• OF HIERARCHY AMONG MAGAZINE READERS •
DESPERATE FOR Christmas gifts I have been driven to giving subscriptions to magazines this year to many of my friends who deserve something better. The tragedy of magazines is that nobody has any time to read them; only those who are condemned to lonely vigils in doctors’ waiting-rooms are able to wade through those pungent comments on world affairs, those brilliant disquisitions on married happiness, those tales of adventure, for which magazine publishers pay so much. But most of us like to have a few magazines coming to the house, if only to proclaim our intellectual status. Thus readers of the New Yorker and the Atlantic curl the lip at those whose living-room tables boast only Life, Time and the Reader’s Digest; and these too are given the sneer of contumely by readers of Horizon and Partisan Review; and all of the foregoing suffer embarrassment in those homes where Country Life, The Tatler and Punch lie beside the chairs, though I cannot quite explain why. So all week I have been tearing those hard little cards out of magazines, and accepting the Special Offer whereby I can give subscriptions at bargain rates. It is a coward’s way out, but what am I to do?
• OF DENTISTS FAR AND NEAR •
I HAD A TOOTH filled today. My dentist wears a tasteful white smock with a high collar; I can remember the first dentist whom I visited in my childhood, who wore a morning coat, and worked his drill with a foot pedal. His operating room was as dark as a church, and he had not been trained to stand any nonsense from children; my recollection is that he knelt on my prone form while drilling, and that every now and then he drilled a piece out of my tongue, just to learn me…. In odd corners of the world strange dentists still lurk; an Irish friend of mine told me recently of visiting a dentist on the West Coast of Ireland who had no running water, and bade his patients to spit into a potted fern which was conveniently placed by the chair…. The fanciest job of dentistry I ever saw was done on a Welsh farmer; a travelling dentist pulled all his teeth in the kitchen one afternoon, and sold him a false set to be inserted at once. The total service cost just under five dollars. The man was wearing the teeth when I met him, and there was a rugged grandeur about the lower part of his face which suggested the Sabre Tooth Tiger in the Royal Ontario Museum.
• OF PLEASURE TOO DETERMINEDLY SOUGHT •
EVERY YEAR, about this time, I take a vacation, as a result of social pressure. I do not really like vacations; I much prefer an occasional day off when I do not feel like working. When I am confronted with a whole week in which I have nothing to do but enjoy myself I do not know where to begin. To me, enjoyment comes fleetingly and unheralded; I cannot determinedly enjoy myself for a whole week at a time. A day’s work when everything goes smoothly, or an evening when I am thoroughly happy and at ease, or an unexpected stroke of luck—these are the things which I enjoy. But when I go after the coy nymph Pleasure with a blunderbuss, determined to make her my mistress for a whole week, she vanishes into her fastnesses, and hurls ordure and makes rude noises at me whenever I approach.
• OF THE CAPRICE OF SYMPATHY •
MY HAY FEVER continues unabated. Several people have told me that I should go to the seaside—useless advice for I have no money for gallivanting. I am toying, however, with a new invention, Marchbanks’ Maritime Mask. It will be a respirator, filled with sea water, and worn over the face and mouth like a dog muzzle; every breath the wearer takes will be filtered through the sea water, and thus he will have all the benefits of the seaside, while living inland.
As I wept, sneezed and coughed my way through my day’s work, I reflected that the world judges disease by unjust standards. Anyone who has a migraine headache, for instance, receives the keenest sympathy, for his ailment is heroic and—this is important—silent. But a man who has hives is a joke, though hives are desperately painful. Similarly it is heroic to suffer with one’s sinus, but a man who has catarrh, and who, in consequence, hawks, hoots, snorts, roars, gags and spits is thought to be making a great and disgusting fuss about nothing. The healthy can endure invalids only when the latter are quiet and motionless. Let them but cough or scratch, and sympathy flies out of the window.
• OF SELF-TORTURE •
WHEN I AWOKE this morning there was a smell of burning in the air, and for a moment I wondered if the northern bush fires had crept up during the night, in the hope of engulfing me and my neighbours. While dressing I wondered what I would do in such an emergency: would I form a firebreak by chopping down the puny hedge of Marchbanks Towers, order my dependants to go and stand waist-deep in the nearest lake, and take up a menacing position on the lawn with a soda syphon; or would I phone the fire department, shrieking, “Save me! Save me!”? Like all men whose work consists of dreaming, word-spinning and prophesying, I like to torture myself with these problems; nothing so entrances a man of words as to imagine himself in a situation in which words are powerless. It is this which keeps him humble. Men of action, I notice, are rarely humble, even in situations where action of any kind is a great mistake, and masterly inaction is called for.
• THE INNER VOICE •
I SAT ON MY verandah last evening, reading Winston Churchill’s new book, which I do very slowly, because I seem to hear that wonderful phlegmy voice declaiming every word. How many people, I wonder, hear voices as they read? I always do. I read American books with an American accent, and English books with an English accent, and Canadian books in the voice of a friend of mine who speaks the best Canadian I have heard. People have told me that I would be able to read much faster if I gave up this indulgence, and clutched groups of words and whole paragraphs with my greedy eyes, but I pay no attention to them. My method is the one I like, and it is an infallible touchstone for judging a writer’s style. The man who writes only for the eye generally writes badly; the man who writes to be heard will write with some eloquence, some regard for the music of words, and will reach nearer to his reader’s heart and mind. Of course, fools and clods will write like fools and clods, whatever means they use…. No, madam, I do not read the works of foreign writers in broken English.
• OF A WITTY POLITICIAN •
I REFRESHED MYSELF today by reading a few chapters of Peck’s Bad Boy,1 a book which delighted my childhood. I wonder if children read it now. Rereading with the eye of bawdy eld supplanting that of dewy innocence, I was astonished to discover what a suggestive work it is. George W. Peck, who wrote it, was a Milwaukee journalist, and he became so popular as a funnyman that he was elected mayor of that city, the first and last time in history that any city ever elected a consciously funny man to be its chief magistrate. He scaled even dizzier heights, however, and was Governor of Wisconsin before he died. Let this be a lesson to our Canadian politicians; wit and politics are not mutually exclusive.
THE MEDICAL profession had some fun with me this afternoon. They extracted blood from me at various strategic points, and did strange things with such of my by-products as they could obtain. They took pictures of my insides, and put me in a machine which rendered me transparent. They gouged and banged me to see if I would scream, but I remembered that I had once been a Wolf Cub, and kept a stiff upper lip (though why I should have done this when my underlip was trembling like a blancmange in an earthquake I cannot say). But the final injustice came when they decided to weigh me. I craftily left off my coat, hoping thereby to gain a slight advantge, but the doctor who had just used the fluoroscope to see through me saw through me again and ordered me sternly to put it on. This I did, and consequently the weight of two books which I had in my pocket, as well as $2.35 in silver, was entered on the charge-sheet against me. This is the kind of unfairness which drives men to rash acts. However, it will be easy for me to make a good impression next time I visit my doctor, for I shall simply leave my books and money at home, and he will think that I am losing weight.
• OF THE STRANGE POWER OF WOMEN •
YES, THANK YOU, my cold is improving. I went to the movies last night; they always cheer me when I have a cold although I expect that I spread germs in a thoroughly antisocial manner. The film was Anna Karenina, and I liked it greatly. Some girls sitting near me appeared to find it funny. Will any of them, I wonder, ever discover themselves in a situation comparable to that of the heroine? Often I look at women on the streets, or in restaurants, and wonder if anybody has ever loved them to distraction, or if they have ever wrecked a man’s life. Most of them have not done so, of course, but a few must have lived out some passionate story, or will do so before they die. The curious thing, of course, is that it is by no means always the beautiful or attractive ones who have caused these upheavals. Little mousy women, or fat, cow-like women have often inspired ill-fated romances, driving men to suicide or murder, or simply to that living death which is worse than either. Statistical records show that women commit suicide rarely, as compared with men; are they more philosophic, or merely more stupid and unfeeling?
• OF HIS RHEUM •
ALL THIS WEEK I have had a cold. At least, I hope it is a cold. My head feels like a pumpkin, and when I breathe my left lung makes a noise as though a kitten were playing in a basketful of crumpled paper. I dare not go to my doctor, for he will send me to bed, and I want to save my usual Autumn holiday-in-bed for later on, when the weather is not so fine. But the man who occasionally sells me a little benzine with which to clean my clothes diagnosed my case today. “You’ve got muck in your bronikkles,” he said, as I gave an agonizing cough. “There’s only one thing that’ll do you any good and that’s mustard tea. Just get a pint of stout, heat it nearly to the boil, and put a couple of good tablespoons of mustard in it and drink it off quick. That’ll fix you!” I thanked him and went away, thinking that it would fix me indeed, and probably for good. I suppose in the dear dead days beyond recall, when doctors were scarce, thousands of people were killed every year by wholesome home remedies given to them by sadistic old creatures with a taste for experiment.
I have suffered from extreme stupidity all day, which I attribute to my cold. I would begin a piece of work, and twenty minutes later would recover consciousness to discover that I was staring into space with my mouth open, making a noise like a sleeping bulldog—snuffle, snuffle, glrrk, woof, snuffle. Is this sort of Hypnosis by the Common Cold well known to medical science, or will I get my name into the medical books under some such heading as “Marchbanks Symptom (Hypnogogia Marchbankensis)”? … Very well, madam, if you are not interested, let us talk of something else. Is that all your own hair?
A YOUNG WOMAN whom I know, who is just learning to read, kindly undertook to read me a story from her schoolbook today. It was one of those pieces about a king who promises his daughter’s hand to any man who can make her laugh. It is this sort of promise which makes me wonder about the psychological make-up of fairy-tale characters; they seem to be ready to marry their daughters to anyone at all, for the most extraordinary reasons. I have never known a Canadian father who would permit a young man to marry his daughter, merely because he could make her laugh. (And I may say in passing that to make a really well brought up Canadian girl laugh is no easy task.) Canadian fathers don’t care whether their sons-in-law are funny or not; all they want to know about is their prospects and how much money they have in the bank, and whether they drink. In fact, I have received the impression that Canadian fathers prefer sons-in-law who do not laugh. No doubt this attitude explains why Canada has no body of native fairy-tales. Many a Canadian father might justly say: “If you can get a laugh out of this sourpuss, you can have her.” But he doesn’t.
• OF THE SUBTLETY OF CATS •
NEXT WEEK, I see, will be observed as National Cat Week. It is a good thing to do honour to this noble, dignified and beautiful animal, but I don’t imagine for a moment that the cats will co-operate. Cats don’t mind being worshipped, but they refuse to be organized. They have always insisted that their lives are their own, to be lived as they see fit, and their attitude toward everything which is symbolized by the American passion for “weeks” of one sort and another is contemptuous, contumacious, and insulting. Can anyone imagine cats walking in a parade? Does anyone seriously think that cats are interested in civic betterment? When have cats ever shown a united front on any subject whatever? The great charm of cats is their rampant egotism, their devil-may-care attitude toward responsibility, their disinclination to earn an honest dollar. In a continent which screams neurotically about co-operation and the Golden Rule, cats are disdainful of everything but their own immediate interests and they contrive to be so suave and delightful about it that they even receive the apotheosis of a National Week. Smart work, cats!
• OF PRECOCIOUS CHILDREN •
I MET A MAN today who boasted intolerably about his child. It is eighteen months old, I think he said, and he asserts without a blush that it has a vocabulary of three hundred words. I believe that I was expected to show awestricken admiration, but as I have no idea what vocabulary may be expected in a child of that age I held my peace and nodded as though prodigies were an old story to me. Frankly, I do not care how large a vocabulary any child has; I am only interested in what it says, and not always in that. What is the use of a large vocabulary of words, if the child has only a small range of ideas?
• OF COMPLACENCE •
OF LATE PEOPLE have been picking on me because I am what they call “complacent.” By this they mean that I refuse to share their hysterical fears about another war, about Russia, about the atom, about the commercialization of Sunday, about divorce, about juvenile delinquency and whatnot. Because I do not leap about and flap my arms and throw up all my meals when these things are mentioned, they assume that I am at ease in Zion. As a matter of fact I have my own well-defined field of worry, which I exploit to the full. But it seems to me that a little complacency would do nobody any harm at present and I am thinking of incorporating complacency into the platform of the Marchbanks Humanist Party—a retrograde movement of which I am leader and sole support. “Tired of Clamour? Try Torpor!” How’s that for a campaign cry?
• OF REALISTIC SPORTSMANSHIP •
MY MORNING PAPER expects me to sympathize with a man who shot a bear cub, and then was charged by the mother bear; he and his companion fired eleven shots at her before they finally killed her. But before I congratulate him on his escape, I would like to know why he shot at the cub in the first place? Had he never heard that bears are strange, unpredictable beasts, likely to chase people who shoot their young? And what is the fun of shooting a bear, large or small? Is it the pleasure of seeing it fall down? Or does a shot bear leap comically into the air, shouting, “O my goodness!” thus providing the hunter with a hearty laugh? It seems to me that I once read in an old musty book (very much out of date, probably) that it was unsportsmanlike to shoot the young of any animal, or to shoot a female who was running with her young. But it is plain from the reports which appear in the papers every season that ideals of sportsmanship have changed, and that the tactics which, in political circles, are called “realistic” are now in fashion.
• OF SILOS AND SILAGE •
I WENT TO THE country to see the autumn colours yesterday, and reflected for the thousandth time on the difficulty of finding any place in Ontario where a man can walk without being warned off as a trespasser. In England the walker’s rights are protected by Footpath Societies and local use: here the landowner is as tyrannous as he pleases, and particularly so in the neighbourhood of lakes. I saw a good deal of wild aster and hawthorn berry, but not much leaf-colour yet. I collected a little more material for my book Silo Architecture in Canada and Its Relationship to the Campaniles of Southern Europe. So far as I know there has been no extended treatment of the aesthetic side of silo-building.
The word “silo” comes, I find, from the Greek “siros,” meaning a storage pit, and the use of silage as fodder was known to the Greeks and Romans, and to the Spaniards, from very early times. The first silo I ever saw was a very grand concrete one which reeked of sour corn so powerfully that it seemed to tear at the lungs as one peeped into it. Cows fed on its silage never drew a sober breath all winter, but leaned against the sides of their stalls, hiccuping; their udders ran pure eggnog. Every Spring they were driven reluctantly to the meadows to take a kind of agricultural Gold Cure, and everyone remarked on the change in the milk. What Alcoholics Anonymous might have done for those cows I cannot now say.
• HE ANIMADVERTS UPON DOGS •
A DOG ATTEMPTED to end it all under the wheels of a car in which I was riding this afternoon. The suicidal instinct seems to be strong in all dogs, but amounts to an overmastering passion in collies and Airedales. My theory is that dogs go mad from the boredom of being dogs and seek to take their lives in consequence. The much advertised intelligence of dogs is mythical. A recent article in Saturday Night, written by a scientist, asserts that dogs have even less intelligence than chickens, which is a strong statement. A dog can’t begin to compete with a monkey, the writer says, and horses simply laugh at the pretensions of dogs to be sagacious. A pig can learn more tricks than a dog, but has too much sense to want to do it. All this supports my lifelong contention that Man’s Dumb Chum is a fraud, and has only wormed his way into the hearts of dog-lovers by undignified self-abasement. The dog is a Yes-animal, very popular with people who can’t afford to keep a Yes-man.
• A HINT FOR THE WEALTHY •
I WAS DELIGHTED to read of the great good luck of Dr. Williamson, the Canadian who has discovered the biggest diamond mine in the world, and is now one of the world’s richest men. I am afraid that Dr. W. is in for some annoyance, though. The South African government will want its slice, quite rightly, but I am betting that the Canadian Ministry of Finance will want a bit, as well. The idea of a Canadian having all that money will drive Ottawa crazy unless they can devise some way of getting at it. If I were Dr. W. I should pay my Income Tax in cash—copper cash—and go to the tax office every year with a procession of Negro porters, each one carrying a big bag of pennies. I should then stand by and make insulting remarks while the clerks counted the boodle, and demand a receipt in full. When leaving I should toss a huge diamond (with a huge flaw in it) among the herdsmen of the Golden Calf, and watch them scramble, claw, kick and bite for possession of it. What’s the good of money unless it gives you some real fun—preferably of a vindictive nature?
• OF HIS ALLERGIES •
I DELIVERED MY body into the hands of Learned Physicians this morning confiding that they may discover why I have hay fever. As soon as they got me out of my clothes I ceased to be a man to them, and they began to talk about me as though I did not understand English. “My guess is that his heart is too small,” said the 1st L.P. “I’ve read some of his stuff, and I’ll bet his heart is a little, shrivelled black thing, like a prune,” said the 2nd L.P. Whereupon they whisked me into a dark room, and made me stand in a machine that revealed my heart, which they observed with unflattering interest. Then they handed me over to a young woman who removed blood from me and sent me on errands which modesty forbids me to specify in detail. Then the Learned Physicians got me again, and poked tickly things up my nose and peeped down my throat, and wrote cryptic notes on pads. At last I was released, completely demoralized, and sent to a technician whose job it was to test me for allergies.
I was fastened in a chair with thongs, and various substances were brought to me. First of all, a vacuum cleaner was emptied right under my nose, and I sneezed. “Allergic to House Dust,” wrote the clinician. Next a flock of geese waddled by, under the care of a pretty Goose Girl. “Kerchoo!” cried I. “Allergic to Goose Feathers,” was the comment. Then a farmer rushed in, carrying a truss of weeds (“truss” in the sense of “bundle,” of course, and not one of those light-weight, comfortable affairs you see advertised in magazines) which he brandished in my face. “Allergic to English Cockleburr, Golden Rod, and Old Man’s Nuisance,” wrote the clinician, as I nearly burst my bonds asunder with sneezing. The next thing to parade past me was a beautiful girl in a lowcut evening gown, which I blew off with my sneezes. “Allergic to Musk and Orris Root,” was the notation. And so it went until I was completely exhausted, and I didn’t miss a single allergy. I am allergic to everything, it seems. Why, when I looked in the mirror this evening, I sneezed violently.2
• OF UNKNOWN PERILS •
LOOKING THROUGH my pocket notebook today I discovered that it contained much valuable information which I had overlooked, including a list of antidotes for common poisons. I jumped slightly when I discovered “hartshorn” listed as a poison, with an antidote of vinegar in water. My amazement was caused by the circumstance that as a child I could never distinguish between “hartshorn” and “horehound” and until this day I imagined them to be the same thing. But hartshorn is a nasty ammonia extracted from the horns of deer, whereas horehound is a nasty flavouring extracted from a harmless herb. As an infant I was wont to trot into drugstores with five cents in my chubby palm to ask for hartshorn candy; what would my amazement have been if the chemist had taken me at my word! I would soon have been writhing upon the floor pleading—perhaps in vain—for vinegar and water. What unsuspected perils beset us, all the days of our lives!
• OF THE FLABBERED GASTER •
“YOU FLABBERGAST ME!” said the man sitting beside our hostess to whom I had imparted a slightly surprising piece of information. His word caught my fancy; I am a bit of an etymologist myself, and I well recall the Greek word “gaster,” which the Elizabethans used to mean the stomach and digestive organs. Now when a man is amazed his stomach and digestive organs bear the brunt of it; sometimes they tremble violently; the word “jellybelly” has been coined to describe this condition of tremulousness. Therefore, when a man is flabbergasted, it means that someone has flabbered his gaster. And what is “to flabber”? Does not the word explain itself? To flabber means to flap or violently agitate something which because of its saponaceous or oleaginous nature does not flap readily—the middle section of a human being, for instance. Therefore when my friend said that I flabbergasted him he meant that I wobbled his tripes, which was interesting if true, and I know many people upon whom I would be happy to produce this effect.
• OF SUFFERING •
THE COLD which has been hovering around me for the past month found a chink in my armour last week, and began its horrible invasion of my person. I passed the next day in bed—confined to my rheum, so to speak. The mail brought its usual yield of junk, including a catalogue of what were described as “Rare, Exciting, Unusual, Entertaining Books!” Among them were Famous Hussies of History, The Book of Torture, and Thrilling Tales of Pep and Spice. The one which interested me most, however, was one called The Seven Keys to Power which promises to teach me many useful things such as “How to gain the mastery of all things,” “How to banish all misery,” “How to cast a spell on anyone, no matter where they are,” and “How to gain the love of the opposite sex.” As it retails at the modest price of one dollar, I do not see how I can go wrong on that one. If I could cast a spell on anyone I would not really need another book in the catalogue, on Lightning Ju Jitsu, which has a special chapter called “The Answer to Pawing Hands.” Nor, if I could compel love at will, would I need the book called How To Write Love Letters. I might risk fifty cents on the book which teaches Ventriloquism, and thus, for a mere $1.50 become one of the choice and master spirits of my age. I might even discover how to cure a cold.
• A FOOLISH QUESTION PARRIED •
I TYPED A LETTER today, and was annoyed to find that I had put the carbon under it in such a way that it printed on the back of my original instead of making a copy. But a boob who saw me do this said, “Why did you do that? Is it for some special kind of filing system?” I replied, “No; the man to whom this letter is going is the most cross-eyed man I have ever known, and if he happens not to have his glasses on when he gets this letter he won’t be able to read it. But if he turns it over and reflects this backward copy in a mirror, he will be able to read it perfectly.” “Oh,” said the boob, looking mystified, “I never knew that before.” … As the Good Book says, “Answer a fool according to his folly and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
• NO TRUCK WITH ANGELS •
I LISTENED TO THE opera broadcast this afternoon for the first time in a long spell. It was Hansel and Gretel, to my immense delight, but I cannot help feeling that children who had fourteen angels to guard them all through the night should not have got themselves into such dreadful trouble as soon as they woke up. Probably that is the moral of the opera: if you depend on guardian angels, your moral fibre and common sense will rot, and you won’t be able to look after yourself.
• LEAR’S FOLLY NOT IMPROBABLE •
I WENT TO SEE Donald Wolfit3 in King Lear last week. He is advertised as the greatest actor since Henry Irving; unless everything I have ever read or heard about Irving is wrong, this is a somewhat over-confident statement. He had fine moments, but the shabbiest scenery and costumes I have seen since the days of the Marks Brothers (not to be confused with Groucho, Harpo and Chico) did nothing to help him. Charles Lamb said that Lear could not be acted, and all sorts of people have parroted that foolish remark ever since; it is as sensible as saying that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony cannot be played. Wolfit acted Lear admirably; if he had had more nobility and more pathos he would have been wonderful. Somebody said to me in the interval that it was unbelievable that any man would be so stupid as to do what Lear did—put himself at the mercy of his children. I don’t know about that: I have seen at least three cases in which parents did the same thing, and with not dissimilar results.
• TRAVEL AMONG STATESMEN •
ON THE TRAIN again yesterday I was travelling with a number of men who were obviously Senators and members of the Commons on their way to Ottawa for the opening of Parliament. They wore that dedicated, holy look which is only to be seen on the faces of men who are travelling on passes and expect to be wearing their best suits within twenty-four hours. The members of the older parties gravitated naturally toward the chaircar; the socialists rode in the coach, ate box-lunches, and occasionally exclaimed, “God pity the poor engineer on a day like this!” whenever there seemed to be a member of the Brotherhood of Railway Men within earshot. I did a good deal of spying and eavesdropping in all parts of the train, but learned nothing.
• OF SABBATH OBSERVANCE •
I SHOVELLED SNOW yesterday aftenoon. As I laboured, a passer-by said, “Considering the dispute that has been going on about Sabbath observance I’d think you would be afraid to be seen doing that.” Leaning on my shovel, and holding my poor bent back, I replied, “Sir, if Providence sees fit to send snow on Saturday night, Providence will have more sense than to condemn me for clearing it away on Sunday. If I am not greatly mistaken, it is pleasure-seeking on the Sabbath which gives pain to the godly; shovelling snow is not a pleasure to me, but a penance, a mortification of the flesh, and a Lenten misery. I offer this labour—which I heartily detest—as an expiation for all my sins of pride, lust, covetousness, greed, sloth, anger and envy during the past six days. And now will you please go away before I sin further by washing your face in this snow bank?” He hurried away, tut-tutting.
• OF UNWONTED EXERTION •
SEVERAL LARGE and dangerous icicles hang from the roof of my house, and I decided that I had better get them down before they fell on the milkman and clove him to the brisket. So I spent quite a long time heaving snowballs at them, this afternoon, trying to knock them off the eavestrough. Throwing things is not one of my accomplishments; I can hit a dog with a baseball bat at ten feet, but picking off icicles with snowballs is quite another thing. However, I threw and threw, until my right shoulder became numb and my appendix gave notice that it was going to burst, but very few of the stalactites (or are they stalagmites?) came down, and those that did smashed uncomfortably near me…. The result of all this stretching is that my right side is now several inches longer than my left side, and I walk with a hippety-hopping gait, like a dwarf and a giant tied together for a three-legged race.
• EDISON THE CALLIGRAPHER •
THE PAPERS ARE full of hullabaloo about Edison,4 who appears to have been not merely an ingenious fellow, but also a major philosopher and saint (as well as the only man who could write the Lord’s Prayer on a piece of paper the size of a dime). Edison’s chief impact was made upon me by means of his phonograph. My great-aunt Lettice had an early model, and as soon as I was strong enough to lift the records (which were as thick as manhole covers and about the same weight) I played it frequently. As a result of this early training, I am still able to recite large portions of a monologue called Cohen On The Telephone, and sing all the hits from a forgotten musical comedy called The Yokohama Girl. Edison’s admirable autograph appeared on each record, and I am surprised that in all the praise of him there has been no word of his genuine skill as a calligrapher.
• GEOGRAPHY AN IMPERTINENCE •
I HAD AN OPPORTUNITY to examine a rather fine stamp collection today. As a usual thing stamps leave me cold; I regard them simply as dirty bits of paper which foreigners have licked. But I had to admit as I turned the pages, that some of the stamps were pretty; the pre-revolutionary Russian ones, for instance, had great charm and the Japanese stamps were delicately beautiful. The possessor of the collection assured me that it was a great aid in learning history and geography, which is probably true, but the kind of history which can be learned from stamps is of no particular interest to me, and I have no desire to learn any geography under any circumstances. The fact that I am never sure where any place is gives a special charm to my consideration of the daily news and if I shattered my ignorance another of my retreats from reality would have been ruined. I think that all this dabbling in geography is rather bad-mannered and nosy, like peeping through people’s windows.
• THE NAÏVETÉ OF OPERA •
THE LAST OF THE opera broadcasts was on the air this afternoon, so I settled down in my armchair with a bag of peppermints to enjoy it. But luck was not with me; things kept cropping up which had to be done, and people kept calling me to the phone who wanted taxis and other things which I couldn’t give them, and altogether the union of Mozart and Marchbanks was incomplete and unsatisfactory. By the time the broadcast was over I had a headache and a peppermint hangover. Nevertheless, opera broadcasts exercise a powerful fascination over me, and every winter I try to hear as many as I can. There is a childlike, unsophisticated quality about opera which commands respect in this wicked world. All that hooting and hollering because somebody has pinched somebody else’s girl, or killed the wrong man, or sold his soul to the devil! These are commonplaces in daily life (particularly the latter) and it is astonishing to hear them treated with so much noisy consideration.
• HE YEARNS FOR THE REVOLUTION •
I MADE A TRAIN journey yesterday. As always I was impressed by the amount of rude staring that goes on when a train is standing in a station. The stay-at-homes on the platform gawp rustically at the people in the cars, while the urbane and world-weary travellers stare back, down their noses. As in an aquarium, it is impossible to say who is staring and who is being stared at…. When the train reached my stop I wrestled my own suitcases to the door, for the porter thought I was going to Toronto, and had fallen asleep. Yet, I gave this neglectful blackamoor a quarter—an act of sheer cowardice; I should have stared into his chocolate eyes like a lion-tamer, and kept my money. But in such matters I am contemptibly lacking in resolution. My face is perpetually ground by those who are, in a purely technical sense, the poor. I shall welcome the Revolution, after which I shall not be expected to tip anybody.
• OF WITCHES •
A LITTLE GIRL was telling me about a dream that she had last night: “A witch was chasing me, and she had germs all over her fingers,” the child said. This is a good example of the way in which superstition keeps abreast of science, instead of being displaced by it, as foolish people believe. In my childhood I sometimes dreamed that witches were chasing me to tear out my liver and lights, or to bake me in a pie, but never to infect me with germs. The next generation, I suppose, will dream that witches are after them to make them radioactive. The fashion in scientific horrors may change, but the witches will go on, and on, chasing generations of horror-stricken children down the shadowy labyrinths of sleep.
• HOW TO DISCOURAGE EVIL SPIRITS •
I SAW A CHILD whizz across the road on her tricycle today, directly in front of a car; when she grows up she will be the kind of woman who darts across the streets against the red light, holding back traffic by sheer power of the human eye. In India it is regarded as a good idea to dart in front of an oncoming car, for the car is sure to kill the evil spirits who are pursuing you, and all the rest of your life you will have good luck. There are a lot of Canadians who seem to be trying to get the best of their evil spirits by this dubious method. Of course, if you are a little out in your calculations, and the car reduces you to a large splash of tomato sauce, your evil spirits may be said to have won the final trick.
• GROWTH OF INCREDULITY •
I SAW A LARGE shell in a friend’s house the other day, and for old times’ sake I held it up to my ear and heard the familiar roaring which is supposed to be the sound of the sea. When I was a child I listened to this sea-noise eagerly, and believed in it. But now I am of a less easily satisfied disposition; the Scientific Spirit has got hold of me and it gives me little peace. If I hold an empty beer bottle up to my ear I hear a noise, too; am I to believe that is the sound of a brewery? And when I hold an old marmalade jar to my ear, must I believe that the suspiration which I hear is the whisper of the zephyrs through orange-groves? No. As a modern poet has put it:
The noise
Which is so easy to explain to girls and boys,
Serves only to insult
The keener intelligence of the adult.
• OF CENSORSHIP •
I HAVE A PARTICULAR affection for the city of Toronto; the mere contemplation of its moral sublimity puts me in good humour for days at a time. The latest outbreak of virtue in the Queen City takes the form of a declaration on the part of one of the city controllers that the Public Libraries of Toronto have been circulating dirty books, including The Decameron. At first I was a good deal startled by the thought that a Toronto alderman had been reading The Decameron; I had not imagined that they read anything more taxing than the portions of the Reader’s Digest which are printed in large type. But I now discover that the alderman had not read the book; he had simply been told by somebody else that it was not a proper book for anyone to read…. The first indecent book I ever read was Quo Vadis, which I got out of a Sunday School library; I found the descriptions of Roman highlife deeply stirring. Later I became very partial to The Song of Songs (which is Solomon’s) which was sold to me by an agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society in a plain wrapper.
• OF DOGS •
A BEAUTIFUL NEW dogproof garbage box was installed on the back stoop at Marchbanks Towers today. For several years all the jolly doggies of the neighbourhood have looked upon my back stoop as a rendezvous where they can drop in for a snack, a chat, a fight or to enquire after some bitch of easy virtue with whom they can pitch a bit of woo; dogs create their own form of bebop, and discuss big deals involving dozens of bones on my back porch, and I make no secret of the fact that I am sick of it. Therefore I have caused to be constructed a large and durable chest, heavily ribbed and studded with brass screws, in which I shall keep my garbage pails in future, and the dogs can find some new Kasbah in which to carry on their raffish social life…. For a time I used to lie in wait in my kitchen until the dogs gathered for the evening, and then (choosing my time very precisely) I would rush out among them, striking to right and left with a broom, and uttering loud and terrifying cries, like a Japanese warrior going into battle. Then I would pick up the garbage and go inside, congratulating myself on a good job well done. But I found that the dogs looked upon me merely as the floorshow, or comedy act, of their evening’s entertainment…. Well, they’ll laugh on the other side of their muzzles when they see my new box.
• OF HAPPY PRIVACY •
ALL YESTERDAY’S papers informed me that this would be International Shut-Ins Day, and when I awoke I found that rain was descending in large greasy blobs about the size of marbles. This meant that I was a shut-in myself until this evening, for though I enjoy a walk in the rain a recent misadventure with my umbrella put such an amusement out of the question. Personally I do not greatly mind being a shut-in. I have often longed to have my sphere of activity sharply limited. Whenever I see an advertisement telling me that it is now possible for me to get to Britain in eight hours, or that the wonders of South America are within my easy reach, I recoil; when a speaker begins his remarks by saying that the world is shrinking, I shrink too. I shall end my days, beyond a doubt, as a happily cantankerous old shut-in, reading, eating and sleeping in one small room, with doors and windows sealed, and a hole in the ceiling for the entry and removal of necessities. At last my corpse will be dragged up through the hole, and only my memories will be left.
• OF NATURE’S MALICE •
IT LOOKED LIKE rain this afternoon, and I gave it every chance to do so. But nothing happened, so I girded up my loins and cut my grass, after which the heavens opened and the rains fell. The malignancy of Nature in these matters is past belief. If I am not to enjoy the beauty of my lawn when I have cut it, why should I bother with it? I often think that I should abandon the futile struggle and allow Nature to reclaim the pleasure grounds of Marchbanks Towers. Let the velvet lawns grow rank; let briars and thistles choke the Lovers’ Walk; let scum accumulate on the lily pond; let the grape arbour and the Temple of Diana fall into ruin. Let the place assume the aspect of Tobacco Road, and I shall sit happily on the decaying verandah, spitting tobacco juice at the passers-by.
• OF HIS UNCLE BRIAN •
THERE SEEM to be a good many advertisements for Irish goods about these days, and most of them give the impression that everything in Ireland is made by peculiar fellows in bobtailed coats, who wear bog beards and smoke clay pipes. If memory serves me aright the word “shantycraft” was used in one such billboard that I saw. It is a lucky thing that my great-uncle Brian Boru Marchbanks never lived to see those things. He was a proud man, and any suggestion that Irishmen kept pigs under their beds or habitually went about with holes in the seats of their pants (for the airiness of it) used to put him into a state of passionate resentment. It was his opinion that Irishmen were just the same as other people, and frequently in the street he would call loudly upon anyone who was with him to point out just one respect—only one—in which he could be singled out from the crowd as an Irishman. Often his protestations of ordinariness would draw quite a crowd, which he would offer to fight, man by man, until he was dragged away by his wellwishers.
• OF THE MANX SHAKESPEARE •
THE LADY on my right has just asked me if I remember the novels of Sir Hall Caine.5 I replied that with Hall Caine, as with Sir Walter Scott, I had never been able to read one of his books through. All of Caine’s characters lived in an atmosphere of agony and molasses, which was intolerable to my ribald mind. The lady then confessed to me that she, too, had no admiration for Caine, but thought that I might recall in which of his novels it was that the heroine dried her baby’s diapers by wrapping them around her own body, next to the skin. I could not recall the source of this astounding instance of mother love but said that any heroine of Hall Caine’s was quite welcome to get rheumatism, so far as I am concerned. It was a little surprising, however, to hear that Caine ever acknowledged the existence of anything so closely related to the baser functions as a diaper…. You’ve never heard of Hall Caine! Sancta simplicitas!
THE LADY ON MY left tells me that she wants a job in my Institute for the Re-Gruntlement of Disgruntled Persons. As qualifications she tells me that she is a bad cook and a terrible dancer; the latter circumstance she attributes to a Methodist upbringing, which still causes her to drag one leg. She says that she gets devilish ideas easily, and advances some very original notions for treating disgruntled persons with Epsom Salts. She seems to be the ideal appointee for the post of Matron. I have already put the Business Management of the institution into the hands of a man who was unfrocked by the Income Tax division of the Department of National Revenue for extortion above and beyond the call of duty.6
• OF CALENDAR REFORM •
I CHATTED THIS evening to a man who is in the calendar business and who tells me that one mighty industry recently distributed several hundreds of thousands of calendars in which April was credited with thirty-one days. This is probably the result of a secret coup by the calendar reformers. I do not personally favour calendar reform as I am a friend to inconvenience and inconsistency, believing that the illogicality of our present calendar serves as a useful reminder of the capriciousness of fate and the mutability of all things. The calendar reformers just want to be cosy. A pox on cosiness!
• OF LUMPISM •
I BECAME INVOLVED in an argument about modern painting, a subject upon which I am spectacularly ill-informed; however, many of my friends can become heated, and even violent on the subject and I enjoy their wrangles. In a modest way, I am an artist myself, and I have some sympathy with the Abstractionists, although I have gone beyond them in my own approach to art. I am a Lumpist. Two or three decades ago it was quite fashionable to be a Cubist, and to draw everything in cubes; then there was a revolt by the Vorticists who drew everything in whirls; we now have the Abstractionists who paint everything in a very abstracted manner. But my own small works (done on my telephone pad) are composed of carefully shaded, strangely shaped lumps, with traces of Cubism, Vorticism and Abstraction in them for those who possess the seeing eye. As a Lumpist, I stand alone.
• OF UNIVERSITY VERSE •
I RECEIVED AN undergraduate magazine this morning, containing the kind of poetry which boys and girls write between eighteen and twenty-one, full of words like “harlot,” “stench,” “whore” and the like. The young have a passion for strong meaty words, and like to write disillusioned verses with jagged edges about the deceit and bitterness of life. I idly turned my hand to versifying, and produced this nice bit of undergraduate poetry, which I offer free to any university magazine:
DISILLUSION
Ugh!
Take it away!
Life—the thirty-cent breakfast
Offered to vomiting Man
In this vast Hangover—
The World.
Till Fate—the old whore—
Loose or costive
Drops me in the latrine of Oblivion—
Plop!
I have not lost the youthful, zestful university touch with a bit of verse.
• OF AN AGREEABLE PASTIME •
ON MY WAY HERE tonight I found that an icy crust had formed on all the snow, about an eighth of an inch in thickness, and as I trod it broke into large flat chunks, like dinner plates. I smashed a few of these, experimentally, and found it an admirable release from tension. I began to pretend that the chunks of ice were valuable pieces of china, and this was even more fun. “Here goes a Spode dinner plate!” I cried, and smashed it to smithereens. Then—“Bang goes a half dozen Crown Derby demitasses!”—and bang they went. Next—“Here’s for those ruddy soup cups I’ve always hated!”—and an armful of them dispersed into atoms. It was glorious. I was a bull in a china shop—an embittered, vindictive bull, revenging itself for a thousand annoyances and injuries. I suppose that, by the time I had finished, I had destroyed about an acre of ice or $50,000 worth of china, and I felt fine. If people had more cheap releases of this kind, there would be fewer deaths from heart failure.
• OF BEETHOVEN’S WIT •
THE PAPERS TELL me that an admirer of Deanna Durbin’s7 has paid $60 for a lock of Beethoven’s hair to give her, to be added to her collection of musical relics. I hope he sniffed it before paying. It is well-known that Beethoven, who was a nasty man in many ways and possessed of a thoroughly Germanic sense of humour, was pestered all his life by women who wanted his hair, and on more than one occasion he cut a swatch off a goat and sent it to a fan, who presumably wore it in a locket, or sewed it into her corsets next to her heart. I doubt if the smell of goat would wear off, even after 150 years.
• OF HIS PROTEAN PERSONALITY •
I TRAVELLED BY train yesterday, and observed a remarkable change in my character, which would undoubtedly be of the deepest interest to psychologists, if I chose to make it public. There was a queue for the dining car, and as I stood in the narrow corridor, beside the axe, hammer, saw and crowbar which railways display in a little glass showcase (doubtless for sale to tourists) I imagined, and mentally ate, several meals, wondering meanwhile how the gluttons in the diner could take so long. It was sheer malignance, I decided. But when at last I was shown to a table I forgot all this, chose my meal with a gourmet’s care, and then ate it as much like a gourmet as its decidedly poor quality permitted, forgetting all about the needy wretches in the corridor. But when I passed them on my way out their fiery and indignant eyes burned through my waistcoat, giving me heartburn.
1 Published in 1883 and popular at least until the twenties of this century. The Bad Boy spent his time in such merry tricks as putting ants in his Pa’s liver-pad, getting him falsely arrested for murder, and in other ways making the old man’s life a burden. It was written, of course, in the days before it became the fashion to believe that boys had souls, and write books about them like The Catcher in the Rye.
2 The reader will by this time have observed that Marchbanks suffers ill-health, even if it is no more than the hypochondria characteristic of so many literary men. One of his worst trials in his visits to the medical profession was the Basal Metabolism Test, which was required of him often. It involved arriving at the physician’s office without breakfast, and lying on a cold table while a rubber bag was strapped over his mouth and nose; the bag was never cleansed, and God knows who had puffed and blown into it; breathing in and out while it was in place was like giving the Kiss of Life to somebody on Skid Row. Under such circumstances Marchbanks was unable to obey the doctor’s command to breathe quietly and easily, and in consequence the record of his Basal Metabolism is a medical marvel of inaccuracy.
3 Donald Wolfit (1902-68) was an actor of extraordinary courage and determination, uninhibited by self-doubt, who in his professional life presented a large number of the plays of Shakespeare, and some of Ibsen, acting with intelligence and clarity of focus. Without any advantages of person, and with a somewhat harsh voice, he was at his best in the roles of tragic heroes, but had no turn for scenes of tenderness. Marchbanks saw him often, and thought him best in the title role in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, the brilliance, ferocity and abrasiveness of the character being perfectly suited to Wolfit’s gifts. He was also greatly admired in the larger-than-life role of the protagonist in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. In the age of Gielgud, Olivier and Richardson, Wolfit exemplified the earlier tradition of the great roaring actors.
4 Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) was the inventor of hundreds of remarkable devices, and seems to have been the Yankee Handy-Man raised to the nth power. His lifelong deafness was caused when he was a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway. Running to catch a train, he was seized by the ears by a brakeman and dragged aboard, with irreparable damage to his hearing. Children and dogs should never be lifted by the ears, as U. S. President Lyndon B. Johnson once discovered, to his cost.
5 Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine (1853-1931) was in his heyday a best-selling author and enjoyed some reputation as a prophet and seer. He was known as the Manx Shakespeare because he had a strong affection for the Isle of Man (though born in Cheshire), wrote plays, and cultivated a resemblance to the Bard, firmly based on partial baldness. Like many writers of the highest popularity, he had little humour. When his drama The Eternal City was being rehearsed by Herbert Beerbohm Tree in 1902, Caine wanted Tree, who played the villain, Count Bonelli, to drag the heroine, Roma, played by Constance Collier, around the stage by her hair and conclude by bashing her head on the boards. “Yes, yes,” said Tree, “but my dear Caine, I seem to remember that incident being worked into another very famous tragedy.” “Good gracious, Tree,” said Caine, “whatever play was that?” “It was,” said Tree, thinking deeply, “yes, it was called Punch and Judy.” Caine was not amused.
6 This was, of course, written at a time when the tax-gatherers admitted that there was such a thing as Going Too Far. They have long since overcome any such inhibiting scruple.
7 Deanna Durbin (b. 1921) was a Canadian girl singer of great charm who enjoyed ten years of success on the screen, when an increasing plumpness brought about her retirement. Would a lock of Beethoven’s hair have added anything to her gift of song? Marchbanks once bid up to $15 at an auction sale in Port Hope, for a disgusting object under a belljar which was described as a cigar butt thrown away by the great Franz Liszt. Marchbanks believed that if he set it on the lid of his own piano it might improve his playing, but stinginess proved his undoing, and another amateur pianist got the cigar butt for $17.