GEORGE STERLING'S ROLE IN NORA MAY FRENCH'S UNHAPPINESS ? : GEORGE WAS NEVER A GOOD CANDIDATE FOR HUSBANDING

While reading this book, I thought about George Sterling, a man who made his living and supported his wife through selling land for building, you could say a real estate agent or maybe a developer, of Carmel-By-The-Sea. Carmel is in the Monterey Bay area south of San Francisco and after the historic San Francisco earthquake many unhoused people made their way to Monterey. 

George Sterling was torn because he had entered into a conventional marriage with his wife, Carrie, but was not capable of being a faithful husband. Rather he was a womanizer and alcoholic. I see him as a man out of control of himself. He was so torn up, especially after Nora May French commit suicide by cyanide poison while an ongoing guest in his marital home, that - eventually - years later - he too commit suicide. At least that's a notion. Maybe he was a bit tortured because they'd had an affair and he was not free to be with Nora, but somehow I don't think this man, who seems to have been ruled by his emotions, would have divorced Carrie and married Nora. There was, in my opinion, much more wrong with him and his life that he couldn't bear.

But of fascination is that George had business connections that meant that he was one of the early members of the Bohemian Club, which is now the mysterious and controversial Bohemian Grove, a big boy's camp that has attracted world leaders and Presidents of the United States to its get-aways from the world. Rumors persist that Satanic rituals occur there but I personally have no idea if that's true. It seems to mainly be a men-only club for the very rich, some of whom probably were in secret society type fraternities when youth in college.

What George Sterling wanted was to be a literary person, a poet, to attract such persons to buying land and building homes in Carmel, to put that village on the map as an artists colony. Although his marketing and public relations had that effect, he actually wasn't successful selling property to people who had unsteady or inadequate income. How he hoped literary luminaries like writer Jack London would settle there.

Many of George's friends blamed Nora's death as his undoing. Or women in general. He and his friends attempted to pick up "Bohemian" women on the poetry scene in San Francisco and George was not the success at it. Further, Nora seems to have been given way too much credit for being a "femme fatale." While reading about these men and their ways, I couldn't help but think they were immature and how stuck the women at that time who married men like this were.

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NORA MAY FRENCH AND HARRY LAFLER : A WINDOW INTO HIS BOHEMIAN WORLD OF SAN FRANCISCO

Excerpt page 81: Then Harry Lafler entered her life. He seemed to offer a window into another world. He was one of the writers who frequented Coppa's, the restaurant at the center of San Francisco's thriving art scene. Poets and painters gathered at a table near the back, dining on sand dabs and green salads and drinking cheap red whine while talking into to the night. Everyone in California had heard of Coppa's. Every arist or writer who visited San Francisco stopped there. And Lafler was painted onto the very wall. .... Harry was at Coppa;s almost every night, writing and then reading his sonnets. He was most often in the company of George Sterling, whom they all called "The King Of Bohemia" because he had defined Bohemianism for the world.  

There are two elements, at least, that are essential to Bohemianism,"he decreed. "The first is devotion or addition to one or more of the Seven Arts, the other is poverty."

Nora realized she had never even seen what Harry Lafler looked like and that it was ridiculous to have developed such strong feelings for him because of a correspondence. However, they had an affair and after she commit suicide it was suggested she was pregnant by him.

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READING THE POETRY OF NORA MAY FRENCH on PROJECT GUTENBERG

 Here's the link! PROJECT GUTENBERG : POETRY OF NORA MAY FRENCH

FROM forest paths we turned us, nymphs, new-made,

And, lifting eyes abashed with great desire

Before high Jove, the gift of souls we prayed.

Whereat he said: “O perfect as new leaves

New glossed and veined with blood of perfect days

And stirred to murmured speech in fragrant eves,

“Still ask ye souls? Behold, I give instead

Into each breast a bird with fettered wings,

A bird fast holden with a silken thread: ........

( read the whole poem at the link!)