson family left Paris, son John stayed behind to study at the Academie Julian, and visited Gertrude and Alice often.

The writers’ salons at rue de Fleurus ended in 1928 when Alice got tired of cleaning up after geniuses and wives. She sent notes which said, “Miss Stein no longer requires your presence.”

Anderson, however, was never dis-invited. When he returned to the States he bought a group of newspapers in Virginia and became a country publisher and active socialist.

The next time the old friends saw each other was when Gertrude and Alice triumphantly toured the US in 1935 in the wake of the successful publication of The Autobiography. By this time, having divorced wife three and put his son in charge of the family newspapers, Anderson was living and writing in New Orleans. He was a frequent speaker for socialist causes, and had defended Stein in print against attacks on her writing. A fourth wife and failed attempts at teaching and lecturing—“I made a little money and often an ass of myself,” he wrote to Stein—didn’t alleviate his bouts of depression.

By 1941, Anderson had faded from public view but was still well respected among popular writers such as Thornton Wilder. In February, Wilder, Anderson and wife four embarked on a cruise to South America. At a cocktail party, Sherwood ate a hors d’oeuvre, toothpick and all, which lodged in his stomach and developed into peritonitis. The ship was forced to pull in to Colon, Panama, where Sherwood Anderson, aged 64, died at the American military hospital.

Back home in Ohio, the local newspaper headlined, “Former Elyria Manufacturer Dies.”

But the more appropriate epitaph is on his tombstone, “Life not death is the great adventure.”

John Quinn: The Amazing Irish-American from New York

2009-02-22T06:35:00.000-08:00

This blog is published in my blook, “Every Wednesday?”: the Journal of a Teacher in Search of a Classroom, available at www.lulu.com/gypsyteacher.

I want to tell you about an amazing man.

While doing my academic research on early 20th century writers, an interesting fringe character kept popping up. Like Woody Allen’s Zelig he appeared in biographies, letters and group photos with Matisse, Picasso, Ezra Pound, James Joyce. Who was this guy?

Recently I researched the 1913 New York Armory Show for my book about the writers, “Such Friends.” There was John Quinn again, buying art in Paris, organizing the first exhibition of international modern art in America, writing to Joseph Conrad and other struggling writers.

Curious, I read B. L. Reid’s The Man from New York: John Quinn & His Friends and discovered it is really awful—poorly written, badly organized. Worst of all, it makes this fascinating man boring.

Here is the Quinn I discovered:

Born in 1870, he was the son of an Irish immigrant baker. He grew up in middle-class Fostoria, OH, and attended the University of Michigan. When a family friend was appointed US Treasury Secretary, Quinn went to work for him in Washington, DC. Holding down a full-time government job, he attended Georgetown University law school at night.

After earning an advanced degree in international relations from Harvard (not bad for a shanty-Irish baker’s son), Quinn moved to New York City, his home for the rest of his life. He predictably worked on high-profile corporate cases for a large firm. Just after 1900, his mother and two sisters died within a few months of each other, and he began to explore his Irish roots. On his first trip to Ireland, at a Galway feis, he met Lady Gregory and other friends of Yeats. While helping this group establish the Abbey Theatre, he started his own New York law firm in 1906.

His practice was supported by lucrative corporate retainers, and he became associated with Tammany Hall. When his candidate didn’t get the 1912 Democratic Party nomination, he became disgusted with politics (go figure). He turned his energies to the arts.

During the first decades of the 20th century Quinn managed to: help organize the Armory Show; fight to eliminate tariffs on contemporary art; bail out the Abbey players, arrested for performing Playboy of the Western World in Philadelphia; have many affairs, including one with Lady Gregory, support Yeats’ father in New York by buying his paintings; support Joyce in Paris by buying his manuscripts; argue the original obscenity case against the banning of Ulysses excerpts; carry on detailed correspondences with most of the cultural luminaries of the time; and amass an incredible collection of modern art. All before his death from cancer at the age of 54.

The only other book about him is a catalogue from the Hirshorn Museum’s memorial exhibit in 1978. The most fascinating tidbits are found in the footnotes. Quinn’s “assistant,” “companion,” and “devoted friend” was Mrs. Jeanne Robert Foster, who, for the last six years of his life helped him on his European collecting trips, while remaining married to the wealthy Matlock Foster. This just gets better and better.

After his death, his art collection, all 2000 pieces, was sold off among museums and collectors. His voluminous correspondence was donated to the New York Public Library, including the manuscript of T S Eliot’s The Wasteland.

When I gave my presentation about the Armory Show to a group of art collectors, I tried to communicate to them Quinn’s enthusiasm for supporting artists as well as art.

To St. Ives

2009-02-22T06:31:00.000-08:00

This piece was written after our week holiday in Cornwall.

‘Can you actually go out to the lighthouse?,’ asked My Irish Husband Tony.

‘Well, that’s kind of the point of the book,’ I said. I’d read it about ten years ago. Did they get there? I couldn’t remember.

When planning our holiday, I realized our best route would take us over to Dublin, down the Irish coast, and back into Wales. Then, where?

Cornwall! Never been there. We’d go to St. Ives where Virginia Stephen summered with her family in the 1890s. Take some pictures. Time to re-read To the Lighthouse.

Bought the book, packed it, but didn’t dig it out until we were settled in to our cottage-for-a-week, the Penrose, high above Boscastle, Cornwall, famed for flash flooding a few years before. Over-estimating my speed reading, and underestimating the fascination of Virginia’s prose, I planned to knock it off in a day, biographical preface (a refresher course in Woolf’s life), introduction, detailed footnotes and all. By the time Tony had our dinner ready on Sunday night I had just finished the description of the Ramseys’ dinner party and was heading towards the end of section one, The Window. I underlined the visual imagery that would make for great photos with our new digital camera. Waves, beaches, flowers. Hmmm. Maybe a calendar.

So yesterday we set off, Tony behind the wheel and me with my eyes closed as we wound up, down and around the B roads of Cornwall. Who thinks these are two lanes wide? What nimnul would actually pass in this passing zone? I tried to stay calm, but at each blind corner I envisaged meeting the tour bus with our number on it.

The wise men and women of St. Ives have arranged a park and ride at the train station outside town. We crawled out of our Vauxhall Vectra and my spirits soared as we strolled through the parking lot to the train platform. A few minutes later Tony and I were taking turns clicking the camera out the window as the Godrevy Lighthouse appeared in the distance.

Off the train we followed the crowd into the town center, slowly inching down the streets, black with tourists, locals, lorries, and cars. Who thinks these are two lanes wide? What nimnul is actually backing up on this bend?

At the tourist office the guide informed us that there is little or no acknowledgement of Virginia’s 13 summers here. Surprisingly, Talland House, which the Stephen family leased each summer until their mother died, still stands and is rented out for self-catering. If only I’d known.

The guide marked the site on the 20p town map, and I searched the postcard racks for a picture of the lighthouse. None. These people are missing out. No ‘Virginia Woolf walks’ in the evenings? No ‘To the Lighthouse Gift Shop’?

We followed the convoluted streets with the help of the guide’s instructions to go up the steps. And up. The hill. The steep, steep hill. With (thankfully) one-way traffic crawling up behind us.

Full buses went by, but how do most people get around here? The driving is impossible, the narrow streets barely navigable for us in sturdy walking shoes. This fault of nature certainly hasn’t diminished the crowds.

The houses clinging to the hill were built for middle class Victorian and Edwardian families escaping summers in London, and are now probably owned by economic refugees from the City with more money than time. At one point I flailed about, exasperated, trying to match the three-dimensional slopes under my feet with the two-dimensional paper representation in my hands. Tony helped.

We found Talland Road. Which one is Talland House? No blue plaques here. Which one has ‘the gate…the carriage drive…the little flight of rough steps…a chink in the escalonia hedge,’ as Virginia described it in her journals? None. One was obviously too modern; the others—maybe. I had arrived unprepared.

‘Which one is it?’ asked Tony.

‘Don’t know,’ I admitted. So I took pictures of all of them, from all angles. I turned around and took pictures of the view. Could you actually see the lighthouse from here? Its beam wouldn’t have shown through the family windows, that’s for sure.

Whichever house it is, the view is spectacular.

But the most striking feature to me was not the lighthouse, nor the view, but getting there and back. How on earth did her mother do this every day? In the novel, Mrs. Ramsay, aged 50, strolls in to town as though it is an easy horizontal. This is a 90 degree hike. My over-50 knees felt it. My arthritic mother, who barely passed 50, could never have visited, let alone lived here, even for a summer.

We walked back down into the town center with the rest of the tourists. Found a pub, the Golden Lion, old enough that Virginia’s dad Leslie Stephen could have stopped in for a pint. Looked as tho it hadn’t been cleaned since then too. Had a diet Coke while we studied the train schedule. Tony risked one pint knowing I would take the first stretch of driving on our way back.

We surrendered to the crowd heading towards the bay, with never even a glimpse of the Tate St. Ives museum on the other side. More pictures of the beach, the lighthouse. No shots of local painters that I had hoped would illustrate Lily Briscoe cleaning her brushes. Maybe we could come back another day, by train, instead of risking the treachery of the Cornwall roads.

Back in our Vectra, I took the wheel as planned. It would be a dual carriageway for a while; I can do this.

But as soon as the A road narrowed, we found a parking area so Tony could take over. I crawled into the passenger’s seat, rather than open the door into traffic. Tony got out for a cigarette, and then walked around to the driver’s side as a six-wheeler rolled by. I remembered my mother confiding to me the fear she had experienced one night, stuck on the side of the road in a storm with my dad fixing a flat tire. ‘He scared me half to death, out there in that traffic. My heart was in my mouth,’ she said. ‘Oh, mum,’ I moaned, dripping teen age disgust. Now I felt her paralyzing fear of loss. What if something happened to him? What would I do, trapped, on this height, this hill, without him?

We arrived back safely at the Penrose, the rain just beginning. We transferred the pictures from the digital camera to the laptop, deleting the totally useless. We heated up the chicken, and fell asleep with red wine and BBC.

This morning, while Tony drove to the shops three winding miles away, I stayed in bed with my tea and continued the book. Underlining the imagery in part three, The Lighthouse, I now connected it with my pictures. ‘…like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window…’ ‘…of cliff, sea, clouds and sky brought purposely together…’ ‘…the Lighthouse looked this morning in the haze an enormous distance away…’ Maybe…a calendar.

Tony arrives back, bringing French bread, train times, and cash from the ATM. This is what Virginia referred to as ‘the eruption of Sidney’—the distraction of having anyone around when trying to read, or write, or paint, like Lily Briscoe struggling to finish her painting, despite Mr. Carmichael dozing nearby.

I read through the last few pages quickly. The Ramsays get to the lighthouse, of course, Dad with his two piss-faced teenagers, thinking, ‘I have reached it.’
‘It was done; it was finished,’ thought Lily as she lay down her brush.

They are frozen in time, and on safe ground.

The Dublin Day

2009-02-22T06:28:00.000-08:00

This piece was written after my visit to the fabulous Yeats exhibit at the National Library in Dublin.

So I said to My Irish Husband Tony, ‘You want to be in Ireland for Dallan’s first birthday, I know. But we’re allowed to be tourists, too. After we stay out in County Cavan with Naomi and Neil, let’s book into beautiful Howth, right on Dublin bay, for three days, two nights.’

The family time overlapped into our romantic getaway, but, after babies and dogs, I had one day, all day, for the rest of Dublin to myself. Tony wanted to spend more time with his daughters, so drove off for the suburbs and points north. I walked from our Howth B&B to the DART station to go into city center and visit some exhibit about Yeats I’d found listed on the internet.

The train from Howth to the city sped past the rich houses of Sutton and the less rich houses of Raheny. The Irish have come through unprecedented (for them) prosperity in an unprecedented (for any Western country) short time. Dublin’s streets teem with immigrants moving in and emigrants finally coming home. There are lots more cars now, fancier cars funded by fancier jobs.

I got off at Tara Street Station, to head to the exhibit at the National Library, up Pearse Street, passed Trinity College. But it had been so long since I’d been in the town center. Which way was Kildare Street from Dawson?

Found it. Up the steps, where the poet ‘AE’ (George Russell) first met a young James Joyce and advised him to ask Lady Gregory to fund his trip abroad. The security guard motions me into the room on the right. Admission free.

There were a few display cases with facsimiles of letters from the 19th century. (Will libraries of the future ever display e-mails?) Interesting. But these aren’t from Yeats. Wait—the exhibit is through there.

I enter a huge room, broken into smaller cubicles, each one chronicling a different aspect of his life. I am surrounded by W B Yeats’ words.

In front of me is a bench to sit on while watching his poetry projected as Irish actors read his lines. Over there are photos of his unrequited love, Maud Gonne, six feet tall and stunning. On the wall next to her hangs framed fabric with Celtic lettering embroidered by his sisters along with pastel portraits painted by his brother.

The next room is plastered with Abbey Theatre posters while a documentary runs on a monitor. Photos of the lake isle of Innisfree succeed one another while Yeats’ own gravelly older voice reads his younger poetry. A display case holds the joint passport issued for him and his wife Georgie to travel to Sweden to accept his Nobel prize. (‘How much?’ he asked, when he got the call.)

All the rooms are brimming with his words, his poems, his plays, his prose. Projected on the floor and walls, overlaying images from his seven decades.

I emerge invigorated. This is the feeling I remember having in Dublin when I was still discovering it, seeking out the places where Yeats and his contemporaries wrote and talked and argued.

After cleaning out the gift shop I head for the downstairs ladies’ toilet. Whoa! Bright white and green mosaics on every wall! Is this some Edwardian tiler’s fantasy of Ireland? How did I miss this in my previous walks?

Back out into Kildare Street, I make my way through the tourists clustered outside Trinity’s gate, and the newly affluent Dubs sunning themselves in Temple Bar outdoor cafes.

After crossing O’Connell Street Bridge, I push my way up to the Ambassador theatre which is now filled with rock concerts—but only Megadeath is marked ‘Sold Out’—towards the Gate theatre, showcasing Noel Coward.

On to the Writers’ Museum, for a frittata in the café and another gift shop spending spree. For my journalist niece I buy a collection of Flann O’Brien’s (Miles na Gopaleen’s) columns for the Irish Times. He writes about ‘the brother.’ Tony always says, ‘The brother wouldn’t eat an egg.’ The egg doesn’t bother me, but why the ‘the’? ‘The Phoenix Park’? ‘The Commitments’? Must be some Gaelic code.

I walk back downhill to Parnell Square, where Yeats restrained Maud Gonne from rushing out to address the crowds in the Jubilee Riots of 1897. ‘What will you say to them?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know until I get there!’ she answered.

The city is ‘changed, changed utterly.’ But, it’s the same Dublin, the same characters. The kids who had fluorescent hair before anyone envisaged a mohawk. The mammies trudging home with the messages in a cart. The old fart riding a bike with his butt crack hanging out.

Joyce didn’t have to make anything up; he just wrote it all down.

It’s still Yeats’ Dublin. Joyce’s Dublin. My Dublin.

W B Yeats and Maud Gonne

2009-02-22T06:25:00.000-08:00

This originally appeared in an Irish-American e-mail newsletter, based on a talk I gave for the Hollywood, FL, ceili association.

Conor Cruise O’Brien has said that Ireland owes a large debt to Irish patriot John MacBride. Besides giving his life for his country, he married Maud Gonne. If she hadn’t jilted Yeats, we wouldn’t have his beautiful poetry: “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams” (“He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”).

Maud Gonne, six feet tall and gorgeous, arrived on Yeats’ doorstep in a thunderclap in 1889. Sent by a political friend of the 34-year-old poet, she got him even more politically involved. Like the guys who went to 60s peace rallies to pick up chicks, in his new political fervor Yeats wrote Countess Cathleen for her.

Gonne was devoted to Irish independence—although she was British. Her claim to Irishness was a 16th century relative who had immigrated. That wouldn’t even get her a passport today.

During the 1897 Jubilee Riots, she and Yeats were in a club in Rutland (now Parnell) Square. He locked the doors so she couldn’t get out until she explained what she would do, but she told him, “How do I know till I get there?!”

When you visit Parnell Square, find the Dublin Photographic Society, just to the west. Ask to see the life-size photo of Gonne they have on the wall.

Willie kept proposing; Maud kept refusing. After the Jubilee Riots, Yeats met Lady Augusta Gregory and they planned their theatre to present plays based on authentic Irish tales. In summers at her Coole Park, Gregory pulled him to art while Gonne pulled him to politics.

About to start a lecture in Dublin in 1903, he received a message that Gonne had married MacBride to spite her French lover. At that moment a hurricane hit Coole Park. Its devastation was nothing compared to the turmoil Gonne’s marriage caused him. Willie told her marrying him could have spited the Frenchman as well.

MacBride was an abuser, and Lady Gregory encouraged her to divorce the drunk. Eventually they separated, and eventually, yes, Willie and Maud did have sex. When MacBride was assassinated after the Easter Rising, Maud donned widow’s weeds and became Ireland’s La Passionara.

“Easter 1916” brought Yeats’ poetry and his politics together. He described those killed, including

A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;…
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Rebuffed by Gonne yet again, he asked, “What about your daughter?” Maud laughed, saying, “Ask her.” Although Iseult had a crush on him, she refused him too.

Friends, agreeing he needed a wife, introduced him to George Hyde-Lees. They married in 1917, with Ezra Pound as best man. On their honeymoon Georgie miraculously developed the skill of automatic writing, keeping her new husband fascinated. Brenda Maddox’s excellent George’s Ghosts chronicles this very unusual marriage.

Yeats and Gonne saw each other just before his death in 1939. When his biographer interviewed Gonne years later, she read to him these lines:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep…
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
—When You Are Old

Sir Bob Reads Yeats

2009-02-22T06:22:00.000-08:00

This blog is included in my blook, A Yank in Brum, about our relocation to Birmingham, UK, available at www.lulu.com/gypsyteacher.

Last month a listing in the Guardian announced a reading of Lytton Strachey’s letters at the British Library in London. Lytton was one of “my writers,” part of Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury group, so I checked the train schedules, did the math, and quickly computed that the tax-deductible day trip would be worth the time. At the Library I picked up a flyer about an upcoming reading of William Butler Yeats’ poetry by Irish actress Sinead Cusack. tucked it into my diary for future reference.

Still debating whether to go, I saw in the Guardian that Sinead would be joined by two other readers: The actor Rupert Graves and the activist/singer/Irishman Sir Robert Geldof. Now THAT is worth a tax-deductible trip. Even the hubby decided to go.

When booking our tickets by phone, I asked if Sir Bob was really going to show. “He has been a bit busy, hasn’t he?” laughed the operator, understating his ubiquitous presence on British media this past week promoting his Live8 concert. “Will there be protesters?” I asked, hopefully. “I don’t think so. He’s done things for us before and it’s always fine,” she added.

So after packing up turkey sandwiches and mini-Snickers, Tony and I hopped the bus to the train today, using tokens from the Birmingham Post to buy two return tickets for ten pounds each. We ate our lunch on the Chiltern Railway special to London Marylebone and I corrected a few papers to assuage my guilt. We arrived two minutes ahead of schedule at 3:59.

Having done this same trip just a few weeks before, it was easy to catch the right Tube to King’s Cross/St. Pancras, and make our way through the construction of the new Euro tunnel station to the British Library. We had a light supper at a nearby bistro, and then soaked up the rare English evening sun outside the Library’s conference centre.

Tony saw him first. There was Sir Bob, walking alone, talking on his mobile, heading into the building for the gig. Black cotton top, white cotton pants. Does he own a comb?

From our vantage point in the last row we had a good view of the crowd, a mix of little old lady book club members and young groupies. Were they here for Sir Bob or Rupert?

The hostess introduced the three well-known participants, but not herself. Because it was billed as the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour, we were supposed to recognize her as Josephine. She introduced Geldof by saying, “We called him because we felt sorry for him. He seemed to have nothing to do this week. So we said, ‘Come along Bob and read some Yeats.’” He looked down at his black binder modestly, laughing along with the crowd.

Having her name above the title also gave Josephine the right to inform us, between readings, about Yeats’ life in relation to his poetry. She intimated that all her information came from just one recent biography. Ha! Amateur.

From up in peanut heaven we could see lovely Sinead’s dark roots. Her light Irish accent was the perfect touch for the brief early love poems—

That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.

Rupert’s upper class British whine was suitably sombre for “Friends”—

And what of her that took
All till my youth was gone
With scarce a pitying look?

But Sir Bob’s low-key, south-Dublin, nasal tones gave the perfect emotional intensity to Yeats’ paeans to his life-long unrequited love, Maud Gonne—

I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread upon my dreams.

And…

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.

And…

O she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.

But I’m partial to Dublin men falling hopelessly in love with their women anyway.

Then came the section devoted to Yeats’ political poems.

Geldof gently mourned, “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone.
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”

And lamented,

But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.

Then, leaning forward, elbows on knees, he repeated, slowly, intensely,

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

You could feel Yeats’ passion for the rift that turned Ireland from one of the Lesser Colonies of Britain into an independent, intense, emotional republic.

As they left the stage, Sir Bob graciously gestured to allow the ladies to exit first, and Tony said, “C’mon. I want to see this guy.”

I assumed he would be surrounded by hangers on and groupies, and we didn’t have anything for him to sign, but I followed my Irish husband’s lead. There was Bob, over in a corner, just one or two people around him. As soon as the blonde guy monopolizing him moved away, Bob went to leave, and Tony moved in.

“Bob. I’m from Dublin.”

Smiling, more grizzled and grey than we are, even though about the same age, Sir Bob stopped and shook our hands.

“I thought that was fabulous. Congratulations,” Tony said.

I added, unnecessarily, “I did my research on Yeats. Your ‘Changed utterly’ was perfect. I could hear old Willy rattling in his grave.”

“Well, thanks,” he said. And moved on.

As we walked out, I said to Tony. “When Pope Benedict canonizes him, you can tell your granddaughter that you shook his hand.”

On the train back tonight I asked Tony for some background about his fellow Dub.

“He went to Blackrock College in South Dublin.”

“So is he uppity?”

“Yeah. Well, I think he actually was expelled from Blackrock College.”

“What did he do before he started saving the world?”

“He hung around a lot of clubs in Dublin and started the Boomtown Rats in 1978, ‘79. They were punk, sort of. They had two number one hits.”

“Hum them.”

“’I Don’t Like Mondays,’ and I can’t think of the other one. Then he went to London and hung around with other guys. And then he saw this documentary about the starving in Ethiopia and so he decided to do Band Aid.”

“Bono is from north Dublin. Did they know each other before?”

“In his book Geldof says that Bono came over to him at an event and said, ‘My name is Bono…’ back before anyone had heard of U2.”

“So what do the Irish think of Geldof?”

“Well, y’know. Secretly we’re really proud of him. But we’re a nation of begrudgers. So we always have to say, ‘Aaah, y’know, he’s just a bollocks.’”

When we got back to Birmingham, Tony texted his son in Galway to tell him that he’d met Sir Bob.

Stay tuned.

Mid-town Manhattan, 1919

2009-02-22T06:19:00.000-08:00

This is intended to be part of the book "Such Friends," about all four groups, which is a work in progress.

Alexander Woollcott arrived home from France on June 3rd and resumed his pre-war job as the New York Times drama critic. Soon after, a press agent, searching for a way to promote his young client, playwright Eugene O’Neill, called on a mutual friend to set up a lunch with Woollcott at the convenient Algonquin Hotel. At lunch, Alex, who weighed only 195 for the last time in his life, had no interest in talking about anyone but himself and his recent exploits in the ‘theatre of war,’ of which he was inordinately proud.

To get back at Woollcott for monopolizing this meeting, and to get more publicity, the public relations flacks decided to invite other well-known critics from New York’s many publications to a big gathering at the Hotel. There were 12 dailies in Manhattan and five in Brooklyn at the time. When 35 people showed up, the hotel manager put them at a big round table in the back of the dining room.

Dorothy Parker was invited as the drama critic at Vanity Fair, and she insisted that her new co-worker Robert Benchley come. Heywood Broun and his wife were there. Parker had met him, a vague acquaintance of her sister, one summer a few years before. FPA was invited because he was a personal friend of Woollcott. Marc Connelly and George S Kaufman, who were already writing partners, were not there the first day, but started coming by soon after. Harold Ross was also a later ‘founder.’

However, many things about that inaugural lunch are vague. When it was over, either the PR people or somebody said, ‘Why don’t we do this every day?’

And so they did, for the next nine years.

The Armory Show, 1913

2009-02-22T06:16:00.000-08:00

This is intended to be included in the book, “Such Friends,” about all four groups, which is a work in progress.

New York City, Spring 1913

All the buzz was about the Armory Show. From mid-February to mid-March cars and carriages pulled up in front of the 69th Regiment Armory at Lexington Avenue and 25th Street, loaded with people eager to see the first International Exhibition of Modern Art. Office girls came on their lunch hours; working class families came on weekends; the social elite came again and again. They stared and laughed at the horrors they had read about in the press. Was it Nude Descending a Staircase? Or Staircase Descending a Nude? Who
could tell?

The more sophisticated, who thought the Impressionists were the latest thing, were surprised to find that indeed the Post-Impressionists were now the rage in Europe. One of the most well represented artists was Cezanne, in Paris considered an old master by now; the most talked about was Matisse; and that “Paul” Picasso? Just plain crude.

Dorothy Rothschild—“No, we’re not related to those Rothschilds”—at the age of 20 was on her own in her hometown of New York for the first time. Her father died that year. She got a job using the skills she had learned at finishing school, playing the piano at a dancing academy. When she was younger, she and her father had written nonsense poems back and forth to each other. Now she was trying light verse, sending it to the newspapers and magazines that published that sort of filler, hoping she would get her name in print.

Robert Benchley, newly married and relocated to Manhattan from Boston the year before, was doing “settlement work” on the Lower East Side, though he really wanted a writing job. He was looking forward to a meeting with a magazine editor that a friend had arranged.

Before the end of the decade, Rothschild would become Mrs. Parker, go to work on Vanity Fair with Mr. Benchley, and begin lunching with a group of writer friends every day at the nearby Algonquin Hotel.

Paris, Spring 1913

The art dealers in Paris were awaiting the verdict from New York. How would the wealthy American collectors react to the paintings in the Armory Show? Would they really pay $48,000 for a Cezanne? Hundreds of dollars for drawings by the young Spaniard, Pablo Picasso? And the show organizers were going to send some of these off to other cities—Chicago! Boston! What were they thinking? The few Americans who came to Paris to buy were always shocked by what they saw in the dealers’ galleries. How would they react when they saw the same works lined up with the latest by their own American artists?

But indeed, seven of the paintings were actually lent by Americans living in Paris. Gertrude Stein and her brother, originally from San Francisco, with the help of a friendly collector, had used their family money to put together a collection of works they personally felt a connection with—Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso, Braque. They enjoyed meeting the painters and talking to them in their salon at 27 rue de Fleurus. Late at night, Gertrude would sit at a desk in front of the paintings and try to create in words what the artists were creating on canvas. A few of her attempts at translating Cubism into prose had been published in the States recently and were being publicized as part of the Armory Show.

Another San Franciscan, Alice B. Toklas, had come to visit a few years before and then moved in with Gertrude. She had quickly taken on the role of handmaiden to the writer, cooking, cleaning, typing. Their relationship had grown so close, that Gertrude’s brother felt he had to move out. Soon.

Gertrude and Alice would soon tire of the painters. At the beginning of the next decade they would begin to welcome writers to their salon: to listen to Gertrude’s theories about English literature, to eat Alice’s little cakes, and to admire the paintings, still hanging on the walls.

London, Spring 1913

Gertrude and Alice were visiting London. They had come to find a publisher for Gertrude’s work, and they spent time socializing with the artists and writers there.

London’s Second Post-Impressionist art show had just closed—early, so that some of the paintings could be sent on to the Armory Show. The second show had a better reception from the average Brit than the first, mounted just two years before. Once the English had gotten used to Cezanne, they were more open to Matisse.

The second show was organized by artists and writers who lived in the Bohemian Bloomsbury section of London. They had come together in the homes of two sisters, Virginia Woolf, married less than a year before, and Vanessa Bell, a painter whose work was included in the London show. Growing up, it was decided early on that Vanessa would be the artist in the family and Virginia would be the writer. Neither had traditional schooling, although Vanessa had attended art school and Virginia had the run of her father’s library. She had had some reviews and small pieces published in local papers, but now she was working on her first novel. The only person she would show it to, and not until she felt it was finished, was her new husband, Leonard.

Her friends were encouraging her; she’d gotten to know them through her brother when he was at Cambridge. All lived in Bloomsbury and got together most Thursdays at Vanessa’s house for dinner, then walk over to Virginia’s for whiskey, buns and cocoa—and conversation and cigarettes late into the night.

Ireland, Spring 1913

In Ireland all the talk was of the recent passage of Home Rule in the British House of Commons. Would this be the first step towards complete independence for the restless colony?

A strong Irish nationalist movement had been agitating for years, through political organizations to keep alive the language, like the Gaelic League, and cultural organizations to keep alive the folk arts of the Irish, such as the Abbey Theatre. The Abbey presented plays in English, but based on Irish folk tales and legends gathered in the west of Ireland.

One of the theatre’s founders, the poet William Butler Yeats, was in England at the time, visiting friends. He was still involved in the operations of the Abbey, but most of the work fell now to his original collaborator, Lady Augusta Gregory. At her house in Coole Park outside of Galway, they had gotten together with friends at the turn of the century to bring their dream of a theatre to life. For six or seven years they had written, fought and worked together, in Galway and in Dublin. Eventually some of the group had gone on to other endeavors, but Yeats and Lady Gregory stuck with the Abbey.

This spring, Lady Gregory was touring the United States with the Abbey. They had had legal trouble in Philadelphia because they had performed the scandalous play, The Playboy of the Western World, but it was nothing compared to the riots that had broken out in Dublin when it premiered there six years before.

But now her trip was almost over. She was in New York where she intended to take in the Armory show. She wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

Summer 1914

A bit more than a year later, the Great War exploded on the continent. Everything changed.

For Yeats, Lady Gregory and their friends in the Irish Literary Renaissance, it meant a distraction from Ireland’s fight for independence from Britain. That would have to wait until after the World War was over.

For Virginia, Vanessa and their friends in Bloomsbury, it meant pairing off with others and moving out of London into the suburbs and country homes. They didn’t see each other as much anymore.

For Gertrude and Alice, trapped in London at the start of the war, it meant a time of feeling truly American. They volunteered for the ambulance services, were decorated by the French government for their efforts, and, after the war was over, welcomed the new American-expatriate writers to their salon.

For Mrs. Parker and Mr. Benchley, it was something to be lived through. Dorothy’s husband was off fighting the whole time; Robert was exempt because of his wife and children in the suburbs. When it was over, other writers who had served, many on The Stars & Stripes, came back to start new lives in a city full of promise that was waiting for them—New York.

In all four places, in four different times, in country homes, in city cafes, in drawing rooms, in restaurants, they got together with their creative friends. They talked, they fought, they wrote, they goofed off—they talked some more.

But each group, throughout the seven to ten years they “hung out” together, became “such friends.”

1906

2009-02-22T06:14:00.000-08:00

This is a blog I wrote when we were in the process of buying our Edwardian house in Birmingham, UK. You can view all of them at www.ayanksearchesforahouseinbrum.blogspot.com.

Our house purchase is moving along at the glacial pace common to transactions in these British isles. Drivin’ me fughin’ nuts.

So while agents and solicitors were doing what they have to do, we went back to Oliver Road again, bringing a house gift of champagne and chocolate for The Happy Seller Family, to measure and chat and take pictures. We still love it.

While we’re waiting, I decided to find out what was going on in 1906 when the houses on Oliver Road were built. I dug out my research on early 20th century writers’ salons and found that it was a momentous year.

In Dublin, William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory (the poet and playwright, not our cats) were having problems in their Abbey Theatre. One of the founders, Douglas Hyde, was in Pittsburgh on his American tour to raise money for the Gaelic League. Another founder, John Millington Synge, had read them his new play, The Playboy of the Western World, but the premiere had to be postponed. They revived his Riders to the Sea, but eventually fighting among directors, actors and playwrights led to a splinter group setting up a separate theater company. That summer Yeats and Lady Gregory met at her house in Coole Park in the west of Ireland to restructure their Abbey under a new director.

In London, Virginia Stephen confessed in a letter to a friend, “I went to a dance last night and found a dim corner where I sat and read ‘In Memoriam’!” Later that year, she traveled to Europe with her sister Vanessa and their brother Thoby, recently graduated from Cambridge. On their return Thoby fell ill with typhoid but was misdiagnosed and died. Two days later, Vanessa agreed to marry her persistent suitor Clive Bell. In Ceylon, Thoby’s Cambridge friend, British civil servant Leonard Woolf, was properly diagnosed and treated for typhoid. But his life there had made him so depressed, he wrote in his diary, “I took out my gun the other night, made my will, and prepared to shoot myself.” Fortunately, an affair with another Brit in the ex-pat community soon perked him up.

In Paris, Gertrude Stein was sitting for her portrait. Frustrated with his progress, Picasso painted out the head and went on vacation in Spain. When he returned and finished the painting; their friends commented that it didn’t look like her; Picasso said, “It will.” And it does.

On April 18th, San Francisco was rocked by a major earthquake. Gertrude’s brother and sister-in-law, Michael and Sarah Stein, decided they had to return to their hometown to check on their property. To impress her friends, Sarah brought with her three paintings by their new Paris friend Henri Matisse, who had recently caused a furor at the Salon des Independents. One young San Franciscan, Alice B. Toklas, who came to see the paintings and hear Sarah’s stories, decided that she had to move to Paris. She wrote later in her “autobiography,” “This led to a complete change in my life...The disturbance of the routine of our lives by the fire followed by the coming of Gertrude’s older brother and his wife made the difference.”

In Illinois and Minnesota, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were discovering girls. In Manhattan, Dorothy Rothschild (later Parker) was sent to Miss Dana’s school; she later claimed she had been expelled from Catholic school for stating that the Immaculate Conception was the result of spontaneous combustion.

Her future Algonquin Round Table members were beginning their careers. Robert Benchley was planning to attend Yale; Heywood Hale Broun was already studying writing at Harvard. Harold Ross, future New Yorker founder, quit school to become an apprentice reporter at the Salt Lake City Telegraph, and Alexander Woollcott was appearing as Mabel the Beautiful Shopgirl with Hamilton College’s Glee Club.

And back in Erdington, UK, the foundation stone was laid for a new library, funded by a Scottish-American industrialist from Pittsburgh like me, Andrew Carnegie. And construction was completed on a row of houses on Oliver Road.

Happy “Bloomsday”!

2009-02-22T06:11:00.000-08:00

This was originally written as a blog as part of my "Every Wednesday" postings, and then adapted for our 2004 tour of Ireland to commemorate the centenary of the founding of the Abbey Theatre and James Joyce’s “Bloomsday.”

Over 100 years ago, June 16th, 1904, during the same summer when Lady Gregory and her friends in Coole Park changed the name of their theatre, James Joyce had his first date with the woman who was to become his wife, Nora Barnacle. He chose to immortalize the day in his epic, Ulysses, which covers every detail of one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a Jew living in Dublin, in only 783 pages.

Many think that June 16th is the date that James and Nora met, but indeed that was June 10th. After coyly putting him off for about a week, she finally agreed to go out with him. If you’ve seen pictures of Nora you know she must have had a wonderful personality.

Joyce was younger than Yeats and his Abbey Theatre friends, and not very admiring of their efforts. He introduced himself to AE one day on the steps of the National Library in Dublin, and after a chat, the poet encouraged the budding novelist to ask Lady Gregory to give him money for his trip to Europe, where he had accepted a teaching position. Reluctantly, she obliged.
.
Soon after he met Nora, James convinced her to come with him to Switzerland. They had two children and visited Paris in 1920 for just a week, but stayed for the rest of his life. Paris has that affect on people. Even the Irish.

The “Joyces” never actually got married until their children were grown. They presented themselves as a married couple and were always accepted that way.

In Paris he continued writing Ulysses and the other writers living there knew that he was working on something big. He didn’t socialize in their salons on the Left Bank. Often he drank alone, breaking into song late at night in the cafés, especially the Trianon. Cab drivers would bring him home, and Nora would be waiting at the top of the stairs, arms akimbo, like a good Irish wife. “Jimmy,” she’d say, looking down on him lying in a drunken heap, “Your fans think you’re a genius but they should see you now.”

When Dorothy Parker visited the city in the 1920s, she saw him on the street but he didn’t speak to her. She explained later, “Perhaps he was afraid he would drop a pearl.”

Before publication, excerpts from Ulysses began appearing in the Little Review in the States, causing quite a stir because of the language. Virginia and Leonard Woolf, operating their Hogarth Press in London, had sent a rejection slip. Reading Ulysses made Virginia feel as though “someone had stolen my pen and scribbled on the privy wall,” she wrote in her diary.

Sylvia Beach, the American who founded Shakespeare & Co., the social center for Paris’ expatriate community, approached him at a party and said, “Mr. Joyce, may I publish your novel Ulysses?” After being rejected by so many who weren’t as adventurous, he was intrigued that this young woman wanted his book.

It took much longer for him to finish than either expected. So for the local artistic community, many of whom had subscribed in response to Beach’s mailed announcement, she held a reading on December 7th, 1921, in her shop. Gertrude Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, didn’t come; they lived a few blocks away but were preparing for their annual Christmas party. When Beach did publish Ulysses the following February, Alice promptly walked over to Shakespeare & Co and cancelled Gertrude’s membership. They would brook no competitors for her title as greatest writer in English.

After publication, Ulysses was promptly banned in Boston, but a friend of Ernest Hemingway’s smuggled a copy into the United States via Canada.

The landmark case that allowed Random House to publish it in the States in 1932 was argued by Irish-American lawyer John Quinn. Like Beach, he is one of the true heroes of early 20th century art and literature. He helped Yeats and Lady Gregory with the Abbey (and had an affair with Augusta later), bought up lots of Cubist and Post-Impressionist paintings in Paris, lent many of them to the 1913 Armory Show in New York, and argued a case for the shows’ organizers that changed the customs law in the U.S. From that point on, works of art less than 100 years old would be free of tariffs, the same as their classical cousins.

In his later days, working on Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce employed another Irish writer, Samuel Beckett, as his assistant, because his own eyesight was so bad. Joyce died in 1941 at the age of 59 of a duodenal ulcer. Nora lived another ten years.

Beach, who had funded the publication of Ulysses on her own with the help of the paid subscriptions, never saw any profit or royalties from it. Her writer friends helped her keep the bookstore open, but when the Nazis occupied Paris she was interned. In the 50s she wrote a lovely memoir called Shakespeare & Co.

When I married My Irish Husband Tony on St. Patrick’s Day, our friend performing the ceremony announced that we each wanted to read something.

Glancing at my scribbled notes, I vowed that I wouldn’t promise to solve his problems, but would help him to solve them. I wouldn’t promise to love everyone he loved, but would always respect those he loved.

I finished with Molly Bloom’s “Yes!” from the ending of Ulysses, but in the emotion of the moment, I misquoted it. So here is the correct ending for Molly and for me:

“…and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

2009-02-14T02:55:00.000-08:00

The Centenary of the Abbey Theatre and 'Bloomsday,' 1904

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This information was originally collected for our 2004 tour of Ireland to commemorate the centenary of the founding of the Abbey Theatre and James Joyce’s “Bloomsday.”

The West of Ireland, Summer 1904

In the big house in Coole Park, a serving girl carried a tray of afternoon tea up the grand staircase, and placed it on the floor outside a bedroom door. Inside was the poet and playwright William Butler Yeats. His friend and hostess, Lady Augusta Gregory, made sure that each day Willie had his tea brought up to him so he wouldn’t lose time on his work. He was beginning a play based on the Celtic tale of Deidre, a popular subject with his friends in the Irish Literary Renaissance.

From the bank of the small lake behind the house, his fellow houseguest and poet, George Russell, always called “AE,” was watching the swans. Earlier in the year, he and Yeats, his friend from high school days, had had a huge row over the operation of their Irish National Theatre Society. As the most well-liked and the most practical of the group, AE had pulled off a major reorganization, forming a limited company with Yeats and Lady Gregory as the directors. Things were running more smoothly now and they were all enjoying this summer at Coole.

As AE headed back to the house to resume his own writing, Douglas Hyde came riding up on his bicycle. Hyde had spent his day cycling around the local countryside, every once in a while pretending that his bike had broken down so he could engage the locals in conversation and record their Irish dialects and stories in his notebook. He had stopped by to see how Lady Gregory was coming on her revision of one of his plays, The Poorhouse.

In another room of the big house, their young friend and fellow theatre director, John Millington Synge, was working on a new play based on his experiences visiting the nearby Aran Islands. His one-act drama, Riders to Sea, had just been produced that February, and the clothes provided by his friends on the Aran Islands had made for truly authentic costumes. Audiences had loved it, but George Moore, one of the founders of the theatre who was now estranged from the group, had dismissed it with a sneer. This time out, Synge was working on a comedy inspired by an Aran story of a man who claimed to have killed his father.

One of the other founders, Edward Martyn, was walking over from Tullira, the large, grey stone house, complete with turrets, he had grown up in. As one of the few rich Catholics in all of Ireland, he had supplied a lot of the financing for the early years of the theatre, while writing and producing plays as well.

Seven summers before, Lady Gregory had first gotten to know Yeats at Martyn’s home, and they had come to Coole Park to lay the plans for a theatre that would present plays based on Irish folktales. This was a radical idea in a time when most contemporary plays concerned members of the British upper classes drinking tea in drawing rooms.

Earlier that year, Miss Anne Horniman, a wealthy Englishwoman with a crush on Yeats, had bought the Mechanics’ Institute and morgue on Lower Abbey Street in Dublin, to give the theatre a permanent home.

Miss Horniman and Yeats gave evidence to get the proper license, and the government granted a patent in Lady Gregory’s name. Although they were all British subjects, only Lady Gregory was an Irish resident. As Augusta later jealously wrote in her journal, “Miss Horniman made the building, not the theatre.”

This summer evening, Augusta had invited them all to gather in her drawing room in Coole Park to discuss the most important piece of business facing their theatre. The first step was to get rid of the confusion of names they had performed under in the past. Now that they had a permanent home on Lower Abbey Street, they would be known as the Abbey Theatre.