Who Am I? July 2024
II was born during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant in western PA to German-Jewish parents, Daniel and Amelia. Dad was a well to do businessman. When I only 3 years old he took the whole family, including all 5 kids, along with our governesses, to Austria for a year in order to absorb some European culture and history.
After our sojourn in Vienna the family moved to Oakland, CA where I actually grew up. Years later, when I returned to locate the family homestead, I found that it had disappeared – the family home had been demolished and the land sold for development. I’m credited with coining a phrase you hear a lot today – “there’s no there there” referring to my lost childhood home. While in Oakland, dad became director of San Francisco’s Market Street Cable Railway Co. The family joined a synagogue in Oakland, but we remained fairly secular.
Unfortunately, both my parents passed away at relatively young ages and I was sent, along with my sister, to my mom’s family in Baltimore. In the early 1890’s I enrolled in the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women where I studied psychology. I became intrigued with stream of consciousness and the layers of personality. I was encouraged to go to med school after I earned my B.A. I then spent 3 years at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine; however, I gradually lost interest and did not keep up my grades and finally quit. Other sources say that I flunked out.
I was very close with my brother, Leo, who was very interested in art. Soon after the turn of the century we moved together to the Montparnasse district on the left bank in Paris. We surrounded ourselves with paintings and artists that included Henri Matisse and Picasso.
In 1907 I met a woman who changed my life. She became my secretary, my companion, my inspiration and my unofficial mate. We resided together in Paris for 2 score years. Probably my most famous and bestselling book was an autobiography of her. Some said the book was probably more a reflection of me than of her. Many years later my mate wrote an eponymous autobiographical cookbook.
I became known as an art collector, a playwright, a poet and a novelist. Critics have called my poems “idiosyncratic, playful and repetitive.” My novels have been characterized as being generally plot free and having only a bare minimum amount of dialogue. The main characters in my novels were usually women who couldn’t or didn’t conform to the mainstream of society because of their ethnicity. Those may be just some of the reasons that I have been identified as being an advocate of avant garde literature and the bohemian community.
During the Great War my significant other and I volunteered to drive supplies to hospitals in France. After the war, our salon became a focal point for the modernist movements in art and literature. Authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway were known to frequent our salon. At our Saturday night gatherings I helped lead the discussions with the artists while my mate played hostess for the girlfriends and wives of the artists.
I am credited with coining the phrase “the lost generation” which has been defined as that generation that came of age during and immediately after the Great War. That “lost generation” was disillusioned with the values, the morality, and the gender roles handed down to them from the previous generation which they felt led to the horror and monumental slaughter that occurred during the Great War. That horrific conflict caused millions of civilian deaths in addition to wiping out a generation of young men.
After 30 years abroad my mate and I were cajoled into returning to the U.S. to tour some 37 cities in 23 states doing a one year public lecture tour. That’s probably how I ended up at Newark airport as seen in the second photo below. My lectures were limited to 500 attendees and I got Random House to publish my future works as a result of agreeing to that tour.
My politics were controversial then and now. I had a strange mixture of both progressive and reactionary views. I was pro-immigrant and pro-democratic yet I was a critic of FDR and the “New Deal.” I supported Generalissimo Franco over the Republicans. I also admired Marshal Petain, a French collaborator with the Nazis, in Vichy France. I even translated his speeches. My own translator and colleague was also a fascist Vichy collaborator and his influence with the authorities is probably what saved my mate and me from persecution and deportation during WWII. Incidentally, Petain was tried for treason after the war, stripped of his rank and honors and sentenced to death. His sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment on the isolated island of Yeu, off the Brittany coast. When his health finally failed he was confined to a hospital there.
I think you know me by now. That’s me as a 3 year old in the first picture below and as a guest public lecturer awaiting a flight at Newark Airport (at what we now call the “North Terminal”) in the second photo.
(1a)Who Am I? (1b)What was the new name of the “Society for the Collegiate instruction of Women” institute where I earned my B.A.? (1c)Who was the psychologist professor who influenced me so much as an undergrad? (2a)For which organization did my mate and I ferry supplies to hospitals during the Great War? (2b)What was the name of my 1930’s bestselling autobiography? (2c) What name did my mate and I confer upon our poodle? (3)My mate and I also had affectionate/pet names for each other. What were they? (4) I was once portrayed in a Woody Allen film. What was the name of that film and who portrayed me? (5) My lifelong mate’s name appeared in the title of a “rom-com” (“romantic comedy”) film released in the late 1960’s. What was the title of that film and who played the part of the attorney, Harold Fine, in the film?
