The Lively Art of Entertaining!

Our book today – the last in this latest, incredibly protracted, almost Egyptianly cursed string of Nine Lives – is from way back in 1957 (surely the Duchess of Newcastle was still alive and kicking?): it's The Lively Art of Entertaining by the incomparable Elsa Maxwell, the most famous daughter of the lovely little town of Keokuk, Iowa.

Entertaining here means parties, which were marvelous multi-voiced instruments for Maxwell, massively complex instruments which she conducted with the consummate skill of a symphony maestro or the lighting-master for the Super Bowl. She knew as well as anybody how evanescent they are – genuine masterpieces of planning, work, and improvisation are forgotten in a season or two, and even once-in-a-lifetime constellations more often than not lack their Pindar or Plato to get the details right (and they'd require one – good party-scenes are devilishly difficult to write; they've defeated some of the best writers in history, whose dullest chapters are usually party-chapters). But that didn't matter to Maxwell – she'd found her one great skill, and good fortune had provided her with the perfect time, place, and means to give it expression. And in typical fashion, she imagined her own lineage, stretching all the way back to Queen Hatshepsut:

Externals change, but the human heart does not. It's an old truth and one we all rediscover from time to time in our lives, yet never have I been made so vividly aware of it as when I stumbled on the records left by this ancient queen and realized fully for the first time how ageless and honored is the heredity of entertaining. Four thousand years ago, could not Hatshepsut have chose to reward the achievements of her travelers merely with titles and lands, the customary royal perquisites? She could have; no doubt she did. But she didn't stop there. She added to her thanks the most heart-warming gesture of gratitude a woman can make: she gave a party.

Well yes she did, and that tone – preening, yet oddly approachable – permeates this book. Maxwell maintained she wrote it mostly for women, for her fellow hostesses in venues large and small, and the heartwarming thing to say here would be that in reality, she wrote it for everybody who's ever tried to reach out to another person. But no – she really wrote the book for herself, to be about herself, because in every good party, regardless of what the lady herself tells you, the hostess is the focal point, the only irreplaceable person. Maxwell loved talking more than almost any human being who's ever lived, and her favorite subject was herself. This isn't necessarily bad – somebody once said of her that she deserved a Puccini opera (she replied “Yes, but do I live happily ever after or knife myself?”), and he was right – but it does shape all the anecdotes in The Lively Art of Entertaining. They start off innocently enough:

If it was difficult in those free-and-easy days to persuade people to put on fancy dress, it has now become next to impossible. Even so, I still do what I can to dress up my parties. For example, when I gave a ball recently to honor Stavros Niarchos I decided that, since it was he who made my cruise to the Greek islands possible, I must pay him a fitting tribute. So I asked all the women to wear a headdress or tiara, synonyms of elegance, and to my amazement two thirds of them actually showed up in tiaras.

But then they get the Maxwell touch:

Mine, incidentally, would have been at home at Niki de Gunzburg's Bal des Valses, as it had belonged to Empress Elizabeth of Austria. Harry Winston, the jeweler, lent it to me, and it was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen – all diamond roses, exquisitely entwined. With it, at Mr. Winston's suggestion, I also wore the Portuguese diamond which one of the Kings of Portugal had sent into Brazil, and which finally reached New York. This was a single diamond of great purity and weight, valued, I believe, in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. So with these two adornments I had, for the first and, no doubt, last time in my life, roughly a million dollars on my person.

The Lively Art of Entertaining (when Rizzoli re-issued the book in 2005, they retitled it How To
Do It, and it's doubtful Maxwell would have approved; she wouldn't have minded the risque, but she would have sniffed at the crudity) doubles as a field guide to all the various types of guests regular hostesses are likely to encounter during the course of their adventures. The drunks are here, and the tee-totallers, the carpers and the gadabouts, the dreaded bore (her advice: seat them all together – never sacrifice a good guest to their terrors), and one other category, perhaps inspired by a poor soul whose wife insisted he accompany her:

Worst of the offending guests, because his offensiveness is negative and therefore difficult to define, is the show-me guest – he who arrives at your party, seats himself, folds his arms, presses his lips together, and deliberately defies you to amuse him. He is there, his attitude says plainly, only to see if you can do it. To him I show no quarter. When I give a party, I always have someone stationed at the door – chiefly as a block to would-be crashers, but also to help out in situations such as this. Also when I give a party I always have a few of the latest books sent in. With these for props, I am ready for the show-me. I first send word to the door to have his (sometimes her, but rarely) coat ready. Then I beckon sweetly to the offender, and when he has followed me out of the party room I say to him, nicely but very firmly, “Darling, you are not happy here. Because you are not happy, I am not happy. So I think a good book and bed will be just the thing for you now.” Before he can recover from his astonishment, his coat is put on, his hat or stick or gloves handed him, the book placed under his arm, and he finds himself on the way out, still not quite grasping what has happened to him. Brutal, yes. But so is he, and I recommend the treatment the next time you want to manage a discreet eviction.

If our hostess could be hoodwinked, it would be a fairly easy way to cadge a new book – but we must not think our hostess could be hoodwinked, not on these elegant battlefields she knew better than anybody. Whether it was a string of barges floating up and down Venice's Grand Canal or a pig-calling contest in an Upper West Side dining room, there was no fete Maxwell couldn't accomplish, and this charming, glowing book is her best shot at having anybody remember it all. It's one of our most entertaining entertaining memoirs, from the real Hostess with the Mostess.

The Duchess of Newcastle's Memoir!

Our book today is the sprightly, weirdly honest wish-it-were-longer memoir of Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, who’s near the top of a list of those oddball historical personages I’m always surprised to find isn’t better known. Better known in this case would be a distinct improvement over totally un-known, which is the current state of affairs with this remarkable woman, who in her own day was a trailblazer noteworthy even in an age of trailblazers.

It isn’t just that she was brought up by her loving mother in a family atmosphere of trust, support, and encouragement – although that was still a rarity in 17^th century England; and it isn’t just that she intended to cut a dash in her life quite independent of the men around her – although she did indeed do that, designing her own unique style of clothes, fashioning her own unique style of speech, and cultivating her own unique brand of personality entirely separate from her powerful, equally vibrant older brothers or her easy-going husband, William Cavendish, the Duke of Newcastle; and it isn’t just that she was impatient of the second-class restrictions put on women in all walks of life – although she was, even going so far as to be the first woman to attend a proceeding of the Royal Society. No, the superlative that concerns us today regarding Margaret Cavendish is bookish, as she would have liked it to be: she poured herself into an endless stream of books, at a time when even the most educated women dared not parade that fact.

She was born Margaret Lucas in 1623 to a wealthy royalist Essex family, and she was writing scenes, monologues, and fantasies from the moment she could first make her letters (a moment postponed perhaps a bit by the rather lax emphasis her delightful mother put on drilling children in their lessons against their will – her mother’s first question in virtually any situation was “Well, what would you like to do?”). When Civil War broke out in 1642, young Margaret volunteered her services as a lady in waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria, and two years later she went with the queen into continental exile, where she met William Cavendish and fell in love.

He fell in love with her as well, although not for her looks – despite what worshipful portraits might want to sell you, Margaret Cavendish was a short, homely woman with a pug nose, an underbite, and stringy brown hair – but rather for her leaping, darting, restless mind, and for a fact that most men are too stupid to prize: life with her was never boring.

As soon as Charles II was restored to his throne, the couple returned, reclaimed the bulk of Newcastle’s seized estates, and promptly retired to the countryside of Nottinghamshire to write and read and talk with each other. Margaret disliked the superficial frenzy of the court, and she and her husband very much liked the quiet, invigorating routine they developed. During her time in exile, Margaret had already begun publishing works of wildly varying natures under her own name, gaining just exactly the mixture of cheering fans and serial deriders such public figures have always had. Her Poems and Fancies and Philosophical Fancies were fresh, effusive, often silly, ultimately invigorating – and provocative, because she readily admitted she was no scholar (although she resented the inevitable speculation that her husband guided her hand while she wrote – there’s a hot denial of that innuendo in virtually all of her works).

That’s the trail she blazed that interests us today: she was the first woman in modern times – indeed, one of the first writers of either gender in modern times – to make herself not just the narrator of her various intellectual investigations but also the subject of them; she dramatized her own process of perpetual inquiry, never for a moment doubting that it was of intrinsic interest to her readers. For some reason, it’s hugely gratifying to see how often, how happily, she makes reference in her various works to “my readers.” There’s a particular quiet pride that comes with being able to say that, and surely for most of her life Margaret was the only woman in England who would say it (needless to say, if she were alive today she would be blogging to beat the world).  Even the redoubtable Aphra Behn only followed in her wake.

All her works contain threads of fascination (not nearly enough such fascination, if you listen to her most illustrious critic, Virginia Woolf – or too many threads), but perhaps the most fascinating thing of all is her brief memoir, in which she openly divulges all kinds of personal quirks and habits of her own and, in the what has since become the grand tradition of memoir writing (although you could make a case that it started here), she lies her face off on virtually every page. It’s an indelibly charming work, as precipitate and immediate as anything Pepys ever wrote.

Typical of the woman and typical of the time, she spends a good portion of the memoir’s scanty page-count defending its very existence against anticipated charges of willful flightiness:

I desire all my readers and acquaintances to believe, though my words run stumbling out of my mouth, and my pen draws roughly on my paper, yet my thoughts move regular in my brain for the several tracks or paths that contemplation hath made on my brain, which paths or tracks are the several ways my thoughts move in are much smoother than the tongue in my mouth, from whence words flow, or the paper on which my pen writes: for I have not spoke so much as I have writ, nor writ so much as I have thought …

A good line, but the book scarcely bares it out – those acquaintances of hers would not have recognized a Margaret who placed any control on what she spoke, writ, or thought. Her sentences often mirror the endless cascade of talk she could be in person, sometimes rambling for entire pages without a single breath of a period:

As for my breeding, it was according to my birth, and the nature of my sex; for my birth was not lost in my breeding, for as my sisters was or had been bred, so was I in plenty or rather with superfluity; likewise we were bred virtuously, modestly, civilly, honourably, and on honest principles: as for plenty, we had not only for necessity, conveniency, and decency, but for delight and pleasure to a superfluity; ‘tis true we did not riot, but we lived orderly; for riot even in the kings’ courts and princes’ palaces, brings ruin without content or pleasure, when order in less fortunes shall live more plentifully and deliciously then princes, that live in a hurlieburlie, as I may term it, in which they are seldom well served, for disorder obstructs; besides, it doth disgust life, distract the appetites, and yield no true relish to the sences; for pleasure, delight, peace, and felicitie, live in method and temperance.

She could pause and be quiet when it suited her; the memoir’s sweetest, softest notes are sounded when she’s remembering her mother:

Her beauty was beyond the ruin of time… one might think death was enamoured with her ,for he imbraced her in a sleep, and so gently, as if he were afraid to hurt her …

But this is definitely the Margaret Show, and her protestations are everywhere, for the gullible to believe:

… whatsoever I was addicted to, either in fashion of cloths, contemplation of thoughts, actions of life, they were lawful, honest, honourable, and modest, of which I can avouch to the world with a great confidence, because it is a pure truth.

Modesty seldom entered into things with her, but one part of this is most certainly pure truth: her dialogue was conducted with the world. And the world listened – often hooting in derision, but listening just the same, and buying her books as fast as she could issue and re-issue them. Penguin Classics used to make a slim volume of those books, but it didn’t include the memoir; some enterprising publisher ought to craft a tiny, gorgeous (and fully annotated, of course) edition of just that one remarkable work, so people could bring the Duchess everywhere they go.