Leaguers, and deserve to be there, by the best of baseball standards. I
believe these baseball critics. I am willing to accept, without the
tedium of a personal inquiry, that the fellows who are playing in
Paterson or Oshkosh are not as good as their brothers in Big Time. But I
am quite as sure that the real Major Leaguers in politics, law,
business, literature, education, are usually ignored by the papers;
whereas every morning there’s a new crop of tenth-rate Minors in the
five-column spreads.
McGraw would stand for no Mayor Hylan in his line-up. It wouldn’t pay
_him_, as it paid Tammany. No sentimental blurb can hide the fact if
Ruth has batted .170 for a week. No lack of a blurb can blur the
fielding and batting splendor of George Sisler. There’s plenty of stuff
about the past, that we believe in; plenty of hopes for the future. But
today—what can we believe today? In the sports I get rare satisfaction,
for I can say: “It’s in the papers, and I do believe it.”
You’ve got to have _some_ certainties at breakfast. You’ve got to have
_some_ English written in a style living, appropriate, honest. There’s
plenty of fiction: forty pages, daily, in our average-sized journals.
Forty pages of cake. That’s all very well. But, being a plain highbrow,
I need a little of the bread of fact. Thank the Lord for baseball.
_1926_
8. THE NEW CONQUISTADORES
So I went to Florida for a rest....
Of course, I left all my money there in real estate ventures, and had to
return by boat. This is a cheaper way than Pullman, and I soothed my
pride by arguing that it would round out my experience. In Miami,
Sarasota, St. Augustine and Jacksonville, I had encountered nothing but
millionaires. There must be a nether side, an “other half of the world,”
even in Florida. More modest revelers in sunshine surely must go south
by winter and doubtless I would find these coming north by boat.
I was mistaken. The steamer was crowded. Every cabin and berth were
occupied by men and women who, according to admissions obliquely and
nonchalantly let fall in talk, were larded with money. Everyone had
tried to get a _de luxe_ stateroom, alas! and had failed. Everyone,
moreover, was traveling by boat because of a tender love of the sea.
There was not much wind; but a good portion of our company were sick.
Nor do I recall any gazing at the ocean, save on one or two instances
when porpoises were sighted. Perhaps there was more sea to the voyage
than the pampered landowners had bargained for. It is true that from
beginning to end the boat was utterly surrounded.
And besides, there was too much of an intellectual, cultural,
public-spirited nature to discuss on board for any childish pleasure in
salt water. These were men and women on a holiday. Yet, everybody knows
that the athletic mind finds rest, not in lazing, but in a simple change
of the topic of cerebration. These men and women had gone South
ostensibly in quest of sunshine, alligators, golf and bathing. Their
alert minds had soon discovered that Florida today was the very apex of
American progress, the cynosure of all live American eyes, the ideal of
every purse possessed of the creative impulse to increase and multiply.
What more inevitable than that, returning to their estates in Kalamazoo,
Newark and the Bronx, they should discuss and discuss?
We were foregathered in the smoking room.
“They are sure doing wonders down there in Florida.” A heavy Elk spoke
with gleaming eyes. His chest was deep and so was his voice. It was
strange how two-dimensional those eyes seemed.
As the four others of us round the table nodded and sipped our near beer
and chewed at our cigars, I became aware of a strange presence overhead.
The smoking room was fitted out after the fashion of an old English inn.
In the ceiling were open rafters clouded in smoke. And here, straight
above us, through the darkling mist, I saw another group of men gathered
like us about an oaken table.
At first, I thought that there must be a mirror in the beams, catching
our group through the haze; for these men above were placed like us. But
as my vision cleared I saw that they were different, after all. They
were clad in steel coats of mail; swords swanked angularly at their
sides; they wore flaring boots; armored gauntlets were drawn off, and
freed the harsh-haired fists of conquistadores clasping silver goblets
filled with ruby wine.
My neighbor answered—a weasel fellow, all grey, whose nose seemed in a
perpetual tremor of scenting and searching:
“Why, Jacksonville’s population alone has doubled in ten years!”
—_Tell the Padre that we have made another hundred converts_, came from
the smoke-veiled rafters.
“They got 268 manufacturing plants that can turn out $50,000,000 worth
of goods a year.”
—_Our first stone building at San Agustin is a school for the Indians._
“You know that filling-in of marsh water front at Sarasota cost the
Ringling Brothers about $10,000. They sold it at $13,500 the acre.”
—_The new Cathedral was built by Christian natives. We have sent the
deed of the property as a gift to the University of Salamanca._
“Miami has a transient population of 90,000. That’s what pays ... the
transients.”
And over my head the echo:—_We are being urged to marry with the Indian
if need be, and to settle. Are these men not the hidalgos of a great
land? Has not Don Francisco called them brothers of the Spaniard?_
“Fifteen thousand hotels in Florida.” The Elk eyes glowed.
—_A Mission in the Everglades at last!_ was the refrain.
“The whole thing is stupendous,” came the shrill voice from the grey man
at my side. “It’s the greatest land rush in the history of the U. S. A.”
“Which means, in the history of the world,” said a surgeon who operated
in lots on the side. He was a man burly and sinuous. There was in him
something of the otter and a good deal of the boar. “Why, compared to
this, the great movements of history—the gold rush into California, the
dash to the Klondike, the opening of the Middle West and the Northwest
with Harriman and Hill, were puny.”
He was an eloquent as well as learnèd speaker. And as each glorious
instance rolled from his soft mouth, there came an echo mysteriously
transformed by the smoky rafters....
—_Movements of history ... passage of the children of Israel across the
Red Sea ... the quest of the Holy Grail ... Crusades ... Columbus._...
“But it ain’t business only!” I protested.
“You bet not,” said the Elk. “‘Come to Florida and see the nation at
play.’” He quoted the great line without hesitation.
I saw our nation at play. Motoring ... movies ... lot jugglings ...
motoring ... walnut chocolate fudge sundaes and bad booze ...
motoring ... boosting, boasting ... motoring....
Overhead clinked silver goblets. The conquistadores were humming a
“malagueña.” From the mist about them came a glow as of mellow vineyards
yielding sunny wines, and of women dancing. Below, hard lips told of
sport.
Said our Elk: “I dropped in on the Yankees at St. Petersburg. Those boys
clear a fortune even out of training.”
The tale of sport from overhead was different. Honor and love were
counters; the players risked life and joyously won death.
“Not alone a nation at play,” exclaimed the surgeon. “Florida is a
frontier with all the culture of the capitals. Here is a whole state
being opened up, with the best accommodations! For modern improvements,
New York’s got nothing on it.”
“And they ain’t forgot religion,” added the grey man with the tremulous
nose. “They just put up a church in De Land, cost $300,000. You bet I
bought all the lots I could in a town like that. Where they spend money
on a church, they’re going to stick. A swell church means business.”
—_Our Mission was builded by volunteers from the old Settlements
elsewhere. They were not paid, of course; but we had to shoot many
infidel natives who did not understand why we wanted to build so fair a
church in a land that was not ours. Yes, many were killed and some were
tortured. There is no room for infidels. We let the gold go home for the
greater glory of our Gracious Queen._
“Well,” cried I, emptying my mug of legal beer, “Florida is certainly a
hum-dinging first-class show of American progress.”
“It’s enough to make you proud,” said the Elk.
“—and rich,” smiled the sly surgeon.
“Why, in Jacksonville every guy in town’s got to wear a big button—and
if he don’t, you just bet he gets into trouble. It’s yellow and on it is
printed in red [those are old Spain’s colors, you know]: WE ARE
BELIEVERS IN JACKSONVILLE.”
—_We are believers in God_, came clearly from the rafters.
_1925_
9. TWO FACES
In the literary office of a certain magazine there is a vast table piled
with books. “Mostly junk,” the editor will explain. My hand feathers the
outskirts and picks a volume with title: “Calvin Coolidge. His First
Biography.” I am not permitted to speak of it here. Nor shall I linger
wistfully over the so symbolic circumstance that a book about a living
President should be a thing void of ideas, vile in composition, rancid,
and false in spirit. Within its covers, I found the portraits of two
faces: one of the President and one of the President’s mother. Thereby
hangs my tale.
She was beautiful. She looks out at you in a black dress of satin,
sterncuffed in white, high-collared, with a cameo at the throat. The
hands lie demure in the lap. The hair is drawn tight and sideways to the
ears. She looks out at you, not so much from the frontispiece of a book
as from New England.
She is impressive. The sharp small chin is firm. The mouth is pursed,
its prim lips faintly flexed into a downward frown. The nose is
straight. It has delicacy; its nostrils seem to quiver not from emotion,
but from restraint of emotion. Under the plastered hair is a forehead
high and ample: a square forehead which is the feminine form of the
stern unsubtlety of pioneers. It holds a mind serene through exclusions,
correct through lack of doubts. The eyebrows are straight as a whiplash.
Above them the flesh puckers like a girl’s, ere the forehead’s rigor
claims it. But the eyes are deep-set as in some dark seclusion.
They glower. Their gaze is reproof. And their sight is a shadow. Pain
lurks in them, muted and proud, and constant. There speaks a virtue
assumed, a mastery willed: almost a habitude of judgment. The eyes
dominate all. Under the girlish brows with their faint fleshliness,
above the exquisite nose, within the contour both fragile and brittle
which the folded hands whitely enhance, these eyes are paramount.
Tenderness turns hard; frailty assigns itself master; weakness wills
itself mighty. The result is a transformation. This face, so gracious in
its elements, gives for its final word inhospitality and shutness. The
result, in more personal terms, is Calvin Coolidge.
His face is the response to his mother’s. She was the obscure farmer’s
wife in the Connecticut River Valley. There, as with countless other
women, her loveliness had its begrudging bloom. Winters long as a siege,
summers of swift fever, the inclement lordship of Puritan ideals, made
her astringent. Weather attuned to will hardened this flesh and drew the
spirit down to the sure rigor of material affairs. Virtue became a
saying of Nay and an economic cunning. Poetry took property for symbol.
And so at last, on a certain Fourth of July, this daughter of New
England gave birth to Calvin Coolidge. Not she alone. A whole decadent
Puritan tradition gave birth to him; fathered his spirit; molded his
memorable face.
The little man waxed great. And as he grew, his face became the
caricature of his mother’s fairness. It is a caricature horrible in its
significance, superb in its logic.
Chin, mouth, nose, brow, eyes of Calvin Coolidge are children of the
splendors strangled in his mother. Her face already is this twilight, is
a recession of splendors. Her features speak but greyly an ancestral
greatness. Moral power, will, devotion, chastity, singleness of vision,
bore this woman. But the essence of their means to life made the mind
intense to the exclusion of content; made the beauty neurotic; made the
virtue shut. Made, inevitably, their own culminant death whose Person
now presides the American lands.
The chin of Calvin Coolidge has grown pointed, out of all proportion: it
is a shallow, contentless thrusting. The lips have almost disappeared.
The mouth is a crease of shrewd, complacent purpose. The fold of
resolution beneath his mother’s nose becomes a dugout of meanness. The
nose itself is bulbous, perhaps with too much half-baked nutriment: it
is a proboscis of forwardness unchallenged along the path which the
canny eyes select from all the paths of the world. The forehead is blown
into a windy conch, unruffled and unfilled save with the echoes of dead
covenants. It crowns the face like a seashell; and the face itself
becomes, beneath it, a pucker of soft parts like some naked creature
peering forth for food. The head, indeed, is the Rhetoric of absence.
The face is the expression of an immaculate instinct for sure and mean
details.
[Illustration: © _Fairchild Aerial Surveys_]
Again, as with his mother, the man’s eyes give the key. They have lost
the tragedy of hers. They have flattened, hardened, and come out to the
surface. They do not, from a secret depth, glower upon a hostile world:
but have pressed, with a twist and a leer, to Victory. They twinkle.
They have the lasciviousness of cold possession. They are the logical
eyes of the battener on nullities: the eyes of the democratic
politician.
So, as Calvin Coolidge, professional legislator, might declare: The Nays
have it. Here is a face at last, ultimate and stripped to the model of a
will like a machine. A face where no dream lingers beyond the dreams
approved by a smug world: a face which no thought troubles that has no
answer in the current coinage: a face that knows not passion, unless it
be charted and chartered in the Statutes. The mother’s frown is gone
with the conflict it expressed. Here, in lieu, is a smirk. All the
realms of spiritual risk which her men, good pioneers, to such good
purpose barred, have here stayed out, indeed. A race’s turning of its
ideal power into the body of Success becomes this face and body,
stripped to cunning, instinct with the spirit of acquisition. The symbol
becomes a man; the man becomes a symbol. He crawls up the greased ladder
of public honors. He becomes a leader and an idol, in whom the mob can
worship its own meanness....
_1926_
10. THE DRUG ON THE MARKET
It is prevalent and poisonous. And the land is proud of it. Its
manufacture is a huge industry; its sale is a popular art. Billions of
dollars are spent in making it: millions more go to the appurtenances of
its use: and billions are paid in wages to men and women who devote
their lives, openly, to its production, distribution, upkeep. The states
all license it, turning a tithe of the wealth spent for it by our people
to their own coffers. Great magazines and newspapers grow fatter with
its advertisements. Some papers, indeed, are entirely given to its
commercial and esthetic aspects. And no publication, however ethical in
editing its columns, however adverse to such drugs as coffee or tobacco,
refuses to display its blandishments for money.
All America lives under its influence, and does not suspect that it is
enslaved by a drug. “Shows” are planned yearly in great towns to
propagate its sales and sing its praises. Special sections of the
dailies detail its progress. Schools teach the beginner how to enjoy it.
And everywhere ordinances and officials tune the whole life of the land
to the needs and habits of those who use it.
It comes in varieties of kind which display distinct differences in
expenditure of money. And these gradations have a truly hierarchic
value. In a democracy where castes are vague, where money-power has few
manifest badges of dress or standard of living; where, indeed,
millionaire and clerk go to the same movie, read the same books, travel
the same roads, and where intellectual distinctions must be very
carefully concealed, the conspicuous uses of this drug have become a
standard of social status. The lowest classes aspire, first of all, to
earn the means of _visibly_ possessing it. When they have risen so far,
they may be said to have a foot on the first rung of the Ladder of
Success. Thence, they are urged, instructed, exhorted, by advertisement,
editorial, numberless methods of herd pressure, to progress upward. It
is neither uncommon nor unworthy to mortgage a farm or keep it bare of
such luxuries as furniture and books, in order to purchase a more showy
form of the drug: one whose effects are swifter and whose price is
higher.
Like all drugs, this one has estimable virtues. Its effect is great on
the motility of man, when used in moderation. It is a synthetic product.
It is not found in a state of nature, but must be concocted; although,
of course, from natural ingredients both mineral and vegetable. I do not
know how man first came to put it together. Probably his love of new
combinations led him. I doubt whether the incentive to increase our
mobility on earth was there at the beginning. (The thing, by the way,
was invented in Europe; and in Europe, largely still, it is controlled
within the limits of good use.) But America soon transformed it from a
delicate ornament to the mastering instrument it is today. It increases
man’s power to move things, and to move himself. It increases his power
to see things. It opens up to him stretches of the world he might
elsewise never reach: communities of action and intercourse with other
men whom he might elsewise not come near enough to work with.
This virtue of the drug is a positive contribution. It makes it not
unworthy to be placed in man’s esteem beside other concoctions long
known and loved. Alcoholic drinks, for instance, with their heat-making,
cheer-making, fat-making, nerve-relaxing power: tobacco, which is a
subtle sedative to mind and stimulant to nerve: coffee and tea which
cheat fatigue: opium, morphine, cocaine, ether, by means of which men
and women are helped across the crises of the body without the drain of
too great suffering.
The drug’s most typical and most desired effect is the sense of
_self-motion_. The user feels that he is “on the go.” The faith that he
is covering ground or getting somewhere (although that “somewhere” be of
no intrinsic value) is, of course, the type of morbid rationalization
common to all addicts of all poisons. The sensation of flight is the
main matter. The drug is a means of physical escape. It becomes a symbol
of psychological escape.
Now, “progress” is an American superstition whose chief feature is
movement. To progress, you’ve got to move on: you’ve got to be
perpetually passing from what _is_ to what will never, never be—since as
soon as _that_ is, it also must be passed. This superstitious tic is
potently flattered by the effects of our drug. From being a means of
motion and escape, it has grown into a symbol of progress. It began by
cajoling our nerves. It ends by cajoling our ideals.
Of course, this subtle transition from use to abuse is generic of all
vices. Far too soon, the ill annuls the good which tempted us into the
path leading to addiction. But with older narcotics, men have had time
to learn the dangers hidden in delight. They have elaborated mental and
moral mechanisms to protect them. It is deemed a “social vice” in Europe
to drink too much liquor. Men almost everywhere have become “afraid” to
employ opiates without the doctor’s sanction. Sometimes this instinct of
defense hardens into law. America, for instance, as befits a timid land,
was armored by Constitutional Amendment against the ravages of a mug of
beer, against the blight of a little glass of wine. (This may not be
known to the reader, who can verify it by consulting any lawyer.) The
instinct of self-protection is naturally strong in the small and the
weak. This makes it all the more amazing that America has developed no
defense, and no awareness of the need of defense, against the
holocaustic uses of this drug on our market.
The reason is, that we have not yet had it long enough. The lapse from
use to abuse has been too subtle and too short. And the reason is, also,
that there has been confusion between the sensory effects of the drug
and what Americans consider their ideals. The notion, for instance, of
bare movement as value—is this, indeed, a human value or is it the
delusion of a drug fiend? or the idea of utilitarian progress whereby
all present life is successively sacrificed to a never-reached tomorrow?
or the standard of measuring worth which makes man neglect himself and
give his love only to the accumulation of dead external objects? It
might well be argued that such “values” as these are the results of a
drug habit, rather than the spiritual traits of a Great Republic.
The key to the popular appeal of this narcotic is, then, an induced
sense of flight—idealized into the delusion of “progress.” The addict
becomes nervous and restless. He hungers to “progress” with his drug to
help him move; and also he aims to heighten the outward splendor of the
drug itself, so that the world may judge his “progress” in the world by
it. Battening on change, he dares not stop. He must go on moving. And
since even motion can become a constant almost as steady as rest, he
must be forever changing his pace of motion. His life must be accented
motion—ever irregularly accented. And change, from being a means,
becomes an end.
Now follow other results. Swift movement, increasing the extension of
our sight, enfeebles the intensity and quality of what we see. With the
delusion of seeing more, we see less: with the delusion of unfolding
more miles of the world, the span of living shrinks. The drug is foe to
meditation, to solitude, to careful and loving observance. It frees the
addict from resorting to himself in the crises of dullness: he need not
explore the devious trails of his soul, when so many, wider, asphalted
roads are beyond him. But meditation and leisurely observance are the
traits whereby life becomes real.
In lieu of them, we have the bare experience of passing. Moments are not
dwelt in; they are overcome. The “present” of life, no longer a treasure
to be mined, is a barrier to be vaulted. But moments and places are real
to us only in so far as we put ourselves _within_ them. Now with this
drug the converse happens: we take ourselves _away_ from moments and
from places. Moments and places grow void. Life becomes a succession of
zeros.
Within each soul there is a kindred process. The drug is a substitute
for thought and for emotion. So hallucinatory is its sensuous effect of
“progress” that the addict literally _moves out_ of his troubles. Are
troubles not matter for thinking and for feeling? And do not thought and
feeling require some rest—or at least some constant, unconscious
motion—in order to be enjoyed? This drug of ours, spelling flight,
flight from the hour and the place upon us, brings flight as well from
the problems of life that fill the place and the hour.... Remains only
motion ... only the emotion of motion.
The drug’s use is a short cut: and nothing is more dangerous and
sterile. A short cut through time, through place, through life—leads to
death! Life is swift, and the value of life is the value of every
moment. A machine, an act, a drug which makes us leap this moment is
murderous. Alas! here, too, there has been confusion between the effects
of a narcotic and what we consider our ideals. For we are proud of the
short cuts with which we clutter and sterilize our world. Newspapers,
telephones, radios, are imperious short cuts, demanding that we devote
an ever-increased portion of our days to details and surfaces of men and
matters we might well ignore. The use of this drug eliminates the ground
between the “beginning” and the “end.” But both “beginning” and “end” of
anything are abstractions, darkness, death. The _between_ is life. So
the use of the drug lessens life.