SALON: A Brief History of Salons, page 2

Illustration by ZACH TRENHOLM
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SALONS, page 2

It may seem odd that discussion groups led by middle-aged French society women from their bedrooms should have had a decisive influence on Western civilization. The English writer Horace Walpole provides an explanation: Of Madame Geoffrin, who hosted a salon he frequented, he wrote, "I never saw anybody in my days that catches one's faults and convinces one so easily. I never liked to be set right before." As Walpole's remarks suggest, it was the civilizing influence of women upon ordinarily dogmatic and combative men that allowed the French salon to change the course of intellectual history. (Although, to judge by the Marquise de Sévigné's comment "The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs," the civilizing influence only went so far.)
Probably inevitably, the French salon ossified. Witty aphorisms became pompous pronouncements; elegance degenerated into mere pré ciosité . (Moliè re skewered the pretentiousness of les pré cieuses in his play The Ridiculous Young Ladies.) According to the high-minded Amelia Gere Mason in her 1891 tome The Women of the French Salons, by the 18th century many salons had become morally dubious, or worse. "The watchword of intellectual freedom was made to cover universal license, and clever sophists constructed theories to justify the mad carnival of vice and frivolity," she trills, in the apparent belief that her words constitute some sort of condemnation. (Cf. Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, in which the lively Potterstown, with its many attractive bars, is contrasted with the moribund, putatively superior Bedford Falls.)
Those unfortunate enough to miss that particular carnival -- or the London coffeehouse gatherings in the age of Addison and Steele -- were to have many other chances at mad vice and frivolity, however. For the 19th century witnessed the rise of the Bohemian salon -- one characterized by lack of money (or at least employment), long hair, loud ranting against the bourgeoisie, unruly sexual behavior, and copious consumption of wine, absinthe, opium, hashish and other substances d'abus. The Bohemian salon prefigured many famous 20th-century artistic gatherings. There was the Dada group (Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, etc.) that made Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire a bizarre modern legend. There was San Francisco's Six Gallery, where Allen Ginsberg first read "Howl" (described by an observer as being about "our group, pessimistic dionysian young bohemians and their peculiar and horrible feats") as Jack Kerouac chugged a gallon jug of burgundy and sang scat between the verses. There was A'Lelia Walker's "Dark Tower" on West 136th St., the most famous salon of the Harlem Renaissance, where, according to legend, one night the white guests were served pig's feet and chitterlings while the black guests dined on champagne and caviar.
A special, serious kind of fun is what salons are finally all about -- which is why it is so hard to capture their spirit. For unlike literature, fun leaves no traces. There is no archaeology of camaraderie.

And, of course, there was America's most famous salon -- the Algonquin Round Table. In the long and peculiar history of salons, the Round Table holds a pleasingly weird niche. The daily luncheon gathering at the Algonquin Hotel, which started in 1920 and ran for ten years or so, was composed of a group of writers, editors and wits, a remarkably high percentage of whom were full-blown alcoholics, and most of whom posterity has not honored with literary immortality. Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woolcott, Heywood Broun, and Robert Benchley were the big names, and theirs is a pretty second-rate writer's Olympia. What they did leave was a legacy of good fellowship, bon mots, wit -- a legacy, in short, of fun.
Fun, a special, serious kind of fun, is what salons are finally all about -- which is why it is so hard to capture their spirit. For unlike literature, fun leaves no traces. There is no archaeology of camaraderie. No detective can exhume the great line, delivered offhand over the remains of a meal, that suddenly unites a group of men and women in liberating laughter, laughter at once self-conscious and free, laughter that contains something of the profound. The traces of successful conversation are fragile; they do not outlive the shining moment when thought finds its perfect expression in language.
The glory, and pathos, of salons consists in their ephemerality. (As Dorothy Parker said, "Time doth flit. Oh, shit!") Their history is a secret one. But it is renewed every time people gather together to engage in that simplest, most difficult, most human of rituals: good conversation.