'The Best Dinner-party'

In a July 15, 1924 letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., then an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Harold Laski writes: 

“I have had an amusing time with [August] Birrell on the best dinner-party to consist only of people in fiction and limited to ten.”

 

As parlor games go, this isn’t bad. Even critics identify good guys and bad guys, charmers and bores, when reading fiction or watching a movie. That may not be sophisticated but it is healthy and human. Birrell (1850-1933) was a British lawyer, politician and literary critic who specialized in appreciation. In an earlier letter, Laski describes Birrell as “a great joy and full of real learning taken with the right leisurely feeling.” Laski continues:

 

“We agreed that Pickwick should head the table and Elizabeth Bennet sit at the bottom. The other guests would be Florizel of Bohemia, Colonel Newcome, Diana of the Crossways, Becky Sharp, Shirley, Dr. Thorne, Barry Lyndon and Manon Lescaut.”

 

The authors, respectively, are Dickens, Austen, Stevenson, Thackeray, Meredith, Thackeray again, Charlotte Brontë, Trollope, Thackeray a third time, and Prévost. A Victorian focus representing the grand age of the novel. The outlier is Manon Lescaut – eighteenth-century and French. No Russians, no Americans. Laski asks Holmes: “Can you better that list taking into account the variety of temper and experience to be fitted in?”

 

In his July 23 reply, Holmes makes no attempt to "better that list," and writes, “At your imaginary dinner who is Br. or Dr. Thorne?” No reply from Laski.

 

One immediately begins assembling a guest list. The first is obvious: Natasha Rostova. You’ve already fallen in love with her. The eponymous heroes of Daniel Deronda, Nostromo and Invisible Man. Valentine Wannop of Parade’s End, without her husband. Misail Poloznev of Chekhov’s My Life (for what he learns). Perhaps Leopold Bloom but definitely not Stephen Dedalus. Mr. Biswas. David Bendiner in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Certificate. Robinson Crusoe after he returns to England and takes a shower. Isabel Archer. One looks not necessarily for “good” people but people who have lived, and the experience wasn’t wasted on them. They have something to say worth listening to.

 

Readers, have at it.

 

[All quotations are drawn from the first volume of the two-volume Holmes-Laski Letters, edited by Mark DeWolfe Howe and published by Harvard University Press in 1953.]