as genius, _A_ will not dream of murder. He will pick _B_’s pocket, or
gamble with him, or slip by stealth into his room at night—or even do
without! Again, it is clear that success is less assured. The solution
is in doubt: the result is far below 100 per cent certain.
And now, finally, _A_ belonging to any of the effete societies of Europe
has a rival in _B_ for a girl and for social fortune. He will probably
try to get at the girl (an uncertain method where a moment’s success
“carries no insurance”) or he may try to outstrip _B_ by study and
application. The processes are long, difficult, full of hazard. The
American way of assassination is sure-fire.
But the American method gets so quickly and nakedly at the result, by
destroying what stands in the way: _which is Life itself_. And not alone
the life of _B_: what _A_ avoids—trial, struggle, doubt—is just that
content of experience which enriches living and is the stuff of art. The
American system is very competent, and very sterile. It is related
neither to life nor to art: but rather to the machine.
Let us consider our other American arts. We shall then see at once how
general is this love of a _quick_ solution; and how systematically we
eliminate from life those elements which might hinder a solution. Quite
recently we were mad over the Crossword Puzzle. The puzzle was soluble:
it made success easy: and it contained nothing—neither sense nor
content—except the incentive toward success. Even if one did happen to
fail, despite the aid of dictionaries and of neighbors, in finding the
“3-letter word meaning the adult of kitten,” next morning’s paper put an
end to the agony. Similarly, there is the Movie and the Popular Story.
They must contain a mechanism leading in simple and directest terms to
Success and a solution. They must dispense with any forms of “life” that
might impede solution. We can see now how harmoniously murder fits in
with the other common ways of American Law and Order.
So much for our recognizable arts. If we tum to our public life—to our
“serious” side—we encounter the same habit. We have social problems: and
we solve them. Folks get drunk on alcohol? Easy: abolish alcohol.
Roundhead foreigners cluttered up our landscape? Easy: abolish
immigration. Dour dramas corrupted Sweet Sixteen? Easy: censor the
drama. Crazy communists upset bedtime story mood of bourgeois gentlemen?
Easy: jail ’em and let the Supreme Court of the United States outlaw
their nonsense. These are all problems they still have in blundering,
backward Europe. By gosh, we’ve solved them.
And we’re constructive, too: not merely defensive. Having money means
having a good time. We’ve learned that. So we are abolishing every
value, and throwing in contempt each occupation, which does not aim at
money: either in the earning of it or in the display of it, once it has
been earned. And finally, success is success. Having discovered this,
there is nothing left but to murder all moods and impulses which would
deny this crucial American proposition.
You have the idea. We jolt off more folk in New Jersey in a week than
they do in France in a generation, because murder is so consonant with
the American Idea. Of course, murder’s the low form of our art: a folk
art. (We have our pickpockets, too.) But you can’t get away from it. The
murderer is a go-getter. The murderer has a problem, and he solves it.
The murderer sees what he wants, and he takes it. The murderer believes
in quick action: he is a maker of success: he is a man with results.
(“Success” magazines and popular platform artists please copy.)
And all this makes for bad art because—as Goethe put it—“art is long.”
The short cut gets you “there.” But what if the “short cut” cuts out
life itself? You’ve had nothing on the way. And when you are once
“there,” what can you do but start again—on another short cut—for the
next place? This is the joker in our competence. We do away with the
means: and behold! The Means are everything and the End is nothing. It’s
like the modern Sunday afternoon. We used to go nowhere in particular,
on foot: and see the country. Now we motor a hundred miles to X. And X
is nothing. And we’ve gone so fast, and swallowed so much carbon
monoxide gas, that the way was nothing either. So we speed on to Y and
to Z, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
To solve the problems of life is very simple. All you need do is to
eliminate—to murder—life. That gets rid of the problems: and that
explains 99/100 of what men call civilization. For life is all Problem,
and the brave dwelling therein: and the solution is death. A good life
is the art of avoiding quick solutions. And murder—this so popular
American practice, this so simple mechanical means toward a solution—is
a good symbol of the bad art of America.
_1925_
5. THE BATTLE OF A CENTURY AND A HALF
PHILADELPHIA (JULY 4, 1776-SEPT. 23, 1926)
The rain was the hero of the evening. The gentle falling rain. It
appeared second on the scene, pattering down so modestly just after
Tunney had climbed up, and preceding the Champion Dempsey. It was not
greeted quite so cordially by the crowd as were Gene and Jack. But ere
long it made itself felt. At the end, it held undisputed sway.
The rain was the hero of that memorable hour in which the Mauler of
Manassa lost his crown to the Sweet Marine—for a variety of reasons. To
begin with, everybody saw the rain; and don’t you dream for an instant
that every one of those good 130,000 American patriots who had come so
far—at such expense and trouble—just to celebrate their country’s
Sesquicentennial birthday, _saw_ the Fight. Did the seats lack
visibility? Not a bit of it. A marvel of architectural finesse is the
great stadium. But even Mr. Rickard could not stretch the structure of
men’s sight nor mold to a more plastic shape the sort of scrap he had
staged. The seeing was carefully graded, as everything should be in an
orderly Republic.
For $27.50 (up) you _saw_ the Fight, and the stripe on Jack’s trunks;
you saw the exquisite process whereby Dempsey was softened, slowed,
mauled, unshaped by the obdurate indifference of Tunney. The sum of
$16.50 gave you two men—one square head and one oblong—manifestly clad
in purple and blue trunks; face and condition a blank, but bodies
spinning visibly enough, and hopping and hugging and lunging, boring and
jabbing in a ten-round dance. Fairly balanced, they were, under the
heavy crown of the loudspeakers. No one went down, no one went through
the ropes. Tunney was steadfast and Dempsey was wild. So $16.50 got a
mere guess at the decision of the Fight you had come so laboriously to
behold. At $10.00, what you saw was a couple of bright bugs with swift
antennae, making love or something in true insect fashion—and getting
nowhere, so that you could notice. And at $3.30, you beheld, all about a
far flame, a spot, a sky of moveless, pivotless heads, a sky rolling
with human thunder. And that was worth the money.
But when the rain came, the gentle falling rain, it played no favorites.
It did not pour buckets on Mayor Walker’s crown, and drip a mere drop on
Paddy. And how the rain was needed! Don’t you believe it put a damper on
that mob. Individual men and women may have been disgruntled—although
they didn’t show it. But the crowd itself, and the spirit of the show,
_called for_ the rain.
In the mists which tided to the crowd from the high shell walls, see a
symbol of tedium, and you’ve got the idea. A solid, stolid thing was the
mob, massing from the ringside. When the lights that stared from
brackets all around went out, the crowd seemed dead. Myriad heads rose
from the flanks of the thing like carven facets—like knobs—like
artificed protuberances on a woody substance. You felt that a plane, if
it were big enough, could run over the vast surface, and smooth it, and
smooth off the heads. You felt there’d be a lot of sawdust, and that’s
all. You were unjust, however. For when the lights screamed back,
shedding their green-blue ice on the hot crowd, you saw that each of
these myriad individual knobs had a face: mostly a man’s, perhaps a
woman’s, face. The expression was dull, not too lifelike; and almost
never varied. But if you doubted the monumental genius of the painter of
all those phizes, you couldn’t help admiring the assiduity for going to
such trouble.
Then the Fight, to make the stadium come alive. Shouts, cheers, murmurs,
ran at first through the inert thing: trickled, jabbed at it,
harried—and failed to fuse it together. Many sparks and no flame. The
spirit of the evening was not a spirit of fire. Sogginess,
wetness—spirit of the rain was what Philadelphia summoned from its weary
streets to meet the wearied visitors from afar. And that’s why, when the
rain did fall, it was right. You can’t blame Mr. Rickard. How could he
know? How could he know, for instance, that this stadium, unlike other
circuses, sprawls too horizontal from the ring, is too fluid in its
forms to be galvanized into a furious hard passion? A fight scene should
be more vertical, more funnel-shaped. Then your scrappers have a chance,
with their lean frail arms, to weave a spell to pull the human lump
together—fire it, make it the mad, single-howling creature which loomed
above Dempsey and Firpo in New York.... And how could Mr. Rickard
foresee that his two prize babies, this time, would keep their feet so
well?
If the prize fight is to outlive its present mastodonic bulk, and
not—like other dinosauri—collapse from sheer flatulent vastness, the
pugs’ arms will have to grow stronger so that there is more flooring, or
their legs will have to grow feebler, so that there is more flopping. In
a huge stadium, you can see a man go down flat—and that is always worth
a week’s salary and ten hours’ sweating in trains. But boxing, boring,
sparring, dancing, spinning—but a bloody nose and Jack’s shut
eye—what’n’ell do such fine points get you, when you cannot _see_ them?
The fat ball park developed the fat Babe Ruth. Slugging makes contact
with the huge modern mob, where all the place-hitting of Nap Lajoie
would be lost. The fisticuff equivalent of a fast-bounding ball in the
bleachers is a couple of giants tumbling each other, as in the
Dempsey-Firpo fracas. There was none of that in Philadelphia.
The crowds were childish about it; and you cannot blame them. They
wanted action: thudding, sudden action. Without it, they were bored. How
far they had come! what hours they had voyaged, leaving wife and
children! what hours’ hard earnings expended! what sweat exuded! what
shoe leather worn away, in order to be in Philly! Was it to see two
boxers, bobbing in a white-roped ring? Once they were there, they
couldn’t wait to get home. A knockout in round one would have delighted
them. Immediate action—what the French in another context call _la
jouissance immédiate_—that was the infantile temper of the crowd. They
howled down the announcer, when he wasted time on adjectives. They were
nonpartisan. They were for Tunney when his blow landed; they were for
Jack when the thud of _his_ glove came over the acred heads. They were
for anybody who’d bring it all crashing to a decisive thrill. Poor
public! Hadn’t they paid two million dollars for _something_? I suppose
that is why Mr. Rickard, whose influence with the weather is well known,
brought down the rain.
Which leads me to our Showman. The show was, of course, the packed
stadium. Or, if you prefer, the show was the show itself. The Fight was
the pretext for bringing the show together. To this end, Jack and Gene
fought for championship. To this end, one hundred and fifty years ago,
our fathers fought for independence. So that Philadelphia might have her
celebration and dawdle through it meagerly for many months on such
nurture as the Pageant of Freedom (loss $700,000)—and recoup it all in
the sudden financial glory of a scrap fight, which a hundred-odd
thousand paid for, and which the radio stay-at-homes alone followed
clearly. But if the Show was the show itself—who saw it?
Not the newspapermen, not the frontiersmen in the wide, cheapest spaces.
All of them erroneously had their eyes on the ringside. The chief
appreciator of this thing of beauty was the chief creator of it: Mr. Tex
Rickard himself.
From 8:00 to 9:30 P.M. I followed this enraptured artist as he moved
from entrance to entrance of his golden dump. I was happy to catch the
esthetic gleam in his eye, and to hear him murmur:
“Gee! Only look at ’em all! See that silver blimp tipping the stadium
askew as if we were on a boat in a storm. See that Penn State Building
yonder, like a city in the air. See the heavens rolling, rumbling near.
All so fluid, all so fairy-like—above the solid substances of my crowd!
One hundred thirty thousand ... solid ... solid ... _paid for_! By
Michael Angelo,” cried our leading modeler of mobs, “it’s worth earning
half a million dollars to make a thing as beautiful as this.”...
And so, to make that beauty perfect, he summoned down the rain. It
worked on the crowd like water on a thirsty plant. It eased them—brought
them together. It gave them something more immediate and urgent than
that distant dance in the ring. Water, drooling from one bosom to
another, joined them. The little raindrop, bounding from head to head,
made brothers as it bounded. We knew that our forefathers, fighting for
freedom, had fought to make a Nation, after all.
Men and women removed their hats and swathed their heads in
handkerchiefs that gleamed in the gloom like turbans. The stadium turned
Oriental; the fight fans became worshipers at some rite. Now, the
remoteness of the bout was good—since a rite before an altar should be
occult. Now, the cavortings and borings of two men on a light-blazed box
seemed fitting. And it was well that a little man in an incongruous
dinner coat should make noiseless speech under a diadem of arcs and
amplifiers; and that his voice should loom, by some sudden miracle, into
each shadow of the conchshaped pile. And, finally, it was right that at
the very end, at least a hundred thousand of the worshipers (who had,
they thought, come to _see_ a fight) should stand quiet until the Metal
Voice belched forth the news to them of _who had won_.
Slowly, sweetly they plashed away through the mud and the motors, toward
their distant homes. Through the waterlogged rhetoric of a National Fair
which needed a prize fight to put it on the map. And the heavens wept
gently.
But when we reached the Penn Station at Broad Street, all my hopes for
mankind were reborn. With a greater drive than Dempsey’s, with more
stamina than Tunney’s, silent mobs of men stormed with drenched bodies
through the gates—to the New York trains. And then I knew that my
brothers, after all, were capable of enthusiastic action when some high
purpose urged them.
_1926_
6. ENNOBLING OUR CRIMINALS
So it has come to this. They’re advertising for the crook and the yegg.
The first practical sign of the uplift was in the modest little placards
which blossomed out some time ago in the “L” stations: they reminded
prospective robbers of ticket offices that, _if they were caught_,
they’d get from six to seven years. The suggestion, of course, was: not
to be caught, and doubtless some few courageous men were thereby
inspired to do better work. But now there are to be flamboyant
posters—every bit as good as the old ones which urged us to Buy Liberty
Bonds, to Save Sugar, to Save the World from the Kaiser.... These new
works of democratic art speak out to all whom they concern: “You CAN’T
win. Ships Don’t Sail Beyond the Arm of the Law.” Or, “You CAN’T win.
You Have to Get All the Breaks. One Little Slip Means Sing Sing.”
It is fair to assume that these exhortations are not addressed to the
little girl who works all day in a milliner’s shop; nor even to the
plumber riding home from his pipes. There must be a criminal class,
large and plebeian enough to use the streetcars, to whom these
advertisements are devoted and whom they are aimed to improve. This is
highly significant as perhaps the final proof that we are a democracy. I
feel, however, that much good material is neglected by not putting the
posters also in the taxis.
At last the criminal class is to be exalted. Today, of course, it is
small pumpkins to hold up a bank clerk or sandbag an aged millionaire as
he saunters from his club. Mediocre men—men of conservative instincts
and cool passions—have degraded the ranks of crime. All this is now to
be changed. The crook is to be challenged! The yegg is to be dared! “YOU
CAN’T WIN” shout the ads. This will, of course, discourage the weak
members. It will fire and inspire the strong ones. It will weed out the
cautious crooks. It will raise the moral and spiritual standard of the
whole fraternity of pillagers, marauders, brigands, thugs and pirates
who grace our peaceful land, and serve to circulate moneys and emotions.
Dick Turpin, Robin Hood, the great corsairs, had no encouragement like
this. They worked against a spirit of states and peoples which in every
way encouraged “virtue.” When one thinks of the drawbacks of those days
one wonders that picaroons, spielers and strong-arm men survived at all!
It merely goes to show the indestructibility of genius. Men were
discouraged from peculation by thoughts of God, and by the subtle
suggestion of the priests that it was _harder_ to go straight! Moses had
thundered: “Thou shalt not”—with the assumption that, of course, _thou
couldst_. Jesus of Nazareth went even further. He made it clear that it
was almost impossible to be good. For ages, the aristocracies and the
churches kept up their propaganda, discouraging crime on the ground that
crime was easy, forgivable and mean.
We have changed all that. “You can’t win my swag!” challenges the
banker, knowing well that this is the very tune to inspire the daring
crook against him. Indeed, the best of this new scene of our Democratic
Drama is the altruism of the leaders.
They have suffered, after all, very little from holdups. Crime has been
endemic, but sporadic. The land buccaneering art needed uplift and
stimulation. It needed the standards and the token of popular support
which advertising—that university of democracy—alone would give it.
Enough vivid posters encouraging superior youth to bust safes or board
bullion-carrying motors—through the method of challenge and of a call to
adventure, and we can look forward to the day when all banks will be
broken, all rich ladies stripped of their jewels, and all motors in the
hands of thieves, save, of course, those taxis which are already run by
licensed yeggmen.
Our ruling class disproves the cynicism of the materialist philosopher.
Are they not now inspiring a criminal class, with educational posters,
to despoil them?
But perhaps there’s a way out of this dilemma, after all.
Everyone knows that about fifty years ago our pioneers and pork-barrel
experts instituted the campaign which has resulted in the present flood,
throughout the land, of novelists and poets. Advertising methods in
those days were more intimate, because the science had not been
standardized. Yet the process was essentially the same as that now begun
for the benefit of our criminal classes. Instead of shouting in posters,
it was whispered about: “Write Poetry—and Starve.” “Creators—You Can’t
Win. The Possessive Arm of the Law Will Get You, Even in Paris.”
The result, of course, was Greenwich Village, and our ten thousand
Little Theatres. In the bright lexicon of youth, there’s no word of
challenge like CAN’T. But the crowning stroke of this maneuver for
supplying our land with a sufficiency of poets, was the system of awards
and prizes which has since sprung up.
The creators, of course, were first _challenged_ into existence by the
possessors. Then, those who were wise enough to make their imagination
and their art work _for_ the possessors, were paid sumptuously in coin.
Similarly, bank robbers and holdup men must first be inspired to know
the dignity of their calling. These posters will help to draw the right
class of energetic youth. All that remains, then, will be to announce
positive rewards for those criminals who make good.
_1925_
7. READING THE SPORTS
Oh, how glad I am that spring is coming and that baseball’s here! For
once again, I can get something from the papers. I am what America would
unanimously call a highbrow. Put me down as that, since the Majority
Rules. It is because I am a highbrow, spending my days and nights in
philosophic contemplation, that I rely on the sports in our dailies.
During these last months, life has been bitterly empty. At its best, pro
football is a vague business, and tennis is the sort of game you must
see in order to believe. I have suffered frightfully for lack of news.
But now I am myself again. The sun shines promisingly in my window.
Mayor Walker has thrown out the first ball and at last I can spend my
pennies evening after evening, for Baseball Finals: certain at last of
having _news_ to read.
It is, if you insist on explanations, because I am a highbrow spending
my days and nights in philosophic contemplation that I require the
sports. You don’t see? Well: let’s examine the matter like two highbrows
together.
I prop my morning paper carefully (so as not to spill it) against the
water tumbler, with its edge held down by the plate which holds my
grapefruit. Right column spread: Briand and the League of Nations. Do I
read it? No. Why do I not read it? Because I am not concerned in
International Affairs? Wrong again. It is because I am concerned in
International Affairs, and know something _about_ International Affairs,
and know a good deal about papers—that I skip this column. For I am
aware, whatever the true crux of the crisis, that I’ll not find it
printed. Vague conjectures, superficial facts, details, a perfect
avoidance of everything causal—of all that _counts_ in this particular
matter—this is what my faithful paper spreads before me, on
International Affairs. Next door, an article about the Police and
Bootlegging and the Crime Wave in our city. I am exceeding interested in
all crime news, and in the liquor market. That is why I skip the column.
If I desire to be sure what really happened, I must wait till I can drop
in on the boys who know one thing and who write another.... Left column:
the big story about Congress. It also fails to qualify. Nothing but the
hot air is in the print. The real plots, plans, motives, are as far from
this open page as are the committee rooms and dining rooms of Washington
from the visitors’ gallery at the Capitol.
I turn the page. I fare no better. Discovery of ruins in Yucatán, Egypt,
the Gobi Desert. I know the “desk” has sedulously deformed the trickle
of “quick” news which the telegraph has shot across the sea.... Divorce?
I’ll get none of the violet rays of subtle human truth in this odious,
scarlet, lyingly “whole” report. Taxi smashup? Perhaps the names at
least are right (though even they may be misspelled, unless they’re
famous). Music? I happen to know too much about music to marvel
convincedly at Marion Talley’s voice.
Ah, but here is the book page! I may glance at the ads. They tell me at
least, with a modicum of truth, that Mr. Mencken’s new novel is out; and
that the Hexameter Epic to which Mr. Broun has devoted so many years of
silence is to be published in the fall. But will these lengthy and
pontifical disquisitions about the current output give me either _facts_
or credible _opinion_? Alas! I fear not. There is more honesty and
candor here than in the sections devoted to politics and crime. But not
more competence. Real information about books and art requires an
informer with background and perspective, and fairly permanent esthetic
standards.
And I crave facts! I’m a highbrow: I want to _know_ at least of
SOMETHING that’s happened in the world, since yesterday. So I turn to
the sports page.
I am told that Babe Ruth fanned three times, and I believe it! I am told
that Vance pitched as good a game as that famous one of Walter
Johnson’s, five years ago in Detroit. I’ll stake my dollars, it’s true!
Here is the statement that the Giants blew in the seventh and the
Pirates hammered five earned runs. I know it! I know the runs were
earned! (What a relief it is, to know anything at all in our chaotic
world—when even the atom has crumbled!)