I like the Revolvers, handsome plausible short-barreled Revolvers
with pictures of ordinary people in dim-lit midnight bedrooms, and
ordinary expected-looking burglars climbing in windows--Revolvers
of ten shots and of six, and of different calibers, and all of them
gleamingly mystically desirable: I like the Soaps, smooth amorous
appetizing Soaps, some in luxurious Paris packets, and others
spread out in blue water and rosy foam, splashed in by athletic
Archimedesque young men and fat creamy babies and slim beautiful
ladies--Mary Garden Soap of pungent delicious scent, tar Soap for the
long lovely hair of girls, austere Ivory Soap--It floats: I like the
Rubber Heels of resilient charm so tellingly pictured and described
that at once I desire them beneath my spirit-heels--springy and
solid and thick and firm: I like the Tooth-pastes and Tooth-powders
and Tooth-lotions in tubes and tins and bottles, each bearing
beneficent messages to the human white teeth of this world--one
unfailing kind coming lyrically out like a ribbon and lying flat
on the brush: I like the foods--of miraculous spotless purity and
enticement--Biscuits and Chocolate and Figs, and _Foie-gras_ in
thick glossy little pots, so richly pictured and sung that merely
to let my thoughts graze in their pasturage fattens my Heart: I
like the men’s very thin Watches, and men’s Garters--no metal can
touch you--, and men’s fluffy-lathered shaving sticks, and men’s
trim smart flawless tailored Suits, in none of which I have use or
interest until I find them in the Back of a magazine--where at once
they grow charming and romantic: I like the jars and boxes and tubes
and glasses of Cold Cream, Cold Cream fit for skins of goddesses, fit
for elves to feed on--a soft satiny scented snow-white elysium of
wax and vaseline and almond paste, pictured in forty alluring shapes
till it feels pleasantly ecstatic just to be living in the same world
with bewitching vases of Cold Cream, Cold Cream, Cold Cream--always
bewitching and lovely but never so notably and festively as in the
Back of a magazine: and I like the Pencils: and Book-cases: and
Silver: and Jewels: and Glass: and Gloves: and Shoes--beautiful
Shoes: and Fountain-pens: and Leather things: and Paint--silkish
salubrious Paints, house-Paints, and the panegyrics with them--they
make me long to own a spirit-house and paint it liberally: and Rugs:
and Varnish: and Clothes--wonderful Clothes: and Bungalows: and
Phonographs--his master’s voice: and Paper--fine-wrought Paper to
write on--bond and linen and hand-pressed, pale-tinted--a vast virgin
treasure: and Oranges: and Cigarettes--a shilling in London a quarter
here: and Water-Bottles of powdery rubber: and Stockings--patrician
Stockings which take me into realms of silk-looms and delicate dyes
and slim ankles: and Candle-Shades: and Candle-Sticks: and countless
Cosmetics--Cosmetics of tender colors for the outer women: and
Sealingwax indescribably useless and attractive: and Tennis-Racquets:
and Ivory--smooth Vantine Ivory toys and trinkets polished softly
bright as moonlight--and their lily-worded descriptions like
restrained sonnets: and Washing Powders--let the Gold Dust twins do
your work: and Shower-baths: and Evans’ Ale: and Flying Boats: and
Umbrellas: and Cameras--if it isn’t an Eastman it isn’t a kodak: and
boxes of Candy--sweet wilderness of chocolates--their very makers’
names have a melting gust--Allegretti, Huyler, Clarence Crane,
Maillard--cloying courtiers all: and Diamond Dyes--a child can use
them: and Veranda Screens--she can look out but he can’t look in:
and Cedar Chests: and Chartreuse from Carthusian monasteries: and
Perfumes--Perfumes in their maddening-sweet pride, Perfumes from
Paris, Perfumes bottled in thick crystal, enchantingly costly--each
American dollar added to their price-by-the-ounce making them
fragranter to my thoughts: and boxes of benevolent Matches, and
captivating Brooms, and fascinating Scouring-powders--a Dutch girl
on the can chasing dirt--all three luscious tempting things in the
Back of a magazine: and Automobiles--ask the man who owns one: and
Rifles--simple and formidable and fine: and restful Rat-poison--they
die in the open air seeking water: and sacks of Flour--eventually
why not now--flour unusual and piquant in the Back of a magazine,
flour novel and endearing: and Type-writers: and Mushrooms: and
Monkey-Wrenches: and Rosaries: and Rock-salt--
the Back, the Back, the Back of a magazine--
There’s no sadness and no terror in the Back of a magazine.
And it is for Everybody, Everybody.
A million people read a story in the middle of the magazine and half
the million readily miss its point. But a single tin of Talcum Powder
in the Back--the whole million note that and miss nothing in it: it
gets to them both on and under their skin.
Some of the million read a ten-line poem in _vers libre_ in the front
of the magazine--and nine-tenths of their number are hard-put to it:
the mentalities of this human race being mostly shops shut down.
It is something pregnant and prophetic to a poet, merely musical
to a plain prose writer, arrant folly to a telephone girl, amusing
nonsense to a butcher, a comic fantasy to a milliner, a form of
insanity to a plumber, an unknown tongue to a milk-man, a kind of
sin to a Baptist minister. But to each of those a Can of Soup in the
Back of the same magazine has easily, exactly the same ox-tail-ish
meanings: it reaches them where they live.
A thousand persons agree with an article about atavism in
orang-outangs and ten thousand more quite refute it. But they all
harmoniously commit suicide with the same make of Revolver--hammer
the hammer--or get rousing drunk to the same degree with the same
brand of high-powered whiskey--Wilson, that’s all.
A countess, a courtesan and a convict-woman summarily pass over the
front and middle of the magazine as containing nothing to their
purpose. But like jungle denizens at their drinking pool the three
of them meet hostilely on the common ground of a popular Cigarette
featured in the Back--a blend to suit every taste--wherewith they
unwittingly smoke away half their generic differentiations. The
Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady anoint themselves nightly into a
state of shining invisible kinship from separated twin jars of the
same bewitching Cold Cream.
I’m not sure myself and Miss Lily Walker of the Broadway chorus
regard similarly a beauteous box of Rice Powder: she perchance would
at once dash madly into it and powder herself o’er with it, whereas
I would fain ponder about it awhile as a tiny be-violeted adventure.
But pondering or powdering, equally exciting to each of us is its
delicate pale lilac blazonment in the Back of a magazine.
The front of the magazine may mean little to you and the middle
of the magazine may mean nothing to me: the Back of it none of us
escapes.
It is for Everybody, Everybody.
Even Senegambians: they can look at the pictures and marvel over them.
I can there meet a Senegambian on the common ground of it might be a
delicate transparent oval of Pears’ Soap, pretty as a jewel of price:
perchance we would each unconsciously feel we wouldn’t be happy till
we got it.
It’s only as playthings I want the Things in the Back of a magazine.
To me they are toys, lyrics of matter, food of the senses.
The octroi would have no sympathy with my loiterings among their
wares. It is a fête of my own, indolent and fanciful, unrecognized in
commerce. Any article I may put to its forthright use in actuality
becomes an idyllic toy when I find it in the Back of a magazine.
The desirable Revolvers are not firearms with which to shoot myself
and burglars, but only bijous to have and handle and caress. The
luxuriant vervain- and violet-scented Soaps are not for my toilet,
but something to eat, for my astral body to feed on--nourishing food
they make. The lush Cold Creams have no massaging possibilities in
them--they are for my thoughts to gambol among, for my meddlesome
spirit-fingers to touch and fuss with deliciously, blissfully,
transcending all vulgar use. The men’s thin Watches mean nothing
to me as Watches: and their Garters--what’s it to me whether
no-metal-can-touch-you or no-metal-at-all? My thoughts merely revel
and juggle with them, picture and legend--they are pastimes of my
child-self. The cream-woven Note Papers are not to write on but
wherewithal to imagine how cool and smooth they would feel drawn
slowly across my flushed cheek. A sack of Flour--I feel only how
I’d like to have it spilled out--eventually-why-not-now--in a thick
warm-tinted heap on the blue-velvety floor of my room that I might
roll and bathe in it and feel it feathery-fluffy on my skin.
So I play with my toys on black-browed Wednesdays.
Some Wednesdays even fail to be black-browed because there are Backs
to magazines.
_The conscious analyst_