of Mr Lardner, too, because he is so clean in handling it now. Satire
in detail he had--there is a dictionary of it in his one word “he-ll.”
Elsewhere, in a series later than _You Know Me, Al_ he has described a
half-fatuous, half-hardheaded roughneck dragging his silly and scheming
wife and sister-in-law through the hotels and apartments of the
backwash of society, and the story grew more and more sardonic, more
and more entertaining; little of the aimless, sickly, trivial life of
the merely prosperous escaped him. Unlike Mr Dooley, his chief concerns
were private ones; it is only recently that he has touched upon public
affairs. For a long time his only “universal” was baseball--a form
of entertainment which now bores him exceedingly. He is also bored,
I gather from an interview in the New York _Globe_, with the sort of
fiction he has been writing, and amuses himself with writing plays. But
as a satirist he is turning slowly towards matters of pith, and the
question of his ultimate rank depends on this: Can he, as he broadens
out, retain the swift, destructive, and tremendously funny turn of
phrase, the hard and resistant mind, the gaiety of spirit which have
made him a humorist? Can he, in short, learn from Mr Dooley and remain
Mr Lardner? For many reasons I think he can.
Between the busher and these newspaper reports Mr Lardner has written
much; among his ephemera, even, there are many pages not to be lost. I
shall return to them after drawing a long course with Mr Dooley as my
centre, for it is one of the significant things about Mr Dooley that
you must always keep him in your eye when you are scanning the horizon
for an American satirist.
Mr Dooley was a satirist of the highest order and an excellent
humorist. The combination is interesting. Psycho-analysts may determine
at a later date that the reason he wrote in dialect was that he was
afraid to attack the American people directly; I prefer to believe that
the good sense of his creator (Finley Peter Dunne, to be sure; but
one always thinks of Martin Dooley in his independent existence) saw
that a benevolent humour was the correct medium for a satire adequate
to America. And that is America’s good fortune. Read the criticism
of American warfare and politics as developed in the satire of Mr
Dooley and compare it with the satire of French politics and warfare
as expressed in the irony of Anatole France; without measuring the
quality of the one by the other, think only that each is _adequate_
to the subject. Less than the bitterness of _Penguin Island_ and the
_Histoire contemporaine_ would not have served for France; more than
the laughter of Dooley would have been disproportionate and unmanly for
us.
Satire is like parody in admitting the integrity of the subject; it is
a pruning knife applied for the good of the tree; and irony is a dagger
with corrosive poison at the tip. Satire is proper to America because
essentially the satirist believes that life is all right, and that
only the extravagances and frailties of American life, at the moment
of writing, need correction or are subject to mockery. The Frenchman,
in a highly organized society, which he takes to be not only the best
expression of life, but life itself, turns to irony as his natural mode
when he is confronted with the ineluctable vision of its evil.
The danger is, to be sure, that our satirists remain superficial. When
the thing is done roughly, without much humour, with no rich sense of
the vastness and variety of the comic carnival, we get little more than
the eternal “wise crack”; and the wise crack is no more entertaining
in misspelled English than it is in capital letters, no more in pidgin
than in Yiddish. I do not mean that George Ade and Wallace Irwin and
Bill Nye and Montague Glass haven’t each a special quality which makes
for amusement; I do mean that they lack the great general qualities
of knowing and understanding which create humour. An illustration
will do more than any defining to make the difference clear. The
Japanese Schoolboy used to begin his letters, “To Hon. Editor” and Ring
Lardner is, I suppose, the only man in America who can begin, “Well,
friends....”
Ambrose Bierce is generally supposed to have had this quality;
certainly he had intelligence and wrote respectable English with a
cold pen. His _Dictionary_ does not impress me as the work of a spirit
naturally ironical. Ade wrote satirically a long time ago; once in
a while something occurs in the _Fables_ to justify the acclaim of
which F. P. A. is the curator. There is much more in Artemas Ward,
whose glory is kept alive, worthily, by the sardonic leader-writer
of _The Freeman_, Mr Albert Jay Nock. As language neither Ade nor
Ward approaches in interest the studies of Mark Twain in _Life on the
Mississippi_, nor those of Dooley and Lardner. The difference between
Bill Nye and Ward on one side and Montague Glass and Lardner on the
other, is that the former did not use an actually viable language or
dialect, but used distortions of English for a specific effect. (I am
far from suggesting that Ward did not use American notably, nor that
his language is the better part of his work; he was a real satirist.)
It is my guess that in the beginning the misspelled words signified
that the speaker was the hard sensible common man with none of “your”
refinements. Juvenal and Johnson may have been superior to the thing
attacked; it pleased the democratic American to pretend to be beneath
it. The literary success of the dialects is another matter, which
anyone who believes that ours is still an Anglo-Saxon country will do
well to consider. Montague Glass is particularly interesting in this
respect. He impresses me as being neither a wise nor a foolish man, but
a smart one. What gave him his vogue was his conformity with the norm
of business acuteness and his use of a highly complex private racial
idiom, which expresses a highly complex integrated almost secret racial
life; he transferred, almost transliterated it into recognizable, at
least understandable English, with such a climax as “I wish I were
dead, God forbid!” which was recognized by the populace as a part of
American life ten years before Mr Henry Ford bought the Protocols. The
racial dialect is also exploited, but not with so reliable an ear, by
Hugh Wiley in his negro stories; it is possible that the stories of
Octavus Roy Cohen are more accurate (they are not so entertaining);
but the life they represent is, in any case, too near to America to be
surprising to us.
I am convinced that nearly all of Mr Dooley and nearly all of the later
Lardner would stand without dialect. It is not an odd-looking word that
impresses most in Mr Dooley’s masterpieces about the Dreyfus case. “The
witness will confine himself to forgeries” is English as Swift would
have written it, and is neither better nor worse than, “How th’ divvle
can they perjure thimsilves if they ain’t sworn?” or
“’‘Let us proceed,’ says th’ impartial an’ fair-minded judge, ‘to
th’ thrile iv th’ haynious monsther Cap Dhry-fuss’ he says. Up jumps
Zola, an’ says he in Frinch: ‘Jackuse,’ he says, which is a hell of a
mane thing to say to anny man. An’ they thrun him out. ‘Judge’ says
th’ attorney f’r th’ difinse, ‘an’ gintlemen iv’ th’ jury’ he says.
‘Ye’re a liar,’ says th’ judge. ‘Cap, ye’re guilty, an’ ye know it,’ he
says.... ‘Let us pro-ceed to hearin’ th’ tisti-mony,’ he says.... Be
this time Zola has come back; an’ he jumps up, an’, says he, ‘Jackuse,’
he says. An’ they thrun him out.”
It is no wonder that this passage was reprinted by the New York
_Evening Post_ after the expulsion of the Socialists from Albany.
Nearly everything serious in Dooley has the same relevance, and one
reads about war experts and “disqualifying the enemy” (in relation to
the Spanish-American and Boer Wars) with a slightly dizzying sensation
that this man has said everything that needed to be said twenty years
in advance of his time. We needed him badly during the war, but a comic
song about him had somehow withdrawn his name from the rank of great
literature and we had to do with sad second-bests. There isn’t a chance
in the world that he will be forgotten, because he is recognized in
England and we shall some day reimport his reputation. For he has
the great advantage of being at the same time a humorist and a social
historian, an every-day philosopher and the _homme moyen sensuel_.
His qualities are so immediate that analyzing them appears superfluous.
He gets his effects by distortion, not by exaggeration. When he
told Mr Roosevelt to call the next edition of his book _Alone in
Cubia_ he extracted an essence from it, rather than inflated it.
His adversatives are surprising and devastating. He conceives a
Blood-is-thicker-than-Water speech in these terms (from the English to
the American): “Foolish and frivolous people, cheap but thrue-hearted
and insincere cousins.... Ye ar-re savage but inthrestin’.” Sometimes
he leaves out the “but”: “They was followed be th’ gin’rals iv th’
Fr-rinch ar-rmy, stalwart, fearless men, with coarse, disagreeable
faces.” His unexpectedness goes farther; he once said that left alone
General Shafter could have taken “Sandago” without losing an ounce.
I do not wish to write a literary essay about Mr Dooley, and having
mentioned Swift I have little to say. I must admit that the Irish of Mr
Dooley is stage-Irish; what makes it acceptable is that it is entirely
Dooley-Irish, and whatever the spelling, whatever the oddities of
words, the intonation is always right. For of course it is possible to
write a dialect without imitation of sound, and to do it effectively
and honestly. Sherwood Anderson has done it in _I Want to Know Why_ and
in _I’m a Fool_; Lardner has done it in _The Golden Honeymoon_; and
the amiable efforts of Mr John V. A. Weaver are ineffective because
in nine out of ten cases he is setting slang words, well observed and
accurately recorded, to the rhythm of literary English. Mr Dooley’s
rhythm is always that of the estimable, easy-going barkeeper who is
speaking.
One looks back with a certain envy to the time when a barkeeper could
talk about the world. Our present social situation is disjected, and
the period before the war seems incredibly calm and halcyon. It seems
to us that then America was settling into the character it had made
for itself in the Civil War, a time of consolidation and certainty.
A minor passion for social justice seems to have been the only great
force hostile to that sense of security and self-satisfaction without
which no civilization can become sophisticated and refined. It was
pre-eminently the time when a satirist could exist. Mr Dooley is the
proof that he did. He understood his America, as in his time, and
without bitterness he makes it live again.
Ten years from now, if we settle down, Mr Lardner may have another
such opportunity. For the moment he is driven to the surface; he
has no _point d’appui_ for his attack; in a bewildering and unsure
civilization, he is himself unsure. It is possible that he will become
so accustomed to shallow waters that he will never venture into deep; I
should be sorry, because he has qualities too precious to be wasted.
He is developing a strain of wild imagination, of something approaching
fantasy. And his occasional pieces of fiction are far beyond the
average of stories written in America. _The Golden Honeymoon_ (which Mr
Edward J. O’Brien had the acumen to put in his collection of the best
stories of 1922) is almost a masterpiece; it has a sort of artistic
wisdom, is without tricks, and is beautifully written. He has also
written a burlesque which failed drearily with the 49-ers and a sketch,
_The Bull Pen_, in which the busher reappeared, which was a moderate
success in the Ziegfeld Follies. This piece and _The Golden Honeymoon_
show a fresh tendency on Lardner’s part to understate; they are
actually quiet, as if he were tired of noisiness. I do not think he is
tired of anything. In an interview recently he said, “Some philosopher
once said that if you want a thing badly when you’re young you’re
likely to get too much of it before you’re old; _I hope to God he knew
what he was talking about_.” He is afraid of nothing; one fancies he
doesn’t care for too many things.
He grew weary, a little while ago, of the literary diaries published
from week to week by the highbrows, these records “of who they seen and
talked to and what they done since the last time we heard from them”
and so he wrote his own for the New York Sunday _American_. Among the
items chronicled were:
“When I got home Sousa was there and we played some Brahms and Grieg
with me at the piano and him at one end of a cornet. ‘How well you
play, Lardy,’ was Sousa’s remark. Brahms called up in the evening and
him and his wife come over and played rummy....” (This is grotesque,
but he knows his subject.) “Had breakfast with Mayor Hylan and Senator
Lodge.... Went home and played some Rubinstein on the black keys....
President Harding called up long distants to say hello. The Mrs talked
to him as I was playing with the cat.... Took a ride on the Long Island
R.R. to study human nature....” And so on. It is a little better than
verbal parody, is it not, Lardy?
Mr Lardner pretends still to feel some of the he-man’s contempt
for letters, suggesting at the same time the fat-headed pride of a
real-estate broker who has had a patriotic poem printed in the local
paper. He is, as Sherwood Anderson says, “sticking to the gang.” But he
is wise and witty and he has few compunctions about being vulgar. It is
his most precious asset. For in America the fear of vulgarity is the
beginning of deadness. Abase! (if I may quote Mr Dooley).
_A Tribute to
Florenz Ziegfeld_
A TRIBUTE TO FLORENZ ZIEGFELD
The incurable romanticist, George Jean Nathan, was the first to
speak boldly in print and establish the rule of the silver-limbed,
implacable Aphrodite in the theatre of Florenz Ziegfeld; and the
equally incurable realist, Heywood Broun, has discovered that it isn’t
so. Mr Nathan, obsessed by the idea that the world in general, and
America in particular, goes to any extreme to conceal its interest
in sex, really did a service to humanity by pointing out that there
_were_ beautiful girls in revues and that these girls constituted one
of the main reasons for the attendance of men at the performances. Mr
Broun, sensing a lack of abandon and frenzy in the modern bacchanale,
says, simply, that it isn’t so, and implies that anyone who could get
a thrill out of that--! Like the king in that story of Hans Christian
Andersen, of which Mr Broun is inordinately fond, the girls haven’t any
clothes on; and this little child, noticing the fact, is dreadfully
disappointed.
Now Mr Ziegfeld is, in the opinion of those who work for him, a genius,
and can well afford to say, “A plague on both your houses,” for he has
built up what he himself calls a national institution, glorifying, not
degrading, the American girl (_pauvre petite_). He can afford to look
with complacency upon undergraduates charging upon his theatre in the
anticipation of unholy delights, and forced to bear the clownings of
Eddie Cantor or the wise sayings of Will Rogers; then he can turn to Dr
John Roach Straton who, having heard from Mr Broun that the Follies
are chaste, approaches to see some monstrosity of a classic ballet and
hears the vast decent sensuality of a jazz number instead.
Mr Ziegfeld has lived through so much--through the period when it
was believed indecent to be undressed and through the manlier period
when nudity was contrasted with nakedness (it is the basis of a sort
of Y. M. C. A. æsthetics that the nude is always pure) and through
the long period, 1911–15, when the reviewers discovered the superior
attractiveness of the stockinged leg; art in the shape of Joseph Urban
has left a permanent mark upon him, and he has trafficked in strange
seas for numbers and devices; what was vulgar and what was delicate,
boresome and thrilling, have all passed through his hands; he has sent
genius whistling down the wind to the vaudeville stage and built up new
successes with secondary material; the storehouses are littered with
the gaudy monuments of his imitators. And all the time the secret of
his success has been staring Broadway in the face.
It is well to speak of Mr Ziegfeld’s success because in the last few
years several things have happened to the revue; for almost as long
as I remember the Ziegfeld Follies, I remember the Winter Garden
opposition, the Passing Show, its exact antithesis.[12] But lately
there have arrived at least two productions which give every guaranty
of permanence, in addition to some others which may turn out to be
equally sure of survival. I mean the Music Box Revue and the Greenwich
Village Follies. The Music Box is only in its third year; its chiefs
assets are one of the most agreeable theatres in New York, assuring a
reputation on the road, and first call on the still unsatisfied talents
of Mr Irving Berlin. The Greenwich Village Follies, even if it lose its
present director, John Murray Anderson, will continue to be successful
for one of the strangest reasons in the world--its reputation for being
“artistic.” The Winter Garden, the two Follies, and the Music Box, are
the four points of the compass in this truly magnetic field. When the
needle points due north, I usually find Mr Ziegfeld fairly snug under
the Pole Star.
There are, if you count the chorus individually, about a hundred
reasons for seeing a revue; there is only one reason for thinking
about it, and that is that at one point, and only one point, the
revue touches upon art. The revue as a production manifests the same
impatience with half measures, with boggling, with the good enough and
the nearly successful, which every great artist feels, or pretends to
feel, in regard to his own work. It shows a mania for perfection; it
aspires to be precise and definite, it corresponds to those _de luxe_
railway trains which are always exactly on time, to the millions of
spare parts that always fit, to the ease of commerce when there is a
fixed price; jazz or symphony may sound from the orchestra pit, but
underneath is the real tone of the revue, the steady, incorruptible
purr of the dynamo. And with the possible exception of architecture,
_via_ the back door of construction, the revue is the most notable
place in which this great American dislike of bungling, the real
pleasure in a thing perfectly done, apply even vaguely to the arts.
If you can bring into focus, simultaneously, a good revue and a
production of grand opera at the Metropolitan Opera House, the
superiority of the lesser art is striking. Like the revue, grand opera
is composed of elements drawn from many sources; like the revue,
success depends on the fusion of these elements into a new unit,
through the highest skill in production. And this sort of perfection
the Metropolitan not only never achieves--it is actually absolved in
advance from the necessity of attempting it. I am aware that it has the
highest-paid singers, the best orchestra, some of the best conductors,
dancers and stage hands, and the worst scenery in the world, in
addition to an exceptionally astute impresario; but the production of
these elements is so haphazard and clumsy that if any revue-producer
hit as low a level in his work, he would be stoned off Broadway. Yet
the Metropolitan is considered a great institution and complacently
permitted to run at a loss, because its material is ART.
[Illustration: THE SUN’S DWELLING. By Joseph Urban]
The same thing is true in other fields--in producing serious plays, in
writing great novels, we will stand for a second-rateness we would not
for a moment abide in the construction of a bridge or the making of an
omelette, or the production of a revue. And because in a revue the bunk
doesn’t carry, the revue is one of the few places you can go with the
assurance that the thing, however tawdry in itself, will be well done.
If it is tawdry, it is so in keeping with the taste of its patrons, and
without pretense; whereas in the major arts--no matter how magnificent
the masquerade of Art may be--the taste of a production is usually
several notches below the taste of the patrons.
The good revue pleases the eye, the ear, and the pulse; the very
good revue does this _so well that it pleases the mind_. It operates
in that equivocal zone where a thing does not have to be funny--it
need only sound funny; nor be beautiful if it can for a fleeting
moment appear beautiful. It does not have to send them away laughing
or even whistling; all it needs to do is to keep the perceptions of
the audience fully engaged all the time, and the evaporation of its
pleasures will bring the audience back again and again.
The secret I have alluded to is how to create the atmosphere of
seeming--and Mr Ziegfeld knows the secret in every detail. In brief,
he makes everything appear perfect by a consummate smoothness of
production. Undoubtedly ten or fifteen other people help in this--I use
Mr Ziegfeld’s name because in the end he is responsible for the kind of
show put out in his name and because the smoothness I refer to goes far
beyond the mechanism of the stage or skill in directing a chorus. It is
not the smoothness of a connecting rod running in oil, but of a batter
where all the ingredients are so promptly introduced and so thoroughly
integrated that in the end a man may stand up and say, This is a Show.
Everyone with a grain of sense knows that Mr Urban can make all the
sets for a production and Mr Berlin write all the music; Mr Ziegfeld
has the added grain to see that if he’s going to have a great variety
of things and people, he had better divide his _décor_ and his music
among many different talents.
There have been funnier revues and revues more pleasing to the eye and
revues with far better popular music; nowhere have all the necessary
ingredients appeared to such a high average of advantage. Mr Anderson
could barely keep Bert Savoy within the bounds of a revue; the Music
Box collapses entirely as a revue at a few dance steps by Bobby Clark.
But Ziegfeld as early as 1910 was able to throw together Harry Watson
(Young Kid Battling Dugan, nowadays, in vaudeville), Fannie Brice,
Anna Held, Bert Williams, and Lillian Lorraine and, as if to prove that
he was none the less producing a revue, bring down his curtain on a
set-piece of “Our American Colleges.” And twelve years later, with Will
Rogers and Gilda Grey and Victor Herbert and Ring Lardner, he is still
producing a revue and brings both curtains down on his chorus--once _en
masse_ and the second time undressing for the street in silhouette.