"Any question is quite a question. If I merely asked you how to get to
Fifth Avenue, you would be telling me, in answering, where to take my
life. I might be run over, doing it. I might get into a street fight.
Or meet a blonde. If I asked you why you've been crying so much--that
would be quite a question, too. If I were a woman, I might ask,
simply--what you wore under what, and where you bought it. The answer
to that one would describe dozens of your attitudes toward dozens of
important matters."
She didn't say anything. If she nodded, it was the smallest of her
nods. She twirled her cocktail glass, sipped the last of the amber
drink, and returned to her reading.
She wanted me to know that she didn't flirt. I expressed my
apperception by ordering lemon pie, which I didn't want, and coffee,
which I did--and further, by leaving my table and the restaurant while
my place was being cleared and my dessert brought. I went across the
hot street to the newsstand and bought _Time_ magazine--which I used to
read for information and read now to keep abreast of the Biases--and
the _Telegram_. When I came back to the bar I found the girl had also
ordered coffee--and brandy. That settled it.
"My name," I said immediately, "is Philip Wylie. I'm a writer. The
waiters will vouch for me. I live here."
The strain left her eyes and they widened slightly. "I've read lots of
things you've written! For _heaven's sake_!"
Most Americans who get around have read lots of the things I've
written. This is a great instant advantage--though often a present
handicap--in picking up strangers. They are at first agreeably
surprised; but they generally expect writers to "be like" the
characters in their books--from God alone knows what an abysmal lack of
imagination--and are therefore eventually disappointed.
Since I said nothing, she went on, "You're the author who hates women!"
There was shine in her eyes, then--challenge--amusement. Spite, too.
"Only moms," I answered. "And not 'hate'--deplore."
"And Cinderellas, too!"
"Oh, yes. I'd forgotten the Cinderellas. I deplore them, also."
"Maybe I'm one."
"A superior specimen--if true." I am semigallant.
"What made you hate women so violently? Did your mother beat you?
And why do you blame everything that goes wrong on women?" Two hard
lines showed the muscles around her teeth. "Don't you realize that for
everything you've written against women--you could say the same--and a
hundred times as much--against men?"
"Lookie," I said. "Many years ago, when I was younger and foolish, I
wrote a book about a few of the more conspicuous and lethal flaws in
our fair nation. The book was some three hundred and seventy pages
long. I devoted all but about twenty pages to the calamitous follies
of males. Men, as you call them. But I did, for some twenty pages of
light blast, violate the ironclad altar of femininity and point out
mom's big mouth and little brain, her puffed crop and shaky pins. A
few things. I hardly thought I had loaded the dice--inasmuch as half
the people are female and I gave females only about a fifteenth of my
slightly caustic attention. But ever since that book came out, almost
every woman I've met has accused me of outrageously laying the blame
for a manifestly hell-bound society on females. In the first place,
this is not true. In the second place, such statements--the hundreds
I've collected--tend to show that American women positively refuse to
take any blame for anything whatever. They have no conscience and no
sense of responsibility. They believe themselves to be as spotless as
United States senators say they are, in campaign orations. They lack
the capacity for admitting guilt. They are nearly all--I have thus
found--psychologically far, far, far more destitute than I claimed only
certain kinds of them to be."
She laughed. "You're _still_ mad! Someday you'll break down and write
a wonderful novel about the woman who really poisoned you against them
all."
"I'll break down," I agreed. "But I'll never write the novel! One
reason is--there's no such novel. Women have always been good to
me--with a few exceptions I can tolerate. Women have made love to me
and they have been generous with me, and taught me, and they have been
sensitive toward me. My daughter--who is sixteen--adores me. My first
wife tried every combination she could think of to make me happy--and
put up with me for ten years, when I was a drunkard. My second wife
has gone even further. Past ten years--for one thing. And I quit
drinking altogether, after we'd been married for a while. I--to repeat
the most readily understandable expression--adore her. And I adore my
daughter. I adore women, as a matter of fact. Such vexation as I have
shown represented an aspect of that reverence: a good many women are
fundamentally disappointing to anybody who cares much for women. And
I resent the general damage such women do. A man"--I looked at her as
loftily as I could--"has a curious faculty for resenting human sabotage
even when he is not, himself, directly involved in the matter. A woman,
as a rule, sees harm in the ruinous excursion of a nitwit only if she
sees it as a real or potential menace to herself, loved ones, and
assigns. It is a comfortingly personal outlook toward which I am hotly
antipathetic."
"You talk like your books," she said.
"Why not? I wrote the damned things!"
She poured her brandy into her coffee and drank a little.
"Men," I went on, "in this century, are deeply imbued with just that
personal, feminine attitude. They refuse to meddle with evils that do
not immediately threaten them. They have sold out their duty toward
the whole species, for local, temporal advantages. They no longer
live lives but merely cadge existences. If a guy is successful and
well fixed, the ordinary American does not and cannot see that he has
the reason or the right--let alone the need!--to take a dim view of
anything on earth." I picked up my copy of _Time_ magazine and waved
it at her. "Whenever one of my morally indignant volumes appears, this
self-righteous periodical, for instance, usually begins its reviews
by saying that I own a palatial residence in Florida, earn big money
writing commendable hack stories for the magazines, fish all the time,
and yet--blackguard!--I have the gall to gripe! The inference is that
I am a lunatic. Indeed, it has become more than an inference. This
carburetor of the news called my latest effort a 'whiff into midnight.'
Who is nearer the witching hour--the well-heeled gent who still sees
imperfections in the planet and says so or the editor who unconsciously
imagines that prosperity and criticism are incongruent? That is the
Ivy League philosophy--suitable to cover the ruins it soon will bring
about."
"You're mad at Clare Luce," the girl said.
"There you go! Personal again! See here, ma'am. A man can get as
intense feelings from statistical tables as a woman can from Sinatra's
brow wave. Vital statistics give them to me. I had such sensations
when, after the publication of the Smythe Report, I pensively ran over
the Periodic Table. Many other charts and graphs deeply affect me. I
hardly know Clare Luce. I had cocktails with her once--though. Very
attractive. Very--not bright--ardent. That's the important thing in
women, too. We disagreed about everything we discussed. But a woman
who enters the field of ideas is obliged, naturally, to follow some
man or men. Women have never left any ideas around for men or women
to follow. Clare said she follows Monseigneur Fulton Sheen--another
glitteringly ardent soul. I'm not mad at Clare Luce. In my situation I
find it impossible to be mad at anybody on earth. And it was generally
difficult for me, even before now."
"What's happened that made you change?"
"God has sent for me," I said sarcastically.
"You mean--you've been converted?"
"If I am ever converted--in the common sense--it will be the hard way:
posthumously and in the Presence. No. The change in me, what little I
have so far discovered, probably comes from atrophy. The peace and
mellowness that men mistake for wisdom--that is in fact the result of
calcium deposits, excess urea in the cells, and so on."
"You're forty!"
"And you're twenty--instead of twenty-six."
"You don't look it."
"You do. And as you well know, it's a damn good age for a woman to
look."