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

  Between my ribs forever of hot pain.

  III

  Pity me not because the light of day

  At close of day no longer walks the sky;

  Pity me not for beauties passed away

  From field and thicket as the year goes by;

  Pity me not the waning of the moon,

  Nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea,

  Nor that a man’s desire is hushed so soon,

  And you no longer look with love on me.

  This have I known always: love is no more

  Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,

  Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,

  Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales;

  Pity me that the heart is slow to learn

  What the swift mind beholds at every turn.

  IV

  What lips my lips have kissed, and where,

  and why,

  I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

  Under my head till morning; but the rain

  Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

  Upon the glass and listen for reply,

  And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

  For unremembered lads that not again

  Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

  Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,

  Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

  Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

  I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

  I only know that summer sang in me

  A little while, that in me sings no more.

  SPRING

  To what purpose, April, do you return again?

  Beauty is not enough.

  You can no longer quiet me with the redness

  Of little leaves opening stickily.

  I know what I know.

  The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

  The spikes of the crocus.

  The smell of the earth is good.

  It is apparent that there is no death.

  But what does that signify?

  Not only under ground are the brains

  of men

  Eaten by maggots.

  Life in itself

  Is nothing,—

  An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

  It is not enough that yearly down this hill

  April

  Comes like an idiot, babbling and

  strewing flowers!

  WEEDS

  White with daisies and red with sorrel

  And empty, empty under the sky!

  Life is a quest and love a quarrel;

  Here is a place for me to lie.

  Daisies spring from damnéd seeds,

  And this red fire that here I see

  Is a worthless crop of crimson weeds,

  Cursed by farmers thriftily.

  But here, unhated for an hour,

  The sorrel runs in ragged flame;

  The daisy stands, a bastard flower,

  Like flowers that bear an honest name.

  And here awhile, where no wind brings

  The baying of a pack athirst,

  May sleep the sleep of blessed things

  The blood too bright, the brow accurst.

  THIS IS A MAGAZINE

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

  FROM DECEMBER 1920

  The scene is the vast and soggy interior of a magazine—not ponder or pistol, but paper and popular. Over the outer curtain careens a lady on horseback in live colours. With one hand she raises a cup of tea to her glossy lips while with the other she follows through on a recent mashie shot, meanwhile keeping one rich-tinted, astounding eye upon the twist of her service and its mate on the volume of pleasant poetry in her other hand. The rising of the curtain reveals the back-drop as a patch-work of magazine covers. The furniture includes a table on which lies a single periodical, to convey the abstraction ‘Magazine’, and around it your players sit on chairs plastered with advertisements. Each actor holds a placard bearing the name of the character represented. For example, the Edith Wharton Story holds a placard which reads “By Edith Wharton, in three parts.”

  Near (but not in!) the left hand stage box is stationed a gentleman in underwear holding a gigantic placard which announces that “THIS IS A MAGAZINE”.

  As the Curtain rises the audience discovers the Edith Wharton Story attempting a tête à tête with a somewhat arrogant British Serial.

  THE EDITH WHARTON STORY (a bit bitterly): And before I could so much as shoot a saucy subtlety, there I was plumped down between an odious fable in broken Yiddish and this—this affair next to me.

  ‘This affair’ is a very vulgar and proletarian Baseball Yarn who sprawls colloquially in his chair.

  THE BASEBALL YARN: Was you speakin’ to me, lady?

  (On the lady’s part a frigid and Jamesian silence. She looks, by the way, like a lady who has lived all her life in three-room apartments and had her nerves ruined by impulsive elevator boys.)

  THE BASEBALL YARN (in brutal soliloquy): If they could jes’ stick a guy in a magazine where he could borrer one good chewterbacker!

  A DETECTIVE STORY (in a tense whisper): There’s one in my third paragraph. But be quiet and be careful not to break any retorts.

  THE BASEBALL STORY (facetiously): Or make any, eh? Ha! Ha! Ha!

  THE BRITISH SERIAL (to The Edith Wharton Story): I say, who’s that little story over near the Editorial? Don’t fancy I’ve seen her before since I’ve been running.

  THE EDITH WHARTON STORY (lowering her voice): My Dear Man, she’s a nobody. Seems to have no family—nothing but a past.

  THE BRITISH SERIAL: She has a certain charm, but a deuced vulgar plot. (He yawns.)

  THE BASEBALL YARN (in a rude aside to the Detective Story): The noble Duke looks a bit padded his own self. Say! Pipe the old grampa asleep on his advertisements.

  THE DETECTIVE STORY: That’s the Robert Chambers Serial. He’s through this issue.

  THE BASEBALL YARN: Kinda like that little thing next to him. New in here ain’t she?

  THE DETECTIVE STORY: New and scared.

  THE BASEBALL YARN: Looks as if she was wrote with a soft pencil.

  THE DETECTIVE STORY: Overdressed! Her illustrations cost more than she did.

  (Several chairs down, a little Love Poem leans tenderly across a story to another Love Poem.)

  THE FIRST LOVE POEM: I adore your form.

  THE SECOND LOVE POEM: You’ve got a good figure yourself—in your second line. But your meter looks a little strained.

  THE FIRST LOVE POEM: You are the caesura in the middle of all my lines. Alas! someone will cut you out and paste you on a mirror—or send you to his sweetheart with “Isn’t this lovely!” scrawled across you—or passepartout you.

  THE SECOND LOVE POEM (coyly): Now you just get right back to your own page.

  (At this point, the Robert Chambers Story awakens with a start, and walks rheumatically over to the Edith Wharton Story.)

  THE ROBERT CHAMBERS STORY (asthmatically): May I join you?

  THE EDITH WHARTON STORY (acidly): You seemed well content to flirt with that sentimental little piece, behind the advertisements.

  THE ROBERT CHAMBERS STORY: On the contrary, she bores me. Every character in her is born in wedlock. Still she’s a relief from the Commercial yarns.

  THE BRITISH SERIAL: You can be thankful you haven’t got your feet between two smelly soap advertisements. (He points to what appears to be a paralytic dwarf at his feet.) Look! There’s my Synopsis of Preceding Chapters all tangled up again.

  THE ROBERT CHAMBERS STORY: Thank heavens, I’m published! I’ve had some annoying experiences in the last ei
ght months. In one issue there was a Penrod Story next to me making so much noise that I couldn’t hear my own love scenes.

  THE EDITH WHARTON STORY (cruelly): Never mind. The shop-girls could fill them in with their eyes closed.

  THE ROBERT CHAMBERS STORY (sourly): My dear lady, your climax is on crooked.

  THE EDITH WHARTON STORY: At least I have one. They tell me you drag horribly.

  THE BASEBALL YARN: Well, if the swells ain’t scrappin’ with each other!

  THE EDITH WHARTON STORY: No one invited your comments.

  THE BASEBALL YARN: Go on! You’re full of dots!

  THE EDITH WHARTON STORY: At least, I’m not full of mixed metaphors!

  THE ROBERT CHAMBERS STORY: Weak repartee! Columnist’s humor.

  (A new voice, very oratorical and sonorous, breaks in. It is—)

  THE POLITICAL ARTICLE: Come! There’s nothing irreconcilable there. There’s no knot so tight that there isn’t a way out of the labyrinth.

  THE LITTLE STORY WITHOUT A FAMILY (timidly): Dear folks, it’s a sweet cosy world. So don’t poison your little lungs with naughty unkind words.

  THE BRITISH SERIAL: Shades of those Porter women!

  THE LITTLE STORY WITHOUT A FAMILY: You don’t know what abuse is until you’ve been returned with “Join the Navy” stamped on your envelope.

  THE BRITISH SERIAL: If I had been fished out of the waste-basket, I shouldn’t boast about it!

  THE BASEBALL YARN: Let her alone! She’s a honest Gurl. I’ll kick you one in the conclusion!

  (They rise and square off, eying each other menacingly. A contagious excitement springs up; the Basil King Revelation forgets its credulous queens and tears over; an Efficiency Article loses its head and runs wildly through the issue, and even the illustrations leap out of their borders, the half-tones vying democratically with the Ben Days, in reaching the scene. The excitement spreads to the advertisements. Mr. Madison Whims of Seattle falls into a jar of No-Hairo Cold Cream. A Health and Strength Giant arrives clinging to an earphone; a Short Story Course becomes covered with Rat Poison. The Circulation increases.

  In fact, for a minute everything is something awful! Just as the number’s minutes seem as numbered as its pages, a stentorian voice proceeds from the Table of Contents, an efficient looking gentleman with a megaphone who has been sitting unnoticed in the orchestra: “Places! A Reader!” A hush falls; everyone scurries back into position, just as a thick and impenetrable dark descends upon the stage through which emerge, as an emanation from limbo, the large glossy eyes of the cover girl, on horseback in five colours.

  A voice comes out of the dark and, in the great quiet, it is like the voice of God.)

  THE VOICE: Wonder if there’s anything in this worth readin’. Sure is some queen on the cover!

  AN INSERT JOKE (laughing feebly): Hee! Hee! Hee! (It is the grotesque and horrible cackle of an old man.)

  The lights go on to show that the curtain is now down, in front of it sits a reader, a lone stage hand. He wears an expression of tremendous and triumphant boredom. He is reading the magazine.

  SPORT FOR ART’S SAKE

  HEYWOOD BROUN

  FROM SEPTEMBER 1921

  For years we had been hearing about moral victories and at last we saw one. This is not intended as an excuse for the fact that we said before the fight that Carpentier would beat Dempsey. We erred with Bernard Shaw, who declared that the odds ought to be fifty to one on the Frenchman. Swayed by the master we bet, and our half dollar is gone, but we are not minded to moan about it. The surprising revelation which came to us on this July afternoon was that a thing may be done well enough to make victory entirely secondary. We have all heard, of course, of sport for sport’s sake, but Georges Carpentier established a still more glamorous ideal. Sport for art’s sake was what he showed us in the big wooden saucer over on Boyle’s dirty acres.

  It was the finest tragic performance in the lives of ninety thousand persons. We hope that Professor George Pierce Baker sent his class in dramatic composition. We will be disappointed if Eugene O’Neill, the white hope of the American drama, was not there. Here for once was a laboratory demonstration of life. None of the crowds in Greece who went to somewhat more beautiful stadiums in search of Euripides ever saw the spirit of tragedy more truly presented. And we will wager that Euripides was not able to set his crowd up upon its hind legs into a concerted shout of “Medea! Medea! Medea!” as Carpentier moved the fight fans over in Jersey City in the second round. In fact it is our contention that the fight between [Jack] Dempsey and [Georges] Carpentier was the most inspiring spectacle which America has seen in a generation.

  Personally we would go further back than that. We would not accept a ticket for David and Goliath as a substitute. We remember that in that instance the little man won, but it was a spectacle less fine in artistry from the fact that it was less true to life. The tradition that Jack goes up the beanstalk and kills his giant, and that Little Red Ridinghood has the better of the wolf, and many other stories are limited in their inspirational quality by the fact that they are not true. They are stories that man has invented to console himself on winter’s evenings for the fact that he is small and the universe is large. Carpentier showed us something far more thrilling. All of us who watched him know now that man cannot beat down fate, no matter how much his will may flame, but he can rock it back upon its heels when he puts all his heart and his shoulders into a blow.

  That is what happened in the second round. Carpentier landed his straight right upon Dempsey’s jaw and the champion, who was edging in toward him, shot back and then swayed forward. Dempsey’s hands dropped to his side. He was an open target. Carpentier swung a terrific right hand uppercut and missed. Dempsey fell into a clinch and held on until his head cleared. He kept close to Carpentier during the rest of the fight and wore him down with body blows during the infighting. We know of course that when the first prehistoric creature crawled out of the ooze up to the beaches (see The Outline of History by H. G. Wells, some place in the first volume, just a couple of pages after that picture of the big lizard) it was already settled that Carpentier was going to miss that uppercut. And naturally it was inevitable that he should have the worst of it at infighting. Fate gets us all in the clinches, but Eugene O’Neill and all our young writers of tragedy make a great mistake if they think that the poignancy of the fate of man lies in the fact that he is weak, pitiful and helpless. The tragedy of life is not that man loses but that he almost wins. Or, if you are intent on pointing out that his downfall is inevitable, that at least he completes the gesture of being on the eve of victory.

  For just eleven seconds on the afternoon of July 2 we felt that we were at the threshold of a miracle. There was such flash and power in the right hand thrust of Carpentier’s that we believed Dempsey would go down, and that fate would go with him and all the plans laid out in the days of the oozy friends of Mr. Wells. No sooner were the men in the ring together than it seemed just as certain that Dempsey would win as that the sun would come up on the morning of July 3. By and by we were not so sure about the sun. It might be down, we thought, and also out. It was included in the scope of Carpentier’s punch, we feared. No, we did not exactly fear it. We respect the regularity of the universe by which we live, but we do not love it. If the blow had been as devastating as we first believed, we should have counted the world well lost.

  Great circumstances produce great actors. History is largely concerned with arranging good entrances for people; and later exits not always quite so good. Carpentier played his part perfectly down to the last side. People who saw him just as he came before the crowd reported that he was pitifully nervous, drawn, haggard. It was the traditional and becoming nervousness of the actor just before a great performance. It was gone the instant Carpentier came in sight of his ninety thousand. His head was back and his eyes and his smile flamed as he crawled through the ropes. And he ga
ve some curious flick to his bathrobe as he turned to meet the applause. Until that very moment we had been for Dempsey, but suddenly we found ourself up on our feet making silly noises. We shouted “Carpentier! Carpentier! Carpentier!” and forgot even to be ashamed of our pronunciation. He held his hands up over his head and turned until the whole arena, including the five-dollar seats, had come within the scope of his smile.

  Dempsey came in a minute later and we could not cheer, although we liked him. It would have been like cheering for Niagara Falls at the moment somebody was about to go over in a barrel. Actually there is a difference of sixteen pounds between the two men which is large enough, but it seemed that afternoon as if it might have been a hundred. And we knew for the first time that a man may smile and smile and be an underdog.

  We resented at once the law of gravity, the Malthusian theory and the fact that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Everything scientific, exact, and inevitable was distasteful. We wanted the man with the curves to win. It seemed impossible throughout the first round. Carpentier was first out of his comer and landed the first blow, a light but stinging left to the face. Then Dempsey closed in and even the people who paid only thirty dollars for their seats could hear the thump, thump of his short hooks as they beat upon the narrow stomach of Carpentier. The challenger was only too evidently tired when the round ended.

  Then came the second and, after a moment of fiddling about, he shot his right hand to the jaw. Carpentier did it again, a second time, and this was the blow perfected by a life time of training. The time was perfect, the aim was perfect, every ounce of strength was in it. It was the blow which had downed Bombardier Wells, and Joe Beckett. It rocked Dempsey to his heels, but it broke Carpentier’s hand. His best was not enough. There was an earthquake in Philistia but then out came the signs “Business as usual” and Dempsey began to pound Carpentier in the stomach.

  The challenger faded quickly in the third round, and in the fourth the end came. We all suffered when he went down the first time, but he was up again, and the second time was much worse. It was in this knockdown that his head sagged suddenly, after he struck the floor, and fell back upon the canvas. He was conscious and his legs moved a little, but they would not obey him. A gorgeous human will had been beaten down to a point where it would no longer function.