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The Indigestible Years

Part II: Chesley at the Chelsea (1922-1925)

The 20s were a period that F. Scott Fitzgerald would describe on one drunken jag as: "a frickin' good time people!"

Emily returned to North America just as the jazz age was heating up. But in London, Ontario, one would never have guessed it was a period that F. Scott Fitzgerald would describe on one drunken jag as: "a frickin' good time people!"

Mirroring the state of her innards, the rambling mansion on Princess Ave. had fallen into serious disarray. Her housekeeper, Miss Beasley, had been a contemporary of Emily's who did not share the freakish Flannigan genome; she had died at some point in Emily's 1919 round-the-world journey, and had lain undiscovered for nearly four years. Between her moldering corpse, a family of racoons that had taken up residence in the cellar, and leaky fuel tank in the Flannigan Flyer, the house was somewhat pungent.

To Emily, it seemed as though it couldn't possibly get worse. It was precisely at that moment when she received the following telegram:

Dearest Emily. Am trapped inside the head of George Wenige. Gather the CU and rescue me. Love. M. O. Venery

Emily dutifully visited Venery at the asylum, bringing along a couple of her old activist friends. It seemed that the former Secretary General of the Canadian Congress of Speculationists had gone barking mad, as he was convinced that he was in the "bicycle hell" of George Wenige's cranium. (8) Venery told his visitors that he was made to ride an absurdly small tricycle around a circus ring from noon till midnight, after which, he was lashed with un-inflated bicycle tubes, all inside the confines of George Wenige's head. Venery's psychosis was an unprecedented one, and there was little that modern science could do for him, though Venery did suggest that if Wenige's head was removed from his body, he might be able to escape through the exposed trachea.

M.O. Venery was convinced that he was in the "bicycle hell" of George Wenige's cranium.

Emily commissioned a paper-mache head from a local artist, and presented it to Venery. Unfortunately, news that London resident Frederick Banting had just won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin had just been announced, and Venery was now convinced that he was trapped inside Banting's pancreas with a small white mouse called Hervé. She did not visit him again, but she sent regular shipments of cheese until Venery's death in 1928. (9)

After a year of airing out the mansion on Princess Ave., Emily sold the property for a tidy sum -- adding to her considerable wealth from the few successful Flannigan patents. She prepared to leave London, Ontario for good. The bright literary lights of New York city beckoned, and Emily heard their call, their enticing aroma, their delicious mixed metaphors:

Perhaps I can make a new start in the capital of the Jazz Age. Mr. Fitzgerald is doing interesting things with his prose, and I've heard that he is quite Norse-looking. I seem to have the Troubles under control now, so perhaps it is time to put the old fight with the British patriarchy aside, and see what this new sophistication in America is all about. I must remember not to take my traveling flask with me in the Frolics trunk, though. . . (10)

Emily stayed in London until the dedication of University College and the Middlesex Memorial tower at The University of Western Ontario, and then made her way for New York.

Eschewing standard modes of transport, Emily signed on as a wingwalker with a group of barnstormers known as the Flying Freakshow. She worked the barnstorming circuit in a World War I Curtis Jenny, (11) and kept her distance from "Igor, the Human Wind Sock".

After an adventurous season moving ever-eastwards with the Freakshow, Emily arrived at New York on Christmas eve, 1923.

That very evening she met a young woman, who reminded Emily of herself in her younger days (minus the thong of course). This nubile lass, Anias Nin by name, was visiting a "friend" at the Hotel Chelsea when she ran into Emily. The fell into a fast friendship, and Anais helped Emily find a publisher in town. Filled with the vibrancy and promiscuity of the jazz age, Chesley decided to return to the themes of her earlier stories -- unbridled female sexuality.

This coincided well with the plans of her new publisher, Sal A. Tzush, the infamous "the Skin Merchant of Seventh Avenue". The Hungarian immigrant was notorious for his line of dirty magazines, cleverly sold as the automotive journal: "Parts and Labor". At the time, Tzush was trying to break into society, and was convinced that a new line of "exotic and speculative tales" would capture the public imagination, make him some money, and show his social betters that he was a cultured man. (12)

But Tzush insisted that Chesley include more graphic sex scenes in her writing, as opposed to referring obliquely to the act of congress, as she had learned to do under the Victorian regime.

Chesley was delighted to oblige Tzush's pornographic proclivities. But despiteher glee at presenting her fiction fully and frontally, Chesley's prose was filled with pathos. This emotionalism pervades the Serpent Women of Sigma Six. Scholars have suggested that this shows her maturity as a writer, but some suspect that this was merely a by-product of her lingering Troubles.

But something else fills the lewd pages of The Serpent Women of Sigma Six: mind-bending perversity. This must account for its wild success.

Surprisingly, Emily did not get along with many flappers of the day.

Unfortunately, these books were printed after F. Scott Fitzgerald had fled for Paris, so she never had a chance to meet the writer who coined the term "jazz age". However, she did get to meet Anita Loos, the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925); some have surmised that Lorelei Lee is based on Lei Loralay, the lead character in Emily's 1924 speculative and exotic tale: Thong! Thong! Thong!

While she was in New York, she also had the occasion to meet both O. Henry, and the famed painter John Sloan (a prominent member of the Ashcan school), both of whom also lived at the Chelsea, and one of whom also lived with Dolly Sloan.

It was an exciting time to live in New York. But despite the ambience and her new friendships with Anais Nin and Anita Loos (13), Emily was not happy in New York. The speakeasy life did not suit her, and she occasionally had relapses of the Troubles. This Mimsy-aftermath earned her the scorn of many young flappers. Emily writes in Speculations:

I could have stood the indifference of these short-haired, short-skirted, simple-minded twits who had no respect for the women who had come before them and earned them the right to behave so licentiously. But I could not stand to hear them refer to me as "that farty Canadian." I decided to return to Paris, where the citizens have a laissez-faire attitude towards personal hygiene, and where, I hoped, my (now) occasional bouts of Troubles would offer no serious impediment to social success.

Emily makes no mention of the arrest of her publisher, Tzush, but it is possible that this also contributed to her decision to return to the City of Lights.

Next: A Migratory Buffet ...>

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Notes:

(8) Wenige was the owner of the Bicycle and Motor Sales Company, the largest bicycle dealership in Southwestern Ontario. He also happened to be running for mayor at the time. (He won that election and in subsequent years, eight other mayoral races.) [back]

(9) This episode yielded an intriguing short story that was published in one of the final editions of the Meanderings of the Canadian Congress of Speculationists, "Being John Movernery," in which the protagonist, a paper-mache artist, discovers a secret passage into the mind of John Movenery, a famous opera star. The similarities to this and the 1999 Spike Jonze film, "Being John Malcovich" are eerily similar, though no doubt a case of synchronicity as the only surviving short story is in the Tundra Collection. [back]

(10) Prohibition had gone into effect in the US in 1920. [back]

(11) Coincidently, the same kind of plane used by Charles Lindbergh in the same period for stunt flying in the mid-west. [back]

(12) Alas this was never to be. Shortly after the printing of Buxom Betelgeuse, the last in Chesley's series of exotic and speculative tales, Tzush was arrested for, and convicted of, "gross sexual depravity" after being caught in flagrante delecto with several daughters of leading society families (at the same time, naturally -- Tzush was a legendary swordsman, not to mention a master of the saucy limerick). [back]

(13) Emily coined a darling nickname for this duo. [back]