Not only does the F.B.I. accidentally refer to Ray Bradbury as “Roy” for the first five pages of his file, but they spend 40 pages investigating his potential trip to Cuba. The F.B.I. suspected Bradbury had attended the Cultural Congress of Havana five years after President Kennedy’s ban on travel to the embargoed nation. The file notes that Bradbury told the F.B.I. he did “not possess informant potential, in view of his occupation as a freelance science fiction writer.” However, the F.B.I. continued to view him as a threat, noting his significant influence as a writer and as a guest of a Women’s Legislative Action event in 1968. In true F.B.I. fashion, there’s also a thorough biography of Bradbury that goes as far as to trace his ancestors back to their arrival in Salisbury, Massachusetts in 1630.
The investigation was eventually closed after the bureau examined Bradbury’s passport file and found that he had never applied to travel to Cuba — let alone actually travelling to Cuba. The F.B.I. also recognized that Bradbury had been “extremely successful in the writing field.”
‘Complimenti, you bitch,’ wrote Ezra Pound to Eliot in 1922 upon reading a near-final draft of his friend’s latest work, which Pound had edited. ‘I am wracked by the seven jealousies.’ Pound – no slouch in the poetry department himself – knew not only that Eliot had just given the emerging Modernist literature movement its standard bearer, but that he had just read what would surely become known as one of the greatest poems of the 20th century. Sure enough, it did.
The masterpiece – about the devastating aftermath of the First World War – defied convention as it weaved different voices, to explore themes of trauma, disillusion, and death, wrapped in the barbed wire of Eliot’s electrifying intellect. With The Waste Land, he lay waste to old notions of poetry’s role as an art form, and changed the way it was written forever.
Colette (full name: Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) was the ultimate literary renegade who both outraged and intoxicated turn-of-the-century Paris with her technicoloured personal life. She was an author, a poet, a memoirist, a feminist icon and a prolific journalist who trapezed between all manner of subjects from trench warfare to domestic abuse, fashion to faking orgasms.
But her novels are what have best withstood the tests of time, and Cheri was her masterpiece about a beautiful ageing courtesan’s affair with a gorgeous but selfish much-younger man. In a review in 1929, TIME magazine described her style as ‘distinguished for presenting the human side of animals, the animal side of humans.’ It is a sumptuous tale of repression, scandal, sex and desire that rattled Parisian society by the bed boards, not least because it was one of the first novels of its kind to celebrate female sexuality as it ages.
The F.B.I. has an entire file based on several strange phone call received by William Faulkner’s wife Estelle in 1956 and 1957 regarding her husband. One of the callers identified himself as A.B. Stein, claiming that he had information regarding Estelle’s husband and a Jean Stein that could be had for $500. (William was known for having extramarital affairs, and Jean Stein may have been no exception.)
William Faulkner told the F.B.I. that he had a hunch it may have been a young writer whom he had offended in the past and claimed that he and Jean Stein were just close friends with “mutual interest in radio, television and literary matters.”
A ravishing tale about desire and betrayal in upper-class New York, Edith Wharton’s literary groundbreaker won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, making her the first woman ever to do so. It tells the story of Newland Archer, an aristocratic young lawyer, and his boring but beautiful bride-to-be May Welland, as they prepare for their wedding.
But when May’s exotic cousin Ellen materialises from Europe, having fled her failed marriage to a Polish count, Archer’s loins are activated by her worldly ways. He must make a choice: should he bow to societal strictures and marry a woman who bores him half to sleep, or to a femme fatale to whose flame he is intoxicatingly drawn?
Henry Miller earned the first 10 pages of his F.B.I. file for supposedly expressing Nazi sympathies during a guest lecture at Dartmouth College: “Subject believes Nazis are decent people and that he likes collaborationists.” The F.B.I. caught wind of this through Albert Kahn, who had attended the lecture, harassed Miller and written an article in The Daily Worker insulting the “phony writer” for being a fascist, anti-Semitic propagandist and a former labor spy. On more personal notes, Kahn claims that Miller’s “first wife supported him by being a prostitute” and that the professor who had invited Miller to speak was “a devoted member of the Miller cult.”
That last assertion triggered a chain of accusations about the “Miller Cult.” An article in Harper’s entitled “The New Cult of Sex And Anarchy” portrayed Miller as a Big Sur guru. Another piece appeared in theSan Francisco Examiner a month later, titled “Group Establishes Cult of Hatred in Carmel Mountains” and identified Miller as a cult leader.
Despite the accusations, all the F.B.I. was able to dig up from witnesses was that Miller was “strictly the artistic type” and “could very easily be called ‘screwball’ by people who didn’t understand or appreciate his writing.”
The Bloomsbury Group was a small, informal association of artists and intellectuals who lived and worked in the Bloomsbury area of central London. Most prominent of these was novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf. In all, only about a dozen people at any one time could have called themselves members of the group. Beginning shortly before 1910, the Bloomsbury Group gathered at irregular intervals for conversation, companionship, and the refueling of creative energy. The members of Bloomsbury, or “Bloomsberries,” would more or less maintain allegiance to their mutual philosophy of an ideal society, even through a World War and three decades of tectonic shifts in the political climate. They had no codified agenda or mission. They were not political in the ordinary sense of the word. Most importantly, there was no application or initiation required to become a member. Bloomsbury was an informal hodgepodge of intellectual friends, and one either merited inclusion to that circle or one did not. No rules of order, as in a committee, governed the way in which Bloomsbury managed their interactions. Instead, they held impromptu dinners and gatherings where any number of topics was the subject of serious discussion and contemplation. These intellectual exchanges served as the main influence on later work by individual members. By no means were all members in full agreement on all subjects. Some of Bloomsbury’s most stimulating ideas and writings were borne out of internal disagreement and strife. One can safely say that each member of Bloomsbury was leftist in his or her politics, although as individuals they expressed their politics in very different ways.
A significant fact about the Bloomsbury Group is that the members, for the most part, did not achieve their greatest fame until later in life. The Group held its discussions and parties while all the participants were still virtually unknown. The men of Bloomsbury were students at King’s College and Trinity College, constituents of Cambridge University. They were almost all high achievers and active in student life, yet one must imagine that they didn’t quite fit in as well as other students. Many of the Bloomsberries held particular ideas on human society which at the time seemed beyond radical. For example, the noncritical assessment of homosexuality, however appropriate today, was considered a serious moral error in the early twentieth century. Indeed, many of the Bloomsberries called into question the idea of traditional monogamous marriage. Several advocated for and practiced polyamory – multiple, consensual romantic partners. The idea of this level of sexual liberation in Edwardian England was unspeakable. In a sense, they made it very easy for their generation to dismiss them as quacks and deviants. However, none could deny that the Bloomsbury Group brought a great deal of intellectual clout to bear on any issue of the day.
The de facto leader of the Bloomsbury Group was Virginia Woolf, born Adeline Virginia Stephen, who descended from an eminently Victorian and moneyed household. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was an accomplished writer, and most certainly a powerful influence on his daughter’s intellectual development. Upon his death in 1904, Woolf and her two brothers, Thoby and Adrian, moved into a dwelling in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London, and thus the foundation of the Group was firmly in place. Woolf was a gifted writer from her earliest years. Her essays, such as A Room of One’s Own, are cornerstone pieces in the history of feminist literature. She also wrote extensively on more strictly literary topics, and her theories on fiction have continued to draw the attention of critics. The novel, though, is where Virginia Woolf found her truest and most natural form of expression. Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, showcases the full range of her talents, as well as demonstrating the effervescent stream of consciousness style for which she was famous. Without a doubt, the writings of Sigmund Freud made a profound influence on the artist Virginia Woolf, but she gave her creative outputs a vitality entirely her own. There is poignancy to Woolf’s characterizations that raw psychoanalysis does not achieve.
In “The Flapper,” Dorothy Parker shares the wild charisma of a young woman in the 1920s by describing her actions as well as reactions from others. As stated in the poem, “Her golden rule is plain enough- just get them young and treat them rough,” the flappers’ only rule was to have no rules. This is important because the carefree nature of the flapper was envied by their fellow young women, admired by gentlemen and frowned upon by elders. Parker explains this by saying that “Her girlish ways make a stir… All tongues her prowess herald,” this proves that they didn’t go anywhere unnoticed. Whether she received a good reputation or bad; she just appreciated the attention. Because of the line from the poem, “She’s not what grandma used to be, you might say, au contraire,” meaning that while times were changing, women were as well. This demonstrates that Flappers were independent, original women. They were nothing like past women of America; they created a new outlook, and with that, a new era. The individuality and strong traits of these young women are that of what inspires girls today to be one of a kind, powerful people.
The Flapper – by Dorothy Parker
The Playful flapper here we see, The fairest of the fair. She’s not what Grandma used to be, — You might say, au contraire. Her girlish ways may make a stir, Her manners cause a scene, But there is no more harm in her Than in a submarine.
She nightly knocks for many a goal The usual dancing men. Her speed is great, but her control Is something else again. All spotlights focus on her pranks. All tongues her prowess herald. For which she well may render thanks To God and Scott Fitzgerald.
Her golden rule is plain enough – Just get them young and treat them Rough.
Parker’s file began in the 1930s, according to The New York Times, when an anonymous source reported she was contributing to a communist movement. Parker’s work with the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, which the House Un-American Activities Committee considered an anti-Catholic communist front “masterminded by Jews,”also caught the F.B.I.’s attention in the 1940s, following a number of events to raise funds for medical supplies, ambulances, hospitals and orphanages to assist refugees of European fascism. The F.B.I. went so far as to save the entire guest list of JAFRC’s “Free People’s Benefit Dinner” at the Beverly Hills Hotel on July 2, 1942.
Altogether, the bureau kept a watch on Parker for 25 years, during which it accumulated a 1,000-page dossier on the author.
Insults from an era of quips and wit, “before” the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words:
“He had delusions of adequacy ” Walter Kerr
“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”- Winston Churchill
“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. – Clarence Darrow
“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”-William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”- Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)
“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.” – Moses Hadas
“I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.” – Mark Twain
“He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.” – Oscar Wilde
“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one.” -George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill
“Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second… if there is one.” – Winston Churchill, in response
“I feel so miserable without you; it’s almost like having you here” – Stephen Bishop
“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.” – John Bright
“I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.” – Irvin S. Cobb
“He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.” – Samuel Johnson
“He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up. – Paul Keating
“He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.” – Forrest Tucker
“Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?” – Mark Twain
“His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.” – Mae West
“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” – Oscar Wilde
“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination.” – Andrew Lang (1844-1912)
“He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.” – Billy Wilder
“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But I’m afraid this wasn’t it.” – Groucho Marx
The exchange between Winston Churchill & Lady Astor: She said, “If you were my husband I’d give you poison.” He said, “If you were my wife, I’d drink it.”
“He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.” – Abraham Lincoln
“There’s nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won’t cure.” — Jack E. Leonard
“They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.” — Thomas Brackett Reed
“He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them.” — James Reston (about Richard Nixon)
Mark Bere Peterson’s Counterculture, Urban Legends, Paganism & Witchcraft 