LEO IS the sign of the Lion. You who are born under it are born to rule, and to have your own way in everything, and therefore you should take special care never to be associated with persons born under Aries or Taurus, for they will dispute with you for top place. Avoid persons born under Gemini, for they may overthrow you by their subtlety. Have nothing to do with those born under Cancer, for their criticism may undermine you. The Leo-born have a tendency to show off; this should not be resisted for, contrary to opinions spread chiefly by those born under Cancer, it is impressive and strengthens the feeling that you should be allowed to do as you please. This is what is important; get your own way, and if any misfortunes result therefrom, you will probably not notice them, or will attribute them to some other cause.
Lucky indeed are those born under Leo. Look at your fortunate colours—blood-red, orange, scarlet and yellow! Whee! And your lucky flowers—marigold and peony! And your lucky stones—diamond and ruby! If this doesn’t make you happy with your lot you are hard to please indeed. You will observe that red is lucky for you wherever it appears, but be sure you keep it for yourself. A Leo-born husband will be likely to think that his wife always looks best in a red dress; his Ideal Woman is dressed in red from top to toe, has red hair and a flaming makeup, and is sitting in a red chair eating red jelly. Try to moderate this passion. Do not force red meat upon your Cancer-born friends, when they are yearning for a bowl of blanc-mange. Get it through your head that red is for you to wear, and that it is not necessary for you to see red all the time.
You have wonderful health, but you must be careful of your heart and back. This will not be easy, for you are the kind of fellow who tries to move the piano single-handed, and delights in being anchor-man when tug o’ war is played. If something goes wrong with your heart, don’t tell people about it. Remember, your character is founded upon that of the Lion, and a hang-dog Lion is not a pretty sight. A Lion nobly inactive, however, is just as impressive as a Lion on the rampage. If you have perfect health, which is highly probable, don’t tell people less fortunate that they could be like you if only they would try. It is not true and they might give you a saucy and disconcerting answer.
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BIBLE CONUNDRUM / A small child begged me to tell her about Adam and Eve, which I did. I then scored a great success by asking her a Bible riddle which was a favourite of my childhood: “What eight men in the Bible milked a bear?” The answer, to be found in Genesis 22:23, is Huz, Buz, Kemuel, Chesed, Hazo, Pildash, Jidlaph and Bethuel, the eight sons of Abraham’s brother Nahor, by his wife Milcah; the Hebrew reads—“these eight did Milcah bear to Nahor, Abraham’s brother.” I am full of hallowed jocosity of this sort.
INFORMATION SCORNED / To the movies and sat first of all behind a small boy whose hair had obviously been cut at home; the poor child looked as though an Indian had begun to scalp him, but had been called out on strike when half done. Behind me sat a woman with a package of sticky popcorn; I did not much mind her noisy champings, but it bothered me that she dropped a lot of the goodies on the floor, and they rolled down under my feet and gave me a sense of treading on broken eggs. So I moved, and found myself behind two girls, both at the very pinnacle of romantic yearning. The film, however, seemed to be beyond their modest intellectual grasp; it was about a period of history before the advent of the combustion engine, and everybody went everywhere on horses or behind horses. At one point a lady entered a room and said that she must stay a while because a shoe had been lost. The girls whispered busily between them, and then agreed that she must be crazy, as she was wearing both her shoes, as any fool could plainly see. I leaned forward helpfully, “Her horse lost a shoe, poppets,” I said. They viewed me with the scorn of youth. “Drop dead, Gramp,” said one of them; “since when did horses wear shoes?” Since when, indeed?
UNEARNED INCOME / Have been looking over the questions the census-taker will ask me. One of them is an enquiry as to how much money I earned last year. The answer to this will be, “about $125.” Of course I had more money than this, but I didn’t earn it. The Government itself says that I didn’t. For I get my living as a writer, and the Government makes it very clear in its Income Tax forms that what a writer gets is Investment Income, comparable to the guilty gold which the Idle Rich derive from their holdings in Stocks and Shares. The census-taker will stare about him in amazement, his eye straying from the rich tapestries upon my walls to the priceless products of old Persian looms beneath his feet; as I scratch a match upon a rare piece of cloisonné, and scissor a chunk out of an early Picasso in order to mend a hole in my shoe, he will scratch his head and wonder how I came by such Byzantine luxury without earning it. But if my Government says that I do not earn my money, I am not the kind of saucy fellow who will suggest that they do my job, and see if it feels like work. No, no! I am behind my Government one hundred per cent, and when it says my labour is idleness, I knock my head upon the floor and cry Selah!
REVIVING A LOST ART / Had occasion to look at a display of wallpaper. Fastening decorative paper to walls is an old trick, which came into favour when it became too expensive to use decorative cloth. The decorative cloth fastened tight to the wall followed the painted cloths which the people of Tudor days hung loose upon their walls, and these in their turn were substitutes for tapestries. Personally I think it might be interesting to return to tapestries, for in these days of labour-saving household devices women have plenty of leisure time for tapestry work. Modern tapestries, of course, would have to have modern themes. A really loving wife might work for ten or twelve years to create a tapestry showing how her husband had worked up from the lowly post of office boy to be vice-president in charge of the mail-order department, along the lines of the Bayeux Tapestry. As a substitute for wallpaper this might take rather a long time to prepare, but it would have a personal touch and, after the husband had been fired or demoted, a pleasingly nostalgic quality.
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To the Rev. Simon Goaste, B.D.
Dear Pastor:
Don’t you think it is high time that the Americans had their own translation of the Bible? Recently I saw Cecil B. DeMille’s film of Samson and Delilah, and afterward I re-read the story as it is written in Judges 13–16; it was clear to me what DeMille had gone through, trying to turn Samson and Delilah into good, respectable Americans.
Consider: in the Bible version Samson carelessly allowed twenty years to pass between his strangling of the lion and his adventure with Delilah. Such a lapse of time would have made him at least forty when the film ended—practically an old man by Hollywood reckoning. In a new translation this period of time could be tactfully left out. And it is recorded also that Samson had an adventure with a lady about whose virtue the Scriptures, in their coarse way, leave no doubt. In fact, it appears that Samson was not A Nice Clean American Boy but a rowdy old delinquent. This blot on his character could be glossed over in a new translation, as it was in the movie. And there is also the flat statement that Samson set fire to the tails of a lot of foxes; the SPCA would certainly not have tolerated that if it had been shown in the film.
What the USA needs is a translation of the Bible all its own. It is now the dominant Western power, and should avail itself of the traditional privilege of a dominant power to impose its religion, or its version of an existing religion, upon the rest of the world. There is much in the Bible that is undemocratic and un-American. Indeed, I put it to you that the implication that the Supreme Being was not democratically elected to that position casts grave doubts upon the moral magnitude and spiritual significance of the Constitution. It is time to abandon the King James Version, with its seventeenth century cast of thought and its strongly English slant, and to adopt something more in keeping with the Gospel according to Washington.
Your expectant parishioner,
Samuel Marchbanks.
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To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
Dear Mr. Marchbanks:
One of the things that is wrong with the world today, but which nobody ever complains about, is that children are not as religious as they used to be. No doubt about it, a religious child is a good example to its elders, and children have a duty in this respect which they are neglecting.
Two fine examples of youthful piety have come up in the course of my reading this past week. Consider Katherine Philips, the poetess, who was born in 1631. John Aubrey records of her that “She was when a Child much against the Bishops, and prayd to God to take them to him, but afterwards was reconciled to them. Prayed aloud, as the hypocriticall fashion then was, and was overheared.” And then consider Edmund Gosse, as a Victorian child. When his father told him that he intended to marry again, and that the lady did not belong to the strict evangelistic sect of the Gosses, young Edmund, who was then eleven, shook a finger at him and said, “Papa, don’t tell me that she’s a paedobaptist?” He records that this affected his father painfully, as well it might. What modern child has the gumption or the learning for such an enquiry?
If the world is going to the dogs, it is the children’s fault as much as anybody’s. Sometimes I receive the impression that modern children are living solely for pleasure.
Yours,
Simon Goaste.
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To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
Dear Sam:
The other day I was looking at the Modern Library edition of Boswell’s Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and in the Preface it was said that the inclusion of that book in that particular library of reprints awarded it “an accolade of modernity.”
What a base passion our age has for pretending that whatever is good is necessarily “modern.” What a depraved appetite we have for mere contemporaneity! How old Samuel Johnson would have snorted at the idea that a classic—particularly a classic about himself—was in some way ennobled by being declared the contemporary of the Wettums Doll, sliced, wrapped bread, and the singing telegram! This is an age without humility.
Your aggrieved
Amyas Pilgarlic.
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To the Rev. Simon Goaste, B.D.
Dear Pastor:
I have spent part of this week reading The Great Divorce, by C. S. Lewis. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it as an excellent book about Heaven and Hell. But without illustrations. I feel that this is a real lack.
When I was a child there was in my home a strange book, the name of which I have forgotten, devoted to a detailed description of what evil-doers and worldly choosers might expect in the hereafter. It was bountifully and imaginatively illustrated with pictures of the damned being fried, grilled, toasted, fricasseed, barbecued, boiled and pressure-cooked by nimble little black devils with tails and disagreeable expressions. Since then I have read many speculations about Hell, including those of Dante, but none has impressed me so deeply. Another childhood book of mine was a Bible with Doré’s illustrations including some which I think he made originally for Paradise Lost. And Doré’s Devil will be my Devil forever—the humourless, malignant, infinitely sad winged creature; if we should ever meet he will not, I am sure, understand me at all, and to be misunderstood in Hell would be more terrible than to be understood through and through. This is a mighty persuasion to grace, and accounts for my lifelong circumspection.
Yours apprehensively,
Samuel Marchbanks.
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To Mervyn Noseigh, M.A.
Dear Mr. Noseigh:
I am enchanted by the thought that you wish to do a full-scale PH.D. thesis on my work. Of course I recognize your name immediately as that of the writer of essays already famous in the very littlest magazines:
Oh Marmee, What Big Teeth You Have: A Study of the pre-Oedipal mother in the works of Louisa May Alcott—(Peewee Review: Vol. 1, pp. 23–47)
Withering Depths: A Study of womb-frustration in Emily Bronte—(Wee Wisdom: Vol. 1, pp. 22–46)
Codnipped: A Study of impotence-fantasy in the adventure novels of Robert Louis Stevenson—(Microscopic Quarterly: Vol. 1, pp. 24–48).
These splendid studies are daily reading in the Marchbanks household. I cannot wait to see what you will make of me.
Tremulously yours,
Samuel Marchbanks.
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To Amyas Pilgarlic, ESQ.
Dear Pil:
I had an enlightening experience yesterday, when I went to the exhibition of pictures at the Ontario Art Gallery with my friend Crosshatch, the artist. I had rather dreaded the visit, for Crosshatch knows a great deal about pictures: I know nothing of them. Crosshatch is widely admired for his taste: I am often told that my taste is all in my mouth. I am afraid of Crosshatch and shrink from displaying my ignorance when he is around.
When we entered the gallery, therefore, I was ready to put on an act as an Art Connoisseur. I had determined to pause for at least ninety seconds before every third picture, and to nod approvingly at least once in each room (but not at any special picture, for fear of showing ignorance). I reminded myself to stand at least eight feet from the pictures when looking at them, and to squint a lot, so as to look discerning. I worked up a little repertoire of remarks, such as “Interesting treatment,” “Character there,” “Nice feeling for colour,” which I could murmur if Crosshatch liked a picture. I was loaded for bear when I entered the art gallery.
Judge of my amazement then, when Crosshatch whizzed around the rooms at a fast walk, neglecting whole wallfuls of pictures; he marched right up to others and glared at them, and tried the paint with a fingernail to see if it was dry; often he sniggered and sometimes he burst into a loud, derisive laugh; once he swore sharply, and made several people jump. We covered the show in half an hour flat, and he said, “Come on, let’s get out of this,” loudly enough for several obvious Art Lovers to hear him. But they whispered, “That’s Crosshatch” in reverent voices, which seemed to make it all right.
Next time I go to an art show I shall know how to behave. Maybe somebody will mistake me for an artist.
Yours in the pride of enlightenment,
Sam.
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To Haubergeon Hydra, ESQ.
Dear Mr. Hydra:
Enclosed find a cheque for $2.16; this, added to the $11.26 already deducted from my salary in weekly portions by my employers, completes the full sum of $13.42, the total of my Income Tax for the past year. It is also, if you care, almost an exact quarter of my yearly earnings, and I hope that you, as Deputy Confiscator-general, will take the utmost care of it.
Are you aware, sir, that when Captain Cook went to Australia in 1770 one of his men pointed to a kangaroo, and said, “What is it?” A native, standing by, said, “Kan g’aroo,” meaning “I don’t understand you.” But the sailor thought that it was the name of the beast, and it has stuck to this day.
Now a similar error occurred when Jacques Cartier first set foot on the soil of our country. “What do you call this place?” he cried to a native. “Canada,” cried the Indian in return, and Cartier took it for the country’s name. But the Indian—one of the Crokinole tribe—actually said in the remarkably economical language of his people, “Take my advice, gentlemen, and go back where you came from; the taxes here are well-nigh insupportable.” That is what Canada really means, but the time for turning back has passed.
And so, Mr. Hydra, as you press my $13.42 into the hand of a career diplomat who is going to fly round the world in order to see whether it is round or merely egg-shaped, or as you send it to a Western wheat-grower who needs it to enable him to go to California for the winter, remember how hard I had to work to earn it.
Yours maliciously and grudgingly,
Marchbanks the Tax-Serf.
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SACRED TO WHOM? / This evening I heard The Rosary (the work, if I recollect aright, of the ineffable Ethelbert Nevin) announced on the radio as a “sacred song.” This caused me to laugh uproariously, for The Rosary is a love-song of a particularly gooey sort, in which the hours the lovers spent together are compared to rosary beads, and the final bust-up (probably when he deserted her for a girl who didn’t wear her rosary to bed) to the embrace of the Cross. True lovers of the devotion of the rosary might fittingly shriek in protest every time this song is sung.
MONOTONY OF DIET / This evening to the movies and saw Fabiola, an Italian film about the goings-on of Christians under the Caesars—in this case the Emperor Constantine. It concluded with a grand mass martyrdom in which, at a rough guess, eight or ten thousand head of Christians were fed to a total count of six lions. Afterward I consulted Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in which he says he can find no record of more than ten Christians being turned off at a time, so I dismissed Fabiola as what Gibbon himself calls “holy romance.” But the statistics and dietetics of the film still bother me, for even the most anti-clerical lion must weary of an unrelieved diet of Christians, consumed under circumstances of hustle and bustle.
THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS / While I was away from home today a man brought a load of sand needed for some cement work; instead of dumping it where it was meant to be, he dropped it all in my driveway, making it impossible to put the car away. I presume that it is such thinking as this which makes sand truckers what they are, instead of eminent biologists, respected theologians, or the scented darlings of elegant boudoirs. With a heavy heart I set to work to heave the sand off the drive, and as it was wet I soon found that my heart was giving audible crunching sounds, as though somebody were crushing apples in my breast; my spine developed a hairpin bend and my knees shook; large black specks floated slowly before my eyes, my liver turned completely over, and bells tolled in my skull. The sand, however, was not without interest. In one shovelful I found what I believe is called a garter-belt. Who, I wondered, could have discarded her garter-belt in a sand pit, and why? Was I, all unwillingly, turning over the grave of some fleeting summer romance? And if so, was a sand pit not a somewhat gritty place for extra-mural amours? I shall never know. Crept into the house like a horse with the heaves, and took cordials suitable to my many ailments.
PRIMEVAL FILM / To the movies, to see Charlie Chaplin and Marie Dressier in Tilly’s Punctured Romance, which they made in 1913. In my younger days I was an ardent follower of Charlie, but as I watched this relic from the Old Red Sandstone Period of the cinematic art, I realized that time had bathed the humour of another day in a golden but untruthful light. It was the most restless film I have seen in years. Nobody stood up if he could possibly fall down. Nobody fell down without at once leaping to his feet in order to fall down again. Nobody entered a door without slapping somebody else in the face with it. Food was never eaten, it existed only to be thrown. Liquid was not taken into the mouth in order to be swallowed, but only that it might be squirted into somebody else’s face. The usual method of attracting a lady’s attention was to kick her; she invariably responded with a blow. The life of man in the comedies of the silent films was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. And viewed from this distance it does not appear to have been especially funny, at that.
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To Mrs. Kedijah Scissorbill.
Respected but Unloved Madam:
Walking along the street today I passed an organ-grinder; I gave him ten cents. I write to you of this because you are a dominating figure in many charities, and I often receive unpleasantly mimeographed, badly worded letters signed with a facsimile of your niggling signature, asking me for money. These letters always stress the deserving nature of the cause, and the care with which the money is administered by a staff of competent, well-paid officials. I usually respond to your letters with a donation, for your causes are genuinely good, and I am sure that you use the money wisely. Nevertheless, my heart does not go with them. My heart was with the organ-grinder’s ten cents, even though he was unable to give me a slip entitling me to deduct my gift from taxable income.
Charity is infinitely better conducted nowadays than it was a century ago. It is thorough, economical, informed—everything but charitable. It does incalculable good to the receivers; it does nothing whatever to the givers—the answerers of form letters who never see the objects of their benevolence. For there is no merit in giving money, if one has it: the merit is in the charitable impulse and the cleansing of the spirit which compassion brings.
Modern charity is wonderful for the receivers, but it is useless to the givers. And I remind you that they also have souls to save. Charity is something greater than organized pillaging of the haves on behalf of the have-nots.
Yours with qualified approval,
Samuel Marchbanks.
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To Raymond Cataplasm, M.D., F.R.C.P.
Dear Dr. Cataplasm:
At breakfast yesterday I watched a small boy sprinkle salt on his grapefruit. When I asked him about it, he said it made the fruit taste sweeter. A lady at the table said, “Mark my words, that child will die of hardening of the arteries.” “Oh come, madam, surely that is an old wives’ tale,” said I. “Who are you calling an old wife,” said she, and her wattles wobbled. “You,” I rejoined, flicking a gob of marmalade at her and scampering from the room.
Tell me, Doctor, can salt harden the arteries? I have heard this threatened in connection with other household substances. For years I have followed each meal with a strong chaser of baking-soda and water, as an aid to digestion, and various people have told me that this will harden my arteries. Nevertheless my arteries are still capable of balloon-like expansion.
It seems to me that if anything were going to harden the arteries it would be excessive iron in the blood, which would coat the arteries with rust, like old hot-water pipes.
Your perennial patient and amateur adviser,
S. Marchbanks.
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To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
Honoured Sir:
Unexpected tidings, Mr. Marchbanks, sir. Your case against Richard Dandiprat will not come before the Autumn Assizes as we had planned. This is the result of a legal complication of a type incomprehensible to the lay mind, but I will try to explain it.
The papers in the case went, as usual, to Mr. Mouseman, Senior, for his consideration before they were taken to the court house. Knowing that the case would be tried before Mr. Justice Gripple—an old law-school companion of Mr. Mouseman’s—he made a pencilled notation on the document giving notice of the case, which said: “Don’t let this come up any day when Old Gripple has lost heavily at bridge the night before. You know that he really needs a murder or a rape case on such days as a relief for his spleen.” This was intended as a private direction to the sheriff, but some foolish clerk transcribed it on a document which reached Mr. Justice Gripple himself. He said several things which convinced our firm that it would be better to ask for a delay, and bring the case up again in the Spring, when we are confident that Mr. Justice Gripple will be in another part of the Province.
Oh, the law, the law! What a fascinating study it is, Mr. Marchbanks. You laymen cannot comprehend the subtle psychological elements which may sway the judgement of the courts! But patience—patience must be the watchword of the successful litigant.
Yours with infinite patience,
Mordecai Mouseman
(for Mouseman, Mouseman and Forcemeat).
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To Mervyn Noseigh, M.A.
Dear Mr. Noseigh:
I am overjoyed by the news that you have really decided to do a PH.D. thesis on my work, and am especially tickled by your title—Skunk’s Misery to Toronto: a study of spiritual degeneration in the work of Samuel Marchbanks. The questions you ask fill me with delightful new importance. Number 7(a) for example: “What were the first books you remember reading and what influence do you consider that they have had on your later style and symbological system?”
The first books I remember reading were called Mother Hubbard’s House Party, and Chuck and Cooney Caught in the Corn; the first of these was about a Christmas party assembled by Mother Hubbard (a kind of Magna Mater or Demeter-figure, as I now realize) at which Jack and Jill, Mary Mary Quite Contrary, Tom Tom the Piper’s Son, Georgy Porgy, Little Jack Horner and Little BoPeep acted out, in a high mimesis, various pseudo-Arcadian romances, culminating in a mass bedding at the end of the day. Although the writer had badly botched this conclusion, I assume that the Primal Scene was enacted by all these characters in turn, in every conceivable combination, under the obscene prompting of Mother Hubbard, who had assumed a Hecate-identity with the coming of darkness. I now realize that the book was a pseudonymous work by Frank Harris.
As for Chuck and Cooney, they appeared to be a wood-chuck and a raccoon who were surprised by a farmer in his corncrib, and escaped by a narrow margin, but I am aware that it was a thinly-disguised fable of race-hatred, because Cooney was the stupid one and got into all the serious trouble.
All my subsequent work has drawn heavily on these sources, accounting for the ugly undertone on which you comment so frankly. Please tell me more. There is nothing that flatters an author so much as having his work explained to him by a graduate student who brings a modern, critically-trained intellect to bear upon it. I can hardly wait for the next instalment.
Eagerly yours,
Samuel Marchbanks.
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STRANGE DELUSION / Waiting to see my doctor today I fell into conversation with a woman, obviously from the country, who sat near me. She appeared to be deeply aggrieved at life in general, though her manner was pleasant enough, and I judged that she was suffering from some inconvenient but not serious malady. “You city people don’t know how well off you are,” she said, broodingly. “Every kind of convenience—electric toilets and such.” I marvelled at the quaintness of this idea, but did not feel capable of explaining the limitations of hydro-electric power to her. But since then I have gazed at the plumbing at Marchbanks Towers with new eyes.
FOG-DENSITY / Picked up a magazine this afternoon and read an article by a man who had appointed himself an expert upon what he called the “fog-density” of authors—meaning the difficulty which they presented to the average reader. He did not reveal all his secrets, but one way in which he measures this quality is to count the number of three-syllable words in every 100 words of a writer’s prose. If they are frequent, fog-density is high. I suppose I present a considerable fog-density to some of my readers, but I don’t care; who wants to be understood by everybody? I like long and unusual words, and anybody who does not share my taste is not compelled to read me. Policemen and politicians are under some obligation to make themselves comprehensible to the intellectually stunted, but not I. Let my prose be tenebrous and rebarbative; let my pennyworth of thought be muffled in gorgeous apparel; lovers of Basic English will look to me in vain.
LET US BE PATIENT / The failure of yet another Canadian play on Broadway was attributed to many things, but I think it was owing to the simple fact that nobody is interested in Canadians except, very occasionally, other Canadians. Nations enjoy spells of popularity in the theatre and elsewhere; they become fashionable for no reason that I can discover. For centuries, for instance, nobody was interested in Scotsmen; they were regarded simply as hairy fellows who spoke faulty English. But during the nineteenth century plays about Scots, books about them, jokes about them and indeed everything about them sprang into a new popularity. We are beginning to tire of them now, but Irishmen, Armenians, and Scandinavians have become objects of popular interest. As yet the world does not think that Canadians are interesting; we stand where the Scotch stood before the Big Bagpipe Boom of the Victorian Era, and the period of 1900–1920, when Sir James Barrie persuaded the world that, appearances to the contrary, all Scots were delightful fellows with the souls of little children. Canada’s day will come, no doubt, but we may have to wait a few centuries for it.
SABBATH MUSINGS / Sat by my window, and as the church bells rang and people hastened past my door with their prayerbooks and hymnals in their hands, I pondered upon the secrets of the human heart. Do people go to church in Chalk River, I wondered, and in Los Alamos? And if they do so, do they try to square it with the Almighty that they are engaged in making the most devilish engines of destruction that the world has ever known? We are assured, of course, that atomic power will do great things for the world at peace, but we never hear anything specific except what it will do for the world at war. Do the wives of atomic scientists worry about hats and social prestige? Did the wife of Dr. Faustus fret about what to do with the leftovers of yesterday’s dinner while the Doctor was in his study chatting with the Devil? The answer to all these questions, I have no doubt, is Yes.
CARELESS MUSICIAN / Joined in a private sing-song—one of those affairs where three or four people work through a book called The Jumbo Volume of Songs the Whole World Loves, or something of the kind. We sang The Lost Chord, familiar to me as a boy through a gramophone record of Arthur Pryor playing it on the trombone. But, as I sang, I wondered how the musician in the song ever lost that chord, which sounded like a great Amen? I am no master of musical theory, but the number of chords on an organ which could have sounded like a great Amen to a Victorian organist were remarkably few, and if he was unable to find it again the Royal College of Organists should have insisted that he repeat his final examinations.
GOGOL UNMASKED / Was talking to a Russian, and worked up courage to address him thus: “For many years I have read in books about literature that the Russian author Nikolai Gogol was a very great humorist—the peer of Shakespeare, Aristophanes and Cervantes—and that his novel Dead Souls is one of the world’s great funny books. During a bout of ’flu last year I read Dead Souls carefully, attentively and receptively, but my gravity was not disturbed. Am I stupid, or does Gogol not translate well into English, or what is the matter?” (During this I took care to pronounce Gogol’s name in a gargling fashion, which I hoped would sound Russian.) To my amazement he replied: “My dear Samuel Marchbankovitch, I have never thought Gogol very funny myself. Indeed, Russian writers are never funny in the way that English or American writers are. They are rather facetious, little father, but that is all.” (I observed that he pronounced the name “Goggle,” which I take to be the true Russian manner.) So there it is. I suppose that the Russians, like every other nation, like to pretend that they have a sense of humour. I have been told Chinese jokes, too, by people who thought them funny though, like much Chinese art, the only interesting thing about them was that they were Chinese.
CANADIAN SHIBBOLETH / Was at a party where a merry fellow—a Ph.D. and much respected in academic circles—was tormenting an Australian lady about the accent he believed to be characteristic of her native land. “I can always tell an Aussie by the way they say ‘stewed fruit,’ ” he declared, and then went on saying “stewed fruit” very comically, as well as he could through his laughter. “Please say ‘wash and curl the hair of the squirrel,’ ” said the Australian lady, and the savant obligingly said, “Worsh ’n currl the haira the squrrl.” “That is how I always know a Canadian,” said she, and he was not pleased. But there is something about a Canadian which compels him, however much education and sophistication he may have attained in other realms, to preserve intact the accent in which his barefoot old granny used to curse the timber wolves that raged around her cabin. It is one of the last areas in which illiteracy is equated with integrity.
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To Big Chief Marchbanks.
How, Marchbanks:
Meet fellow on park bench yesterday. Bum, Marchbanks. He awful fat. I got to get rid of this fat, he say. Why, I say. Fat not healthy, he say. All doctors say fat make you die young. First I got to get money to eat, he say, then I got to go on diet. You got fat head, I say. Look at bear. Bear awful fat. Bear healthy, too. Bear healthier than any doctor. Skinny doctor meet fat bear, bear win every time. You poor ignorant Indian, he say. You know nothing about modern science. I know bears, I say.
Not in jail yet, Marchbanks. Winter come soon. How can I get in jail?
How, again,
Osceola Thunderbelly,
Chief of the Crokinoles.
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A book is criticized by the reviewer in direct proportion as the reviewer is criticized by the book: no man can find wisdom in print which is not already waiting for words within himself.