20th Century Girl

Sunday Mar 30

by

Wrote to Henriette (the 20 C. girl)
a letter, asking for admission
into her circle of intimate friends.
She got me thinking of something

Visited Sister Clara at hospital
in afternoon saw the baby.

Saw some friends during day
in evening had a little
sociable game at my house
with Blaustein Friedman and
Zichlinsky.

The operas heard last
night were L’Cock D’or and
L. Oracolo

—————–

Matt’s Notes

I’ve found Papa’s writing style for the last couple of days to feel particularly formal, but this one really rings of 19th Century drawing-room drama. What does he mean when he says he wrote a letter to Henriette “asking for admission into her circle of intimate friends?” Has he given up on his prospects with her, or is this a euphemism for a love letter? (If it was a love letter, I wonder if it was euphemistic and oblique itself, or if he came right out and declared his intentions.) And why has he decided to refer to her by name, at last, instead of as the “20th Century Girl?” Is it just easier to write, or does it reflect his desire for deeper intimacy?

Questions, questions. Still, his abandoned sentence in the first paragraph — “She got me thinking of something — intrigues me most of all. What “something” did he decide not to write about? Or did he just cut his thought short because he needed space to talk about the other events of the day?


Monday Mar 31

by


What keep me at home for
an entire evening, the radio.

In my quest for a rest of
my longing soul there is no
better remedy as the radio
The fascinating music, and
other features.

I heard just new, Rubensteins
Romance which was wonderful

—–

Henriette will undoubtedly
answer my letter, I am
anxious to see what she will
write.

It’s her kind that appeals
to me, but has a poor dog [like me]
a chance? Is a girl even of
her type ripe enough to see
my qualities, and truly love
me despite my poor standing?

Heard Sleeping Beauty Tchaikovsky
Waltz

———-

Matt’s Notes

Papa’s fascination with the radio may seem quaint, but it fairly represents the excitement most radio listeners felt in 1924. Up until then, wireless broadcasting had been a tool for a military and a toy for amateur enthusiasts who were willing to build their own transceivers and spend their days and nights sending, receiving and praying for a signal. If Papa came to America in 1913, it would be eight more years before he’d see an all-in-one radio set in a shop window, and still another year before the radio business really took off.1

So, when he wrote this entry Papa was still discovering, along with broadcasters, advertisers and artists, what the medium could do. That’s not to say it wasn’t widespread — I just mean it had exploded before Papa’s eyes as a commercial and social force in the same way the Internet exploded before our eyes in the mid 1990’s. In describing how the radio distracts him, however incompletely, from his woes, Papa may have shown us an early prototype of the lonely guy who sits and home, channel- or Web-surfing while everyone else is out having fun.

Speaking of which, the song this “poor dog” listened to, “Rubenstein’s Romance,” was a classical piece by Anton Rubinstein properly called “Romance in B-flat, Op. 44, No.1.” A popular adaptation known as “If You Are But a Dream” became a Frank Sinatra hit, and though this didn’t happen until the 1940’s I think the lyrics sum up Papa’s feelings about Henreitte:

If you are but a dream, I hope I never waken,
It’s more than I could bear to find that I’m forsaken.

If you’re a fantasy, then I’m content to be
In love with lovely you,
And pray my dream comes true.

I long to kiss you but I would not dare,
I’m so afraid that you may vanish in the air,
So darling, if our romance should break up,
I hope I never wake up, if you are but a dream.

I long to kiss you but I would not dare,
I’m so afraid that you may vanish in the air,
So darling, if our romance should break up,
I hope I never wake up, if you are but a dream.

——————–

Additional Notes and References:

1 – This is very roughly condensed from information presented in Erik Barnouw’s A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933.

————————

Music:

Wendesday Apr 2

by

Movie & home
Sent home to parents $10.00

It is funny how I am trying
to pass my idle hours,
nothing seems to cheer me.

Its a period of one great
longing for me.

—————-

Matt’s Notes

Movies Papa might have seen in this day included:

  • Sporting Youth, a car-racing comedy starring Reginald Denny (“a good-looking, virile young man who does not overact,” according to the New York Times)
  • Try And Get It, a farce about competing salesmen, accompanied by a short film of boxing match recreations called Great Moments in Great Battles (the latter sounds more interesting to me)
  • Woman to Woman, a Moulin Rouge drama with Betty Compson condemmed by the Times for its overuse of rain effects, a bad habit perpetuated, unfortunately, by modern movies
  • Three Weeks, an adaptation of an Elinor Glyn novel by the same name (Papa probably saw this if he was in the mood for a first-run movie at a big movie palace, since it was playing at The Capitol Theater, one of his preferred venues)
  • Beau Brummel, starring John Barrymore in the title role and Mary Astor as Lady Margery
  • Virtuous Liars, a light comedy dismissed by the Times as “a modern entertainment, the story of which does not bear close scrutiny.”

Papa’s local theaters like the Loews Delancey or the Clinton Theatre probably showed movies a few weeks after they had opened rather than first-run movies, so if he was in the mood to pass his “idle hours” in the neighborhood he might have seen:

  • The Covered Wagon
  • America
  • Secrets
  • The Thief of Bagdad
  • The Ten Commandments

And for those of you just joining us, note that Papa’s $10 disbursement to his family back in the old country was larger than usual. He was no doubt worried about his father’s ongoing convalescence from an injury sustained in a fall a few weeks earlier. This, along with a bevy of romantic woes including his infatuation with an aloof woman named Henriette, would have contributed to his ongoing malaise.

—————–

Additional notes

We’ve talked about the Loews Delancey Theatre and Clinton Theatre before. Both were within walking distance of Papa’s apartment on Attorney Street.

Sunday Apr 6

by

All day long real April showers,
Spent a great deal of my time
at home, pasting in some
new pictures in my album,
which contains episodes of my
broken romances, looking them
over a thought comes to my mind
of a happiness that would have
been, but most of my tragic
episodes will probably never
be recorded in pictures.

Spent the remainder at
some Zionist districts in
a most monotonous mood.

Always blues, blues, even the radio
is sending me blues through
the air.

Henriette did not yet answer my letter
She is slowly drifting out of my mind
like many others who dissappointed
me.

—————-

Matt’s Notes

Internet access is spotty for me today, so I’ll post this entry without comments for the moment (though the image of Papa sitting at home, pasting photos in an album and listening to the blues while torrential rain falls outside may speak for itself).

Update 4/7:

Jim, who runs the music department here at Papa’s Diary Project, says that if Papa heard blues on the radio in 1924, there’s a good chance it was something by Bessie Smith. Here’s a sample of one of her big 1923 hits called “Down Hearted Blues” from Last.fm:

And here’s a 1923 recording of “Who’s Sorry Now” from Archive.org:

Sunday Apr 27

by


Again an unexpected
dissappointment by Henriette
By something unforeseen
she could not join me to the
party at Shapiros,

I went alone, but not the
only one to come alone.

It was a kind of reunion
of old times in my group
and credit to Shapiro for the
wonderful arrangements.

————-

Matt’s Notes

For those of us who have been following the story of Papa and Henriette, a.k.a. “The 20th Century Girl,” the disappointment she caused him is hardly “unexpected,” but then again neither is his willingness to be surprised by her unreliability.

She had proved, again and again, to be aloof and shallow, a poor Jew with sophisticated pretensions and little regard for Papa’s gentle advances (in his typically courteous, old world way, he courted her with a night at the opera and mailed a follow-up letter to declare his affections). Yet Papa, who never held grudges, who believed that people would, if given the chance, eventually show their good sides, does not judge Henriette harshly, does not seem angry even though she had accepted his written invitation to Shapiro’s party a week earlier. He even manages to put a good spin on it — “I went alone, but not the only one to come alone” — and thus absolves her further.

A reporter interviewed me about this site a couple of weeks ago and asked what similarities and differences I’ve discovered between myself and Papa. It’s not an easy question, because one point of this project is to figure out how, if he died when I was four, I can figure out whether he was a genuine influence on me, whether I can evolve into the same kind of adult he did. Yet I do know I’m far less forgiving of Henriette than he was. I get furious when I read about her behavior. And so I wonder if that capacity for forgiveness, which makes it so difficult for him to finally dismiss Henriette and see her as the highly flawed, unimpressive person she is, is another quality that, like Papa’s idealism, has a dual edge.

On the one hand, Papa allows himself to feel disappointed and stung by people when they don’t behave as he hopes they will. Constant hopefulness cannot help but lead to frequent disappointment. Yet it prompts me to ask a variation of a question I posed a few weeks ago: when does hopefulness, which makes a young man suffer the pangs of naiveté, evolve into something so useful that it allows a grown man to live so remarkably? For his hopefulness and generosity of spirit is also what made him such a memorable, positive and serene person, someone who lived through the traumas of his generation yet conducted himself without bitterness or resentfulness, someone who so affected me before his departure in my fourth year that, thirty-six years later, I search his diary every day for the feel of his presence, even though I can hardly remember the sound of his voice.

Friday Sept 12

by


Went to Miss S.S. a
fine type of a girl, I wish
I had some affection for
her, went with her to the
park (Prospect), and another
picture of flaming youth,
by just getting friendly
with her.

The Enchanting atmosphere
in the stillness of the night
tempted me to take her in
my arms and kissed her.

Flaming youth

Nettie made an appointment
for me without my knowledge, but
I could not keep it as I had the above, the
girl came, according to
Nettie, she is a very pretty girl,
she will come again.

————-

Matt’s Notes

The expression “flaming youth” sounds like one of Papa’s own romantic turns of phrase, but it’s actually a reference to the title of a racy novel and its 1923 film adaptation. The story deals with the romantic trials of Pat Fentriss who, among other things, gets involved with her deceased mother’s ex-lover. The movie “endeavors to establish that young men and maidens wild are going up in the smoke of their own cigarettes,” said Time Magazine‘s film reviewer, who nevertheless found it “rather ingenious.”

Flaming Youth became a sensation partly because its relatively unknown young lead, the proto-flapper Colleen Moore, launched an era-defining trend by appearing on screen with bobbed hair. Moore became an immediate superstar and went on to appear in dozens of films, remaining “at the vanguard of fashion’s first revolution of the 20th century as skirts rose above the knee, bosoms vanished and waistlines slid down to the hips,” according to her New York Times obituary. While her name isn’t as recognizable as those of other silent greats, it’s easy to see from the clip below why she was so appealing:

Anyway, Papa’s feelings about such modern women were subject to change. To call a woman “naive” was one of his higher compliments (though he could also use it disapprovingly) and he hated a party earlier in the year because it was full of “wild women” and “Jazz babies…none of that good type which appeals to me and [is]so rare among women.” Later on, though, he became infatuated with a woman he nicknamed “The 20th Century Girl” because he admired, among other things, her “passion for cigarette smoking,” and still later he battled turbulent, mixed feelings for his distant cousin Clara and her outspoken, seductive ways.

It would be easy to say his standards were inconsistent because, like most mortal men, he had no standards that a pretty face couldn’t derail, but he really might not have known where he stood regarding the emerging flapper phenomenon. He was certainly possessed of an old-world, formal approach to courtship, and he disliked men who took advantage of women and “did not act gentlemanlike.” Also, at age twenty-nine in an era when twenty-nine was not so young, Papa may have had trouble embracing emerging dating habits and meeting the expectations of younger women who wanted to act like Colleen Moore.

Papa mixes tenses in this paragraph so I can’t tell whether he actually kissed “Miss S.S.” in Prospect Park or if he was just tempted to, but to even think about kissing a woman he didn’t feel strongly about clearly threw him for a loop and sent him searching the popular vernacular for the right words to describe it. The expression “flaming youth” was obviously in circulation by the time Papa wrote this entry1, and the way he repeats it makes me think he was either taking it for a test run (as he did with the phrase “date her up” a few days earlier) or was genuinely amazed by the bold, permissive world in which he now found himself.

—————

Additional references for this post:

  • 1 – “Flaming Youth” would also become the title of a Duke Ellington song, a Kiss song, and the name of Phil Collins’ first band.
  • Colleenmoore.org – As you would imagine, this site has everything you want to know about Colleen Moore
  • Flaming Youth’s synopsis at allmovie.org. Alas, it looks like only a short piece of the film survives.