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

  WHEN CALVIN COOLIDGE LAUGHED

  E. E. CUMMINGS

  FROM APRIL 1925

  Calvin Coolidge laughed.

  Instantly an immense crowd gathered. The news spread like wildfire. From a dozen leading dailies, reporters and cameramen came rushing to the scene pell-mell in highpowered aeroplanes. Hundreds of police reserves, responding without hesitation to a reiterated riot-call, displayed with amazing promptness a quite unpredictable inability to control the ever-increasing multitude, but not before any number of unavoidable accidents had informally occurred. A war veteran with three wooden legs, for example, was trampled, and the nonartificial portions of his anatomy reduced to pulp. Two anarchists (of whom one was watering chrysanthemums at Salt Lake City, Utah, while the other was fast asleep in a delicatessen at the corner of Little H and 12 1/2 Streets) were immediately arrested, lynched, and jailed, on the charge of habeas corpus with premeditated absence. At Lafayette Square, a small dog, stepped on, bit the ankle [of] a beautiful and highstrung woman who had for some time suffered from insomnia, and who—far too enraged to realise, except in a very general way, the source of the pain—vigorously struck a child of five, knocking its front teeth out. Another woman, profiting by the general excitement, fainted and with a hideous shriek fell through a plateglass window.

  • • •

  On the outskirts of the throng, several nonogenarian members of the Senate, both Republican and otherwise, succumbed to heart-trouble with serious complications. A motorcycle ran over an idiot. A stone-deaf night-watchman’s left eye was extinguished by the point of a missing spectator’s umbrella. Falling seven stories from a nearby office-building, Congressman N. G. Knott of Tennessee (Dem.) landed in the midst of the crowd absolutely unhurt, killing eleven persons including the ambassador to Uruguay. At this truly unfortunate occurrence, one of the most promising businessmen of Keokuk, lowa, Aloysius Q. Van Smith (a member of the Harvard, Yale, and Racquet Clubs) swallowed a cigar and died instantly. Fifty plainclothesmen and two policewomen with some difficulty transported the universally lamented remains three and three-fourths miles to a waiting ambulance where they were given first-aid, creating an almost unmentionable disturbance during which everybody took off everybody’s hat and the Rev. Peter Scott Wilson, of the Eighteenth Anabaptist Church of Paragould, Ark., received internal injuries resulting in his becoming mentally unbalanced and attempting to undress on the spot.

  Needless to say, the holy man was prevented by indignant bystanders from carrying out his ignominious intention, and fell insensible to the sidewalk.

  Calm had scarcely been destroyed, when a lovesick sailor from the battleship Idaho was seized with delirium tremens. In still another part of the mob, a hydrant exploded without sufficient warning, causing no casualties and seriously damaging an almost priceless full-length portrait of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt kissing ex-Admiral Hashimura Togo on both cheeks by John Singer Sargent in the neighboring chapel of the Y.W.C.A. Olaf Yansen, Klansman and plumber, and a floorwalker, Abraham Goldstein, becoming mutually infuriated owing to some probably imaginary difference of opinion, resorted to a spontaneous display of physical culture, in the course of which the former (who, according to several witnesses, was getting the worst of it, in spite of his indubitably superior size) hit the latter with a brick and vanished. Mr. Goldstein is doing well.

  While quietly playing with a box of safety-matches which his parents, Mr. and Mrs. James H. Fitzroy, of 99 Hundredth Street, Omaha, had given to their little son James Jr. to keep him quiet, the infant—in some unaccountable manner—set fire to forty one persons, of whom nine and thirty were burned to ashes. A Chinese, Mi Wong, who exercises the profession of laundryman at 17 Sixteenth Street, and Signor Pedro Alhambra, a millionaire coffee-planter, who also refused to be interviewed but is stopping at the New Willard, are the survivors. Havoc resulted when one of the better-liked members of the voting married set (whose identity the authorities refuse to divulge) kissed Tony Crack, iceman extraordinary to the White House, on the spur of the moment, receiving concussion of the brain with two black eyes. In the front rank of onlookers, a daughter of the people became so excited by the Chief Executive’s spectacular act, hereinbefore referred to, that before you could say Jack Robinson she presented the universe with twins.

  • • •

  But such trivial catastrophes were eclipsed by a disaster of really portentous significance. No sooner had Wall Street learned what Mr. Coolidge had done, than an unprecedented panic started, and Coca-Cola tobogganed in eight minutes from nine hundred decimal point three to decimal point six zeros seven four five, wiping out at one fell swoop the solidly founded fortunes of no less than two thousand two hundred and two pillars of society, and exerting an overpowering influence for evil on wheat, and sugar, not to mention that ever mobile commodity, castor oil, all three of which tumbled about in a truly frightful manner. At Detroit, Mich., the president of the India Rubber Trust Co., hatless and with his white hair streaming in the wind, tore out of the Soldiers and Sailors’ Savings Bank at a snail’s pace carrying in one hand a hat belonging to the president of the latter institution, James B. Sears, and in the other a telephone which the famous first had (in the frenzy of the moment) forgotten to replace on the distinguished second’s desk.

  A hook-and-ladder, driven by Augustus John at an estimated speed of sixty eight miles an hour, passed over the magnate longitudinally as he crossed Edsel Avenue and left a gently-expiring corpse whose last words—spoken into the (oddly enough) unbroken mouthpiece of the instrument, only to be overheard by P. Franklin Adams, a garbage-man—were: “Let us then, if you please—”

  So unnerved was the Jehu of the Henry Street Fire Station by this totally unexpected demise that, without pausing to consider the possible damage to life and limb involved in a purely arbitrary deviation from the none too ample thoroughfare, he declined the very next corner in favor of driving straight through the city’s largest skyscraper, whose one hundred and thirteen stories—after tottering horribly for a minute and a half, during which negligible period several thousand suspicious characters left town—thundered earthward with the velocity of light, exterminating every vestige of humanity and architecture within a radius of eighty leagues including one billion six hundred and forty nine million five hundred and thirty eight thousand two hundred and seven Ford sedans.

  • • •

  This paralysing cataclysm was immediately followed by a fire of stupendous proportions whose prodigiously enormous flames, greedily winding themselves around monuments, cyclone-cellars, and certain other spontaneous civic structures, roasted by myriads the inhabitants thereof, while generating a heat so terrific as to evaporate everything evaporable within an area of fourteen thousand square miles not exclusive of the Missouri river—which, completely disappearing in fifteen seconds, revealed a giltedged submarine of the U-C type containing (among other things) William Jennings Bryan, William J. Burns, William Wrigley Jr., Strangler Lewis, the Prince of Wales, Senator Richard O. Thimble of California, Babe Ruth, Major Arthur B. Good, Humphrey Ohm, emeritus professor of radio at Johns Hopkins University, Rear Admiral George Monk, K. C. B. etc., Nichola Murray Butler, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, T. S. F., Harold Bell Wright, Clive Bell, the honorable Robert W. Chambers, the Amir and Amira of Afghanistan and their hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Harold S. Packingbox of Philadelphia and Newport, Al Jolson, Luther Burbank, Ben Ali Hagin, Alfred Stieglitz, Howard Chandler Christy, Daniel Chester French, Paul Manship, George Gershwin, Houdini, Thomas A. Edison and Dr. Frank Crane, the last of whom (being only incompletely intoxicated) promptly shuffled off this mortal coil with the Star Spangled Banner upon his lips and was buried by six or seven stalwart bootleggers on the exact spot where he did not fall.

  A moving picture of the preceding historical catastrophe was thereupon instigated by the usual genius of Mr. [D. W.] Griffith who, with unerring judgment if not tact, invoked Rudolph Valentino at a salary of two hundred a
nd seventy-five thousand dollars per week, less nineteen cents war-tax, to impersonate simultaneously both George Arliss and Napoleon, whereas Lillian Gish played to imperfection the thankless part of the old mother who—after being bitten by sharks—kills the villain with a knitting-needle on horseback and escapes out of the crater of Vesuvius in a brown paper bag, causing a strike among the white paper bag manufacturers, which spread all the way from Tuscaloosa to Yazoo.

  Suddenly—unexpectedly—in the midst of all this infrahuman and ultranational pandemonium, compared with which such trivial incidents as solar eclipses, earthquakes, the battle of Aegospotami, Sheridan’s ride, the fall of Babylon, the Declaration of Independence, and Pepy’s Diary, were as an inelegant globule of H2O beside the tempestuous entirety of the Dead Sea—in the centre of doom, debauchery, and dissolution—in the naked heart of tintinnabulous chaos—a miracle, a thing unknown, unanalysable, a phenomenon irremediably acatalectic, indubitably unbelievable, and totally indescribable, occurred.

  Over the whole country there swept (as sometimes sweeps, o’er the sickbed of some poor delirious sufferer, a spontaneous sweetness—purging the spirit of its every anguish, uniting the multifarious moods and aspects of the human heart in a triumphant arch through which, with flags flying and bugles blowing, the glorious armies of the soul go marching as to war)—there thrilled—there burgeoned—a mysterious and invincible ululation of utter, absolute, unperforated silence.

  So stunning, so irrevocable, was this silence, that the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, and the fish of the sea, felt, and (each in his own peculiar and characteristic way) responded to, its thunderous intensity. The prairie-dog of Kansas and the armadillo of Texas emerged from their burrows hand in hand, bent on satisfying at all costs an unquenchable curiosity as to its occult cause—united by a common inquisitiveness, the moose of Maine and the codfish of Massachusetts (abandoning simultaneously their respectively foliate and aqueous habitats) put their heads together, and listened—the versatile mocking-bird of Kentucky started from his sleep and mingled his mellifluous pæons of inquiry with the more staccato queries of the cynical rose-breasted nuthatch—even the mayor of Kankakee, Ill., fired by an overwhelming curiosity, leaned out of a superb gothic aperture in the pre-romanesque I. O. O. F. hall, dropping a half-smoked Chesterfield into the exact middle of a passing load of hay, with the remark: “Is cigarette taste changing?”—in short, all America, which (but a moment before) had been convulsed to its very roots by unparalleled spasms of massacre, machination, and mayhem, closed its weary eyes . . . and sank suddenly into a profound swoon of unadulterated ecstasy, a delicious coma of inexpressible bliss . . . as through the entire nation, from sea to sea, completely surged that sublime and unmitigated titillation of telepathic tranquility, of rapturous reintegration, of perfect peace . . .

  Calvin Coolidge had stopped laughing.

  WHAT, EXACTLY, IS MODERN?

  ALDOUS HUXLEY

  FROM MAY 1925

  At a café in Siena I once got into conversation with an Italian medical student. Like most of his compatriots, he was very open and confiding. We had not known one another half an hour before he told me the whole story of his life. Among other things he informed me that he had spent a year as a student at the University of Rome, but that he had been compelled to remove to Siena because it was impossible for him to learn anything at Rome; there were too many distractions in the capital, too many feminine distractions in particular. He knew that he would never get a degree if he stayed at Rome. “In a little town like Siena,” I said, “I suppose there are no distractions of that sort?” “Not so many,” he admitted, “as at Rome. All the same,” he added, and smiled a smile of male fatuity, “you’d be surprised by the young women of Siena. They’re really very modern.” And he went on to tell me of his adventures with the local shop girls.

  I laughed, not at his stories, which were exceedingly tedious and commonplace, but at his peculiar use of the word, “modern”. It was the first time I had heard it employed in such a context. Since then I have heard it similarly used, more than once. I remember, in London, hearing one of those scrubby camp-followers of the arts who make their “artistic temperament” the excuse for leading an idle, sordid and perfectly useless life, loudly and proudly boasting that he was absolutely modern: anyone might have his wife, so far as he was concerned. And he gave it to be understood that the lady in question thought just as little of promiscuous infidelity—was, in a word, just as modern—as he.

  Now, as a grammarian and a literary pedant, I strongly object to the improper use of words. Every word possesses some single, definite meaning. It should always be used in its accepted sense and not forced to signify something it was never meant to signify. Thus, when one wants to say of a person that he or she is lascivious and insensitive to the point of indulging promiscuously in what is technically known as “love”, one should state the fact in so many words and not say that he or she is “modern”. For such a person is not modern, but on the contrary, antique and atavistic. To behave like the Romans under Caracalla, the Asiatic Greeks, the Babylonians, is not a bit modern. In point of historical fact it is monogamous love and chastity that are the modern inventions. My Italian friend and the young camp-follower of the arts were terribly old-fashioned, if only they had known it. They were eighteenth-century in their outlook, they were Roman-Empire, they were Babylonian. Really modern people love like the Brownings.

  My Italian friend and the camp-follower of the arts had, it is true, a certain justification for their employment of the epithet, “modern”, in this particular context: the state of mind which they thus qualified does happen to be fairly common, in certain circles, at the present time. But a thing may be fashionable without necessarily being modern. There is a great difference between mere fashionableness or contemporaneity on the one hand and modernity on the other. For things and ideas which were fashionable in the past may become fashionable again. Crinolines and clinging draperies, waists high or low, tight or loose, alternately come and go. But it would be absurd to call any one of them modern merely because it happens to be in vogue at the particular moment when you are speaking. Only that which is really new, which has no counterpart in antiquity, is modern. Thus, our mechanical civilization, with the conditions of life and the ideas begotten by it are modern. But sexual promiscuity is not modern at all, it is a very ancient and anachronistic habit which happens, at the moment and in certain limited circles, to be fashionable.

  We talk of modern art just as loosley and inaccurately as we talk of modern manners. Some contemporary art is genuinely modern, inasmuch as it is typical of our civilization alone and different from ancient art. Much, on the other hand, is not modern, but merely something old, réchauffé, which we call modern only because it happens to be in voyage. Thus, the barbaric music of Stravinsky is fundamentally not modern at all. It is merely an ingenious, scholarly and more efficient development of the noises made by savage people to work themselves up into a state of emotional excitement. Those who heard the transcriptions of Tibetan music brought back by members of the Everest expedition must have been struck by the close resemblance which this savage music bore to Stravinsky’s. Without excessive vanity we can say, I think, that the Tibetans are several thousand years behind us in mental development; the music of Stravinsky and his imitators is therefore only a cultured and conscious atavism. In their intellectuality and idealism, Bach and Beethoven are incomparably more modern than Stravinsky. Among contemporary musicians Schoenberg may be regarded as modern for unlike the fashionably atavistic Stravinsky, he is doing something which our savage ancestors could not do—appealing to the intellect and the spirit, not to the primary emotions and the nerves. Schoenberg, though not, perhaps, a greatly inspired artist, is at any rate moving forward in the direction of all human development—towards more and more mind and spirit. Stravinsky is going backwards, away from mind; toward physiology.

  In speaking of t
he visual arts, we make a somewhat similar mistake. For we are accustomed to call “modern” almost any picture or sculpture which happens to be unlike the object which it is supposed to represent. Now distortion as such is not at all modern. All primitive art is non-realistic. So is all incompetent art (which does not mean, of course, that all non-realistic art is incompetent). Non-realism in itself is no criterion of modernity. It is only an accident that we happen to be living in an age when many artists cultivate a deliberate naïvism, when the technical practice (though not the subject matter and the symbolism) of the primitives is freely imitated and art is simplified and conventionalized to the utmost. There is obviously nothing remarkably modern in imitating the primitives. What is modern—and deplorably so—is the contemporary habit of emptying the primitives of their content and significance. Art for art’s sake and the theory of pure aesthetics are modern products, due to the divorce of art from religion. The majority of contemporary painters, one feels when looking at their works, haven’t the faintest notion what to paint. They exercise their art in the void, so to speak, making no contact with the life and the ideas around them. Plenty of admirable artists have shown, in the past, that it is possible to combine pure aesthetics with story telling and the expression of ideas. Few of the most talented artists of the present day make any attempt to accomplish this union or there would be more really modern art.

  It is the same in literature as in painting and music. What is commonly called modern, by journalists and other thoughtless people, is either trivially eccentric, like the literature of the dadaists; smartly cynical and heartless in a minor eighteenth-century way, like the novels of Mr. [Ronald] Firbank; or obstreperously gross and blasphemous, like Ulysses, which is simply the reaction of its author against his mediaeval catholic education. The blasphemies in Ulysses are precisely like those of Marlowe in the sixteenth century and the grossnesses are those of a Father of the Church, who, having emerged from his hermitage, enlarges on the horrors of the sin-ridden world. None of these literary manifestations are modern. For they are not new; they do not represent what is most typical of our civilization; they are off the main line of progress, which is towards increasing subtlety of mind, increasing sensitiveness to emotion, increasing toleration and understanding. An enormously enhanced mental elasticity and freedom distinguish this age from past ages. The most modern work of literature is the most intelligent, the most sensitive and spiritual, the freest and most tolerant, the most completely and widely comprehending. Thus, the most modem novelist who ever wrote is certainly Dostoievsky. That he happened to die in 1881 makes no difference to his modernity. His subtlety, his sensitiveness, his intelligence and comprehension remain unsurpassed and hardly approached. His novels are still the most complete and characteristic product of the modern mind. It may be hoped, it may even be expected, that, in the course of evolution, the mass of human beings will grow to be as intelligent, as deeply and as widely comprehending, as exquisitely sensitive as was Dostoievsky. He has been dead for more than forty years. But he was so excessively and abnormally modern that it will probably be several centuries before the rest of us have come abreast with him.