Lady, Play Your Endocrines
In the latter half of 1925, when the spirit of François Villon still hovered over the Jumble Shop and no poetry evening was complete without Eli Siegel declaiming “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana,” I shared with another impecunious prospector and fellow-alumnus from Brown a cavernous, dingy room on West Eighth Street, in the Village. Four flights up and colder than the Kirghiz Steppe, it was nevertheless pervaded by a tropical effluvium from the dry cleaner’s on the ground floor and commanded an unobstructed view of five restaurants neither of us could afford to patronize. We took our meals, to use a very loose designation, at a cruller shop down the block, and while we succeeded in sustaining life, I have ever since managed to view doughnuts with a measure of stoicism. Montague Adair, my roommate, was one of those unique personalities whose exteriors are as distinguished as their names. His classic features, seemingly chiseled of purest Parian marble, sable hair that put the raven’s wing to shame, and an air of Beardsleyesque melancholy had already devastated innumerable coeds, and, to judge from the lipsticks and bobby pins strewn about when one returned from an enforced evening’s stroll, he was by way of becoming the outstanding nympholept of the downtown metropolitan area.
A slim purse, however, pretty well circumscribed our social life, and our leisure was usually spent at home reading. Montague, employed on a garment-trade newspaper, dreamed of one day blossoming into a writer of pulp fiction. Consequently, he made a point of keeping abreast of Argosy, Flynn’s, Cupid’s Diary, Railroad Stories, and similar periodicals—solely to study their plot techniques, he was quick to assure you, for he professed to scorn their sleazy, infantile philosophy. Sprawled in a rump-sprung Morris chair, his forehead contorted in a scowl of concentration, Montague nightly applied himself to the incredible villainies and galanteries of the pulps. Some cut-rate leech having told him shortly before that he was anemic, my roommate was also valiantly attempting to restore his tissue tone. In the course of his evening’s homework, he would work his way through a pint container of vanilla ice cream and a box of graham crackers, eating with a deliberate, maddening obduracy that in time began to take its toll of my nerves. I used to loll across the room from him on a Roman day bed covered in monk’s cloth, struggling to fix my mind on the novel I was reading, but sooner or later I would detect myself staring at him in fascinated revulsion. He ate the ice cream with the small, flat wooden paddle supplied by the drugstore, sluggishly scooping up a gob, placing the paddle on his tongue, and allowing the cream to disintegrate, his slightly bovine eyes never straying from the printed page. This grisly ritual, varied only by an occasional tangerine, whose stringy rind he braided into a torque and left in the ashtray, eventually became a fixation with me. Each time he raised the paddle to his lips, I could almost taste its dry, grainy surface myself; beads of sweat the size of Malaga grapes stood forth on my brow and I ground my nails into my palms to keep from crying out. At last, the floodgates gave way. One night, I leaped to my feet, cut loose with a falsetto paraphrase of Hedda Gabler, and ran screaming down Macdougal Street. The next day, I moved into a single bedroom at the West Side Y.M.C.A.
I hardly expected that bittersweet epoch to return with such poignancy when, a few days ago, I picked Gertrude Atherton’s Black Oxen out of a second-hand bin on Fourth Avenue. Then, as I thumbed through it, with the Cyclops eye of the bookseller behind the plate glass challenging me to steal it, I remembered it as the great novel of my fin-de-siècle period. For one freezing instant, I was propelled backward in time to my spavined day bed, torn between Mrs. Atherton’s glandular Spielerei and Montague’s odious paddle. Every dictate of good sense warned me that the prudent course would be to let the past bury its dead, flee to a Turkish bath, and go on a brannigan, but did I do it? Ah, no—I had to buy the book yet.
Black Oxen, published in 1923, achieved thirteen editions in nine months, disrupted bridge luncheons and dinner parties the country over, made its author one of the most talked-of women of the century, and brought to movie stardom a lady who, after twenty-five years, is still my dream boat. To those who remember Corinne Griffith as the Countess Marie Zattiany in the film version, I need say no more; if any gentlemen are minded to form a club like the Junta in Zuleika Dobson, dedicated to celebrating her sempiternal loveliness, I place at their disposal my rooms at the Albany. Rereading Black Oxen today, I find it difficult to be objective. I cannot altogether divorce the incomparable luster of Miss Griffith’s eyes, her porcelain fragility, from the heroine of the novel, and if I should occasionally whinny or segue into the opening bars of “Yearning,” I trust it will be taken in good part.
Ponce de León’s fountain has always found favor with the popular imagination, and in choosing its modern counterpart, gland rejuvenation, as her theme, Mrs. Atherton was a sly mongoose. Her tale begins at a fashionable first night, at which we are introduced to Lee Clavering, top-flight columnist and former dramatic critic. Clavering is a schoolgirl’s dream, an alloy of Heathcliff, Conrad Veidt, and Jinx Falkenburg’s brother. He is thirty-four, has a long, lounging body, a dark, saturnine face, and steel-blue eyes, and, to list but four of the labels used to tag him, is fastidious, cynical, morose, and mysterious. It is superfluous to add (though the author does, and at length) that he is a thoroughgoing misogynist. Well, Mac, you must be intuitive. As the first act draws to a close, he spies in front of him a head of hair “the color of warm ashes” and “no more than a glimpse of a white neck and a suggestion of sloping shoulders.” “Rather rare those, nowadays,” observes Clavering to himself—a sentiment I found baffling, for most heads I recall in the twenties were part of a set that included neck and shoulders. A few minutes later, during the intermission, their owner rises and coolly scrutinizes the audience through her opera glasses. Space precludes my tabulating the niceties of her face and figure, but I may assure the reader that she’s a dilly. She wears a dress of white jet, long white gloves, and a triple string of pearls whose radiance is dimmed by her eyes: “They were very dark gray eyes, Greek in the curve of the lid, and inconceivably wise, cold, disillusioned.” The problem is posed; the players attend. White captures Black in an unspecified number of moves, and damn’d be he that first cries, “Hold, enough.”
Once started, the plot of Black Oxen picks up speed like a ruptured toboggan. In the theater lobby, Clavering runs into Charles Dinwiddie, an elderly clubman and a relative of his, who likewise has been struck all of a heap, but for quite another reason. “Thirty-odd years ago,” he informs Clavering, “any one of us old chaps would have told you she was Mary Ogden, and like as not raised his hat. She was the beauty and belle of her day. But she married a Hungarian diplomat, Count Zattiany, when she was twenty-four, and deserted us.” Before long, the lady begins exciting popular attention as well; society and the press boil with speculation and rumor about her identity. It is pertinent to note here what a flattering level of literacy Mrs. Atherton ascribes to the journalism of the Jazz Age: “The columnists had commented on her. One had indited ten lines of free verse in her honor, another had soared on the wings of seventeenth-century English into a panegyric on her beauty and her halo of mystery. A poet-editor-wit had cleped her ‘The Silent Drama.’ ” The last verb, incidentally, is a fair sample of Mrs. Atherton’s relish for the recherché, or uptown, word. She speaks elsewhere of a “rubescent Socialist,” “rhinocerene hides,” and a “debauched gerontic virgin.”
Despite concerted efforts of Dinwiddie and Mrs. Oglethorpe, a dowager who grew up with Mary Ogden, to probe the mystery surrounding the fair stranger, she remains a fascinating enigma. She turns up at every first night, fanning Clavering’s infatuation to white heat as the weeks pass. “She never rose in her seat again, and, indeed, seemed to seek inconspicuousness, but she was always in the second or third row of the orchestra, and she wore a different gown on each occasion.” A rather ineffectual method of shunning the limelight, if I may say so; it would probably have caused less comment if she had worn a fringed lampshade on her head, and a pair of snowshoes. Finally, Clavering follows her one evening to her mansion on Murray Hill. To his elation, she is not unaware of his interest. “Oh, it is you,” she says with a faint smile. “I forgot my key and I cannot make anyone hear the bell. The servants sleep on the top floor, and of course like logs.” Her cavalier obligingly kicks in a windowpane, and she rewards him with sandwiches and whiskey in the library, where a log is burning on the hearth—presumably some servant incapable of reaching the top floor. Out of this session comes her declaration that she is yet another Countess Zattiany, a third cousin of Mary Ogden, who, she says, is in a Vienna sanitarium. Clavering is so enamored of her Old World charm, whatever her identity, that, on reaching the sidewalk, he stands guard over the house for two hours. The heroes of current fiction exhibit such constancy all too seldom. In a dozen hardboiled novels I could name, girls have lavished lots more than sandwiches and whiskey without any token of devotion beyond a glancing peck on the cheek.
As the story progresses and Clavering lays siege to the countess, it grows rapidly apparent that she is a femme du monde of vast experience for a person in her early thirties, one who has enjoyed social triumphs and knows them to be illusory. “Luncheons! Dinners! Balls! I was surfeited before the war,” she observes scornfully on being pressed to re-enter society. When Clavering admiringly remarks that she must have distinguished herself abroad, she assents with fetching candor: “Oh, yes. Once an entire house—it was at the opera—rose as I entered my box at the end of the first act.” Besides betraying an intimate knowledge of three decades of European diplomacy, Mme. Zattiany also drops several casual hints about Dr. Steinach, the noted Viennese endocrinologist, which should tip her mitt to the least observant, but her beau grimly refuses to tumble. For a columnist-critic represented as a blend of Jimmie Fidler and James Gibbons Huneker, Clavering is wondrously obtuse. He bumbles around with no suspicion that he has pinned his affections on a miracle of surgery, attributing her witchery to everything but the obvious medical reason. One evening, for example, they are dining at her home. “She was eating her oysters daintily and giving him the benefit of her dark brown eyelashes,” states the narrative, breeding envy in those of us who have trouble gracefully manipulating our lashes, let alone our oysters. This inexplicably provokes from Clavering a genealogical litany establishing Mme. Zattiany as a Nordic princess. “Oh, yes, you are a case of atavism, no doubt,” he assures her. “I can see you sweeping northward over the steppes of Russia as the ice-caps retreated . . . re-embodied on the Baltic coast or the shores of the North Sea . . . sleeping for ages in one of the Megaliths, to rise again a daughter of the Brythons, or of a Norse Viking . . . west into Anglia to appear once more as a Priestess of the Druids chaunting in a sacred grove . . . or as Boadicea—who knows!”
The upshot of these dithyrambs is, of course, a proposal of marriage, which ultimately compels the countess to publicly divulge her secret; namely, that she is the true Countess Zattiany (née Mary Ogden), that she is crowding fifty-eight, and that her pristine zip has been rekindled at Professor Steinach’s gland parlors in Vienna. Clavering’s ardor abates temporarily; he undergoes a phase of irresolution and soul-searching wherein his work suffers, but he gamely meets his obligations: “He avoided the office and wrote his column at home. Luckily a favorite old comedian had died recently. He could fill up with reminiscence and anecdote.” Providential indeed, and a striking demonstration of the truth of a pair of old adages about silver linings and ill winds. At any rate, love vanquishes his misgivings, and, proposing again to the countess, who by now is a national sensation comparable to the flying saucers, he is accepted. Just as the blissful couple are making plans for a honeymoon at a shoe box in the Dolomites (it may have been a shooting box; frankly, I had no time for technicalities at this advanced stage of the story), the third leg of the triangle comes into view. Prince Moritz Franz Ernest Felix von Hohenhauer, an elder statesman of the Austrian Empire and former lover of the Gräfin, arrives in New York on business of state. He pursues his ex-sweetheart to a bohemian retreat in the Adirondacks, to which Clavering has spirited her, and, in the following majestic mouthful, tries to dissuade her from the marriage: “Your revivified glands have restored to you the appearance and the strength of youth, but although you have played with a role that appealed to your vanity, to your histrionic powers—with yourself as chief audience—your natural desire to see if you could not be—to yourself, again—as young as you appear, you have no more illusion in your soul than when you were a withered old woman in Vienna.” Whether by his logic or by his tortured grammar, the Prince succeeds in casting a blight on the romance, and the book closes on a lovers’ renunciation in Central Park as sweet as any Linzer Torte in Rumpelmayer’s. Or, should I say, as any wooden paddleful of vanilla ice cream slowly dissolving on the tongue.
If my sentimental return to Black Oxen had any aftermath other than biliousness, it reminded me how negligent I have been of late toward my ductless glands. The last time I visited Los Angeles, there was a shop on South Figueroa in whose window was a mound of assorted jelly beans marked “Fancy male hormones and pep glands—$1.49 the pound.” My next trip through, I figure to latch onto a little bag of those—say, ten cents’ worth. So if you see a middle-aged chap with a dark, saturnine face, fastidious and morose, swinging around the shelves of your second-hand bookshop and chattering like a gibbon, you’ll know who it is. But don’t think you’ve got a Chinaman’s chance, girls. His heart’s still pledged to Corinne Griffith.