Mark Twain at his birthday party, looking irascible
To continue what was a brief but most exciting, glittering, breathtaking research adventure: my investigation into the guests (including my grandmother) at Mark Twain's 70th birthday party, which was described in Harper's Weekly for Dec. 23, 1905, with pictures of the 170 literary guests. The New York Times reported the following observations about the women guests:
Many Women There.
"A particular feature of the dinner was the strength of the feminine contingent. There were fully as many women there as men, and they were not present as mere appendages of their husbands, but as individuals representing the art of imaginative writing no less than the men. An observer looking over the host of diners, after having scanned the list of guests and noticed that every feminine name in it was familiar to all readers, could not but wonder that the women he found corresponding to those names were all young and pretty. The whole gathering did not seem to include half a dozen women with streaks of gray in their hair."
Gray hair? Well, the past is a different country; and to put these views of women guests into context, Harpers points out: "At Whittier's seventieth birthday, women were admitted into the room only after dinner, to hear the toasts. At Grant's Chicago banquet they were not admitted at all."
Now to meet some of the women.
Jean Webster's Table
At the height of their friendship, Jean Webster and my grandmother Winnie (Onoto Watanna) frequently went to plays together, and Jean was Winnie's literary mentor and advisor, writing the foreword to her memoir, Me. Those days were a decade in the future, though they probably knew each other by the time of the Twain party in 1905, as Winnie's husband had grown up with Jean in Fredonia, NY. Jean was present despite the mixed feelings she must have had about her great-uncle Mark Twain. He fired her father, his publisher, who later committed suicide, and their relations can be guessed by this anecdote, from an historical site about Fredonia: http://app.co.chautauqua.ny.us/hist_struct/Pomfret/20CentralPomfret.html
[Charles Webster] was proud of the honor bestowed on him by the Pope when he visited Rome during his European travels. He now had the right to wear the uniform of a Knight of the Order of Pius. It was a pale blue jacket with gold epaulets, white cashmere pants, and a tricorner hat. On occasions he appeared in the village wearing it with sword in hand. His neighbors called him Sir Charles. His bitter uncle, Mark Twain, was said to have commented, "If Charles deserved to be a Papal Knight, Twain deserved to be an archangel."
Karen Alkalay-Gut writes, on her website about Jean Webster: http://karenalkalay-gut.com/web.html
"In later interviews she never charged her famous ancestor with crimes against her father, but covered up her relationship with Twain until it became a matter of public knowledge, and the expression on her face when photographed at Twain's seventieth birthday tells what she was not allowed to express."
And now we see that expression! Jean is lovely in her delicate gown, hair piled high, hands primly folded in her lap, but she is a little slumped, and is frowning. She looks depressed, a bit alienated. The man nearest
her, Richard Le Gallienne, has his back turned to her; he is an elegant piece of work himself, rather Oscar Wildeian. Looking him up, I see his dates are 1866-1947, he is an English man of letters, literary critic and
contributor to the Yellow Book, father of the actress Eva Le Gallienne...and the bio says he was associated with "the fin-de-siecle aesthetes of the 1890s" which is exactly what I would have judged from the look of him. Jean would have written something wickedly funny about him, no doubt. Another woman at Jean's table was somebody who really should have been sitting at Winnie's table, Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore. Now, my goodness, just read about this lady - I read with my mouth open - it makes you want to write her biography:
Elizabeth Bisland
Elizabeth Bisland was a journalist who in 1889 was ordered by her boss to race Nelly Bly on her round-the-world journey. Protesting the assignment, Elizabeth went in the other direction. Her personality was utterly unlike that of outgoing Nelly; we're told she was "dignified, autocratic, flighty, sybaritic, temperamental, patronizing, powerfully intellectual and effusively romantic...a minefield of complexity. Diminutive, half-blind Lafcadio Hearn, the bohemian journalist who worked with Miss Bisland when, at age 17, she was culture and society editor for the New Orleans Times-Democrat [described her thus]...'She is a witch - turning heads everywhere - but some of her admirers are afraid of her. [An admirer] felt as if he were playing with a beautiful dangerous leopard, which he loved for not biting him. As for me, she is like hasheesh. I can't remember anything she says or anything I myself say after leaving the house; my head is all in a whirl, and I walk against people in the street, and get run over and lose my way - my sense of orientation being grievously disturbed. But I am not in love at all - no such foolishness as that; I am only experiencing the sensation produced upon - alas! - hundreds of finer men than I."
Nelly Bly
A review tells us that the story is about "the lovely young Mrs. Wing Tee (of course married reluctantly to an aged husband) who nurses a young British gentleman thrown from his horse outside her gates, despite having been warned about the foreign devils. She dreams of a future with him, while he dreams about his fiancee. When the husband returns, tipped off by a nosy neighbor, there is a feast in which a ginger jar figures prominently (and tragically)." The notes comment, "The author provides local color in this story by describing an exotic milieu, and by attempting to render the heroine's dialogue in pidgin English. There is no evidence the author had any direct knowledge of Tientsin (or indeed China), but an oriental setting would appeal to a popular audience at the time." How jealous she and Winnie must have been of each other!
Frances Hodgson Burnett's table
Frances, Thompson Buchanan, Henry van Dyke, Carolyn Wells, Prince Troubetskoy, Will Carleton, Lloyd Osborne
Hard to believe there were two Winnies in the world - or five or six - but we are also in the world of Frances Hodgson Burnett, where such things could happen. So now, Frances's table. She sits to the left, a little apart from the others and hunched over, rather like Jean Webster, with no one regarding her at all (which must have been odd for her); but her expression is pleasant. Her frou-frou lace gown trails on the ground, she is aged 56, rather older than most of the women at the party (however, her hair is not gray). She seems ignored by those at her table; young Thompson Buchanan, whose playwrighting and directorial career lies mostly in front of him (so how did they know to invite him then?), has his back turned to her for the picture. Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933, clergyman and professor of English literature at Princeton, author of inspirational stories), is turned away as well (though we know from the New York Times he escorted her into the dinner), to talk to an unnamed but more attractive woman. In the center of the picture is Carolyn Wells (1862 - 1942), wearing a very advanced looking draped gown; she would seem to be an even more prolific - and forgotten - author than Frances, having written some 170 books, mostly mysteries and girls' books. A humorist, her Rubaiyat of a Motorcar (1906) is one of her most famous books, and she contributed to Gelett Burgess's magazines, The Lark, The Chap Book, The Yellow Book. Other gentlemen at Frances's table are Prince Troubetzkoy, an artist and sculptor, whose wife was also there though not at that table (unless she's the unnamed woman, but I don't think they were seating husbands and wives together). More about her in a minute - she was another "hold on to your hat, how many women like this could there BE in one room?" types. Will Carleton, then known as "the poet of the people," and now forgotten, rounds off the table, along with Lloyd Osbourne, stepson of Robert Louis Stevenson, who collaborated with him on three novels while they lived in the South Seas (The Ebb Tide, The Wrong Box, The Wrecker) and was the "indirect inspiration" for Treasure Island. He looks intellectual and bored. Here's an interesting little piece he wrote on Stevenson, telling how he would:
"rail at the respectable and well-to-do; RLS's favourite expression was 'a common banker,' used as one might refer to a common labourer. 'Why, even a common banker would renig at a thing like that!'--'renig' being another favourite word. I got the impression that people with good clothes and money in their pockets, and pleasant big houses, were somehow odious, and should be heartily despised. They belonged to a strange race called Philistines, and were sternly to be kept in their place."
Amelie Rives, Princess Troubetskoy
Well! One could chase Internet stories all day and all night, in fact I have, but to calm us down, let's close with a look at Willa Cather's quiet table.
Willa Cather's table
Charles Major, Arthur Colton, Elinor Macartney Lane, Lilian Bell Bogue, Frederick A. Duneka, Willa Silbert Cather, Edward S. Martin, Anne O'Hagan.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Cather's lifelong friend and sometime enemy, was there too, at another table, but much as I love The Deepening Stream and The Homemaker, we have to stop somewhere. I certainly have quite enough material for several more posts about Twain's gala, but shall next turn back to the more restful pastures of my thrift store finds, interspersed with sleeping cats.
