by Unknown
“Yes, yes—I remember,” answered the obliging young man; “you’d look good with a swell new wind-blown touzle.”
In the mean time the lady who was observed reading the Christian Science Monitor had taken another barber chair which had been vacated by the occupant. She held fast her Monitor as she settled back in the seat. “This time you can trim me down to—well, on account of my years, let’s call it a mannish, instead of a boyish bob.” It seemed a pity to sheer off her lovely, becoming curls, but—“There,” she exclaimed, “now no more fortunes will be spent by me for permanent waves.”
The younger woman admired and patted the whisk-broom effect bristling over her ears, chummily asking, “Would you have a hot oil shampoo, if you were me, or would you wait until I have my next marcel?” The barber hesitated, thoughtfully, before replying, “Well—for your style of coiffure I’d advise only water-waves. We have just got in a Ritzie line of water-wave comb-sets, in that big show case next to those ‘Vanity Razors.’” “Oh, razors remind me,” confidingly whispered the pretty patron, “this is the day—”
The door opened abruptly and a man and woman entered the shop. I realized that again and again I must give my turn to “Ladies First”—that no matter how long I waited I might never be “next”; that woman has taken all the so-called advantages that man once had and yet clings fast to her old time privileges as well. I realized that for some years past man has been slowly losing his place as “next”. In fact I doubt if he had ever been really “next”. This idea was probably only apparent,—a delusion like most of life.
I waited no longer, but fled from the shop. As I went away I pondered over the long steady invasion of women into what was once man’s domain and what this invasion means to both. Is not the so-called “Woman’s Awakening” taking the colour and freedom from the world? Is it not slowly and surely destroying the illusion and the romance which lure the born and the unborn alike in the prime venture of living?
SOME AMERICAN EXPATRIATES
FORD MADOX FORD
FROM APRIL 1927
Editor’s Note:—Ford Madox Ford, collaborator and biographer of Joseph Conrad, nephew of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and grandson of Ford Madox Brown, attempts in this article to explain to America why so many of its votaries of the arts are voluntary expatriates. Mr. Ford, who has recently made his tenth visit to the United States, discusses, specifically, Ernest Hemingway, whose most recent novel, The Sun Also Rises, has become a best-seller; George Antheil, the modernist composer who is now playing in concert in America; and Ezra Pound, the American champion of futurism in poetry. Mr. Ford analyzes these men as artists, as friends, and particularly as Parisian-Americans.
Sir Henry Wotton, the inconveniently witty envoy of James I, incensed his royal master by stating that an ambassador was a man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country, and I am frequently reminded of his epigram when in this country I hear—as I constantly do—comments on those fortunates or unfortunates who go to Europe in order to live whilst they paint pictures, write books, compose music or do such other things as make Europe respect the United States. For Big Business may make the United States envied, or detested, or ignored, or avoided, by Europe in general and France in particular; respect it cannot earn. It is long since France discovered that a country’s books are its best ambassadors.
But such Americans here as talk to me about the American artistic colony in Paris call them expatriates coram publico and have the air of secretly gloating over their supposed exploits with the bottle and other implements of bliss or of forgetfulness. I do not know that Mr. Ernest Hemingway’s admirable novel The Sun Also Rises or the fame of the uproars that arise when Mr. George Antheil gives a public concert have not added to or confirmed these rumours of riotous lives led in the greyer and more mouldering streets of Paris. Now, as the gentleman says in Major Barbara, there is a great deal of tosh about this and the last gentleman who leeringly interrogated me as to the habits of American-Parisian expatriates was considerably drunker than I have ever seen any of his compatriots across the water. Mr. Hemingway’s book is certainly finely alcoholic and irregular, but it is not a balanced record of life in Paris, any more than the newspaper records of crime in New York give a balanced impression of the quiet metropolitan existence that life in New York really is. And when Mr. Antheil gives a concert, representatives of the French, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Czecho-Slovak and Lithuanian jeunes—but not too jeunes—attend and throw things, emit catcalls, wave their arms and demonstrate from the galleries of the concert hall. Then the music comes to a stop and Mr. Ezra Pound arises in his place and shouts “Dogs! Canaille! Unspeakable filth of the gutter!” and French enthusiasts for the music of Mr. Antheil exclaim with tired voices: “Oh, Taisez-vous!” and “Laissez-nous écouter!” and it is all very gay and revives the demonstrations that have always attended the births of new forms of Art in Paris . . . But that does not make Mr. Antheil a riotous figure.
On the contrary, during these demonstrations, he sits at his piano on the platform and patiently grins at the footlights, waiting to go on with the Ballet Mécanique or a Symphony. And Mr. Pound is a patriot, championing American music, a very Ajax; and the rest of the Colony in their best bibs and tuckers modestly applaud the fulminant chords with a well-drilled unanimity and so the cause of American art is advanced in the most art-loving city of the world.
I select a concert of Mr. Antheil’s, rather than any other festivity of the American Latin Quarter, for adumbration because these are the most riotous social functions that I ever there attend, and because they pretty well attest my text of the moment—that there is a good deal of tosh about these Paris-American legends.
And if you think it out for yourself you will see that that must be the case. Mr. Hemingway writes extremely delicate prose—perhaps the most delicate prose that is today being written; Mr. Antheil composes music that, besides being very advanced, is of an extremely—I had almost written excruciatingly—learned nature. I know this because not only have I studied his scores with attention, but I have turned over for him whilst he played, so that I have seen and heard the exact relation of the sounding music to the written page. And Mr. Antheil’s eccentricities are of the sort that is born of knowledge; he is carrying the old music of tradition a stage further, not merely making an irresponsible row on tin canisters.
Now it is an extremely difficult thing to write delicate prose, and perhaps almost more difficult to write scholarly music that is also advanced. You as lay reader may not believe this. There is a tendency amongst members of the public to think that, if they turned their attention to it, they could easily write books as good as those of—oh, whoever is your favourite author; and that with a little attention they could write music as complicatedly beautiful as the four- or eight-part fugues of Bach. But they could not. Try it and see.
Well, you cannot write delicate and beautiful words, still less can you compose advanced and very complicated music, in what is here, I believe, called a state of hang-over. It cannot be done. Try it and see. Art—any art by which you may become famous—is a tiresome and laborious affair; if it were not, famous painters, musicians and writers would grow on every blackberry bush. They do not. Then it is mere common sense to assume that the artist is not a candidate for delirium tremens or the other things that men fear. Of course there are gentlemen who take studios for purposes of debauchery—but it is done more often in New York than in Paris. There is more money in New York. And New York is much the more amusing city—for people who have such tastes. At any rate the South Side of Paris is less amusing than New York, for it is a place of hard work and precious little money. How it may be with Montmartre I do not know; the readers of this journal probably know better than I, for I have been there only twice in the last thirty years and then did not much like it.
The South Side—the Latin Quarter, I know very intimately and have known it all my life. I studied there as a boy and li
ve there now. It is a region of professors, doctors, judges lawyers, students, some artists, some musicians, some writers and except for a notorious carrefour rendered disagreeable by foreign tourists of all nations, it is about as quiet as the British Museum. To that cross-roads the tourists of all nations go to make as near beasts of themselves as they dare, and other tourists of all nations who are less courageous go and play the rubberneck from cheap tourists’ cars, their eyes sticking out of their heads, so attractive is “vice”. But the resident American colony avoids these parages. It really does. So do I. One has to be at work at a decent hour of mornings.
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But the queer thing is that a constant warfare wages between the American colony of the North Bank and that of the Quarter—or rather, the American Colony of the Quartier de l’Etoile is constantly making raids on the Americans of the Quartier Montparnasse. Why Americans cannot let each other alone I could never understand. I do not know that my own countrymen in Paris are especially gay or attractive or interesting, but at least they never try to uplift me. But the resident Americans of Commerce, Industry, Finance and the rest are never easy but when they are trying to improve the morals of their unfortunate artistic compatriots on the South of the Seine. A little time ago they were seriously proposing—the serious proposal appeared in the local Press—to go in bands and, either by persuasion or by appeals to the police de bonnes mœurs, to make the South Side of Paris a little, if not brighter, then better, than they found it.
There is no end to these activities. The other day I was applied to furnish a character for Mr. Antheil—not of course by Mr. Antheil himself, but by an American organization. Now I do not know Mr. Antheil, so very well as all that—but if there were anything against his morals I should know, for though Paris is not as much of a whispering gallery as New York, it can do its bit in that way too. So I replied in words to that effect, adding that whenever I had been in his company on social occasions his conversations and behaviour had been of the most impeccable and that his music was wholly admirable. (I may make the note that the other day in Chicago I heard M. Darius Milhaud speak complimentarily of Mr. Antheil’s music, and if you know anything at all about French composers, you will know what that means.)
Now my “character” of Mr. Antheil was quite sufficient to secure for him the travelling scholarship or whatever it was that the American Organization desired to bestow on him. It was more than sufficient. But what happened? This: An ornament of sorts of the commercial resident American Colony, occupying some sort of minor official position, took it upon himself to write to that American Organization imploring them as they value the purity of America’s daughters and the spotless folds of Old Glory—imploring them not to honour Mr. Antheil. And why?. . . . Because Mr. Antheil was a friend of Mr. Pound!. . . . Now I ask you!
As I have said, I do not know Mr. Antheil very well. But I meet him in drawing rooms where he would not be admitted if there were anything against him. That is enough for me and for any sensible human being. But Mr. Pound I know very well indeed—as well as it is possible for one man to know another. And I will vouch for it that no more sober, honest, industrious and wholly virtuous American is to be found on this, or the other side of the Atlantic. To know him is to know that—and to know him is an honour. That that minor American official does not know that, is due to the fact that Mr. Pound does not suffer fools gladly. That is perhaps a fault.
But I think the United States ought to do something to stop that sort of imbecility, which renders it ridiculous in foreign eyes. The American artistic colony of Paris—and, heaven knows, of New York too—do a great deal to dignify the United States in the eyes of the world. Let the testimony of myself, a foreigner, bear witness to that. Then the non-artistic part of the United States should at least let them alone. The reason why large numbers of American artists live in Europe is almost entirely economic. They are very badly paid; they can live in Paris for almost nothing. There is no conspiracy against the United States, or even against hundred per cent Americanism. They are hundred per centers all right. They make me tired with it most times. And that any obscure and ignorant minor official commercially occupied, should have the power to interfere with the destinies of an artist whom the rest of the world considers to adorn this country . . . well, it makes the whole of Paris and the Russians and Czecho-Slovakians and Lithuanians and Spaniards and the Ruthenians and the Wallachians and Armenians, cackle.
I don’t know exactly what is to be done about it—except that Americans should read the poems of Mr. Pound and see that the works of Mr. Antheil are performed often and with applause. That is bound to come some day. It would be well if it came soon—for that would really be the New World redressing the balance of the Old.
BLAZING PUBLICITY
WALTER LIPPMANN
FROM SEPTEMBER 1927
The publicity machine will have become mechanically perfect when anyone anywhere can see and hear anything that is going on anywhere else in the world.
We are still a good long way from that goal, and the time has not yet come when the man in quest of privacy will have to wear insulated rubber clothing to protect himself against perfect visibility. That is something for posterity to worry about. It may even be that when men have lived for a few more generations in the modern apartment house they will have become so habituated to sharing their neighbors’ joys, their neighbors’ sorrows, their neighbors’ jazz and the odours of their neighbors’ cooking, that the race will no longer have any prejudices in favor of privacy. They may enjoy living in glass houses.
We can see this promised land, but we shall not enter it. Yet we have made great progress in a somewhat different direction. We can transmit sound over great distances. We can transmit photographs. We can make moving pictures. We can make moving pictures that talk. Tomorrow we shall have television. The day after tomorrow we shall have a combination of the radio telephone and television. These inventions combined with the facilities of the great news gathering organizations have created an engine of publicity such as the world has never known before. But this engine has an important peculiarity. It does not flood the world with light. On the contrary it is like the beam of a powerful lantern which plays somewhat capriciously upon the course of events, throwing now this and now that into brilliant relief, leaving the rest in comparative darkness. The really important experiments with the modern publicity machine have been made since the war. During the war itself the machinery was not yet sufficiently developed, and the censorship was too active, to allow more than a few trials of its possibilities. The war, therefore, was never reported to the people at home as we now understand reporting. The non-combatants never knew the war as they have since had an opportunity to know the precise behavior of Judd Gray when he testified in the Snyder case. The epoch-making events in the experimental stage of our modern publicity machine have been, if I remember correctly, the visit of the Prince of Wales, the death of Rudolph Valentino, the channel swimming of Gertrude Ederle et al, the amours of “Peaches” Browning, the Hall-Mills case, the Dempsey-Tunney fight, the Snyder case and the reception to Lindbergh. These events have really been reported, in the modern sense of the word.
No one can say we have not been neutral in our choice of the subjects on which we have cast the full brightness of the publicity machine. It is after all a mechanical device. It does not have and could not have an automatic governor to regulate its use according to accepted standards, or any standards, of good taste and good policy. The machine can no more be made so as to regulate itself in a civilized fashion than an automobile can be made which will refuse to run if there is a drunken driver at the wheel. Our publicity machine will illuminate whatever we point it at. If we point it at the “Peaches” Browning affair, it will ruthlessly and efficiently flood the consciousness of men with swinishness. Point it at Lindbergh and it will transfigure the mundane world with young beauty and unsullied faith.
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The machine itself is without morals or taste of any kind, without prejudice or purpose, without conviction or ulterior motive. It is guided by men. More specifically it is guided by newspaper men. They are the watchers who scan the horizon constantly looking for the event which may become the next nine days’ wonder. They set the special writers and the batteries of photographers hurrying to the scene of action. If their judgment has been good, that is to say if they have picked a sensation which the public finds fascinating, the lead is taken up by the auxiliary services, the moving picture people, the managers of the chains of broadcasting stations, and the Mayor’s committee on the reception of distinguished visitors. In the providing of these sensations many are offered and few are chosen. The public interest works somewhat mysteriously, and those of us who serve it as scouts or otherwise have no very clear conception as to just what will go down and what won’t. We know that the best sensations involve some mystery, as well as love and death, but in fact we work on intuitions and by trial and error. We know that sensations have to be timed properly for the public cannot concentrate on two sensations at the same time. It is no use trying to tell the public about the Mississippi flood when Ruth Snyder is on the witness stand. These excitements have to be taken in series with a certain interval of quiet during which public attention can relax and refresh itself for the next exertion. The opening of the Hall-Mills prosecution had to be delayed two weeks, I believe, until the front pages could be cleared of the clutter of news about a subway strike. Chamberlain and Levine, for example, flew too soon after Lindbergh, even if they had been as charming and had had fewer relatives, to arouse the interest which their exploit would otherwise have justified.