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

  Because one may not ask him questions one must know him. It has been my pleasure to talk to him many times during my four months in Paris. We have talked of rivers and of religion, of the instinctive genius of the church which chose, for the singing of its hymns, the voice without “overtones”—the voice of the eunuch. We have talked of women, about women he seems a bit disinterested. Were I vain I should say he is afraid of them, but I am certain he is only a little skeptical of their existence. We have talked of Ibsen, of Strindberg, Shakespeare. “Hamlet is a great play, written from the standpoint of the ghost,” and of Strindberg, “No drama behind the hysterical raving.”

  We have talked of death, of rats, of horses, the sea; languages, climates and offerings. Of artists and of Ireland.

  “The Irish are people who will never have leaders, for at the great moment they always desert them. They have produced one skeleton—Parnell—never a man.”

  Sometimes his wife, Nora, and his two children have been with him. Large children, almost as tall as he is himself, and Nora walks under fine red hair, speaking with a brogue that carries the dread of Ireland in it; Ireland as a place where poverty has become the art of scarcity. A brogue a little more defiant than Joyce’s which is tamed by preoccupation.

  Joyce has few friends, yet he is always willing to leave his writing table and his white coat of an evening, to go to some quiet near-by café, there to discuss anything that is not “artistic” or “flashy” or “new.” Callers have often found him writing into the night, or drinking tea with Nora. I myself once came upon him as he lay full length on his stomach poring over a valise full of notes taken in his youth for Ulysses,—for as Nora says, “It’s the great fanaticism is on him, and it is coming to no end.” Once he was reading out of the book of saints (he is never without it) and muttering to himself that this particular day’s saint was “A devil of a fellow for bringing on the rain, and we wanting to go for a stroll.”

  However it is with him, he will come away for the evening, for he is simple, a scholar, and sees nothing objectionable in human beings if they will only remain in place.

  Yet he has been called eccentric, mad, incoherent, unintelligible, yes and futuristic. One wonders why, thinking what a fine lyric beginning that great Rabelaisian flower Ulysses had, with impartial addenda for foliage,—the thin sweet lyricism of Chamber Music, the casual inevitability of Dubliners, the passion and prayer of Stephen Dedalus, who said that he would go alone through the world.

  “Alone, not only separate from all others, but to have not even one friend,” and he has, if we admit Joyce to be Stephen, done as he said he would do. “I will not serve that which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in my art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning.”

  This is somehow Joyce, and one wonders if, at last Ireland has created her man.

  WITHOUT THE CANE AND THE DERBY

  Charlie Chaplin Playing for His Friends After Dinner

  CARL SANDBURG

  FROM MAY 1922

  The woman had done him wrong.

  Either that.. or the woman was clean as a white rose in the morning gauze of dew.

  It was either one or the other or it was the two things, right and wrong, woven together like two braids of a woman’s head of hair hanging down woven together.

  The room is dark. The door opens. It is Charlie playing for his friends after dinner, “the marvelous urchin, the little genius of the screen,” (chatter it like a monkey’s running laughter cry).

  No.. it is not Charlie.. it is somebody else. It is a man, gray shirt, bandanna, dark face. A candle in his left hand throws a slant of light on the dark face. The door closes slow. The right hand leaves the door knob slow.

  He looks at something. What is it? A white sheet on a table. He takes two long soft steps. He runs the candle light around a hump in the sheet. He lifts the sheet slow, sad like.

  A woman’s head of hair shows, a woman’s white face. He takes the head between his hands and looks long at it. His fingers trickle under the sheet, snap loose something, bring out fingers full of a pearl necklace.

  He covers the face and the head of hair with the white sheet. He takes a step toward the door. The necklace slips into his pocket off the fingers of his right hand. His left hand lifts the candle for a good-by look.

  Knock knock, knock. A knocking the same as the time of the human heartbeat.

  Knock, knock, knock, first louder, then lower. Knock, knock, knock, the same as the time of the human heartbeat.

  He sets the candle on the floor.. leaps to the white sheet.. rips it back.. has his fingers at the neck, his thumbs at the throat, and does three slow fierce motions of strangling.

  The knocking stops. All is quiet. He covers the face and the head of hair with the white sheet, steps back, picks up the candle and listens.

  Knock, knock, knock, a knocking the same as the time of the human heartbeat.

  Knock, knock, knock, first louder, then lower. Knock, knock, knock, the same as the time of the human heartbeat.

  Again the candle to the door, the leap, the slow fierce motions of strangling, the cover-up of the face and the head of hair, the step back, the listening.

  And again the knock, knock, knock.. louder.. lower.. to the time of the human heartbeat.

  Once more the motions of strangling.. then.. nothing at all.. nothing at all.. no more knocking.. no knocking at all.. no knocking at all.. in the time of the human heartbeat.

  He stands at the door.. peace, peace, peace everywhere only in the man’s face so dark and his eyes so lighted up with many lights, no peace at all, no peace at all.

  So he stands at the door, his right hand on the door knob, the candle slants of light fall and flicker from his face to the straight white sheet changing gray against shadows.

  So there is peace everywhere.. no more knocking.. no knocking at all to the time of the human heartbeat.. so he stands at the door and his right hand on the door knob.

  And there is peace everywhere.. only the man’s face is a red gray plaster of storm in the center of peace.. so he stands with a candle at the door.. so he stands with a red gray face.

  After he steps out the door closes: the door, the door knob, the table, the white sheet; there is nothing at all; the owners are shadows; the owners are gone; not even a knocking; not even a knock, knock, knock.. louder, lower, in the time of the human heartbeat.

  The lights are snapped on. Charlie, “the marvelous urchin, the little genius of the screen” (chatter it with a running monkey’s laughter cry). Charlie is laughing a laugh the whole world knows.

  The room is full of cream yellow lights. Charlie is laughing.. louder.. lower..

  And again the heartbeats laugh.. the human heartbeats laugh..

  I LIKE AMERICANS—THEY ARE SO RIDICULOUS

  EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (PSEUDONYM NANCY BOYD)

  FROM AUGUST 1922

  I like Americans.

  You may say what you will, they are the nicest people in the world.

  They sleep with their windows open.

  Their bath-tubs are never dry.

  They are not grown-up yet. They still believe in Santa Claus.

  They are terribly in earnest.

  But they laugh at everything.

  They know that one roll does not make a breakfast.

  Nor one vermouth a cocktail.

  I like Americans.

  They smoke with their meals.

  The Italians are nice.

  But they are not so nice as the Americans.

  They have been told that they live in a warm climate.

  And they refuse to heat their houses.

  They are forever sobbing Puccini.

  They
no longer have lions about, to prey on Christian flesh.

  But they have more than a sufficient supply of certain smaller carnivora.

  And if you walk in the street alone, somebody pinches you.

  I like Americans.

  They give you the matches free.

  The Austrians are nice.

  But they are not so nice as the Americans.

  They eat sausages between the acts at the opera.

  But they make you go out into the snow to smoke.

  They are gentle and friendly. They will walk ten blocks out of their way to show you your way.

  But they serve you paper napkins at the table.

  And the sleeves of their tailored blouses are gathered at the shoulder.

  And they don’t know how to do their hair.

  I like Americans.

  They dance so well.

  The Hungarians are nice.

  But they are not so nice as the Americans.

  They make beautiful shoes.

  Which are guaranteed to squeak for a year.

  Their native tongue is like a typewriter in the next room, and every word beginning with the shift-key.

  Their wines are too sweet.

  I like Americans.

  They are the only men in the world, the sight of whom in their shirt-sleeves is not rumpled, embryonic, and agonizing.

  They wear belts instead of suspenders.

  The French are nice.

  But they are not so nice as the Americans.

  They wear the most charming frocks in the world.

  And the most awkward underclothes.

  Their shoes are too short.

  Their ankles are too thick.

  They are always forgetting where they put their razors.

  They have no street-corner shoe-shining palaces, where a man can be a king for five minutes every day.

  Nor any Sunday supplement.

  Their mail-boxes are cleverly hidden slits in the wall of a cigar store.

  They put all their cream into cheese.

  Your morning cup of chicory is full of boiled strings.

  If you want butter with your luncheon, they expect you to order radishes.

  And they insist on serving the vegetables as if they were food.

  I like Americans.

  They make a lot of foolish laws.

  But at least their cigarettes are not rolled by the government.

  The material of which the French make their cigarettes would be used in America to enrich the fields.

  In the city the French are delightful.

  They kiss in the cafés and dine on the sidewalks.

  Their dance halls are gay with paper ribbons and caps and colored balloons.

  Their rudeness is more gracious than other people’s courtesy.

  But they are afraid of the water.

  They drink it mixed with wine.

  They swim with wings.

  And they bathe with an atomizer.

  Their conception of a sport suit is a black taffeta gown, long gloves with fringe on, a patent leather hand-bag, and a dish-mop dog.

  In the country they are too darned funny for words.

  I like Americans.

  They carry such pretty umbrellas.

  The Avenue de l’Opera on a rainy day is just an avenue, on a rainy day.

  But Fifth Avenue on a rainy day is an old-fashioned garden under a shower.

  The French are a jolly lot.

  Their cities have no traffic regulations.

  And no speed limit.

  And if you get run over, you have to pay a fine for getting in the way.

  They have no ear drums.

  Paris is the loveliest city in the world.

  Until she opens her mouth.

  Should the French go forth to battle armed only with their taxi horns, they would drive all before them.

  I would liefer live in a hammock slung under the “L” at Herald Square, than in a palace within ear-shot of the Place de la Harmony.

  I like Americans.

  They are so ridiculous.

  They are always risking their lives to save a minute.

  The pavement under their feet is red-hot.

  They are the only people in the world who can eat their soup without a sound as of the tide coming in.

  They sell their bread hygienically wrapped.

  The Europeans sell it naked.

  They carry it under the arm.

  Drop it and pick it up.

  Beat the horses with it.

  And spank the children.

  They deliver it at your apartment. You find it lying outside your door on the door-mat.

  And European hotels are so hateful and irritating.

  There is never an ash-tray in your bedroom.

  Nor a waste-basket.

  Nor a cake of soap.

  No sweet little cake of new soap all sealed in paper!

  Not even a sliver left behind by a former guest.

  No soap.

  No soap at all.

  And there’s always a dead man in a blanket across the head of the bed.

  And you can’t get him out. He’s tied there.

  And the pillow-slips are trimmed with broken buttons.

  That scratch your ear.

  Then there are their theatres.

  They make you tip the usher.

  And pay for your program.

  The signal for the curtain to rise is the chopping of wood, off stage.

  Then the railroad system.

  Especially in France.

  Have to get there forty-five minutes ahead of train time, or stand in the aisle all day.

  Pay for every pound of trunk.

  Never a soul in sight who knows anything about anything.

  No place to sit.

  No place to powder up.

  And before they will let you into the station at all, they insist on your pushing two sous into a slot-machine.

  When you have just had your pocket picked of the last sou you had in the world.

  And are expecting your only husband on the express from Havre.

  I like Americans.

  They let you play around in the Grand Central all you please.

  Their parks are not locked at sunset.

  And they always have plenty of paper bags.

  Which are not made of back numbers of Le Rire.

  The English are nice.

  But they are not so nice as the Americans.

  They wear much too much flannel.

  No matter with whom they are dancing, they dance a solo.

  And no matter where they go, they remain at home.

  They are nice. They keep the tea-set at the office.

  But the Americans keep the dish-pan in the music-room.

  The English are an amusing people.

  They are a tribe of shepherds, inhabiting a small island off the coast of France.

  They are a simple and genial folk.

  But they have one idiosyncrasy.

  They persist in referring to their island as if it were the mainland.

  The Irish are nice.

  But they are not so nice as the Americans.

  They are always rocking the boat.

  I like Americans.

  They either shoot the whole nickel, or give up the bones.

  You may say what you will, they are the nicest people in the world.

  THE PUBLIC AND THE ARTIST

  JEAN COCTEAU

  FROM OCTOBER 1922

  I am working at my wooden table, seated on my wooden chair with my wooden penholder in my hand, but this does not prevent me from being, in some degree, responsible
for the course of the stars.

  A dreamer is always a bad poet.

  Nietzsche was afraid of certain “ands”; Goethe and Schiller, for example, or, worse still, Schiller and Goethe. What would he say at seeing the spread of the cult of Nietzsche and Wagner or, rather, Wagner and Nietzsche!

  The opposition of the masses to the elite has always stimulated individual genius. This is the case in France. Modern Germany is dying of approbation, carefulness, faithful application and a scholastic vulgarization of aristocratic culture.

  Let us keep clear of the theatre. I regret to have felt its temptation and to have introduced to it two great artists. “Well, then, why do you write for the theatre?” That is precisely the weak point about the theatre; it is forced to depend, for its very existence, upon immediate successes.

  When I say that I prefer certain circus or music-hall turns to anything given in the theatre, I do not mean that I prefer them to anything that might be given in the theatre.

  One day I was looking at a children’s puppet show in the Champs Elysées when a dog came on the stage, or rather a dog’s head, as big in itself as the two other actors put together. “Look at that monster,” said a mother to her child. “That is not a monster, it is a dog,” said her little boy. Men, as they grow older, lose—when in a theatre—the clairvoyance they had as children.

  Tradition appears at every epoch under a different disguise, but the public does not recognize it under its masks.

  That which makes the public laugh is not inevitably beautiful or new, but that which is beautiful and new inevitably makes the public laugh.

  “Cultivate those qualities in thee for which the public blames thee: they are Thyself.” Get this idea well into your head. This advice ought to be written up everywhere like an advertisement of “Pear’s Soap.” As a matter of fact, the public likes to “recognize” what is familiar. It hates to be disturbed. It is shocked by surprises. The worst that can happen to a work of art is to have no fault found with it, so that its author is not obliged to take up an attitude of opposition.