Tag: Dorothy Parker

A ballast in turbulent times: Soniah Kamal and Shikha Malaviya

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During these unsettled and unsettling times, we’ve been finding solace in the novels we’ve long loved, returning to some of those we wrote about in A Secret Sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf. Who better to chat to this month, then, than fellow fan of Jane Austen, Soniah Kamal, whose latest novel Unmarriageable is a retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in Pakistan. Soniah introduced us to poet, Shikha Malaviya, who is currently working on a novel. The candour of their conversation made us to feel, for a moment, as if we’d all gathered in one room.

Sonia Kamal and Shikha Malaviya – long-distance friends

How did the two of you meet, and what were your first impressions?

Soniah:  Shikha founded and edited Monsoon Magazine, a literary journal dedicated to showcasing South Asian writers. I was impressed with the quality of work and submitted a short story. Shikha accepted it and gave me an editorial call in which we discovered that we had a lot in common. Even though Shikha is from India and I’m from Pakistan, we’ve both spent formative childhood years in those countries as well as in England. We’d both married young and moved to the US, and we have children, our sons the same age. We’d both grown up on similar authors and books. We bonded instantly. Because of Monsoon Magazine, I already knew that Shikha cared about literature and new voices, but she also turned out to be smart, warm and gentle, funny, no-nonsense, and honest. We laughed a lot and really connected over literature and life both on and off the page. I remember hanging up and feeling like I’d known Shikha forever. Fifteen years later, I know I was blessed to have met Shikha. I always wonder what might have happened had she rejected my story!

Shikha: I first met Soniah through her story, ‘Call Me Mango’, which she had submitted to Monsoon Magazine. In it, Soniah had subverted many of the common themes in South Asian immigrant literature and I wanted to find out more about the person behind the story. It didn’t matter that Soniah was Muslim and I was Hindu or that our countries were always at war with each other in one way or another. We talked on the phone as if long lost sisters. The week after, she came over with her kids and since then, we’ve been a part of each other’s lives through every good and bad moment, every good and bad word written. In Soniah, I found a best friend and colleague who is blunt, courageous, brutally honest, funny, talented, hard working, sensitive, and always there, despite my numerous moves. I’ll never forget how she called every single day after my father passed away, despite her being in Atlanta and my being in India, and her youngest child barely a few months old.

What do you particularly admire about each other’s writing?

Shikha: Soniah is a brilliant writer who takes no shortcuts when it comes to writing about difficult things and I really admire that about her. She often writes about things that people like to avoid or are too scared to write about. There’s a raw honesty in her work that is rare to find these days, especially so in Soniah’s essays. Also, Soniah’s psychological insight into her characters is amazing along with her ability to make connections that are unique yet very insightful. If you read Soniah’s short stories and novels, you’ll see how she is able to balance all the elements that make a good story – plot, pacing, setting, narrative arc, and above all voice. All her characters are heard.

Soniah: I was drawn to Shikha’s poetry because of her stunning imagery and her subject matter – hyphenated identities and homelands, displacement, the ability to sensitively layer women’s experiences and emotions. Shikha is working on a novel right now and what I’ve read so far is breathtaking. She’s really able to take her poetic language to write stellar character descriptions and even do some awesome things with pacing through images. She can capture an entire universe in one image; I really don’t know how she does it, but the result is magical.

Do you share each other’s unpublished writing?

Soniah: We absolutely do critique each other’s work and also offer suggestions, run ideas past one another and give encouragement on days when we get the writer blues. I have great respect for Shikha’s craft skills and tastes so trust her judgment implicitly. It’s a huge relief when I send her something and she says she likes it. We’re very upfront if something not working for us and we end up laughing about our duds. At one point, I planned to set part of my novel An Isolated Incident in a pet shop. I told Shikha, who’d already read myriad drafts, my brilliant idea, and her groan alone and ‘please don’t do that’ was enough to deter me but also I realized how absurd the idea was and it’s till a running joke.

Shikha: It’s amazing we aren’t sick of each other’s writing yet! We share things for feedback almost every week. We’ll send each other stuff and then text each other to follow up and then a phone call, which often leads into other tangential conversations. Soniah’s advice is often about me having to expand on things, and mine usually involves her cutting down. We complement each other by coming to the table with different literary/editorial strengths. We’ve learnt together and learnt from each other, and I hope that continues for many years to come.

Which female author from history or female literary character would you have liked to have as a friend? 

Soniah: Any author who sees through pretense and speaks up about it. Jane Austen of course would be very entertaining with her wit as would Ismat Chughtai. As for literary character, it’s a toss up between the speaker in Dorothy Parker’s poem ‘One Perfect Rose’ and Melia in Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Ruined Maid’. They’d be droll and perceptive and great fun.

Shikha: To meet an author is one thing, to have one as a friend…There are many who I would have loved to have had as a mentor: poets Eavan Boland, Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks. But perhaps the 16th-century Hindu mystic poet Mirabai would have been a great friend – to see her world of devotion and revel in it. She lived life on her own terms in a world that was deeply patriarchal.

How have the unprecedented times we are living through in 2020 impacted your lives as writers and friends?

Shikha:  Our friendship is a constant in this turbulent time. Just before the shelter-in-place orders kicked in, Soniah and I attended the Association of Writers and Writing Programs‘ conference in San Antonio. For the past few years we had been meeting and rooming together for this conference, and with the threat of COVID-19, we knew that it might be a while before we met up again. We showed up for each other in a way.

Soniah: Except when we first met and lived within driving distance of each other for six months or so, Shikha and I have never lived in the same place, so we’re used to talking over the phone. I think what has become even clearer is the realization that life can be cut short and that brings with it an urgency to focus on the things that are important. In these precarious times, Shikha is my ballast – but then she always has been.

Soniah Kamal is the author of novels Unmarriageable and An Isolated Incident. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram: @SoniaKamal. Her website is: soniahkamal.com

 

 

Shikha Malaviya is the author of poetry collection Geography of Tongues, and publisher & co-founder of literary press The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective. You can follow her on Twitter: @ShikhaMalaviya. Her website is: shikhamalaviya.com

For me she is not dead: playwright Julia Pascal on war correspondent Martha Gellhorn

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In the lead-up to Julia Pascal’s new play Blueprint Medea, running at London’s Finborough Theatre from 21 May to 8 June, she lets us into the secret influence of Martha Gellhorn on its most powerful scene.

Some of you might remember that Pascal reviewed our book A Secret Sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf for The Financial Times, calling it ‘an exceptional act of literary espionage’. We were delighted to receive this endorsement from a writer whose stage plays we had long admired for their daring representations of female friendship.

It is a particular pleasure, therefore, to welcome Pascal to Something Rhymed.

Who has been my most important female literary friend?

Martha Gellhorn, in later life.

Martha Gellhorn.

It was 1990. I was writing a drama about the Nuremberg Trials. Someone told me Martha Gellhorn had attended them. I knew of her fame as the most important female war journalist of her time but I had no idea that she had seen the architects and perpetrators of the ‘Final Solution’.

I called her, introduced myself and asked her to lunch. I don’t lunch, she told me, I drink.

She invited me to her Eton Square apartment. Everything was white. The sofa, the carpet, her sleek hairstyle.  She immediately harangued me about my wild curls. Can’t you do something with your hair?  We drank whisky. She smoked. She spoke about war, travelling, writing. And, of course, the man she hated being associated with, Ernest Hemingway. After a few meetings, she told me that Hemingway was a lousy lover.  She talked about marriage as a terrible idea. Don’t. You end up quarrelling about the gas bills.

Gellhorn would send me postcards in those days when letters were written and stamps were bought, and I saw her intermittently as I was conducting my own difficult love affair with a man in France.  Yes, we did marry. No, we did not quarrel about the gas bills.

But in other ways I followed her lead. What did she teach me? There were forty years between us. I saw a woman who was unafraid of offending. I saw a woman in her eighties still madly in love with the craft of writing even though her sight was limited by macular degeneration. I learned from others who knew her that she was both feared and admired, and I liked her say-it-as-it-is attitude.

Julia Pascal in the early 1990s, around the time when she first met Martha Gellhorn.

In my new play Blueprint Medea, there is an unexpected female friendship. Set today, Medea, a Kurdish soldier flees imprisonment in Turkey and arrives in Heathrow on a forged passport. She works illegally as a cleaner in a gym where she meets Jason-Mohammed, the son of an Iraqi taxi-driver.  They have a similar Muslim background but their cultures and philosophies are different.  Medea, a Kurdish Muslim, has become politicised by the PKK.  She is an atheist and a feminist. Jason believes himself to be a secular Londoner but, during the action of the play, is sucked back into conservative Middle Eastern values.

When his father forces him to marry his cousin Glauke, Jason is made to believe that Medea, as a Kurd, is the ‘wrong tribe’.  Euripides’ play Medea kills Glauke by sending her a poisoned wedding dress. In my version, Medea deflowers Glauke and, in doing so, suggests that she is freeing her from the strictures of Islamic patriarchy. By placing her finger in Glauke’s vagina is Medea committing violence or freeing Glauke from the Islamic marriage market?

Did meeting Gellhorn provoke me to write this unusual scene?

Gellhorn and I did once connect in the most visceral of ways. I was at her apartment once when I felt menstrual blood seeping through my skirt. I excused myself. But before I could finish cleaning myself up, Gellhorn was forcing me out of her bathroom. Making straight for the toilet, she fished out the tiny offending tampon. As I looked on from the hall, it struck me as extraordinary that the great war correspondent was touching the tampon that had just been inside me, that she was plunging her hand into the essence of my womb.

Her aggressive yet liberating act did not mark the end of our friendship. The last of her communiqués was Come over and tell me how your career is going.

I was busy with a production and did not reply. I did not realise this was her last postcard to me. I did not know that she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It was years after her death that I learned this command was her way of organising goodbyes to friends before her carefully planned suicide.

No longer would I go over to her white flat, taking with me packets of smoked salmon – there was never food in her apartment. No longer would I see her watch television and shout at the injustices of the world or hear about her snorkelling in Eilat with her brother. Until long after her death, I didn’t even know that, like me, she was Jewish. Why did she never mention that?

I was brave when I met Gellhorn: her influence has made me braver. This has led to a kind of wildness in my writing of female friendships. I like to think that Gellhorn would have enjoyed Blueprint Medea and the two huge female characters I have created. I wish she were still alive to be there on the first night.

She would tell me that women don’t behave that way. She was no feminist and female solidarity was not her world. And yet, because of our friendship, my impulse to write strong female characters has intensified.

For me she is not dead.

Julia Pascal is a playwright and theatre director. She was the first woman director at the National Theatre with her adaptation of Dorothy Parker’s prose and poems in the Platform Performance Men Seldom Make Passes. She has been produced in the UK and internationally and is published by Oberon Books. In 2016 she completed her PhD at the University of York. She is a Research Fellow at King’s College, London University. Currently she is researching a new play on a meeting between American philosopher Hannah Arendt and German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon in France 1940.

You can book tickets for Blueprint Medea via London’s Finborough Theatre, where it will be running from 21 May to 8 June. We’ve already got our tickets, so do say hello if you spot us there.

If you too have an idea for a future Something Rhymed post, please do get in touch. You can find out more about what we are looking for here.

 

 

 

Dorothy Parker and Elinor Wylie

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Regular Something Rhymed readers will remember Kathleen Dixon Donnelly’s post on Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein (and Alice B. Toklas). For our last post of 2018, Kathleen has written a follow-up piece on another absolutely fascinating literary friendship.

Dorothy Parker purportedly said, ‘The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.’ Well-known for her nasty comments about anyone who had just left the room – sometimes before – she didn’t forge many strong bonds. But she rarely said anything negative about her female friend, poet and novelist Elinor Wylie.

Both were born in New Jersey to affluent families, Wylie eight years before Parker.

In the first few years of the 20th century, Parker—then Rothschild— was struggling with guilt over her hated stepmother’s sudden death, and writing poems about dogs to her father. She left Catholic school, later claiming she was fired for insisting ‘that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion’.

Dorothy Parker.                                      This image is in the public domain.

Meanwhile, Wylie—then Hoyt—eloped with an emotionally unstable Harvard graduate, but soon found herself being followed by an older married Washington attorney, who encouraged her poetry. She abandoned her husband and son to run off to England with the lawyer, where they lived under assumed names.

By the time war broke out in 1914, Wylie’s husband had committed suicide and her new partner’s wife had agreed to a divorce. Returning to the States, the socially ostracised couple moved from city to city, and Wylie suffered two miscarriages, as Parker would later.

Now that Parker’s father had died, she was teaching dance classes on the Upper West Side and sending couplets to the most popular newspaper column in the city, ‘The Conning Tower’ penned by FPA (Franklin Pierce Adams). By 1917 she had talked herself into a job at Vanity Fair, and by the 1920s, she was writing for all the main periodicals, lunching and drinking regularly with the writers of the Algonquin Hotel’s Round Table.

220px-Elinor_Wylie
Elinor Wylie This image is in the public domain.

Wylie had dumped her second husband and moved to New York City with incoming husband number three, who, in his role as founding editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, helped her burgeoning career as a poet. When they married in 1923, she dismissed their friends’ misgivings by saying, ‘Yes, it would be a pity that a first-rate poet [Wylie] should be turned into a second-rate poet by marrying a third-rate poet.’

The women became good friends that same year, and Parker was soon going to the Wylies’ impressive apartment to write. By this time, Parker was free-lancing, and it was Wylie who had now talked herself into a job (as poetry editor) at Vanity Fair.

In May 1925, Wylie and Parker were invited to Connecticut for the wedding of Parker’s mentor and fellow Round Table member, FPA, along with other writers working on the newly established New Yorker magazine. Wylie insisted that all continue the party at her nearby country home. Passed out on the couch, Parker was devastated to wake up to the voices of Wylie and another guest whispering about the scars on Parker’s wrists left by her recent suicide attempt.

At the end of the following year, Wylie had an opportunity to come through for her friend. Parker showed up early one Sunday morning at Wylie’s Greenwich Village townhouse, talking about trying to kill herself again. Wylie calmed her down. This was one of the only times Parker talked to someone about suicide before she tried it.

Wylie’s brother and sister, in addition to her first husband, had also killed themselves. She wrote to her mother, ‘I suppose Dottie thinks we are experts on the subject!’

Fittingly, Parker’s first collection of poetry, Enough Rope, was published the next month, dedicated to Wylie and containing Parker’s most well-known poem, ‘Resumé’.

Wylie’s poetry was totally unlike Parker’s short, witty quips. Wylie favoured more traditional wording and structure, and, obsessed with romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley, she wrote two novels fantasising that he had been reincarnated.

Having suffered from high blood pressure and migraines most of her life, Wylie was staying with her by-then estranged third husband during Christmas 1928. When he brought her some water, she wryly remarked ‘Is that all it is?’ and dropped dead from a stroke at age 43.

On hearing of Wylie’s death, Parker was so distraught that she found herself rendered temporarily mute. But her late friend continued to speak to her through the words of ‘Anti-Feminist Song, For My Sister’ – her poem addressed to Parker, which was published in the New Yorker shortly after Wylie’s death. ‘I am I,’ Wylie had written, ‘and you, my darling;/Someone very like myself.’

A few years later, during Parker’s visit to Venice with friends, Wylie apparently spoke up again from beyond the grave. When the holidaymakers started playing with the latest craze, a Ouija board, a spirit identifying herself as Wylie began talking about such gruesome crimes and poisonings that the group became quite scared – an apt end to a friendship founded on death, despair, and the darkest of wits.

 

Written by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly, who runs the blog Such Friends, and is working on a book ‘Such Friends’: A Scrapbook Almanac of Writers’ Salons, 1897-1930. You can follow her on Twitter @SuchFriends

Edited by Clêr Lewis. Clêr has an MA in creative writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is  working on her first novel.

Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein (and Alice B. Toklas)

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Regular readers of this blog will perhaps remember Alice Fitzgerald’s post on the friendship between Pratibha Parmar and Alice Walker, edited by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly. Today, Kathleen writes a post of her own for us, edited this time by Clêr Lewis. We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.

If this inspires you to get more involved with Something Rhymed, please find further details here.

Gertrude Stein by Carl Van Vechten, 1934. (This image is in the public domain.)

Think of ground-breaking writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) — a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, like me — and you automatically think of her life partner, Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967).

From the moment Stein and Toklas met, in Paris in 1906, their joint biographer, Diana Souhami, writes that they ‘never travelled without each other or entertained separately, or worked on independent projects’.

Very romantic—but, didn’t they have any woman friends?

Both were great friends with many writers—mostly male—who admired Stein’s work, including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Female acquaintances would come to their salons on the Left Bank in the 1920s, but most were the wives of the writers.

Another American who became well known for her 1920s Greenwich Village salons was Mabel Ganson Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan (1879-1962), daughter of a wealthy Buffalo businessman, widowed and married again before she was 26. Dodge’s first husband was killed in a hunting accident, leaving her with a young son. To pry her away from an affair with a Buffalo gynaecologist, her family sent her to Paris. On board ship she met a rich Boston architect, Edwin Dodge, and they married two years later, establishing a fabulous home, Villa Curonia, in Florence.

MAbel Dodge
Mabel Dodge Luhan by Carl Van Vechten, 1934. (This image is in the public domain.)

In 1911, Dodge visited rue de Fleurus, in Paris, to meet Stein and Toklas. The Dodges in turn invited their new friends to their ornate Italian home, and there Stein began writing A Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia. She developed an essay technique by adapting what Cezanne and other painters had done in the portraits that she had bought to adorn the walls of her salon. Stein wrote, ‘Pablo (Picasso) is doing abstract portraits in painting. I am trying to do abstract portraits in my medium, words.’

Stein wrote late at night, in her room next to Dodge’s. As Mr Dodge was away, his wife invited her children’s 22-year-old tutor into her bedroom. Stein incorporated overheard sounds into her portrait: ‘So much breathing has not the same place where there is that much beginning. So much breathing has not the same place when the ending is lessening. So much breathing …’ Dodge was thrilled.

Toklas was not.

Dodge had felt Stein warm to her and became a bit flirtatious. As she described in her memoir: ‘Gertrude sitting opposite me in Edwin’s chair, sent me such a strong look over the table that it seemed to cut across the air to me in a band of electrified steel—a smile traveling across on it—powerful—Heaven! I remember it now so keenly! (Alice walked out.) Gertrude gave a surprised, noticing glance … and followed.’ Stein came back to say that Toklas wouldn’t come to lunch as, ‘She feels the heat today.’

Alice B. Toklas by Carl Van Vechten, 1949. (This image is in the public domain.)

From that moment, Dodge felt that Toklas kept them apart. But for the next twenty years Dodge and Stein wrote to each other.

Back in New York, divorced from her husband, holding political salons and having an affair with radical, communist journalist John Reed, Dodge became involved with the organizers of the 1913 Armory Show, the first major exhibition of European and American modern art in the States. Dodge had had a few essays in Alfred Stieglitz’s intellectual photographic journal Camera Work, so the Armory Show’s publicist asked her to write a piece about Gertrude Stein’s avant-garde style for a special issue of Arts and Decoration magazine.

Dodge obliged with ‘Speculations, or Post-Impressionists in Prose’, comparing Matisse and Picasso’s work in paint with Stein’s in print. Stein reacted with delight: ‘Hurrah for gloire! Do send me half a dozen copies … I want to show it to everybody.’

From then on, Stein’s name was associated, both seriously and satirically, with the cubists.

When Reed went off on his communist adventures, Dodge married a painter, Maurice Sterne, following him to Taos, New Mexico, where they established an artists’ colony. By the mid-1920s, Dodge had dumped him and married a Native American, Tony Luhan. They hosted many of the decade’s leading artists and writers, including D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda.

Meanwhile, in Paris, Stein and Toklas were welcoming a new generation of Americans who were taking advantage of a cheap franc, cheap food and cheap wine.

Dodge helped Stein get her work published in the States, but Stein didn’t hit it big until, in six weeks in 1932, she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas because Toklas wouldn’t. American friends encouraged them to come on a US lecture tour, starting at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan. When they arrived, newspaper headlines proclaimed: ‘Gerty Gerty Stein Stein Is Back Home Home Back.’

Dodge urged the pair to come to her in Taos. Or they could visit her home in Carmel on the California leg of their trip.

Toklas said no.

When the first volume of Dodge’s memoirs, Intimate Memories, was published in 1927, reviewing it in The New Yorker, Dorothy Parker was underwhelmed: ‘It may be in her forthcoming volume, when she gets into her stride of marrying people, things will liven up a bit.’

In later volumes, Dodge treated her friend Stein well, but described Toklas as sinister, and concluded ‘I missed my jolly fat friend very much.’

 

Written by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly, who runs the blog Such Friends, and is working on a book ‘Such Friends’: A Scrapbook Almanac of Writers’ Salons, 1897-1930. You can follow her on Twitter @SuchFriends.

 

Edited by Clêr Lewis. Clêr has an MA in creative writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is  working on her first novel.