K
KARACTERS
A Portrait: She will never be able to build a house. She hops herself up on crazy arrogance at intervals and wanders around in the woods chopping down everything that looks like a tree {vide: sixteen or twenty short stories in the last year, all of them about as interesting as the average high-school product and yet all of them “talented”). When she comes near to making a clearing, it looks too much to her like all the other clearings she’s ever seen, so she fills it up with rubbish and debris and is ashamed even to speak of it afterwards. Driven, ordered, organized from without, she is a very useful individual—but her dominant idea and goal is freedom without responsibility, which is like gold without metal, spring without winter, youth without age, one of those maddening, coo-coo mirages of wild riches which make her a typical product of our generation. She is by no means lazy, yet when she chops down a tree she calls it work—whether it is in the clearing or not. She makes no distinction between work and mere sweat—less in the last few years since she has had arbitrarily to be led or driven.
Someone who was as if heart and brain had been removed and were kept in a canopic vase.
Lonsdale: “You don’t want to drink so much because you’ll make a lot of mistakes and develop sensibility and that’s a bad trait for business men.”
He had once been a pederast and he had perfected a trick of writing about all his affairs as if his boy friends had been girls, thus achieving feminine types of a certain spurious originality.
A dignity that would have been heavy save that behind it and carefully overlaid with gentleness, something bitter and bored showed through.
There was, for instance, Mr. Percy Wrackham, the branch manager, who spent his time making lists of the Princeton football team, and of the second team and the third team; one busy morning he made a list of all the quarterbacks at Princeton for thirty years. He was utterly unable to concentrate. His drawer was always full of such lists.
He abandoned the younger generation which had treated him so shabbily, and, using the connections he had made, blossomed out as a man of the world. His apprenticeship had been hard, but he had served it faithfully, and now he walked surefooted through the dangerous labyrinths of snobbery. People abruptly forgot everything about him except that they liked him and that he was usually around; so, as it frequently happens, he attained his position less through his positive virtues than through his ability to take it on the chin.
He was a warrior; for him, peace was only the interval between wars, and peace was destroying him.
“Against my better judgment,” he would say, having no judgment, and “obviously” and “precisely.”
From the moment when, as a boy of twenty, his handsome eyes had gazed off into the imaginary distance of a Griffith Western, his audience had been really watching the progress of a straightforward, slow-thinking, romantic man through an accidentally glamorous life.
A young lady “in pictures” who once, in the boom days of 1919, had been almost a star. It had been announced in the movie magazines that she was to “have her own company,” but the company had never materialized. The second girl did interviews with “cinema personalities”—interviews which began, “When one thinks of Lottie Jarvis, one pictures a voluptuous tigress of a woman.”
He has a dark future. He hates everything.
But if they haven’t, it all comes out the same. Only if they control themselves, they forget their emotion, and so they think they haven’t missed anything.
“Don’t get the idea that Seth doesn’t ask anything. He’s lived all his life off better minds than his own.”
Nicole’s attitude toward sickness was either a sympathy toward a tired or convalescent relation who didn’t need it— a sympathy which therefore was mere sentimentality, or else a fear when they were absolutely threatened with death. Toward real sickness—dirty, boring, unsympathetic—she could control no attitude—she had been brought up selfish in that regard. Often this was a source of anger and contempt to Dick.
Idea about Nicole [that she] can do everything, extroverts toward everything save people. So earth, flowers, pictures, voices, comparisons. [She] seems to writhe—no rest wherever she turns, like a tom-tom beat. Escapes over the line, where in fantasy alone she finds rest.
No first old man in an amateur production of a Victorian comedy was ever more pricked and prodded by the daily phenomena of life than was—
Mrs. Rogers’ voice drifted off on an indefinite note. She had never in her life compassed a generality until it had fallen familiarly on her ear from constant repetition.
Instinct of Peggy Joyce collecting jewelry instead of bonds.
List of Troubles:
Heart burn
Eczema
Piles
Flu
Night Sweats
Alcoholism
Infected Nose
Insomnia
Ruined Nerves
Chronic Cough
Aching Teeth
Shortness of Breath
Falling Hair
Cramps in Feet
Tingling Feet
Constipation
Cirrhosis of the Liver
Stomach Ulcers
Depression and Melancholia
He was wearing old white duck trousers with a Spanish flare and a few strange coins nodding at their seams, and a striped Riviera sweater, and straw shoes from the Bahamas, and an ancient Mexican hat. It was, for him, a typical costume, Diana thought. Always at Christmas she arranged to get him some odd foreign importation from parts as far away as possible from Loudoun County.
When I like men I want to be like them—I want to lose the outer qualities that give me my individuality and be like them. I don’t want the man; I want to absorb into myself all the qualities that make him attractive and leave him out. I cling to my own innards. When I like women I want to own them, to dominate them, to have them admire me.
Like so many “men’s women,” she hid behind girls when available, as if challenging a man to break through and rescue her. Any group she was with became automatically a little club, protected by her frail, almost ethereal strength—tensile strength of thin fine wires.
The old woman afraid of aeroplanes.
When he was despised, it was rather more than usually annoying,—the last stages of throwing him over, I mean. For he knew it as soon as, if not sooner, than you, and seemed to hang about analyzing your actual method of accomplishing the business.
Fatality of Beauty: Man who instinctively with people he liked turned the left side of face, the ugly half, had corresponding reaction on brain, spinal chord, etc., and had charm.
Contrariwise, right side of face exact opposite. Perfect— made him self-conscious, paralyzed mental and nervous etc.
To be worked out.
The nervous quarrel between husband and wife, which had already caused sensitive passengers to have their tables changed in the dining salon.
He had a knowledge of the interior of Skull and Bones.
“You were so brave about people, George. Whoever it was, you walked right up to them and tore something aside as if it was in your way and began to know them. I tried to make love to you, just like the rest, but it was difficult. You drew people right up close to you and held them there, not able to move either way.”
Addresses in his pocket—mostly bootleggers and psychiatrists.
Inescapable racial childishness. In the act of enjoying anything, wanted to tell. Sandy, Annabel, etc., trying to get everything out of first meeting.
He seldom exuded liquor because now he had tuberculosis and couldn’t breathe very freely.
Just when somebody’s taken him up and making a big fuss over him, he pours the soup down his hostess’ back, kisses the serving maid and passes out in the dog kennel. But he’s done it too often. He’s run through about everybody, until there’s no one left
“You mustn’t do that, Abe,” protested Mary. “Abe spends half his time living up to engagements he makes when he’s tight. This spring in Paris he used to take dozens of cards and scraps of paper out of his pockets every morning, all scrawled with dates and obligations. He’d sit and brood over them for an hour before he dared tell me who was coming to lunch.”
“I’ve given parties that have made Indian rajahs green with envy. I’ve had prima donnas break $10,000 engagements to come to my smallest dinners. When you were still playing button back in Ohio, I entertained on a cruising trip that was so much fun that I had to sink my yacht to make the guests go home.”
Mother had explained his faults to Seth and found him extremely understanding.
She wanted to be ringmaster—for a while. In somebody else’s circus—a father’s circus. “Look here, my father owns this circus. Give me the whip. I don’t know how or why I snap it, but my father owns this circus. Give me your mask, clown—acrobat, your trapeze, etc.”
* * * * was a social impressario of considerable ability but her ambition had driven her to please so many worthless people that she had become, so to speak, a sort of lowest common denominator of all her clients.
Zelda on Gerald’s Irishness, face moving first.
Hates old things, the past, Provence. A courtier.
Constance Talmadge on my middle-class snobbishness. Also Fanny Brice.
There is undoubtedly something funny about not being a lady, or rather about being a gold digger. You’ve got to laugh a lot like * * * * and* * * *
Once tried to get up a ship’s party on a ferry boat.
You had to have a head of lettuce and mayonnaise, and she realized vaguely that the latter was seldom found in a wild state. Brought up in apartment hotels and married at the beginning of the delicatessen age, Vivian had not learned to cook anything save a strange fluid that in emergencies she evolved from coffee bean; she was most familiar with the product of the soil in such highly evolved forms as “triple combination sandwiches.” A farm to her was a place where weary butterflies retired with their lovers after the last fade-out in the movies.
Vivian Barnaby was just what her husband had made her, no masterpiece. She was pretty in a plaintive key, so was the child, and momentarily when you first met them you liked them for a certain innocence, a blowy immaturity— momentarily, that was all.
Perhaps a drunk with great bursts of sentimentality or resentment or maudlin grief.
He saw men acutely and he saw them small, and he was not invariably amused—it was obvious that his occasional dry humor was washed over the brim of an over-full vessel. Francis’ first instinct was to defer to him as to an older man, a method of not bothering him, but he saw that Herkimer turned away from delicacy even more than from the commonness to which he was adjusted.
Roscoe’s gestures increasingly large and increasingly fall short. Again he “hates old things.”
Greatest vitality goes into displeasure and discontent.
Irving—on the bust at fifty.
He said that, no matter what happened, he always carried about his own can of olive oil. He had a large collection of lead soldiers and considered Ludendorf’s memoirs one of the greatest books ever written. When McKisco said that history was already ruined by too much about war, Monsieur Brugerol’s mouth twisted fiercely under his hooked nose, and he answered that history is a figured curtain, hiding that terrible door into the past through which we all must go.
Capable of imaginative rudeness.
Mother always waiting in waiting-rooms an hour early, etc., pulled forward by an irresistible urge of boredom and vitality.
* * * * talks in several more syllables than she thinks in.
He was one of those men who had a charger; she always knew it was tethered outside, chafing at its bit. But now, for once, she didn’t hear it, though she listened for the distant snort and fidgeting of hoofs.
Like most men who do not smoke, he was seldom still, and his moments of immobility were more taut and noticeable.
Someone with a low voice who feels humble about it.
About a man looking as if he was made up for a role he couldn’t play.
Mrs. Smith had been born on the edge of an imaginary precipice and had lived there ever since, looking over the precipice every half hour in horror, and yet unable to get herself away.
Surprised that a creature so emotionally tender and torn as himself should have been able to set up such strong defenses around his will.
My father is very much alive at something over a hundred, and always resents the fact that the fathers of most of the principal characters in my books are dead before the book begins. To please him, I once had a father stagger in and out at the end of the book, but he was far from flattered— however, this is a short word on money-lending. Father passed on to me certain ineradicable tastes in poetry: The Raven and The Bells, The Prisoner of Chillón.
One button always showed at the front of his trousers.
Family explained or damned by its dogs.
Girl’s tenderness against man’s bogus humility.
The drunk on Majestic and his hundred yard dash.
Bogus girl who reads Ulysses—Wharton gives her a pain in the eye.
As to Ernest as a boy: reckless, adventurous, etc. Yet it is undeniable that the dark was peopled for him. His bravery and acquired characteristics.
All girls know some way to kill time, but * * * * knows all the ways.
I never know what * * * * is—I only know what she’s like. This year she seems to have a certain community of purpose with the Scarlet Pimpernel.
For * * * * Communism is a spiritual exercise. He’s making it his own.
* * * * : An intellectual simpleton: He pleases you, not by direct design, but because his desire to please is so intense that it is disarming. He pleases you most perhaps when his very words are irritants.
Boy from the Tropics: That wonderful book Soldiers of Fortune was a “gross misrepresentation.” He was least objectionable when he talked about what they did to Igorrotes and how there were natives in the backhills of Luzon who had tails of real fur.