Life is a Banquet
BUCKLEY, CHRISTOPHER
LIFE IS A BANQUET Th e rich world olr Patrick Dennis's Auntie Mame By CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY "Patrick Dennis is long M overdue for a proper ¦ renaissance," screen-.A. writer, novelist, and wit Paul...
...Welcome back, and what have you been up to all this time...
...Auntie Mame's manservant and chauffeur Ito has packed it with his delicious cucumber sandwiches, almond cake, and champagne...
...One other author who debuted in 1955 is also likely to endure: Kay Thompson, author of Eloise...
...The occasion is a trip from Mame's Beekman Place apartment to suburban Scarsdale, where Mame and her ten-year-old nephew and ward Patrick must pass muster with Mr...
...And, by God . . . " Did we really talk this way in 1955...
...more interesting and important than any serious novel after World War II...
...Crisp, crash...
...But wait, darlings, it gets even better...
...What about Ethical Culture?' Auntie Mame said wildly...
...Played Rupert in The Prisoner of Zenda...
...After the war, he moved to New York City, married, and produced two children—all while living two lives: one as a loving dad and husband, the other as a Greenwich Village bisexual, or as they said back then, a "friend of Dorothy...
...His glee is his art...
...The artist as concierge," Paul Rudnick writes, he enjoyed access to the rich and famous, but kept a skillful distance...
...You can't really be so naïve as to believe that the Jews are a race," Auntie Mame said...
...Boniface boarding school...
...I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you...
...He died in 1976 at the age of fifty-five, and his life is the subject of the 2000 biography, Uncle Mame, by Eric Myers...
...Marvelous comic writing will always endure, and [Dennis's] novels grow ever more valuable as sheer social reportage...
...Babcock was confined to vapid Yeses and Noes and Oh, Reallys...
...It kills love...
...In the first list, he left out "Republicans...
...He drove an ambulance in World War II...
...My dear Miss Dennis, you surely wouldn't suggest sending the child off with a pack of Jews?' Auntie Mame's false coronet rocked alarmingly...
...Coming across this tart bit of dialogue, I was struck that it's been a long time since I'd heard the name of the twentieth century's ur-Philistine, Babbitt, invoked...
...It's a fair bet that those two million copies of Auntie Mame contributed mightily to the de-Babbitting of America...
...I can't account for my strange Christopher Buckley is editor of Forbes FYI magazine...
...Footnote—Royal yard: The third level of square sails above the deck...
...After a few references to the neighborhood being restricted to "nigger" caddies, the Upsons bring up the horrifying prospect that a Mr...
...The rest took care of itself...
...If Dennis had an agenda, he wrote it down in invisible ink and concentrated on entertaining the hell out of us...
...At the end of the evening, Dwight gives young I atrick a "dank handshake" and goes off to his dead butterflies, while Mame disappears into the den with Mr...
...We'll have to see, but it's certain that Auntie Mame will be in print when many of the biggest names in fiction today are Trivial Pursuit questions...
...There one hears the echo, again, of Anthony Blanche, lecturing Charles Ryder on his faux-ferocious jungle paintings: "Charm is the great English blight...
...Michael Tanner points out, by the way, that Mame's signature line, "Life is a banquet, and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death...
...But there was the glorious movie starring Rosalind Russell, written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, based on the 1956 play by Jerome K. Lawrence and Robert E. Lee...
...Every so often she'd grasp my hand and murmur, "Oh, my little love, whatever are we to do...
...Mame rises to the Bernsteins' defense, pointing out that he's an editor and she's an authority on Rimbaud, "a delightful couple...
...Ah, the picnic hamper...
...Babcock (rhymes, sort of, with Babbitt) plays the same role in the Mame stories that Gorgon aunts play in the works of Dennis's literary antecedents, P.G...
...He's the Bigot of the Barbecue who serves his steaks "just right"—where "Just Right was black with soot and ashes on the outside and cold and raw on the inside...
...He also had the gift of knowing when to call it quits...
...So were we all...
...The trip to the Babcocks' is treated with all the ceremony and preparation of an expedition into the heart of American darkness, Scarsdale—Dennis's version of Zenith, home of Sinclair Lewis's George Follansbee Babbitt: In 1929 it took little more than half an hour to get to Scarsdale by train, but Auntie Mame could never adjust herself to the precise demands of railroads...
...The Stonewall Inn Riot of June 1969 that kicked off the "Gay Rights" movement was a decade and a half away...
...The Babcocks weren't a stimulating family...
...What elevates Auntie Mame above mere entertainment (not that entertainment is ever really "mere") are the scenes in which Dennis goes for the jugular of Middle American charm...
...He wrote sixteen novels, four of them under the name virginia Rowans, and several under sub-pseudonyms, as it were: Little Me, ostensibly by Belle Poitrine "as told to" Patrick Dennis...
...That "ill-moored coronet" and "twitching her sables" are the mark of a master stylist...
...Babcock, manager of Patrick's trust fund and final authority on Mame's guardianship...
...It sold over two million copies and was made into the Broadway play starring Angela Lans-bury...
...Born in Chicago in 1921, Dennis— né Tanner—grew up on the North Shore...
...the second omission is more revealing...
...In his afterword to Auntie Mame, Dennis's son Michael recounts that he suggested to the editor of the paperback that the book be annotated, "like my college edition of Moby Dick ": HERMAN MELVILLE: Jollies...
...The names throughout are Dickensian...
...Footnote—Ramon Novarro (18991968): Romantic Mexican leading man of the twenties in Hollywood...
...Nineteen-fifty-five was another country...
...Within a decade of Mame's first appearance, his books had sold ten million copies...
...Duck lower, Pip, here comes the royal yard...
...It would have been tautological to include the former...
...The movie rights to that biography were optioned by Kelsey Grammer of Frasier...
...Wodehouse and Oscar Wilde...
...There are serious writers who call IPG...
...I was going to quote sparingly, but it's hard...
...Babcock who'd been shrunk in the laundry...
...The novel roared onto the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for 112 weeks...
...Which one would you rather keep reading...
...The son, Dwight junior, wore glasses and looked just like a Mr...
...By the 1970s, Dennis had exhausted himself creatively, and in other ways...
...It was stifling in the Babcocks' English-style dining room, and the dinner of overdone roast lamb, mashed potatoes, squash, beets, and lima beans—after Ito's delicate Eastern cuisine—hit my stomach like a lump of cement...
...Mame refers to a family as a "lit-tle B. Altman's—the more expensive floors, mind you," and during World War II she declares that she "sold more bonds than any woman who's ever worked El Morocco...
...Upon reaching the Kisangani of suburban America, we meet the Bab-cocks in their "pseudo-Tudor" hut...
...Her nephew grows up not to be an antique dealer in Provincetown, but to marry a nice working-class Irish-American girl and go to an office at nine every morning and have a young son that Mame, in the book's final scene, can sweep off to India...
...First Lady, by Martha Dinwiddie But-terfield "as told to" Dennis...
...There goes the jib-stay...
...Lord help such jollies...
...Mame" in name and inspiration apparently deriving from the real Dennis's Aunt Marion, with whom he eventually fell out...
...And I mean this in the most sympathetic way...
...Babcock to discuss the matter of Patrick's schooling...
...If Patrick Dennis gets his renaissance, maybe he'll sell another ten, plus a cd-rom computer game and action figures...
...The only proselytizing that goes on is to urge us to live...
...Dwight junior showed me his collection of dead butterflies and told me all about his tonsils and the keen times he was going to have at St...
...Only Patrick Dennis could have invented this story line for himself...
...And he helped to rescue us from the Upsons...
...I just know that as long as I have a breath left in my body I'll fight every goddamned last one of these Izzys and Beckys trying to muscle in on white man's territory...
...I suppose the answer is, yes, we did...
...And "he loved generosity, Democrats, theater people, New York City, and people who smoke and drink...
...The answer, despite the manuscript's being rejected by a dozen publishers, was: Darling, it's absolutely brilliant...
...When the book came out, the now-defunct Washington Star declared, "Auntie Mame is the gayest, most unconventional aunt you've ever known and you'll love her...
...Two-thirds of the way through the novel, Patrick has managed to fall in love with a bland blonde deb named Gloria Upson...
...Long live the grandest dame in American literature...
...Patrick Dennis was the nom de plume of Edward Everett Tanner III...
...In one of Mame's more icy lines, delivered at a moment of heat to her beloved nephew before the disastrous soiree in Mountebank, she tells him that he's turned into "one of the most beastly, bourgeois, babbittry little snobs on the Eastern Seaboard...
...Bab-cock is, to use the Babcockian vernacular, keen on Manhattan Buckley School, the Hogwarts of the Upper East Side for future investment bankers and Establishmentarians...
...Along the way, he dictated the episodes that became Auntie Mame to Vivian Kardaras and Elaine Pulakos Adam, pacing and smoking Salem cigarettes and drinking Ballantine ale, pausing to ask them, "Do you think it's any good...
...Auntie Mame sat tensely in back fingering her ill-moored coronet and twitching her sables...
...In the second, "gays...
...His latest novel is No Way to Treat a First Lady...
...PATRICK DENNIS: A sinister-looking couple strode across the foyer...
...I'm out of fashion," he declared in 1974, "and I've said everything I had to say...
...During one of the many lulls, Auntie Mame got the bit between her teeth and delivered a long and remarkably learned lecture on architecture of the Tudor period, which was a fascinating discourse except that it pointed up every detail of the Babcocks' room as a counterfeit...
...Auntie Mame mentioned Freud once and then thought better of it...
...It does not exist outside these damp islands...
...Michael Dennis adds: "Quick...
...On that note, he left Manhattan for West Palm Beach where he—are you sitting down?—took a job as butler...
...Dennis struck lethal blows against babbittry, but he wisely refrained from making his novel a pro-to-gay liberation tract...
...Upson appears in "chartreuse playsuit and deafening huaraches" and prides himself on his (disgusting) daiquiris, made with honey instead of sugar...
...Michael Tanner writes of his father, "He hated snobs, bores, intolerance, the suburbs, anti-Semites, parsimony, and people who use 'I' as the object of a preposition...
...Why any anthropologist . . ." "Don't give me none of your high-toned anthropology...
...writer, novelist, and wit Paul Rudnick declares in his introduction to last year's paperback reissue of Auntie Mame...
...It spots and kills anything it touches...
...The man looked like a woman, and the woman, except for her tweed shirt, was almost a perfect Ramon Novarro...
...Babcock wore glasses, too, and talked to Auntie Mame about gardening and home canning and child psychology...
...The dedication page reads: "To the worst manuscript typists in New York...
...A-bra-ham Bernstein," from Summit, New Jersey, might be moving in next door...
...Dennis was a detail addict...
...So the big Mercedes rolled out of Beekman Place just eight hours before we were expected, which was probably all to the good since Ito was a peripatetic driver at best, and none of us had any idea of where or what Scarsdale was...
...There are no "friends of Dorothy" in Auntie Mame—or, at least, no character is thus identified, though to be sure, there are many walk-ons by what Brideshead Revisited's Anthony Blanche would doubtless have called "rather qu-queer fish...
...It's a great moment there in the first chapter of Auntie Mame, when the "regular Japanese doll of a woman" with "hair bobbed very short with straight bangs above her slanting brows," wearing "a long robe of embroidered golden silk," her feet "thrust into tiny gold slippers twinkling with jewels, and jade and ivory bracelets clattering on her arms," the "longest fingernails . . . each lacquered a delicate green," with "an almost endless bamboo cigarette holder" hanging languidly from "her bright red mouth," gave a "tinselly laugh" and said to the young boy gaping at this marvelous, improbable, liberating apparition, "But darling, I'm your Auntie Mame...
...Twice...
...It could make quite a movie...
...He had managed to spend all that money...
...Like its less-good but still enjoyable sequel Around the World With Auntie Mame, the book, subtitled, "An Irreverent Escapade," is about art, not ideology...
...Dennis lacuna, but perhaps it's just as well I didn't encounter his work while I was in school, or the Great Books might have gotten short shrift...
...The Upsons are Babcocks with more money and pretentious clothing...
...Dennis became the first author in history to have three books on the bestseller list simultaneously...
...Upson said evenly, "a joke's a joke, but if you think I want a lot of sheenies throwing their filthy garbage all over my lawn...
...He is, above all else, a brilliant social observer and a detail addict, in a tradition encompassing everyone from Edith Wharton to Tom Wolfe...
...Driving ambulances in world wars is de rigueur for future literary stars of the greater Chicago area...
...it kills art...
...All three of these books are now back in print—and together they may give the author the renaissance he deserves...
...The term bab-bittry seems to have all but disappeared, having been replaced with "Christian Right" or "Religious Right," though those are not quite the same thing...
...The visit to the Upsons in Mountebank, Connecticut, occasions a Babbitt Redux, and shows the author at his most viper-ish, in the cause of anti-anti-Semitism...
...Though it's always tricky agreeing with Camille Paglia, she may be onto something when she writes that Auntie Mame is "America's Alice in Wonderland...
...Wodehouse "The Master," and it's tempting to garland Dennis with the same laurels...
...Blang-whang...
...The rest of her conversation with Mrs...
...I'm ashamed to declare that until now I'd never read Auntie Mame, or The Joyous Season, the funniest Christmas carol ever set on the Upper East Side, or Little Me, Dennis's photo-illustrated sendup of the picaresque adventures of a fictional actress named "Belle Poitrine...
...Lookee here," Mr...
...and two others...
...His son Michael writes that he was "compulsively generous...
...Sinclair Lewis published his novel about the J. Alfred Prufrock of America's Rotarians in 1922, a year after Dennis was born...
...Dennis had charm, but he had steel and he knew where to put it...
...Mame has other notions...
...Oh, Daddy," Gloria cried, "how dreadful...
...I'm glad I spent those hours with Melville, but I must admit, there are no boring whale chapters in Auntie Mame...
...When I first read these sentences, I had no idea what B. Altman's or El Morocco was, but I instantly got the point: Patrick Dennis has a passion for the precise contents of an upscale picnic hamper, and the exact inflections of a Dixie bore...
...One of the delights of the book, in fact, is finding so many mentions of the word "gay" used in its pre-homosexual context...
...we're going to keep these dirty kikes and all the rest of their lousy, stinking race out of...
...was written by the theatrical adapters Lawrence and Lee, not Dennis...
...One of his three employers was Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's...
...She put her arms around me and kissed me, and I knew I was safe...
...It was also turned into an unsuccessful Hollywood musical starring Lucille Ball, about which the Dennis cult is still having hissy fits...
...We may be no less bourgeois now, but by God—he said through post-WASP lockjaw—at least we insist on expensive coffee, German cars, and NPR...
Vol. 8 • March 2003 • No. 25
