Sunday; or A Working Girls [sic] Lament.
Inscribed to Natalie Clifford Barney
[Barney, Natalie Clifford, her copy]. [Fellowes, Daisy]. Sunday or a Working Girls Lament. Monaco: Imprimerie A. Chêne, 1930.
Small 4to.; printed in black, red, green, blue and violet; illustrated; ¾ paper-covered boards, with colored illustration on upper panel; faint occasional foxing; green cloth spine; light edgewear. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition; limited to 200 numbered copies signed at the colophon (this is copy #78). OCLC only lists two other copies: at the University of Stonybrook (New York) and Indiana University libraries. Printed on Papeteries de Renage vellum; with corrections pasted-in at pages 10, 22, 23, 36, 37, 42 and 53, and handwritten on page 46. With four color illustrations, faintly offset onto preceding pages. Printed in five colors – black, red, green, blue and violet – in order to identify the speakers engaging in dialogue: black for the narrator; red for the protagonist, Valerie; blue for her friend Jack; green for her friend Bill; and violet for “the whore.”
A presentation copy, inscribed at the colophon: To Natalie Clifford Barney/with love/Daisy Fellowes. Fellowes and Barney were both convention-shattering heiresses and socialites with literary leanings; they became friends through the international social circuit. Barney was a homosexual; it was her home that the exotic dancer and World War I spy Mata Hari rode naked through the gardens of on a white horse harnessed with turquoises. Fellowes hosted a Left Bank literary salon that was visited by James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Somerset Maugham, T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Isadora Duncan, Ezra Pound, André Gide, Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote and Francoise Sagan.
Sunday or a Working Girls Lament is a caustic epic poem with a random rhyming sequence. It’s the story of a tipsy night in the life of Valerie, a New York City girl, who meets up with her father’s friend Jack – “the rheumy old man/with his gripping old fingers” – and spends the evening with him; they see a movie then they go out drinking and dancing. Meanwhile, she’s pining after her true love, Tom. Valerie has a little too much fun, and her night ends up becoming not unlike one that a young woman would experience in New York City today:
Her ears were singing.
She didn’t hear
She took his arm
And tried to steer
Him straight across
The floor.
She got him
Safely
To the door.
He said –
“Tha’s right,
If a’d stayed,
A’d had a fight.”
He was so tight,
He couldn’t stand
Alone –
He gripped her hand.
They got to the curb
And located his car,
A task
Getting him in –
His flask wasn’t empty,
She drained it dry.
He had a try
At handling the bus,
It was a mess,
She took his place.
Suddenly
She felt sick –
She opened the windows to get more air –
He would stick
His face in her hair
She wanted to kick
Him out –
She felt him fumbling with her dress –
Mumbling.
She pushed her elbow
Sharply
In his ribs –
She heard him gasp
And strike the wood
A sharp blow
With his head –
She thought –
“I’ll be sick any minute – “
She felt dead
Tired.
Fellowes is also the author of Cats in the Isle of Man (1929), Les dimanches de la Comtesse de Narbonne (1931), and Sundays A Fantasy (1960).
Fellowes (1890-1962) – Christened with the francophilic tongue-twister of a name: Marguerite Séverine Philippine Decazes de Glücksbierg – was the heiress to the Singer sewing machine empire, an editor at Harper’s Bazaar, and an encouraging patron of Elsa Schiaparelli’s couture creations. She was twice-married: first, to Prince Jean Amédée Marie Anatole de Broglie, with whom she had three daughters, then, after his death, to Hon. Reginald Ailwyn Fellowes – a cousin of Churchill’s and a grandson of a Duke of Marlborough – with whom she had a daughter.
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