Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair Read online

  The effects of hashish are more unexpected and more bizarre than those of opium. It is a drug which can separate ourselves from ourselves; change our very shapes into shapeless images; drown us in the deep depths of annihilation, out of which we emerge vaguely, slowly, pleasantly. It can bury us under the oldest roots of the earth; give us death in life and life in death; bestow upon us sleep that is not sleep, and waking dreams that are not any part of waking. There is nothing, in short, human or inhuman, moral or immoral, which this drug cannot give us.

  Yet, all the time we are indulging in it, we know not what it is taking from us, nor what deadly exchange we are certain to be made to give for it; nor what intoxication will some day be produced beyond its intoxication; nor that it will soon become almost a habit of the Soul.

  • • •

  Imagine a universe in disorder, peopled by strange beings who have no relation to each other; whose speech is jargon; where such houses as one sees are built in unbelievable ways—none with straight lines, many in triangles; where the animals are wholly unlike ours, some smaller than ants, some larger than beasts of the forest; where there are no churches, no apparent streets; where we see shadows, but not the shadows which the sun casts from our figures as we walk on the grass; not the moon’s shadows that make mockery of us; but shadows from the veritable fire and fumes and flames of Hell; where, if one sees fire, the smoke goes downward; where flames leap out of the soil again only to turn into living serpents. Now one sees a python return into his proper flame. There seem to be no gods in this fantastic land, nor idols, nor priests, nor shrines; but only chaos, and smoke, and music, and the sound of dancing and carousing in innumerable brothels.

  The seas storm the skies. See! They have swallowed up Heaven; and all that lives and all that dies has become indistinguishable.

  Hashish, with all that is agreeable about it, is one of the most insinuating and terrible means employed by the Princess of Dreams to enslave humanity, to give to her victims a monstrous sense of the horror of life, of the wickedness, not only of living beings, but of Space and Time as well. Those who taste long of this supreme poison seem fated to be hurled—always, without ending—between violent and opposing whirlwinds of horror.

  The pale and shadowy Princess of Dreams has a habit of appearing, in proper person, to her votaries in their drowsy visions. She guides them and hovers over them, all the time becoming more vicious and more formidable. And, pale though she is, and dead, and abnormal, and sinister, yet does she still continue the heroine of all their dreams.

  And the Princess has a way of becoming—month by month—more cruel, more merciless. In her eyes there burns a more ardent and violent light; she becomes more insatiable than Death—more ravenous than Life.

  • • •

  It is, as a rule, the last sign of the drug’s mastery over a man, when he begins to admire himself inordinately; when he glorifies himself; when he becomes the center of the whole universe; as certain of his virtues as of his genius and destiny. Then, with stupendous irony, he cries aloud: “I have become God.” At last he wishes to tell the whole world of his divine attributes: to project himself out of himself—as if the will of a man liberated by intoxication had some magical and efficacious virtue—and to cry, again and again, with a cry that might strike down the scattered angels from the ways of the sky: “Look at me. Look at me well! I have become God.”

  OUR OFFICE: A HATE SONG

  DOROTHY PARKER

  FROM MAY 1919

  An Intimate Glimpse of Vanity Fair—En Famille

  I hate the office;

  It cuts in on my social life.

  There is the Art Department;

  The Cover Hounds.

  They are always explaining how the photographing machine works.

  And they stand around in the green light

  And look as if they had been found drowned.

  They are forever discovering Great Geniuses;

  They never fail to find exceptional talents

  In any feminine artist under twenty-five.

  Whenever the illustrations are late

  The fault invariably lies with the editorial department.

  They are always rushing around looking for sketches,

  And writing mysterious numbers on the backs of photographs,

  And cutting out pictures and pasting them into scrapbooks,

  And then they say nobody can realize how hard they are worked—

  They said something.

  Then there is the Editorial Department;

  The Literary Lights.

  They are just a little holier than other people

  Because they can write classics about

  “‘Brevity is the soul of lingerie’, said this little chemise to itself”;

  And “Here are five reasons for the success of the Broadways plays”.

  They are all full of soul;

  Someone is forever stepping on their temperaments.

  They are constantly having nervous breakdowns

  And going away for a few weeks.

  And they only come in on Saturday mornings

  To hold the franchise.

  They tell you what good training editorial work is.

  But they don’t mean to stay in it—

  Some day they will be Free Lances

  And write the Great Thoughts that Surge within them.

  They say they only wish they could get away from the office,—

  That makes it unanimous.

  Then there is the Fashion Department;

  First Aids to Baron de Meyer.

  If any garment costs less than $485

  They think you ought to give it to the Belgians.

  They look at everything you have on,

  And then smile tolerantly

  And say, “Sears, Roebuck certainly do a wonderful business, don’t they?”

  They are forever taking pictures of prominent Wild Women

  Dressed as brides and kneeling at Property Altars.

  And they write essays on Smart Fashions for Limited Incomes,—

  The sky’s the limit.

  There is the Boss;

  The Great White Chief.

  He made us what we are to-day,—

  I hope he’s satisfied.

  He has some bizarre ideas

  About his employees’ getting to work

  At nine o’clock in the morning,—

  As if they were a lot of milkmen.

  He has never been known to see you

  When you arrive at 8:45,

  But try to come in at a quarter past ten

  And he will always go up in the elevator with you.

  He goes to Paris on the slightest provocation

  And nobody knows why he has to stay there so long.

  Oh, well—

  You can’t expect to keep him down on the farm.

  I hate the office;

  It cuts in on my social life.

  1920s

  WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM: A PEN PORTRAIT BY A FRIENDLY HAND

  HUGH WALPOLE

  FROM JANUARY 1920

  When I first saw William Somerset Maugham (it is a considerable number of years ago now) I was most acutely conscious of his grey top hat.

  It must have been that same grey hat which figured so prominently in Gerald Festus Kelly’s portrait—a grey hat set audaciously, cynically, with humor and with a quite definite pose of a dandyism in which the wearer obviously did not believe. That hat belonged to Maugham’s earlier, more cynical days, the days of “Mrs. Dot” and “Smith,” the days when he was out quite determinately to make money and had put behind him for the moment the unproductive austerities of “A Man of Honour” and “Liza of Lambeth.”

  I had the merest glimpse of him at that time w
andering, under the grey hat, through the gardens of a Campden Hill retreat, where Violet Hunt was giving a literary garden party. How desperately those garden parties seem now to be things of the past! It was at the time when May Sinclair was showing her reverence for Henry James in her novel, “The Creators”; when untidy young men and women discussed, with bated breath, the audacities of the Vedrenne Barker management at the Cort Theatre. The days when Conrad was still despised and rejected, and Frank Harris was writing about Shakespeare, and Bernard Shaw was a freakish young thing who would write better one day.

  Lord! What a long while ago and how scornfully Somerset Maugham moved amongst those shadows under the high trees and how he despised them for their high-brow sentiments and baggy-looking clothes!

  That garden party at which I saw him must have been I think the very last of its series. I never went to one again. I never heard of one again. The London world moved on to a new phase.

  • • •

  The next time that I saw Maugham was in that gay discreet bandbox of a house in Mayfair that became, for many of us, one of the happiest, most hospitable, most amusing houses in London. I was, I remember, from the very first struck by the strange contrast of the lower social part of the house and the room on the top floor where he did his work. That top floor remains, after all these years, as the most ideal spot for a writing man that I have ever seen.

  All rooms are, I suppose, symbolic of their owners. Maugham’s had just that mingling of harsh reality with barbaric and preferably Eastern splendor that represents him. He had worn his grey top hat as the King of China might have worn it, and here was the King of China again among the squatting Eastern gods and the marvellous lacquer boxes and the heavy gold chests mysteriously engraven. And against this there was, in the very center of the wide bare room, a large rough deal table with good plain English legs and no nonsense about it. Here Maugham sat and cultivated his genius.

  He was supposed, at the time of which I am speaking, to be giving himself up to the production of those merry superficial comedies that delighted the London world for so long. It was the characteristic thing to say at that time that Maugham had sold his soul for a “mess of pottage.” He let the world say what it liked; admitted, if anyone asked him, that certainly “Mrs. Dot” was a more profitable lady than “Liza” and that one could live only once. Meanwhile, how characteristically he was producing through all those years what will remain. I am convinced, not only his masterpiece, but one of the great English novels of the period—“Of Human Bondage.”

  Only one or two of his friends knew of that book. He had for it that love which is beyond question the happiest thing in a writer’s life, that love which is not pride nor conceit, but simply so deep an immersion in the thing that you are creating that you positively cannot pull yourself out of it. He lingered on and on over this “Pattern in the Carpet,” as he called it, rewriting, adding, subtracting, knowing full well what every writer knows, that no book belongs to an author after its publication, that that intimacy of creation will never return once the world shares it with you.

  He never tried during that time to persuade people of his other artistic self. That third book of his—“Mrs. Craddock”—still remains as one of the ablest, most poignant studies of woman in our generation. How many people here have read it?

  Maugham never forced anyone to think about him at all, but the obtuseness of the world in general is one of his pleasantest private jokes. He prefers them obtuse.

  The life of a popular and successful dramatist must be a very exciting and happy one. I should like immensely to be Mr. Hopwood, or Miss Zoë Akins or Mr. Knoblock. It has all the elements of horse-racing, Chemin-de-Fer, public oratory, the Episcopal Bench and proposals of marriage; it must make one simply conceited to death.

  Maugham has never had that kind of conceit. He has, as have all artists who are any good at all, a justified sense of his own powers. He knows that he can write books that are worth the attention of serious people and plays that anyone, serious or not, is justified in going to see. He knows that he is better than Mr. Tom Noddy, who doesn’t realize the first thing about stage technique, and Mr. Emery Paper, whose novel about Mormonism is being much read just now. But he also knows that Aristophanes and Aeschylus lived before him and understood quite a lot about the theatre and that Dostoiefsky and Flaubert wrote pretty good novels.

  • • •

  Into this happy and exciting existence then broke the war. Maugham was luckier in the war than many of us in that he found work that was exactly suited to him. The secret service job that fell to him was made for him, made for his knowledge of languages, his knowledge of human nature, his knowledge of when to speak and when to keep silent. I saw a little phase of his work in Russia. We were in Petrograd together during those months after the Revolution of March, 1917. Very depressing those months were, when the idealism of some of us got some hard knocks, and when all our preconceived notions of Russia and the Russian spirit fell to the ground one after another. I don’t think that Maugham knew very much about Russia, but his refusal to be hurried into sentimental assumptions, his cynical pretence that “all was anyway for the worst” (he did not himself believe that for a single moment) gave him a poise and calm that some others of us badly needed. He watched Russia as we would watch a play, finding the theme, and then intent on observing how the master artist would develop it. He did not see the end of that play—the end indeed is not yet—but he sent home some pretty wise notions as to its probable last act.

  It was in the last summer of the war that I caught quite a different glimpse of him. I stayed with him for a day or two in one of the loveliest houses in the whole of England, and it was at that time that he was writing “The Moon and Sixpence.” I think that he had the idea of the book in his head long before he wrote it. He had always been passionately interested in modern painting, and I remember his saying to me a long while ago what a novel Gauguin’s life would make. I don’t think, however, that that artist gave him more than the starting-point for his story. Maugham’s Strickland is his own creation; the technique of that fine book is his own technique, above all, the poetry of it is his own poetry. It does seem to me to rank among the very finest novels in English of the last ten or twenty years.

  Maugham is still mid-way in his career. I for one do not believe that he has yet touched the heights that he will reach as a dramatist. His present visit to China should provide him with the motive that his strange talent, Eastern, Western, cynical, harsh and tender, demands.

  MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  A. A. MILNE

  FROM JANUARY 1920

  A few years ago I published a book. That is to say, I wrote the thing, and my agent induced a publisher to accept it, and the publisher tried to induce the public to buy it. We had quite a fair success; we sold a good seven copies. However, it is generally agreed among actuaries and others that we might have had a really big success, we might have sold nine or even ten, copies, but for an unfortunate occurrence. I shall explain what happened.

  At about the time that the book was accepted I wrote a story which appeared in an American magazine. I had never written in an American magazine before, and though my name is of course a household word in the uninhabited parts of China, it was felt that I needed a special introduction to the people of New York. My agent suggested, therefore, that I should write a short life of myself—two or three hundred words, say—explaining who the dickens I was, in order that the editor might print this alongside my story, as a sort of explanation why he did it. “This is the fellow,” the editor was to be assumed as saying. “I thought we ought to give him a chance.”

  Naturally, when I sat down to write my life I began to wish that I had lived a better one. But it was then too late; the copy had to be in by Friday. I told them where and when I was born, where I was educated (when I say “educated,” you know what I mean), and what made me first begin to write. I described my marr
iage, my permanent address and the regiment to which I had attached myself for the war. I mentioned my travel-book, “Half an Hour in the Malay Archipelago,” and my detective-story, “The Crimson Cough.” I wrote three hundred words all about myself—a fascinating subject—and sent them to my agent, and he wrote back to thank me, and said that he supposed it would have to do. But he seemed to be a little disappointed.

  A week went by, and then I heard from my agent again. My book would be coming out soon, my first book in America. Widely quoted as I was on the desert islands of the Pacific, I was not (he opined) a very familiar personality to the library-subscribers of New York. The publisher suggested therefore that I should write a short life of myself—two or three hundred words, say—explaining who the devil I was, in order that he might circulate it in advance as a warning of what was coming.

  So I sat down to write my life. It was rather a bore doing it again, and I wished that I had kept a copy of what I had written the week before. However, it was no good worrying about that now. Selecting a clean piece of paper, and dipping my pen in the ink, I told them where and when I was born, when I was educated and what made me first begin to write. I described my marriage, my home, my military experiences. I mentioned my detective-story, “The Crimson Cough,” and my travel-book, “Half an Hour in the Malay Archipelago.” I wrote three hundred words all about myself—a subject still fascinating, although some glamour had worn off—and I sent them to my agent.

  The next morning he called me up on the telephone. He was very much upset.

  “I say, really!” he expostulated. “This won’t do at all.”

  “Why, what’s the matter?”

  “My dear fellow,” he said, reproachfully, “this is the same life as the other one.”

  He thinks that, but for this, we might have sold nine, or even ten, copies of the book.

  THE HIGHER EDUCATION ON THE SCREEN

  ROBERT E. SHERWOOD

  FROM FEBRUARY 1920