Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair

by Unknown

  If you choose that can stand as the last moment in a completed piece of art. We are sentimental enough to wish to add the tag that after a few minutes Carpentier came out to the center of the ring and shook hands with Dempsey and at that moment he smiled again the same smile which we had seen at the beginning of the fight when he stood with his hands above his head. Nor is it altogether sentimental. We feel that one of the elements of tragedy lies in the fact that Fate gets nothing but the victories and the championships. Gesture and glamour remain with Man. No infighting can take that away from him. Jack Dempsey won fairly and squarely. He is a great fighter, perhaps the most efficient the world has ever known, but everybody came away from the arena talking about Carpentier. He wasn’t very efficient. The experts say he fought an ill considered fight and should not have forced it. In using such a plan, they say, he might have lasted the whole twelve rounds. That was not the idea. As somebody has said “Better four rounds of—” but we can’t remember the rest of the quotation.

  Dempsey won and Carpentier got all the glory. Perhaps we will have to enlarge our conception of tragedy, for that too is tragic. Surely here, if anywhere, was a protagonist striving bravely against a fate “too strong, too clever, too relentless for the sons of men!”

  MEMOIRS OF COURT FAVOURITES

  NOËL COWARD

  FROM NOVEMBER 1921

  MADCAP MOLL (THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF BIOGRAPHY)

  Nobody who knew George I could help loving him—he possessed that peculiar charm of manner which had the effect of subjugating all who came near him into immediate slavery. Madcap Moll, his true love, his one love, adored him with such devotion as falls to the lot of few men, be they kings or beggars.

  They met first in the New Forest, where Moll spent her wild, unfettered childhood. She was ever an undisciplined creature, snapping her shapely fingers at bad weather, and riding for preference without a saddle—as hoydenish a girl as one could encounter on a day’s march. Her auburn ringlets, ablow in the autumn wind, her cheeks whipped to a flush by the breeze’s caress, and her eyes sparkling and brimful of mischief and roguery! This, then, was the picture that must have met the King’s gaze as he rode with a few trusty friends through the forest for his annual week of otter shooting. Upon seeing him, Moll gave a merry laugh and crying, “Chase me, Laddie”, in provocative tones, she rode swiftly away on her pony. Many of the courtiers trembled at such a daring exhibition of lèse majesté, but the King, provoked only by her winning smile, set off in hot pursuit. Eventually he caught his roguish quarry seated by the banks of a sunlit pool. The King cast an appraising glance at her shapely figure and tethered his horse.

  “Are you a creature of the woods?” he said.

  Madcap Moll tossed her curls. “Ask me!” she cried derisively.

  “I am asking you”, replied the King.

  “’Odd’s fudge—you have spindleshanks!” cried Madcap Moll irrelevantly. The King was charmed. He leaned toward her.

  “One kiss, mistress!” he implored. At that she slapped his cheek good naturedly. He was captivated.

  “I faith, my daring girl!” he cried delightedly. “Knowst that I am George the First?” said the King, rising.

  Madcap Moll blanched.

  “Sire”, she murmured, “I did not know—a poor unwitting country lass—have mercy!”

  The King touched her lightly on the nape.

  “Arise”, he said gently, “you are as loyal and spirited a girl as one could meet. Hast a liking for Court?”

  “Oh, sire!” answered the girl.

  Thus did the King meet her who was soon to mean everything in his life—and more.

  MAGGIE MCWHISTLE (THE SCOTCH SCHOOL OF BIOGRAPHY)

  Born in an obscure Scotch manse of Jacobite parents, Maggie McWhistle will go down to immortality as perhaps the greatest heroine of Scottish history.

  And perhaps not.

  What did Maggie know of the part she was to play in the history of her country? Nothing. She lived through her girlhood, unheeding; she helped her mother with the baps and her father with the haggis; and occasionally she would be given a new plaidie.

  A word must be said of her parents. Her father was known all along Deeside as Handsome Jaimie—and oh, how the light-hearted village girls mourned when he turned minister; he was high, high above them. Of his meeting with Janey McToddle, the Pride of Bonny Deeside, and the mother of Maggie, very little is written. Some say that they met in a snowstorm on Ben Lomond, where she was tending her kine; others say that they met on the high road to Aberdeen, and that his collie Jeannie bit her collie Jock—thus cementing a friendship that was later on to ripen into more and more.

  History tells us that Maggie’s griddle cakes were famous adown the length and breadth of Aberdeen, and that gradually a little path came to be worn between the manse and the kirk, seven miles away, where Maggie’s feet so often trod on their way to their devotions. She was an intensely religious child.

  One dark night, so the story runs, there came a hammering on her door. Maggie leapt out of her truckle, and, wrapping her plaidie round her—for she was a modest girl, she ran to the window.

  “Wha is there?” she cried in Scotch.

  The answer came back through the darkness, thrilling her to the marrow.

  “Bonnie Prince Charlie!”

  Maggie gave a cry and, running downstairs, opened the door and let him in. She looked at him by the light of her homely candle. His brow was amuck with sweat; he was trembling in every limb.

  “I am pursued”, he said, hoarse with exertion and weariness. “Hide me, bonnie lassie, hide me”.

  Quick as thought, Maggie hid him behind a pile of cold griddle cakes, and not a moment too soon, for there came a fresh hammering at the door. Maggie opened it defiantly and never flinched at the sight of so many men.

  “We want Bonnie Prince Charlie”, said the leader of the crew in Scotch.

  Then came Maggie’s well known answer, also in Scotch.

  “Know you not that this is a manse?”

  History has it that the men fell back as though struck dumb, and one by one awed by the still purity of the white-faced girl, the legions departed into the night. Thus Maggie McWhistle proved herself the saviour of Bonnie Prince Charlie for the first time.

  There were many occasions after that in which she was able to save and hide him. She would conceal him up a tree or in an oven at the slightest provocation. Soon there were no trees for miles around in which she had not hidden him at some period or other.

  Poor Maggie—perchance she is finding in Heaven the peaceful rest which was so lacking in her life on earth. For legend hath it that she never had two consecutive nights’ sleep for fifteen years, so busy was she in saving and hiding her Bonnie Prince Charlie.

  LA BIBI (THE FRENCH SCHOOL OF BIOGRAPHY)

  Hortense Poissons—“La Bibi” the dancer. What memories that name conjures up! The incomparable—the lightsome—the effervescent! Her life, a rose-coloured smear across the history of France; her smile—tier upon tier of sparkling teeth; her heart, that delicate organ for which kings fought in the streets—but enough. Let us trace her to her obscure parentage. You all know the Place de la Concorde—she was not born there. You have all visited the Champs Elysées—she was not born there. And there’s probably no one who doesn’t know of the Faubourg St. Honoré—but she was not born there. Sufficient to say that she was born. Her mother, poor, honest, gauche, was an unpretentious seamstress; she seamed and seamed until her death in 1682 or 1683. Bibi at the age of ten, flung upon the world homeless, motherless, with nothing but her amazing beauty to save her from starvation—or worse. Who can blame her for what she did—who can question or condemn her motives? She was alone. Then Armand Brochet (who shall be nameless) came into her life. What should she do? Refuse the roof he offered her? This waif (later on to be the glory of France) was a leaf blown hither and th
ither by the winds of Destiny. What was she to do?

  Enough that she did it.

  Paris, a city of seething vice and corruption—her home, the place wherein she danced her first catoucha, that catoucha which was so soon to be followed by her famous Peruvian minuet. Voltaire wrote many books, but he didn’t mention her; Jean Jacques Rousseau never so much as referred to her; even Molière was so reticent about her charms that no single word about her can be found in any of his works.

  Her life with Armand Brochet—three years before she stepped on the boards—how well we all know it. Her first appearance on the stage was in Paris, 1690, at the Opera when this airy, fairy thing danced her way into the hearts of the multitudes. Oh, Bibi—“Bibi, Coeur d’Or”, as she was called so frequently by her adorers—would that in these mundane days you could revisit us with your girlish laugh and supple dancing form! Look at the portrait of her, painted by Coddlé, at the height of her amazing beauty; note the sensitive nostrils, the delicate little mouth, the graceful neck and shoulders, and those eyes—the gayest, merriest eyes that ever charmed a king’s heart.

  In November, 1701, she introduced her world-famed Bavarian fandango, which literally took Paris by storm—it was in her dressing room afterward that she made her celebrated bon mot to Maria Pipello, her only rival. Maria came ostensibly to congratulate her on her success but really to insult her. “Ma petite”, she said, “l’hibou, est-il sur le haie?” Quick as thought Bibi turned round and replied with a gay toss of her curls, “Non, mais j’ai la plume de ma tante.”

  Oh, witty, sharp-tongued Bibi!

  A word must be said of the glorious ballets she originated which charmed France for nearly thirty years. They were, “The Life of a Raindrop” and “Angels Visiting a Ruined Monastery at Night”. People flocked to the Opera again and again in order to see them and applaud their ravishing originator. Then came her meeting with the King in his private box. We are told she curtsied low and glancing up at him coyly from between her bent knees, gave forth her world-renowned epigram, “Comment ça va, papa?” Louis was charmed by this exquisite exhibition of drollery, and three weeks later she was brought to Versailles.

  La Belle Bibi was certainly not one to miss opportunities, and only one month later she found herself installed at Court—the King’s right hand. Then began that amazing reign of hers—short lived, but oh, how triumphant. Dukes, duchesses, countesses, even princes paying homage at the feet of La Bibi, the dancer, now Hortense, Duchesse de Mal-Moulle. Did she abuse her power? Some say she did, some say she didn’t. Every afternoon, Louis was wont to visit her apartments; together they would pore over the plans and campaigns of war drawn up and submitted by his generals. Then, when Louis was weary, Bibi would put the maps in the drawer, draw his head on to her breast and sing to him songs of her youth. Meanwhile, intrigue was placing its evil fingers upon the strings of her fate. Lampoons were launched against her, pasquinades were written of her. When she went driving, fruits and vegetables were hurled at her.

  Absinthe was her one consolation. Her gay humour remained with her to the end. As she lay on her death-bed she uttered the supreme bon mot of her brilliant life. Stretching out her wasted arm to the nearly empty absinthe bottle by her bed, she made a slightly resentful mouth at the physician and murmured, “Encore!”

  Oh brave, witty Bibi!

  Note: These biographical sketches of famous court beauties are abbreviated versions of a series of essays shortly to be published for Mr. Coward by Christopher’s in London under the title of A Withered Nosegay. Those familiar with the large and beautifully bound—oh, always beautifully bound, and emblazoned in gold with coronets and what-nots—memoirs, inevitably to be found in the libraries of our best non-reading families, will appreciate the justice of Mr. Coward’s little parodies.

  JAMES JOYCE

  DJUNA BARNES

  FROM MARCH 1922

  There are men in Dublin who will tell you that out of Ireland a great voice has gone; and there are a few women, lost to youth, who will add: “One night he was singing and the next he wasn’t, and there’s been no silence the like of it!” For the singing voice of James Joyce, author of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and of Ulysses is said to have been second to none.

  The thought that Joyce was once a singer may not come as a revelation to the casual reader of his books; one must perhaps have spent one of those strangely aloof evenings with him, or have read passages of his Ulysses, as it appeared in The Little Review to have realized the singing quality of his words. For tradition has it that a singer must have a touch of bravado, a joyous putting forth of first the right leg and then the left, and a sigh or two this side of the cloister, and Joyce has none of these.

  I had read Dubliners over my coffee during the war, I had been on one or two theatrical committees just long enough to suggest the production of Exiles, his one play. The Portrait had been consumed, turning from one elbow to the other, but it was not until I came upon his last work that I sensed the singer. Lines like: “So stood they both awhile in wan hope sorrowing one with other” or “Thither the extremely large wains bring foison of the fields, spherical potatoes and iridescent kale and onions, pearls of the earth, and red, green, yellow, brown, russet, sweet, big bitter ripe pomillated apples and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes,” or still better the singing humour in that delicious execution scene in which the “learned prelate knelt in a most Christian spirit in a pool of rainwater.”

  Yes, then I realized Joyce must indeed have begun life as a singer, and a very tender singer, and—because no voice can hold out over the brutalities of life without breaking—he turned to quill and paper, for so he could arrange, in the necessary silence, the abundant inadequacies of life, as a laying out of jewels—jewels with a will to decay.

  Yet of Joyce, the man, one has heard very little. I had seen a photograph of him, the collar up about the narrow throat, the beard, heavier in those days, descending into the abyss of the hidden bosom. I had been told that he was going blind, and we in America learned from Ezra Pound that “Joyce is the only man on the continent who continues to produce, in spite of poverty and sickness, working from eight to sixteen hours a day.”

  I had heard that for a number of years Joyce taught English in a school in Trieste, and this is almost all of his habits, of his likes and his dislikes, nothing, unless one dared come to some conclusion about them from the number of facts hidden under an equal number of improbabilities in his teeming Ulysses.

  And then, one day, I came to Paris. Sitting in the café of the Deux Magots, that faces the little church of St. Germain des Près, I saw approaching, out of the fog and damp, a tall man, with head slightly lifted and slightly turned, giving to the wind an orderly distemper of red and black hair, which descended sharply into a scant wedge on an out-thrust chin.

  He wore a blue grey coat, too young it seemed, partly because he had thrust its gathers behind him, partly because the belt which circled it, lay two full inches above the hips.

  At the moment of seeing him, a remark made to me by a mystic flashed through my mind “A man who has been more crucified on his sensibilities than any writer of our age,” and I said to myself—“this is a strange way to recognize a man I never laid my eyes on.”

  Because he had heard of the suppression of The Little Review on account of Ulysses and of the subsequent trial, he sat down opposite me, who was familiar with the whole story, ordering a white wine. He began to talk at once. “The pity is,” he said, seeming to choose his words for their age rather than their aptness, “the public will demand and find a moral in my book—or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.”

  For a moment there was silence. His hands, peculiarly limp in the introductory shake and peculiarly pulpy, running into a thickness that the base gave no hint of, lay, one on the stem of the
glass, the other, forgotten, palm out, on the most delightful waistcoat it has ever been my happiness to see. Purple with alternate doe and dog heads. The does, tiny starlet tongues hanging out over blond lower lips, downed in a light wool, and the dogs no more ferocious or on the scent than any good animal who adheres to his master through the seven cycles of change.

  He saw my admiration and he smiled. “Made by the hand of my grandmother for the first hunt of the season” and there was another silence in which he arranged and lit a cigar.

  “All great talkers,” he said softly, “have spoken in the language of Sterne, Swift or the Restoration. Even Oscar Wilde. He studied the Restoration through a microscope in the morning and repeated it through a telescope in the evening.”

  “And in Ulysses?” I asked.

  “They are all there, the great talkers” he answered, “them and the things they forgot. In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying does, to what you Freudians call the subconscious,—but as for psychoanalysis” he broke off, “it’s neither more nor less than blackmail.”

  He raised his eyes. There is something unfocused in them,—the same paleness seen in plants long hidden from the sun,—and sometimes a little jeer that goes with a lift and rounding of the upper lip.

  People say of him that he looks both sad and tired. He does look sad and he does look tired, but it is the sadness of a man who has procured some medieval permission to sorrow out of time and in no place; the weariness of one self-subjected to the creation of an over abundance in the limited.

  If I were asked what seemed to be the most characteristic pose of James Joyce I should say that of the head; turned farther away than disgust and not so far as death, for the turn of displeasure is not so complete, yet the only thing at all like it, is the look in the throat of a stricken animal. After this I should add—think of him as a heavy man yet thin, drinking a thin cool wine with lips almost hidden in his high narrow head, or smoking the eternal cigar, held slightly above shoulder level, and never moved until consumed, the mouth brought to and taken away from it to eject the sharp jets of yellow smoke.