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

by Unknown

  To distinguish what is modern in recent literature from what is not modern requires only a little reflection. Thus, Anatole France, however delightful an author, is not modern; he is a contemporary ancient, a sort of Lucian brought up to date. Marcel Proust, on the other hand, is decidedly modern; his sensitiveness and his acute, though somewhat limited, understanding of character, are things to which we can find no parallel in antiquity. D. H. Lawrence is partly extremely modern, partly atavistic, in the manner of Stravinsky. As a poet, Thomas Hardy, in spite of his age, is a great deal more modern than, shall we say, Jean Cocteau. It would be easy, but tedious, to multiply such examples. They would all point to the same conclusion: not all that is fashionable is modern. Let us not, therefore, abuse a very useful and significant word by applying it indiscriminately to everything that happens to be contemporary.

  POEMS

  LANGSTON HUGHES

  FROM SEPTEMBER 1925

  Langston Hughes’ poem, The Weary Blues, was awarded the first prize in the contest for Negro writers recently instituted by Opportunity. The judges were John Farrar, Witter Bynner, James Weldon Johnson, and Clement Wood. In January 1926, Alfred A. Knopf will publish a book of his verse. . . . The work of this poet is informed with a sensitivity and a nostalgia, racial in origin, for beauty, color, and warmth. His subjects are extraordinarily diversified. A lyric simplicity marks his sea pieces; his cabaret verses dance to the rhythm of Negro jazz; now he mourns for the hurt of the black man; again he celebrates the splendor of the women of Mexico or the savage beauty of the [inhabitants] of the African coast.

  Although still a very young man, Langston Hughes has crowded more adventure into his life than most of us will experience. Born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Mo., he has lived in Mexico, Topeka, Kansas, Colorado Springs, Charlestown, Indiana, Lincoln, Illinois, Cleveland, Ohio, New York City, Staten Island, Pittsburgh, the West Coast of Africa, Holland, Paris, Desenzano, on Lago di Garda, Verona, Venice, and Genoa. His occupations have been as various as his peregrinations. He has acted as paper boy, hotel porter, soda-fountain boy, waiter, cook, errand boy at a florist’s, sailor, farmhand, advertising solicitor, pantry-man in an oyster house, book agent, and even as a beach-comber!

  —CARL VAN VECHTEN

  CABARET (FROM “THE CRISIS”)

  Does a jazz-band ever sob?

  They say a jazz-band’s gay;

  Yet, as the vulgar dancers whirled,

  And the wan night wore away,

  One said she heard the jazz-band sob—

  When the little dawn was grey.

  TO MIDNIGHT NAN AT LEROY’S

  Strut and wiggle.

  Shameless gal.

  Wouldn’t no good fellow

  Be your pal?

  Here dat music . . .

  Jungle night.

  Here dat music . . .

  And the moon was white.

  Sing your Blues song,

  Pretty baby.

  You want lovin’

  And you don’t mean maybe.

  Strut and wiggle,

  Shameless Nan,

  Wouldn’t no good fellow

  Be your Man?

  FANTASY IN PURPLE

  Beat the drums of tragedy for me.

  Beat the drums of tragedy and death,

  And let the choir sing a stormy song

  To drown the rattle of my dying breath.

  Beat the drums of tragedy for me,

  And let the white violins whir thin and slow,

  But blow one blaring trumpet note of sun

  To go with me to the darkness where I go.

  SUICIDE’S NOTE

  The calm,

  Cool face of the river

  Asked me for a kiss.

  THE EDUCATION OF HARPO MARX

  ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

  FROM MARCH 1926

  Nightly now in the performance of The Cocoanuts at the Lyric Theatre—a Broadway playhouse built years ago by Reginald DeKoven but given over this season to the jauntier tunes of Irving Berlin—there comes a moment when a mute and ineffably comic clown stops his antics, cuddles up in a pool of light to a great, golden harp and plays it with a caressing stroke that is all his own. Nightly the hilarious audience, of which you would have sworn that each member would rather die then and there than listen to anyone play anything pays him the tribute of an abrupt and breathless hush. Even the commuters forget all about that 11.25 for Mamaroneck and when his turn is done, the applause is an avalanche.

  His name is Marx—either Adolph or Arthur according to the date of the record you consult. But this fascinating question is of purely academic interest. For he lost both names somewhere in the shuffle of the two-a-day. There he and his brothers were celebrated for many years before Broadway graciously discovered them, and, in its infuriatingly parochial way, proceeded to assume either that they had just gone on the stage or, more plausibly had been in confinement somewhere for a generation.

  So now in the program of the Lyric, as well as in the croquet world (where he might be described as ambitious but no more than adequate) and also in the weekly shambles of the Thanatopsis Pleasure and Inside Straight Club [the regularly scheduled poker game organized by the members of the Algonquin Round Table], Arthur Marx is known only as Harpo.

  • • •

  With the patiently educated musicians who shudder at his technique, I have the greatest sympathy. It is, indeed, one of the more annoying phenomena of the American theatre that a man should become known from coast to coast by the name of an instrument which, properly speaking, he cannot play at all. Like Berlin, whose Remember he has been twanging sweetly every night, he is musically illiterate. Professors of the harp assure me with tears in their eyes that his heresies in fingering are so deplorable that it would be too late now even to begin teaching him a correct attack upon the inscrutable strings. Why, say the professors, this zany even tunes his harp in a fashion so preposterous that if a really good harpist should try to pluck a melody from his strings, the result would not only be painful. It would not even be recognizable. Smouldering at the recurrent statements that he cannot play the harp at all, Harpo appears at least to have fixed his own so that no one else can play it.

  Early in life he suffered from similar disparagement of his musicianship. When he was a youngster living in a third avenue tenement, he was afflicted by the fact that whereas his older brother, Chicco, had been taught to play the piano expertly he himself could play only two tunes. These were Love Me and the World is Mine and Waltz Me Around Again, Willie, and whereas he played them with great spirit and no little feeling, listeners affected after a time to find his performances monotonous.

  Fortunately, there was at that time a striking resemblance between these two of the brothers, so striking, in fact, that the mild, innocent Harpo had his hair pulled on several occasions by enraged women who explained later that they had mistaken him for the devastating Chicco. But the likeness had its conveniences as well. Whenever one of the nickelodeons with which the town was beginning to break out in a rash, would advertise for a pianist to tinkle pleasantly during the Biograph, Chicco would apply for the job, dazzle the management with his wealth of melodies and agree to go on duty that night at six. Not once did the guileless management detect the fraud when, at six, Harpo would come around and go to work. After a time when he would persist in accompanying the custard pie battles with Love Me and the World is Mine and would firmly attend the burning of a great factory in Peoria with Waltz Me Around Again, Willie, a puzzled manager used to always throw him out. But after all a week’s pay is a week’s pay.

  His subsequent turning to the harp can be traced to the fact that there was one which stood always in the corner of their house when he was growing up. It had been his grandmother’s in Germany. The grandfather who died in Chicago at the age of 101 was for many years a wandering magician jour
neying from one Hanoverian town to another in a wagon which was big enough not only for his bag of tricks but for his children, his wife and her harp.

  When the old man and his tribe came to America, the daughter went to work in a lace factory but the memory of those barnstorming days in Germany clung to her and the notion that her family were show folks persisted even into the period when she was a mother of five boys, no one of which betrayed the slightest inclination to go on the stage. Her inner determination that they should do so whether they wanted to or not was only whetted by the triumphs of her brother who, not content with being known as the fastest pant presser south of Rivington Street, had forsaken trade for art and was doing well in vaudeville. The more ancient among the patrons of the two-a-day will remember the Manhattan Comedy Four of which he was a prankful member and many more will recall the insidious ditty entitled Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean with which this land was cursed a few years ago. Well, that Mr. Shean was the Marxes’ Uncle Al.

  • • •

  When Mrs. Marx grimly made a vaudeville act out of her own struggling offspring, her instinct for the difficulties of the game called Pigs-in-Clover made her discreet enough to employ only two of the boys at first. There seemed to be no place for Harpo who led a dissipated existence as bellhop at the Hotel Seville, where his only connection with his seven arts lay in his not particularly remunerative contract to take Cissie Loftus’s dog for an airing in Gramercy Park every day.

  The thought of him left behind when the act should go on tour proved too much for the ample heart in the bosom of that combined mother and manager, Minnie Marx. At the last moment, she appeared dramatically on the steps of the Seville, flung him into a cab, rushed him to Coney Island where the act was booked for the week and fairly pushed him onto the stage. As there had been no preparation, he had nothing to do and, like the House of Peers throughout the war, he did it very well. It has been ten years since he has spoken a word on the stage (except one New Year’s Eve when he grew garrulous and spoke two) and now there is no one who can say more with no words at all except a fellow named Chaplin. He’s a good comedian, too.

  The history of the Marx Brothers in the vaudeville halls of the South and the Middle West is an exhilarating chapter in the story of American vagabondage. For years they were billed as The Four Marx Brothers except on the rare occasions when they would be joined by an aunt or two. Then they would appear in the program as The Six Nightingales or The Five Tomtits as the case might be. I think Mrs. Marx’s most magnificent gesture was her rising to the crisis presented to her when, after the war, Gummo Marx came out of the army determined not to go back on the stage at all. Without batting an eyelash, this great lady announced (with an exaggeration amounting almost to perjury) that her fifth and last was ready to take his place.

  So her set is still unbroken in The Cocoanuts but eighteen years had to slip by before her dream came true. She had always dreamed that she should see “The Four Marx Brothers” picked out in lamps on the Broadway night. It was not until the Spring of 1924, however, that the workmen began to erect such a sign over the portals of the old Casino Theatre. For this occasion, Mrs. Marx felt that nothing short of a new gown would do, for she intended to sweep majestically to the proscenium box on the opening night. In anticipation, she was standing on a chair while the dressmaker fluttered about her when the chair failed basely at its not inconsiderable role and Mrs. Marx broke an ankle. Of course she attended the première just the same but it is admittedly difficult to be carried in majestically.

  The next day the New York papers admitted the Marxes to the ranks of the elect and, while whole families were rent in twain by the great debate as to whether Groucho Marx was funnier than Harpo, the latter grew pensive and decided to begin taking harp lessons after all. He went to the most celebrated Maestro in the city, found that the lessons would be $10 for each half hour, decided he could make the Thanatopsis pay for them and started in. But the Maestro, having heard him play, swore there would be no way of his unlearning all the shockingly wrong things he knew about the harp.

  “Why,” said the Maestro, “there are one or two things you do I never saw any one even attempt before.”

  Indeed there was one trick of Harpo’s with the strings that quite baffled him. Harpo showed how he did it. The Maestro practised for ten minutes and mastered it. Then there was another. Harpo showed him that one too. The Maestro used up another ten minutes.

  “Well, well,” said the professor, cheerily. “Your half hour’s up. Gracious, how the time does fly!”

  And Harpo, much impressed with the big man’s art, paid his ten dollars and went his way. It was after he got to thinking about it next day that the course began to strike him as unpromising. So he never went back.

  HELLO, BIG BOY

  An Inquiry into America’s Progress During One Hundred and Fifty Years (appearing in the magazine’s special issue on the country’s sesquicentennial)

  SHERWOOD ANDERSON

  FROM JULY 1926

  Nations are like people. It takes a long, long time for one of them to grow up. Most people, I am sure, never get beyond about twelve years of age. No one gets very old or very wise. The great problem is to get intellectually and emotionally beyond twelve, well, just a bit beyond twelve.

  Thank Heavens we in America have begun to hear less and less of the good old days, and of the spotless virtue and wisdom of the makers of America. In Abraham Lincoln’s day you had to breathe softly when you spoke of “The Fathers”. Certain men, being ambitious, managed to get up a row between the American colonies and Mother England. For a long time our historians had to be very careful in speaking of all that period. Such a sacred lot of men, doing such a sacred thing. Everyone noble and grand—doing noble, grand things—out-nobling all the rest of mankind. It makes your bones ache to think of it. Nowadays anyway we can be a bit more careless and human when we speak of the early days of the Big Boy, America. It is being done. First-rate histories are now being written about the whole affair.

  • • •

  We are finding out something of truth about the Adamses, the Jeffersons, the Madisons and the rest. I think we respect them none the less but they get a bit nearer our own level. That’s a help. We are what we are and we aren’t so bad. No need to twist the British Lion’s tail any more. The Irish vote doesn’t cut the figure it did. When you quit being afraid you can be more gentle, more human. America is far and away the strongest and richest nation in the world now. If we can learn to be gentle without being too patronizing we’ll be O. K. A hundred and fifty years since we pulled that little party on King George—well, well. How the time passes. If we hadn’t pulled it how many grand titles we might have had over here by now. Think of it—Sir Charles of Kalamazoo, Count Albany, Duke Schenectady, Viscount Reno, Lord Pittsburgh and Wheeling. It makes your mouth water to think of it. Thinking of it almost makes a royalist of a man. Do you know I have several friends who think there should be a royalist party in America. And it isn’t a bad idea. I like a parade myself. If we only had a Pretender I believe I’d get in line. Well, we got started, running our own house and, of course, we had to go on. There was another little scrap with Mama England later but we were lucky to get out of that as well as we did. She came near slapping us good—that time. What we got out of it was the beginning of the reign of the people.

  There was one Andrew Jackson who fought a battle in New Orleans after the war was all over and no battle needed—and won it too. It was about the only thing we did win, that time.

  It made Jackson, made the common man politically conscious. When Jackson went in, the old Eastern and Southern crowd, who had been running things, were in a bad way.

  It’s rather dangerous business this talking all the time about what a wonderful fellow the common man is. He may believe it.

  After the second war with England we got a trial of the common man in power. That ended in Lincoln. A lucky ending. No nati
on ever gets a poet in power more than once.

  • • •

  But I am not trying to write, even briefly, of the political history of America during these hundred and fifty years. I am trying to think where we have got in another way. After all being politically-minded may be but a sign of immaturity.