Books: Nonsenseorship
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G. G. Putnam >> Nonsenseorship
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We do not know, unfortunately, just at what point in her history woman
went under the long siege of her taboos. Whether the system of keeping
her publicly helpless and interdicted goes before church and state, or
was the result of them, there is now no history to tell us. But
certainly she always had one supreme power and one supreme weakness,
and somewhere in time, her more neutrally equipped male companion
played the one against her, to save his own skin from being stripped
by the other.
But if the past is foggy, the present is not. We do know what is now,
and has for a long time been, a shocking list of what she must not be
allowed to do.
She cannot own and control her own property, for instance, except here
and there in the world. Perhaps the theory was that she could not
create property. But one would have said that such of it as she
inherited she had as sound a right to as that that her brother
inherited. But no such common sense notion prevailed. No matter how
she came by it, it became her husband's as soon as she married. The
law has always behaved as if a woman became a half-wit the moment she
married. Seeing what she deliberately lost by it, perhaps the law is
right. She lost control of her possessions, including herself. She
lost her citizenship, and she lost her name, though this by custom and
not by law. And finally, she never could acquire control even over her
own children, which certainly she did create. We do not know how many
of these disabilities would have been excused on the ground that they
were for her own good. It seems likelier that they came under the head
of that fine old abstraction, the general good. No longer back than
1914, H. G. Wells, in "Social Forces in England and America" observed
that they would probably never be able to give women any real freedom
because there were the children to consider. Mr. Wells did not appear
to know that he was bridging a horrible conflict in terms with a
pretty fatuity. Nor did he later give himself pause when, towards the
end of the book, he complained that all the babies were being had by
the low grade women, while the high grade ones were quite insensible
to their duties.
It was possibly with an unruliness of this kind in contemplation that
the law decided that women should know nothing of birth control. Now
there's a taboo for you. Many of our very best people--the moral
element, so called--will not even speak the words. But that
prohibition, like all the others, has its side door--may one say its
small-family entrance? The women who do not know all there is to know
about it are just those poor, isolated, and ignorant women
economically starved who should be the first to be told.
Consider the quaintest, we think, of all the proscriptions against
women--that they cannot have citizenship in their own right. What is
citizenship if it is not the assumption, made by the State, that
because you were born within it, and had grown used to it and fond of
it, and were attached to it by all the associations of blood ties,
friendships, and what not, you were therefore entitled to take part in
it, and could be called on to give it service? If citizenship is a
mere legal figment, by what right do States send their citizens to
war? Yet women are theoretically transferred, body and bone, heart,
memory, and soul, to whatever country or nation their husbands happen
to give allegiance to. Isadora Duncan, born in California, of
generations of Californians, and American all her life, has lately
married a young Russian poet. Hereafter she must enter her country as
an alien immigrant--if it so happens that the quota is not closed.
Does anybody in his senses imagine that Isadora Duncan has been
changed, or could be changed, for better or worse? An opera singer who
was in danger during the war of losing her position at the
Metropolitan Opera House because she was an enemy alien, went forth
and married an American. By that means she was actually supposed to
have been made over into an American. Can naïveté go further?
For our present purposes we merely want to point out that what is done
to one woman in the name of the public good is craftily used by the
next one to serve her own ends. There is a terrifying proportion of
women in America today who can vote, without knowing a word of our
language, without participating in one particle of our common life,
because their husbands have taken on American citizenship. They
wouldn't be allowed to become American citizens if they wanted to, by
any other means.
There are scores and scores of these legal absurdities conscripting
the activities of women. Twenty books could be written about them, and
probably will be. But we must leave them, with such representation as
these few instances afford, and go from, the body of taboos that are
done in the name of the good of the State, to that collection done for
Woman's own personal good.
Some of these are legal and some are not, but they are all operative.
They are all things she has to go around, or under. She cannot serve
on juries. She is always righteously barred from courtrooms when there
is to be testimony concerning sex. Woman, the mother of children, the
realist of sex compared to whom the most sympathetic of males is at
best an outsider, is to be "protected" from a few scandalous
narratives. Of course all women know that they are barred from juries
not because the happenings in court would shock or even surprise them,
but because they would embarrass their far more sensitive and finicky
men. So what they wish to know of court proceedings, they learn from
their good men, in the pleasant privacy of their homes. If the juries
are so much the worse for this sort of thing, and they are, the matter
cannot be helped by the ladies, dear knows, and the men would die
almost any death liefer than that of ravaged modesty.
Probably the most ungrateful of the restrictions on females is that
forbidding them to hold office in churches. This has been put on all
sorts of high grounds, chief among them being that women could do so
much abler work in little auxiliaries of their own. This contention
was challenged about two years ago in the House of Commons, by Maud
Royden, the English Lay Evangelist to whom the pulpits of London are
forbidden, with one or two exceptions. Miss Royden, whose preaching
was being bitterly opposed by several members of the House, annoyed
them all considerably by saying that the Church of England had already
had two women as its absolute head. This was denied in a great
sputter, to which Miss Royden replied, "How about Queen Elizabeth and
Queen Victoria?" Well, this happened to be something that nobody could
gainsay, but into the wrathy silence which followed, one member of the
House rose to his feet and let the cat right out of the bag. If women
were given church authority, he said, they would refuse to accept
their husbands' authority in their homes, and England would go to rack
and ruin. This is one of the few recorded occasions when a taboo-er so
far forgot himself, and American church potentates do not like to be
reminded of it. Within a month, one of the Protestant sects in this
country has given women the right to hold minor offices, but three
others, in general convention, refused even to consider it.
Again we are going to rest our case on selected instances, and return
to a consideration of how these walled-in women have learned to live
comfortably and with some self-respect behind the garrison wall. It is
this, after all, which they must now teach their men.
The first thing that happened to the woman who married was that she
became legally non-existent. But though she was scratched off the
public books, she couldn't exactly be scratched out of her husband's
scheme of general well-being. Neither could the race make great
strides without her. After everything in the world had been done to
make her as harmless as possible, she still remained non-ignorable.
Two courses were open to her; and she has always used whichever of the
two was necessary at the time. She could be so sweet and beguiling, so
full of blandishments, that man rushed out to bring her all and more
than she had been prohibited from having. Or she could terrify him,
both by her temper and her biological superiority, into stopping his
entire precious machinery against her, and thanking his stars that he
could get off with a whole skin.
Of course these things have not always worked out just so. There have
been the tragic mischances. But in the main, an oppressed people learn
how to outsmile or outsnarl the oppressor. The Eighteenth Amendment
may yet live to wish it was dead. Mr. Volstead seems to have believed
that the nonsenseorship game was new and exciting, and could be
trusted to carry itself by storm. Not while the ancient wisdom of
long-borne bans and communicadoes looked out of the female eye. There
was a body of experts in existence of whom, apparently, he had never
even heard.
He never once thought how the twentieth century was to become known as
the Century of The Home, with the home brew, and the subscription
editions, and the sagacities of women. If he should complain that
there is no honor and fine living in all of this, we shall have to
agree with him. But we can answer that by guile we have preserved our
joys, and cleared our way out from the shadows of his big totem pole.
If we have but little magnificence, we have as much as anybody can
ever have who is hounded by the legal virtues. And if we may keep a
little gaiety for life, by that much do we make him bite the dust. It
isn't pretty, but it's art.
OWED TO VOLSTEAD
[Illustration: Wallace Irwin composing under the influence of synthetic
gin and Andrew Volstead.]
WALLACE IRWIN
I--_First Round_
Prune extract and bright alcohol, so wooden
One kills its flavor in rank fusel oil!
C2-H3-HO--a rather good 'un
To mix with fruity syrups in our toil
To give our social meetings after dark
Their necessary spark!
And you, most heavenly twins,
Born of one mother--
Although our woe begins
When, through our mortal sins,
We can't tell which from 'tother--
Ethyl
And Methyl!
Like Ike
And Mike
Strangely you look alike.
Like sisters I have met
You're very hard to tell apart--and yet
The one consoles more gently than a wife;
The other turns and cripples you for life.
Such spirits as these, and many more I summon
From many a poisoned tin,
Or many a bottle falsely labelled "Gin."
Or many a vial pathetic,
Yclept "Synthetic."
Like Dante on his joy-ride Seeing Hell,
Fain would I take you down
Through sulphurous fires and caverns bilious brown
Into the Land of Mystery and Smell
Where Satan steweth
And home-breweth
While thirsty hooch-hounds yell
Their blackest curse,
Or worse:
"Vol-darn our souls with each Vol-blasted dram
That burns our throats and isn't worth a dam!
We drink, yet how we dread it--
Vol-stead it!"
They've said it.
II--_Short Intermission to Change Meter_
In Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-three
A. Lincoln set the darkies free;
In Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen
A. Volstead muzzled the canteen
And freed the millions, great and small,
From bondage to King Alcohol.
Was it not thoughtful, good and kind
For such a man of such a mind
To show an interest so grand
In his misguided native land?
And don't these statements illustrate
Our Nation's progress up to date?
We're freedom-loving and we're brave
And simply cannot stand a slave.
And when a crisis needs a man
From Mass, or Tex. or Conn, or Kan.
That man steps forward, firm of chin--
So Andrew Volstead came from Minn.
He came from Minn, to show the world
That gin is wrong
And rye is strong
And Scotch to limbo should be hurled.
Thus with his spotless flag unfurled
He went against the Demon Rum
Who snarled, "I vum!"
Got sort of numb,
Rolled up his eyes, lay down and curled
While all the saints of heaven above
(Including Mr. Bryan's Dove)
Cried "Rah-rah-rah!
And siss-boom-ah!
Three cheers for Health and Christian Love!
But, Andrew dear--
Say, now, look here!
You're not including wine and beer!"
Then Andrew Volstead squared his chin
And answered briefly, "Sin is sin."
No compromise
With the King of Lies!
Both liquor thick and liquor thin
We'll cease to tax
And use the axe
Invented by the Man from Minn.
For right is right and wrong is wrong--
A spell has cursed the world too long.
The curse of drink--
Stop, friends, and think
How, reft of spirits weak or strong,
My Nation will be purified
Of all corruptions vile.
The lamb and lion, side by side,
Will smile and smile and smile.
The workman when his day is o'er
Will hurry to his cottage door
To kiss his loving wife;
He'll lay his wages in her hand
And peace will settle on the land
Without a trace of strife.
The criminals will cease to swarm,
Forgers and burglars will reform
And minor crimes will so abate
That lower courts--now open late--
Will close and let the magistrate
Go to the zoo
Or read _Who's Who_.
In short I do anticipate
A thinner, cooler human race,
Its system cleansed of every trace
Of inner fire
And hot desire
And passions spurring to disgrace.
"'Tis simple," said the Man from Minn.,
"To cure the world of mortal sin--
Just legislate against it."
Then up spake Congress with a roar,
"We never thought of that before.
Let's go!"
And they commenced it.
III--_Tone Picture's Suggesting Conditions in U. S. A. Some Two
Years After Alcoholic Stimulants Had Been Legislated out of
Business_
1
Grandma's sitting in her attic,
Oiling up her automatic.
Mid-Victorian is her style,
Prim yet gentle is her smile
As she fits the cartridges
One by one, and softly says:
"Grandson is a Dry Enforcer.
Grandpa is a Legger--
All for one and one for all--
I'll never die a beggar.
Bill brings booze from Montreal,
Grandpa lets him through--
Oh, life's been rosy for us folks
Since the red-light laws went blue."
2
Pretty Sadie, aged fourteen,
To a lamp-post clings serene.
"What's the matter?" some may ask.
On her hip she wears a flask
Labelled "Tonic for the Hair"--
"Hic," says Sadie, "we should care!"
"Father is a corner druggist--
Why should I abstain?
Brother is a counterfeiter,
Printing labels plain.
I can buy grain alcohol
As all the neighbors do;
And if you treat me right I'll lend
My formula to you."
3
Sits the plumber, man of metal.
Joining gas-pipes to a kettle.
'Neath the bed his wife is lying
Rather silent--she is dying
From some gin her husband gave her.
He's too busy now to save her.
"Things," he sings, "are looking upward;
I am making stills.
Soon we'll cook the stuff by wholesale,
Running twenty 'mills.'
What we make and how we make it
Doesn't cut no ice.
Anything you sell in bottles
Brings the standard price."
4
In the gutter, quite besotted,
Lies the drunkard, sadly spotted.
People pass with unmoved faces--
Why remark such commonplaces?
Just another Volstead duckling,
Rolling in the gutter chuckling:
"Over seas of milk and water,
Angels' wings a-flappin',
Now we're purified and holy,
Things like me can't happen.
Liquor's gone and gone forever--
Even the word is lewd:
Otherwise there's somethin' makes me
Feel like I was stewed."
IV--_Finale--A Short Interview with the Human Stomach_
Last night as I lay on my pillow,
Last night when they'd put me to bed
I spoke to my dear little tummy
And wept at the words that I said:
"My sensitive, beautiful tummy
That once was so rosy and pure!
My dainty, fastidious tummy--
O what have you had to endure?
"You once were inclined to be fussy;
You turned at inferior rye;
You moped at a dubious vintage
And shrieked if the gin wasn't dry.
"But now you are covered with bunions
And spongy and morbid and blue;
You bite in the night like an adder--
O say, what has happened to you?"
Then my sullen and sinister tummy
Rose slowly and spoke to my brain;
"Say, boss, what's the stuff you've been drinking
That fills me with nothing but pain?
"Today you had 'cocktails' for luncheon--
They tasted like sulphured cologne.
They--were followed by poisonous highballs
That fell in my depths like a stone.
"I am dripping with bootlegger brandy,
I ooze with synthetical gin;
And the beer that you make in the kitchen--
Ah, dire are the wages of sin!
"The cursed saloon has departed,
And well we are rid of the plague;
But I'm weary of furniture polish
With the counterfeit label of Haig.
"Yea, gone is the old-fashioned brewery
And the gilded cafe is no more...."
Here my tummy jumped over the pillow
And fell in a fit on the floor,
THE CENSORSHIP OF THOUGHT
[Illustration: Robert Keable urging the Automaton called Citizen to turn
on his oppressor.]
ROBERT KEABLE
I knew a man, about a year ago, who published a novel upon which the
critics fell with such fury this side the water at least, that whether
in the body or out of the body, such was ultimately his state of
bewilderment, he could not tell, and if I am asked to discuss
"Prohibitions, Inhibitions and Illegalities" it is natural that the
incident should be foremost in my mind. True, it is becoming
increasingly the fashion for a parson to preach a sermon without
announcing text, but modern preaching, like brief bright brotherly
breezy modern services, does not seem to cut much ice. Therefore we
will hark back to the manner of our forefathers and take the incident
for a text. It affords an admirable example of nonsenseorship.
As is always done in approved sermons (but humbly entreating your
forbearance, which is less common) let us consider the context, let us
review the circumstances of the case in point. Our author left the
lonely heart of Africa for the theatre of war in France. He left a
solitude, a freedom, a beauty, of which he had become enamoured, for
that assemblage of all sorts of all nations, in a cockpit of din and
fury, known as the Western Front. He expected this, that, and the
other; mainly he found the other, that, and this. Being desirous of
serving the God of things as they are, he pondered, he observed, and,
his heart burning within him, he wrote. He had no opportunity of
writing in France, so he wrote on his return, away up in the
Drakensberg mountains, alone, with the clean veld wind blowing about
him and the nearest town an hour's ride away, and that but three
houses when he reached it. He had seen vivid things and it chanced he
was able to write vividly. There were twenty chapters in his novel and
he wrote them in twenty days.
The novel finished, the MS. of it was despatched to nine publishing
firms in succession, who silently but swiftly refused it. It only went
to the tenth at all because there is luck in a round number, and it
found a home because it found a free man. On the eve of its
appearance, it was hung up for a month because it was felt that
whereas the booksellers might display a book containing a certain
passage which referred to a woman's bosom, they would not do so if it
contained a plural synonym. (I offer abject apologies for these
dreadful details.) And when it finally appeared, the main portion of
the English Press cried to heaven against it, and a smaller section
clamoured for disciplinary action. For a hectic month the author, who
had simply and plainly written of things as they were, honestly
without conception that anyone existed who would doubt their truth or
the obvious necessity for saying them, sat amazed before the storm.
Now that incident, unimportant to the world at large as it is, does
afford an admirable example of that censorship which is about us at
every turn. True, in this case, the official censor remained silent.
Although prepared to read passages from Holy Scripture in the
witness-box, and challenge a denial of the facts, the author was not
called upon to do so. He had previously given slight hints of the
truth about the racial situation in South Africa in another book and
had had that volume censored out of existence, but perhaps because
this present work merely touched on morals the official censor decided
to give him rope with which to hang himself.
He was hung, of course, rightly and convincingly, hung by the neck
till he was dead. Thus a clergyman who took the book from a
circulating library because of its Scriptural title, and whose
daughters wrapped it in _The Church Times_ and read it over the
week-end, declined to meet him at dinner. A bishop cut him in the
street. Very rightly and properly too. The book honestly, simply,
undisguisedly, told the truth. Since then America has been good enough
to recognise it.
But this is at least the first consideration of British censorship
today: it must suppress the truth about most of the important things
in life. Take the allied case of the Unknown Warrior. We are told that
he was a crusader, that he was glad to die in a noble cause, that his
valour deserved the Victoria Cross and his religion Westminster Abbey.
In short he was a saint. But, one protests (a bit bewildered because
it sounds so good) that was not the man I knew. The man I knew lived
next door and was a damned good chap. The man I knew chucked up his
business and left his home and risked his life because everybody was
doing it, because it seemed there was a real mess-up, because one had
to.
Also, it was a change. Oddly enough, Adam goes out from a modern
office or a modern factory in order to hoe up weeds in the sweat of
his brow and in danger of his life with barely a regret for the
Paradise he has to leave. Besides Eve went with him. God, there were
Eves in France! Women who knew how to make a man forget, women who
didn't count the cost, women who loved for love's sake. And for this
and other causes, the Unknown Warrior was extraordinarily bored at
having to die, except that he came not to care so much so long as he
was sure he was only to be asked to die. As for his valour--Well, said
he, it's no use grousing, and if it's a question of bayonets, it had better
be mine in the other chap's stomach. Besides we English-speaking
peoples don't shout about our valour. And as for religion--Well,
if there's a God why doesn't He stop this bloody war, or, anyway,
where the blazes is He?
There you are. It's abominable to write like that. Here it is in
print; isn't it disgraceful? You see, it happens to be true. But if
men said that, loud enough and enough of them, there would be no more
wars. No more wars? There would be no more Downing Street either, and
an American army would march, as like as not, on Washington.
Disgraceful! It's so disgraceful that I am not sure, as I write, that
this article will ever be printed.
Now since the War it is noticeable that the spirit of censorship has
very visibly increased its activities among us. There is little doubt
of that and there is little doubt of the reason for it. The War, by
tearing down shams and by stripping men and women to the essentials,
forced many to see things as they are. The old lies were no use in
that hour, nor the old conventions and beliefs. Men learned to look
beyond them, and they learned not to be afraid to look. Partly it was
no use being afraid in the War and men got out of the habit, and
partly, having looked, they saw something so much better ahead. Or
again the trend of modern civilisation was so unarguably revealed in
all the stark horror of its inhumanity that men saw suddenly that it
was better to be brave and revolt and be killed than be cowardly and
submit and live.
A great many of those who saw did not survive to tell the tale, but
some did. There are more men and women about today who are not to be
put off with humbugs than ever there were before. Such folk make up an
element in Society which the censors know to be something more than
dangerous. They are men who cannot easily be bribed for they have seen
through the worth of the bribe, who cannot be intimidated because they
no longer fear, and who cannot be cheated because they have seen true
values. Hence your new censorship and its methods. Rebels must be
drowned in a babble of words. They must be suppressed by the action of
the unthinking masses rolled up upon them. They must be ground to
powder lest they should turn the world upside down.
That, then, is the basis of censorship. Fear. You can do most things
in England today except tell the truth, or, at any rate, except tell
the truth in such a way that people will believe you. At the time of
the French Revolution there was a broadsheet in circulation which
showed on one side Louis XVI in his coronation robes. He was a fine
figure of a man. His flowing wig descended majestically to his broad
shoulders and his shapely leg, thrust forth, dominated a world. But on
the reverse, a pimply shrunken figure emerged from the bath. Shortly
after publication they had a revolution in France.
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