A Miscellany (Revised)

by e. e. cummings

  Herself is two perfectly fused things: an entirely beautiful body and a beautiful command of its entirety. Her voice (simultaneously uncouth and exquisite—luminous as only certain voices are luminous) is as distinctly a part of this body as are her gestures, which emanate a spontaneous or personal rigidity only to dissolve it in a premeditation at once liquid and racial. She enters the show twice: first—through a dense electric twilight, walking backwards, on hands and feet, legs and arms stiff, down a huge jungle tree—as a creature neither infrahuman nor superhuman, but somehow both; a mysteriously un-killable Something, equally nonprimitive and uncivilized or, beyond time in the sense that emotion is beyond arithmetic. This stark and homogeneous glimpse is isolated, heightened and developed by a series of frivolously complicated scenes (Whose Handkerchief Is It? The Language of Flowers, Oh the Pretty Sins, Bewitched and A Feast at Versailles) whereby we are swiftly and surely conducted to that unique phenomenon of noise and naughtiness, the Intermission.

  And still we find ourselves remembering the jungle.

  Nor does the jungle release us from its enchantment until the middle of Act 2; when a vast egg very gradually descends from the topmost ceiling of the theatre to the level of the orchestra, opens, and emits a wand of golden flesh—a wand which struts and dances, a lithe and actual wand which blossoms unbelievably in authentic forms of love and death. Whereupon, from all parts of the audience, surges a gigantic wave of protest. Cries of “disgusting” mingle with gasps of “how shocking!” and wails of “how perfectly disgusting!” Horrified ladies cover their faces or hasten from the polluted environs. Outraged gentlemen shout, stamp or wave their arms angrily. And still Josephine Baker dances—a dance neither of doom nor of desire, but altogether and inevitably of herself.

  Such, or nearly such, being the inexcusably alive protagonist of the revue at the Folies Bergère, we have at last found an answer to our question: “What is the revue?”

  The revue is not (as Earl Carroll and most European producers think) a mammoth exhibition of boudoir-paintings-come-to-life and is not (as F. Ziegfeld, Jr., pretends to believe) a “glorification” of some type of female “beauty.” By the laws of its own structure, which are the irrevocable laws of juxtaposition and contrast, the revue is a use of everything trivial or plural to intensify what is singular and fundamental. In the case of the Folies Bergère, the revue is a use of ideas, smells, colours, Irving Berlin, nudes, tactility, collapsible stairs, three dimensions and fire works to intensify Mlle. Josephine Baker.

  And the sentiment which we beg to add is: Long live la Folie!

  From Vanity Fair, September 1926.

  HOW I DO NOT LOVE ITALY

  An extremely unorthodox view of a widely celebrated section of Europe

  Editor’s Note: The receipt of this article in the offices of Vanity Fair caused a high degree of perturbation and anguish. Why? Because the Editors were nurtured on Italian culture, achievements and ideals. Our first thought, therefore, was that the author of this essay should be reprimanded, not to say chastised. Then there came to us this thought. What if Italy should become efficient? What if automats and five-and-ten-cent-stores and slot machines and Ford factories and quick lunch counters should definitely succeed the sonnets of Petrarch, the paintings of Mantegna, the learning of Pico della Mirandola, the sculptures of Giovanni Bologna and the large, easy-going, colourful grandeur of the Medicis? Merciful heavens, what weighty pain in that thought! With that direful prospect in mind we saw the need of publishing Mr. Cummings’ article forthwith, in toto, with the idea of saving Italy from imminent disaster, from modernity, and from (what is most terrifying of all)—American efficiency.

  Once upon a time, when we were incredibly spirited, helpless, and otherwise young, the singing teacher of a New England public school induced our throat to utter the following fraudulent ditty:

  “O, Italia, Italia belov-ed

  Land of beauty, of sunlight and song,

  When afar from thy bright skies remov-ed

  How our fond hearts for thee e’er do long”

  or something like that. We were amazed, at the time, by the asininity of the words and the triteness of the tune. But amazement is temporary. We sang other songs and we grew up and we forgot all about Italia.

  Not until full fifteen years later did the land of sunlight, etc., actually loom upon our horizon—when, becoming bored with Paris, we purchased a bicycle and rode all the way to Napoli with a patient friend. This little jaunt (and the reader is strongly advised to consult a map ere attempting the same) taught us altogether too much about Italia. We became so disillusioned, in fact, that when afar from her bright skies remov-ed our very far from fond hearts decidedly did not do any longing.

  Yet what is disillusionment to a healthy person? Niente. Only a year or so after the Paris-Napoli venture, we found ourselves getting shoved off all the sidewalks of Roma by enthusiastic cohorts of Black Shirts. A revolution, or something, had just happened. We sought refuge in a stationery shop. Before our eyes reposed a series of coloured post cards celebrating the recent cataclysm. The first card at which we glanced depicted Mussolini, in the role of Christ, raising Italia, in the role of Lazarus, from the dead. Shocked to our aesthetic foundations, we left hurriedly both the shop and Italia.

  Shocks, however, cannot discourage really inquisitive people. Our third visit to Italia belov-ed has just been completed—and completed successfully, thanks to a hypertranquil disposition plus, at times, a superhuman digestion. All things considered, we feel that we are now entitled to express ourselves publicly re the home of beauty, etc.; therefore (in the limpid language of that notorious nation) “avanti!”

  Italia, without any doubt the most overestimated country in this world, consists of a peninsula which is shaped like a leg that has been caught in the act of kicking Sicily. This naughty leg, whose chief industries are ruins, religion and automobiles, is technically a monarchy ruled over by a king (S.M.Il Re) but is actually a pawn in the hands of the onorevole Benito Mussolini. The king nevertheless retains two extremely important functions, which are (a) to be photographed with Mussolini and (b) to pose for postage stamps.

  Signor Mussolini, whose singularly uncheerful visage appears all over Italia at the present moment—not only in rotogravure, but painted on houses, fences, railroad stations, etc.—was, just a few years ago, a wicked radical. But one day this wicked radical turned a complete backward somersault and landed an ultraconservative. Shortly afterward he bought up all the black shirts in sight, hurriedly put a great many young men into them and captured Rome without difficulty. He then informed everybody that Italia had been dead for some time and that his program, il fascismo, consisted of nothing less than a revivification of the corpse. If Italia swallowed the dictatorship pill, Mussolini positively guaranteed that she would rise from the dead and be alive even as she was alive in the days of the Caesars. In other words, she would be alive at the expense of everybody else and would rule the modern world very much as Rome ruled the ancient world.

  After a number of Mussolini’s former comrades, the Italian bolsheviks, had been beaten up, compelled to drink castor oil and sent to other planes, the corpse took her medicine and Mussolini was acclaimed as “Caesar.” But Mussolini was no ordinary man. He could not possibly be satisfied with being merely Caesar. He also wanted to be Napoleon. This was easily arranged. A photographer “shot” him in Napoleonic costume, the photograph was printed on thousands of post cards and the post cards were circulated all over Italia. Taking the bull by the horns, Mussolini now rushed into international politics and mixed them up “something awful,” as we say back home. But while the world at large recoiled from his exploits, Italia applauded with both hands and both feet—and exactly what the Hon. Caesar Napoleon Mussolini will attempt next, nobody knows. The French people guess that it will be the annexation of France, since he says quite frankly that Italia is overpopulated and must have a lot of brand-new territory—in a hurry.

  So much for the s
hepherd. And now a few words concerning his flock.

  In our humble opinion, there is no word big enough to suggest, let alone describe, the bigness of the contemporary Italian inferiority complex. To understand the origin of this national misfortune, we must remember that for some time previous to “il Duce’s” somersault, the inhabitants of Italia had lived in a tranquil doze. But with the thunderclap of fascism, they awoke to a consciousness of themselves; or, more truly, they awoke to a realization of their weakness and apparent unworthiness. Practically the entire nation, stricken with a sense of shame, thereupon set in motion within itself what psychologists term a “defense mechanism”—that is to say, all Italia (with few exceptions) began to swagger and boast and pose; dozing meekness was superseded by insolence; and vanity, never a negligible Latin characteristic, bulged to colossal proportions. Luckily, however, the official military headgear consists of a cap so high in the crown as to permit of considerable head-swelling. From which painful subject, let us turn to Italia’s scenic glories.

  Concerning the innumberable catacombs, cathedrals, museums, ruins, etc., which recall an illustrious past and which have inspired so much bad and good poetry, philosophy and criticism, we beg to opine (1) that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is worth all the rest of Italia dead and undead (2) that we love Venice much but that we love Coney Island more (3) that one small church of Santo Tomé (Spain), which contains El Greco’s The Burial of Count Orgáz, houses more aesthetic intensity than does the whole Galleria degli Uffizi and (4) that the world is still looking for an unidentified man who disappeared after partially expressing a desire to show us the coliseum by moonlight.

  Concerning the famous scenic glories of the unillustrious present, we have the following remarks to make. First of all, nobody can possibly comprehend better than ourselves the real meaning of the celebrated mot, “see Naples and then die”—for when we saw Naples we very nearly did die; and Naples at its worst is certainly no more depressing than are the other famous Italian cities at their best. Secondly, while it is true that certain much-touted portions of Italia’s landscape, such as Fiesole, are distinctly attractive, it is not true that said portions are any more remarkable, in and of themselves, than is most of the unadvertised country called Portugal. Finally, be it known that there exists, somewhere in the Italian Riviera, a perfectly cracker-box-shaped edifice (known as a villa) with twenty windows, of which nineteen are painted while one is real—and be it further known that the painted blinds of the nineteen painted windows all cast painted shadows and that in one of the nineteen painted windows is a painted potted plant which also casts a painted shadow and that on what remains of the villa’s walls are a number of painted statues, each statue casting its own private, separate, individual, particular painted shadow. No wonder Italia, Italia, belov-ed is described as a land of sunlight!—Incidentially, all the painted shadows are very, very wrong.

  They are not, however, any more intrinsically wrong than is the sign “SOMETHING NEW, CHEAP AND BEAUTIFUL” which, ostensibly, is an attempt to lure unwary Anglo-Saxons into a shop off the Piazza San Marco in Venice, but which actually—unless we very deeply err—is an epitome of the whole fascist program for Italy in particular and the world in general. Nor do we, as an American, write the foregoing sentence without shame; for we realize that the glittering slogan just quoted reflects, all too well, our own nation’s slip-shod method of thought. The sad fact is, that Signor Mussolini has invented nothing. He has simply, as a means of purging his compatriots of their unworthiness, borrowed from America her most unworthy credo (the utterly transparent and lifeless lie: Time is money) and the results of this borrowing are already apparent.

  Assuming the continuation of Italia’s present régime, America will find herself playing second fiddle to Italia in more unlovely ways than either Napoleon or Caesar could shake a stick at. Already Italia is up to America’s tricks of “progress” and “morality.” If you doubt this, get in touch with the fascist representative in your home town and find out for yourself. Already the Piazza Venezia is dark and dreary. Already you cannot buy a glass of cognac on Sunday. Later, or sooner, everybody in the “land of beauty, of sunlight and song” will be minding everybody else’s business as thoroughly as everybody does in the dear old U.S.A.—at least, so your correspondent decided one night, when (being unable to sleep on account of a deafening racket) he lifted up his weary eyes and beheld, emblazoned on the door of his microscopic room at the Albergo Somethingorother, the following moonlit sentiment: In the generally interest, the Visitors are requested to observe the extremely quiet.

  From Vanity Fair, October 1926.

  THE TABLOID NEWSPAPER

  An investigation involving Big Business, the Pilgrim Fathers and psychoanalysis

  Editor’s Note: Almost a score of tabloid newspapers are presently being published in the United States. The New York Daily News, the first to be published in America, began in 1919, and now has a circulation of over a million. The circulation of many of the others is increasing by the hundreds of thousands. These tabloids frankly base their appeal on morbid and sensational details, “faked” news and “faked” pictures, prize contests and trashy stories on sex themes. The Macfadden publications, publishers of the incredibly successful New York Evening Graphic, frankly declare themselves in favour of a sex interest to attract their customers, while more conservative editors stress “big” news pictorially presented, with reading matter deliberately concocted for a public of minimum intelligence. In this article, Mr. Cummings considers the prevalence of tabloids as an index to the national mentality.

  Like all phenomena which we are in the evil habit of taking for granted, the mentality of the Great American People—by which is meant, that kind of liveliness or unliveliness which is common to most citizens of our grand and glorious republic—invites more than a casual inspection. We should not merely realize, as most of us merely do, that “Americanism” rules supreme in this epoch-making day and time, or that “Americanization” now applies to everything from non-citizens to safety pins. Granted, that the entire universe echoes and reechoes to the mighty strides of our nation’s progress—assuming that a whole civilization trembles in the hollow of our superhuman hand—in brief, admitting that nobody “never saw nothing” like us—it is far from improbable that an analysis of the invincible spirit underlying this uncontested supremacy will give quite as startling results, in a quiet way, as the huge and noisy product itself. Moreover (economists, sociologists, efficiency experts and similar learned gentry to the contrary) such an analysis does not involve a very vast acquaintance with the occult science of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Quite the contrary. From a thousand adjectives which fairly clamour for a chance to describe the Great American Mentality, there immediately stands forth one adjective in which our epoch finds its perfect portrait, in which our civilization sees itself miraculously mirrored, in which the U.S.A. shimmers in all the unmitigated splendour of its great-and-only-ness. This adjective is infantile.

  By no circumstance the least important, and certainly the most obvious, example of the strictly infantile essence of America’s all-conquering mentality greets our eyes daily, anywhere and everywhere, in the guise of the tabloid newspaper. The tabloid newspaper actually means to the typical American of this era what the Bible is popularly supposed to have meant to the typical Pilgrim Father: viz. a very present help in time of trouble, plus a means of keeping out of trouble via harmless, since vicarious, indulgence in the pomps and vanities of this wicked world.

  Without the Bible, as everybody knows, your Pilgrim Father would have been seriously inclined to wonder why an Almighty Providence saw fit to freeze him in winter, starve him in summer and fill him full of arrows at all times. He might even have been tempted to register a few complaints with his Omnipotent Protector. Conceivably, this righteous person might eventually have strayed so far from the path of righteousness as to throw up the sponge entirely or join the wicked Indians. But the Pilgrim Father’s Bible so
lved his problem very nicely, by pointing out to him that things are not what they seem and by furnishing him with a pleasing catechism of values in place of a painful concatenation of realities. Furthermore, it occasionally stopped an arrow or two.

  If the tabloid newspaper cannot boast of stopping arrows, it can at least retort that arrows are not being done this year, and that, if the woods are not full of Indians, the skyscrapers are full of time clocks and that a struggle is a struggle still, the noblest thing alive, and that temptation remains temptation, no matter which of innumerable disguises the insidious Tempter may see fit to assume. Ask Billy Sunday, he knows. Or, to put the matter a little differently: just what would become of the machine known as Big Business, were many hundreds of thousands of male and female cogs denied their daily oil in the form of the tabloid newspaper, Heaven alone knows; but it is not difficult to guess.

  In “ye good olde days” of a year or two ago, these human cogs were being satisfactorily, if not thoroughly, lubricated by means of common-or-garden newspapers which appealed to the mind through intricate symbols, such as words of one, two, or even three, syllables. But that is over. Gone are the snows, etc. The Big Business Machine (as any Big Business Machinist will be the first to admit) has been enormously developed in a couple of years. The parts of each and every subsidiary mechanism have not only been standardized but have been rendered accessible at all times and under all conditions. Whereas not so long since, the prerogative of a human cog was his or her occasional obscurity, he or she is now always observable and easily getatable. Such complicated oilcans as were suitable for eliminating obscure sources of friction have accordingly been dispensed with.