Counting all this money is so tiresome!

'Tis a Friday of virtual hobnobbing with the wealthy and titled . . .

We'll start with the diary entry of Count Harry Kessler for June 20, 1911:

Dinner at Madame Edwards's. D'Annunzio, Boni de Castellane, Rejane, Bakst, Romain Coolus, Tata Golubeff, Sert, the lover of Rejane Nicodemi, and an Argentinian, Quintana, the son of a former president, were present. After dinner came Maupeou, Gloria, Ricciotto Canudo, and the Russian Baryton Kedroff, who sang wonderfully. The apartment of Edwards is one of the most tasteful I have ever seen. Many chinoiseries from the time of Louis XV and Louis XVI, everywhere expensive old laces as curtains and tablecloths and on the walls, like tapestries, decorations by Bonnard. In between a mass of roses, big and small. D'Annunzio had said he would come after dinner but arrived during the fish course. He seemed to enjoy our surprise. Rejane who is a ruin, but still of a refined elegance and very amusing, allowed D'Annunzio to pay court to her. They disappeared together after dinner into a boudoir as Rejane, in leaving the salon, cried out, "When you hear the first cry, you will come . . . no, not the first, but at the third."

Those of us who generally move in less refined circles can take solace from the fact that most of those names mean nothing today, even when annotated--but it's hard to begrudge Kessler his society and name-dropping, as he at least seemed to appreciate it and make good use of it, working with von Hofmannsthal and spending time with Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Nietzsche, Rilke, Verlaine, Richard Strauss, Shaw, and others of impressive accomplishment.

But mightn't we, were we to be suddenly dropped, Quantum Leap–style, amid all that glamor, simply get bored? Ben Macintyre, early in his new book about the D-Days spies, Double Cross, offers an example:

Boredom stalked Elvira Chaudoir like a curse. Her father, a Peruvian diplomat, had made a fortune from guano, the excrement of seabirds, bats, and seals, collected off the coast of Peru and exported as fertilizer. Elvira grew up in Paris, where she was expensively educated and tremendously spoiled. In 1934, at the age of twenty-three, to escape the tedium, she fled into the arms of Jean Chaudoir, a Belgian stock exchange representative for a gold-mining firm. Jean turned out to be a crashing bore, and life in Brussels was "exceedingly dull." After four years of marriage and a number of unsatisfactory love affairs with both men and women, she came to the conclusion that "she had nothing in common with her husband" and ran away to Cannes with her best friend, Romy Gilbey, who was married to a scion of the Gilbey gin dynasty and very rich. Elvira and Mrs. Gilbey were happily losing money made from gin in a casino in Cannes when the Germans invaded France; they fled, in an open-top Renault, to St. Malo before taking a boat for England.

In London, Elvira moved into a flat on Sloane Street, but the tedium of life swiftly descended once more. She spent her evenings shuttling between the bar at the Ritz and the bridge tables, losing money she did not have. She would have borrowed from her parents, but they were stuck in France. She tried to join the Free French forces gathering around the exiled Charles de Gaulle but was told she was unsuitable. She did a little translating for the BBC and found it dreary.

Chaudoir eventually turned to the elixir that has stemmed the ennui of so many of the idle rich over the centuries: spying.

Finally, lest you assume that our jet-powered, ever-connected, new Gilded Age has freed the poor wealthy from the besetting curse of boredom, I'll leave you with the unimpressed glories of the Pierces.



Milton's ending to Paradise Lost--

The world was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest

--was surely intended to be equivocal, perpetual grace traded for free will--but little did he know those centuries gone that with but the appending of a weary sigh his lines could be adapted to the pitiful plight of the privileged.

"A thoroughly nasty piece of work" or, Parties and some lessons in the glories of cattiness

{Photo by rocketlass.}

I apologize in advance for the vulgarity of this first scene, but it was too good to pass up. It comes from Gary Indiana's Do Everything in the Dark (2003):

From a fat manila envelope bursting at the seams, Jesse fishes snapshots of Millie Ferguson. He remembers her green eye shadow, glassy Mylar dresses, high wiry whore-blond hair, the array of indelible expressions that wacky woman wore instead of jewelry. Millie exuded an air of hoarding astounding secrets and spiriting special people into dark corners to examine her pussy (which Jesse'd always imagined the lair of rare African snakes or fantastic Amazonian orchids) or to snuffle up an Everest of cocaine. The dope addict rictus, the born sneak's irresistible smirk, the stolid Teutonic jawline that slackened like rubber after two a.m. Millie Ferguson got ambushed by mirrors, stuck to them like a pinned butterfly, and who wouldn't if they looked like her? People wanted either to be Millie or to fuck her, or both.

Such sterling cattiness Indiana pulls off there, reaching heights only scaleable with the aid of real longing and undeniable praise. It's nearly worthy of the master, Proust, whose way with a cutting comment is so easy that he doesn't even have to save them all for Marcel, instead distributing them freely to all manner of characters, worthy and unworthy alike. Here, for example, is Madame de Guermantes, taking her oily leave of a party, in Sodom and Gomorrah:

"Goodbye, I've hardly spoken to you, that's how it is in society, we don't meet, we don't say the things we'd like to say to one another; anyway it's the same everywhere in life. Let's hope it'll be better organized after we're dead. At least we won't always have to wear low-cut dresses. Yet who knows? Perhaps we shall show off our bones and our worms on big occasions. Why note? I say, look at old mother Rampillon, d'you see any great difference between that and a skeleton in an open dress? It's true she has every right, she's at least a hundred years old. She was already one of those sacred monsters I refused to curtsy to when i was starting out in society. I thought she'd died long since; which would as it happens be the one explanation for the spectacle she's offering us. It's impressive and liturgical."

Or this, which he gives to Madame de Gallardon, spurned cousin of the Duchesse de Guermantes:

"I'm not in the least anxious to see her," she had replied. "I caught sight of her just now, in any case, she's beginning to age; it seems she can't come to terms with it. Basin himself says so. And I can well understand that, because, since she's not intelligent, is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, and has a bad way with her, she certainly feels that, once she's no longer beautiful, she'll have nothing left at all."

It is one of Proust's greatest achievements to reveal the emptiness and ridiculousness of society life while simultaneously making us very glad that he took us along to these parties. We love being there because, unlike all the guests Proust depicts, we can simply relax and enjoy the spectacle through his eyes, without worrying about the figure we cut or the connections we make. Which makes Proust's eye for the ridiculous and the silly all the more fun. Here he offers us the words of the frivolous and self-regarding Madam de Citri, at the same party:

"Do you like listening to that, music? Good Lord, it depends on the moment. But it can be so very tedious! I mean, Beethoven, la barbe!" With Wagner, then with Franck, and Debussy, she did not even trouble to say 'la barbe' but was content to pass her hand across her face, like a barber. Soon, what was tedious was everything. "Beautiful things, they're so tedious! Paintings, they're enough to drive you mad . . . How right you are, it's so tedious, writing letters!" In the end it was life itself that she declared to us was a bore, without one quite knowing from where she was taking her term of comparison.

Which puts me in the mind of that great apostle of both cattiness and list-making, Sei Shonagon. Here she combines her two strengths, with a list of "Things That Have Lost Their Power" from her Pillow Book, which itself is definitely belongs on a list of life's pleasing things:

A large boat which is high and dry in a creek at ebb-tide.

A woman who has taken off her false locks to comb the short hair that remains.

A large tree that has been blown down in a gale and lies on its side with its roots in the air.

The retreating figure of a sumo wrestler who has been defeated in a match.

A man of no importance reprimanding an attendant.

An old man who removes his hat, uncovering his scanty topknot.

A woman, who is angry with her husband about some trifling manner, leaves home and goes somewhere to hide. She is certain that he will rush about looking for her; but he does nothing of the kind and shows the most infuriating indifference. Since she cannot stay away forever, she swallows her pride and returns.

Or, for a more straightforward baring of her teeth, how about this:

Masahiro really is a laughing-stock. I wonder what it is like for his parents and friends. If people see him with a decent-looking servant, they always call for the fellow and laughingly ask how he can wait upon such a master and what he thinks of him. There are skilled dyers and weavers in Masahiro's household, and when it comes to dress, whether it be the colour of his under-robe or the style of his cloak, he is more elegant than most men; yet the only effect of his elegance is to make people say, "What a shame someone else isn't wearing thse things!"

Ouch. And double ouch when you remember that Sei Shonagan surely smiled to Masahiro's face as she composed these lines in her head. Then there's this, from a list of "Hateful Things":

A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything.

There's enough of an implicit warning in that to make me close this post; I'll wrap up by including a video for one of my favorite songs of last year, the languid, scandalously unimpressed Pierces singing "Boring." Enjoy . . . or, as the mood strikes you, be bored: