Books: Nonsenseorship
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G. G. Putnam >> Nonsenseorship
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The preachers are wasting their time when they rail that the flappers
are painting their faces like "fallen women." Of course they are
painting them that way--for the very good reason that mankind has
demonstrated too unmistakably that that kind of woman has "a way with
her."
Not so long ago cosmetics became a moral issue. The curl rag was the
only beautifier that somehow never lost its odor of sanctity--and that
was doubtless because curl rags were a perfectly logical part of the
long-sleeved Canton flannel nightgown civilization. Curls couldn't be
so very wrong when they were so frightfully unbecoming in the making.
And so the "good woman" handed over intact to her weaker sister every
beautifier that the world had been eight thousand years accumulating.
Slowly, timidly the allurements returned. The talcum powder bought for
baby surreptitiously reached the nose. When the half generation ago
was young, we had adopted a certain lip salve, just one shade darker
than the way lips come, explaining, to save our reputations, that we
were keeping our lips from chapping. Rouge too had come coyly,
back--but--and here's the gist of the whole matter--in polite society
paint was put on to imitate nature.
We were still doing our make-up as man conducted his double life--with
intent to deceive the general public. We still belonged at heart to
the Puritan era, in spite of our wicked fox-trot. All may have been
artificial below the neck, from our Gossard corsets with their phalanx
of garters on to our hobble skirts. But above the neck, we pretended
it was natural.
The flapper has changed all that. She has turned the lady up side
down, as well as the world. For the flapper is _au naturale_
below the neck. Above the neck she is the most artificially and
entertainingly painted creature that has graced society since Queen
Elizabeth. With one bold stroke of a passionately red lip stick, she
has painted out Elaine the Fair and the later-day noble Christie Girl
and painted in an exotic young person, meet to compete alike with a
Ziegfield show girl, with a heaven-born Egyptian princess or even a
good Queen Bess, who could not move her face after it was dressed up
for the morning. And Bess was the Virgin Queen. The American-Victorian
is indeed the only era in history when cosmetics became a moral issue.
Even in dour Cromwellian England, rouge registered the wrong politics
but not immorality. We are merely getting back to normalcy in
cosmetics--back behind the dun wall of the Victorian era.
And it is the flapper who has done it for us. What's more, she has
done it frankly and purposefully--because the reformer, in his naive
innocence, has explained to her that what she is doing is wicked and
will get that kind of "results." Similarly those of 'em who had not
yet taken off their corsets at dances, promptly did so when shocked
elders began repeating the corset checking story. Dear heart, the only
reason that they had not done so before was because the little dears
hadn't heard that the worst people were using ribs instead of
whalebone that season.
Vice would die out from disuse, if the reformers did not advertise.
THE WOWZER IN THE SOUTH SEAS
[Illustration: Frederick O'Brien finds the South Seas purified and
beautified by the Missionaries.]
FREDERICK O'BRIEN
All over the South Seas the censor has had his day. From New Guinea to
Easter Island, he has made his rules and enforced them. Often he wrote
glowing pages of prose and poetry about his accomplishments, for
reading in Europe and America. He was usually sincere, and determined.
He felt that it was up to him to make over the native races to suit
his own ideas of what pleased God and himself. When he had the lower
hand, he prayed and strove in agony to change the wicked hearts of his
flock to Clapham or Andover standards; he suffered the contumelies of
heathen jibes, and now and again--often enough to make a cartoon
popular--he was hotpotted or baked on hot stones as a "long pig." When
he converted the king or chief, and he always directed his sacred
ammunition at the upper classes, he took advantage of every inch of
spiritual and governmental club put in his hand, and smote the pagan
hip and thigh. His sole effort was to make the South Seas safe for
theocracy, and to _strafe_ Satan.
Of course, he was a missionary. It is doubtful if any other urge than
a religious one could have infused into those canny migrants of the
past century the extraordinary zeal that characterized their singular
labors in the exquisite and benighted isles of the tropics.
To leave the melancholy and futuristic atmosphere of seminaries and
bethels where the ghosts and penalties of millions of sins cast down
their hearts, where few baths and drab clothes, dark homes and poor
food, made all conscious of dwelling in a vale of tears, and after
half a year or more of hard, ship fare and the rough discipline of a
tossing windjammer, to find themselves in the most magnificent scenes
on the globe, and amid the richest bounty, was trial enough of the
unstable soul of man. That they--most of them--resisted the
temptations of the tropical demon, that they continued to preach fire
and brimstone, to remain flocked and shod, pantaletted and stayed, is
proof enough of their cementation to the rock of ages.
The men were even subjected to direr spells. They were youths, the
rude boys of farm and hamlet, schooled in simple studies, untried by
the wiles of siren blandishments. If married, their courtships had
been without passion, and their wedded years without competition, and
generally without other incidents than children.
A typical union of this kind I find in an old diary of the wife of one
of the most famous propagandists of the American God in Polynesia. He
was of Yale and Andover, and she of Bradford, the daughter of a
Marlboro deacon. She was twenty-four and he a little older when her
cousin called upon her at her Marlboro home, to ask if she would
"become connected with a missionary now an entire stranger, attach
herself to a little band of pilgrims, and visit the distant land of
Hawaii."
"What could I say? We thoroughly discussed the subject. Next week is
the anticipated, dreaded interview of final decision. Last night I
could neither eat nor close my eyes in sleep."
The suitor came. "The early hours of the evening were devoted to
refreshments, to free family sociality, to singing, and to evening
worship. Then one by one the family dispersed, leaving two of similar
aspirations, introduced as strangers, to separate at midnight as
interested friends.
"In the forenoon, the sun had risen high in the heavens, when it
looked down upon two of the children of earth giving themselves wholly
to their heavenly Father, receiving each other from his hand as his
good gift, pledging themselves to each other as close companions in
the race of life, consecrating themselves and their all to a life-work
among the heathen."
After six months on the wave, she approaches the "land of darkness
whither I am bound. When I reflect on the degradation and misery of
the inhabitants, follow them into the eternal world, and forward to
the great day of retribution, all my petty sufferings dwindle to a
point."
They anchor, and "soon the islanders of both sexes came paddling out
in their canoes, with their island fruit. The men wore girdles, and
the women a slight piece of cloth wrapped around them, from the hips
downward. To a civilized eye their covering seemed to be revoltingly
scanty. But we learned that it was a full dress for daily occupation."
The note of nudity this really remarkable woman struck at her first
sight of the welcoming savages, was the keynote of the new domination
of the islands from Hawaii to Australia. The censors were convinced
that it was a state of ungodliness. Their reasoning was based on the
fig leaf tied about them by the first man and woman when they became
conscious of sin, and it proceeded to the logical teaching that the
less of the body exposed the more godly the condition. When they found
this nakedness associated with a relation of the sexes utterly opposed
to their own, and when, especially, the first white wives on the South
Sea beaches, found the joyous, handsome, frolicsome women of the
islands, making ardent love to their husbands, the innate heinousness
of bodily bareness became fixed as a guiding star towards bringing the
infidel to the true worship.
Clothe them and sanctify them, became the motto. From the wondrous
Marquesas valleys to the American naval station of Samoa, the bonnet,
the bonnet of a half century ago, is the requirement of decency in the
coral or bamboo church, as it is in the temples of New York. The
nightgown or Mother Hubbard of Connecticut became the proper female
attire for natives in the house of God, and thus, by gradual
establishment of a fashion, in their straw homes, and everywhere.
Chiefesses were induced to don calico, and chiefs the woolen or denim
trousers of refinement. The trader came to sell them, and so business
followed the Bible. Tattooing, which, with the Polynesians and
Melenesians, was probably a race memory of clothing in a less tropical
clime, was condemned bitterly by the white censors as causing nudity.
A man or woman whose legs and body were covered with marvellous
arabesques and gaudy pictures of palms and fish was not apt to hide
them under garments.
And here the censor also had an ally in the trader. The two joined,
unwittingly, to break down both the old morale of the pagan and the
new morality of the converts. The censorious cleric said that the Lord
disliked nakedness, or, at least, that unclothedness was unvirtuous,
while the seller of calico and alcohol advised the purchase of his
goods for the sake of style. He ridiculed tattooing and nudity, but he
also laughed with ribaldry at the religious arguments. The confused
indigene, driven by admonition and shame put on the hot and griming
stuffs, and finally, had them kept on him by statute. The censor in
the South Seas achieved his highest reach of holy effort. He had made
into law the _mores_ his sect or tribe had coined into morals,
and was able to punish by civil tribunal the evildoers who refused to
abide by his conception of the divine wish.
But here, old Mother Nature revolted. All over the world it would
appear that she is not in touch with the divinity that shapes the ends
of the censors. The clothing donned by the natives of the South Seas
killed them. They sweated and remained foul; they swam, and kept on
their garments; they were rained on, and laid down in calico and wool,
They abandoned the games and exercises which had made them the finest
physical race in the world, and took up hymn books and tools. The
physical plagues of the whites decimated them. They passed away as the
_tiar้_ Tahiti withers indoors. The censored returned to the rich
earth which had bred them, and taught them its secrets and demands.
Only a mournful remnant remains to observe the censorship.
But the curious spirit of inversion which tries to make the assumed
infinite of a finite nature, which had sacrificed a race to an
invented god, persists even in the South Seas. One of the most
distinguished authors, who has chosen that delectable clime for his
researches was arrested for napping on his own _paepae_ partly
clothed. The parson informed upon him, and the _gendarme_ fined
him. In the British South Seas, where I was recently, prohibition had
cast a blight upon the more poetical whites. I remember one night when
my vessel was anchored for a few hours in the roadstead of a lonely
island, a group of civil servants and a minister of the Church of
England had come aboard to buy what comforts they might from our
civilized caravan. They sat on deck clinking glasses occasionally,
talking of cities where a man might be freed from the "continuous
spying of the uncoo good." That was the phrase they used, being
English or Scots, and when the word was passed that we up-anchored
with the turn of the tide at midnight, they sang in a last burst of
lively furor a song of Dionysian regret. One stanza lingers with me:--
Whack the cymbal! Bang the drum!
Votaries of Bacchus!
Let the popping corks resound,
Pass the flowing goblet round!
May no mournful voice be found,
Though wowzers do attack us!
In the darkness I called to them as they went down the gangway into
their boat, "What is a wowzer?"
"'E's a bloomin' ---- 'oo wants to do unto others wot 'e's bleedin'
well done to 'imself."
The wowzers are more active in Hawaii, the most temperate portion of
Polynesia, than in the Maori isles of New Zealand. A law passed at the
last session of the Hawaiian legislature prohibits "any person over
fourteen years of age from appearing upon the streets of Honolulu in a
bathing suit unless covered suitably by an outer garment reaching at
least to the knees." There is a ferment in Honolulu over the arrest
and punishment of offenders against this new censorship. It is the
result of the control by the spiritual, or perhaps, lineal,
descendants of the first South Sea censors, of the great
grand-children of those men who wore the girdles of leaves at the
landing of the Marlboro school teacher a hundred years ago. The
girdle-wearers are members of the Hawaiian legislature--soon to be
succeeded by Japanese-native-born--and the censors, likely, are wives
of financiers and sugar factors. Again the feeble remnant of the
Hawaiian race voted against the girdle.
A friend of mine, grandson of the estimable missionary and his bride
of the New England of a century ago, thus comments upon the law in a
paper sent to me:--
The facts which caused the passage of the law were, that certain
residents of Waikiki were donning their bathing suits at home, walking
across and along the public streets to the sea and returning in the
same state of undress.
If the bathing suits had been of the old-style no objection to this
would have been made. The woman's bathing suit of the olden days were
a cumbrous swaddling garment, high-necked, long-sleeved, full-skirted,
bloomer-breeched and stockinged.
Simultaneously with the outbreak of the street parade era, above
noted, there came with spontaneous-combustion-like rapidity, a radical
change in the style of female bathing suits "on the street at
Waikiki."
First the sleeves, then the stockings, then the skirts, then the main
portion of the garment covering the legs, successively disappeared,
until the low-necked, sleeveless, legless one-piece suit became "the
thing"; and women clad in garments scantier than the scantiest on the
ballet stage, were parading Kalakaua avenue in the vicinity of the
Moana hotel, to the scandal and disgust of some; the devouring gaze of
others; and the interested inspection of whomsoever chose to inspect!
It was a startling sight to the uninitiated--probably unduplicated in
any other civilized country.
The South Pacific or the heart of Africa would probably have to be
visited to find virtuous women so scantily clad, making such
exhibition of their persons in public-more particularly on the public
streets.
This scantiness of dress became the subject of protest, of
justification, of discussion in press, in public and in private
throughout the community.
The practice was violently attacked as tending to lewdness and
scandal; as vigorously defended as a question of personal taste and
liberty, and as a matter concerning safety and comfort in swimming.
Those "old-style suits" he refers to, "full-skirted, bloomer-breeched"
were the godly ones brought to Hawaii by the censors, but which
gradually disappeared with the influx of rich tourists from America,
and the importation by Honolulu merchants of the flimsier and less
concealing kind. This new generation of whites that has sought escape
from the "cumbrous, swaddling garment" embraces the flapper, who at
Waikiki is a beautiful and wholesome sight. Browned by years of
exposure to the beach sun, charmingly modelled, and with the grace and
freedom of limb of the surf-board rider and canoeist, she has no
consciousness of guilt in her emergence dripping from the sea, in her
lying in the breeze upon the sand, nor in her walks to and from her
bungalow nearby. And she refuses to be censored.
The commentator, proprietor of the oldest newspaper in the islands,
and himself a noted diplomat, lawyer and revolutionist--he took up a
rifle against Liliuokalani--says so:--
The law has been observed by a few, ignored by a few, and caricatured
by the many. It is not an uncommon thing to see a woman walking the
streets in Waikiki in the scantiest of bathing suits, with drapery of
the flimsiest suspended from her shoulders and floating behind upon
the breeze.
The police have made a few feeble and spasmodic attempts to persuade
observance of the law, with some ill-advised attempts to enforce
individual ideas of propriety on the beach itself.
On the whole, the law is either openly and flagrantly violated or
rendered farcical by the contemptuous manner of its semi-observance.
And, cautiously but firmly, the grandson of the first missionaries to
Hawaii, himself living six decades in Honolulu, a church member and
supporter of all evangelical and commercial progress, gives advice to
the people of his territory. Urging that those opposed to the bathing
suit law try legally to secure its repeal, but that all obey it while
it is on the statute books, he says:--
As to the question of attire on the beach, there are modest and
immodest women to be found everywhere, regardless of their clothes. It
is impossible to legislate modesty into a person who is innately
immodest, and it is therefore useless to try and do so. The attire of
a woman on the beach at Waikiki as well as her conduct elsewhere,
should therefore be left to the individual woman herself.
That is the last word of a very shrewd, wealthy, experienced,
religious son of censors. But wowzerism dies hard in America or in the
South Seas. The Anglo-Saxon American has it in his blood as an
inheritance from the rise of Puritanism four hundred years ago, while
with many it is an idiosyncrasy to be explained by the glands
regulating personality. In fact, I feel that this is the enemy the
would-be free must fight. We must attack and extirpate the wowzerary
gland.
REFORMERS: A HYMN OF HATE
[Illustration: Dorothy Parker hating Reformers.]
DOROTHY PARKER
I hate Reformers;
They raise my blood pressure.
There are the Prohibitionists;
The Fathers of Bootlegging.
They made us what we are to-day--
I hope they're satisfied.
They can prove that the Johnstown flood,
And the blizzard of 1888,
And the destruction of Pompeii
Were all due to alcohol.
They have it figured out
That anyone who would give a gin daisy a friendly look
Is just wasting time out of jail,
And anyone who would stay under the same roof
With a bottle of Scotch
Is right in line for a cozy seat in the electric chair.
They fixed things all up pretty for us;
Now that they have dried up the country,
You can hardly get a drink unless you go in and order one.
They are in a nasty state over this light wines and beer idea;
They say that lips that touch liquor
Shall never touch wine.
They swear that the Eighteenth Amendment
Shall be improved upon
Over their dead bodies--
Fair enough!
Then there are the Suppressors of Vice;
The Boys Who Made the Name of Cabell a Household Word.
Their aim is to keep art and letters in their place;
If they see a book
Which does not come right out and say
That the doctor brings babies in his little black bag,
Or find a painting of a young lady
Showing her without her rubbers,
They call out the militia.
They have a mean eye for dirt;
They can find it
In a copy of "What Katy Did at School,"
Or a snapshot of Aunt Bessie in bathing at Sandy Creek,
Or a picture postcard of Moonlight in Bryant Park.
They are always running around suppressing things,
Beginning with their desires.
They get a lot of excitement out of life,--
They are constantly discovering
The New Rabelais
Or the Twentieth Century Hogarth.
Their leader is regarded
As the representative of Comstock here on earth.
How does that song of Tosti's go?--
"Good-bye, Sumner, good-bye, good-bye."
There are the Movie Censors,
The motion picture is still in its infancy,--
They are the boys who keep it there.
If the film shows a party of clubmen tossing off ginger ale,
Or a young bride dreaming over tiny garments,
Or Douglas Fairbanks kissing Mary Pickford's hand,
They cut out the scene
And burn it in the public square.
They fix up all the historical events
So that their own mothers wouldn't know them.
They make Du Barry Mrs. Louis Fifteenth,
And show that Anthony and Cleopatra were like brother and sister,
And announce Salome's engagement to John the Baptist,
So that the audiences won't go and get ideas in their heads.
They insist that Sherlock Holmes is made to say,
"Quick, Watson, the crochet needle!"
And the state pays them for it.
They say they are going to take the sin out of cinema
If they perish in the attempt,--
I wish to God they would!
And then there are the All-American Crabs;
The Brave Little Band that is Against Everything.
They have got up the idea
That things are not what they were when Grandma was a girl.
They say that they don't know what we're coming to,
As if they had just written the line.
They are always running a temperature
Over the modern dances,
Or the new skirts,
Or the goings-on of the younger set.
They can barely hold themselves in
When they think of the menace of the drama;
They seem to be going ahead under the idea
That everything but the Passion Play
Was written by Avery Hopwood.
They will never feel really themselves
Until every theatre in the country is razed.
They are forever signing petitions
Urging that cigarette-smokers should be deported,
And that all places of amusement should be closed on Sunday
And kept closed all week.
They take everything personally;
They go about shaking their heads,
And sighing, "It's all wrong, it's all wrong,"--
They said it.
I hate Reformers;
They raise my blood pressure.
PROHIBITION
[Illustration: Frank Swinnerton contemplating, from the Tight Little Isle,
the two classes of prigs developed by Prohibition; those who accept it and
those who rebel.]
FRANK SWINNERTON
I shall never forget the shock I received when an American woman,
newly arrived in England, gave me her impressions of London. She was
distinctly pleased with the town, and when I rather foolishly asked if
she had been terrified by our celebrated policemen, she said, "Why,
no. I was in a taxicab yesterday, and the driver went right on past
the policeman's hand, stealing round where he'd no business to go. And
the policeman just said, 'Here, where you going? D'you want the whole
of England?' Why, in New York, if he'd done that, he'd have been in
prison inside of five minutes!"
I wonder if it will be understood how terrible disillusion on such a
scale can be. I had been thinking of the United States for so long as
the home of the free and the easy that it was hard to bring myself to
the belief that the police there were both peremptory and severe. I
had thought them all Irishmen of the humorous, or "darlint" type. It
seems I was mistaken. The little--I am now afraid misleading--
paragraphs which from time to time appear in the English papers,
saying that there has been a hold-up on Fifth Avenue, or that the
Chief of Police in some great city has been found to be the head
of a gang of international assassins, that things called Tammany and
graft and saloons flourish there without let or hindrance, had
attracted me to the United States. I wanted to live in such a country.
Here, I said, is a place where every man's hand is for himself, where
the revolver plays its true part, and where, with the aid of a
humorous Irish policeman, who will find me stunned by a sandbag and
take me to his little home in 244th Street and reveal the fact that he
is descended from Cuchulain, I can be happy.
At first I thought that my friend must be exaggerating. Not lightly
was I prepared to let my dream go. But I am afraid that my confidence
in America as the home of freedom needs a tonic. She may have been
right, although it seems unbelievable. When I thought the problem out
clearly I came to the conclusion that there was a sinister sound about
that comment upon our policemen. Were they losing control of us?
Apparently not. I had trouble on the road with a policeman over the
rear light of my car. There is no doubt that England is efficiently
policed. And so my mind stole back to America with a new uneasiness. I
recollected tales which I had heard about sumptuary laws regulating
the dress of American women, both in and out of the water. I saw the
police invading restaurants and snatching cigarettes from the mouths
of women. I saw drink being driven underground by Prohibition. I began
to question whether I should really like to live in the United States
after all. I asked those of my friends who had been to America.
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