Books: Nonsenseorship
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G. G. Putnam >> Nonsenseorship
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It may be that I am entirely wrong. I do not know. But I do know that
it seems utterly unreasonable to force me to abstain from wine if I
wish it, just because there are a few heavy imbibers of whiskey in the
world. I think it is a far more serious matter to have practically all
of us law-breakers than to have one-half of one per cent of us
drunkards.
Let us have done with insincere, inelastic laws, and get back to
wisdom and truth and sanity.
BOOTLEG
[Illustration: John V. A. Weaver noticing the bartender who has been thrown
out of work by Prohibition.]
JOHN V. A. WEAVER
(With a graceful bow to Don Marquis)
You heard me! How many times I got to tell you?
Them is my words: you leave that girl alone.
Leave her alone, you hear? Leave her alone!
You think I'll have my son foolin' around
A little snippy rat that's all stuck-up,
And thinks my son's not good enough for her?
"Yeh," that's what Bill says, "Yeh, it's like I say;
Ellen is got swell friends up on the Drive;
I'm sorry she had to break a date with Fred.
But still, you know, the world is changed a lot,
And we changed with it. You're about the same,
But me--well, I been gettin' right along,
And honest, Jack, you see the sense yourself--
Why should I let my daughter marry a clerk?"
Can you believe it? Why, I damn near fainted.
His daughter too good for the likes of us!
Of course I got so mad I couldn't see!
Of course I pasted him square in the eye!
And if I catch him sayin' things about me
I'll knock his stuck-up head off! And I tell you,
If you go near the dirty oilcan's place,
And crawl around that snippy brat of his,
I'll kick you out into the street to stay.
You hear that? Eight out in the street you go!
The nerve! The dirty, lousy, low-down crook!
A Bootleg gettin' stuck-up over money!
The world is crazy, that's all there is to it!
Crazy, I tell you! All turned upside-down!
Listen. It's fifteen years I know this Bill.
Them good old days, most every afternoon
On the way home from the lumber yards I'd drop in
And get a beer, and gas around a while.
That was my second home, I useta say,
And Bill's Place was a home you could be proud of.
Say. The old woman never kep' a floor
As clean as Bill's was. And the brass spittoons
And rail-you could of shaved lookin' in one.
And all the glasses polished! And the tables
So neat! And over at the free-lunch counter,
Charlie the coon with a apron white like chalk,
Dishin' out hot-dogs, and them Boston Beans,
And Sad'dy nights a great big hot roast ham,
Or roast beef simply yellin' to be et,
And washed down with a seidel of old Schlitz!
Oh, say, that sure was fun, and don't forget it.
Old Ed, and Tom, and Baldy Frank McGee,
And the two Bentleys, we was all the reg'lars.
It was our meetin'-place. And there we stood,
And Lord! The rows about the government,
And arguin! and all about the country,
How it was goin' to the dogs. And maybe
Somebody'd start a song, and old Pop Dikes
Would have to quit the checker-game in the corner
That him and Fat Connell was always playin',
And never gettin' through. I never seen
No bums come in and stay for more'n a minute;
Bill didn't like to have no drunks around;
He made 'em hit the air. Well, some of us,
Of course, might get just a wee mite too much
Under the belt, but who did that ever hurt?
At least we knowed the licker wasn't poison.
And when somebody would get very lit
Bill was right there to try and make him stop;
I can't see how it ever hurt us any.
And Bill! He was some barkeep! One swell guy!
A pleasant word for everybody, always,
Straight as a string, and just the whole world's friend.
I never saw a guy was liked so much.
He hardly took a drink, just a cigar,
And oncet a while a pony, say, of lager.
And my, the way that bird could tell a story!
Why, many a time I laughed until I cried.
And if it happened I was out of dough,
Bill was right there to make a little loan.
Generous, that was Bill, and one good pal.
A great old place it was, that place of Bill's.
Them was the happy days!-them was the days.
I never will forget that good-bye party
The night that Prohibition was wished on us.
You bet it wasn't any rough-house then.
We all stood 'round the bar, solemn and quiet,
And couldn't hardly think of what to say.
Bill--it was funny what had happened to him.
He didn't crack a smile the whole blame night.
He just would shake his head, and bite his lips,
And gosh, the way his eyes was shootin' fire.
The last thing that he said before I left,
"By God, I'll get back at 'em, you just wait!
I'm closing here. But don't you fret--I'll get 'em--
The dirty, pussy-footin' lousy skunks!"
I had to go home early. And the next day
I seen the wagons comin' to take the bar
And all the furniture. I felt like cryin'.
Well, you know what this prohibition is.
Bill goes away, and stays about three months.
And then one day I meets him on the street.
"Well, Jack," he says, "You want some real good gin?"
"Just what I need," I says. "All right," he says,
"You come down to the house at nine o'clock.
I'll fix you up. I'll give you half a case
Four Bucks a bottle."... "Four a bottle!" I says,
Thinkin' he must be kiddin'. "Sure," he says,
"I got to make my profit. There's the risk.
This is good stuff. I made it by myself.
I guarantee that it won't make you sick."
"I'm sick already, just from hearin' the price.
No thanks. Not now," I says. He says all right,
But when I want some, just remember him.
And so, of course, later I did want some,
And had to pay that much, and even more;
But hell, what can you do? So long's you're sure
The stuff ain't goin' to burn your insides out,
You got to pay the price. And all the friends
That Bill had useta have is customers,
And all get stung the same. And dozens more.
Them old days Bill was one fine friend for sure,
Happy and nice and straight and generous.
And now to think he high-brows you and me!
A great big house he's got, and a new Packard,
And di'monds for his wife, that scrubbed the floors
Back in the days when he was only barkeep.
That's what this Prohibition done for him,
And what's it do for me, I'd like to know?
It makes a crook of me, the same as him,
Only I'm losin' money, and he gets it.
Why, say, I catch myself all of the time
Laughin' about this Prohibition law,
And figgerin' new ways how I could break it.
And that's the way it is with everybody.
We get to see that one law is a joke,
And think it's smart to bust it all to pieces.
And pretty soon there's all the other laws,
And how're you goin' to keep from think' likewise
About a thing like stealin', and all that?
No wonder that we got these here now crime waves!
No wonder everybody is a crook!
But that ain't what I'm sayin' to you now!
You leave that stuck-up little Jane alone!
They's plenty of girls that's pretty in the world--
You leave that dirty oilcan's daughter be.
Ten years ago she used to run around
And rush the can for me and other folks.
Now she's a real swell lady! Damn her eyes,
And Bill's, and them there pussy-footin' fish!
The world is, crazy! And I'm goin' nuts!
High-tonin' me! You hear me? If I catch you
Foolin' around that girl, I kick you out,
So fast you won't know what has ever hit you!
A bootleg's daughter! Hell!
AND THE PLAYWRIGHT
[Illustration: Alexander Woollcott rescuing the Playwright from the awful
shears of the Censor.]
ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT
Every American playwright goes about his work these days oppressed by
a foreboding. He suspects that before long a censor is going to
materialize out of thin air to take stern and morose charge of the
American theatre. It is true that no statutory precipitation of such
an agent has been definitely proposed. It is true that the policeman
from the nearest corner has not gone so far as to drop around and warn
him that he'd better be careful. Nevertheless, he has the foreboding.
He perceives dimly that a desire to chasten the stage is in the air.
And he is right. It, is. It has been ever since the war.
Of course an itch to lay hands on the theatre was begetting
restlessness in the American bosom considerably prior to April 6,
1917. It is part of this country's Puritan inheritance to believe that
playgoing is somehow bad, that an enjoyment and patronage of the
theatre is sinful. This belief flows as an unconscious undercurrent in
the thought even of those clergymen who try pathetically hard to seem
and be liberal and unpharisaical, the kind who always begin their
lectures on Avery Hopwood by saying that they yield to no one in their
admiration and respect for the many splendid ladies and gentlemen of
the stage whom they are proud to number among their acquaintances.
Shaw, in his comparatively mild-mannered preface to "The Showing Up
of Blanco Posnet," recognizes the Puritan hostility to the theatre, but,
somewhat perversely, ascribes it to the fact that the _promenoirs_
have always been used as show-windows by the courtesans of each
generation. I suspect, however, that that hostility was more deeply
rooted. The Puritans disliked the theatre because it was jolly. It was
a place where people went in deliberate quest of enjoyment. And you
weren't supposed to do that on earth. Plenty of time for that later on.
When I was a knee-breeched schoolboy in Philadelphia, some of the more
dissipated of us used to organize Saturday excursions to Keith's old
Eighth Street Theatre, a vaudeville temple known to the natives as the
Buy-Joe. Fortified with a quarter and some sandwiches, one went at
eleven in the morning and hung on till the edge of midnight. To my
genuine surprise and confusion, I gathered that some of our classmates
not only avoided these orgies, but sincerely believed that we, who
indulged in them were simply courting Hell's fire. They stayed at home
and, I suppose, read "Elsie Dinsmore."
It so happens that I never encountered that book during my formative
years, but was in my hopelessly corrupted thirties before ever I saw a
copy. Even then, it did not lack interest. And one passage, at least,
richly rewarded a glance through its pages. It seems that Elsie,
arriving from somewhere, reached some city in the late evening. Her
father (a rakish, devil-may-care fellow who thought it was all right
for Elsie to play the piano on Sunday) met her at the station and
engaged a cabriolet to take her across town to whatever shelter had
been selected for the night. As they were bowling along one of the
principal streets, Elsie noticed a building which the author described
in shuddering accents as having, if I remember correctly, "a lighted
façade." The tone, if not the precise words of the description, rather
suggested that here was a gambling hell whose lower circles were
dedicated to rites of nameless infamy. Elsie shrank back into the
cloistered shadows of the cab. "Oh, father," she cried in hurt
bewilderment, "what kind of place was that?" Smitten, apparently, with
a certain remorse that he had suffered her virginal eyes to reflect so
scabrous a spot, he put a sheltering arm around her and said, sadly:
"That, little daughter, was a THEATRE."
At which limp climax, perhaps, you smile a little. But it is well to
remember that the children who were molded by "Elsie Dinsmore" are now
grown up and can be detected voting warmly at every election. Many of
them kicked over the traces long ago, but there are also many who are
reading Harold Bell Wright today. They admire Henry Ford. They sit
enthralled at the feet of Dr. John Roach Straton. And, not wryly but
with undiscouraged faith, they vote away for the Hylans and the
Hardings of each recurrent crisis. They brought the bootlegger into
existence and, at a rallying cry lifted by anyone against the theatre,
they will come scurrying intently from a thousand unsuspected flats
and two-story houses.
They are the more responsive to such cries since the war. That might
have been foreseen by any one at all familiar with the psychopathology
of reform. A cigarette addict who, in a spartan moment, swears off
smoking, is familiar enough with the inner gnaw that robs him of his
sleep and roils his dinner for days and days. His body, long
habituated to the tobacco, had dutifully taken on the business of
manufacturing its antidote. When the tobacco is abruptly removed, the
body continues for a while to turn out the antidote as usual and
during that while, that antidote goes roaming angrily through the
system, seeking something to oppose and destroy.
A somewhat analogous condition has agitated the body politic ever
since the late Fall of 1918. The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment
had robbed the prohibitionists of their chief excitement; then the
signing of the Armistice took away the glamor of public-spiritedness
from all those good people who had had such a splendid time keeping an
eye on their presumably treasonable neighbors. Behold, then, the Busy
Body (which is in every one of us) all dressed up and nowhere to go.
The itch became tremendous. The moving pictures caught it first. No
wonder the American playwright is uneasy. He ought to be.
He dreads a censorship of the theatre because he suspects (not without
reason) that it will be corrupt, that it will work foolishly, and
that, having taken and relished an inch, it will take an ell.
He is the more uneasy because he realizes that the theatre presents a
special incitement and a special problem--a problem altogether
different from that presented by the bookstall, for instance. The
play, once produced, is open to all the world. It may have been
written with the thought that it would amuse Franklin P. Adams, but it
is attended (in a body) by the Unintelligentsia. It may have been
heavily seasoned in the hope that it would jounce the rough boy of
Baltimore, H. L. Mencken-and lo, there in the third row on the aisle,
is Dr. Frank Crane, being made visibly ill by it. Your playwright may
write a piece to touch the memories and stir the hearts of elderly
sinners, but he has to face the fact that the girls from Miss Spence's
school may come fluttering to it, row on row.
On his desk is a seductive two-volume assemblage of "Poetica Erotica,"
edited by T. R. Smith, the antiquarian. It is a book which, if
flaunted, would agitate the Postmaster General, stir up the Grand
Jury, and make the Society for the Suppression of Vice call a special
mass-meeting. It is managed as a commercial article by a system of
furtive, semi-private sales which probably enhance its value as a
source of revenue and yet shut the mouth of the heirs of Anthony
Comstock. A folder announces that the juicy Satyr icon of Petronius
Arbiter will shortly issue from the same presses. And so on,
endlessly. It is a neat arrangement but one which cannot be imitated
by the playwright. When he wants to be naughty, he must make up his
mind to being naughty right out on the street-corner where every one
can see him.
And though, in the moments when he is disposed to temporize, he
sometimes thinks that suspect plays might, like saucy novels, be first
inspected in manuscript, he knows full well that no such tactics are
really feasible in the theatre. Your publisher, inwardly hot with
resentment, may nevertheless take the occasional precaution of showing
the script of a thin-ice book to the authorities--even to the
self-constituted ones--thereby forestalling prosecution by agreeing to
delete in advance such phrases and incidents as seem likely to agitate
those authorities unduly. But the flavor and significance of a play
depends too much on the manner of its performance and cannot be
clearly forecast prior to that performance any more than the hue of a
goblet can be guessed before the wine is poured. I can testify to
that--I, who in my time, have seen players make a minx out of Ophelia,
a mild-mannered mouse out of Katherine, an honest woman out of Lady
Macbeth and a benevolent old gentleman out of Shylock. I have seen
French players cast as the servants of Petruchio invade "The Taming of
the Shrew" with a comic pantomime in which they fought for their turns
at the keyhole of Petruchio's bedroom wherein Kate was being subjected
to a little off-stage taming. It would have amused Shakespeare
immoderately, I imagine, and certainly it would have surprised him.
Until his piece is spoken, even the author cannot tell--and
thereafter, from night to night, he cannot be sure.
That is why there is the quality of an eternal fable in the pathetic
old tale of the stagehand who had always felt that, if chance would
ever give him even the smallest of rôles, he would show these actors
where their shortcomings were. He would not drone out even the least
important and most perfunctory of speeches. Not he. Into every
syllable he would pour real meaning, real conviction. At last, after
twenty years of yearning from the wings, chance did rush him on as an
understudy. Unfortunately, he was assigned to the role of the page in
"King John," who must march into the throne-room and announce the
approach of Philip the Bastard.
So, it seems apparent that any real supervision of the theatre must
function with relation to produced plays and cannot deal with mere
unembodied and undetermined manuscripts.
Our playwright's suspicion that such supervision, if managed by a
politically appointed censor, would work foolishly, are justified by
all he has heard of such functionaries as they have worked in other
fields and in other lands. This was true of the gag which the doughty
Brieux finally pried off the mouth of the French playwright. It has
certainly been true of the mild and intermittent discipline to which
the remote and slightly puzzled Lord Chamberlain has subjected the
English dramatists. Indeed, when their mutinous mutterings finally
jogged Parliament into inspecting his activities, the Lord Chamberlain
was somewhat taken aback by the tactics of Shaw, who, instead of
hissing him for forbidding public performances of certain Shaw and
Ibsen plays, derided and denounced him instead for the plays he had
_not_ suppressed. And indeed, for every play which the Lord
Chamberlain has suppressed, the old playgoer of London could point to
five which, had he been more intelligent, he might more reasonably
have suppressed in its place.
But after all those scuffles on the Strand do seem part of the strange
customs of a fusty-dusty never-never land. So our American playwright
turns, instead, to the purifications effected nearer home. He looks
apprehensively into the matter of the movies. As an occasional
scenario writer, he has been instructed by bulletins sent out for his
guidance, little watch-your-step leaflets which list the alterations
ordered in earlier pictures by the august Motion Picture Commission of
the State of New York. Most of them are fussy little disapprovals of
language used in the titles. You mustn't say: "I shall kill Lester
Crope." Better say: "I shall destroy the false Lester Crope" or
something like that. You mustn't say "roué." You mustn't say: "I don't
like that rich old roué hanging around you." Better say: "I don't like
that rich old sport." And when, in a moment of self-indulgence, a
title-writer allowed himself the luxury of writing "In a moment of
madness, I wronged a woman," the Censor seems to have turned scarlet
and issued the following order: "Substitute for 'wronged' the word
'offended' or something similar."
"Or something similar." Somehow, that seems to recall an old "Spanish
for Beginners" textbook which bade me not bother with the "tutoyer"
business as it would not be needed during my travels in Spain, unless
I married there "or something similar."
At all events, no playwright can be scoffed at as an alarmist who
ventures to fear that a censorship of the drama will, in practice, be
foolish. At the thought of such frivolous and fatuous blue-pencillings
of his next drama (which is to be his master-piece, by the way) our
playwright becomes profoundly depressed and every time he goes out to
dinner or finds himself with a small, cornered audience at the club,
he winds up the talk on this bugaboo of his.
Out of the resulting prattle, two widespread impressions always come
to the top, two familiar comments on the subject which, whenever
questionable plays are mentioned, seem to emerge as regularly and as
automatically as does the applause which follows the rendition of
Dixie by any restaurant orchestra in New York. Both comments are
absurd.
One comes from the man who can be counted on to say: "They tell me
that show at the Eltinge--What's it called? 'Tickling Tottie's
Tummy?'--well, they say it's pretty raw. Certainly does beat all how
there are some men who just have to see a show soon's they hear it's
smutty. I can't understand it."
This might be called the Comment Ingenuous. A man who never fails to
edge into any group whence the bent head and the hoarse chuckle tells
him that a shady story is on, a man who would have to think hard to
name a friend of his to whom he would not rush with the latest
scandalous anecdote brought in by the drummers from Utica--such a man
will, nevertheless, express a pious surprise when the crowds flock to
see the latest Hopwood farce just because it is advertised as
indecorous. It is not known why he is surprised.
Or, if he is not surprised, then he falls over backward and makes the
Comment Cynical. When he hears that "Under Betty's Bolster" is making
a fortune while "The Grey Iconoclast" is playing to empty benches next
door, he gives a sardonic little laugh (which he reserves for just
such occasions) and says: "Of course. You might have known. Old
Channing Pollock was right when he said: 'Nothing risqué, nothing
gained.' Don't the smutty shows always make money? Doesn't the public
invariably stampede to the most bedridden plays? Isn't the
pornographic play the most valuable of all theatrical properties?"
To which rhetorical questions, the answer in each case, as it happens,
is "No." The blush is not, of course, a bad sign in the box-office.
But the chuckle of recognition is a better one. So is the glow of
sentiment. So is the tear of sympathy. The smutty and the scandalous
have a smaller and less active market than homely humor, for instance,
or melodramatic excitement or pretty sentiment. When "Aphrodite" was
brought here from Paris, it was, for various reasons, impossible to
recapture for the translated dramatization the flavor of abnormal
eroticism which lent the book a certain phosphorescent glow at home.
So its producers relied on lots and lots of nudity to give it réclame
here. At this the Hearst papers did some rather pointed blushing and
the next morning, there was a grand scrimmage at the box-office and
seats were hawked about for grotesque prices. Whereupon the Comment
Cynical could be heard on all sides. But when at the end of the season
or so later, "Aphrodite" was withdrawn with a shortage of a hundred
and ninety thousand dollars or so on its books, the Cynics were too
engrossed with some other play to mention the fact. To be sure that
shortage was more than made up next season on the road, but it ought
to be mentioned that "Aphrodite" knew the indignity of many and many
an empty row in New York.
The great fortunes, as a matter of fact, are made with plays like "Peg
o' My Heart" and "The First Year," both as pure as the driven snow. It
is true that Avery Hopwood has grown rich on his royalties. But not so
rich as Winchell Smith, who has dealt exclusively with sweetness and
light. Also those who laugh most caustically over the Hopwood estate
usually find it convenient to ignore the fact that the greatest single
contribution to it has been made by "The Bat," at which Dr. Straton
might conceivably faint from excitement but at which he would have to
work pretty hard to do any blushing.
So much for the familiar catch-words and their validity. A little
discouraged by the fatuity of all lay discussion, our playwright may
be pictured as retreating to the clubrooms of the American Dramatists
and there finding his fellow-craftsmen all busy as bees on scenarios
overflowing with not particularly original sin. They are turning them
out hurriedly with an "After-me-the-deluge" gleam in their haunted
eyes. Some such despairing courtship of disaster may be needed to
explain the jostling procession of harlots which marked the American
Drama in the season of 1921-1922. An unprecedentedly large percentage
of the heroines had either just been ruined (or were just about to be
ruined) as the first curtain rose. Also the plays wallowed in a
defiant squalor of language which, five years before, would have
called out the reserves.
The privilege to indulge in such didos is not, as a matter of fact,
especially dear to them. They do not really prize unduly the right to
use the word "slut" once in every act. They can even bear up whenever
a law forbids disrobing on the stage. They know that most pruriency in
the theatre derives from the old frustrations sealed up and festering
in the mind of the onlooker who detects it. They suspect, from what
little reading they have managed in the psychology of outlets, that
the more mock-raping there is done on the stage of the local opera
house, the less real raping will be done on the greensward of the
nearest park. But they know, too, that the force of modesty is one of
the strongest and most ancient instincts of civilized man, that
probably it is a sound and healthy one, inextricably involved in the
race's instinct of self-preservation and self-perpetuation. Anyway,
they feel that the discussion draws them into matters unarguable.
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