The Great American Saloon Series/Club Away from Home
Jamieson, T. John
CLUB AWAY FROM HOME Where can a civilized man go these days for a drink and a little good talk without exposing himself to the cafe society, to nostalgiacs de la boue, and to the general auditory...
...yet a minority in fhe club would chuck Jackson gladly and give one of the Adamses a turn...
...Some genuine and quite illegal absinthe appeared on the night of a discussion of Oscar Wilde...
...By the way, this is supposed to be a secret ballot...
...Not that Jackson has been treated with that much respect∔one year, in the confusion, his portrait nearly fell out of the window, and sustained a nasty gash in the throat...
...The honorary consul of San Marino will occasionally share the latest vintage of "my uncle the Duke," a very respectable Chianti...
...Nevertheless it is in Detroit that a piece of the nineteenth century has survived in the form of the club...
...but after many speeches and debates, it was at length agreed to sit out the other century...
...by T. John Jamieson longer than the state of grace of our progenetrix Eve...
...then everybody rushes into the dining room to pour himself a drink from the great array of bottles on the Round Table, which really is round...
...he was an index to the literary taste of a couple of generations ago∔Ch'esterton, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Willa Cather, and Bernard de Voto were among his favorite writers...
...One imagines that this rule lasted no See Amory's The Trouble with Nowadays: A Curmudgeon Strikes Back (Arbor House, 1979...
...I confess that I was once part of a conspiracy to rehang Walt Whitman (an object of devotion to the founders) in the bathroom...
...Of course they have inflated their membership vastly in order to pay the bills...
...Because it would rather die than change, it will probably live...
...It had been a club...
...on the other hand, nineteenth-century papers survive in the archives with titles like "Bridget: A Revery" and "The Girls I Left Behind...
...Johnson, has just died...
...Old Dr...
...It is a clandestine elite of curmudgeons in the manner of Cleveland Amory's fictional "Fortnightly" in Burke's phrase it is "the little platoon we belong to in society...
...Whitaker was one for blood and guts∔he would show early color films of his own pioneering surgical techniques that made the Prisms bend over and reach for the Pewabic pottery spittoons...
...Perhaps it took the transcendentalists some time to adjust to the manly freedom of the Midwest...
...At the turn of the century...
...The falling edifice had not been exactly a home...
...Unfortunately, the membership committee is trying to water the blackballs...
...No sane, whole gentleman of parts from the nineteenth century would consider calling one of these establishments a club...
...Max Beerbohm once stood before one of these dinosaurs in Edwardian London as it fell to the wrecking ball...
...Though the Prismatic meets only on a Saturday night, it has already survived riots, muggings, leaky roofs, and falling plaster,, and will probably sit out this century in hope of a better...
...an Italian diplomat who quotes d'Annunzio...
...Now when Levi Barbour, lawyer and butterfly collector, directed in his will that there should always be space in this house for the Prismatic Club, its portraits, and its safe, it was 1926∔and from 1919 to 1933 there was only one reason for any organization that was not a bank to own a safe...
...A member reads a paper on a subject of his choosing as the other members nod off in rocking chairs...
...This is the Last of the Clubs . . .and the first, in fact, for it was founded by transcendentalist refugees from New England in 1866...
...The lawyers and librarians specialize in local history, and could well collaborate in an authoritative account of nineteenth-century Detroit brothels...
...Why I cannot say, but the Prismatic's first honorary member was Brigham Young...
...It is called the Prismatic Club, and it meets every Saturday night in a Victorian house lined with oil portraits of its past presidents...
...An annual dinner program from the Twenties shows a particularly degenerate-looking Prism (i.e., Prismatic member) sharing libations with a goatish devil: the cartoon's caption reads, "Making the World Safe for Hypocrisy...
...Levi Barbour and his cohorts were literally traveling the world over to research their talks...
...I am beginning to sympathize with one of the curmudgeons from long before my time, a president of the American Philosophical Society, who nearly killed the club by blackballing everybody they put up...
...Just as well∔we all know from experience that secret ballots encourage irresponsibility...
...Portraits are good for showing symbolic respect or disrespect, like icons...
...What exactly would it be a refuge from...
...One old Prism was an amateur mad-scientist who spoke on his theory that the solar system really revolved the other way and on his very early experiments in manufacturing diamonds...
...that...
...a urologist who will tell you by sight how many cc's per minute a sticky bottle is pouring and also why fifteen of the first seventeen American Presidents had no children...
...Among the facets are an Episcopal priest, a relaxed traditionalist who in a former life was a jazz pianist...
...CLUB AWAY FROM HOME Where can a civilized man go these days for a drink and a little good talk without exposing himself to the cafe society, to nostalgiacs de la boue, and to the general auditory nuisance known politely as "entertainment...
...America's clubs may have preserved their facilities intact, but not their character...
...Johnston, who specialized in martinis and Dr...
...This all makes for interesting conversation, but the Prisms did not set out to be "interesting...
...This tradition has been maintained for the sake of maintaining tradition...
...But he induced a constitutional crisis resulting in an increase from one to two blackballs to blast the hopes of a would-be member...
...Yet the original constitution of that year stipulates that "water shall be the only beverage served...
...My heart deplored that they must perish...
...On the Friday night closest to the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, the Prisms take themselves out to dinner at the Detroit Club in black tie and toast Andrew Jackson, who is, quite mysteriously to them, their patron...
...today there are more Tories in the club than Democrats...
...The archives contain his reply.to our invitation, in which he makes his excuse for not attending the annual dinner: he has married a wife...
...Alas, a pediatrician named Dr...
...This is where the watering process began...
...I am afraid that they have lapsed to the status of saloons...
...It had been a refuge from many homes...
...Somebody has to do it, he must have thought...
...To his club and nowhere else...
...Detroit, like many decaying Midwestern cities, is full of dinosaurs, among which are its clubs...
...Scotch mostly prevails...
...If you would like to become a member of the Prismatic, I suggest that you perform a noble deed likely to commend you to the club's notice, such as discovering legal evidence that will send the present mayor of Detroit to prison...
...The effect of alcohol on the club's ability to function has been formulated: "the blackball is mightier than the highball...
...Lord help him if he does not have a club...
...Before inaugurating a new president, they unveil a portrait of the outgoing one and hand him a broom, since he becomes the new janitor...
...It had been even more than T. John Jamieson is a Richard Weaver Fellow at Northwestern University...
...but since the blackballs are actually cubes (to assist the bumbling in keeping things straight) you can tell when one goes into the box because it thuds...
...Historians infer that it was his twenty-seventh...
...It does not admit women (except for the Valentine's Day party) and it has not inflated its membership to pay the bills...
...They are naturally obsessed...
...an ear doctor who claims that Caesar suffered not from epilepsy but from Meniere's disease...
...This was the Everlasting Club, which, "toward the close of 1700 . . . had under consideration whether they should break up or continue their session...
...Mourning both the splendid facade and the fraternity it had long protected from the general public, he waxed sentimental...
...Irish, bourbon, and lesser breeds of whiskey are tolerated...
...Yes, if you want to converse with well-established establishmentarians, brilliant amateurs, and genuine eccentrics, you can pour your own damned drink...
...an octogenarian Buck-minster Fuller type who builds electric cars in his garage...
...a haiku-spewing surgeon...
...If you are wondering about the name, "prismatic" has to do with bright colors and facets...
...The cult of Andrew Jackson goes back to the nineteenth century too, when the club was a haven for reform politicians and Free Press editors...
...Just as conversation has its ups and downs, the quality of the papers varies too, and this has always been the case...
...In this august and distinguished journal's previous incarnation, The Spectator of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele (1711-1714), Addison wrote of a club of dram-drinkers dating back to the Civil Wars that had been continuously in session since then, by means of a circle of presidents for each of the twenty-four hours∔with a brief hiatus during the Great Fire of London∔so that if a member "be disposed to take a whet, a nooning, an evening draught, or a bottle after midnight, he goes to the club, and finds a knot of friends to his mind...
...They stand in ruins insofar as they admit women...
Vol. 16 • June 1983 • No. 6
