The Crack-Up
Page 14
She was desperately adaptable’, desperately sweet-natured.
Her face was heart-shaped, an impression added to by honey-colored pointed-back hair which accentuated the two lovely rounds of her temples.
She was a key-board all resonant and gleaming.
He smoothed down her plain brown hair, knowing for the thousandth time that she had none of the world’s dark magic for him, and that he couldn’t live without her for six consecutive hours.
Her childish beauty was wistful and sad about being so rich and sixteen.
Much as the railroad kings of the pioneer West sent their waitress sweethearts to convents in order to prepare them for their high destinies.
Basil’s heart went bobbing around the ballroom in a pink silk dress.
H
DESCRIPTIONS OF HUMANITY (PHYSICAL)
They rode through those five years in an open car with the sun on their foreheads and their hair flying. They waved to people they knew, but seldom stopped to ask a direction or check on the fuel, for every morning there was a gorgeous new horizon and it was blissfully certain that they would find each other there at twilight. They missed collisions by inches, wavered on the edge of precipices, and skidded across tracks to the sound of the warning bell. Their friends tired of waiting for the smash and grew to accept them as sempiternal, forever new as Michael’s last idea or the gloss on Amanda’s hair. One could almost name the day when the car began to splutter and slow up; the moment found them sitting in a Sea Food place on the water-front in Washington; Michael was opening his letters, his long legs thrust way under the table to make a footstool for Amanda’s little slippers. It was only May but they were already bright brown and glowing. Their clothes were few and sort of pink in general effect like the winter cruise advertisements.
The uni-cellular child effect—short dress.
Cordell Hull—Donald Duck eyes?
His hair was grey at thirty-five, but people said the usual things—that it made him handsomer and all that, and he never thought much about it, even though early grey hair didn’t run in his family.
When Jill died at last, resentful and bewildered to the end, Cass Erskine closed up his house, cancelled his contracts and took a boat around the world as far as Constantinople—no further because he and Jill had once been to Greece and the Mediterranean was heavy with memories of her. He turned back, loitered in the Pacific Isles and came home with a dread of the years before him.
Attractive people are always getting into cars in a hurry or standing still and statuesque, or out of sight.
* * * *’s expression, as if he could hardly wait till you did something else funny—even when I was ordering soup.
His mannerisms were all girls’ mannerisms, rather gentle considerations got from [—] girls, or restrained and made masculine, a trait that, far from being effeminate, gave him a sort of Olympian stature that, in its all-kindness and consideration, was masculine and feminine alike.
Captain Saltonville—the left part of his hair flying.
For better or worse, the awkward age has become shorter, and this youth seemed to have escaped it altogether. His tone was neither flip nor bashful when he said:
Ernest—until we began trying to walk over each other with cleats.
His features were well-formed against the flat canvas of his face.
Dr. X’s story about the Emperor of the World.
Big fingers catching lisps from unintended notes. Arms crowded against his sides.
Max Eastman—like all people with a swaying walk, he seemed to have some secret.
Romanticism is really a childish throwback horror of being alone at the top—which is the real horror.
Photographed through gauze.
Women read a couple of books and see a few pictures because they haven’t got anything else to do, and then they say they’re finer in grain than you are, and to prove it they take the bit in their teeth and tear off for a fare-you-well— just about as sensitive as a fire horse.
Pretty girl with dandruff in Rome.
A long humorous pimply chin.
A panama hat, under which burned fierce, undefeated Southern eyes.
His heart made a dizzy tour of his chest.
A gleam of patent Argentine hair.
A lady whose lips, in continual process of masking buck teeth, gave her a deceptively pleasant expression.
He was a tall, even a high young man.
His old clothes with their faint smell of old clothes.
The boy’s defence of his mother’s innocence in the Lausanne Palace Bar. His mother sleeping with the son of the Consul.
Single way of imitating: distend nostrils, wave his head from side to side and talk through his nose.
Francis’ excitability, nerves, eyes, against calm atmosphere.
They went to sleep easily on other people’s pain.
The air seemed to have distributed the applejack to all the rusty and unused corners of his body.
His long, lanky body, his little lost soul in the universe, sat there on the bathroom window seat.
The young man with a sub-Cro-Magnon visage.
She did not plan; she merely let herself go, and the overwhelming life in her did the rest. It is only when youth is gone and experience has given us a sort of cheap courage that most of us realize how simple such things are.
The oily drug store sweat that glistens on battle and struggle in films.
He swelled out the muscles of his forehead but the perfect muscles of his legs and arms rested always quiescent, tranquil.
Her dress wrapped around her like a wrinkled towel unnecessarily exposing her bottom.
Always seems to be one deaf person in every room I’m in now.
Receiving line—girls pirouette, men shifting from one foot to the other. Very gracious man shaking hands like crawl.
The continual “don’t remember” of amateur singers is annoying.
Small black eyes buttoned to her face.
* * * * * * * *,* bound as Gulliver, vomiting on treadmill, etc., 1932.
Gus first learned to laugh, not because he had any sense of humor, but because he had learned it was fun to laugh— think of other types in society—as a girl learns it’s pretty.
Deep belly-laughs of H. L. M.
He was not the frock-coated and impressive type of millionaire which has become so frequent since the war. He was rather the 1910 model—a sort of cross between Henry VIII and “our Mr. Jones will be in Minneapolis on Friday.”
He was one of those unfortunate people who are always constrained to atone for their initial aggressiveness by presently yielding a more important point.
A white handsome face aghast—imprisoned eyes that had been left out and stepped on and a mouth [—] at the outrage.
She held her teeth in the front of her mouth as if on the point of spitting them delicately out.
Harlot in glasses.
South—aviation caps, southern journalism, men’s faces.
Glass fowl eyes.
A hand-serrated blue vein climbing the ridges of the knuckles and continuing in small tributaries along the fingers.
Girls pushed by their arm in movies.
Thornton Wilder glasses in the rosy light.
He was dressed in a tight and dusty readymade suit which evidently expected to take flight at a moment’s notice, for it was secured to his body by a line of six preposterous buttons.
There were supernumerary buttons upon the coat-sleeves, also, and Amanthis could not resist a glance to determine whether or not more buttons ran up the side of his trouser leg.
Rather like a beachcomber who had wandered accidentally out of a movie of the South Seas.
The good-looking, pimply young man with eyes of a bright marbly blue who was asleep on a dunnage bag a few feet away was her husband—
Fat women at vaudeville or the movies repeating the stale wisecracks aloud and roaring at them.
The steam heat brings out Aquilla’s bouquet.
There was no hint of dissipation in his long warm cheeks.
She carried a sceptre and wore a crown made by the local costumer, but due to the cold air the crown had undergone a peculiar chemical change and faded to an inconspicuous roan.
Those terrible sinister figures of Edison, of Ford and Firestone—in the rotogravures.
Round sweet smiling mouth like the edge of a great pie plate.
She took an alarming photograph in which she looked rather like a marmoset.
The bulbs, save for two, were dimmed to a pale glow; the faces of the passengers as they composed themselves for slumber were almost universally yellow-tired.
He saw that they made a design, the faces profile upon profile, the heads blond and dark, turning toward Mr. Scofield, the erect yet vaguely lounging bodies, never tense but ever ready under the flannels and the soft angora wool sweaters, the hands placed on other shoulders, as if to bring each one into the solid freemasonry of the group. Then suddenly, as though a group of models posing for a sculptor were being dismissed, the composition broke and they all moved toward the door.
His restless body, which never spared itself in sport or danger, was destined to give him one last proud gallop at the end.
He had leaned upon its glacial bosom like a trusting child, feeling a queer sort of delight in the diamonds that cut hard into his cheek. He had carried his essential boyishness of attitude in a milieu somewhat less stable than gangdom and infinitely less conscientious about taking care of its own.
Aquilla’s brother—a colored boy who had some time ago replaced a far-wandering houseman, but had never quite acquired a name of his own in the household.
Her buck teeth always made her look mildly, shyly pleasant.
Then, much as a postwar young man might consult the George Washington Condensed Business Course, he sat at his desk and slowly began to turn the pages of Bound to Rise.
So poor they could never even name their children after themselves but always after some rich current patron.
The chin wabbling like a made-over chin, in which the paraffin had run—it was a face that both expressed and inspired disgust.
Men mouthed cigars grotesquely.
A handsome girl with a dirty neck and furtive eyes.
As an incorrigible masturbator, he was usually in a state of disgust with life. It came through, however, etc.
For the first time a dim appreciation of the problems which Dr. Hines was called upon to face brought a dim, sympathetic sweat to his temples.
The ones who could probably drive looked as if they couldn’t type; the ones who looked as if they could type looked as if they couldn’t drive with any safety—and the overwhelming majority of both these classes looked as though, even if they liked children, the child might not respond.
“The German Prince is the horse-faced man with white eyes. This one—” He took a passenger list from his pocket, “—is either Mr. George Ives, or Mr. Jubal Early Robbins and valet, or Mr. Joseph Widdle with Mrs. Widdle and six children.”
A young man with one of those fresh red complexions ribbed with white streaks, as though he had been slapped on a cold day.
Family like the last candies left in dish.
She was so thin that she was no longer a girl, scarcely a human being—so she had to be treated like a grande dame.
His face over his collar was like a Columbia salmon that had flopped halfway out of a can.
A thin young man walking in a blue coat that was like a pipe.
Run like an old athlete.
She reminds me of a turned dress by Molyneux.
They look like brother and sister, don’t they? Except that her hair is yellow with a little red in it and his is yellow with a little green in it.
He sat so low in the car that his bullet head was like a machine gun between the propellers of a plane.
I
IDEAS
Play in which revolutionist in big scene—“Kill me,” etc.— displays all bourgeois talents hitherto emphasized, paralyzes them with his superiority, and then shoots them.
Lois and the bear hiding in the Yellowstone.
For Play.
Personal charm.
Elsa Maxwell.
Bert.
Hotels.
Pasts—great maturity of characters.
Children—their sex and incomprehension of others.
Serious work and worker involved. No more patience with idlers unless about them.
Helpmate: Man running for Congress gets hurt in line of other duty and while he’s unconscious his wife, on bad advice, plans to run in his stead. She makes a fool of herself. He saves her face.
Family breaks up. It leaves mark on three children, two of whom ruin themselves keeping a family together and a third who doesn’t.
A young woman bill collector undertakes to collect a ruined man’s debts. They prove to be moral as well as financial.
* * * * * * * * running away from it all and finding that new ménage is just the same.
Widely separated family inherit a house and have to live there together.
Fairy who fell for wax dummy.
Three people caught in triangle by desperation. Don’t resolve it geographically, so it is crystallized and they have to go on indefinitely living that way.
Andrew Fulton, a facile character who can do anything, is married to a girl who can’t express herself. She has a growing jealousy of his talents. The night of her musical show for the Junior League comes and is a great failure. He takes hold and saves the piece and can’t understand why she hates him for it. She has interested a dealer secretly in her pictures (or designs or sculptures) and plans to make an independent living. But the dealer has only been sold on one specimen. When he sees the rest he shakes his head. Andrew in a few minutes turns out something in putty and the dealer perks up and says, “That’s what we want.” She is furious.
A Funeral: His own ashes kept blowing in his eyes. Everything was over by six and nothing remained but a small man to mark the spot. There were no flowers requested or proffered. The corpse stirred faintly during the evening but otherwise the scene was one of utter quietude.
Story of a man trying to live down his crazy past and encountering it everywhere.
A tree, finding water, pierces roof and solves a mystery.
Father teaches son to gamble on fixed machine; later the son unconsciously loses his girl on it.
A criminal confesses his crime methods to a reformer, who uses them that same night.
Girl and giraffe.
Marionettes during dinner party meeting and kissing.
Play opens with man run over.
Play about a whole lot of old people—terrible things happen to them and they don’t really care.
The man who killed the idea of tanks in England—his after life.
Play: The Office—an orgy after hours during the boom.
A bat chase. Some desperate young people apply for jobs at Camp, knowing nothing about wood lore but pretending, each one.
The Tyrant Who Had To Let His Family Have Their Way For One Day.
The Dancer Who Found She Could Fly.
There was once a moving picture magnate who was shipwrecked on a desert island with nothing but two dozen cans of film.
Angered by a hundred rejection slips, he wrote an extraordinarily good story and sold it privately to twenty different magazines. Within a single fortnight it was thrust twenty times upon the public. The headstone was contributed by the Authors’ League.
Driving over the rooftops on a bet.
Girl whose ear is so sensitive she can hear radio. Man gets her out of insane asylum to use her.
Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, befor
e the clear product emerges.
A man hates to be a prince, goes to Hollywood and has to play nothing but princes. Or a general—the same.
Girl marries a dissipated man and keeps him in healthy seclusion. She meanwhile grows restless and raises hell on the side.
J
JINGLES AND SONGS
ONE SOUTHERN GIRL
Lolling down on the edge of time
Where the flower months fade as the days move over,
Days that are long like lazy rhyme,
Nights that are pale with the moon and the clover,
Summer there is a dream of summer
Rich with dusks for a lover’s food—
Who is the harlequin, who is the mummer,
You or time or the multitude?
Still does your hair’s gold light the ground
And dazzle the blind till their old ghosts rise?
Then, all you care to find being found,
Are you yet kind to their hungry eyes?
Part of a song, a remembered glory—
Say there’s one rose that lives and might
Whisper the fragments of our story:
Kisses, a lazy street—and night.
FOR A LONG ILLNESS
Where did we store the summer of our love?
Come here and help me find it.
Search as I may there is no trove,
Only a dusty last year’s calendar.
Without your breath in my ear,
Your light in my eye to blind it,
I cannot see in the dark.
Oh, tender
Was your touch in spring, your barefoot voice—
In August we should find graver music and rejoice.
A long Provence of time we saw
For the end—to march together
Through the white dust.
The wines are raw—
Still that we will drink
In the groves by the old walls in the old weather.
Two who were hurt in the first dawn
Of battle; first to be whole again (let’s think)
If the wars grow faint, sweep over. . .
Come, we will rest in the shade of the Invalides, the lawn