How to Do !t by Elsa Maxwell

How to Do !t -- the cute exclamation point is not a typo -- is subtitled OR The Lively Art of Entertaining, and as you plow delightedly through the first several chapters, you may think that this is the most unique and truly interesting, entertaining, book you've read in years. Carrying on, you may find it turns a bit repetitive, but that is partly because few people anymore need our author's detailed advice on good party-giving. Most of us socialize only with our own families, and so are puzzled by any idea of artificiality in company, or of making an effort because you are supping with strangers. Did you know, for example, it used to be a rule at dinner that you talked to the person on your left, and then at the change of courses, to the person on your right? This was to ensure that everybody got talked to at some length. Families needn't bother with that. And when was the last time anyone ever enjoyed the bizarreness of a scavenger hunt? Our authoress invented them, but also lived long enough to notice how many parties were becoming television-watching appointments.

And who was our authoress? She was Elsa Maxwell. She occupied a strange position among the jet set from the end of World War I to her death in 1963. There had been great political hostesses before her time, wives of powerful men living in great, gaslit capitals, giving balls and receptions where political things incidentally got done, where wheels were greased and egos (literally) fed. And there may be women today who still give A-list parties for small groups of the rich and famous, but who remain obscure themselves.

Elsa was different in seemingly having no power, yet rising to such prominence that nation states came to her when they wanted to do little things like create a postwar tourism industry. See: Greece, and the two-week Yacht Party, 1955. She rose to such fame that the general public could break into warm and excited applause when she appeared on game shows. (You can surf YouTube for an old clip of Elsa sailing, be-gloved and all, on to the set of What's My Line. Her affected, squawky Munchkin voice is startlingly annoying.) She rose to such fame that she could introduce How to Do !t with this story, whose emotional ring she fully expected her public to understand:

Of all the parties I have given, there is one that stands out in my memory as perhaps the most rewardng of all. Certainly it was the smallest. I had a guest list of one! Yet never have I known a happier fulfillment in my role as hostess than I did on that evening when I entertained a girl I had never seen before, and may never see agian.

Her name, let's say, was Alice. Alice was young, a widow, and having a heavy time of it making ends meet in the Brooklyn flat she shared with a friend. One day I received a letter from her. She knew, she said, how mcuh I love music, that I went often to concerts and the opera. She had read in my column about the places I dined and the people I met. "Oh, once, just once," she wrote, "to spend and eveing as you do!"

So I invited her to do just that.

I booked seats at Carnegie Hall for a concert Toscanini was to condeuct. Before the concert we dined at El Morocco and Alice had the time of her young life watching the parade of Hollywood and Broadway and society that came and went. People stopped at our table to chat: Walter Winchell, Leonard Lyons, a former governor of Pennsylvania; and when, as we were about to leave for our conceert, Alice came face to face with Betty Grable I nearly had to assist my little friend into our taxi.

I don't think two people ever had a better time ....

Most of Elsa's parties were not tete a tetes. She hosted must-see (and must-be-seen-at) occasions for diplomats, movie stars, prima donnas, writers, and aristocrats; somehow this dumpy native of Keokuk, Iowa leaped, in 1919, from being an odd-jobs girl in a traveling Shakespeare troupe to hosting an "exquisite" dinner for Britain's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour at the Ritz in Paris. Her career was made then. Her parties do sound as if they were great fun. At an early success, she writes, "cabinet ministers had the time of their sedate lives blowing feathers off an outstretched sheet."

You and I may have no need to host an affair like that, although it does sound more fun than watching television. In fact How to Do !t's introduction, written by one Simon Doonan, warns us that of course no one would dream of consulting the book for advice on entertaining anymore. We are meant only to use it as a microscope through which to view the "psychological case history" of Elsa, name dropper extraordinaire and all around "attention junkie."

On the contrary. I found the book most enjoyable for Elsa's plain, hearty prose and her knowledge of human nature, gleaned at forty years' worth of parties. That it all happens to add up to party giving advice is simply, we might say, gravy. Pretend she is looking over your shoulder with a clipboard, and consider:

• Making a guest list? Mix interests, she says, and mix age groups. Who could be more intriguing than an elderly soul who has seen the world? Yet what old soul could fail to be fascinated by the young Marlon Brando? (Who indeed?) 
•  Watch out for the shy. "A little of the lion lurks in every mouse, and there is nothing like alcohol to bring it out." 
•  Watch out for wolves -- even if they tend to be only as wolflike as a woman permits them to be. "No really attractive man will be guilty of wolfishness. No really attractive man needs to be. It is always the creepy little fellow with the look of having spent his early years hoping vainly to make the team who fancies himself a Lothario... just be sure you stop it."
• You've got an inebriated guest? Tell him he's had enough, bluntly, but accept your own responsibility for a "too-liberal pouring of liquor." It's your party. 
•  There's been a horrible spill? Of course you must prepare for the evening in perfect detail, but "accidents will happen, and if you're going to worry about something being spilled on the now pristine carpet, or a cigarette burn on a burnished tabletop, then you shouldn't entertain." 
•  Your teenagers want to "have the gang in"? By all means. Just cover everything up. "Plaster aluminum foil over precious wood surfaces. It will save the furniture, save your nerves, and look festive besides." 
•  And suppose, incredibly, it rains on your garden fete. Be "clever" about it. Accept your guests' help in bringing things in and getting dinner. People are drawn together by mild emergencies and a "common adventure." Everyone will sit down to eat far faster and in a far gayer mood if they are allowed to help in the fuss, than they will if you keep them standing around watching you cope frantically amid the thunder and lightning, assuring them it's all right.

And what of that killer of parties, the Bore? This problem brings out Elsa at her best:

My method of protecting others from bores is, at a large party, to seat them all together at one table. This not only serves the initial purpose of isolating them -- it has a really electrifying effect on the bores themselves. Bores, like other dumb creatures of the field, instinctively recognize their own kind. They don't know why, they just do. A bore therefore, put with a group of other bores, looks about him, correctly sizes up his companions, and -- since, as I have said, it will never enter his head that he is one of them -- will instantly decide that it is up to him to make the best of a bad situation by injecting a little life into things. Now when you have, say, ten people sitting together, each privately self-sworn to show the others what a rollicking good fellow he is, you are very soon going to have a rollicking good party going. I have found to my astonishment and delight that the bore table at my parties invariably turns out to be the merriest of all. Bursts of wild laughter erupt from them, their tongues seem never to be still, you find yourself craning your neck to hear what is causing all that gaiety. 

Presiding over splendid, fun evenings and making partygoers happy was an art, and one that Miss Maxwell is proud to think she can trace back from ancien regime France to Renaissance Italy to the hetaerae of classical Greece to ancient Egypt's Queen Hatshepsut, whose hieroglyphs call her, among other titles, "renewer of hearts." At this remove we could be rather cruel about it, agree for her part Elsa was a gossip columnist first, and say that generally her guest lists amounted to a roster of mid-twentieth century Eurotrash, who attended her soirees for God knows what reasons. Her "cooking party" in Hollywood was an affair, surely, that Clark Gable's publicist told him to go to and wear a toque at. (But why?) And because she was a professional, she did things that no modern hostess entertaining family would do, barring some catastrophic extenuating circumstance. She threw out party-crashers and sometimes even Bores, and claims to have controlled drunken women by going up behind them and "giving their pearls a twist."

Not fun. Being a guest at an Elsa Maxwell bash must have been a terrifying experience sometimes; you must have had to keep a sharp eye out. In the end not many people came to her funeral, despite the thousands of dear friends and "darlings" whom she had worked hard to amuse around the world for nearly two generations. Modern day commentators, here and here, seem to gloat a little bit over this. I think some of them regard it as cosmic retribution for her having said bad words about homosexuality, despite enjoying a lifelong lesbian relationship herself. But judging the turnout at somebody else's funeral strikes me as a bit of hubris in itself. When it comes to that we can all only hope for the best.

As for her legacy, I think it must lie not in ballrooms or yachts or scavenger hunts, or the farm at Auribeau "not far from Cannes" where she spent summers with "Dickie" Gordon, but in her writing. A minor legacy, perhaps, but still a private hour with Elsa and a little something to eat and drink -- a little party of two, a la Alice -- is fun.   

I haven't actually stopped reading

The trouble is, a Kindle allows you to read so much at once. The Works of Lord Byron, vol. 1 -- here, the teenaged genius discusses his annoying mother:

... though timely Severity may sometimes be necessary & justifiable, surely a peevish harassing System of Torment is by no means commendable, & when that is interrupted by ridiculous Indulgence, the only purpose answered is to soften the feelings for a moment which are soon after to be doubly wounded by the recal of accustomed Harshness. I will now give this disagreeable Subject to the Winds.

And he writes a lot about his debts and his weight loss. It is interesting and encouraging, though, to see him grow up, to read him become sympathetic, self-deprecating even about his poetry, and humbly anxious to maintain old friendships. "I do not know how far our destinations in life may throw us together, but if opportunity and inclination allow you to waste a thought on such a hare-brained being as myself, you will find me at least sincere, and not so bigoted to my faults as to involve others in the consequences."  Old men kept his letters for fifty years.

Lays of Ancient Rome, Thomas Babington MacAulay. The Victorian schoolboy of legend read it or was assigned to read it, and out of it all, memorized it seems mostly this:

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods...."

I liked the scholarly prose discussion of what happened to Rome's pre-imperial historical documents better than the poetry which MacAulay invented to try to recreate something of what they had said. It seems the Gauls burned Rome's archives in the 4th century B.C.E. when they sacked the city, and that Roman historians of later centuries knew perfectly well they had no documents upon which to base anything they wrote or thought they knew about that time. They had only, it seems, memories of popular legend and poetry; it would be as if American historians could only reconstruct the colonial period from childlike songs about Paul Revere's ride, or Washington crossing the Delaware. MacAulay's Lays are his imaginative reconstructions of what those word of mouth songs might have been; they concern the biggest topics of remote Roman history, like Rome's wars against more powerful Italian neighbors, or the class struggles between patrician and plebeian. It's astonishing, what MacAulay understood his readers would already know about what he was doing.

The loves of the Vestal and the God of War, the cradle laid among the reeds of the Tiber, the fig-tree, the she-wolf, the shepherd's cabin, the recognition, the fratricide, the rape of the Sabines, the death of Tarpeia, the fall of Hostus Hostilius, the struggle of Mettus Curtius through the marsh, the women rushing with torn raiment and dishevelled hair between their fathers and their husbands, the nightly meetings of Numa and the Nymph by the well in the sacred grove, the fight of the three Romans and the three Albans, the purchase of the Sibylline books, the crime of Tullia, the simulated madness of Brutus, the ambiguous reply of the Delphian oracle to the Tarquins, the wrongs of Lucretia, the heroic actions of Horatius Cocles, of Scaevola, and of Cloelia, the battle of Regillus won by the aid of Castor and Pollux, the defense of Cremera, the touching story of Coriolanus, the still more touching story of Virginia, the wild legend about the draining of the Alban lake, the combat between Valerius Corvus and the gigantic Gaul, are among the many instances which will at once suggest themselves to every reader.

Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages. Not at all what you might think -- not at all gamy little exposes of Victorian marriages that were troubled, as written by the men and women involved. Rather, simply short stories by a variety of Victorian authors, Kipling, Conan Doyle, etc., about characters in troubled marriages. Kipling's "The Bronckhorst Divorce Case" was not very interesting, and I have yet to move on to Doyle's "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange."

Also on my Kindle home page are the Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de l'Enclos -- very strange; are the French really that different? When she warbles on about "love," does she mean sex, does she mean the love that makes a couple married sixty years nurse one another through the last illnesses, or does she mean a kind of freewheeling indulgence (including sex), of every new crush that comes along and excites you and flatters your vanity? -- on the grounds that indulging so is only human nature and therefore one must be humane and sophisticated and true to it? 

The White House Cookbook. The Rubaiyat of a Huffy Husband. The Spectator. Under Two Flags by Ouida, who I think was somehow scandalous and terribly popular in another era. The Chaplet of Pearls by Charlotte Yonge, ditto. Confessions of an English Opium Eater, certainly ditto. Aristotle. Twenty-four Little French Dinners ... not by Aristotle, that last.

The Talisman Ring by Georgette Heyer

I salute the lady's research. To have found out that people ate mutton with cucumbers in the late eighteenth century, and that a certain part of a country house's grounds, between the gravel walk and a wicket gate, could be called a "ha ha," indicates a writer with a respect for her task and her readers.

I salute her plotting, really incredibly extravagant, what with all the different servants, villains, women,  Excisemen, and passersby who had to be put on station in order for Ludovic to finally break into the Dower House and search for the ring and yet endure just the right amount of danger before rescue by the dark and brooding Sir Tristram. And this is just one thread of the story.

Rescue -- which reminds me. I salute her integrity, too. The Talisman Ring was published in 1937. This was before the days when romance novels became a mere setting for a requisite number of porn scenes stuck like big fake pearls on big fake jewelry, offered up and turned this way and that for the admiration of otherwise respectable middle-class, middle aged women. The closer a romance novel's publication date comes to our own time, the more Hustler-like and ridiculous these scenes become. But seventy years ago, no: not only is there no gasping and striving and probing, but Sir Tristram rescues his cousin Ludovic, and not the tempestuous heroine (a few such rescues are also de rigueur in today's romances), because it made sense according to the workings of the plot for the men to be involved in this particular dangerous nighttime adventure, and not the women.

So I salute Miss Heyer for all these virtues. We mustn't forget to throw in enjoyable conversation and pleasant characters, too. I'm only a little disappointed that the plot she had led her readers to believe would be It, turns out not to be It. What could have been a delicately handled and yes, perhaps even tempestuous arranged marriage between Sir Tristram and Eustacie is instead put aside for matters that are, well, let's say -- extravagantly plotted.

I feel sure Georgette Heyer has done better things than The Talisman Ring. I'm not sure I will run out and search for them immediately.

The Garden, You, and I by Mabel Osgood Wright

This book may not be for everyone -- what book is? -- it may be most useful, and give the greatest pleasure, to today's gardener purely as a technical manual. This despite its being first published in 1906, at which time it was curiously credited only to authoress "Barbara." (It is available for free at our favorite place, Project Gutenberg).

I reason that it's still useful because I reason gardening can't have changed too much in a hundred years, and because the book amounts to such a positively encyclopedic treasure trove of actual, useful names of plants, along with precise instructions in the use of really professional methods. Consider the seed bed, for example. A seed bed is a raised bed of earth where you sow seeds on purpose so as to transplant the results somewhere else, while maintaining the plot, double-duty like, as a useful cutting garden for indoor flowers. Or, consider the hairpin. In The Garden, You, and I you'll learn to garden with hairpins. The near-professionals here take such care over their transplants that they patiently untangle every last rootlet of each one, and pin the rootlets to the earth, to be sure they will enjoy as good a start in new ground as possible.

Since I am a hideously amateur gardener, I marveled politely while reading these things, while reading too the gorgeous names of a thousand roses and a hundred ferns -- Gem of the Prairies, Felicite Perpetual, Baltimore Belle, Safrano, Perle des Jardins, Rock Rolypody. But I confess I took more interest in the book's background stories, in all the little details about life in America only a hundred years ago. The three women at the heart of The Garden, You, and I are three semi-fictitious friends who maintain a correspondence over the course of a year, during which the two better gardeners help the acolyte with her experiments and questions. They are very thorough friends -- one, Lavinia Cortright, is in a way set aside to tend and represent the seaside garden, with its sandy and salt-flecked flora all different from what her inland companions know.

All three are what used to be called "commuters' wives," women living close enough to the city for their husbands to take the train in to an office job every day, but far enough away from it to still raise chickens and transplant whole young trees from "the knoll" to their own property whenever they like. In 1906, horse and buggy were just making room for the automobile and the "macadamed" road; young middle-class couples still employed servants, the "man" often being a recent German or Irish immigrant pining for the old country. Young parents saw their toddlers through the dangerous "second summer" with real anxiety, for childhood diseases killed and there were no vaccines and no antibiotics. A little treat like a working man's being able to take a shower after a long, grimy day was a huge luxury and a gift procured for him by the combined efforts of wife and domestic staff. They rigged up some sort of outdoor shower stall and shower head all run by gravity, and they hauled up by hand the twelve buckets of water needed to make it go.

Mabel Osgood Wright must have sensed that she could not very well keep every reader's interest alive by talking about gardening only. So in addition to these little details we also have the one or two subplots that also caught my eye, plots which, to her credit, resolve (or don't resolve) in surprising ways. We don't see too much of Lavinia's seaside garden as it happens. Instead, we spend most of our time out in suburban woods and farm fields, following -- when we are not assiduously tilling the soil -- a halting romance between the visiting city public school teacher, Miss Maria Maxwell, and the mysterious local Man from Everywhere. Once, way out in the country, we meet the tragic, gentle neighbor Mrs. Markham, who went insane after her husband and son were killed in a carriage accident years before. She lives happily now in a secluded house set in a glorious scent-filled garden, attended by one understanding servant woman. Mrs. Markham dresses all in white, and tends her flowers while assuring visitors that the Doctor and their son have just gone out -- they will be so sorry to have missed you. At the very end of the book, following the technical instruction, the thousand roses and the gentle subplots, we understand that the primary author of these letters has just had a very interesting event happen to her, and that everyone is doing well. We remember that night spent in the open, after the horse and buggy got lost in the dark .... 

If you are a hideously amateur gardener like me, read the book for these daguerreotypes of Americana. If they don't strike you much,  read it for the lovely writing. Wildly obscure though the book may now be, the lovely writing reflects the lovely efforts these women made to put lovely things, every single day, into their otherwise unrecorded American lives. I may say, the surprisingly good photographs are an extra treat.

Before night enough Jacqueminot buds showed rich colour to justify my filling the bowl on the greeting table, fringing it with sprays of the yellow brier buds and wands of copper beech now in its velvety perfection of youth. This morning, the moment that I crossed my bedroom threshold, the Jacqueminot odour wafted up. Is there anything more like the incense of praise to the flower lover? Not less individual than the voice of friends, or the song of familiar birds, is the perfume of flowers to those who live with them, and among roses none impress this characteristic more poignantly than the crimson Jacqueminot and the silver-pink La France, equally delicious and absolutely different.

Glory Road by Bruce Catton

Is it permissible to scribble brief notes about a book I haven't quite finished yet, but that is overdue at the library? A few things strike me:

I doubt there can ever again be American historians of the Civil War working at the same level as men like Bruce Catton or his Southern counterpart, Shelby Foote. They were both of exactly the right generation to have grown up with boyhood memories of actual veterans' stories, told by old men in small towns at the turn of the twentieth century, and to be able to publish in the 1950s, just when the centennial of the war was coming. I am sure all this permeated their scholarship and it brought still more alive, for them and for us their readers, the regimental histories and enlisted men's diaries from which they drew so much detail. The deer bounding out of the forest just before the battle of Chancellorsville commenced, late on a spring evening; horses, wagons, cannon, and mules trampled and sunk in feet of mud on the pointless winter march to Falmouth.

Fredericksburg: thousands of Union soldiers lined up in the town and marched as ordered across a short rise of ground to the stone wall before Marye's Heights, where they were slaughtered by Confederate artillery and rifle fire. It all happened on a day in mid-December, 1862. It is very strange to see it, in the imagination, as a slowly unfolding tableau, and to think that all these men were "his majesty the Baby of some twenty years back," as Tom Wolfe described the pilots involved in the space program's early disasters in The Right Stuff. Thousands of mothers on that day in 1862 could not see the tableau, could not rush forward from kitchen and laundry and pull their very special baby out of the marching mass. They could only hear about it later.

One of the themes of the book: no matter what advantages a nation may have in war, industrial or financial or what have you, it can still lose if it can't match the enemy's passion. This is why the North came close to losing and why no one at the time could relax and assure himself "the South never really had a chance." Yes, the South did. Their soldiers, in Catton's words, were "men of passion."

The bulk of the book is what I think historians call "order-of-battle analysis." Terrain, logistics, strategy, weather, the building of pontoon bridges and the "unlimbering" of guns. The most dull sort of history to read, for most people including me; and yet, it is what the men went through from one day to the next, and it is why battles were won or lost. Anyway this is Catton's strength, once he gets down to it. The opening chapter, in which he introduces half a dozen characters via their tangled relationships with one another and loads it all up with trivial anecdote, reads like something the editor made him do to appease the reader who doesn't like order-of-battle analysis.    

Finally: extraordinary that American men went into woods and farms and mowed one another down, en masse, with cannon and rifle fire only a hundred and fifty years ago. And Gettysburg is yet to come.

Twelfth Night

Difficult, of course. It will require a second reading even to begin to get the plot straight, even though it is "only" a comedy.

The prime difficulty is that for the bulk of the story, we follow "the lighter people," the non-noble characters, as they play three successive tricks on one another: first a steward, Malvolio, finds a forged letter that deceives him into behaving pompously before the countess Olivia, whom he now thinks is in love with him; then the delightful idiot, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, is tricked into provoking a near-duel with Count Orsino's young manservant "Cesario" (who is really the disguised girl, Viola); finally Malvolio is hied off to a dungeon and succored and visited as a madman by the rest of the lighter folk, ostensibly because of the behavior encouraged in him by the forged letter.

All this takes up quite a bit of time, and it all taxes the modern reader's understanding because the non-nobles, not only Andrew and Malvolio but Sir Toby Belch, Maria (she forges the letter), and Feste the clown, speak in language much more obscure than that used by their betters. They speak, I venture to guess, like common people of 1600. Their banter is full of lost references to popular songs and jokes, they are forever joshing each other in that pun-infested, can-you-top-this style that Shakespeare loved (Samuel Johnson complained about his "quibbles"), and naturally they use the slang and idiom of the time, some of it bastardized French, some of it simply vocabulary long disused. A "catch" is a song, "Catay" is China. Decipher this, either on the page or in the theater, and by the way I know people who attended a performance of Twelfth Night just this past weekend.

TOBY: "My lady's a Cataian, we are politicians, Malvolio's a Peg-a-Ramsey, and [sings] 'Three merry men are we.' Am not I consanguineous? Am I not of her blood? Tilly-vally, lady. [sings] 'There dwelt a man in Babylon, lady, lady."  (II, iii, 69-72)

There's plenty more, and why does it always seem that the helpful notes at the bottom of a page of Shakespeare never elucidate what is truly bizarre? Your scholarly editor will assure us that "skill-less" means "without knowledge," but will not explain why Viola wants a beard, but "would not have it grow on my chin" (III, i, 45). Good luck to all.

So oddly enough it is the daunting-looking columns of poetry given to Viola, to the Countess Olivia, to Sebastian and to Duke Orsino which seem to swing aside like doors and, actually comprehensible, open up the movement of the play beyond. As an example of this sheer mental refreshment, here is Viola. She has been sent in her male disguise from her master, Orsino, to woo the mourning and cloistered Olivia by proxy.  "What would you?" Olivia asks, amused and attracted by the beardless "Cesario." Viola answers. She would

Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Hallo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out 'Olivia'! ....

At least we understand this as English, or think we do. It sounds very feeling. But we may yet be deceived. This may not be as dreamy and deeply meaningful a speech as changed modern ears are apt to hear. Explanatory notes at the bottom of the page, useful at long last, tell us that the willow is a symbol of grief for unrequited love, so the image of a shack built of willows at someone's door might have been intended as simply enjoyably silly. The same for "calling upon my soul within the house" -- imagine some lovelorn person wandering around literally saying "Upon my soul," as characters did in plays and books until that oath fell out of use. Because we're not used to glowing language (and who ever gets used to Shakespeare in any case?) we may see profundity, and make extracts, where the great man intended pleasant absurdity. 

While the reader is deciphering the lighter people's three successive barroom tricks, the nobility carries on, behind its swinging doors of poetry, with the love story. Its focus is the entrancing disguised girl, Viola. She has been shipwrecked along with her brother, Sebastian, on the coast of Illyria. Separated by the storm, each thinks the other is drowned. Viola dresses as a man, and takes service with the Duke, Orsino; her chief duty is to pursue his romance with the Countess. Olivia rejects him, but falls in love with the new page, "Cesario." For her part, Cesario falls in love with the duke herself.

It remains only for Sebastian to enter the fray, exactly resembling his sister, to astonish everyone and prompt questions, accusations, and confessions of truth and love, and thus launch the action softly down to its denouement, all the while he eyes Olivia himself. Did Shakespeare mean for us to draw any profound lessons from it all? I doubt it; only the fine expression "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them," thrice repeated, suggests a peg upon which a grand theme might hang. And yet the fine expression comes from Maria's forged letter, so possibly it is all in fun, too.

The introduction to Twelfth Night in my 1960s-era volume of Shakespeare says that this is one of the three "Joyous Comedies," the other two being Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It. Very well, but four hundred years is a long time for one civilization's definition of a joyous comedy to endure. It's a long time specifically for an upper class, courtly definition of joyous comedy to endure -- the joy of the gentleman's belly laugh at the idea of a steward being persuaded a gentlewoman loves him. The joke on Malvolio is about far more than his yellow stockings. I wonder what went on at the theater this weekend; I wonder how any theater company can make a modern audience understand and relish this play. I'm not such a virtuous and democratic killjoy that I can't laugh at Malvolio, but the entire world that bred him and his mockers (and they included everyone, beginning with his fellow servants) has gone, and how are we to resurrect them, even in make believe? For us pale twenty-first century weaklings, it's far easier to understand Viola and Olivia, arguing like soft-voiced birds over personal identity. "I prithee tell me what thou think'st of me"/"That you do think you are not what you are," etc.

...
OLIVIA: Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.
VIOLA: By innocence I swear, and by my youth,
I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth,
And that no woman has; nor never none
Shall mistress be of it, save I alone. ... (III,i,153-157)

Beautiful. The writer of my '60s era introduction also dwells much on the love story, but I think Shakespeare liked his servants and his Belches better here. And just how do we go about properly appreciating that?

Two ghost stories

What makes a ghost frightening? That it is more alive than we are. 

From The Norton Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Brad Leithauser (1994), come these two to start a collection. First is Ann Bridge's marvelous "The Buick Saloon," originally published in 1936. An exotic setting -- the foreign Legation in Peking in the 1930s -- a dumpy little diplomatic wife who hears a disembodied female voice speaking French in the back of her chauffeured car; there is little more to be said, because to say too much more would be to reveal too much and spoil it all. Suffice it that Ann Bridge (pen name of Lady Mary Dolling Sanders O'Malley, English diplomat's wife) is, if not the find of a lifetime, at least the find of a good long time, for any appreciative reader. Just listen:

Below her Peking lay spread out -- a city turned by the trees which grow in every courtyard into the semblance of a green wood, out of which rose the immense golden roofs of the Forbidden City; beyond it, far away, the faint mauve line of the Western Hills hung on the sky. 

And then she turns to overlook the old garden in the house by the Tartar wall, where the French voice had once been happy.

In the same anthology we find "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes," by Henry James (1868). Certainly he is a grander writer, one of the evidences of which I think is that unobtrusive, but always present, arch-browed humor which seems the mark of a master. But as a ghost story this one is less effective than Ann Bridge's. If ghosts are frightening because they are more alive than we are, then the ghost of this Romance is neither terribly alive nor terribly frightening.

Here we follow two sisters in colonial Massachusetts as they fight, very quietly, over one well-to-do English suitor. When he picks one of them, the other must make the best of it. Rosalind and Perdita were neither very loving nor very hateful toward one another to begin with, so there is no question of a ruined sisterly love or a further embittered hate. When one of them becomes a ghost, it really is all about the clothes. The creepiest moment of the story occurs when they are both still living and polite. The betrothed sister plumbs the depths of the other's jealousy and quietly says, " 'At least grant me a year. In a year I can have a little boy, or even a little girl ....' "

The ghost story genre is a challenging one. A writer has to get the scope and the pace of the visitation(s) just right, or else the delicate souffle of fear, fantasy, and plausibility collapses. It collapses, I think, even for Ann Bridge in her "The Song in the House," contained in a different anthology -- The Fireside Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Edward Wagenknecht (1947). It's another beautiful story, but, a whole gardenful of bejeweled Elizabethan ghosts, and all in broad daylight? Alas, no.  

Curiously enough, Ann Bridge's papers, thirty boxes of them, are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Someone gave them as a gift in 1975, the year after her death. It seems rather an abrupt document dump. I hope she doesn't haunt the place.