Missing Persons
Delightful People by Stephen Schmalhofer
It is pleasant, when poring over a new volume of essays, to find oneself in the company of an author who does not prove to be a mere hydrant of loud opinion. Mr. Schmalhofer's Delightful People is a good sort of literary hors d'oeuvre: never brazen or argumentative, it is ever leisurely, concerned chiefly with the lives of unnoticed or forgotten figures whose privilege it was in their time to associate with celebrities of the social, literary, and ecclesiastical spheres. Here we meet Winthrop Astor Chanler, adventurer, veteran of the Spanish-American war, and friend of Theodore Roosevelt; Viola Roseboro, editor of McClure's, patron of O. Henry and Jack London, and fairy godmother to Willa Cather's My Antonia; painter and traveler John La Farge, who in his peregrinations enjoyed the company of Henry Adams and Robert Louis Stevenson; and the sprightly priest Monsignor Cyril Fay, bon vivant, diplomat, intimate of Pope Benedict XV and spiritual advisor to a young F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Before picking up this book, I had known the names of few of its protagonists, who for all their many differences leave a common impression of having known nearly everyone one could wish to have known. They shared connections with one another, familial and professional, and spent the prime of their lives in the last decades of the nineteenth century and first years of the twentieth, a period the author evokes with a nostalgia that may be appreciated for its lack of lugubriousness. Mr. Schmalhofer is visibly and contagiously fond of his subjects, and his all-too-slender book is a pleasant testimony to their talents and their graces, natural and spiritual. He compares his chosen company to the miraculous wine at the Feast of Cana, and the savor of these characters, and the author's self-possessed style, make good on his advertisement.
The most memorable of them I think must be Margaret Terry "Daisy" Chanler, wife of the above-mentioned Winthrop. She was a woman of outstanding cultivation in a generation of cultivated women, and her conversation was relished by Henry James, Edith Wharton, and the art historian Bernard Berenson, who remembered her after she died as one in whom "there was something expansive, generous, radiant . . . and a perpetual adolescence of mind that made her eager for contact with . . . the upper reaches of recent but already consecrated literature and art." She mastered several languages in addition to her own, read all that was best in European literature, and had the unexampled distinction of being one who knew or met Pope Pius IX, Franz Liszt, and Edward Lear in her youth, and George Gershwin and Arturo Toscanini in old age. In another example of her singularity, she recalled Pio Nono as "a man of wit and warmth," a judgment perhaps not shared by many of those who had any sort of dealings with that pontiff.
Catholics & Catholicity
Many, though not all, of the people Mr. Schmalhofer has sketched for us were Catholics, whether by upbringing or conversion. Nearly all were people of marked aesthetic refinement, and on page 43 we read Matthew Arnold's monitory observation that "the man of imagination will always have a weakness for the Catholic Church, because of the rich treasures of human life which have been stored within her pale."
Interestingly, Mr. Schmalhofer introduces this quotation without giving an indication of whether he agrees with it or not. It is a common explanation of motive that probably every Catholic convert is bound to hear at some point. To my ear, it has always rung false, or at best as only a fraction of the truth, especially in the English-speaking world, where so much of the best painting, music, and poetry of the modern centuries has been the work of Protestants or agnostics.
It may, of course, easily be imagined that a man who, living for years in Florence or Vienna and passing daily by Santa Croce or the Stephansdom, may eventually find himself on his knees before the altar, and may credit his decision to the visible monuments of the ancient faith, the beauty of these drawing him more powerfully than any other form of apologetic. But such persons are rare. And this surely must be for the best, as the Church is not a society of aesthetes or connoisseurs, though happily there is room for the occasional Wilde or Huysmans.
Besides the Catholic religion, a catholicity of pursuits is a factor common to many of the lives contained in this book. Here is a priest who serves in the capacity of wartime journalist and volunteer in the International Red Cross; there is an Italian-American painter, the scion of a great banking family, who is a self-taught architect (Egisto Fabbri Jr., "the Brunelleschi of Bar Harbor"). Such a diversity of aptitudes Schmalhofer appears to aim at in his own life, as he is not a professional writer, but in fact a partner in a venture capital firm. These essays are the products of his hours outside the office, many of them evidently written while commuting between Greenwich, Connecticut, and New York City.
Most of these pieces have appeared in print before, in The New Criterion, First Things, and elsewhere. This, together with the close interconnection of these lives, occasionally leads the author to commit a superfluous repetition: twice we read that the Princess Schachowskoia, with whom Daisy Chanler played piano duets, was six feet tall, and physically robust enough to "drag the piano forcefully to her lap rather than shift her seat." The facts of Winthrop Chanler's wounding in Cuba, and his death while horseback riding, are likewise communicated more than once. In a book of such limited scale, redundancies like these might have been spotted by the editor, or by the author himself. Otherwise, this is a book whose merits far outweigh its inadequacies.
It is strange to consider that, even though the existences related in these pages were, on the whole, marked far more greatly by joy than by tragedy, the book raises a certain melancholy in the reader who has just finished it. This must be because men and women of such remarkable charm are ones we distinctly do not expect to meet in 2021, least of all among the wealthy and beautiful of New York or Paris or London. When the world may produce another Daisy Chanler or Viola Roseboro is a question that only the passage of time can answer.
Thomas Banks lives in North Carolina and teaches online at the House of Humane Letters. His poems, translations, and essays have appeared in First Things, The New English Review, Quadrant, The Imaginative Conservative, Crisis Magazine, The St. Austin Review, and other publications.
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