There are probably a thousand fancy guitar-shaped platitudes you could string together to form a wreath to lay at the foot of this painfully grand departure. Parting is such sweet sorrow. Sometimes you have to grow farther apart to keep growing together. Yesterday brought the beginning, tomorrow brings the end but somewhere in the middle…
Trotsky in Brownsville, Brooklyn, February 1917
The mystery is not why Trotsky was at the reception in Brownsville, Brooklyn but who had arranged it. The staff members of Forverts, including its editor-in-chief, Abraham Cahan, were based predominantly in Manhattan. Ludwig Lore, another of his regular contacts at Forverts, was holed-up at 55th Street, some six miles west in Borough Park. Furthermore,…
Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives — The Curiously Quantum World of Hugh Everett III
‘He’s everywhere and nowhere baby. That’s where he’s at. Going down the bumpy hillside in his hippy hat. But though he’s flying around the country, his tyres are never flat.’ Or should I say, in one dimension his tyres are flat and in the other he’s not flying around at all. He’s at home in…
For America: Roth’s ‘Europe’ & Cahan’s ‘The Rise of David Levinsky’
I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn’t—at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn’t—drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound — The…
Modernism under Surveillance. A look at some ‘Literary Bolsheviks’ of the 1920s.
During the war, the essayist and critic H. L. Mencken was quizzed on several occasions about his German heritage and the contact he had with ‘enemy’ oculist Dr Wilhelm Sohler and Victor Hugo Erpf, a Baltimore businessman who had been arrested and imprisoned as a spy in April 1917. By this point in time, Mencken…
Colwell and Young. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s trip to London, November 1925
In an entry in his ledger dated November 1925, Scott mentions his second trip to London. Like previous entries it is difficult to piece together any kind of meaningful narrative from the handful of names and places he lists and much of our understanding of this trip has been gleaned from supporting diary entries made…
The Usual ‘Unusual’ Suspects. The Lindbergh Kidnapping, Arms Deals and a New York Prohibition Scandal.
“I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans.” The Great Gatsby I’d like to go back to another Max Gerlach conundrum. On Max’s 1942 World War II Draft Registration Card, Gerlach…
“God damn the continent of Europe”. F. Scott Fitzgerald letter to Edmund Wilson, Hotel Cecil, July 1921.
A ‘violent’ xenophobic letter written by the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, to his friend Edmund Wilson from the Hotel Cecil in London in July 1921 has been a constant source of embarrassment to his biographers. “The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic Race,” he writes. How much does the letter tells us about…
The Shining Ending, July 4 1921. The Shining, Isolationism and the American Dream
The ending of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining has chilled and intrigued movie-goers for years. In the closing scene of the film the camera moves from Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance sitting upright, dead in the snow, to a gallery of pictures in the ballroom of the Overlook Hotel. On one of the pictures is Jack in…
Designs on Gatsby: Max Gerlach, Francis Cugat and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Max von Gerlach, an associate of author F. Scott Fitzgerald, made regular trips to Havana. At one time, Havana was also the home of Francis Cugat, the Spanish-Cuban artist who designed the famous dust-jacket for Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby. Here we explore the remarkable life of Cugat and the very faintest possibility that…