January 2011

A. R. Gurney, Jr.’s reminiscences of gracious dinner parties of the twenties and thirties were informative and witty (September/October). But Mr. Gurney was not well served by your caption writer, who did not realize that the maid in the accompanying 1929 illustration on page 69 is not serving soup, as your caption states.

The properly uniformed maid is obviously bringing to the hostess a tray (silver, of course) bearing a coffeepot (also silver) and cups (finest porcelain) for after-dinner coffee.

New York was indeed the “Supreme City” (November) in the 1920s. Items that Gerald Carson might have mentioned: Ed Wynn, the Perfect Fool, in Manhattan Mary , accompanied by a line of bare-legged girls that really gave pause to a high school boy recently arrived from Vermont; a ride through the Holland Tunnel on one of the first excursion buses to make that trip (all I remember is an endless vista of white ceramic tile); and Arthur Guiterman’s archetypical Manhattanite, Lady Jane, who read the ads “Of laces at Macy’s, of thimbles at Gimbel’s, or urns at Stern’s and churns at Hearn’s … fur mittens like Peary’s at Mr. McCreery’s, and silver salt-shakers at John Wanamaker’s.”

What a time, and what a city!

Jesus Christ, American Jesus Christ, American Jesus Christ, American Soup’s Off What a Time! Secret Life Secret Life Blaming the Press And Another Thing

Patrick Allitt’s “The American Christ” (November) was a concise, comprehensive survey of the American literary treatment of Christ as found in many great and not-so-great novels from America’s earliest days to the present. The books mentioned in the article would make enjoyable light reading for the summer, or at any time for that matter.

I thought Allitt did a better job writing his piece than Martin Scorsese did filming The Last Temptation of Christ . The American Heritage article was much more stimulating. However, perhaps one of the good things that came out of the controversial film is that a wider and more serious dialogue on Christ is taking place.

In the middle of Patrick Allitt’s “The American Christ,” there is an advertisement for Malcolm Forbes’s book They Went That-a-Way , which tells “how the famous, the infamous, and the great died.” In the partial list of contents, it is significant that Jesus Christ is not listed. Jesus claimed to be the son of God, a claim validated by his resurrection from life’s only certainty—death. This is why we cannot “judge Jesus simply as a notable historical figure.”

Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind must surely be the most unexpected happening of American intellectual life in recent years. It is an erudite, closely argued book of philosophy and cultural criticism. That it should sit atop the New York Times best-seller list for eleven weeks and produce a hard-cover sale of a half-million copies defies publishing’s common sense.

Mortimer Adler gives wonderful inside glimpses of the early Great Books campaigns in his autobiography, Philosopher at Large (1977). A valuable recent secondary work that places the Great Books movement in its cultural context is James Sloan Allen’s The Romance of Commerce and Culture (1983). Of the making of lists of great books there seems to be no end, including a recent one issued by Bennett for grade school children. Adler’s autobiography provides two lists, and anyone interested in joining a Great Books discussion can contact the Great Books Foundation, 40 East Huron, Chicago, IL 60611.

Several years ago, after a dinner meeting of our Contributing Editors—most of them historians—the talk turned to current politics, and I noticed an interesting phenomenon. While their judgments about issues and personalities seemed to me no more or less profound than those of any group of intelligent citizens, they had one advantage over the rest of us: they could cite precedents; they could recall some parallel crisis or personality in our past, thereby moving the argument onto a plane of story and insight that is rarely encountered in an ordinary conversation.

Guy Pène du Bois is one of the more enigmatic figures in twentieth-century American art. His paintings catch the eye with their simple, stylized forms, and their peculiar psychological tension sticks in your mind. The best of them also exude a mysterious and unsettling melancholy that makes you wonder about the man who painted them.