Needless to say, the holy man was prevented by indignant bystanders from carrying out his ignominious intention, and fell insensible to the sidewalk.
Calm had scarcely been destroyed, when a lovesick sailor from the battleship Idaho was seized with delirium tremens. In still another part of the mob, a hydrant exploded without sufficient warning, causing no casualties and seriously damaging an almost priceless full-length portrait of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt kissing ex-Admiral Hashimura Togo on both cheeks by John Singer Sargent in the neighbouring chapel of the Y.W.C.A. Olaf Yansen, Klansman and plumber, and a floorwalker, Abraham Goldstein, becoming mutually infuriated owing to some probably imaginary difference of opinion, resorted to a spontaneous display of physical culture, in the course of which the former (who, according to several witnesses, was getting the worst of it, in spite of his indubitably superior size) hit the latter with a brick and vanished. Mr. Goldstein is doing well.
While quietly playing with a box of safety matches which his parents, Mr. and Mrs. James B. Fitzroy, of 99 Hundredth Street, Omaha, had given to their little son James Jr. to keep him quiet, the infant—in some unaccountable manner—set fire to forty-one persons, of whom nine and thirty were burned to ashes. A Chinese, Mi Wong, who exercises the profession of laundryman at 17 Sixteenth Street, and Signor Pedro Alhambra, a millionaire coffee planter, who also refused to be interviewed but is stopping at the New Willard, are the survivors. Havoc resulted when one of the better-liked members of the young married set (whose identity the authorities refuse to divulge) kissed Tony Crack, iceman extraordinary to the White House, on the spur of the moment, receiving concussion of the brain with two black eyes. In the front rank of onlookers, a daughter of the people became so excited by the Chief Executive’s spectacular act, hereinbefore referred to, that before you could say Jack Robinson she presented the universe with twins.
But such trivial catastrophes were eclipsed by a disaster of really portentous significance. No sooner had Wall Street learned what Mr. Coolidge had done, than an unprecedented panic started, and Coca Cola tobogganed in eight minutes from nine hundred decimal point three to decimal point six zeros seven four five, wiping out at one fell swoop the solidly founded fortunes of no less than two thousand two hundred and two pillars of society, and exerting an overpowering influence for evil on wheat, and sugar, not to mention that ever-mobile commodity, castor oil, all three of which tumbled about in a truly frightful manner. At Detroit, Mich., the president of the India Rubber Trust Co., hatless and with his white hair streaming in the wind, tore out of the Soldiers and Sailors’ Saving Bank at a snail’s pace carrying in one hand a hat belonging to the president of the latter institution, James B. Sears, and in the other a telephone which the famous first had (in the frenzy of the moment) forgotten to replace on the distinquished second’s desk.
A hook and ladder, driven by Augustus John (coloured) at an estimated speed of sixty-eight miles an hour, passed over the magnate longitudinally as he crossed Edsel Avenue and left a gently-expiring corpse whose last words—spoken into the (oddly enough) unbroken mouthpiece of the instrument, only to be overheard by P. Franklin Adams, a garbage man—were: “Let us then, if you please—”
So unnerved was the Jehu of the Henry Street Fire Station by this totally unexpected demise that, without pausing to consider the possible damage to life and limb involved in a purely arbitrary deviation from the none-too-ample thoroughfare, he declined the very next corner in favor of driving straight through the city’s largest skyscraper, whose one hundred and thirteen stories—after tottering horribly for a minute and a half, during which negligible period several thousand suspicious characters left town—thundered earthward with the velocity of light, exterminating every vestige of humanity and architecture within a radius of eighty leagues including one billion six hundred and forty nine million five hundred and thirty eight thousand two hundred and seven Ford sedans.
This paralysing cataclysm was immediately followed by a fire of stupendous proportions whose prodigiously enormous flames, greedily winding themselves around monuments, cyclone cellars, and certain other spontaneous civic structures, roasted by myriads the inhabitants thereof, while generating a heat so terrific as to evaporate everything evaporable within an area of fourteen thousand square miles not exclusive of the Missouri river—which, completely disappearing in fifteen seconds, revealed a giltedged submarine of the U-C type containing (among other things) William Jennings Bryan, William J. Burns, William Wrigley Jr., Strangler Lewis, the Prince of Wales, Senator Richard O. Thimble of California, Babe Ruth, Major Arthur B. Good, Humphrey Ohm, emeritus professor of radio at Johns Hopkins University, Rear Admiral George Monk, K. C. B. etc., Nicholas Murray Butler, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, T. S. F., Harold Bell Wright, Clive Bell, the honorable Robert W. Chambers, the Amir and Amira of Afghanistan and their hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Harold S. Packingbox of Philadelphia and Newport, Al Jolson, Luther Burbank, Ben Ali Hagin, Alfred Stieglitz, Howard Chandler Christy, Daniel Chester French, Paul Manship, George Gershwin, Houdini, Thomas A. Edison and Dr. Frank Crane, the last of whom (being only incompletely intoxicated) promptly shuffled off this mortal coil with the Star Spangled Banner upon his lips and was buried by six or seven stalwart bootleggers on the exact spot where he did not fall.
A moving picture of the preceding historical catastrophe was thereupon instigated by the usual genius of Mr. Griffith who, with unerring judgment if not tact, invoked Rudolph Valentino at a salary of two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars per week, less nineteen cents war tax, to impersonate simultaneously both George Arliss and Napoleon, whereas Lillian Gish played to imperfection the thankless part of the old mother who—after being bitten by sharks—kills the villain with a knitting needle on horseback and escapes out of the crater of Vesuvius in a brown paper bag, causing a strike among the white paper bag manufacturers, which spread all the way from Tuscaloosa to Yazoo.
Suddenly—unexpectedly—in the midst of all this infrahuman and ultranational pandemonium, compared with which such trivial incidents as solar eclipses, earthquakes, the battle of Aegospotami, Sheridan’s ride, the fall of Babylon, the Declaration of Independence, and Pepys’ Diary, were as an inelegant globule of H2O beside the tempestuous entirety of the Dead Sea—in the centre of doom, debauchery, and dissolution—in the naked heart of tintinnabulous chaos—a miracle, a thing unknown, unanalysable, a phenomenon irremediably acatalectic, indubitably unbelievable, and totally indescribable, occurred.
Over the whole country there swept (as sometimes sweeps, o’er the sickbed of some poor delirious sufferer, a spontaneous sweetness—purging the spirit of its every anguish, uniting the multifarious moods and aspects of the human heart in a triumphant arch through which, with flags flying and bugles blowing, the glorious armies of the soul go marching as to war)—there thrilled—there burgeoned—a mysterious and invincible ululation of utter, absolute, unperforated silence.
So stunning, so irrevocable, was this silence, that the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, and the fish of the sea, felt, and (each in his own peculiar and characteristic way) responded to, its thunderous intensity. The prairie dog of Kansas and the armadillo of Texas emerged from their burrows hand in hand, bent on satisfying at all costs an unquenchable curiosity as to its occult cause—united by a common inquisitiveness, the moose of Maine and the codfish of Massachusetts (abandoning simultaneously their respectively foliate and aqueous habitats) put their heads together, and listened—the versatile mockingbird of Kentucky started from his sleep and mingled his mellifluous paeans of inquiry with the more staccato queries of the cynical rose-breasted nuthatch—even the mayor of Kankakee, Ill., fired by an overwhelming curiosity, leaned out of a superb gothic aperture in the pre-Romanesque I.O.O.F. hall, dropping a half-smoked Chesterfield into the exact middle of a passing load of hay, with the remark: “Is cigarette taste changing?”—in short, all America, which (but a moment before) had been convulsed to its very roots by unparalleled spasms of massa
cre, machination, and mayhem, closed its weary eyes . . . and sank suddenly into a profound swoon of unadulterated ecstasy, a delicious coma of inexpressible bliss . . . as through the entire nation, from sea to sea, completely surged that sublime and unmitigated titillation of telepathic tranquility, of rapturous reintegration, of perfect peace . . .
Calvin Coolidge had stopped laughing.
From Vanity Fair, April 1925. This was the first prose work of E. E. Cummings to appear in Vanity Fair under his own name. It was later shortened and otherwise altered for its appearance as “Chapter I” of a contribution without a title in The New American Caravan (New York: The Macaulay Co., 1929). The entire “contribution,” illustrated by the author, was published in a limited edition by Covici, Friede in 1930. This book without a title will also be found in this collection.
WILLIAM ADAMS-WIGGLEY: GENIUS AND CHRISTIAN
Minutes of a speech delivered on the birthday of America’s great gum magnate.
Reported by C. E. Niltse, S.P.C.V.1
Editor’s Note: The following are the remarks of the Honorable Humphrey Halitosis, director of the Department of Domestic Propaganda of the Adams-Wiggley Gum Society Inc., at a grand banquet tendered Mr. Adams-Wiggley in honor of his thirty-sixth birthday, by the Y.M.C.A. and the S.P.C.V., under the distinguished auspices of the Harvard Business School; from which festive, albeit sober, gathering the guest of honor was (unhappily) absent, rumor having it that he had embarked for Paris with the preconceived idea of espousing Mrs. William Adams-Wiggley number nine.
Gentlemen: I stand before you tonight endowed with the proudest mission which I dare say it has been the lot of a human mind to accomplish, a mission so deep, so spiritual, and so real, that the soul trembles at its very proximity. I am here to express my appreciation of beauty, of genius, of benevolence, of philanthropy, of Christianity, of every awe-inspiring and uplifting element which can be found in the character of man; and the personage who embodies these singular and lofty traits, and who is the subject of my little discourse to you folks, is no other than he whose name has become a symbol for clean living and high thinking wherever hearts beat, a byword fondly quoted by billions upon billions of grateful mouths in every country of the world at this moment. I refer to that almost divine benefactor of the human race, whose masterful invention may aptly be called the mainspring of mastication and the father of reflection: William Adams-Wiggley.
I don’t need to tell you folks who Adams-Wiggley is. I see by your faces that you’re all of you intelligent people who can read and write and do addition and subtraction, and that’s the kind of audience that puts William Adams-Wiggley’s name in the same pigeonhole with names like Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, Alexander the Great and all the big heroes and great statesmen and mighty generals and illustrious presidents who have ever lived. As I look at you, I see something else: I see your mouths move, your jaws move, your faces move, your ears move, your souls move, rhythmically, musically in tune with the universe, in time to the music of the spheres—and I know who is responsible for that. No, gents, I’m not here to try to describe a superman whom you all of you, consciously or unconsciously, worship: I’m here to give you my idea of that man (if he be a mere man) and I want you to excuse me at the outset for whatever injustice the limitations of my intellect may do the magnificent quality of his rare and indefinable spirit.
In the first place, I want to disillusion you about one thing. I want to tell you, in plain simple language so you’ll all of you understand it, that I myself am nothing but a man like any of the rest of you. If I was selected for this task it was not for any qualities of eloquence and intelligence which I might have, but rather because for thirteen years I have lived and moved and had my being in the colossal shadow of the gigantic personality above referred to. Or, to put it differently, I was raised with William Adams-Wiggley, I went to school with him, I grew up with him, I loved him, and I admired him. He was a shy lad when I knew him first—a blond-haired blue-eyed little chap with a dreamy look hovering about his oval face; but under that dreamy look there dwelt an energy, a determination, a sticktoitiveness, which made me feel (even in those early days) that the world would hear from him some day. We were always inseparable: if one did something, the other had to do it. I remember very well when he was taken with mumps and I came down with jaundice the next afternoon—in fact, no closer bond probably ever existed between two spirits than between his and mine, which is why I am here tonight to tell all I know about the man.
William was born in my home town, Mobile, Alabama, at five o’clock in the morning of Irish-German parents, on March seventeenth, eighteen-eighty-eight, making him thirty-six years of age. His father, Mike Wiggley, was the village blacksmith, exactly as he is described in Longfellow’s famous poem except he was a consumptive. His mother, Gretchen Adams, was descended from a very old royal family which had a coat of arms. A remarkable woman in every way, she bore twenty-three children in twenty-four years, of which William was number twenty-three and the most intelligent. Being, from his birth, a delicate and sickly child, he distinguished himself by winning a spelling match at the tender age of four and three quarters: in short, he was precocious, so precocious that when I first knew him he used to do the lessons for his brothers and sisters, six of whom died, while one went insane.
The feverish atomosphere of this high-strung and numerous family, combined with the humbleness of his surroundings, could not but cause agony to so sensitive a child. Accordingly, William left home on his sixth birthday never to return, and came to New York after riding the bumpers for eleven days and twelve nights, where he soon made enough money selling newspapers to enable him to start a mining concern, which, however, failed, bankrupting all concerned. Shortly after, penniless, at the age of ten, he wired me to join him in the big city, which I did; and we hunted around for some way of clearing expenses. William was at this time living in a tiny little ramshackle hall bedroom on the Bowery, which I shall never forget, with next to no furniture but a broken bed, and an enlarged photograph of his mother on the wall, to whom he sent two dollars twice a week with a regularity that was positively touching.
We used to eat in Chop Suey joints together, and talk over prospects. One evening (it was ten below zero outside and somewhat colder within) William leaned over the tumble-down table and his face lit up like it was electrified as he cracked me on the back, crying: “Eureka!” I didn’t know what that meant, but, as I started picking the wooden dishes off the concrete floor whither his excitement had sent them, something about his wonderful blue eyes and his lively bright smile told me that he’d had an idea. And a few seconds later, after he’d whispered a few words in my ear, I knew that the world was his.
That’s how the marvellous and truly wonderful product which we all know today—the industry that ranks second to none throughout the length and breadth of this fair land of ours—had its birth: as we two lingered over a half portion of chow mein and two portions of an Egyptian Deity cigarette which a bum gave us and I broke in two, giving William the longer half as I always did, for I was very fond of him. Today I am well-off and have my own limousine and eat the best of food, while he is a millionaire with a country house at Piping Rock where he entertains such noted celebrities as Gabriele D’Annunzio, Ben Ami, King Albert of Belgium, Lady Duff Gordon, and others too numerous to name. And that, gentlemen, is a romance of American business life which I will now leave in order to consider, in greater detail, the genesis of the actual invention itself.
When I questioned William as to how he came to have the idea which revolutionized contemporary manners, he explained to me, with characteristic frankness, that he had been daydreaming. For no apparent reason, he had had a kind of vision of himself standing at an open window and looking into his empty hand. As he looked, he saw something: rubber. You could do that. I could. Anybody could. But that isn’t all—no. William was a dreamer, but he was also a genius. A dreamer is somebody who goes to sleep, while a genius is somebody who no
tices what you and I can’t see. William Adams-Wiggley’s eye observed; and his whole frame trembled, his face contracted, his jaw dropped, for he had noticed an invisible something else: rubber was lonely.
What is a man without a woman? Nothing. What is a bowstring without an arrow, a ship without a rudder? Worse than nothing. Vegetables are just the same. They are like anything else; like us. Rubber was lonely and rubber wept: rubber cried out in its loneliness, and William Adams-Wiggley, bending his pitying head, and applying his incredibly keen and miraculously sympathetic left ear to the unhappy substance which cowered in his benevolent palm, heard that cry. Still he did not quite understand. “What do you wish?” he breathed softly. And a small voice answered with the almost unheard-of monosyllable—“mint.”
Right here I should like to utter a well-intended and not unnecessary warning. It seems very simple and obvious, now, to regard mint in its true light as a glorious and salutary and disease-annihilating and health-inspiring plant: an unbelievable cure-all which mother Nature has thrown into our ungrateful laps, making it possible for our otherwise overworked and nervously exhausted organisms to breathe and live. But let us, after all, not avoid the truth; for the truth is always more beautiful than any substitute, however graciously and intricately concocted for our easy and insipid delectation. Let us never forget to remember that it was a man like you and me, folks, only somehow different—somehow strong where we are weak, courageous where we are cowardly, inspired where we are uninspired, prophetic where we are dull—in short, a superman—who lifted mint for all time out of a shameful mire of injustice and obliquity into the perpetual radiance of everlasting renown. That man wears clothes like you and me, has his hobbies, loves his wife and children to distraction, takes a bath regularly, works, laughs, smiles, plays, weeps, like we do—but he is somehow a genius: and his name (which, like the affectionate components of his earth-shaking invention, boasts a proud plurality of parts) is William Adams-Wiggley.
A Miscellany (Revised) Page 8
