Living the lush life

{Photos by rocketlass.}

"I have a theory," writes Lauren Cerand this week over at The Rumpus, "that elegant people have an aura of impenetrable private sadness, and that good taste and impeccable manners are life’s consolation." What follows is a wonderful essay that interweaves pithy, epigrammatic definitions of elegance and its kin--

Glamour is constructed, elegance is acquired, and charm is innate.

--with elements of her life story and her approach to matters of fashion, furnishing, and self-presentation. It's well-handled, with Cerand coming across as neither unduly proud of nor the slightest bit uncertain about her tastes; her appreciations and definitions are infectious, bolstering the often too timid thought that yes, the sensual details of life are worth your attention, though their value may largely be self-contained, non-transferable. The moment, the day, the existence, is worth it.

It brought to mind a passage from Cyril Connolly's appreciation of the archly over-ripe pleasures of Ronald Firbank, from The Condemned Playground. "For my part," writes Connolly,

I am secretly a lyricist; the works to which I lose my heart are those that attempt, with a purity and a kind of dewy elegance, to portray the beauty of the moment, the gaiety and sadness, the fugitive distress of hedonism.

Elegance gives us something to celebrate on days when little else is on offer--on, as Fitzgerald put it, those "metropolitan days and nights . . . as tense as singing wires." Even then one's tie can be tied, one's creases pressed, one's clauses delicately balanced.

Cerand mentions in passing that in a friendless childhood in the midst of a complicated, riven family, she turned to, of all people, Machiavelli, pulling "the leather-bound edition of The Prince down from the shelf in hopes of gaining insight on how to navigate it all." And, while in the popular portrait of Machiavelli everything takes a backseat to his recommendations for ruthlessness, he, too, understood the essential respect for the world around us that elegance conveys. In the best of his letters, written on December 10, 1513 to his benefactor, Francesco Vettori, he tells of how he enters his library at the end of a day of farming:

On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day's clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which is only mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.

And now to straighten my tie, pour a martini, settle in at the piano, and open my lounge player's songbook. And what do I happen to be working on tonight? Nothing else but Billy Strayhorn's unparalleled account of the louche ashes of faded glamour, "Lush Life."

"The more one sees of life the more one is aware how hopeless it is without art to give it meaning."

{Vivien Leigh in Anna Karenina, 1948}

From Viktor Shklovsky's "Another Note on Beginnings and Endings," from Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot (1981)

If a talented person tried to lie, Tolstoy said, his talent wouldn't allow him to.

It's an inordinately busy week, so I've only got time to share a couple of quick bits tonight.

The Shklovsky I present in honor of a renewal, last night with my friend Bob--who is spending this week getting drunk on Tolstoy--of the eternal, inexhaustible conversation about Anna Karenina. A bit more from the same essay:

Sometimes happy endings are dressed with irony. As in one of Charlie Chaplin's pictures his friend, the millionaire, recognizes him only when he is drunk, but when he is sober, Chaplin is a stranger to him.

At the beginning of the novel, Karenina is reading an English novel about a baronet. She reads it through to the traditional ending, when the baronet gains his happiness.

Suddenly she is filled with shame.

She has already seen Vronsky.

This is the first hint of adultery.

It's not going to end like the novel about the baronet.

Which seems like a good enough lead-in to a pair of entries from Cyril Connolly, who provides this post's title. I'm drawing today from a piece in The Condemned Playground (1945), "England Not My England," which consists of selections from a journal kept by the twenty-three-year-old Connolly, chosen by him to highlight his whiplashing dis- and re-enchantment with his native England. The first strikes an unusual note of forthright satisfaction:

2nd to 4th August 1927

I ought in fairness to announce that these two days by the sea I have been distinctly happy.

But true to form, Connolly is soon right down in it again:

8th September 1927

My thoughts run to depression as a child to its mother. Not to be born is best, or, being born, to live at Cadiz.

Even at his most self-pitying, Connolly remains detached enough to derive a level of amusement--even pleasure--from his condition; Robert Burton would, I think, have approved.

Where to point one's time machine?

To open a review of a book on Lord Chesterfield, collected in The Condemned Playground (1945), Cyril Connolly wrote,

All of us who allow the sense of the past a certain play in our lives come sooner or later to adopt a special period, to fall in love with a few decades of history which we cannot read about without a certain quickening, an interior voice affirming, "This was the time." For many people it will be the Elizabethan period, for others the seventeenth century, the Regency, or the reign of Charles II. For me it is the first half of the eighteenth century and the few years before it: the end of Dryden, the flowering of Congreve and Pope, the beginnings of Horace Walpole and Selwyn, a transitional age full of a certain beautiful clumsiness such as is found in the interiors of Hogarth and the furniture of William Kent.

Before I set about answering Connolly's implied question, the relatively rigorous rationalist in me insists on pointing out that any serious look at the difference between past and present will come down almost entirely in favor of the present, at least for those of us fortunate enough to live in the developed world. Looked at from any number of viewpoints (from basic human rights and gender equity to advances in medicine to the decreasing costs of knowledge to the fact that I can, right now, on a freezing March night, find a bunch of fresh grapes for sale, cheap, within half a mile, something that would have made a Roman emperor pass out) any real wish to be somewhere in the past should be looked at with deep suspicion--and that's all before we note that such a wish always assumes that one's historical travels will land one in some echelon of the comfortable classes, however small their numbers may have been. The life of a peasant in the early eighteenth century is not, we can assume, what Connolly is imagining.

But now that rationality has said its piece, let's just wave politely at its departing back and settle in to the pleasurable warmth of literary nostalgia. Aaaaah. That's more like it.

So what era whispers to me? It won't surprise regular readers of this blog that for almost my entire adult life it's been Connolly's own time: the interwar years in England. Described vividly in countless cherished novels and memoirs, they were the heyday of so many of my favorite writers: Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene, Ivy Compton-Burnett, George Orwell, and Nancy Mitford among them. The satirists alone make me want to travel to their time, so that I can see firsthand the vapidity and philistinism that was their source material. The lives we learn about from the authors of the interwar years are similar enough in both outlook and material culture to ours to feel comfortably comprehensible, yet the world they reflect is tinged with a glamor that did not survive the rapid-fire modernization that followed World War II. It's almost enough to make you forget that this was also the period of the rise of fascism, the Moscow show trials, and a worldwide depression--but I forgot: I'm officially trafficking in nostalgia here. Oh, to have a drink on the terrace of a country house with Anthony Powell and Henry Green, with Evelyn Waugh grumbling in the corner!

In the past year, however, I've found my faith wavering, my eyes wandering to the eighteenth century, the freewheeling years that saw the births of both the novel and the print culture in which we still live. Maybe Connolly is right? Or almost right--I'd be more inclined to pick a slightly later period, essentially the years of James Boswell's lifespan, 1740 to 1795. Johnson dominates the era, but he is joined by such an array of wonderful characters, among them Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, David Garrick, Laurence Sterne, William Hogarth, and Lord Chesterfield. If I could be allowed to tack a few years onto each end of Boswell's sadly short life, it would be possible to be an adult in time to meet Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, while as an old man getting to read the first of Jane Austen's novels. Could one ask for more?

So which should it be? My reading in the eighteenth century is neither as broad nor as deep as my knowledge of the interwar years, so if confronted today with a time machine, I'd have to chose the closer destination. But the late Georgian era is tempting nonetheless . . . maybe Jenny Davidson, who specializes in that period, would be willing to weigh in?

And while we're at it, what period calls to you?