Memoirs of a Banquet Speaker
The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months; at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep. I am dealing here with the young banquet speaker, the dilettante, who goes into it in quest of glamour. There is, he finds out too late, no glamour at banquets—I mean the large formal banquets of big associations and societies. There is only a kind of dignified confusion that gradually unhinges the mind.
Late in my thirty-fifth year, having tasted every other experience in life (except being rescued by Captain Fried), I decided to be a guest of honor at some glittering annual dinner in a big New York hotel. At first blush, you might think it would be difficult to be asked. It isn’t. You don’t, of course, have to be a member of an organization in order to address its annual banquet. In fact the organization doesn’t even have to know who you are, and it almost never does. The names of the speakers are got out of newspapers and phone books, and from the better Christmas cards; sometimes a speaker is suggested to the entertainment committee by a woman named Mrs. Grace Voynton. That’s all I know about her. She suggested me. I never saw her again. As a matter of fact, I never saw her at all. She phoned me one day and asked if I would address the annual banquet of a certain organization, the name of which, in the ensuing conversation, which was rather controversial, slipped my mind. I said I wouldn’t address the banquet because my dinner pants were too tight. She was pleased to regard this as a pleasantry, and phoned me again the next day, as a woman will. Finally I said I would make a short talk. I was told to be at the Commodore Hotel at seven-thirty on a certain Wednesday evening. It was only when I was in a taxi on my way to the hotel that I realized I didn’t know the name, or the nature, of the organization I was going to talk to—let alone what I was going to talk about. So high is the courage of youth that the young banquet speaker is likely to dismiss this unfortunate ignorance too lightly. He has an idea that Mrs. Voynton will be at the hotel, or that the doorman will recognize him. Certainly, he thinks, it is going to be easy enough to find the banquet-room. It isn’t going to be, though (the italics are mine). During the banqueting season anywhere from three to eleven banquets are being held, simultaneously, at the average hotel on any given night. Not realizing this, the young guest of honor is almost sure to think that the first banquet table he spies is the one at which he belongs. There is only about one chance in ten that he is right.
I walked into the first banquet-room that I came to, on the mezzanine floor, after having been met by no one at all except a man who asked me where the ladies’ dressing-room was. I told him I didn’t know and he walked over and told a lady who was with him that I didn’t know. There is no reason in the world why a trivial incident like that should unnerve a banquet speaker; it leaves him, however, with a vague sense of insecurity: he begins to wonder where he is, and what night it is, and whether the whole thing may not possibly be a hoax.
In somewhat of a daze—the first warning of a bad mental state—I found myself seated at a long table on a dais, next to a lady who asked me, as soon as I had drunk a glass of ice water, if I understood the makeup and purposes of the organization we were about to address. She had also accepted over the phone, and had had a miserable connection. I told her facetiously—as one who whistles in the dark to keep his nerve up—that I was under the impression we were the guests of honor at the National Women’s Bulb-Raising Association. This caused the man on her right to pale slightly. He drank a little water and whispered to me that, on the contrary, we were at the annual dinner of the North-Eastern States Meat-Handlers Association. I could see, however, that he was uncertain of himself on that point: he kept twisting his napkin. After the coffee and ice cream he was called upon for the first speech of the evening, and if ever a man touched lightly on the meat-handling situation he did. His nervous condition and incoherent remarks obviously upset the toastmaster who, all we speakers were instantly aware, was not absolutely sure that he was at the right banquet himself.
At this point, since I figured that several speakers were yet to come before I would be called on, I slipped from the table and made a hasty trip to the lobby to look up the sign which tells where the various conventions are being held. Several were listed, and their locations were given merely as Ballroom A, Ballroom B, Second Assembly Hall, Jade Room, etc. It was impossible to identify these rooms in the short time at my disposal and so I simply hurried back to my seat. From the sign, however, I had discovered that there was a possibility I might be in the midst of the National Chassis-Builders Association, the Society for the Advancement of Electric Welding, the American Society of Syrup and Fondant Makers, or the Past Presidents and Active Officers of Ye Olde Record Binding Company.
As I sat in my chair, breathing heavily, I tried to think up a few words of greeting and appreciation which might apply equally to the aims and purposes of all the various organizations. This got me nowhere at all. Nor did I receive any help from the gentleman who was talking at the moment. His expression was the agonized expression of a man who hasn’t the slightest idea what it is all about and wishes he were home. He told four stories, in a husky voice, and sat down. The toastmaster now arose and said that we were going to have the pleasure of listening to a man who knew more about the subject nearest our hearts than anyone else in America, a man whose great authority in this field has been recognized by his being selected to write on the subject for the new Encyclopaedia Britannica (I quote him more or less accurately—it was a little more involved than that). Instead of naming his man at this juncture, the toastmaster told a story, and then reverted to the world’s greatest authority on the subject nearest our hearts, repeating what he had already said, and finally, with a sweep of his hand, pronouncing the speaker’s name—”Mr. Septimus R. Groves.” As the toastmaster sat down, I lapsed back into my chair and applauded lightly. Nobody got up. All eyes then followed the toastmaster’s—and rested finally on me. I knew now that I was at the wrong banquet. Vaguely, as I got to my feet, I wondered where Mr. Groves was, and on what subject he was so eminent an authority. I was received with tremendous applause. When it quieted down I began to speak. I sketched briefly the advance of transportation, the passing of riveting, the improvement shown in the handling and distribution of meats, chassis construction, electric welding, and the absolute reliance that one could place nowadays upon the binding of old records. In conclusion I left with my audience the thought that in meat-handling, as in bulb-raising, and binding old records, it is Service and Cooperation that count. The speech was received with thunderous applause and a little stomping.
It was not until I got into a taxi that I realized my mind was already beginning to go. The driver asked me where to. I was surprised to hear myself tell him the Pennsylvania Hotel. There I registered as “Septimus R. Groves.” “We already have a Septimus R. Groves registered here,” said the clerk, with polite interest. “What’s his name?” I asked. “Septimus R. Groves,” he said. “He’s attending the annual banquet of the Fish and Game Wardens.” “Oh,” I said, “there must be some mistake; the man you’re thinking of is Horace R. Morgner—gypsum blocks and building laths.” The clerk gave me my room key, albeit with a certain reluctance. It was a week before I went home. I don’t mutter any longer, but I still cry out in my sleep.
A Mile and a Half of Lines
THURBER ON HIS DRAWINGS
Answers-to-Hard-Questions Department
To the Editors of The New Yorker
Sirs:
Has The New Yorker got a policy on drawings, sketches, etc., as I draw rather easily and would like to submit some. I understand you want only sophisticated or smart pictures, and would like to know if this is correct, and who does the captions, the artist or the editors? Please explain your covers also.
Respectfully,
H— C—
Dear H— C—
All that The New Yorker has ever had in the shape of a written policy on drawings is a set of rules
, for the guidance of the office staff, setting forth what must be done with drawings when they are received. In the early years of the magazine thousands of drawings got lost around the office and never were found. This set the artists crazy. As one of them, whose style had grown outmoded while he was trying to learn where his drawings had got to, said to us, “What the hell is the use of submitting pictures to you if you are going to become gradually unaware of where they are?” There was no satisfactory answer to that at the time—and still isn’t. This situation, in the first year or two of The New Yorker’s life, led to friction, ill-feeling, and catcalling between the artists and the editors and, finally, in the famous case of the Charles Durande drawings, to a lawsuit. Durande was an artist who claimed he had sent six or eight hundred pictures to the magazine over a period of a year and a half, for which he received no money, which were never used, and which he never got back. The upshot was that the magazine had to pay Durande a hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars for drawings which no one, except Mr. and Mrs. Durande and some friends of theirs, had ever seen, or, for the matter of that, ever will see. Because of annoying little incidents like that, a system of handling drawings finally had to be instituted. In the last year or two it has been working smoothly and no drawings have been lost, except a few of the smaller ones.
As to what kind of drawings The New Yorker wants, I find it difficult, even at this period of the magazine’s development, to formulate a written policy which will make sense. All I can do is cite a few random instances of pictures that didn’t work out, draw a few diagrams, and indicate roughly the field we are trying to cover. The diagrams are going to clutter the thing up and I suggest that you cut them out and paste them on a piece of cardboard.
Sophistication and smartness are, of course, the chief prerequisites. This is true not only of the drawings themselves, but of the captions for them. A drawing and its caption dovetail, or should dovetail. When they don’t they are hard to figure out. We have found it advisable to have the artists do the pictures and let us think up the captions for them. An artist doesn’t have to have any idea in mind when he makes a drawing for us; in fact, it is much better if he doesn’t. If he starts out with a vulgar idea (and sometimes artists have vulgar ideas which they think are smart ideas) he is likely to produce a picture which no other caption in the world except his own will fit. If his caption is very vulgar even an extremely sophisticated drawing wouldn’t save it. A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption. That’s an infallible rule: a drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption. Remember that, because we are going to come back to it in a couple of thousand words, and I’ll expect you to know. A case in point is the drawing of the man and woman at the dinner table (FIGURE I). The artist’s own caption for that was “Give this note to my husband and wait for an answer.” Now it is conceivable that a lot of people might be amused by that, but it would not be the sort of amusement we are after. It would be a little loud, for one thing, and might be followed by some such remark on the part of the vulgar reader as “I’m a if that ain’t the funniest drawing I ever see.” We don’t want that. What we want is the appreciative chuckle. Anybody can guffaw. The trouble with the caption given above is that it is neither smart nor sophisticated, it is just funny, screamingly funny—we grant you that. It fails because the woman’s words betray an annoyance with her husband—an annoyance which she has so far forgotten herself as to convey to a servant. If we printed such a caption, thousands of sensitive readers would be estranged. In cases like that we usually “tinker” the caption—that is, try to change it about so that it will be sophisticated; or we write a brand-new line. In this particular instance, however, the artist was so intent on making his drawing fit his caption that he turned out a picture which no other caption we could think of would fit. Well, there was one other, but it dealt with the possibility that the husband had suffered a stroke and that the wife was sending the note to a physician. Such a situation would of course meet the requirements of sophistication—nothing, in fact, could be more sophisticated than for a woman to remain calm and decorous during dinner in the face of a grave physical affliction—but this interpretation of the drawing gets so far away from humor that it isn’t even whimsical. No organic ailment is funny; only accidents are funny. Yet the drawing itself is unquestionably smart, depicting, as it does, two persons of obvious breeding, against a background of grandeur—the grandeur of simplicity, not of gaudy display. That’s exactly the kind of picture we want. The note in the woman’s hand is what outlawed this particular drawing. It makes the whole thing vulgar and there are no two ways about it (counting out the physician angle).
FIGURE I
In FIGURE II we have a similar problem. The girls themselves are smart enough, but the large begonia, which takes up so much room, caused the drawing to be thrown out and the whole idea to be abandoned, for the reason that no caption was possible which simply ignored the begonia. The artist’s own caption for this drawing was: “What do you think of the new planet?”
FIGURE II
“Begonia, ain’t it?”
If you can’t see why that is out, we could never tell you. We might observe, however, that two-line captions are never as smart as one-line captions. For example, the simple line “Begonia, ain’t it?” would have been much smarter and might have carried the picture except that it leaves out the new planet, which the artist insisted on getting in. We agreed with him there, because the new planet is what we call a “timely subject” and we like drawings occasionally which deal, in a sophisticated way, with timely subjects[*] We kept the picture around for weeks, tinkering with it, and meanwhile the planet not only became less and less timely but was also suspected of being merely a comet. That was a lucky break for us, in a way, because had the picture been used it would probably have come out the very day that the authenticity of the plant was questioned—that is usually our luck in such matters.
Now for a few general suggestions. The New Yorker prefers certain groupings of persons in its drawings, of which these are a few: two fat women; two businessmen; two middle-aged men and a young woman; a silly woman and a banker; a silly woman and a major- general; a languid man in evening dress enormously involved with another man’s wife, or not involved at all with her but suspected, nevertheless, by the husband (maybe you better let that one go); two to six eager girl friends conversing in a tea-garden; two workmen on a big clock or a scaffold; and an intoxicated wife and her sober husband at a cocktail party. To explain why all these groupings are essentially smart and sophisticated would take too long—would take all night, in fact. We pick out, as just one example, the intoxicated wife and the sober husband at a party. We had just such a picture a few months ago, in which the giddy wife says to her husband, “I told you not to let me drink.” That was not my caption. My caption for that drawing was rejected, although I thought it was better than the one that was used. It was: “Haven’t you proud of me that I still know who I am in the mist of all this revery?” However, all this is beside the point. I simply want to establish that there is nothing smarter than for a finely gowned, handsome woman to become cockeyed at a large formal party. A vulgarian would not be able to get away with it. In such situations vulgar people go to pieces and scream or hurt somebody. It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home. There is no use sending in any drawings of an intoxicated wife alone with her husband. There must be some other person in the scene, perhaps a butler, or a man under the bed, to make the thing sophisticated. Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one’s poise and prestige (such as the butler, or the man under the bed—but never the husband).
I am sorry that I cannot explain our covers. We are not permitted to give out that information. Anyway it would involve diagrams, and a lot of references you wou
ldn’t understand.
Wayne Van R. Vermilye
for The New Yorker
* EDITOR’S NOTE: At the time of this writing’s appearance, August 2, 1930, the ninth planet, Pluto, had just been discovered by Clyde Tombaugh.
Speaking of Drawings …
Some people thought my drawings were done under water; others that they were done by moonlight. But mothers thought that I was a little child or that my drawings were done by my granddaughter. So they sent in their own children’s drawings to The New Yorker, and I was told to write these ladies, and I would write them all the same letter: “Your son can certainly draw as well as I can. The only trouble is he hasn’t been through as much.” [COOKE]
My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point. [LIFE]
Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge. Le dessinateur rapide also feels he is catching fugitive moods just barely in time. This general air of urgency sometimes lends an illusion of insight, a quality usually thought of, for some reason, as coming in flashes, like lightning. Furthermore, celerity produces quantity, a factor of considerable, if deceptive, importance in a competitive world. [GARLAND]
EDITOR’S NOTE: For the source of each interview or article, please see the Notes on page 257, matching the key word at the end of each excerpt with the list’s respective entry.
If all the lines of what I’ve drawn were straightened out, they would reach a mile and a half. I drew just for relaxation, in between writing. [BREIT]
Collecting Himself Page 12
