Vanity Fair

Alan Odle did drawings in a humorous vein for the monthly American magazine Vanity Fair from 1920-29 (see The Life & Work pages 61-63 for details). Examples are shown on the webpages. The great mystery is who wrote the captions? Odle certainly wrote the caption headings as can be seen from The Round-up on the webpages. Did he also write the captions? It strikes me as a rather difficult task for someone to receive, say, An Up-to-Date Guide to the Opera (Life & Work page 15) with the 4 drawings titled A Smart Salome, The Death Grapple, The Superman, & The Oedipus Complex and to come up with a caption. On the other hand there is mention of real Americans, and the captions have a Thurberesque humour, so on balance I would say they were written by an American. The editor Frank Crowninshield does pose the question as to whether Mrs Odle (Dorothy Richardson) might write some captions, but that was not until a letter of October 1924, and whether she did or not is unknown. The same letter queries ‘Where are those articles that Mrs Odle said she would send us?’ (she had published ‘Talent and Genius: Is Not Genius Far More Common than Talent’ in the 1923 October issue, “Women and the Future: A Trembling of the Veil Before the Eternal Mystery of ‘La Giaconda’ in the April 1924 issue, and had obviously promised more). She did contribute ‘Women in the Arts: Some Notes on the Eternally Conflicting Demands of Humanity and Art’ to the May 1925 issue, but after that was probably too busy with her contributions to the cinematic magazine Close Up to submit anything else. This may seem strange on the surface, as I’m sure Vanity Fair paid much better than the average English periodical, but Close Up involved as assistant editpr her friend Bryher, who was also an heiress, so I’m sure she was well renumerated.