Kings Canyon and For the King

Peter enjoying King's Canyon

Here I am at Cedar Grove Lodge in King’s Canyon National Park, which is the northern part of Sequoia. It’s been a favorite place of ours for years, and perfect for Peter while he’s still semi-convalescing.  No place could be more peaceful. The beautiful Kings River rushes right past the lodge, and Peter loves to sit on the porch and watch the water and the Stellers Bluejays that pop and flit about.

  The river runs

Today we drove to Road’s End and took a little walk by the river. But mostly we’ve been reading, and I have read two books by Frenchwomen on this trip: Adelaide and Theodore by Madame de Genlis, and the new historical novel by my friend Catherine Delors, For the King. So I spent the weekend simultaneously in eighteenth century France, and by a very American, western river. Usually in these settings I’m more moved to read Americana, but not this time, and nor was Peter.  For the record, he was rereading Prometheus Bound and Thus Spake Zarathustra, and reading part of The Mahabarata for the first time.  (We are united in our love for reading and writing...but what different books!)

Peter reading on the porch at Cedar Grove Lodge

For the King is a hybrid, being a combination historical novel and detective thriller, and it is exciting in both genres.  The historical background is particularly vivid and rich; in the details, the feeling of living in Paris in 1800, is evoked so well, that you feel you've been plunged into the tense, turbulent, rapidly changing society. The realities of daily life are fleshed out with a full bloodedness that many historical novels don’t achieve. The story centers around a fascinating true event, the attempted assassination of Napoleon by the explosion of a gunpowder cart, or “infernal machine.” Chief Inspector Roch Miquel, a clever and likeable detective, has his hands full with taking evidence while walking through a minefield of political maneuvering, in which his own peasant father, a former Jacobin, is faced with the guillotine.  The mystery plummets along urgently, laced with danger, politics, sex, fashion, and love - a rich French potion.

Me in Kings Canyon

Wild raspberries, picked and eaten...

I’ve read little about France, concentrating on Jane Austen and England, but France and its political events impinged upon Austen's life, and I enjoyed reading this story set in the France she knew about (though never visited), through her cousin, Comtesse Eliza de Feuillide, whose husband was guillotined.  Jane Austen also read Madame de Genlis’s book, Adelaide and Theodore (Adele et Theodore, in French), as is evidenced by her mentioning it in Emma, in talking about Mrs. Weston's new baby:

"She has had the advantage, you know, of practising on me," she continued -- "like La Baronne d'Almane on La Comtesse d'Ostalis', in Madame de Genlis' Adelaide and Theodore, and we shall now see her own little Adelaide educated on a more perfect plan."

So I’ve always meant to read it, and obtained a translated copy thanks to my useful almost-librarian son Paul, who downloaded it from the ECCE site; I also found the introduction by Gillian Dow online.

Gilia

Adelaide and Theodore is very readable; the style and attitudes took me back to the world of Les Liaisons Dangeureuses, written in the same year (1782) and which also would have been known to Austen. Gillian Dow writes, “As portraits of decaying and corrupt Ancien-Regime high society, the two novels are remarkably similar,” and that’s what I felt. These baronesses and viscontesses, writing to each other, remind me of Laclos’s characters in their epistolary style; but they are writing in milk-and-water fashion, like Hannah More out of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, about how to bring up children – instead of how to attract and corrupt lovers! But, being Frenchwomen, the subject does shift from whether or not to teach your boy Latin, to how to conquer one’s own proclivities to coquetry. Written in 1782, when Mme. de Genlis was thirty-six, she delivers a feeling opinion on being a fading beauty. “I think there is one time of life very dangerous for women, who are not entirely free from coquetry. It is when they are still handsome, but no longer possess the brilliancy and charms of youth, nor are talked of for their elegance of person, which now ceases to attract admiration. In short, as soon as it is said of a woman, she is still handsome; that still spoils the compliment.”

Leopard lily

There can be no doubt that Austen knew a good deal about this ancien regime French society, its manners and morals - her cousin Eliza was a "living rule" example of it, and Austen's own Lady Susan, the portrait of a character who seems more French than English, is proof positive.  In Adelaide and Theodore so far (I've read only the first half) I've detected only a few places that made me think might have influenced Austen, or given her thought. “Genius [in a woman] is a useless and a dangerous gift,” writes de Genlis. “It lifts them out of their proper sphere, or serves to disgust them with it.” What would Austen have thought, reading that? Perhaps it’s why she wrote in Northanger Abbey, “A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can."

Peter contemplating the stream in Giant Forest, Sequoia

The mention of studying history with “emperors down to Constantine” recalls a phrase in Mansfield Park, while “an artful woman may be able to govern a weak and narrow minded husband,” may put us in mind of Mr. Collins and Charlotte. But these are stray thoughts. More interesting is the France I read about in Adelaide and Theodore, one of aristocrats leading a life exquisite except in the complete lack of modern medical science (a woman is bled for her headache, and bears her pain nobly so as to teach her children to do the same), and how very different it is from the France in For the King, which takes place six years after the Reign of Terror and shows the lower orders as Austen and Genlis never showed them. Nothing could make clearer how the Revolution changed France, than reading this pre-Revolution book, side by side with the novel set in the turbulent post-Revolutionary France.

And then I looked up, and there was the river...not the Seine, but one beside which, in 1800, Indians shot deer and ground acorns.  On the last night, I stepped into the woods for a last look at the darkling river, and I came upon the largest black BEAR I ever saw:  a veritable monster, cinnamon dark, most busily engaged in nibbling raspberries from the very bushes where I'd picked some earlier.  I hastened back to the car, for he was a noble monster indeed.  Like this one, only...bigger.

Monsieur Ours

Speaking of animals, the cats had an emotional meltdown at our being away (or possibly Paul had one, trying to meet the pampered neurotic fears and fancies of all three).  When we got home, it was clear that the cats had all concluded, as one, that we'd died, and therefore our reappearance after three days was as if we were ghosts.  They ran.  It took an hour or so to win them back, and then Pindar appropriated me and would not allow Marshy to approach, which made her skulk.  Oh, it was a tempestuous evening!

Tempestuous Testament

Tempestuous Petticoat, Clare Leighton's memoir of her mother, Marie Connor Leighton

Recently I read Testament of Youth for the first time in many years, Vera Brittain's powerful evocation of the effects World War I on her generation. She often mentions Olive Schreiner as a writer who shaped her thinking, so I also had a browse into Schreiner's Story of an African Farm and Women and Labour, in an attempt to understand the young Vera's mindset, but their appeal was lost on me. Testament, however, is such eloquent, yes, testimony, of the thinking and experience of a generation, as only retrospective thoughts written in the writer's maturity, incorporating her own young notes, could be. I've read Vera's early diary, and it's banal and naive, reminding me of an unpublished diary of the period that I read by Lois Austen-Leigh (who became a detective story writer in the 1930s), a teenage debutante before World War I who wrote a diary much like Vera's. Reading both diaries gave insight into what a middle class young girl's life was like then, seeming to us today as unimaginably sheltered, childish, privileged and frivolous. Yet Vera's Testament of Youth is (among other things) a commentary on this pre-war innocent mind (as Jane Austen said, "as unformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is"), and what became of that summery pre-war experience.

Buxton

It's commonplace to say that it was this very idealism and lack of knowledge of life, are reasons why that generation went so willingly to war. Vera Brittain depicts her world so well, that it does help you understand people of that place and time as perhaps never before. Yet, In spite of admiring this work, I have to confess that I have never liked Vera Brittain. It's hard to say why exactly; I don't blame her for having no sense of humor, under the circumstances, but it's hard to relate to her and Roland's earnest conversations about things like the Afterlife.

Roland Leighton, 1914

I do love her portrait of Buxton, the suffocatingly provincial town she came from. It's interesting to try to trace this stifling snobbishness and narrowness and find something similar in Jane Austen's experience a century previously, but I just can't. Buxton isn't Highbury. Nor is it Chawton or Bath. Jane Austen's villages were just as confined and hermetically sealed, and brimming with snobs. So it must be Austen's own mind, laughing at it all instead of doing a slow burn like Vera. But again, this may be because Austen accepted the narrowness of her world, a provincial woman's world, without much question: things were as they were, questions had not really been raised, except perhaps like outre revolutionaries like Mary Wollstonecraft. In Vera's day the world was changing, and there were many people who were a good deal more enlightened than her stultifying, narrow-minded parents. She longed to be out of Buxton, in the more enlightened world. Austen does not seem to have ever had any such longing (she resisted meeting the literati), but then her family were not to be compared with the Brittains, being vastly more intelligent and tolerant. Austen found no one to satirize in her writings who was anything like the Brittains - but she was writing before the Victorian era, not after. That was what made the provincials in Brittain's world so rigid and conventional. Austen seems almost to celebrate the conventions of society, the order that was necessary for civility. She takes the established mode for granted because there was no possibility of anything else, yet, and seems to imply that conventional manners and ways are necessary for life to run properly, sanely, as things should be. She shows covertly things that need change - such as the lot of the dependant spinster. The young Vera Brittain, by contrast, rails with fury in a way that would be unthinkable in Jane Austen's day. Women were starting to go to universities (though they were not granted degrees yet), but her parents didn't believe females needed such an education, though they sent her brother to university. Where Jane Austen took this sort of thing as part of the world order, Vera knew there were women already at university, and that it was a fight in progress that could and would be won.

Clare Leighton

I followed reading Vera Brittain's book with the tangentially related Tempestuous Petticoat by the artist Clare Leighton (1899-1989), and they form a most fascinating and enlightening contrast. Clare Leighton was the sister of Roland Leighton, Vera's lost wartime fiance, and this book is a portrait of her mother, whom Vera mentions meeting and grieving with in Testament. Both books treat of the same era and some of the same people, but to read them back to back is to explore vast differences in character and society. Where Vera is a serious, soulful modern young bluestocking, her character scarred by her wartime experiences, Marie Conner Leighton (1864?-1941) is about the most fanciful, exasperating Edwardian I've ever encountered in fact or fiction, almost like an E.F. Benson caricature. Simultaneously raffish and snobbish, she sits in her paradisical home in the richly beautiful, secluded, flowery bower of St. John's Wood, alongside neighbors who are great artists and great courtesans. She is so class bound in her pronouncements, she won't allow her children to set foot in nearby Maida Vale, considering contamination from the mediocre to be worse than being exposed to smallpox. She scribbles at her Daily Mail romantic serials day and night, carelessly stuffing bills and sandwiches in with her manuscripts, and has her children scratch her back with her run-down quill pens. The back cover calls her "a dual personality, an Edwardian and a Bohemian...illogical, vain, superstitious, opinionated and self-satisfied." You do wonder at the contradiction with her doing all this incessant work while supposedly simultaneously daily entertaining her three adoring, cartoonish lovers, while keeping her kind, deaf husband bent to the grindstone writing Westerns and boys' stories. It's a horrifyingly but deliciously priceless portrait, but takes on much more resonance if you've read Testament of Youth. In that book, perhaps surprisingly, Vera adores Marie on the few occasions when they meet, and they share their love of Roland. Yet the reader feels a dreadful certainty that, beyond a shadow of doubt, if Roland had survived and married Vera, the relationship between her and her mother-in-law would have made World War I run on for at least another generation.

Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

The title comes from a Robert Herrick poem, "Delight in Disorder." Here it is:

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher:
A cuff neglected, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat:
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema in his studio in St. John's Wood, the upper end of Marie and Robert Leighton's bohemian world (1880s)

Marie is quite the exasperating monster, and very much a product of her time. Here are some quotes from her:

"It's all nonsense - this morning sickness and such. Leave that to the women with no work to do."

"You'll always find that it's the lower classes who rush to pay their bills the moment they arrive."

(Speaking of would-be bohemians) "They are trying to learn the secret of our magic. But they'll never manage it. You see, they aren't real. They don't work."

She was an ardent Suffragette but strangely didn't care if she had the vote. "Why should I want a vote? As it is, I hold the power to control the votes of six - no, eight - men. All of these men will vote as I want them to, to please me, for they think of me as a woman; but directly I get the franchise my power will be taken from me."

(On a fellow novelist) "Ninety-two novels he has written, and if you were to boil the whole lot down into one book you might manage to make something just worth reading while you were waiting at a station for your train on a rainy day. But then, I am always forgetting that most people in the world can only understand trivial books."

"History is something to be created rather than remembered."

(She preferred to have admirers visit one at a time because) "I feel like a lighthouse that is trying to throw its beam on everybody at the same moment. It is most exhausting."

"The really worth-while women are those who feel most at home in rich furs."

"...a lower middle class place, such as Switzerland"

"it is safer any day to leave your children in the company of a rake than to place them for half an hour in the care of a vicar's wife."

"If you cover yourself with jewelry it's as good as proclaiming to the world that you know you are not beautiful."

"A distinguished woman, with a dream, needs a large hat."

And I've saved the worst for last:

"Much as I loathe mice, I'd rather have them in the house than keep such a common thing as a cat. A cat is almost as impoverishing to the general atmosphere of an establishment as a baby's napkins hanging in the garden."

Can you imagine this as Vera Brittain's mother-in-law? Heavens! Yet both women were extremely ambitious writers, with strong elements of vanity in their make-up. And Vera quotes Marie in a very different vein, saying shrewdly, "Why does she want to go to Oxford?  It's no use to a writer - except of treatises." Perhaps they did briefly bond as professional writers, though this book sheds light on the romantic unreality of Vera's relationship with Roland: she does not seem to know anything about the world from which he came.

Clare Leighton, about the time she emigrated to the U.S. (1939)

The book's ending is oddly troubling, disappointing. Clare is superb as long as she is describing her mother's grandiose eccentricities in her heyday. But she obviously feels very uncomfortable and has no idea how to handle Roland's death and the hard times that followed - for after the war the lavishness was at an end, Marie went bankrupt, and her life became rather pathetic. A realistic treatment would have been best, but Clare was clearly not able to come to grips with the subject matter at all, when it turned tragic. Interestingly, even though Roland and Vera Brittain were engaged, Vera is never once mentioned, though Clare does mention Roland's conversation to Catholicism, which they learned about after his death.

Lily Elsie, Marie's idol

in The Merry Widow (1907)

I wish I could find a picture of Marie Connor Leighton, but apparently she had a characteristically superstitious terror of being photographed.  But there are scatterings of her many books to be hunted out, and some of Clare Leighton's fine woodcuts can be found reproduced online.

Dressing the Bride, woodcut by Clare Leighton (1940)

Oh my. I've just read Marie's The Boy of My Heart (1916) online. It's the book she wrote after Roland's death, and is over the top beyond even the heights of Edwardian sentimentality, but it is rather revealing as to what she thought of Vera. Apparently she never was able to perceive anybody other than though a romantic novel haze. Here are quotes:

"But is he wholly mine? Is there there somebody else who wants him even though he is hardly more than a boy? There floats before my eyes the vision of a girl: a small, delicate-faced creature with amethystine eyes, who is dreaming dreams that have got him for their centre. What a forcing power for sex this war has been, and is!"

Vera Brittain

"If he has sent Vera The Story of an African Farm, then she can't be the ordinary sort of girl. She can't be of the great army of girls who play games and are always taking bodily exercise, yet never by any chance do anything more useful than arrange cut flowers. She must be a personality - one of the few girls that can think and are not afraid to do it; one of the few who know what real romance is, and who, because they know this, will be able to marry as often as they like, no matter how small the number of marriageable men may be, while other women stand around and gasp for a husband in vain. And if she is this - then he is not only and wholly mine as he was just a few weeks ago. He will never be wholly mine any more."

Later, Marie asks her son coyly, "Do you think you will ever be as fond of her as you are of me?" And she quotes him as answering: "What are you talking about, Big Yeogh Wough? [his stupendous pet name for her] I'm only a boy yet and not likely to get fond of any woman, except in a comradely way. [He is then twenty and a commissioned lieutenant, but we can hardly blame him for being disingenuous.] You know when the time comes for me to love a woman and think of marrying her, I'd like to find one like you, if I could. But I'm not likely to be able to do that. Yet, whether the woman be Vera or anybody else, there won't be any question of whether I love you or her the better. You and I have lived so much in each other's life we are like one person, and the woman I love will have to have you for a lover as well as me, while she'll have to love you if she wants me."

Marie describes her first meeting with Vera, at which Roland and his sister Clare (always called The Bystander) were also present: "Not one of us breathed a word as to what we had really come there for - namely, to examine each other and see how we liked each other; but the verdict was an all-round satisfactory one, and in the end we all got into a taxicab together, and Miss Vera [Brittain] sat on my knee. "How tiny you are!" I said playfully.

Later there's a stunningly melodramatic scene where Vera puts out her arms imploringly and tells Marie how she loves her son, but will give him up if she says so, and Marie takes her into her arms and holds her to her heart for a very, very, very long time.
 
Whew.

Vera Brittain as a VAD nurse in 1914

Woodcut by Clare Leighton

  

The Pictures Tell a Story: Hiking in the High Country

Paul and I drove up to the little town of Lee Vining, overlooking Mono Lake, on Monday (made record time for us, 330 miles in 5.2 hours), and met our friends the Willemsens at the Yosemite Gateway motel, which overlooks Mono Lake.  This is the view at sunset.

We had dinner at the Mobil Station, which perhaps does not sound like the grandest thing in high cuisine, but it's actually a place with a lot of character and good food.

Sunset at the Mobil

Paul at the Mobil

Dinner:  prime rib, garlic mashed, fried onions, broccolini

Next morning we drove over Tioga Pass just inside Yosemite Park, to the Mono Pass trailhead.  Our destination was Spillway Lake at 10,400 feet, 7.5 miles round trip.

Paul and I at the start of the trail

Paul with Mike and Eleanor, our long-time hiking friends

Paul on the trail:  still some snow

Heather

Eleanor and I at Spillway Lake

It's tiring at the top

A cold landscape

On the way down:  greener meadows

Mike taking flower pictures

Buttercups

Remnants of an old cabin

Thunder is heard

And it starts to rain!

Hailing now, and I'm getting wet! 

Naturally it's the one time in ten I didn't bring my rain slicker...

And then we got thoroughly soaked fording a fast rising stream.  But it was fun!

Next day:  Sunny.  We're on the water taxi crossing Saddlebag Lake.

On the boat

Paul and our friends just before parting - us to go home, they to hike on.

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.