The hour is late, and night draws in on silent feet

(Photo by Rocketlass)

Though Chicago is nowhere near as mysterious as Venice, this is the best time of year for sitting late on the back steps and watch the city night steal in over the dark cemetery behind our house, its silent occupants waiting patiently for their hours to come. The sodium vapor lights in the alley slowly expand their dominion, the day sounds--of cars and talk and alley basketball--turn to night sounds--of sirens and breaking bottles and the distant music of party chatter. The evenings unfold slowly, and the mosquitoes have yet to renew their annual war on all warm-blooded creatures, so with books and a martini I remain outside until darkness forbids further reading.

From After Dark (2004, English translation 2007), by Haruki Murakami

Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature--or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city's moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.

From Lois the Witch (1856), by Elizabeth Gaskell

Evening was coming on, and the wood fire was more cheerful than any of the human beings surrounding it; the monotonous whirr of the smaller spinning-wheels had been going on all day, and the store of flax downstairs was nearly exhausted, when Grace Hickson bade Lois fetch down some more from the storeroom, before the light so entirely waned away that it could not be found without a candle, and a candle it would be dangerous to carry into that apartment full of combustible materials, especially at this time of hard frost when every drop of water was locked up and bound in icy hardness. So Lois went, half shrinking from the long passage that led to the stairs leading up into the storeroom, for it was in this passage that the strange night-sounds were heard, which everyone had begun to notice and speak about in lowered tones.

From At Day' Close: Night in Times Past (2005), by A. Roger Ekirch

"He that does ill hates the light," affirmed a Scottish proverb. Numerous folk, besides burglars, robbers, and other hardened rogues, exploited the evening darkness, often for illicit purposes. Petty criminals were far more numerous, if less feared. For poor families, social and legal constraints of all sorts eased. Indigent households buried their dead at night to escape paying parish dues, which had the added benefit of protecting gravesites from thieves, often needy themselves. Where grave robbers at night stole clothing and caskets, "resurrection men" unearthed entire bodies, freshly interred in churchyards, to sell for medical dissection. . . . The best time for treasure hunting fell after midnight, with some evenings preferred to otehrs depending on the moon's phase. Silence was critical. As a defense against demons, it was customary to draw one or more circles at the supposed spot. More alarming to authorities, malevolent spirits might be invoked to assist in unearthing the treasure. An English statute in 1542 threatened hunters with the death penalty for "invocacions and conjurations of sprites" to "get knowledge for their own lucre in what place treasure of golde and silver shulde or mought be found."

From Peter Haining's introduction to The Ghost-Feeler: Stories of Terror and the Supernatural, by Edith Wharton

It is a strange fact that for the first twenty-seven years of her life, a woman who is today regarded by several authorities on ghost fiction as one of the foremost writers of supernatural stories of her time, was quite unable to sleep in any room that contained so much as a single book of such tales. So unnerved was Edith Wharton by supernatural fiction that she later admitted to destroying any that she came across in the home.

From Blitz: The Night of December 29, 1940 (2005), by Margaret Gaskin

On his brief fact-finding mission from New York, PM editor Ralph Ingersoll had found the most striking aspects of Blitz life were "the normalcy of life by day and the dramatic suddenness with which that life stops at sundown." Though he had adjusted to it, he just "couldn't get over" it at first: in London, "The two worlds, the world of peace and the world of war, exist side by side, separated by only a few minutes of twilight.

From Religio Medici (1643), by Sir Thomas Browne (encountered in The Oxford Book of Death (1983), edited by D. J. Enright

I believe . . . that those apparitions and ghosts of departed persons are not the wandring souls of men, but the unquiet walks of Devils, prompting and suggesting us unto mischief, blood, and villainy; instilling and stealing into our hearts that the blessed Spirits are not at rest in their graves, but wander solicitous of the affairs of the World. But that those phantasms appear often, and do frequent Cemeteries, Charnel-houses, and Churches, it is because those are the dormitories of the dead, where the Devil, like an insolent Champion, beholds with pride the spoils and Trophies of his Victory over Adam.

From The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984, English translation 1991), by Jose Saramago

The evidence of death is the veil with which death masks itself. Ricardo Reis has gone past the tomb he was looking for. No voice called out, Hello, it's here, yet there are still those who insist that the dead can speak. What would become of the dead if there were no means of identifying them, no name engraved on a tombstone, no number as on the doors of the living.

One's only recourse, clearly, is to stay awake, keeping company with the owls and the nightjars, opossums and rats. If it means closing one's book when it's too dark to read, well, at least night also belongs to the hoboes and raconteurs, who can surely keep us entertained until dawn.

A final post on raconteurs

I was able today to see what the full Oxford English Dictionary had to say on the subject of raconteurs:

One skilled in relating anecdotes or stories.

1828 J. C. YOUNG Jrnl. 3 July in Memoir Charles Mayne Young (1871) I. v. 169 Sir Charles is a handsome, thoroughbred gentleman, and a capital raconteur. 1829 DISRAELI Yng. Duke I. xii. (1831) 97 Stamped the illustrious narrator as the most consummate raconteur. 1855-6 THACKERAY Four Georges (1861) 183 Scott..the very best raconteur of his time. 1885 Manch. Exam. 13 Apr. 5/7 He was a good raconteur. No one knew more good stories or could tell them so well. 1922 JOYCE Ulysses 604 A gifted man, Mr Bloom said of Mr Dedalus senior, in more respects than one and a born raconteur if ever there was one. 1937 Discovery Oct. 326/1 Mrs. Johnson says little about herself, indulges in no purple passages, and without the conscious effort of the raconteur she manages to introduce many good stories and telling anecdotes. 1958 L. DURRELL Mountolive xv. 296 The inevitable anecdote of a famous raconteur to round off the letter. 1972 J. MOSEDALE Football iii. 35 (caption) Jimmy Conzelman functioned as quarterback, coach, raconteur, songwriter..and promoter.


So raconteuse (-tøz), a female raconteur.


1863 OUIDA Held in Bondage (1870) 46 ‘There's not one of you men now-a-days like Selwyn’, began the old raconteuse again. 1892 Daily News 2 Aug. 5/1 Let us admit that she is a good raconteuse, for the sake of grammar.

Which leads me to a couple of raconteuses, a group I've managed to neglect all week. We'll start with Dorothy Parker. She opens this selection from "Literary Rotarians," (from the February 11, 1928 issue of the New Yorker and collected in The Portable Dorothy Parker (2006)), by slagging, by implication, the literary raconteur:

You cannot go ten yards, on any thoroughfare, without being passed by some Rotarian of Literature, hurrying to attend a luncheon, banquet, tea, or get-together, where he may rush about from buddy to buddy, the writing game. I believed for as long as possible that they were on for their annual convention; and I thought that they must run their little span and disappear, like automobile shows, six-day bicycle races, ice on pavements, and such recurrent impedimenta of metropolitan life. But it appears that they are to go on and on. Their fraternal activities are their livings--more, their existences.

Granted, Parker is writing not so much about raconteurs as about a very specific type of literary hobnobber, but her capacity for scorn is so great that I doubt she would hold fire should some theoretically unobjectionable retailer of anecdotes of literary life wander into her sights.

Even so, she can't help herself; the stories to be gleaned from watching this crowd are too tempting:

I went to a literary gathering once. How I got there is all misty to me. I remember that, on that afternoon, I was given a cup of tea which tasted very strange. Drowsiness came over me, and there was a humming noise in my ears; then everything went black. When I came to my senses, I was in the brilliantly lighted banquet-hall of one of the large hotels, attending a dinner of a literary association. The place was filled with people who looked as if they had been scraped out of drains. The ladies ran to draped plush dresses--for Art; to wreaths of silken flowers in the hair--for Femininity; and, somewhere between the two adornments, to chain-drive pince-nez--for Astigmatism. The gentlemen were small and somewhat in need of dusting. There were guests of honor: a lady with three names, who composed pageants; a haggard gentleman who had won the prize of $20 offered by Inertia: A Magazine of Poesy for the best poem on the occupation of the Ruhr district; and another lady who had completed a long work on "Southern Californian Bird-Calls" and was ready for play.

But Parker, as you can already see, did not allow the glamour of the event to overwhelm her skepticism:

By pleading a return of that old black cholera of mine, I got away before the speeches, the songs, and the probably donning of paper caps and marching around the room in lockstep. I looked with deep interest, the net morning, or the bookmen's and bookwomen's accounts of the event. One and all, they declared that never had there been so glamorous and brilliant a function. You inferred that those who had been present would require at least a week to sleep it off. They wrote of it as they wrote of every other literary gathering--as if it were like those parties that used to occur just before Rome fell.

From that day to this, I have never touched another cup of tea.

To balance Parker's scorn, I'll close with a raconteuse who truly relished outre stories, Nancy Mitford. In an October 19, 1953 letter to Evelyn Waugh, she tells of meeting Field Marshall Montgomery for lunch:

Well I had my luncheon with Monty. He is terribly like my Dad--watch in hand when I arrived (the first, luckily), only drinks water, has to have the 9 o'clock news & be in bed by 10, washes his own shirts, rice pudding his favourite food. All my books by his bed & when he gets to a daring passage he washes it down with Deuteronomy. But oh the glamour! He sat me next him although there were a French Marquise & and English peeress at the bout de la table. I do hope I did well--not absolutely sure, though. He took me to see an awful little English garden with maples turning red, & I was obliged to say that I couldn't look--too ugly. He was surprised. His ADC told me he said to a French general "I know what you're like--I've read The Blessing" & the Frog replied "Yes, well I've read Love in a C. C."

And, finally, from another letter to Waugh from October 30th of that year, a description of the recent activities of her reclusive, reactionary father (nicknamed Prod):

Prod lives on a small yacht, usually tied up at Golfe Juan. He is a perfectly happy human being & the idol of the local population there. He looks exactly like some ancient pirate--bone thin, pitch black, white hair & beard & dressed in literal rags. He wears steel rimmed spectacles. He has a villainous Spaniard who does the chores--when, on one occasion this fellow displeased Prod he ran up a signal, "Mutiny on board." However nobody in the modern world, except Prod, can read these signals any more so nobody came to the rescue. Last time he went to England he was shown that list of dutiable goods at the customs. He asked for paper & pencil & wrote down everything that is on it: "perfume handbags ladies underwear etc etc." It took ages & they had to keep the train. Then they asked him to open his suitcase & it was empty. So they said they would have him up, but Prod said "you can't have me up for declaring what I haven't got, only for not declaring what I have got." Do say he's lovely.

Some more on raconteurs

Before I move on, as promised, to Ludwig Bemelmans, I can't resist giving you another taste of Julian Maclaren-Ross's storytelling, one which seems to perfectly place him within my personal definition of the word raconteur. Here, in Memoirs of the Forties, he describes a night out in Guildford Street:

More of the chaps appeared, I hoped some of the girls might show up as well, but the party remained all male and the conversation became a lot less literary. All at once it turned on a woman, evidently much given to experiment and well known to all, who'd been the victim of an accident, perhaps to her leg, on a remote Italian hillside, and had had to have a blood-transfusion on the spot. Since none of the people roundabouts belonged to the proper blood group, the doctor had been compelled to accept as blood donor some mountain animal; here my memory begins to falter, although a goat seems the most probable in such surroundings and comes most readily to mind as the kind of quadruped concerned.

. . . .

I remember that, in an effort to divert my attention, one of the young men pointed wildly into the darkness ahead, shouting, "Look, down there's Doughty Street. Where bloody old Dickens lived," while another leant over some railings to show me an area in which he'd once either had a fight or else been sick, dropping in the process a bottle of pale ale which shattered below.

. . . .

After [the antique dealer] had finished explaining that all worthwhile drama, indeed all art, had originated somewhere in Central Europe, eaten the last piece of salami and made sure that there was no more wine, he climbed with Makins' assistance into a fur-collared overcoat. . . . The antique dealer was however, the only jarring note in the whole evening: the chaps were all nice cheerful intelligent young men and I regret, during all my future nights in Bloomsbury and Soho pubs, that I never came across any of them again; nor did I ever run into the woman who had been transfused with the blood of the goat. Perhaps they were all killed in the war, though I hope not.

I don't tend to think of Anthony Powell as a raconteur, because despite the stories of his contemporaries that fill his autobiography he is best known for his fiction, which while drawing on those stories alters them significantly. But a Powell fan can hear his voice in Maclaren-Ross's studied vagueness--"evidently much given to experiment," "perhaps to her leg," "my memory begins to falter"--which, as in A Dance to the Music of Time, where the most unexpected and unlikely events come to the narrator second- or third-hand, over drinks, lends a wonderful air of verisimilitude to even the most outlandish drunken tales. Some of the best of those tales, of course, concern down-at-heel writer and Soho raconteur X. Trapnel, who was modeled, down to the malacca cane he carried, on Julian Maclaren-Ross.

Now on to Ludwig Bemelmans, whom you probably know best as the writer and illustrator of the Madeleine books. Since my first trip to New York a few years ago, I've also known him as the artist who decorated one of my favorite spots in the city, Bemelmans Bar at the Hotel Carlyle, which is a forties-style bar decorated top to bottom in lovely little paintings of animals, children, parents, and New York scenes, all clearly the work of Madeleine's creator. But I had also heard that Bemelmans had done some writing for adults, and recently Stacey got me a volume put out by Overlook, Hotel Bemelmans (2002), which collects his short pieces about working in New York's grand hotels at their 1920s and '30s height.

Turns out he's quite the raconteur, with a quick wit and an eye for the telling detail. His grandfather owned a brewery, and:

After years of experience [he] could drink thirty-six big stone mugs of beer in one evening. He ate heavy meals besides, hardly any vegetables, only dumplings and potatoes, potatoes and dumplings, and much meat.

In consequence of this diet, Grandfather had several times a year attacks of very painful gout, which in Bavaria is called Zipperl. Much of the time, one or the other of his legs was wrapped in cotton and elephantine bandages. If people came near it, even Mother, he chased them away with his stick saying: "Ah, ah, ah" in an ecstasy of pain and widening his eyes as if he saw something very beautiful far away. Then he would rise up in his seat, while his voice changed to a whimpering "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus." He said he could feel the change in weather in his toes, through the thick bandages. But he did not stop eating or drinking.

His hotel and restaurant stories are the works of a perceptive insider, revealing the knavery and goofiness that go on behind the scenes, familiar in contour if not detail to anyone who's ever worked even the lowest level of food service. In the following passage, he helps a friend break into the hotel icebox to steal cheese for a party:

"Shh," said Mr. Sigsag, and I looked around once more; there was no one outside. He climbed in and reached down, but he was too short to reach the cheeses. I held his knees, then his ankles, and then his shoes; then I had his shoes in my hands and Mr. Sigsag was down with his face in some Camembert. Also there was a noise. I closed the icebox door. It was the night watchman; he looked in and I polished away at some bottles. The man sat down, lit a pipe, and started to talk; it wa a long time before he left again on his rounds.

In the meantime, Mr. Sigsag had been trying to get up; kneeling and standing and sliding and then sitting down again in all kinds of cheese. He first handed out a Pont L'Eveque, hard and solid. "There will be trouble anyway," he said, "we might as well take it along." Then he gave me his cold hands, but for some time I could not lift him out. They were smeared with cheese and slipped out of mine. I gave him a napkin, with which he cleaned his face and hands, and finally I could pull him out, his sleeves and trousers full of cheese. He took a shower downstairs, change his trousers, but he still smelled.

That passage exemplifies what I ask of a raconteur: take me someplace where I by temperament or circumstance am unlikely to go, and tell me about the people you meet there and what they're up to. I suppose it's not all that different from what I ask of any writer, of fiction or non-fiction.

Regardless, as again and again I tuck myself in at an hour long before the monsters, night owls, beats, aberrations, goths, goons, vagabonds, knockabouts, oddities, lunatics, ravers, on-the-makers, and drunk poets have rounded into form, I'll reserve a special place in my heart for the raconteurs and raconteuses, my foreign correspondents from the night.

On Raconteurs

Though I've long loved the word "raconteur," I've recently realized that I have been giving it a sense that it does not, apparently, have. According to Merriam-Webster's, the meaning of raconteur, which dates from 1828, is very straightforward:

A person who excels in telling anecdotes.

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is a bit more inclusive to start:

A (usu. skilled) teller of anecdotes

but then circumscribes the word significantly by adding a reference to a word I'd never heard of:

raconteuse A female raconteur.

What surprises me here (aside from raconteuse) is not what is in the definition, but what is left out. Having over the years imagined a definition based on the ways I've heard the word used, I would have defined raconteur as

One who skillfully tells anecdotes, often (if not always) from personal experience, that experience gained often (if not always) while drunk or with drunks.

Am I the only one who thinks of raconteurs this way? I decided to put the question to Google. A search on notable storyteller Garrison Keillor and raconteur returns 518 hits, while a search on notable drunk, actor, and storyteller Peter O'Toole and raconteur yields 567 hits. That may not satisfy science, but the fact that someone best known for his acting and drinking outperforms someone primarily known for his storytelling is enough for me.

[Side note: A search on Garrison Keillor and drunk yields a surprising 67,700 hits--but here's where O'Toole really shines: he draws about 130,000. What a man.]

This is all prelude to an appreciation of raconteurs, especially as I erroneously define them. As someone who mostly stays at home or sees the same old friends, enjoys a single martini and hates hangovers, and is nearly always in bed by midnight, my respect for those who are capable of adventuring until dawn knows almost no bounds. I understand that the rackety life can cause difficulties for the practitioner and his loved ones--but once the tippler has survived his adventures, and especially once he's committed them to the page, he becomes my friend for life, giving me entree to late-night worlds as unexpected and exotic as those of The Arabian Nights.

In recent weeks, I've been spending a lot of time with a couple of literary raconteurs. I'm continuing to plow through Soho dandy Julian Maclaren-Ross's ouvre, which is essentially one long story about being down at heel and looking for money for cigarettes and booze. His Memoirs of the Forties (1965) features cameos from all sorts of well-known and long-forgotten London literary drunks and hustlers, from Dylan Thomas:

"Why don't you take that bloody jacket off?" Dylan said.
"What's wrong with my jacket?"
"Fucking dandy, flourishing that stick. Why don't you try to look more sordid, boy. Sordidness, that's the thing."

to the mostly-forgotten editor of Poetry London, J. Meary Tambimuttu, about whom Maclaren-Ross first learns from a girl named Kitty of Bloomsbury:

When Kitty came down from Oxford and was looking for a job, [Tambi] took her to a bare basement room, containing a half-collapsed camp bed, a kitchen chair and a wooden table on which were a bottle of blue-black ink, a chewed post-office pen holder, and stacks of [his] embossed crested paper.

"This was my office," he said. "Now it is yours. I engage you as my secretary and poetry-reader." Squashing a cockroach on the sweating wall with a rolled-up copy of Poetry London, he waved this at a chaos of accumulated MSS in a corner.

"Poems," he said. "Contributions, you know? I have not time to read them. If they're no good, perhaps they should be returned. They've been here a long time; the rats have eaten some. We have no typewriter yet, but there is ink and paper to write the authors. You will be paid fortnightly. Do you have any money?"

"Yes, thank you, I've got five pounds."

"That is good," Tambimuttu said. "I am a prince in my country and princes don't carry money, you know. Give me the fiver and later the firm will refund you. I am going to lunch with T. S. Eliot. You know who is T. S. Eliot?"

Tambimuttu, whose incorrigibility is perhaps only matched by his general enthusiasm for anything not involving paying out money, becomes a regular drinking companion of Maclaren-Ross. One night, says Maclaren-Ross,

We were with two suburban young women, new to Fitzrovia, whom he'd picked up in the Wheatsheaf and who were both uninteresting and interested only in being bought a meal in some newly opened restaurant which they'd heard was good but which was off our usual beat. Tambi was becoming increasingly worried as we stumbled over cobble-stones further and further from the territory that he had made his own; he glanced longingly at strips of light visible through the blackouts of pubs where the girls refused to stop.

"Nearly ten o'clock," he muttered. "In an hour they'll be closing and this restaurant perhaps has no license," and suddenly he caught up with the girls who were walking ahead arm-in-arm, giggling and whispering together, convinced that they'd achieved their objective in finding a pair of suckers who would foot the bill.

"Listen you must tell us please, my friend and I wish to know, do you do it or not?"

"Do it?" they chorused. "Do what?"

"You know. Sex."

There was a pause for shock to register, then outraged gasps of "How dare you," came in unison.

"You mean you don't?"

"Certainly not. The idea!"

"Then be off!" Tambi shouted, banishing them with a gesture into the blackout: "You are wasting our valuable drinking time," and we retraced our steps to Rathbone Place.

I said: "I could have told you those girls were NBG."

"How did you know?"

"Well they were nurses or something weren't they?"

"Don't nurses do sex?"

"Yes but only with doctors whom they hope to marry after."

"Only doctors? Is that all?" Tambi was silent for a moment then asked: "Only medical doctors? A doctor of literature would not be any good?"

"Are you a doctor of literature?"

"Not yet, but I could have a degree conferred. Honorary you know. From Oxford. I know many professors there, and then I could fuck with all these nurses. What do you think?"

Again and again, Maclaren-Ross recounts tales that could only happen in the wee hours, when the participants are burning with a low blue flame--exactly the hours I spend in bed, and exactly what I want from my raconteurs. Similarly, many of the people he tells of would be absolutely intolerable in real life--especially if one or both of you were sober--which leads me to expand on my definition of raconteur:

One who skillfully tells anecdotes, often (if not always) from personal experience, that experience gained often (if not always) while drunk or with drunks--frequently drunks who are best heard of at second-hand.

This rambling post is getting long, and I haven't even gotten to the second of my recent raconteur companions, Ludwig Bemelmans. For that, you'll have to wait until tomorrow. Until then, I'm going back to my martini.