I Missed Persephone Reading Week #2

At the beginning of May two book bloggers, Verity and Claire, hosted the Second Persephone Reading Week in which readers were supposed to read at least one book published by Persephone Books.  As luck would have it, I happened to have a Persephone Book on hand:  The Homemaker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher.  My sister had ordered a few books off of the Persephone Books web site and had lent this one to me.   She had also managed to fit in a visit to the actual Persephone Books Store when she was in England a few weeks ago where she bought a few more books.  Time got away from me and I didn’t finish the book until a week after the Reading Week ended.  Next year I’ll have to plan better.

If you’ve never heard of Persephone Books here’s what they are about:

Persephone prints mainly neglected fiction and non-fiction by women, for women and about women. The titles are chosen to appeal to busy women who rarely have time to spend in ever-larger bookshops and who would like to have access to a list of books designed to be neither too literary nor too commercial. The books are guaranteed to be readable, thought-provoking and impossible to forget. We sell mainly through mail order, through selected shops and we have our own shops.

When I picked up The Homemaker I had never heard of Dorothy Canfield Fisher, which seems strange now that I know she was a best selling American author of the early 20’th Century. Perhaps if I had children, I would have heard of the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children’s Book Award, which is voted on by students.  But I hadn’t. Eleanor Roosevelt named her one of the ten most influential women in the United States.  She was a vocal advocate of the Montessori style of teaching. She published eleven novels between 1907 and 1939.  Her 1921 novel, The Brimming Cup, was the second best-selling novel of the year behind Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street. 

The Homemaker was published in 1924 and is the story of the Knapp Family who live in an average town in America.  It is the sort of town that has one department store and everyone knows everyone else. Mr. Knapp works at the store in the bookkeeping department where he is unhappy in his job and not very good at it.  He is much more interested poetry and literature.  He probably should have been a college teacher but it is too late for that.  Mrs. Knapp stays at home to keep house and bring up the children.  She is the model wife: her house is always clean, her children are well behaved.  She volunteers for community activities and is admired for her organizational skills.   She gives the world the impression of having a perfect family.  She never criticizes her husband in front of the children. And yet she is unhappy. Mrs. Knapp bring joyless perfection to all of her tasks and she suffers from severe eczema that will not clear up.  The two older children, Helen and Henry, live in fear of doing anything that is not perfect – Henry has stomach problems that are certainly brought on by his nervousness.  The youngest child, Stephen, is engaged in a battle of wills with his mother and the only reason she is likely to win is because she is bigger than he is.    

One day a catastrophic event occurs (it isn’t completely clear from the novel if it happened intentionally or not but it certainly was catastrophic), the type of occurrence that should have pushed the family over the edge.  But, instead, it forces Mrs. Knapp out of the house in search of a job and leaves Mr. Knapp home to tend the house and children.  And instead of being a catastrophe, the event turns out to be the turning point that allows everyone in the family to begin to live a happier life.   The tension comes when all the characters realize that this better life could be taken away from them by societal expectations.

This would be a perfect book club book because all the themes are still relevant plus it would be fun to try to figure out how people in the 1920’s would have viewed it.   The subjects can be somewhat controversial. I’ve found it difficult, in the past, to have reasonable conversations with some people about the risk that a parent simply would not like one of their own children.  Love them, maybe;  like them, maybe not.   Mrs. Knapp thinks about this;

A profound depression came upon her.  These were the moments in a mother’s life about which nobody ever warned, you, about which everybody kept a deceitful silence, the fine books and speakers who had so much to say about the sacredness of maternity.  They never told you that there were moments of arid clear sight when you saw helplessly that your children would never measure up to your standard, never would be really close to you, because they were not your kind of human beings, because they were not your children, but merely other human beings for whom you were responsible.  How solitary it made you feel!

One of the things that Fisher captures perfectly is the terrible powerlessness that children have over their own lives.   She uses a simple situation to illustrate it – the youngest child, Stephen, is very attached to his Teddy Bear.  He fears that his mother is going to wash his Teddy Bear and ruin it (he has seen the result of washing on another Teddy Bear).   This causes him to act up in ways that no one understands.  His moods are black and there is talk that maybe he is just a child who is going to grow up to be bad.  At last, more than half way in the novel, he is able to confess this fear to his father, Lester.   And Lester, when he suddenly sees Stephen’s point of view, is shaken by a moment of enlightenment:

What was terrifying to Lester was the thought that the conception of trying to understand Stephen’s point of view had been as remote from their minds as the existence of the fourth dimension.

And even now that the violent shock of this little scene with Stephen had put the conception into his brain, how under the sun could you ever find out what was felt by a child who shut himself up so blackly in his stronghold of repellent silence. 

Why had Stephen so shut himself up?

The question was as new to Lester as a question of the cause of the law of gravity.  It had never occurred to him that perhaps Stephen had not been born that way.

The style of this novel is old fashioned, filled with “gee” and “swell” and words out of 1930’s black and white movies.  Sentences start with “Say …”.  But the themes of this novel are still issues today.  Who is the better person in a couple to stay home with children?  What if both parents work, how do you find someone to take care of your children who won’t harm them physically or mentally?  Why is there a stigma if it is the man who takes care of the home and the children?

Although the language is old fashioned, Fisher’s use of words is clever.  For instance when the busybody next door, Mrs. Anderson, warns Mr. Knapp that Stephen needs an iron hand and a spanking:

To illustrate her point she now addressed Stephen’s listening, stubborn back in a reproving tone of virtue, “Stephen, you mustn’t kick your blocks like that.  It’s naughty to.”

Stephen instantly kicked them harder than ever and continued to present a provocatively rebellious back to the visitor.

Mrs. Anderson turned to his father with the gratified look traditionally ascribed to the Teutonic warlords when they forced Serbia into a corner.

And sometimes it is easy to forget that Fisher is writing a story that took place 100 years ago.   For instance, the local department store is as worried by competition from the mail-order houses as today’s stores are worried by competition from the internet.   And Lester Knapp is turned off by the gross commercialization of the day in which the desire is to sell people (mostly women) things that they don’t need. 

I really enjoyed this little novel.  It is the first Persephone Book that I’ve ever read and it was a good one to start with.

Looming Ahead and Receding Behind

When I finished reading AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book I felt the need to read something short that I could finish quickly.  So I picked up J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country which had been in my pile for a number of months.  I had never read it, although I had a vague recollection of seeing a dramatization of it on Masterpiece Theatre long ago, starring Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth.  But all I really remembered about the story was that it involved a church in the English countryside.

I had completely forgotten that the principal character and narrator, Tom Birkin, had recently returned from The Great War.  Tom was an artist (actually a restorer of medieval paintings) whose wife had left him during or immediately after the War. He took this job in the country restoring a wall mural in a church not only for the money but in the hope that the quiet of the countryside would help him get his life back together again, including his nerves.  Tom suffers from a facial tic brought on by the stress of the War.  How serendipitous, I thought,  to pick up this particular novel immediately after reading The Children’s Book, which ended with World War I.

The Children’s Book is not a novel about World War I, although the war occurs.  It is a novel about people going about their lives when, suddenly (or so it seems to them), a war occurs.  And yet the War is not foreshadowed in the novel by the author; any foreshadowing occurs simply because an educated reader knows that the War will occur.  So when political events of the day are discussed by characters, especially violent political events, the reader knows that eventually one violent event will precipitate mass carnage on a scale unimaginable to these characters.  But the characters themselves are simply discussing them as part of their life.  Byatt does a very good job of intertwining discussions of violence with every day life – exactly the way, for instance, in the 1990’s Americans might have discussed the bombing of the Cole as they were eating a hotdog at the ballpark. 

I’'ll give you an example.  In one scene a number of the characters are having dinner in Paris where they have gone to see the Grande Exposition Universelle de Paris.  It is the turn of the century, Victoria is still Queen of England.  Charles/Karl Wellwood, a teenage boy, has been giving thought to the great issues of the day and has been introduced by his German tutor to a group of Anarchists.  At the fair, Charles and his tutor have broken away and met Emma Goldman and seen presentations on the plight of poor women.  Now it is dinnertime:

He dined with the Cains, Tom, Fludd and Philip. Everyone talked of what they had seen at the fair. Charles did not mention Emma Goldman, and did not discuss streetwalkers.  Cain said he supposed it was encouraging that people at war with each other – the Germans and the Chinese, for instance – could coexist in this imaginary city.  Benedict Fludd, who seemed alternately excitable and grumpy, said perhaps Cain had not seen the papers?  An anarchist had stepped out of a crowd with a revolver and shot point-blank at the King of Italy.  They missed him three years ago with a knife, said Fludd. This time they got him.  He’s dead.  What do they hope to achieve?

     “Chaos,” said Prosper Cain.  “they are mad.” Karl kept his polite public-school face at this moment also.  He was in a moral knot that he was beginning to recognize.  Belonging to something, believing in an idea, meant perhaps conceding assent to things that were, outside the belief, ludicrous or horrid. He had tried being Christian, and had tried to force himself to believe in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection.  He found the anarchists compelling and arousing. but he could not – he could not – accept that a symbolic killing of this or that muddle-headed, insulated old monarch would really advance freedom or justice.  And then he tried to see it from the anarchists’ point of view.  He formulated an idea:  they are more sane, and madder, than other people. They have a better idea of human nature; which is perhaps only an idea. But they are serious and real, and this hotel is not, and this souffle is all airy nothing, and the women in evening gowns at the next table are bought and sold.

     It was, however, a delicious souffle, elegantly put together with Seville orange and Grand Marnier.  It lingered on the tongue like a blessing.

I loved that passage. The casualness with which the assassination is dropped into the conversation.   They had been talking about the fair for, evidently, some time before Fludd forced the negative event into the conversation.  I love how Byatt switches between Charles and Karl showing, I think, not just the difference between the polite, well behaved outer self of Charles and the deeply conflicted anarchical Karl within him, but also the fact that he is a boy on the cusp of being a man but not yet there yet.  As Charles he doesn’t feel comfortable telling his elders he met Emma Goldman and discussed streetwalkers.  But as Karl he is having the thoughts a man might have about ideology.  And, finally, after all this deep thought by Karl, the last line.  Does it represent the thoughts of Charles/Karl as he tastes the souffle?  Or is it an editorial comment by the author? 

A few years later, Charles/Karl goes to Germany with his sister Griselda and his cousin Dorothy.  Here, again, he tries to think through the necessity of violence to achieve political ends.  In Germany these things can be discussed, unlike in England:

It was a long way from the polite lucubrations of the Fabians and even further from the horse-racing, shooting-party circles of the New King, at the edge of which Charles’ father moved – thanks to his German mother’s fortune.  Charles was quite intelligent enough to see that he was able to be an anarchist because he was rich. The Munich cafe thinkers were aesthetically excited by peasant manifestations of energy – the charivari, the Bauern-tanz, the Karneval.  Karneval and misrule went together, and were glorious.  Joachim Susskind mostly listened.  Wolfgang said little, though, like his father, he sketched incessantly, beards wagging in passionate dissertation, women’s legs visible under their skirts as they leaned back, applauding.  Leon joined in.  He discussed the necessity of assassination, almost primly. Karl said he did not see that it was necessary – such detached Acts as there had been – anarchists had killed the President of France, the Prime Minister of Spain, the Empress Elizabeth and the king of Italy – had only led to more repression.  There speaks an Englishman, said Leon, not unfriendly.  You don’t recognise oppression as we do.  You cannot be put in prison for Unzuchtigkeit - “obscenity” Joachim translated – or for lese-majeste as our artists regularly are.

And yet, these moments in the novel are not necessarily foreshadowing the war because so much else is going on.  So the War, when it arrives in the novel, simply arrives. Just as it did in real life.  And the characters don’t seem too concerned.  Just as people in real life thought it would be over by Christmas.  And it changes the lives of every character in the novel.  Just as it changed the lives of the real people who lived through it.

In an interview, Byatt described her thought process in writing about the War:

And the other thing I discovered which I should have always known, was that they didn’t know the war was coming . I discovered that I could write a society that rushed into a war it had no way of imagining. I’d read so much First World War literature and so much scholarly literature about the war – my favourite is the reminiscences of Edmund Blunden (Undertones of War) I kept reading and re-reading him. And I kept reading Robert Graves (Goodbye to All That). And what I didn’t do was re-read Paul Fussell’s wonderful book, The Great War and Modern Memory. I noticed that a lot of novelists had used the metaphors that he had picked out of all the war poetry – the skylarks and so forth. I very carefully didn’t put a skylark in the novel. I combed and combed for things that nobody had put in. For instance, I had never seen in a novel the fact that they had all these standing up, two –dimensional puppets at Passchendaele which they pulled on strings to get the Germans to fire on them, and betray their own whereabouts, and that gave me intense constructional pleasure. Fussell’s book is a wonderful book but when you’ve read the third or fourth novel which has used exactly the same image . .

Later she says:

I have the great fortune of having a husband who is somewhat obsessed with World War One and military history in general, and so he has a huge library, and as fast as I read one book, he lent me another and I also re-read everybody’s reminiscences and memoirs. And I kept coming back to Blunden, but I read Edward Thomas and Siegfried Sassoon and Edith Wharton and memoirs of doctors and nurses.
I had the option when I started the book, of either finishing it in 1913 but then everyone would forever have wondered which of them died and I decided I couldn’t do that for that reason – it would drive readers crazy in a way they wouldn’t enjoy. So having planned this very long novel about children, I now had to write the first world war novel in a short space.

The War doesn’t take up much space in this novel.  Unlike the real War, Byatt’s war is very efficient. She tells us only the parts we need to know.  Because I knew my history and knew what bloody carnage the War was, I began to suspect that many of the characters I had grown to love were not going to make it.  I didn’t worry only about the boys, but also about the girls because they went over as nurses and, in Dorothy’s case, as a doctor.  I found myself adopting a very fatalistic attitude about it and began to assume that all the boys would die.  And possibly some of the girls.  (And since one of the families we have gotten to know is the German Stern family with two boys I included them in my fatalism.)

I don’t want to give too much away but not all of them die.  And the one thing that Byatt avoids is describing life After the War.  She allows those whose loved ones return to be happy and thankful and then she ends the novel.  But in real life the boys who returned as men from World War I were gravely changed.  (Anybody who really wants to understand the British and French reaction to Germany leading up to World War II must understand just how much they lost in World War I). 

That is why A Month in the Country was a serendipitous choice.  Tom Birkin has survived the War but it still haunts him and has changed his life.   He is, he says, a casualty of the War.

The marvelous thing was coming into this haven of calm water and, for a season, not having to worry my head but uncovering their wall-painting for them. And, afterwards, perhaps I could make a new start, forget what the War and the rows with Vinny had done to me and begin where I’d left off.  This is what I need, I though – a new start, and afterwards, maybe I won’t be a casualty anymore.

Tom’s healing process is slow and he seems to uncover his true self as he uncovers the painting in the church.  He admits that the War gave him a new perspective on time:

We went in and we came out.  That’s good enough for me. We’re here on borrowed time, and I’ll take what’s to come as it comes.

When he finally begins to heal is after he visits a local family who lost a son in the War.  Leaving their house he says:

I suddenly yelled, “Oh you bastards!  You awful bloody bastards!  You didn’t need to have started it.  And you could have stopped it before you did.  God!  Ha! There is no God. “

A Month in the Country is a novel of hope because Tom Birkin survived and manages to regain a sense of normalcy.  He goes on with his life.  But life was not so kind to many others who did not survive the War, or survived to be killed in the influenza epidemic or who were never really “right” again.

In Byatt’s novel one of the characters, Hedda Wellwood, becomes a suffragette.  After I finished the novel I found myself humming the suffragette song from Mary Poppins.  The one that Mrs. Banks sings.  And suddenly I realized that little Michael Banks might very well have died in World War I or come out of it scarred for life either in body or mind or both.   If he had been a real person.

Bad Tempered Chef Spoils Dining Experience?

Our local Riverfront Times food blog is following a controversy in the New York Times Diner’s Journal Blog. Ron Lieber, the New York Times blogger writes that he went to Restaurant Marc Forgione in TriBeCa and got thrown out:

About ten minutes after my party of four sat down, we heard yelling — loud, sustained, top-of-lungs yelling — coming from the kitchen. Mr. Forgione was dressing down a member of the staff, in full view of many of the customers. The dining room quieted as patrons exchanged uncomfortable glances.

No one said a thing though. Soon the target of the chef’s harsh words delivered our amuse-bouche, and the poor guy was so rattled he could barely speak above a mumble.

A few minutes later, the chef was at it again. Fifteen seconds. Another fifteen. And without much forethought, I pushed back my chair and walked through the open doorway of the kitchen.

I don’t remember exactly what I said, though I did not raise my voice to the point beyond where people in the kitchen could hear it. I told the chef that his behavior was making me and others uncomfortable. I let him know that I thought it was mean. And I asked him to cut it out. I don’t remember exactly what he said in response, but whatever it was, I found it irritating enough that I reminded him that I was paying to eat there and told him again to stop berating his staff at that volume.

Maybe 20 seconds after I had returned to my seat, he approached the table. He apologized, barely, and then let me know that he thought it was incredibly rude of me to come into his kitchen and tell him how to do his job. I repeated the fact that he had been ruining my dinner. But his yelling was all in the interest of maintaining quality, he said.

“I think it’s time for you to go,” he said.

“Are you kicking me out?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

Ian Froeb at the Riverfront Times writes:

For all my restaurant meals, I've never experienced a situation such as this. Frankly, given my m.o. as a critic, I wouldn't say or do anything at the restaurant if something like this made me uncomfortable during a meal -- but I sure as hell would mention it in my review.

If I was dining as a civilian (that is, on my own dime, not the paper's, and not for a review) and the yelling was especially prolonged or abusive, I might mention my displeasure to a manager and/or resolve never to patronize the restaurant again. I certainly wouldn't have taken the extra step that Lieber did. Not that I don't understand his impulse, but I can't imagine how his action could lead to any other reaction than Forgione's.

(emphasis added by me.) Really? You can’t imagine how this could lead to any reaction other than the abusive chef abusing the dinner guests too? This doesn’t say a lot for the restaurants that Froeb patronizes. I can imagine other reactions. It isn’t that I can’t imagine what happened happening – I can imagine it all too well. But I can also imagine the chef coming out and apologizing and maybe even comping desert or doing something to make up for the fact that his own bad behavior potentially ruined a night out. A night out in the middle of a recession when people have many options on how to spend their money and it doesn’t have to be at your restaurant.

As far as my own reaction though, I agree with Froeb. I doubt that I would have walked into the kitchen and told him he was ruining my dining experience. I might have walked out of the restaurant, but probably not – at least not unless the rest of the table wanted to. I would have just been pissed off about it. I certainly would never have gone there again and would have told everyone about it and blogged about it. But, you know what? None of that is as good as telling an abuser to stop abusing. I think Lieber did the right thing and I give him credit for daring to do it.

What do you think?

Update: Mean Chef Responds to Criticism. I guess he thinks he's the Bobby Knight of restaurants. Does that mean he wants his patrons to also act like they are in an arena? Spilling things all over the floor? Shouting at the waitstaff "HEY! Move it, move it, move it"? Shouting at the maitre'd to question his choice of seating - "You need glasses! Can't you see those other people were here first?"

I Got Nuthin. You?

h/t/scobberlotch

Teh Google is Wunnerful but Still Not Enough

After my cocktail party post on Friday, regular commenter Kidspeak and I had an email conversation about other information that was available about Clara Bell Walsh.  Yes, Google research is, sometimes, addictive.  I discovered that years ago when I was helping my dad with genealogical research.  I also found that not everything a person needs to put together a complete picture is available on the web and even when available it is sometimes hard to find.  Sometimes it was necessary to trudge off to the real library.  Sometimes it was even necessary to look at … gasp … microfilm. 

More and more data is being put on the web these days so things are a bit easier than even five years ago.  But you still have to figure out how to access it. Sometimes what you find is a result of tenacity, sometimes it is the result of luck and sometimes it is the result of inside knowledge.

For instance, Kidspeak found a picture of Clara Bell Walsh when she was eleven years old.  It is from the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, KY. Kidspeak says: “I figured they'd have some info about Clara Bell.”  That’s using your knowledge as a way to narrow your search.  Here is the picture:

It was a surprise to see she had short hair.  We were speculating about it.  The result of head lice maybe?  Or something else?  

The Filson Historical Society also had old newspapers.  Kidspeak found this:

Richmond Climax, Richmond KY: October 21, 1903. Publishing of the Red Book of American Wealth. Lists persons worth more than $300,000. Local persons listed include Miss Clara D. D. Bell, Lexington, KY.

As she said to me, $300,000 in 1903 is the equivalent of many millions of dollars today.  Clara, as the sole child of her deceased father, was a very wealthy person.

The other thing Kidspeak found was an article in the Kansas City Star about the famous cocktail party:

30 March 1917, Kansas City (MO) Star, section 2, pg. 10B: 
GAVE A “COCKTAIL PARTY” 
AND MRS. WALSH OF ST. LOUIS HAS 
ORIGINATED SOMETHING NEW. 
The Home Before Sunday Dinner Was 
Devoted to the Drinking of Appetizers at the Private Bar 
of a Boulevard Home. 
Positively the newest stunt in society is the giving of “cocktail parties.” 

The cocktail party is a Sunday matinee affair which originated in St. Louis. 

Mrs. Julius S. Walsh, jr., a leader in social activities there, is responsible for the innovation. 

Mrs. Walsh introduced it last Sunday, with the first cocktail party in society’s history. Invitations were issued to fifty. The guests were divided into two classes—those who went to church in the forenoon and those who devoted their time to motor promenade of the boulevards. Then at high noon they gathered at the Walsh home on Lindell Boulevard for the hour’s “interregnum preceding 1 o’clock dinner.” 

AN INSTANT HIT. 
The party scored an instant hit. Mrs. Walsh’s home is equipped with a private bar. Around this the guests gathered and gave their orders in a white coated professional drink mixer who presided behind the polished mahogany. If a woman guest who had been driving all forenoon in her limousine, and was a little chilled in consequence, felt the need of a drink with an extra kick in it, she ordered a Sazarac cocktail. Others, of course, preferred a Bronx or a Clover Leaf, and a few who had been to church were old fashioned enough to order a martini or a Manhattan. 

And as long as the professional drink mixer was there to fill all orders, other beverages than cocktails were in demand. Highballs, some with Scotch and some with rye or Bourbon whisky, gin fizzes—ordered because the spring morning hinted of coming summer—and at least one mint julep for a former gentleman of Virginia, were handed out over the private bar. 

COMES TO STAY. 
That the cocktail party already is a St. Louis institution, filling a long felt Sunday want in society circles there, and that the party at which Mrs. Walsh was hostess was so merry and so jolly as to approach in hilarity the famous early morning eggnog parties popular in the same city a decade ago, is vouched for by the St. Louis newspapers. 

In the meantime Mrs. Walsh, because of her innovation, has become more of a social celebrity in St. Louis than ever. 


This article makes it sound as if it is Clara’s home on Lindell Avenue.   And yet Clara supposedly moved into The Plaza Hotel in New York long before the famous party.  And some sources said she gave the party at the home of her father-in-law’s house.  That sent me to do more Googling.  In Google Books I found “The Book of St. Louisans” published in 1906 and the follow-up book published in 1912.   All the male members of the Walsh family are listed including Julius Walsh Sr. and Julius Walsh Jr.  In both books Julius Jr. has an address of Pine Lawn Missouri while his father and brothers have addresses in the City of St. Louis. 

Pine Lawn is now part of the metro St. Louis area but at the time it was the country.  I found a source that stated that in the 1800s many wealthy St. Louisans had country estates in northwest St. Louis County, including in Pine Lawn (PDF).  There was a train that ran that way and it was possible to commute.   But I could find no information about an estate owned by Julius Walsh Jr and Clara.  I knew that it couldn’t be the estate owned by his father on Brown Road because that wasn’t in Pine Lawn.   The fact that Julius Jr. didn’t have a city address might mean that he and Clara simply liked country life or it could have meant that they spent much of their time in New York and didn’t need a St. Louis City address.  I suspected that they used St. Louis as their “main” address due to Julius’ involvement in his father’s business but that they spent a great deal of time in New York.  I did a search of “Mrs. Julius Walsh” in the New York Times and many society columns mention her in the time period around 1910.  She was evidently a fine horsewoman, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows anything about Lexington, Kentucky.  In any event both of the directories I was looking at were published before the house on Lindell was purchased in 1917 so they weren’t dispositive. 

A local newspaper article states that the house on Lindell was built by William Nolker in 1891 and sold to Julius Walsh in 1917, “who, with his wife, hosted that famed cocktail party, which was defined by the New York Times as having drinks standing up rather than sitting down.”  (There is a picture of the house in the article if you want to see it as it looks today.)   It says that Walsh kept the house until he died in 1923 and a year later his heirs sold it to the archdiocese.   The year of death wasn’t right for Julius Jr. because Time Magazine had said he died in 1922.  Maybe it was the father who died in 1923?  An online database put together by a local St. Louisan gave me some information but I couldn’t be sure if it was correct without some backup information. Google also gave me “Find a Grave” which gave me information on the burial of Julius Sr. at Calvary Cemetery and pictures of his gravesite.   So far all of this was tenacity and luck.

Then I recalled that the burial records of Calvary Cemetery are online. I knew this from my prior genealogy experience.   I checked and sure enough both Julius Sr. and Julius Jr. were buried in the family plot (Josephine Dickson, the wife of Julius Sr. is buried there in 1909 but Clara isn’t in the plot.)  Julius Sr. died in 1923.  Bingo!   But Julius Jr. didn’t die in 1922, he died in 1929.  So Time Magazine was wrong.   Then I remembered that some death records are also online and I found the death certificate of Julius Sr.   He was 80 years old.   And he died at his residence at 4510 Lindell.   The reporting party was Mrs. William Maffitt, his daughter, who lived at 4315 Westminster (about a mile or so away).  

Of course, I could get myself downtown and look at the real estate records for that address and find out for sure, but based on the above information I’m willing to bet that Julius Sr. owned the house on Lindell Avenue.  And it doesn’t sound as if Julius and Clara were living there if they weren’t the ones who reported his death.

There is no death certificate for Julius Jr. which probably confirms the information I found in the online data base that says he died out of town.  That database has him dying in Hot Springs Arkansas but I think that’s wrong.  The New York Times social pages regularly report the entire family vacationing in Hot Springs Virginia.  But I can find no announcement of his death.  But Clara did become a widow in 1929.  At that point she would have have had no reason to return to St. Louis, she had no children to “bring home”.  And the Plaza Hotel would have become her sole home.

I was thinking about all this Google searching today as I watched this fascinating short film about the “semantic web”.   Can we transform the web into a data base where enough connections and links between data will give context and allow better expression of information?

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

This includes interviews with: Tim Berners-Lee, Clay Shirky, Chris Dixon, David Weinberger, Nova Spivack, Jason Shellen, Lee Feigenbaum, John Hebeler, Alon Halevy, David Karger, and Abraham Bernstein.

It’s the Weekend! Have a Cocktail.

Today a colleague was telling me about her favorite cocktail: the French 75 Cocktail. It sounds yummy. Cognac, champagne, lemon juice and simple syrup. It “hits with remarkable precision.”

Did you know that St. Louis is where the cocktail party originated? Legend says that it was thrown here by Mrs. Julius S. Walsh, Jr. in 1917 at 4510 Lindell Blvd. I looked that address up on a map and that would have been in what is now the Central West End, just west of where the Saint Louis Cathedral Basilica is. The Cathedral would have been new back then; it was completed in 1914 (although the interior mosaic work wasn’t completed until much later). In fact, the house was later purchased by the Archdiocese to be the archbishop's residence. Mrs. Walsh's party was at noon, which seems a bit early for cocktails to me.

Sauce Magazine ran a little article about that cocktail party and tracked down the first name of Mrs. Walsh. Clara. They tracked it by a wedding announcement from Lexington Kentucky on January 2, 1906: “The wedding of Miss Clara D.D. Bell, of Lexington, and Julius S. Walsh, Jr., of St. Louis, was celebrated at Bell Place, the home of her mother, Mrs. Arthur Cary. The wedding was attended by hundreds of guests from a distance and was the most notable affair in the history of Lexington society.”

Oh my. So I decided to Google Bell Place and, what do you know, it still exists and it was built by Clara’s family. Her parents, David D. Bell and Sydney Sayre Bell, inherited a Greek Revival house in Lexington, called Woodside.

Shortly after the birth of their only child, Clara Davis Bell (1884-1957), Woodside was largely destroyed by fire. Bell employed Cincinnati architect Samuel Eugene Des Jardins (1856-1916) to reconstruct the house, a task completed in late 1885. David D. Bell died in 1892, but not until he had completed his will, an instrument which dictated that the property, now called Bell Place, was to be subdivided into multiple lots for the purpose of providing for Clara's maintenance, education, and future. In 1895 Bell's widow married Arthur Cary (1841-1927), an attorney and president of the Kentucky Union Land Company and the Kentucky Union Land Railroad, and president of the Lexington and Eastern Railroad when it became part of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad in 1914. They remained at Bell House on a four and a half acre tract while the remainder of the property was subdivided into 134 lots in 1906. In the meantime, Clara Bell married Julius Sylvester Walsh, Jr., the son of a wealthy St. Louis scion, and the couple moved to an apartment in New York City's Plaza Hotel.

Hmmpf. No mention of their time in St. Louis or Clara’s trend setting cocktail party.

I was sorry to read the following from that same source: “Following a divorce in the 1930s she continued to live in high society and was a well-known celebrity.” So Clara and Julius didn’t last. But no! That’s not what happened. Here’s her obituary from Time Magazine:

Died. Clara Bell Walsh, 70-odd ("none of your business"), widow of St. Louis, Millionaire Julius S. Walsh Jr. (died 1922), lavish Manhattan hostess who had a suite in the Plaza Hotel for nearly 50 years, and whose intimate soirees of "200 or so" friends were the starting point of many a Broadway career; of a cerebral hemorrhage; in Manhattan.

So Julius died! Young too. And don’t you just love Clara’s (“none of your business”) age? Sounds like my grandma.

Through the magic of Google Books I learned even more. From the Edgar Cayce Handbook for Help Through Drugless Therapy I learned this about Clara:

One of my favorite patients was Clara Belle [sic] Walsh. A tall blond of Wagnerian proportions, and nearly six feet tall, Clara Belle was the heiress of a great old Kentucky family and was internationally famous as a hostess, a theater and music patron, and an intimate personal friend of England’s Queen Mary.

She sponsored many great performers and artists, and I particularly remember meeting Vincent Lopez, then unknown, in her suite at the Plaza Hotel, where she held court when in New York. One day she casually informed us in a matter-of-fact voice that Lopez was the reincarnation of (according to a Cayce life reading) Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo had been left handed which was why Lopez always conducted with his left hand.

Mrs. Walsh had one painful physical complaint. Her legs were elegantly slim but her left knee was arthritic and had a spur. Occasionally the knee would hook up on the spur and cause swelling and excruciating pain. When this would happen, she would send for me, I would hasten to the Plaza Hotel, apply packs to reduce the swelling and work to unlock the knee from the spur. This gave her immediate relief. Once I was out of town when her knee became hooked up for four or five days and developed a terrible inflammation. She had called in the doctor from the Plaza Hotel and he gave her drugs – but not even the strongest narcotic had any effect on her. She was in excruciating pain. When the Plaza’ doctor called in a specialist, he suggested opening the knee or, if necessary, amputating the leg at the knee.

The doctor telling the story saves Mrs. Walsh from amputation. I won’t go on about the involvement of the psychic Edgar Cayce because I find it a little absurd. But at least Clara wasn’t amputated.

I also found a book called Inside the Plaza: An Intimate Portrait of the Ultimate Hotel and read this:

Clara Bell Walsh, a Kentucky debutante, first set foot in The Plaza on October 1, 1907, and never lived anywhere else until they carried her out the front door to a funeral home on August 2, 1957.

Well, then. She couldn’t have been living in St. Louis in 1917, could she? Through further digging on Google I found that St. Louis historians had already addressed that issue. The famous cocktail party was at the home of her father-in-law. “In 1917, Clara Bell Walsh hosted a party at the home of her father-in-law that has come to be known as the first cocktail party.” Well, that explains it. (It appears that her father-in-law was at the time in the middle of an ugly lawsuit involving a family business in which he had been sued by a nephew. The case was ultimately decided by the Missouri Supreme Court in 1920. Maybe she threw the party because she knew he needed a stiff drink.)

Becoming interested in Clara’s father in law I found out that his mother was Isabel DeMun. If you are not from St. Louis that name might not mean much to you, but if you are you might at least recognize the name DeMun from the street and neighborhood just outside the western City Limits (near St. Mary’s Hospital). Ah, an old French name, I thought. From one of the RICH old French St. Louis families. Isabel’s mother was a Gratiot (another street name in St. Louis) and Isabel’s maternal grandparents were Charles Gratiot and Victoire Chouteau. Yes, one of those Chouteaus – founders of St. Louis and of a fur trading fortune. Of course their descendents did well. For instance, Isabel’s aunt was married to Robert Barnes who founded Barnes Hospital. So Clara Bell married into St. Louis’s version of royalty.

I began to wonder what Clara looked like and found that (of course) Life Magazine had done a spread on her. But the photo was taken when she was older. There are no Google images of her when she was younger. But maybe someday one will be published. It would be very appropriate if she were holding a cocktail glass.

Cheers.

Reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño – The End

And so I come to the end of the Group Read of Robert Bolaño’s very long novel, 2666. I’ve been thinking of how I can describe how I feel about it.

A long time ago I went to a special exhibition, at the Saint Louis Art Museum, of the paintings of Max Beckmann. Beckmann is generally classified as an expressionist. SLAM has the largest public collection of Beckmann paintings in the world, probably because Beckmann taught art here at Washington University during the last years of his life. They were exhibiting the works they owned and, I believe, other works lent for the exhibition.

Three of us went to see the exhibition: me, my long time friend Leslie and my sister CB. Leslie is one of those people who has a natural eye for art. Her dad was a professional photographer and Leslie always had the ability to notice and appreciate small details in art that eluded me. She really enjoyed the exhibition and I was glad to have her along because she pointed out things to me that I might not have noticed on my own. My sister, CB, on the other hand did not enjoy it. We found her, at the end of the galleries, sitting on a bench in the center of the room with her eyes closed. “This gave me a headache,” she announced. “Can we please get out of here.”

I could understand how the art gave her a headache. It was harshly colored and portrayed ugly people doing ugly things. I sympathized with her. It didn’t give me a headache but I was more than willing to leave. Leslie thought the art was great. Me? I was glad I could appreciate it better because of Leslie’s insights but on the whole I didn’t care if I ever saw it again. It wasn’t my style. I didn’t regret seeing it, though, because I had learned about it and I had learned I didn’t like it and I could put it behind me. Walking out of the museum that day I found that I was in the minority. The people leaving seemed to fall into either Leslie or CB’s camp. They loved it or hated it.

I’ve never intentionally gone into the Beckmann galleries at SLAM again.

It seems to me that the reactions to 2666 are similar to our three reactions to the Beckmann exhibition. For a lot of people, it seems to have given them a metaphorical headache. During the group read I saw people talking about how many people just couldn’t take it, especially the Part About the Crimes. Some of the people who started reading with the group dropped out. Others proclaimed that this novel “rocked my world”.

Me? Like the Beckmann exhibition, which I don’t think I would have gotten much out of without Leslie, I’m glad I read it while others were reading and discussing it. I don’t regret reading it because I learned that, whatever style or genre this is, I don’t like it. I don’t see what the others who love it see in it. There was nothing in it that gave me a headache that made me want to run from it. But I don’t need to read anything like it again.

Before I began reading 2666, I didn’t want to know anything about it. I like to come to novels without a lot of preconceived notions. I don’t like spoilers. The only thing I knew about it was that it had won an award and it had something to do with the murders of a lot of women in Mexico. Now that I’ve finished it, I decided to go read what the critics had to say about it.

The reviews that I find are uniformly good. A “masterpiece”; “complete, achieved and satisfying”, “a difficult novel to shake off”. Most of the time they admit that it was unfinished when Bolaño died. The other day I read that a sixth part was found among Bolaño’s papers. If that is true then I don’t see how anyone can really definitively interpret this novel as it was published. Because to interpret it as it is now would require you to say that Bolaño intended there to be no “real” ending. Perhaps that’s true or perhaps the new Part Six will show otherwise.

What I find very odd, however, is that almost none of the critics say what I think is obvious about this novel. It’s a mess. This is novel written by someone who died before it was finished and it really needed the author to have lived through the editing process. That didn’t happen and it shows. I really can’t take reviews seriously that don’t even mention this. Obviously the critics think this novel works despite the mess. Or maybe it works because of the mess. Maybe they are right; maybe they are wrong. But I don’t see how you review this novel without stating the obvious mess that it is.

Of course, Bolaño himself didn’t seem to have a lot of respect for the critics he created as characters for his novel. So I see no reason why I should defer to the real critics. This is an unfinished novel and it shows.

Perhaps I should have started with a different Bolaño novel, but I started with this one. I intensely disliked the way he wrote women (although I should say that in the last section he creates a wonderful woman character in Lotte). I was bored by all the diversions into side stories. I didn’t like his verbose style which pervaded every section except The Part About the Crimes which was my favorite section. He never made me care what happened to the characters. No, not a single character. I gave up thinking that the novel was going to “go” anywhere and by the last section was reconciled that he had no intention of letting anything really be wrapped up or come together. Throughout the read I watched the other readers who were carefully documenting lists of the deaths and other details – as thought it would all be relevant at some point. I wondered if it would all come together at the end and I would want to go back and see how the puzzle fit together. But by the last section I knew that wasn’t going to happen. It was like Bolaño threw a bunch of puzzle pieces in a box but they weren’t necessarily all to the same puzzle so you were never going to be able to see the picture.

The darkness of the story did not bother me. The seeming pointlessness of it did. And what really bothered me about it was … I never thought about it when I wasn’t reading it. It just did not grab me intellectually. I think that’s why I was never even tempted to try to go participate in any of the discussions about it. I just didn’t see the point in spending a lot of time trying to figure it out.

So now it’s over and I will put it behind me. I wonder if I will think about it again.