never like to turn a customer away. So they have evolved a
curious positive and negative for the same sentence. Why the
slangmakers hit on bananas has not been discovered. It might as
well have been any other commodity. But the phrase means that
one having asked for bananas in a fruit shop where there are
none, the anxious proprietor, seeking to be ingratiating and
not desiring to displease, answers: ‘Yes; we have no bananas.’
Thereupon he may seek to sell a cabbage or a bunch of beets
instead, since most fruit shops in New York are vegetable
establishments as well.
The phrase is a tribute to the optimism of the newly arrived
immigrant; to his earnest fight to master the language of his
temporary country, and so, somehow, is supposed to take on the
American characteristic of “getting there,” even though by way
of an affirmative in a negative sentence.
It is, I believe, a generation at least since the English began to say
“Yes I don’t think.” And they talk about the cable having brought the
two countries closer together. O God! O Montreal!
AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF THE SONGS WRITTEN BY IRVING BERLIN
When I Lost You
When I Leave the World Behind
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning
(From _Yip-Yip-Yap-hank_)
Everybody’s Doing It
I Want to Go Back to Michigan
Ragtime Violin
When That Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam’
Mysterious Rag
Yiddle, On Your Fiddle
My Wife’s Gone to the Country
That Mesmerizing Mendelssohn Tune
Kiss Me
Call Me Up Some Rainy Afternoon
Grizzly Bear
I Want to Be in Dixie
Keep Away from the Fellow Who Owns an Automobile
International Rag
In My Harem
Snooky-Ookums
Somebody’s Coming to My House
You’ve Got Your Mother’s Big Blue Eyes
Araby
My Bird of Paradise
This Is the Life
They’re on Their Way to Mexico
He’s a Devil in His Own Home Town
He’s a Rag-picker
Along Came Ruth
Sadie Salome, Go Home
Wild Cherry
Next to Your Mother Who Do You Love
Sweet Italian Love
Piano Man
When I’m Alone I’m Lonesome
Ragtime Soldier Boy
Goody - Goody - Goody - Goody - Good
Pullman Porters on Parade
At the Devil’s Ball
Old Maids’ Ball
San Francisco Bound
If You Don’t Want Me, Why Do You Hang Around
Down in Chattanooga
When It’s Night Time Down in Dixieland
If That’s Your Idea of a Wonderful Time, Take Me Home
{ The Hula-Hula
{ Girl on the Magazine Cover
{ I Love a Piano
{ The Ragtime Melodrama
{ When I Get Back to the U. S. A.
(From Stop! Look! and Listen!)
I’m Gonna Pin My Medal on the Girl I Left Behind
Settle Down in a One-Horse Town
(From Watch Your Step)
Mandy
(From Ziegfeld Follies)
A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody
(From Ziegfeld Follies)
Some One Else May Be There While I’m Gone
My Sweetie
Good-bye, France
The Hand That Rocked My Cradle Rules My Heart
I’ve Got My Captain Working for Me Now
You’d Be Surprised
If I’d Have My Way
(I’d Be a Farmer)
Nobody Knows and Nobody Seems to Care
I Never Knew
Homesick
All by Myself
Some Sunny Day
When You Walked Out
MUSIC BOX REVUE, 1922:
Say It With Music
Everybody Step
MUSIC BOX REVUE, 1923:
Lady of the Evening
Crinoline Days
Pack Up Your Sins
GOOD-BYE TO DEAR OLD ALASKA
By John Murray Anderson and Irving Cæsar
The scene it is Alaska and beneath the setting sun
We see a brave young miner toiling there.
He’s thinking of the home folks and when his day’s work is done,
To a humble little shack he doth repair.
He’s dreaming of the happy days
When he was but a boy,
The places he frequented long ago;
On memories’ wings he flies again to his dear mother’s knee.
’Tis then we hear him whisper soft and low.
REFRAIN
Good-bye to dear old Alaska.
I’m going across the sea,
Back to the dear old home land,
My country, the land of the free.
I can picture a love nest at twilight
Where the old folks for me sit and pine,
So good-bye, Alaska, for I’m going home
To that old-fashioned mother of mine.
Once again the scene is changed, he’s on a special train
And lands down at the Battery safe and sound.
He wends his way on Broadway and on every side again
The old familiar faces can be found.
He lingers but a moment as he passes City Hall,
And there he hears the national anthem sung,
And just to prove he’s Yankee, aye, Yankee through and through,
He sings the chorus in his native tongue.
--Sung by Jack Hazzard in “The Greenwich Village
Follies,” with dissolving views by Walter Hoban.
HEAVEN WILL PROTECT THE WORKING GIRL
Words by Edgar Smith. Music by A. Baldwin Sloane. Copyright, 1909, by
Charles K. Harris. British copyright secured.
A village maid was leaving home, with tears her eyes were wet.
Her mother dear was standing near the spot;
She says to her: “Neuralgia dear, I hope you won’t forget
That I’m the only mother you have got.
The city is a wicked place, as any one can see,
And cruel dangers ’round your path may hurl;
So ev’ry week you’d better send your wages back to me,
For Heaven will protect a working girl.
CHORUS
“You are going far away, but remember what I say,
When you are in the city’s giddy whirl,
From temptations, crimes, and follies, villains, taxicabs and
trolleys,
Oh! Heaven will protect the working girl.”
Her dear old mother’s words proved true, for soon the poor girl met
A man who on her ruin was intent;
He treated her respectful as those villains always do,
And she supposed he was a perfect gent.
But she found different when one night she went with him to dine
Into a table d’hôte so blithe and gay.
And he says to her: “After this we’ll have a demi-tasse!”
Then to him these brave words the girl did say:
CHORUS
“Stand back, villain; go your way! here I will no longer stay,
Although you were a marquis or an earl;
You may tempt the upper classes with your villainous demi-tasses,
But Heaven will protect the working girl.”
APPENDIX TO “THESE, TOO ...”
I cannot write about Eva Tanguay--not in the way of Aleister Crowley,
at any rate. Here are fragments from his appreciation:
Eva Tanguay! It is the name which echoed in the Universe when
the Sons of the Morning sang together and shouted for joy, and
the stars cried aloud in their courses! I have no words to
hymn her glory, nay, not if I were Shelley and Swinburne and
myself in one--I must write of her in cold prose, for any art
of mine would be but a challenge; I rather make myself passive
and still, that her divine radiance may be free to illumine the
theme. Voco! per nomen nefandum voco. Te voco! Eva veni!
Eva Tanguay is the soul of America as its most desperate
eagle-flight. Her spirit is tense and quivering, like
the violin of Paganini in its agony, or like an arrow of
Artemis--it is my soul that she hath pierced!
The American Genius is unlike all others. The “cultured”
artist, in this country, is always a mediocrity. Longfellow,
Bryant, Emerson, Washington Irving, Hawthorne, a thousand
others, all prove that thesis....
Eva Tanguay is the perfect American artist. She is alone. She
is the Unknown Goddess. She is ineffably, infinitely sublime;
she is starry chaste in her colossal corruption. In Europe
men obtain excitement through Venus, and prevent Venus from
freezing by invoking Bacchus and Ceres, as the poet bids. But
in America sex-excitement has been analyzed; we recognize it to
be merely a particular case of a general proposition, and we
proceed to find our pleasure in the wreck of the nervous system
as a whole, instead of a mere section of it. The daily rush of
New York resembles the effect of Cocaine; it is a universal
stimulation, resulting in a premature general collapse; and
Eva Tanguay is the perfect artistic expression of this. She is
Manhattan, most loved, most hated, of all cities, whose soul
is a Delirium beyond Time and Space. Wine? Brandy? Absinthe?
Bah! such mother-milk is for the babes of effete Europe; we
know better. Drunkenness is a silly partial exaltation, feeble
device of most empirical psychology; it cannot compare with
the adult, the transcendental delights of pure madness....
Why titillate one poor nerve? why not excite all together?
Leave sentiment to Teutons, passion and romance to Latins,
spirituality to Slavs; for us is cloudless, definite,
physiological pleasure!
Eva Tanguay is--exactly and scientifically--this Soul of
America. She steps upon the stage, and I come into formal
consciousness of myself in accurate detail as the world
vanishes. She absorbs me, not romantically, like a vampire,
but definitely, like an anæsthetic, soul, mind, body, with
her first gesture. She is not dressed voluptuously, as
others dress; she is like the hashish dream of a hermit
who is possessed of the devil. She cannot sing, as others
sing; or dance, as others dance. She simply keeps on
vibrating, both limbs and vocal chords without rhythm, tone,
melody, or purpose. She has the quality of Eternity; she is
metaphysical motion. She eliminates repose. She has my nerves,
sympathetically irritated, on a razor-edge which is neither
pleasure nor pain, but sublime and immedicable stimulation. I
feel as if I were poisoned by strychnine, so far as my body
goes; I jerk, I writhe, I twist, I find no ease; and I know
absolutely that no ease is possible. For my mind, I am like one
who has taken an overdose of morphine and, having absorbed the
drug in a wakeful mood, cannot sleep, although utterly tired
out. And for my soul? Oh! Oh!--Oh! “Satan prends pitié de ma
longue misère!” Other women conform to the general curve of
Nature, to the law of stimulation followed by exhaustion; and
by recuperation after rest. Not so she, the supreme abomination
of Ecstasy! She is perpetual irritation without possibility
of satisfaction, an Avatar of sex-insomnia. Solitude of the
Soul, the Worm that dieth not; ah, me! She is the Vulture
of Prometheus, and she is the Music of Mitylene. She is the
one perfect Artist in this way of Ineffable Grace which is
Damnation. Marie Lloyd in England, Yvette Guilbert in France,
are her sisters in art: but they both promise Rest in the end.
The rest of Marie Lloyd is sleep, and that of Yvette Guilbert
death; but the lovers of Eva Tanguay may neither sleep nor die.
I could kill myself at this moment for the wild love of her....
And so on--until French intervenes.
THE KRAZY KAT BALLET
Mr John Alden Carpenter has been good enough to permit me to reprint
the programme note attached to his ballet of Krazy Kat, performed
Friday, January 20, 1922, at the Town Hall, in New York, and several
times thereafter. The piano transcription of the score, decorated with
many attractive designs by Herriman, is published. The note is:
To all lovers of Mr Herriman’s ingenious and delightful
cartoons it must have seemed inevitable that sooner or later
Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse would be dragged by some composer
into music. I have tried to drag them not only into music but
on to the stage as well, by means of what I have called, for
obvious reasons, a Jazz Pantomime.
To those who have not mastered Mr Herriman’s psychology it
may be explained that Krazy Kat is the world’s greatest
optimist--Don Quixote and Parsifal rolled into one. It is
therefore possible for him to maintain constantly at white heat
a passionate affair with Ignatz Mouse, in which the gender of
each remains ever a delightful mystery. Ignatz, on the other
hand, condenses in his sexless self all the cardinal vices.
If Krazy blows beautiful bubbles, Ignatz shatters them; if
he builds castles in Spain, Ignatz is there with a brick. In
short, he is meaner than anything, and his complex is cats.
After a few introductory bars the curtain is raised and Krazy
is discovered asleep under a tree. Officer Pup passes, swinging
his club. All is well. Then comes Bill Poster, a canine
relative of Officer Pup, with his bucket and brush, and pastes
upon the wall an announcement of the grand ball which will
shortly be given for all the animals. The job finished, Bill
departs.
Krazy wakes up; he rubs his eyes and reads the exciting
poster. He is moved to try his steps; he finds his feet heavy
and numerous. Of a sudden he spies on a clothes line which
the moving scenery has brought into view, a _ballet skirt_.
Undoubtedly it is his costume for the ball. He approaches
the clothes line, first with restraint, then with eagerness.
He snatches the skirt from the line, claps it on, and comes
bounding forward in high abandon.
He is interrupted by the appearance of Old Joe Stork, drilling
by with his bundle on his back. He passes on, but he has
carelessly dropped his pack. Krazy sniffs at it, filled with
curiosity. He picks it up and carries it triumphantly to his
tree in the corner. He opens the bundle, and finds that it
contains not what you thought it would, but a vanity case,
mirror, rouge, powder-puff, lip-stick and all, complete,
including a beautiful pair of white cotton gloves.
He abandons himself to the absorbing task of make-up for the
ball. Meanwhile the moving scenery has brought into view
the house of Ignatz Mouse. The door opens, and Ignatz’ head
appears. Opportunity has knocked. The Mouse steals forward and
is about to seize an inviting brick when Officer Pup (thank
heaven!) arrives in the very nick of time and drives him from
the scene. The unsuspecting Kat, in the meantime, has completed
his make-up. He now arises, draws on his white cotton gloves,
and then by way of further preparatory exercise, he indulges in
a bit of a Spanish dance.
At its conclusion Krazy is suddenly confronted by the
_Mysterious Stranger_. The sophisticated audience will observe
that it is none other than Ignatz disguised as a catnip
merchant. Very formidable indeed! The Stranger steps briskly
forward and holds out to the ever-receptive Kat a bouquet--an
enormous bouquet of catnip. Krazy plunges his nose into the
insidious vegetable, inhales deeply to the very bottom of his
lungs, and then goes off at once into what Mr Herriman calls a
_Class A fit_. It is a fit progressive, a fit _de luxe_, the
Katnip Blues, in which the wily Ignatz joins as additional
incitement. When the frenzy has achieved its climax, the
Mouse throws off his disguise, seizes his brick, dashes it
full in the face of the Kat, and escapes. Krazy staggers back,
stunned and exhausted, but yet undaunted. There is the moment
of ecstatic recognition--Ignatz Dahlink--as he totters and
reels back to his little tree. He sinks down wearily under its
protecting boughs. The moon comes out. Krazy sleeps. Krazy
dreams. Indominatable Kat!
FURTHER NOTE ON THE FRATELLINI
The Fratellini are so ingenious and so full of surprises that it is
useless to try to keep up with them. I have seen them a dozen times
since first writing about them, sometimes three times in a week with
a still growing delight. Some of the stunts demand to be mentioned.
There is one as good as the photographer--it is based on the idea that
a saxophone player who cannot play the saxophone, is engaged because
he has a starving family; another, concealed in a box, does the actual
playing in the test before the manager of the house. The complications
can easily be guessed; but it is impossible to guess the combination of
delicacy and uproariousness with which they are rendered. At the end of
this act Alberto, the grotesque with the square painted windows over
his eyes, hides in a sack and you have one of the everlasting sources
of children’s humour carried to its supreme conclusion. Still another
stunt is a dancing act, first as a burlesque of ballet, and then as
a straight tango, with Francesco as a rather wicked old dowager in a
green dress, and Alberto with complete facial make-up, but otherwise
extremely chic, dancing exquisitely. Finally, I mention another
entrance, superior to the one described in the text. Francesco, very
much the English gentleman, arrives on the scene, followed by his two
servants, Paulo and Alberto, the former with a ludicrous exaggeration
of the Englishman’s travelling rug, the latter with a wicker hamper
of unimaginable proportions. As these two stagger after their master
he tries to get out, as if he had come into the wrong place. Finally
he addresses himself to an attendant, at the same time ordering his
servants to drop their impedimenta. Before these two have time to light
cigarettes, Francesco is off again, they must lift the huge burdens
and follow him; again he orders them to discharge and enters into
conversation; and this goes on until it works itself into a fury, the
master always walking in one direction while the servants are so far
behind him that they are walking in the opposite one. The human basis
of the event, the skill with which it is done, and the intensity of
it, are combined to make a miracle. At the end Alberto is so exhausted
that he sees visions and begins to fight a duel with his own shadow; he
leaps back, guards, and finally falls upon it and beats it to death.
It may not be inappropriate to mention here the name of another clown
also appearing, although not regularly, at the Medrano. He is one of
the three Oréas, the other two being quite exceptional acrobats on
the trapeze. The clown Oréas does not create as the Fratellini do; he
parodies acrobatics and uses an amazingly physical adaptability for
immense fun. To be sure he falls off and on the bars; but he is also
capable of mounting a ladder in a series of march steps, and of missing
the support, as he swings from the bar, sliding round it with his arm
on the upright, and slipping down on his bottom, in a movement of
great grace. His little trick of taking a glass full of beer out of his
pocket at the end of each tumble is not new, but he does it extremely
well, and he has the sense of gait as well as the sense of costume and
impression.
THE CINEMA NOVEL
It begins to look as if we will have to find a new explanation for the
French. Since that would be difficult, I suggest that we hold fast to
the old one, with variations. Let us continue to say that they are
moribund and explain any outburst of activity as a death struggle.
The last gasp. History provides plenty of precedent, and we who find
pleasant things in their art and letters will rank ourselves with those
cultivated persons who cannot begin to care for Latin until it becomes
a highly corrupt language.
I do not know whether seeing new opportunities and developing them
quickly are the best signs of degeneracy, for I seem to remember
reading about these things in the advertisements, where nothing as
irrevocable as degeneracy is permitted. The adaptability of the moving
picture scenario to something besides moving pictures was a thing
easy to guess; the thing has been done in both America and England in
burlesque of the films--an adaptation requiring and receiving very
little intelligence.
It may be slightly beside the point, but it is interesting to note that
the cinema influence in literature in France is almost exactly opposite
to what it is here. There it seems to make for brevity, hardness,
clarity, brilliance. You will find it in the extraordinary stories of
Paul Morand and Louis Aragon; and you will find in neither of these
those characteristic sloppinesses which American authors are beginning
to blame on the movies. If they would take the trouble of studying the
pictures, instead of trying to make money out of them, and discover the
elements in the cinema technique which are capable of making their own
work fruitful, we might have better novels, and we certainly would have
a few less bad pictures.
Two Frenchmen have, at the same time, used the scenario as a method of
fiction, and each of them has written a highly ironic piece which is
capable of being transferred to the film, but which reads sufficiently
well to be considered as an end in itself.
Blaise Cendrars, poet, responsible for the _Anthologie Nègre_, is the
author of _La Fin du Monde_ and of _La Perle Fièvreuse_; the second of
these is running as a serial in a Belgian magazine, _Signaux_. Both
are called Novels; the third instalment of _The Pearl_ adding the word
cinematographic. _The End of the World_ is a cosmic cinema-novel in
fifty-five swift, concisely told scenes.
It deals with a sort of deity, resident on a planet accessible to all
the mechanical comforts of this earth, who is induced to travel to Mars
as a propagandist for his own religion. Like many propagandists he errs
in his psychology and, in a Billy Sunday frenzy of the imagination,
shows the Martians all the cruelties his religion is capable of. Too
late he learns that “the Martians are disillusioned and confirmed
pacifists, iodophages living on the peptonic vapours of human blood,
but incapable of bearing the sight of the least cruelty.” The mission
failing, he decides to make good on certain prophecies uttered in his
name. The following scenes are left a little in the air; continuity
is lacking. One begins again with the sculptured angel on Notre Dame
blowing a blast on her trumpet and the whole world rushing towards
Paris and crumbling into dust. Thereafter, with the aid of retarded and
accelerated projection, we see the world slowly dissolving into its
elements, through those stages so graphically presented to us by H. G.
Wells. There is chaos, and then annihilation.
And then, by an accident in the projection room, the film begins to
reverse and so, naturally, one gropes upward out of the slime and
returns to the first scene--to which is added the single phrase “It’s
bankruptcy.” It opens with the deity “at his American (roll-top) desk.
He hastily signs innumerable letters. He is in his shirt sleeves with
a green eye-shade on his forehead. He rises, lights a big cigar, looks
at his watch, strides nervously up and down the room.... He makes notes
on his pad and blows away the ash which falls from his cigar between
the leaves. Suddenly he snatches the telephone and begins to ’phone
furiously....”
That is American movie technique which M Cendrars has evidently learned
all too well, because he uses it, in all its tedious detail, in _La
Perle Fièvreuse_, for which he is publishing not a scenario but a
director’s script, with the cutbacks and visions and close-ups all
numbered and marked. It is in the manner of the old Biograph movies
with what may turn out to be not such innocent fun at the expense of
the detective film. Among its characters are Max Trick, director of
Trick’s Criminal Courier, the great daily which specializes in criminal
news. He is marked “Type: le President Taft” and is first shown in
his office with twenty-five telephones in front of him; among his
collaborators are Nick Carter and Arsène Lupin, Conan Doyle and Maurice
Leblanc.
What Jules Romains has accomplished is much more remarkable, for he has
pushed the method of the cinema forward a long and significant step,
and, while using everything it can give, he has produced a first class
work of fiction. The plot of _Donogoo-Tonka_ you will see at once, is
entirely suitable to filming; it is not perhaps suitable to commercial
success, but that can be, if it isn’t, another matter.
It begins in Paris with the unfortunate Lamendin, who is about to
commit suicide. A friend gives him a card with the legend: “Before
committing suicide ... don’t fail to read the other side,” and on the
reverse is the advertisement of Professor Miguel Rufisque, director
of the Institute of Biometric Psychotherapy, who guarantees to give
you, within seven days, a violent love of life. Lamendin goes to the
consulting room and after a fantastic examination is given certain
instructions which eventually land him in the library of Prof. Yves
Trouhadec, a geographer. Trouhadec would be certain of election to the
Geographic Institute if he hadn’t, many years before, placed on a map
of South America the wholly imaginary town of Donogoo-Tonka, in the
gold-mining area. Lamendin now proposes to float a company, start an
expedition, and insure the Professor’s election by actually creating
the place.
In the second reel Donogoo-Tonka is launched; in the third we have
adventurers in all parts of the world preparing to rush the gold
fields, while Lamendin tarries at home making fake moving pictures of
the place. At the end of the reel the adventurers have penetrated into
the heart of the South American desert and, too wearied to go forward,
aware of the deception practised upon them, encamp where they are.
Derisively they call the place Donogoo-Tonka.