Wait a moment, reader. It is silly of all these rich compatriots of ours to surround themselves with pictures which they cannot possibly appreciate and do not really enjoy. Yet what have we ourselves done to merit the consideration of contemporary Medicis in particular or (which is vastly more important) of mankind in general? You will reply that we decided, for one reason or another, to become Artists; that we attended Art school, where we learned all there is to know about Art (and then some) through Mr. Z; that, having revelled in value and perspective to the extent of making Mt. Monadnock’s slopes retire and Aunt Lucy’s nostrils behave, we were graduated from Art school with highest honours; that, in consideration of the foregoing facts, we should be encouraged to create on our own hook instead of being driven to the wall by foreign competitors.
Well and good—but let me show you a painting which cost the purchaser a mere trifle and which is the work (or better, play) of some illiterate peasant who never dreamed of value and perspective. How would you category this bit of anonymity? Is it beautiful? You do not hesitate: yes. Is it Art? You reply: it is primitive, instinctive, or uncivilized Art. Being “uncivilized,” the Art of this nameless painter is immeasurably inferior to the civilized Art of painters like ourselves, is it not? You object: primitive Art cannot be judged by the same standards as civilized Art. But tell me, how can you, having graduated from an Art school, feel anything but scorn for such a childish daub? Once more you object: this primitive design has an intrinsic rhythm, a life of its own, it is therefore Art.
Right, gentle reader! It is Art because it is alive. It proves that, if you and I are to create at all, we must create with today and let all the Art schools and Medicis in the universe go hang themselves with yesterday’s rope. It teaches us that we have made a profound error in trying to learn Art, since whatever Art stands for is whatever cannot be learned. Indeed, the Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself; and the agony of the Artist, far from being the result of the world’s failure to discover and appreciate him, arises from his own personal struggle to discover, to appreciate and finally to express himself. Look into yourself, reader; for you must find Art there, if at all.
At this you protest vigorously: but suppose I follow your curious advice, suppose I look into myself and suppose I do not find Art? What then? Do you mean to tell me that I must forever abandon my hope of becoming an Artist?
Absolutely! Art is not something which may or may not be acquired, it is something which you are not or which you are. If a thorough search of yourself fails to reveal the presence of this something, you may be perfectly sure that no amount of striving, academic or otherwise, can bring it into your life. But if you are this something—then, gentle reader, no amount of discrimination and misapprehension can possibly prevent you from becoming an Artist. To be sure, you will not encounter “success,” but you will experience what is a thousand times sweeter than “success.” You will know that when all’s said and done (and the very biggest Butter Baron has bought the very last and least Velasquez) “to become an Artist” means nothing: whereas to become alive, or one’s self, means everything.
From Vanity Fair, April 1927.
WHY I LIKE AMERICA
By an American who, most unfashionably, prefers his native land to France
Like all vogues, the current pro-France or anti-American vogue constitutes a glorification of human credulity. Nor is the reason for this phenomenon far to seek. Persons who are incapable of thinking can only believe; hence to believe has always been the height of fashion. But the subject of belief, or what one believes, changes mightily from time to time. Some years ago (if the present writer remembers correctly) there was a vogue for patriotism; this year it is extremely fashionable to prefer la République française to les Etats-Unis.
As usual, Paris contributes the vogue and New York exaggerates it. Your fashionably brained Frenchman is content to believe that France is superior to America; not so your fashionably brained American. According to him, France is the embodiment of whatsoever things are good, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; America, by comparison, appears as a materialistic monster, an opportunist ogre, a degenerate dollardragon. Your fashionably brained American, then, becomes a sort of Saint Michael, armed in resplendent culture and bent on the heroic mission of quelling this hideous prodigy (alias his native land) in the name of reason, righteousness and Poincaré.
That is indeed a very pretty idea; but, for some obsure reason, the present writer’s brain emanates unfashionableness. When he should have been patriotic, he wasn’t. And now, when fashion dictates anti-patriotism, he finds himself thanking his lucky stars for the large and lively U.S.A. The mere size of America delights him. Yet this statement will be received with ridicule; because, as everybody knows, mere size doesn’t really matter.
What really matters, of course, is intensity. For example: would anyone contend that a certain painting by Cézanne is inferior to a certain painting by Sargent because Mr. Sargent’s effort covered more canvas? Would anyone maintain that the Brooklyn Bridge is a thousand times more beautiful, since a thousand times larger, than the Pont Neuf? Ridiculous! America might be a million times as huge as she actually is and France might still be superior to America.
This argument sounds well. To be sure, intensity really matters. Intensity, however, is of various kinds. Size may be, and sometimes is, one kind of intensity—as in the familiar case of our skyscrapers, which noble structures owe their intensity primarily and fundamentally to their size. Your fashionably brained American, however, is very fond of twisting the fact that America’s bigness has encouraged a lot of drivel into the falsehood that America is drivelling because she is big. One might as well assume that the magnificent ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is a mass of balderdash because the authors of guidebooks use it as an excuse to slop all over themselves. Indeed, like the bigness of the Sistine ceiling, the bigness of America is intrinsic; or, to put the matter a little differently, America is essentially not an enlargement of something else. Her very size is an essential part of America’s life in the same way that France’s culture is an essential part of her life. And this brings the unfashionably brained writer to something which amounts to a full-fledged conviction: he thoroughly believes that America is more alive than France.
Hereupon, the Saint Michaels cry “What do you mean ‘alive’? You mean ‘efficient’ and ‘progressive.’ Having observed that the typical American business man is too busy with his business to digest his luncheon, you have probably run amuck in your typical American way and have credited the entire American nation with a superior degree of vitality. Like a host of other materialists, you are mistaking motion for movement, tempo for rhythm, mere liveliness for life. Half-drowned in the typical American inferiority complex, you clutch desperately at appearances. You pretend that at the root of existence lies the almighty dollar. You deliberately ignore spiritual values. The things which make life living for sensitive people mean nothing to you. What of Art, for instance? Is anything so vital as Beauty? And where, in the whole expanse of noisy, vulgar, ugly America, can you find a museum like the Louvre or a cathedral like the cathedrals of Chartres, Notre Dame and a score of other masterpieces?”
The answer to all such questions is itself a question: “Where, in the entire smallness of France or in the unmitigated amplitude of anywhere else, can you find a painter ‘like’ John Marin, a sculptor ‘like’ Gaston Lachaise and a phenomenon ‘like’ Niagara Falls?” But by “more alive” the present writer meant something which does not contain itself in such adjectives as “efficient” and “progressive.” He meant that France has happened more than she is happening, whereas America is happening more than she has happened.
This rather clumsy idiom seems to suggest merely that France’s past is of greater dimensions than America’s past. Actually, however, it implies something quite different, viz., that France takes refuge in her past. It may be that France takes refuge
in her past because her past is luxuriously enormous, while America is forced to live in her present because her past is uncomfortably microscopic. At any rate, the fact remains that France is not a happening nation. And this fact is tremendously important, because to take refuge in the past—be your refugee a nation or an individual—means to commit a neurotic deed; the past, from this point of view, being a substitute for living.
America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn’t standing still. The same cannot be said of la République française. Nor can France’s immobility be excused on temperamental grounds; the fact being, that France’s past has undermined her present. More and more, indeed, the world realizes that France does not move because she is sick. Yet, sick though France is, she cannot hold a candle to your fashionably brained American who would have us believe that the land of Coolidge is a snare and a delusion, that Greenwich Village is boring while Montparnasse is inspiring, etc.—but who, in reality, is using la République française as a wooden horse to enter the Troy of his own past.
LA “BEAUTÉ” FRANÇAISE
Prohibition! With this dread word still echoing in his ears, your humble servant proceeds to invoke the extraordinary assistance of that occult science which is popularly called “relativity.” Hounded by prohibition, he takes refuge in Einstein. A moment’s concentration suffices; then, fortified against all evils, he boldly faces his parched accusers and demands, “Gentlemen, which is more important: wine or women?” Then, as the enemy staggers at this unexpected blow, the Einsteinian follows up his advantage thus: “Indeed, prohibition is a curse. To endure this ordeal requires quite unprecedented fortitude. Only a nation endowed by Heaven with supernatural vitality could invent for itself a torture so infernal. Small wonder if those carping ‘Yanks’ who, not so long ago, belittled the republic of ‘frogs’ now laud the land of cognac to the skies! Small wonder if the ships are filled with weaklings en route to Burgundy and Champagne! Prohibition corrupts the soul; it is a blemish, a blot upon the scutcheon of liberty, a stigma whereof all good men and true may well be ashamed—or what have you.
“But for a’ that (as one R. Burns has so happily observed) a man’s a man. To every man, if he be a man, it is not wine which matters most. You, an American, demand of me, an American: where in all France will you find a drink as dreadful as the best of America’s synthetic substitutes or diluted verities? And as man to man, I ask you: where in all France will you find a woman as authentic, delicious and otherwise incomparable as (name supplied upon request)?”
From Vanity Fair, May 1927: “La ‘Beauté’ Française” is by the author.
THE NEW MOTHER GOOSE
What has become of Mary’s Little Lamb, now that the fiction magazines are with us?
Mother Goose is supposed to be for children. A grown-up individual who openly absorbed vast quantities of Mother Goose would be considered mentally deranged; in fact, the friends of such a freak would probably have him immediately psychoanalysed. If analysis proved unsuccessful and the patient persevered in his passionate penchant for “Mary had a little lamb,” he would no doubt be gagged, handcuffed, forcibly fed, made to kiss the American flag and placed in an institution for the feeble-minded.
Why, then, are multitudes of “mature” people violently encouraged to indulge ad libitum in preferences which are not—like lively Mary and Mary’s lively lamb—merely childish but are positively infantile? We refer to that deadly preference for the socalled “fiction magazine,” which fires scientifically aimed salvos of high-powered idiocy all over the civilized world at regular intervals, causing millions upon millions of mental casualties. And we point out that this imposing masterpiece of human unintelligence proves, upon examination, to be nothing more nor less than an infantile perversion of something originally childish. Indeed, when we inspect the fiction magazines carefully, we find (hidden within a lyrical sheath of atmosphere, innuendo, balderdash, etcetera) the Mother Goose epic of Mary and her little lamb.
The readers of Vanity Fair who find this assertion surprising will experience heart-failure anent the statement following. We maintain that the changes rung on Mother Goose by writers of cheap magazine fiction are not, as would appear at first glance, innumerable. A patiently conducted inquiry tends to show that only three fundamental variations actually exist. These fundamental variations—thanks to whose lyrical quality the underlying childish epic is often so obscured as to become well-nigh unintelligible—deserve titles. Accordingly we have entitled them: the Heart Kick, the Soul Kick and the Kick Direct. The first is the technique of pure or pastoral sentimentality; the second, of fancy million-volt emotion; the third wings straight to first principles and resuscitates the technique of that medieval favourite, Peeping Tom.
No matter what its setting, atmosphere, plot, dialect, every cheap fiction magazine projectile is loaded with “Mary had a little lamb” and primed with one or more of these three standardized Kicks. For illustration: suppose we pick up the first fiction magazine in sight—mentioning no names—which happens to be incurably addicted to the highly inexcusable vice of Heart Kicking. Upon opening this magazine at random, our bewildered eyes immediately encounter lyrical applesauce of the following infantile brand (or worse):
“An old man, seated in the yellow glow of a barn lantern, fingered his violet suspenders thoughtfully. Her birthday! A musing look, coupled with incessant moisture, stole into the gently puzzled eyes, causing their owner from time to time to remove clouded spectacles from a vigorous, well-modelled nose, about which something of the nobility of youth indelibly lingered.”
Are we awake? Can this be the twentieth century? Help!
“For Herb Rattlesnake, one thing and one thing only really mattered: the child whose tumbling curls and wistful smile he had just tucked into the tiny white crib, stooping a little longer than usual over this wee being, who looked up so trustingly with his dead sister Sarah’s mouth and ears, because tomorrow was her birthday.
“Then he had gone to the barn to think.”
We recognise the ’Gene O’Neill touch about the barn and feel reassured.
“He always went to the barn to think. Perhaps it was the almost inaudible murmur of the peacefully slumbering animals, or the deep, soothing aroma of lofts piled with newly cut hay, which disposed old Herb’s mind to thought. Herb probably could not have told you himself, but anyhow, his old feet always began going to the barn whenever something had turned up that required thinking. And now, the old man’s mind was focused feverishly on a question of the gravest importance—a question which directly concerned, not himself, but someone a thousand times dearer to him than himself: little Mary.”
With pleasure we note the entrance of the main theme.
“What should he give her for her birthday? Over and over again, as he sat alone in the old barn, Herb had asked Providence to help him decide. What could he give her, beyond the unfaltering love which had always been hers from the day when she first looked at the world through timid, mischievous baby eyes? His old spectacles fogged so much at this reminiscence that Herb Rattlesnake had to take them off and wipe them with the very same brightly checkered bandana handkerchief which he had faithfully carried ever since that never-to-be-forgotten day, thirty odd years ago, when Sarah had brought it to him as a birthday present from Boston.”
But, thank Heaven, we are about to get a little action.
“All at once, the old man started violently from his reverie. A cry—an almost human cry—had echoed through the barn’s tranquil silence. Hastily, fumblingly, Herb adjusted the spectacles on his nose, tucked the precious bandana in the left hip pocket of his tattered old overalls, seized the lantern from its hook and stood, erect, listening. Yes! Again the cry—this time even more almost human, more obviously fraught with incipient meaning—came to his straining ears.
“ ‘Wal, I swan,’ the old man murmured rapi
dly. ‘If it ain’t that sheep, by tunket!’ And as he tottered rapidly down a rickety flight of stairs leading to the sheep-pen, the rays of his lantern casting abrupt halos here and there on planks and timbers, his old heart beat wildly with the realization that Providence had answered his prayer and problem! He had asked Providence to help him find a fitting present for Mary; and Providence had spoken (as Providence always will, when the heart really and truly asks) by sending Mary a little lamb.”
Now really and truly, gentle reader, such twaddle occurs in fiction magazines—not only occurs, but buds; not only buds, but blossoms like the rose. Even as these very words are written, Providence alone can tell how many minds are eagerly lapping up yards and miles of it.
Heart Kicking, however, is not a bit more prevalent than Soul Kicking. No, indeed. Breathes there a man with soul so dead who never has enjoyed one genuine, undiluted high-powered Soul Kick? How about the movies? Where do our five-hundred-a-week scenario writers get nine-tenths of their inspiration? From unambiguous bunk of this unmitigated variety to be sure:
A Miscellany (Revised) Page 20
