To revert now to the subject of the drawers. It will do you no good to bombinate endlessly about sleazy material, deterioration from pounding on stones, etc. That they were immersed in an acid bath powerful enough to corrode a zinc plate, that they were wrenched through a mangle with utmost ferocity, that they were deliberately spattered with grease and kicked about the floor of your establishment, and, finally, that a white-hot iron was appliquéd on their seat—the whole sordid tale of maltreatment is writ there for anybody to see. The motive, however, is far less apparent, and I have speculated for hours on why I should be the target of vandalism. Only one explanation fits the facts. Quite clearly, for all your extortionate rates, you underpay your workmen, and one of them, seeking to revenge himself, wreaked his spite on my undergarment. While I sympathize with the poor rascal’s plight, I wish it understood that I hold you responsible to the very last sou. I therefore deduct from the enclosed draft nine francs fifty, which will hardly compensate me for the damage to my raiment and my nerves, and remain, with the most transitory assurances of my regard,
Sincerely yours,
PANDIT MOTILAL NEHRU
Paris,
July 18, 1903
Pandit Motilal Nehru,
Allahabad, U.P., India
Dear Pandit Motilal:
I am desolated beyond words at the pique I sense between the lines in your recent letter, and I affirm to you on my wife’s honor that in the six generations the family has conducted this business, yours is the first complaint we have ever received. Were I to list the illustrious clients we have satisfied—Robespierre, the Duc d’Enghien, Saint-Saëns, Coquelin, Mérimée, Bouguereau, and Dr. Pasteur, to name but a handful—it would read like a roll call of the immortals. Only yesterday, Marcel Proust, an author you will hear more of one of these days, called at our établissement (establishment) to felicitate us in person. The work we do for him is peculiarly exacting; due to his penchant for making notes on his cuffs, we must observe the greatest discretion in selecting which to launder. In fine, our function is as much editorial as sanitary, and he stated unreservedly that he holds our literary judgment in the highest esteem. I ask you, could a firm with traditions like these stoop to the pettifoggery you imply?
You can be sure, however, that if our staff has been guilty of any oversight, it will not be repeated. Between ourselves, we have been zealously weeding out a Socialist element among the employees, malcontents who seek to inflame them with vicious nonsense about an eleven-hour day and compulsory ventilation. Our firm refusal to compromise one iota has borne fruit; we now have a hard core of loyal and spiritless drudges, many of them so lacklustre that they do not even pause for lunch, which means a substantial time saving and consequently much speedier service for the customer. As you see, my dear Pandit Motilal, efficiency and devotion to our clientele dominate every waking thought at Pleurniche.
As regards your last consignment, all seems to be in order; I ask leave, though, to beg one trifling favor that will help us execute your work more rapidly in future. Would you request whoever mails the laundry to make certain it contains no living organisms? When the current order was unpacked, a small yellow-black serpent, scarcely larger than a pencil but quite dynamic, wriggled out of one of your dhotis and spread terror in the workroom. We succeeded in decapitating it after a modicum of trouble and bore it to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, where the curator identified it as a krait, the most lethal of your indigenous snakes. Mind you, I personally thought M. Ratisbon an alarmist—the little émigré impressed me as a rather cunning fellow, vivacious, intelligent, and capable of transformation into a household pet if one had leisure. Unfortunately, we have none, so fervent is our desire to accelerate your shipments, and you will aid us materially by a hint in the right quarter, if you will. Accept, I implore of you, my salutations the most distinguished.
Yours cordially,
OCTAVE-HIPPOLYTE PLEURNICHE
Allahabad, U.P.,
September 11, 1903
Dear M. Pleurniche:
If I were a hothead, I might be tempted to horsewhip a Yahoo who has the effrontery to set himself up as a patron of letters; if a humanitarian, to garrote him and earn the gratitude of the miserable wretches under his heel. As I am neither, but simply an idealist fatuous enough to believe he is entitled to what he pays for, I have a favor to ask of you, in turn. Spare me, I pray, your turgid rhetoric and bootlicking protestations, and be equally sparing of the bleach you use on my shirts. After a single baptism in your vats, my sky-blue jibbahs faded to a ghastly greenish-white and the fabric evaporates under one’s touch. Merciful God, whence springs this compulsion to eliminate every trace of color from my dress? Have you now become arbiters of fashion as well as littérateurs?
In your anxiety to ingratiate yourselves, incidentally, you have exposed me to as repugnant an experience as I can remember. Five or six days ago, a verminous individual named Champignon arrived here from Pondichéry, asserting that he was your nephew, delegated by you to expedite my household laundry problems. The blend of unction and cheek he displayed, reminiscent of a process server, should have warned me to beware, but, tenderhearted ninny that I am, I obeyed our Brahmin laws of hospitality and permitted him to remain the night. Needless to say, he distinguished himself. After a show of gluttony to dismay Falstaff, he proceeded to regale the dinner table with a disquisition on the art of love, bolstering it with quotations from the Kamasutra so coarse that one of the ladies present fainted dead away. Somewhat later, I surprised him in the kitchen tickling a female servant, and when I demurred, he rudely advised me to stick to my rope trick and stay out of matters that did not concern me. He was gone before daylight, accompanied by a Jaipur enamel necklace of incalculable value and all our spoons. I felt it was a trivial price to be rid of him. Nevertheless, I question your wisdom, from a commercial standpoint, in employing such emissaries. Is it not safer to rob the customer in the old humdrum fashion, a franc here and a franc there, than to stake everything on a youth’s judgment and risk possible disaster? I subscribe myself, as always,
Your well-wisher,
PANDIT MOTILAL NEHRU
Paris,
October 25, 1903
Dear Pandit Motilal:
We trust that you have received the bundle shipped five weeks since and that our work continues to gratify. It is also pleasing to learn that our relative M. Champignon called on you and managed to be of assistance. If there is any further way he can serve you, do not hesitate to notify him.
I enclose herewith a cutting which possibly needs a brief explanation. As you see, it is a newspaper advertisement embodying your photograph and a text woven out of laudatory remarks culled from your letters to us. Knowing you would gladly concur, I took the liberty of altering a word or two in places to clarify the meaning and underline the regard you hold us in. This dramatic license, so to speak, in no way vitiates the sense of what you wrote; it is quite usual in theatrical advertising to touch up critical opinion, and to judge from comment I have already heard, you will enjoy publicity throughout the continent of Europe for years to come. Believe us, dear Pandit, your eternal debtor, and allow me to remain
Yours fraternally,
OCTAVE-HIPPOLYTE PLEURNICHE
Allahabad,
November 14, 1903
Dear M. Pleurniche:
The barristers I retained immediately on perusing your letter—Messrs. Nankivel & Fotheringay, of Covent Garden, a firm you will hear more of one of these days—have cautioned me not to communicate with you henceforth, but the urge to speak one final word is irresistible. After all, when their suit for a million francs breaks over you like a thunderclap, when the bailiffs seize your business and you are reduced to sleeping along the quais and subsisting on the carrot greens you pick up around Les Halles, you may mistakenly attribute your predicament to my malignity, to voodoo, djinns, etc. Nothing of the sort, my dear chap. Using me to publicize your filthy little concern is only a secondary factor in your downfall. What
doomed you from the start was the humbling incompetence, the ingrained slovenliness, that characterizes everyone in your calling. A man too indolent to replace the snaps he tears from a waistcoat or expunge the rust he sprinkles on a brand-new Kashmiri shawl is obviously capable of any infamy, and it ill becomes him to snivel when retribution overtakes him in the end.
Adieu then, mon brave, and try to exhibit in the dock at least the dignity you have failed to heretofore. With every good wish and the certainty that nothing I have said has made the slightest possible impression on a brain addled by steam, I am,
Compassionately,
PANDIT MOTILAL NEHRU
1955
MICHAEL J. ARLEN
MORE, AND STILL MORE, MEMORIES OF THE NINETEEN-TWENTIES
WHAT a summer! Everyone was in the South of France. Willie Maugham was at Antibes. Margot Asquith was at Jimmy Sheean’s. Jimmy Sheean was at Margot Asquith’s. In June, we all went up to Paris to watch the Prince of Wales, then the most popular man of his time, fall off his horse at Auteuil. When he did, the crowd rushed across the track, picked up the young heir apparent, and carried him on their shoulders all the way to his room at the Ritz. Despite the twenty-two-mile walk through heavy traffic, with the Prince in obvious pain from a broken collarbone, it was a stirring occasion. Later, in the lobby of the hotel, I noticed a slight, dark-haired American lady making her way discreetly toward the service elevator. “We shall be hearing more about that girl,” I remember remarking to Sherwood Anderson, who was covering the spectacle for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I was right. That girl was Helen Wills Moody.
This was in 1928. Back in New York, Jimmy Walker was mayor and the whole city had embarked on a frenzy of high spirits and wild living. On Broadway, Fred and Adele Astaire, fresh from a season’s triumphs in Kumquats of 1928, were polishing new routines for the opening of Kumquats of 1929. Out in Hollywood, a young Spanish actor, Rodolpho d’Antonguolla, was already making a name for himself (Rudolph Valentino), subject to approval by the Los Angeles District Court. It was the era of prohibition, bootleg gin, and the infield single. Charles D. Flent was the best-loved man in America, and Calvin Coolidge was in the White House.
We were living at the time in a fashionable apartment on upper Fifth Avenue. On the advice of Bascomb W. Bascomb, my father had invested heavily in the rising bail-bond market, and our house was then a gathering place for many of the famous luminaries of the day. On the same evening, one might see such glittering personages as William S. (Big Bill) Thompson, William T. (Big Bill) Tilden, or William S. (Big Bill) Hart. Often, Otto Kahn, the banker, would come bustling in late in the evening with a bagful of money or Radio stock, which he would distribute to the guests. Noël Coward frequently made an appearance, as well as many other literary figures of the time: Bunny Wilson, Victor Hugo, Joseph Moncure March, Bruno Brockton. Sad, clever Bruno Brockton. If only he had published!
One of the best-known gatherings in New York in this period was the famous Oxford Group, a collection of writers, playwrights, and wits who met every Wednesday evening for lunch in the old Oxford Hotel, on Thirty-seventh Street. The members of the Oxford Group had a reputation for dazzling humor and repartee, to say nothing of sheer animal hunger, and to be invited to their table was one of the most sought-after honors that could befall a visitor to the city. It was at one of these lunches, I recall, that the famous exchange between S. S. Van-Flogel, the columnist, and Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist and count, took place. Tolstoy, whose novel War and Peace had earlier attracted much critical attention, had been traveling incognito in New York on the IRT, and was brought to the lunch late one evening by John Cameron Gilpin, the artist. Swiftly, the conversation turned to a discussion of the celebrated novel. It was widely known in New York that VanFlogel had had it “in” for Tolstoy for some time, and, suddenly, in a caustic tone, he asked the Russian if he wouldn’t have written the book differently if he “had been a woman.” There was a stunned silence. Van-Flogel’s biting wit was feared as far north as Sixty-third Street, and it was doubtful whether the elderly Russian could hold his own against the columnist. Tolstoy looked around him at the company. His eyes met Gilpin’s. “Which woman?” he replied quickly. The rest is history.
This was the year when the stock market began its unparalleled rise. Men were making fortunes overnight. A few even made money during the day. A veritable fever, or fervor, of speculation swept Wall Street, which now, thanks to the Securities and Exchange Commission, higher margin rates, sound money, cold feet, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, is no longer possible. It was the Golden Age of Sport. Dempsey knocked out Carpentier. Tunney knocked out Dempsey. Babe Ruth hit five hundred and three home runs. Charles D. Flent was the most popular man in America, and Francis X. Bushman was in the White House, visiting Calvin Coolidge.
SCOTT Fitzgerald was much in the news at this time, and his exploits were helping to set the pace for his generation. Fitzgerald, who had attended Princeton some years earlier, had been dropped from the football squad for being “too thin,” and had always regretted not having had a chance to play John O’Hara’s Yale team in the Bowl. One evening, toward the end of the football season, we were all sitting around in the Plaza fountain—Maxwell Perkins, Burton Rascoe, K. K. Huneker, Ellsworth Vines, Fitzgerald, and myself—when Fitzgerald leaped to his feet and cried, “Let’s go up to New Haven and beard the bulldog!” Rascoe quickly commandeered a carriage from the hack stand on Fifty-ninth Street, and we all piled in for the trip to Connecticut. By the time we reached New Haven, the Yale team had already left the practice field, but Fitzgerald jumped out of the carriage and ran through the college quadrangles yelling, “Fire in the engine room, men! Everybody out to the Bowl!” What a night that was! The undergraduates poured out of the dormitories and we all swept out to the great stadium. By this time, Fitzgerald and the rest of us had dressed in football gear, but Yale unfortunately fielded its first lacrosse team. I remember Fitzgerald turning to me as we all trooped back to the dressing room and saying, “Twenty years from now, we shall all have a good laugh over this.” Sad, brilliant Scott Fitzgerald. Was he more than just a regional writer? I have always maintained that he was.
MY most lasting memory of the times, however, is of the day I went, with John Middleton Mommsen, to meet the Lone Eagle, the young aviator whose daring exploits and pioneering spirit had made him the most famous figure in the land. We found the youthful pilot working in overalls beside a frail little craft, apparently made out of buckboard and canvas, with the legend “Spirit of St. Louis” hand-stenciled on its side. He spun the propeller. The engine gave a few fitful coughs and lay still. He spun it again. There was no response. The third time, he put his whole lanky body into the effort. The engine roared into action. Lindbergh—for it was he—stepped back and turned toward us. “It’s a serviceable machine,” he said shyly, “but it will never replace the Zeppelin.”
How little the three of us knew then. War clouds were already gathering over Europe. The Zeppelin was doomed.
1960
BRUCE MCCALL
THE PICKWICK CAPERS
Stand-up comedy is so brutal in terms of what works or what doesn’t.… You can get away with murder when you’re writing. —Jerry Seinfeld, in USA Today
MY Dear Thackeray, Hastily, a scribble, from my dressing chamber—foetid mop-closet that it be!—at the Hog & Varlet. But what of bodily discomfitures, when the Soul flies so! For I now have at hand as pretty a little fourteen minutes of vocalized risibility as this old Town has yet heard, or any old Town in the good old Realm. The “Corn Riots” jape makes a smart opening volley, followed by the “Lord Palmerston’s Pantaloons,” for a nice change in the pace; whilst at the finale, what better than that I do the “Poor Laws” set-piece?
Concerning your query: Worry not, Thackeray, I have over breakfast dashed off another two chapters of Expectations.
But, alas! The fateful Knock, and I am “on”! Wish me well.
—Boz
Tha
ckeray—
Come up instanter to Manchester, for I fear that, short of a complete reworking, all is lost. Such barracking from the front tables, and ale-bottles hurled from the back. The “Corn Riot” sailed through the Ether, over their heads, and into that Oblivion where dead jokes dwell.
I console myself betimes by lining out more yardage on Gt. Expects; no tipplers obtrude whilst one sits composing one’s prose, free from the hubbub of poltroons more beguiled by far by their own wit, than that of the Performer. Come quickly!
—Desperately, Boz
P.S. Should Wilkie C. choose to join, so much the better for doctoring back to health my maimed fourteen minutes!
My Estimable Collins,
I am deep in your debt for “physicking” my comedic Muse. You are, veritably, the “Surgeon of Smilery.” I inclose a fair copy of the revised fourteen mins., which my new Agent, Mr. Blitz, believes fully strong enough to render t’morrow eve at the Ironmongers’ Smoker. It has taxed my energies & invention more than ten Nicklebys—I do three fresh chapters of Expects. nowadays, for one good stand-up minute. Do you like the East India Co. joke? I practise my Hindoo expression in the looking-glass, the better to put it over.
Disquiet, Please! Page 45
