Memories of a Hostess
A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships, Drawn Chiefly from the Diaries of Mrs. James T. Fields
Mrs. Annie James T. Fields (Annie Adams Fields)
9781465648303
281 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
In the years immediately before the death of Mrs. James T. Fields, on January 5, 1915, she spoke to me more than once of her intention to place in my possession a cabinet of old papers—journals of her own, letters from a host of correspondents, odds and ends of manuscript and print—which stood in a dark corner of a small reception-room near the front door of her house in Charles Street, Boston. On her death this intention was found to have been confirmed in writing. It was also made clear that Mrs. Fields had no desire that her own life should be made a subject of record—“unless,” she wrote, “for some reason not altogether connected with myself.” Such a reason is abundantly suggested in her records of the friends she was constantly seeing through the years covered by the journals. These friends were men and women whose books have made them the friends of the English-speaking world, and a better knowledge of them would justify any amplification of the records of their lives. In this process the figure of their friend and hostess in Charles Street must inevitably reveal itself—not as the subject of a biography, but as a central animating presence, a focus of sympathy and understanding, which seemed to make a single phenomenon out of a long series and wide variety of friendships and hospitalities. The “blue books”—more than fifty in number—which Mrs. Fields used for the journals have already yielded many pages of valuable record to her own books, especially “James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches” (1881), and “Authors and Friends” (1896); also even, here and there, to Mr. Fields’s “Yesterdays with Authors” (1871). Yet she left unprinted much that is both picturesque and illuminating: so many of the persons mentioned in the journal were still living or had but recently died when her books were written. There are, besides, many passages used in a fragmentary way, which may now with propriety be given complete. Into these manuscript journals, then, I propose to dip afresh—not with the purpose of passing in a miscellaneous review all the friends who crossed the threshold of the Charles Street house in a fixed period of time, but rather in pursuit of what seems a more promising quest—namely, to consider separate friends and groups of friends in turn; to assemble from the journals passages that have to do with them; to supplement these by drawing now and then upon the old cabinet for a letter from this or that friend to Mr. or Mrs. Fields, and thus to step back across the years into a time and scene of refreshing remembrance. Many a friend, many a friendship, must be left untouched. In the processes of selection, figures of more than local significance will receive the chief consideration. In passages relating to one person, allusions to many others, sometimes treated separately in other passages, will often be found, for the friendships with one and another were constantly overlapping and interlocking. Bits of record of no obviously great importance will be included, not because they or the subjects of them are taken with undue seriousness, but merely that a vanished society, interesting in itself to those who care for the past and doubly interesting as material for a study in contrasts with the present, may have again its “day in court.” When Fields was publishing his reminiscences of Hawthorne, Lowell wrote to him: “Be sure and don’t leave anything out because it seems trifling, for it is out of these trifles only that it is possible to reconstruct character sometimes, if not always”; and he commended especially the hitting of “the true channel between the Charybdis of reticence, and the Scylla of gossip.” Under sailing orders of this nature, self-imposed, I hope to proceed.
