"Perennial Philadelphians"
I made a dreadful mistake yesterday. I had to look something up, and I reached down Nathaniel Burt's "The Perennial Philadelphians" to find it. As soon as I cracked the cover the prose pulled me in again.
Here's a footnote in page 16:
There's nothing quite like it. Every paragraph of it has some distinct defect, but they're all the more charming for that, and the overall effect is utterly delightful, a prose both high and human at the same time, self-assured and self-depreciating -- which makes it an exact image of its topic. I open it at random and find this:
It's a book about somewhere. It could be read with pleasure by anyone who appreciates the remaining somewheres of the world, but I happen to know this particular somewhere. I was a young man amid the faded embers of Philadelphia society, which had dispersed in pockets of the Main Line and Germantown since the heyday (roughly 1890 to 1930) Burt chronicled in his book. I moved their furniture for them and ran errands for them and watched the horses at Devon and Radnor and had many a lunch in Merion Cricket Club. If I did not know Mrs. Isaac Clothier, I knew little old ladies, delicate and unbreakable in the same moment, who would have done exactly that.
The prose is so perilously close to precious, with its in-jokes and droll capitalizations, artfully side-stepping the dirty word "lawyer" in the last sentence, for instance, but he walks the wire with a smile, and like any good trick it makes you itch to give it a try. It is unsafe to touch a keyboard for two hours after reading this.
Here's a footnote in page 16:
"Dr. Kinsey, examining Philadelphia, said it was the last American stronghold of the established mistress, professional or amateur. Elsewhere either puritanism still held, divorce had caught up, or vice was casual. The apropos story is that of two old codgers in the window of the Union League, good friends but only as clubmates. Said one, "I'm so relieved to see my wife hasn't found me out yet; there she goes down Broad Street with my mistress." "Isn't that a coincidence," said the friend. "I was just going to say exactly the same thing."
There's nothing quite like it. Every paragraph of it has some distinct defect, but they're all the more charming for that, and the overall effect is utterly delightful, a prose both high and human at the same time, self-assured and self-depreciating -- which makes it an exact image of its topic. I open it at random and find this:
One of the best authenticated, most flagrant and recent examples of Philadelphia aplomb was the case of Mrs. Isaac Clothier and the burglar. For several years the Main Line has been enlivened by the raids of a man known as the 'Bandana Bandit.' Presumably once a butler, he robbed only the best people, seeming to know not only who they were, but where they cached the stuff. It was, in fact, a sort of painful honor to be robbed by him. The Clothiers' turn came when Mrs. Clothier was alone in the house and in bed. The bandit walked into her bedroom. She turned on the light, sat up and said, "Now, my dear man, you know I never keep any money in the house. There's nothing but those little things on my bureau my children gave me, they really wouldn't be worth your while. Why don't you just go downstairs and have a glass of milk?" He did, and left.
It's a book about somewhere. It could be read with pleasure by anyone who appreciates the remaining somewheres of the world, but I happen to know this particular somewhere. I was a young man amid the faded embers of Philadelphia society, which had dispersed in pockets of the Main Line and Germantown since the heyday (roughly 1890 to 1930) Burt chronicled in his book. I moved their furniture for them and ran errands for them and watched the horses at Devon and Radnor and had many a lunch in Merion Cricket Club. If I did not know Mrs. Isaac Clothier, I knew little old ladies, delicate and unbreakable in the same moment, who would have done exactly that.
The final Philadelphia touch is supplied to the [Philosophical] Society by something called the Wistar Parties, which involve food. They were instituted in 1787 by Dr. Caspar Wistar, he of wistaria. As president of the Society he used to ask members to his house ... every Sunday. There they regularly indulged in menus of deliberately rather restricted and simple nature. As Philosophers, they were supposed to be above anything beyond oysters and still wines. After Dr. Wistar's death the parties were continued in his memory by his Philadelphia friends. After 1842 the parties were conventionally restricted to members of the Society and their guests, and somewhere along the line sumptuary laws about food, almost Bostonian in their rigor, were codified to nip luxurious tendencies in the bud. The menus were to be limited to croquettes and oysters in one style, or oysters in two styles without croquettes, supported by one kind of salad, ices and fruits; only two kinds of wine permitted, sparkling wines strictly forbidden. The rules were occasionally breached by legally trained hosts, such as the man who served raw oysters, escalloped oysters and croquettes, arguing that raw oysters were in "no style."
The prose is so perilously close to precious, with its in-jokes and droll capitalizations, artfully side-stepping the dirty word "lawyer" in the last sentence, for instance, but he walks the wire with a smile, and like any good trick it makes you itch to give it a try. It is unsafe to touch a keyboard for two hours after reading this.
