Live Journal
An eighty-year-old diary found in a New York dumpster tells the story of a life misplaced.
by Will Doig
April 10, 2008
Maybe New York is a vault of forgotten artifacts to rival the Smithsonian. So when New York Times reporter Lily Koppel spotted a pile of century-old steamer trunks in a Dumpster near her Upper West Side building, she couldn't resist taking a peek. Inside them, she found flapper dresses, jewelry and Western Union telegrams — an accidental time capsule that hadn't been cracked open since the 1930s.
It was a find even before she spotted the diary, a small, leatherbound notebook containing hundreds of "brief, breathless dispatches" written by a teenager named Florence Wolfson. For five years, between 1929 and 1934, Florence had chronicled her youthful literary ambitions, her endeavors at glamour, her sexual experiments and her trips to the just-opened Museum of Modern Art, never missing a single day.
Koppel resolved to complete the narrative. She tracked down Florence, now ninety-two and splitting her retirement years between a condo in Florida and a house in Connecticut. Florence agreed to help Koppel reconstruct those five years of her life; the resulting book, The Red Leather Diary, offers a uniquely personal view of New York, from Roaring '20s to Great Depression. To answer the question of how she feels about her most intimate thoughts from nearly eighty years ago being published for the masses, Florence writes in the forward, "I am probably one of the most excited old women in the world."
Koppel spoke to Hooksexup about reconstructing Florence's life, a forgotten sexual revolution and why it's often worth it to sift through some interesting-looking garbage. — Will Doig
To me, New York is a city that encourages digging through the trash.
Exactly. You're always looking for hidden treasure here.
How did you find this particular treasure?
I came out of my building one morning, late for work, and saw this Dumpster full of old steamer trunks plastered with travel labels from Paris and London and Monaco. I was drawn to it like it was a message in a bottle. I climbed in and started going through the stuff, and there was just something so evocative about these objects: a beaded flapper dress, a coat from Bergdorf, twenty buttons in a Lucite box. I felt like I was slipping into the era, which I literally did that night in my bedroom. And Florence was the heroine who emerged.
It seems like her life was similar to yours in several ways.
Well, we were both painters. Both writers. She was cosmopolitan and cultured and risk-taking and sophisticated, and her life was full of theater and art and an obsession with this avant-garde stage actress, Eva La Gallienne. She hosted a literary salon when she was a nineteen-year-old graduate student at Columbia. She became almost like my guide to New York. Something about her voice was so immediate that it dissolved the time [that separated us].
Reading someone else's diary is the most classic act of illicit voyeurism there is.
Before I even met her, I thought, What is this woman going to think? Is she going to be angry?
But it turns out she was very excited about the idea of her diary being published.
Yeah. You know, when you think about a diary, although you're kind of the lone audience, there's this sense for the author of, What if someone finds this one day? I recently went back to one of my early diaries, and I'd written something very similar: "I wonder if this will ever be published some day." It's almost as if she was just waiting for someone to find her, and it took until she was ninety.
And when she wrote the diary, she wanted to be a known quantity — a published writer.
Or, at the very least, she just wanted to find someone to understand her. That's what her whole search for love was all about with both men and women.
She did hook up with a lot of women, like many women of that era did. But it wasn't really considered bisexuality. When she talks about M. giving her her first orgasm, it was almost like a learning experience.
She very matter-of-factly discusses sex, and yes, even her first orgasm was an episode recorded in the diary. There was a very Greek notion of it — the salon and this group of young people who took the Socratic quest of "know thyself" really seriously. There were two early girlfriends, Pearl and M., and I think they were very intense friendships that evolved into something more. But to me it was more Florence getting closer to the heart of who SHE was than getting to know these women. In her diary's index of important events, there's listed: "Slept with Pearl." Then later it's: "Dismissed Pearl." So I really see her being on a quest to find herself, and these were milestones along that path, and casualties.
Her literary salon was amazing. They'd be having these deep, passionate discussions about literature and philosophy and art, and then suddenly they're having an orgy in the bedroom. Sex and intellectualism were so intertwined.
One of the things Florence recalled about the salon, she said, "I think I served white wine to my guests, and there was a fireplace in my living room, and as I bent down to light the fire I would unpin my long blonde hair and it would cascade down." This was a woman who was intellectually smart as a whip, but also completely aware of her powers of seduction, and there was no need to separate those two things for her. They were both equally powerful.
Her descriptions make the era seem like an early sexual revolution. Even the way they talk about their parents becoming shriveled because they didn't have enough sex — it closely mirrors the attitude young people adopted toward sex during the '60s.
I agree. People think the world just started spinning the other way in the '60s, but I think this diary really proves how buttoned-up our version of the past tends to be. Here was this young woman who could have easily fit into the '60s wearing bellbottoms and flowers in her hair. She could be a young woman today. She's totally modern in her thinking about sex and relationships, and about approaching life in a very open manner.
And her interests were these high-class artistic pursuits. It's almost impossible to imagine a girl her age today interested in opera and poetry. What's changed?
I love this entry: "Went to the Museum of Modern Art today and almost passed out from sheer jealousy — I can't even paint an apple yet — it's heartbreaking." And then there's this one: "Stuffed myself with Mozart and Beethoven — I feel like a ripe apricot, and dizzy with the exotic." It's almost as if she was devouring books and art and ideas. They were things she filled herself with because she wanted to create who she was and make herself a more interesting person. I think today, people kind of wait for other people to tell them what they like and what they want and what they should read and what they should wear. I don't think Florence ever really listened to anyone except herself.
That's a great point. Today we have a culture of professionals and experts who tell us what to pay attention to. It hinders our sense of discovery.
The fact that young women idealize Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan — not that that's wrong, but I hope they realize that really, they are the stars of their lives, they're the ones with the story to tell. Whether they record that in a diary or a blog, it's important to find significance in your own existence, to be your own heroine and your own celebrity. Florence made her life into this wonderful adventure. In 1936 she sailed to Europe and had this love affair with this Italian count, and he was a painter and a poet and composed verses to her — again there was that mix of art and sex. I think it was that very sense of adventure that led me into this dumpster of old steamer trunks. I'm on my way to work, I really shouldn't be doing this in the rational world, but somehow it seemed like such a good beginning of a story. n°
©2008 Will Doig and hooksexup.com