Mark Twain's Party (Part 2)

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."

Agnes Repplier (1855-1950), distinctly grey-haired essayist ("There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth"), reading a poem in tribute to Mark Twain

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

Left to right:  J. Henry Harper, Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore, Nelson Lloyd, Frances Aymar Mathews, Jesse Lynch Williams, Richard Le Gallienne, Jean Webster.

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

And indeed, Nelson Lloyd is staring, mesmerized, sideways at Elizabeth, with the look Henry Kissinger once gave to Princess Diana's chest. Lloyd is a very handsome blond man who wrote romances with such titles as A Drone and a Dreamer and The Chronic Loafer. Doesn't sound too energetic.  Beside him is Jesse Lynch Williams, a Princetonian who wrote things like Adventures of a Freshman; I think it's him Le Gallienne is looking bored with. But front and center in this picture, larger than life, is a really raffish looking woman, ugly, flamboyant, and altogether too much at her ease - ah! no wonder she looks so loud, Frances Aymar Mathews is a Broadway playwright, and her Pretty Peggy was a big hit a couple of years before. But look! She got in on the Winnie boom! Wrote a book in 1904 called A Little Tragedy at Tien-Tsin, which is described as being about "a culture clash between East and West.

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

Now for Princess Troubetszkoy:  good Lord.  A hair raising article entitled "The Strange Story of the Princess Troubetszkoy, Born a Polish Serf," begins with the memorable words, "Princess Troubetzkoy, under arrest here on extradition demanded by Italy for forging documents, committed suicide in the police station in which she was detained..." Short version, this Polish serf girl worked in old bachelor Prince Pignatelli's castle, and since "such loveliness as hers was born only to wear a crown," she got him to marry her. He soon died, and his relatives tore her inheritance from her, so she resolved to disgrace his name and went onstage in the Folies Bergere (wouldn't you?). Many gilded gallants were driven to suicide by her siren eyes. Well, she ran around Europe under various titles, an adventuress and con woman; according to the San Francisco Call she did herself in, in 1898...1898? But that would mean she could not have been at Mark Twain's dinner in 1905, though the New York Times says she was. Better check that again...Aha! Sorry to have misled you. The lady at the dinner was the "Princess Troubetzkoy, who once was Amelie Rives and still writes under that name." I see this one is a poetess, author of an ode unfortunately called "The Farrier Lass o' Piping Pebworth"; and there's a collection of letters she exchanged with Ellen Glasgow. She was a Southerner and wrote several novels, her first and most famous being in 1888, The Quick or the Dead, which caused a sensation because of the "immorality" of the plot (a young widow ponders whether or not to remarry shortly after the death of her husband).  Robert E. Lee was her godfather, and she had a tragic first marriage with the grandson of John Jacob Astor.  Theirs is a tale of morphine addiction in France, affairs, and madness. The Astor family claimed that Amelie drove him mad, her family claimed that he was already mad. There's a "salacious" biography called Archie and Amelie, Love and Madness in the Gilded Age...This was all before she married Prince Troubetzkoy, of course.

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.

My Ten Best Places to Read

Simon Thomas, on his Stuck-in-a-Book blog, has issued a challenge to book bloggers:  post a picture that sums up your reading tastes.  I found so many pictures of beautiful reading spots from memorable moments in my life, I thought I'd make a Best 10 list.  Here is Simon's post, with his own "reading" picture: 
http://stuck-in-a-book.blogspot.com/2010/05/tea-and.html

And now my choices:

1.  The Winding Stair Bookshop, Dublin, 1990s

Apparently this famous bookshop/cafe in Dublin overlooking the River Liffey has closed and re-opened since we were there, so I don't know if the atmosphere is as bookishly magical as it was when Peter and I spent several long and happy Irish afternoons there...reading.

 2.  The Accademia Pensione, Venezia, December 2005.

I don't think there are very many places in the world where I've been more delighted, exalted, happy, than in Venice.  After a day of showing Venice to Paul (it was his first trip there), to come back to the beautiful Accademia (a former palazzo, later the site of the Katherine Hepburn movie Summertime) and relax by the fire with a book and a cup of cappucino, was very heaven. When we left, the staff bid farewell to the "cappuccinistas," we drank so many of them!

1991

2009

Christmas

3.  The Novel Cafe (now known as 212 Pier),

Santa Monica, California

By rights, the Novel should have come first.  After all, this venerable bookshop/cafe is where all three of us have done most of our reading and writing daily (and nightly) for the last twenty years.  But it's so familiar, so every day, that beloved as it is, I began the list with the glamorous exotic ones instead!  In any case, this list isn't in any particular order:  it couldn't be.

  4.  Lake Temagami, Canada.  Most peaceful place where we've ever read.

5.  Tamarack Lodge, Mammoth.  An old favorite.

6.  Bearpaw. 

Is calling Bearpaw our most beloved spot on earth going too far?  No.  We've been to this back country tent camp, a 12 mile hike up the High Sierra Trail in Sequoia, maybe 40 times.  Don't know how many more times we'll be able to make the hike.  But it's our personal heaven...and a wonderful place to read.

7.  New York City - home town life

New York's our home town and when we go back to visit family, we often stay at my cousin the rabbi's apartment...which was his father the rabbi's apartment before it was his.  I remember Seders here, back in the 1950s.  A lot of family memories...and a lot of great reading.

8.  Greenwich Village...back in the day.

Cafe Figaro, as it looked in the '60s, when Peter and I first met there, age 17 and 19.  Me in Washington Square Park, 40 years on, sitting in the same spot as in my avatar picture.

9.  Homer, Alaska. 

One of our greatest trips...and my high school friend Denise's cabin is cozy, full of character, and a great place to read. 

         

      10.  And best of all - at home in bed with a cat!

A Party for Mark Twain

A few years ago, a professor friend mentioned reading about Mark Twain's fabulous gala 70th birthday party at Delmonico's, which was attended by the leading literary lights of the day. The article was in Harper's Weekly for December 23, 1905, and I was all agog because I knew that my novelist grandmother Onoto Watanna was present, along with her friend Jean Webster, a great-niece of Twain (and author of Daddy-Long-Legs). Photographs were taken of each table, and I was delighted to obtain scans of the pictures through the good offices of my friend Peter Hanff and Bob Hirst of the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. I immediately began Googling the guests, and made some surprising discoveries. Later, I was fortunate to score a copy of Harpers myself, on eBay. Now it has belatedly occurred to me that my blog is an ideal format to show some of these pictures, tell about these literary celebrities, and in general try to recreate a magical evening at Delmonico's, over a century ago.

Mark Twain at his birthday dinner

There is not space for all the pictures (there are 20 group portraits, as well as an artist's rendering of the entire scene), but I can impart some of the cream. The guest list is fascinating...170 celebrities and authors at all stages of fame, including Willa Cather, Frances Hodgson Burnett, John Luther Long, Charles Chesnutt, William Dean Howells, Dorothy Canfield, Bliss Carman, Andrew Carnegie, Emily Post, May Sinclair, Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, Princess Trebetzkov.  Each guest received a plaster of Paris bust of Twain. My grandmother's has come down in our family.

Mark Twain's Bust

Of course I was most eager to see the picture of my grandmother.  I longed to know if she wore Edwardian dress like the other ladies, or a kimono?  For Onoto Watanna is considered the first Asian American novelist, but she was born Winnifred Eaton (1875 - 1954) and was raised in an entirely English-speaking home in Montreal.  Her father was an English painter, Edward Eaton, her mother Grace Trefusius was Chinese but had been educated in England, as a missionary. They had 14 "half-caste" children, and the oldest daughter, Edith (1865 - 1914), was also a writer.  Together they are known as the "Eaton sisters," but Edith, who used the pen name Sui Sin Far and wrote stories of the immigrant Chinese, is held in high critical and social esteem, as the godmother of Asian American fiction. Winnifred, or Winnie, sought a frankly commercial career, and took on a fake "Japanese" identity, the better to publicize her fashionable pseudo-Japanese romances.  She was a mistress of publicity, a poseur who changed her ethnic identity as it suited her. 

Here is Winnie at her table, in conventional Western costume, the lady at the center of the picture:

Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), center; Gelett Burgess beside her. (Click on pictures to see larger)

Turning my attention to the others at her table, I was amazed and charmed to notice that she was sitting right next to Gelett Burgess.  He was the author of Goops and How to Be Them, then still a fairly new book (1900) as well as the immortal verse:

I never saw a purple cow

I never hope to see one;

But I can tell you, anyhow,

I'd rather see than be one!

Original Purple Cow illustration, 1895

What can the dinner table conversation have been like?  I imagine they didn't talk too much, judging by the length and number of the tribute speeches printed in Harpers. Winnie evidently came to the party unaccompanied; her hard-drinking newspaper reporter husband Bertrand Babcock was not present, but clearly nothing would have kept her away from the occasion - as evidenced by the fact that she was actually nine months pregnant with her third child (my Aunt Doris)!  In the picture, she manages to conceal this with some dexterity, slumping down so that only her head and shoulders are in view.  Yet she appears to be quite enjoying herself, and unless it is my imagination, she and Burgess have a sort of subtle conspiratorial look together.  He was of course one of the funniest men of the era, brilliantly playful with words, though I should have thought it daunting to eat in company with a man who wrote:

The Goops they lick their fingers

And the Goops they lick their knives

They spill their broth on the tablecloth -

Oh, they lead disgusting lives!

The Goops they talk while eating,

And loud and fast they chew

And that is why I'm glad that I

Am not a Goop - are you?

The New York Times gives a delightful description of the dinner at Delmonico's:

"The dinner began at 8 o'clock. Soon before that hour the guests began to gather in the parlor adjoining the Red Room. In the corridor outside, place had been prepared for an orchestra of forty directed by Nahan Franko. When the march, serving as a signal for the procession to the dining room, was played, Mr. Clemens led the way, with Mrs. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman on his arm. The couples that followed would have attracted attention wherever they were seen and recognized. Col. Harvey led Princess Troubetzkoy, who once was Amelia Rives and still writes under that name. Andrew Carnegie and Agnes Repplier, the essayist, followed side by side. After them came John Burroughs and Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, who was the first author from whom Henry Mills Alden received a contribution after becoming editor of Harper's Monthly, more than forty years ago. The Rev. Dr. Henry Van Dyke escorted Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett, while Bliss Carman, the poet, led Mrs. Ruth McEnery Stuart. While the dinner was in progress the guests - one table at a time - went out into another room and had their pictures taken in groups. The pictures will form the most conspicuous feature of an album which is to be given to Mr. Clemens as a souvenir of the occasion."

 Delmonico's was then in its heyday, the luxurious eatery where Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell held court, where Lobster Newberg and Oysters Rockefeller were invented, where the rich and famous generally enjoyed the high life.  This was definitely an occasion I'd like to travel back in time to attend!

An artist's rendition of the occasion

And now comes the luxury of speculation. Who are all these people and how did they happen to be seated as they were?  As the New York Times put it:

"...his friends and fellow-craftsmen in literature gathered in the Red Room at Delmonico's for the celebration. Barring a half dozen or so, all were guaranteed to be genuine creators of imaginative writings--or illustrators of such writings. The guarantee was furnished by Col. George Harvey, editor of The North American Review, who was the host of the evening as well as the Chairman."

Funny, isn't it, how all the notable literati of an era are but passing shadows - who knows all these names now?  Only scholars.  Some were nearing the end of their fame, others were still so early in their careers that you wonder how they got invited.  Winnie was at the apogee of hers, for her best selling novel A Japanese Nightingale had sold 200,000 copies in 1901 (a copy is in Mark Twain's library; the house site indicates that it is one of the last books that his wife Livy read), and the previous year (1904) was made into a Broadway play, which flopped:  a review said it the play died "like a poor little bird that had twisted its larynx."  At this stage of her life Winnie was doing what she called turning out "a book and a baby a year."  There she sits, demure, age 30, looking very pretty and concealing her pregnancy in her elegant Edwardian dress, her dark hair piled and rolled high, at a table of people who all look rather ineffably stiff and bored and as if they don't have a lot in common. Yet I like to think Winnie was well entertained by Burgess; at any rate, she looks as if she were.

Her neighbor on the other side, F. Hopkinson Smith, seems to have been quite a famous and venerable author, enough for several of his books to be on Gutenberg now. One, The Veiled Lady, that came out in 1907, features "a most charming and lovable Houri, to whom the nightingales sing lullabies." Could he have been inspired by Winnie, his dinner partner at this 1905 event? Although he looks like a disdainful grandee, leaning away from Winnie, they might have more in common than it seems...

Winnie, 1903

The other man at her table, Edwin Lefevre, is the author of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator - which is one of my husband Peter's favorite books. Imagine her sitting there with him and Goops! (I do hope they didn't lick their fingers).

The other two ladies at the table are Famous Poetesses. Josephine Daskam Bacon was a children's writer (Memoirs of a Baby) now remembered for writing the Girl Scout Handbook, but Alice Duer Miller is especially fascinating. Exactly Winnie's age, dark and beautiful, she was from a far loftier background than my raffish grandmother. Her family was wealthy, with a prominent history going back to the Revolutionary War; she was educated at Barnard and at the time of this party was already known as a poetess, though the most interesting part of her career was still to come.  She became a famous Suffragette, author of the satirical Suffrage movement poem "Are Women People?" but her greatest popular success was with her verse novel "The White Cliffs" (1940). This was about an American girl who marries an English aristocrat, and brings up his son in England after her husband is killed in World War I. It ends with the lines:

I am American bred
I have seen much to hate here - much to forgive,
But in a world in which England is finished and dead,
I do not wish to live.

Alice Duer Miller

The most exciting years of the Suffragette movement, World War II, and so much else, was still in the unknown future when these writers sat down in Delmonico's to honor Mark Twain, who was then four years away from his death.  The speech he gave on this occasion can be read here:

http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_seventieth.html

More on the glittering guests in my next post...

To Be Continued

Pizza and Prostatectomy

...not even I can charm away a sore throat..." - Emma

Making low-carb pizza for Peter

I might not ordinarily consider my husband's prostate surgery to be an edifying or entertaining topic for a Light, Bright, and Sparkling blog post, but it is a logical continuation of my posts about how the low-carb diet improved his diabetes, and made the surgery possible.  So, here are the notes I wrote during the experience.  (Pizza recipe follows.)

Thursday, May 13. 

Afternoon

Peter was wheeled into surgery discussing Chinese literature with the all-Asian surgical staff! That's so Peter. I also couldn't believe he actually asked the admitting lady if he could have a visit from his cat.

Peter and Pindar

However, she took it seriously and said only guide dogs could visit patients, and they had to be shampooed first. Who knew. Now Paul and I are in the waiting room, more than halfway through the surgery, which takes 3.5 - 4 hours. We had to be at the hospital at 5 AM, so we haven't slept, except for naps last night. We've got our laptops to try to distract us, and we had scrambled eggs in the hospital cafeteria. It's interesting to watch all the people come and go and wait, it's like a multi-ring theater here at Cedars Sinai, with goodness knows how many operations going on. Everything's pretty reassuringly routine and assembly-line, with kind staff. But there's nothing that can stop the hands shaking. People are just sitting around, chatting, reading, having tea, all very normal - except that everyone is a family member of somebody going through major surgery (most of them hearts), and every now and then a surgeon comes out to talk to somebody, and you're aware that there are $50,000 life or death operations happening all around. There's something electrically tense in the air. We're coping, but having a loved one be operated on for hours by a robot puts you into a strange area of stress where your respond with involuntary coping mechanisms, unexpected if you haven't been through anything similar to this extent before. Yesterday I spent the entire day sorting and alphabetizing and reshelving and dusting all the books in Peter's study (maybe 1500 of them), a job that we always projected would take weeks and weeks: I did it in five hours. To be doing something constructive seemed absolutely essential. I wasn't thinking about the surgery while deciding whether to put a book in the Greek or the Chinese sections. It really helped.

"Ah, my dear, as Perry says, where health is at stake, nothing else should be considered" - Emma

Evening

Peter survived his surgery and is well and strong, and the small, confined cancer is completely OUT in the garbage along with his prostate!

It was quite an ordeal. Peter was taken in for surgery at 7:15, and at 8:30 they called me and Paul in the waiting room to say "the robot" had begun its work. Around noon we were figuring it must be almost done, but they called again to say it would be another hour and a half. At 2 I started to get very nervous. I googled all the complications of robotic laparascopic prostatectomy, and had just finished reading about the morbidity of the perforated rectum, when mercifully they called and said they were DONE! Well I cried and Paul stared at me like I'd grown two heads (I don't think he'd ever seen his brass monkey balled mom cry before!). It was then 2:30, the actual surgery took six hours.  A long time for a diabetic to be under anesthesia and for our fears to get truly lurid.

At about 3 the doctor staggered out, sweaty and shaken and utterly exhausted. I spoke first, "A rough one?" "A nightmare. That was the worst, most difficult one of those procedures I have ever done," said this world's expert in robotics. He explained that Peter was too obese for the machine, he hadn't expected him to be so heavy (he gained weight because of a recent medication, Actos), and he almost abandoned it halfway through because the tubes and things just wouldn't stretch. But he managed, and succeeded at last. "I've never been so exhausted in my life," he said. "Never been through anything like that." "But how is PETER?" I asked. "Oh, he's fine, no problems at all," he replied. "But what an ordeal!"

(Poor Perry is bilious, and he has not time to take care of himself -- he tells me he has not time to take care of himself -- which is very sad -- but he is always wanted all round the country. I suppose there is not a man in such practice any where. But then, there is not so clever a man anywhere." - Emma)

After that, I thought I'd find Peter half dead, but no! He is strong and weathered it very well. His diabetes numbers remained low throughout the surgery, and I found him sitting up, healthily pink-complexioned, anxiously asking the infectious diseases doctor if he thought he'd lost brain function from the anesthesia, all the while telling him about the Chinese legends he was reading. He'll probably have to wear the catheter for an extra week, because of being slow to heal, but he is fine. What a relief! I thought I'd stay at the hospital overnight, but after having no sleep and all that stress, I was crashing, and the nurses finally told me to go home. So here I am. Hallelujah.

"...she had been within half a minute of sending for Mr. Perry." - Emma

Catully Contemplates the Poisonous Peonies

Day after surgery - Friday

Peter is continuing to recover well, and will be going home from the hospital tomorrow! After just the normal routine stay for this procedure, thanks to the low carb diet.

I'm thinking about what Mr. Knightley says about Frank Churchill, in Emma -

"What years of felicity that man, in all human calculation, has before him!"

Of course, Jane Austen was writing ironically, in a way that almost makes you believe in the notorious "secret subtext," because we only know from tradition, not from the novel, that Jane Fairfax dies a few years after her marriage. The phrase "in all human calculation" thus takes on significance, for how reliable ever is human calculation?

So I can only say "in all human calculation," that now Peter at least has the possibility to live to old age. The cancer is gone.  His diabetes will be much better controlled and his body greatly healed, by living on a completely low carb diet in future. Prognosis:  Good! What relief - and after all, who of us ever has anything more than "human calculation"?

Second day after surgery - Saturday

Peter is home!  I was still befuddled and stressed, and mislaid the car in the parking garage, but we made it, catheter and all.  My friend Ellen writes:

"What I'm impressed by for real is the pure love you've shown. You really love this guy -- you really value him. I say nothing about the personal case or your or his characteristics but there has been something so utterly selfless in what you've done -- since on a fundamental economic and social level you are so independent."

So that started me thinking about Love, and I wrote to her:

"Well, yes, it is love - we both of us have it for each other, with Paul included.  Peter may depend on me in some ways (and I on him in others), but that has nothing to do with what we feel, which evolved naturally. We began to feel that feeling 40 years ago, and over the years the original feeling itself has endured and has profoundly flowered and strengthened and come to beautiful fruition. Now that we're Darby and Joan with a catheter bag, it is only stronger than ever. It has recently occurred to us, with naive pleasure, that this is the real meaning of "growing old together." Deep love and unfailing support surrounding, cushioning and enfolding us, as we come to increasingly need it, now more than ever. It's how things are meant to be, and in this, at least, we are - to use a quaint word - very blessed.

  1985

It was hard setting up a boot camp to get Peter ready for surgery, it's not something that came easily to me, or something I would think of myself as being any good at.  And a hospital is an extremely stressful place for even for a healthy person to be. After a single day spent there with Peter I came home utterly beyond whipped. But there was this little matter of getting rid of his cancer, and we as a family had to pull together and launch all our three combined best forces to make it work successfully. It was a case where an "I'm not good at this" would not have been good enough. There's nothing wrong with "I'm not good at this" if all it means is that your tapes won't work or you have a computer muddle. "I'm not good at this" is unacceptable if it's life or death. Whatever one's inhibitions, incapacities, distastes, weaknesses and frustrations, however manifold and incapacitating they are - you have to do it anyway, you have to step up to the plate in these vital situations, even if you feel you're sick with dread and fear and helplessness. There's just no other choice. "I'm not good at this" is something you can say about being unable to operate the VCR. Not about negotiating health care systems when your beloved has a mortal illness. I'm not good at it. It doesn't come naturally. But to save Peter's life I made myself great at it.

Third day after surgery - Sunday

Letter to a friend whose husband had the same surgery a few months before Peter:

No, Peter's not getting stir crazy, because he's already gone out!  Can you believe, he had the surgery Thursday, went home Saturday, and tonight he went out to the coffeehouse to see his friends and have a cappuccino! 

I was going to write to you, though, to desperately ask how on earth you dealt with the catheter. Peter doesn't mind wearing it, it doesn't hurt, but they are SO complicated to use. We stand around the bathroom having conversations like this:

"Loosen the blue toggle."
"No, I think that one's supposed to have a clamp!"
"I never saw any clamp. Did we lose it?"
"No, it's that thing. Murder! How in the hell do I open that?"
"I think those little clips open it - push them up - "
(Urine spills all over floor)
"Yikes! Wipe the nozzle with the alcohol wipe!"
"No, clean up the floor first!"
"No, then my hands will get dirty! You do it!"
"I can't bend down, remember?"
"Oh, Jesus, well don't step in it, here, hold the toggle..."

Etc., etc.  Fortunately we seem to have a better handle on it today. ;-) And we are calling the catheter the Cat Heater because the cats can't keep away from it!  Said Cat-Heater comes out in nine days, three hours and thirty-eight minutes, but who's counting?

Monday, surgery plus four

If I haven't put you off your food completely, I must tell you that I made the most wonderful, low carb pizza ever for dinner tonight.  Recipe was courtesy of Debbie, my low carb guru, and here it is.

"Mr. Perry recommended nourishing food." - Emma

Low Carb Pizza

2 cups cauliflower, grated, then sauteed for a few minutes in a little olive oil.
2 eggs
2 cups mozzarella cheese.  (I used two lumps, and grated them.)
1 tsp. fennel
2 tsps. oregano
4 tsps. parsley
1 8-ounce jar of Trader Joe's pizza sauce

Toppings: A sausage, sliced.
Package of thinly sliced brown mushrooms.
A few cut-up marinated artichoke hearts.
Shredded mozzarella

Pre-heat oven to 450.
Spread a little olive oil lightly on a cookie sheet.
In a bowl, combine grated cauliflower, grated mozzarella, and eggs. Press evenly on the pan. I spread ithe "dough" thinly all over the cookie sheet. Bake for about 15 minutes.
Remove pan from the oven. To the crust, add toppings, with mozzarella sprinkled on top. Broil until the cheese is melted. Serves 3-4.

Crust, baked and ready for toppings

Tomato sauce going on!

With toppings, ready for final broiling

Being eaten too fast to photograph!

"Do not you think, Miss Woodhouse, our saucy little friend here is charmingly recovered? Do not you think her cure does Perry the highest credit? - Emma

Springtime at the Salvation Army

"Emma had a charitable visit to pay to a poor sick family, who lived a little way out of Highbury."

I've always been vaguely aware of the Salvation Army and its thrift shop here in Santa Monica, but hadn't set foot inside it in years, until recently, when an unmoneyed friend who was furnishing an apartment kept exclaiming about the treasures she was finding.  So I went with her, and it was the beginning of a series of surprisingly delightful shopping adventures. 

Here I am at the Santa Monica store

And here is my son Paul, inside

Examining bric-a-brac

"Emma was very compassionate; and the distresses of the poor were as sure of relief from her personal attention and kindness, her counsel and her patience, as from her purse."

Here are some interesting facts about the Salvation Army.

 It was founded in London in 1865 by William and Catherine Booth, as an evangelical charitable mission.

It is called Sally Ann in Canada.

The Salvation Army salute consists of raising the arm above shoulder length with the index finger pointing up to Heaven, and shouting, "Hallelujah!"

Today the Salvation Army is the second largest charity in the United States.

The Salvation Army operates in 120 countries, is organized like an army though most of its workers or adherents are not soldiers but church members. It is well regarded as one of the world's largest providers of social aid and disaster relief, though there was a murky episode when the organization was accused of discriminating against homosexuals in its hiring practices.

The Beatles' song Strawberry Fields was inspired by a Salvation Army children's home of that name in Liverpool.

And these are some of the things I've acquired at the Salvation Army in recent weeks, for your viewing delectation.

An oak rocking chair for Christabel-Catullus

Green glass candle holder ($12)

Pretty blue glasses, and cups in my favorite "Blue Danube" pattern

A nice little mosaic table for Paul

Tiffany style desk lamp

... "[Elizabeth] had finally proposed these two branches of economy, to cut off some unnecessary charities, and to refrain from new furnishing the drawing-room" - Persuasion

I liked this crystal candle holder ($12)

"her writing–desk, and her works of charity and ingenuity, were all within her reach"

- Mansfield Park

Pindar examines my Tiffany style desk lamp

"Upon the whole, Emma left her with such softened, charitable feelings"

Pindar sniffs the green glass candle holder

One day when I brought home a new stash of treasures I asked Paul to guess which ones they were.  He commented that it was like the scene in Ozma of Oz, when they have to guess which ornaments are actually people who've been transformed.  The seeker has to go around touching the ornaments and saying the word "Ev," and if he guesses right, the transformed person turns back into himself.  So Paul went around guessing and saying "Ev - that's Salvation Army, isn't it?"  Nobody got transformed, but he was most often right.

Can you guess?  The blue glass ball is new, and the green hen.

We call the hen Billina of Ev.  ($7.50)

The blue glass ball is magical indeed

And the new green dish clearly comes from the Emerald City. ($7.50)

Ozma of Oz, 1907.  (Is she wearing a Suffragette pin?)

There is a perfectly thumpingly astounding Salvation Army lyric by Vachel Lindsay entitled "General William Booth Enters into Heaven" (1913), with a chorus of "Are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?" Here's the first verse:

BOOTH led boldly with his big bass drum—
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
The Saints smiled gravely and they said: “He’s come.”
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,
Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank,
Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale—
Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail:—
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of Death—
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

And so on. Perhaps the best known verse associated with the Salvation Army, however, is the one we all sang in summer camp:

Sing Hallelujah! Sing Hallelujah!
Put a nickel on the drum,
Save another drunken bum
Sing Hallelujah! Sing Hallelujah!
Put a nicked on the drum and you'll be saved.

I was lying in the gutter,
I was covered up in beer,
Pretzels in my moustache,
I thought the end was near,
Then along came [Name]!
And saved me from my curse,
Glory glory Hallelujah sing another verse

 

"The adieu is charity itself."