Books in Brief
The Duchess Who Wouldn’t Sit Down by Jesse Browner (Bloomsbury, 240 pp., $23.95). Subtitled “An Informal History of Hospitality,” this is a ramble through the downside of etiquette. The title role belongs to the Duchess of Mantua, a seventeenth-century blueblood who challenged the seating arrangement at the court of Louis XIV. Formal rules determined who was eligible to sit, at court, in an armchair, a straight backed chair, or a stool known as a taboret. The duchess was slotted for a taboret, which she rejected as inadequate. So she left town.
Jesse Browner points out that Greek mythology casts nearly every disaster as a result of some “desecration of hospitality.” The list includes Procrustes, who would rearrange the anatomy of his guests to fit the guest’s bed. And Atlas, who was turned to stone for refusing hospitality to Perseus. And Tantalus, who was condemned to perpetual agony because he served his own son as the main course of a banquet. But these are just the tip of the Hellenic iceberg. For additional infamous finales, see Bulfinch’s mythology.
In “The Duchess Who Wouldn’t Sit Down,” Browner wanders through the backstairs of history, picking up items of inhuman interest. For example, the most repellent dish on the medieval menu has got to be a delicacy known as a cockentrice. This was named after a mythical serpent with a gaze that could kill. The recipe consisted of the front half of a piglet sewn onto the back half of a capon. And vice versa. When the results are stuffed, roasted and glazed, you’re left with two kinky mutants.
Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, and Browner includes in her smorgasbord a brace of menus from his Alpine hideaway at Berchtesgaden. Hitler catered to his guests’ every need, plus some they weren’t aware of. A network of underground tunnels was ready with poison-gas propellants, just in case. For lesser problems there were tear-gas nozzles.
A high point of hospitality in modern times was attained by the institution of the salon, a convocation of celebrities, and “The Duchess Who Wouldn’t Sit Down” contrasts the histories of two celebrated salons. The country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell was a magnet for Edwardian England. It attracted the likes of Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, Henry James, Roger Fry, and Clive Bell. “Some came for the weekend, others stayed for the year.” One painter stayed for three years.
But Lady Ottoline’s generosity was not appreciated. (“They ate Ottoline’s food and complained about it.”) She was self-deprecating, and her guests took her at face value. The most unkind cuts of all were given by writers who ridiculed her in their novels. Aldous Huxley lampooned her in “Crome Yellow,” and D.H. Lawrence belittled her in “Women in Love.”
Gertrude Stein was not handicapped by self-doubt. She believed that “nobody has done anything to develop the English language since Shakespeare except myself, and Henry James, perhaps a little.” She also had a keen eye for non-objective art. Gertrude and her brother Leo took up residence on Paris’s Left Bank and turned it into what one guest called “a ministry of propaganda for modern art.” Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Derain, and Duchamp were among the members of Stein’s Saturday night salon, as were most of the leaders of the modernist movement.
World War I brought an end to Stein’s salon. But she remained “the patron saint of the avant garde.” Browner suggests that Stein was liked because she was expansive and democratic, while Lady Ottoline was a chilly aristocrat. Still, that should not have been an excuse to desecrate her hospitality. The Greeks may have been on to something.
—Martin Levin
