105. Odds & Ends

KIM: Hi everyone! Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode! I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes. We’re calling today’s episode “Odds and Ends” because sometimes we just have interesting things we want to talk about that don’t necessarily fit under one umbrella heading. So this episode is a hodgepodge, but hopefully people will enjoy it.

KIM: Works for me! Why don’t we start off with some letters because we have a great one in reference to our recent episode on The Gilded Edge by Catherine Prendergast. That book is about the poet Nora May French and also another woman, Carrie Sterling, whom we learned from our guest was not a big fan of another one of our “lost ladies,” Charmian Kittridge, a.k.a. Mrs. Jack London.

AMY: Yes, and so we don’t normally like to pit women against one another but we have a great note from one listener that we just had to share with you guys. She writes: “I would say Charmian Kittredge London had the last laugh. While Carrie was judging her, Charmian was living a life of adventure and great sex. (And let’s face it, Jack was hot).”

KIM: I love it. And actually, I felt kind of defensive for Charmian, too. I get why Carrie Sterling didn’t like her (not to get too much into that episode, you’ll have to go listen to it) but I feel like Charmian made the best of a difficult situation for women in those days. Anyway, we also got a number of letters earlier this spring after our episode with Hilma Wolitzer aired, including one from Brian who writes: “Hilma Wolitzer is one wise and witty woman. You all had great rapport.” And our listener friend Rosemary wrote “Hilma Wolitzer was so gracious and open. So interesting to learn of her life and work. Her positivity is so inspiring!” And that’s just actually a sampling of the amazing notes we got about Hilma. It was incredible getting to talk to her and we loved how excited everyone was about this episode. We were excited too.

AMY: Yeah, one of the highlights of the year, for sure. Hilma is. You can’t not love her.

KIM: Yeah, and in the meantime, keep those emails and messages coming, everyone! We love hearing from you! While we’re on the topic of letters, I really want to go back to our episode on Debora Vogel for a minute. We mentioned her letters to various publishers and editors in that episode, but we didn’t have time to actually read from any of them, and Amy, I think you know which one was my favorite.

AMY: Oh, yes! It was my favorite too! So I think we did mention in that episode, the Polish modernist writer Debora Vogel didn’t really take no for an answer. So a lot of her letters are very overbearing. She was… well, persistent would be the most polite way of putting it, I think. I guess. It would not be a good idea to try to ghost Debora Vogel because she WOULD NOT ALLOW IT. Let me just read the letter that sums this up best. This was written to a Moshe Starkman at the Yiddish Culture Society in New York City:

“Dear Moshe Starkman,

What’s wrong? Even when we don’t have pronounced business interests and the letter does not need to be answered, I am still wondering why you don’t write? Especially after I sent you my picture, a photo of my portrait where I look like a young lady from Tahiti. And I am anxiously waiting to hear what you think! Perhaps you did not receive my letter? Without a doubt, one cannot get letters which were not actually written, but I did write the letter. I have stopped thinking about the trip to America, since you have not answered my query if I can really count on the pay from a talk or literary reading?”.... [she goes on from there…. But how DARE HE IGNORE HER TAHITIAN LADY SELFIE!!!!!!]

KIM: I mean, that is #goals right there.

AMY: I wish I could see the photo!

KIM: Yes. Imagine if you submitted something to a literary zine…

AMY: Or The New Yorker…

KIM: Or The New Yorker. And you just wrote back with that.

AMY: The Tahiti… was that like racy? Like was she in a bikini?

KIM: I’m thinking it must have been.

AMY: It almost seems like it was a bit sexy. Like, “Did you not get my sexy photo of me being a Tahitian lady?” And like how not professional that would be to send that to an editor.

KIM: It’s wild. Wild.

AMY: And I love that she's just so insistent, like, "Maybe you didn't get the letter, but I know I sent it!" Um, oh my God.

KIM: That’s the best. That is.

AMY: Clearly she never read that book He’s Just Not That Interested.

KIM: Oh, He’s Just Not That Into You. I’m not saying I necessarily read that, but…

AMY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you have to admire her gumption. 

KIM: Yeah, completely. And it’s kind of fitting that Vogel was compared to Gertrude Stein, because we also came across a letter that Stein wrote to an editor following an apparent rejection letter, which reads very much like something Debora Vogel would have written. Do you want to read that, too?

AMY: So Stein wrote: “I am sorry you have not taken the poems, for really you ought to. I may say without exaggeration that my stuff has genuine literary quality – frankly let me say the only important literature that has come out of America since Henry James. After all, Henry James was a picture puzzle, but The Atlantic did not hesitate. To be sure, he was connected with the heart of Boston, but, then, I did graduate from Radcliffe, and I was a juvenile pupil of William James, and that combination ought to encourage The Atlantic. During the war I met many and miscellaneous Americans, and I confess I was surprised to find how many knew my work and were interested. The Atlantic Monthly, being our only literary magazine, it really is up to it. I am sending you a few earlier stanzas that may be easier. Do your best for them; it really is important. Before receiving your letter, I had already sent you two more poems. Did you get them? Sincerely yours, Gertrude Stein.

Wow, these ladies!

KIM: Whoa, they’re awesome. Oh my gosh.

AMY: Don’t you DARE reject me, and here’s why! Oh my gosh.

KIM: Wow, wow, wow.

AMY: And I’m gonna throw Henry James under the bus while I’m at it!

KIM: Absolutely. Oh my gosh. I wonder if in the end it actually worked?

AMY: I do wonder. Yeah. Okay, and still on the topic of letters (I guess we do have a cohesive theme for this episode!) but switching gears a little, can we all just agree that people just don’t write beautiful love letters the way they used to? 

KIM: Nope. Definitely not.

AMY: This thought occurred to me while I was reading an old biography of Diana Manners, a.k.a. “Lady Duff Cooper” out of Britain. She was a contemporary of Nancy Mitford, friends with Evelyn Waugh and Winston Churchill and the like. She was basically another one of those “It Girls” of her day, and she’s got that same sort of “Mitford-esque” sardonic wit. But in this biography there were a few of these love letters she received from Duff Cooper before they married. This is actually a 1981 biography written by Philip Ziegler. So I just want to read you one of the letters that she got from Duff just to show you that men don’t know how to lay it on thick anymore, like they used to. So are you ready?

KIM: Mm-hmm, give it to me.

AMY: [reading]

If I were a painter then you would be properly painted. Not once but a thousand times, in every dress you have ever honoured, in every setting you have ever shone in. And if I were a millionaire I would found a picture gallery in which only pictures of you might be exhibited. The gallery would be open only to the nobility and clergy, the entrance fee would be 1,000 pounds and visitors would have to take off their shoes on entering. And if I was an architect I would design that gallery to look something like a church but more like a heathen temple. And the best of your pictures should hang above the high altar where the pale-faced high priest of Dianolatry would worship every hour. And if I were a musician I would make music so passionate that when it poured out of the temple organ it would reach the souls of your thousand idolaters and make them drunk like wine. And if I were a poet I would write psalms and prayers so beautiful and so unhappy that your picture, half intoxicated with the incense streaming up from the censers, would stretch out its hands in pity to the worshippers below. And if I were God I should let all those unfortunates die in the ecstasy of their devotion — all except one who should live for ever after in a palace of pearl and purple with you sitting on a throne of chrysoprase by his side. But unfortunately I am neither artist, millionaire, architect, poet, musician or even God, but only a rather sentimental, shy young man with ambitions beyond my energy and dreams beyond my income. So shall I send you a small box of chocolates, or would you rather have a postal order?

I mean, marry that dude! And she did!

KIM: Oh my god. I’m speechless.

AMY: I mean to think about getting that.  Later she writes to him, (um, so  Duff suggested that one day their letters might be brought together to provide a picture of the age. Alan Parsons perhaps might edit them.): “It is I that must edit them,” replied Diana proudly. “And if I must be old, it is I that shall read them to the envious young, flaunting, excitingly. And when they hear yours they'll dream well that night and waking crave for such a mythical supreme lover.”

So she knew how good his letters were. 

KIM: Oh my God. That is so romantic. Wow. And then they actually did get married.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, she had a ton of suitors. It was kind of like, who's she gonna pick? And he was not the top. He, he didn't seem like the top choice. He didn't have any money.  But he went on to become the English ambassador  in France. So he did well for himself. But anyway, this biography also has a tie in to Daisy Fellowes.  If you remember from our past episode with Lee Lesner, we learned that Daisy was Duff Cooper's lover for a while. So I have a little anecdote from this book. Basically Duff almost immediately  after the wedding, he could not be faithful for one second. He took lovers right away, and Diana knew this. And for the most part, she was actually okay with it so she's like, “That's all right.  If he needs to do that, that's fine.” And in fact, she was even friendly with a lot of his mistresses then, they would hang out together and it was all like perfectly sanctioned. However, Daisy Fellowes was one that she was not okay with. She didn't like Daisy Fellowes. 

KIM: That’s so interesting.

AMY: So I remember back when we were doing that episode and we were talking about how Daisy Fellowes was maligned as sort of like a villainous kind of woman. Diana seems to have thought so.

KIM: Interesting.

AMY: Like, in the later years, like later decades, they were sort of okay with one another, but for someone who was very willing to give her husband to other women, that was where she drew the line a little bit, But it didn't stop him. They were together for a while. And I should note, also, that I got this biography at the little free library around the corner in the neighborhood. What a treasure! You never think you're gonna find anything good in there, but this one little library, the closest one to my house, there must be somebody in the neighborhood that's got my same exact taste because there's always good stuff in

there. 

KIM: I sense a little mystery here! You need to figure out who it is somehow. You need to leave a book that you think they’ll like and put a note in it.

AMY: Oh yeah! Like a little romantic comedy thing.

KIM: Oh, maybe we’ll write another movie based off this!

AMY: I actually did ask Mimi Pond, who lives in my neighborhood. (She was one of our previous guests.) I was like, “Oh, I bet this Diana Cooper book was yours and you put it in the library,” and she's like, “No, I didn't, but let me read it next!” So I have to pass that on to her.

But my thing with little free libraries is I feel like if you're gonna have them, you have to keep it curated. You have to keep it clean. There cannot be like junky Mormon bibles and dumb stuff in there.

KIM: Yeah, you gotta check it and make sure.

AMY: Yeah, keep it nice. Otherwise it just looks like a garbage pile.

In fact, a friend of mine has a little free library and she doesn't live near enough to me to go, but she not only keeps hers pristine, she makes sure it has really good books. She goes to library sales specifically looking for really good books to put in her little free library.

If she finds junk, like… she doesn't even like cookbooks in there.

She takes stuff out and gets really mad if people put junky books in her library. But she stocks it with really good novels.

KIM: I would only wanna do that too. And Eric offered to build one for me. Um, so I've been thinking about what I wanted to do.

AMY: That's Eric just wanting you to get rid of some of your books

in the house. He has an ulterior motive. Come on.

KIM: Right. Oh my God. How did I not see that? That's yeah,

you're probably right. 

AMY: You should still do it, though.

KIM: I should, yeah, I think it would be a lot of fun.

AMY: And speaking of interesting books that we want to read,  a few biographies that actually came out in recent months on some lost ladies of lit I mean, I guess some are less lost than others, but we've got all these books marked as ones that we eventually want to get around to reading. But, um, in the meantime, wanted to let you guys know and give you a heads up.  First off there's Antonia Frasier's book,The Case of the Married Woman,, which is about the early 19th century British writer Caroline Norton and basically the hell that her husband put her through when she tried to obtain a divorce from him. He’s a real asshole. And our pal Laura Thompson also writes about her in her book Heiresses which is another good book.

KIM: Love that book.

AMY: Yeah. But anyway, so Norton was treated so bad by her husband who basically got custody of their children. One of the kids actually died in his custody, so it was really tragic. The trials she went through (and I'm talking literal courtroom trials), led her to write a number of political pamphlets on legal rights for women and  her intense campaigning (she actually even appealed to Queen Victoria about this subject) eventually led to the Married Women's Property Act of 1870 getting passed. And that was a game changer for women. So Caroline Norton,  she was like tabloid fodder while all this was going on, but she did something and, and made the best of it. She did also write a lot of novels. We had kind of been considering her for an episode, but when I looked into the novels that she had written, they kind of seemed maybe a little bit too of their time; a little stodgy and old fashioned for  a modern reader. So, not sure that we're gonna dive into any of her novels, but the Antonia Frasier book sounds really intriguing to learn more about her.

KIM: Yeah. Maybe we'll do a mini episode at some point. if it's not right  for a full episode. Um, another book that we want to mention is a new biography of Jean Rhys called I Used to Live Here Once by Miranda Seymour. It sounds really good.

AMY: Yeah, it sounds like Jean Rhys had a really up and down 

hard life. And I think a lot of her books are semi autobiographical. So it would kind of be interesting to read that bio and read some more of her work. Um, there's also a biography that’s new in the States.

I think it's been out in the UK for a while, but it is  The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym by Paula Byrne.  It would be so awesome to get Paula Byrne on this show for a Barbara Pym episode. I did try reaching out to her a while ago, but I haven't heard back. So if anybody out there has a Paula Byrne connection, let her know we're interested.

KIM: I think I have a book on Jane Austen by her. I know I follow her on Twitter, I’ll see if I can reach out to her that way.

AMY: Okay, it may have just fallen through like i didn’t have the right email or..

KIM: She seems very busy, like she has a lot of fans.

AMY: Yeah. I still want to do Barbara Pym at some point though.

KIM: Yeah. In the meantime, we’ve got a great lineup of guests scheduled from now through the end of this year and beyond. There aren’t enough weeks in a year to fit in all the amazing pitches we’re getting about other lost ladies of lit. We’ll find a way though because so many great things are coming our way! So keep tuning in, and tell your lit-minded friends about us!

AMY: Bye, everyone! Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.