by Unknown
Similarly the learned doctor or professor is still the learned doctor or professor looked upon as such—and as superior mentally and by training to one who lacks the capacity for such a development. Similarly the manager or director of a great store or factory or hotel—or the chemist or physicist or scientist of any of the important institutions or universities of Russia. All are looked up to as being above the common worker or servant and so they will continue to be, I fear. On the contrary the working man or servant or beggar, except for the security of life, shelter and food which the new system affords them are still workers, servants, beggars, and the Communistic system does not seem to help them much. True, with native ability they can rise—but what laborer or servant or beggar anywhere today cannot do as much. But the class sense remains. I am a doctor, you are a beggar, and as such we can scarcely mingle on equal terms, can we? And communism cannot remedy that, I fear, any more than it can make a brilliant brain associate with a dull one.
On the other hand one result of all this effort has been to shake up the whole country, to generate such tremendous stores of energy in a whole people that the whole world is talking about and looking towards Russia. And much in the way of improvement is certain to come of it. Communism may not work, but if it does not some form of democracy or improved dictatorship on the part of such people as wish to better things will. Under the circumstances I am not inclined to complain but applaud. What is more I would like to see Russia as it is now, recognized and aided financially in order that this great impetus to something better may be strengthened. For here is a thinking people. And out of Russia, as out of no other country today, I feel is destined to come great things mentally as well as practically, or such is my faith at least. And with such a possibility in so troubled and needful a world as ours it is only common sense to aid it to do the best it can.
DO WOMEN CHANGE?
D. H. LAWRENCE
FROM APRIL 1929
They tell of all the things that are going to happen in the future—babies bred in bottles, all the love-nonsense cut out, women indistinguishable from men. But it seems to me bosh. We like to imagine we are something very new on the face of the earth. But don’t we flatter ourselves? Motor-cars and aeroplanes are something novel, if not something new—one could draw a distinction. But the people in them are merely people, and not many steps up, if any, from the people who went in litters or palanquins or chariots, or who walked on foot from Egypt to Jordan, in the days of Moses. Humanity seems to have an infinite capacity for remaining the same—that is, human.
Of course there are all kinds of ways of being human; but I expect almost every possible kind is alive and kicking today. There are little Cleopatras and Zenobias and Semiramises and Judiths and Ruths and even Mother Eves, today, just as there were in all the endless yesterdays. Circumstances make them little Cleopatras and little Semiramises instead of big ones, because our age goes in for quantity regardless of quality. But sophisticated people are sophisticated people, no matter whether it is Egypt or Atlantis. And sophisticated people are pretty well all alike. All that varies is the proportion of “modern” people to all the other unmodern sorts, the sophisticated to the unsophisticated. And today there is a huge majority of sophisticated people. And they are probably very little different from all the other sophisticated people of all the other civilizations, since man was man.
• • •
And women are just part of the human show. They aren’t something apart. They aren’t something new on the face of the earth, like the loganberry or artificial silk. Women are as sophisticated as men, anyhow, and they were never anything but women, and they are nothing but women today, whatever they may think of themselves. They say the modern woman is a new type. But is she? I expect, in fact I am sure, there have been lots of women like ours in the past, and if you’d been married to one of them, you wouldn’t have found her different from your present wife. Women are women. They only have phases. In Rome, in Syracuse, in Athens, in Thebes, more than two or three thousand years ago, there was the bob-haired, painted, perfumed Miss and Mrs. of today and she inspired almost exactly the feelings that our painted and perfumed Misses and Mrses. inspire in our men.
I saw a joke recently in a “modern” German weekly—a modern young man and a modern young woman were leaning on a hotel balcony at night, overlooking the sea:
HE: “See the stars sinking down over the dark, restless ocean!”
SHE: “Never mind that nonsense! My room-number is 32!—”
That is supposed to be very modern: the very modern woman. But I believe women in Capri under Tiberius said “Never mind that nonsense!” to their Roman and Campanian lovers, in just the same way. And women in Alexandria in Cleopatra’s time. Certain phases of history are “modern”. As the wheel of history goes round women become “modern”, then they become unmodern again. The Roman women of the late Empire were most decidedly “modern”—so were the women of Ptolemaic Egypt. True modern never-mind-that-nonsense women. Only the hotels were run differently.
Modernity or modernism isn’t something we’ve just invented. It’s something that comes at the end of civilizations. Just as leaves in autumn are yellow, so the women at the end of every known civilization—Roman, Greek, Egyptian, etc.—have been modern. They were smart, they were chic, they said “never mind that nonsense”, and they did pretty much as they pleased.
And then, after all, how deep does modernness go? Even in a woman? You give her a run for her money: and if you don’t give it to her, she takes it. The sign of modernness in a woman is that she says: “Oh, never mind that nonsense, boy!”—So the boy never-minds it—never-minds the stars and ocean stuff.—“My room-number is 32!”—Come to the point!
• • •
But the point, when you come to it, is a very bare little place, a very meagre little affair. It’s not much better than a full-stop. So the modern girl comes to the point brutally and repeatedly, to find that her life is a series of full-stops, then a mere series of dots. Never mind that nonsense, boy! . . . . . Then she comes to being tired of dots, and of the plain point she’s come to. The point is all too plain and too obvious.
And so the game begins again. Having never-minded it, and brought it down to brass tacks, you find brass tacks are the last thing you want to lie on.
No, women don’t change. They only go through a rather regular series of phases. They are first the slave: then the obedient helpmeet: then the respected spouse: then the noble matron: then the splendid woman and citizen: then the independent female: then the modern never-mind-it girl. And when her edict has been obeyed, the mills of God grind on, and, having nothing else to grind, they grind the never-mind-it girl down, down, down—back to—we don’t know exactly where—but probably to the slave once more, and the whole cycle starts afresh, on and on, till, in the course of a thousand years or two, we come once more to the “modern” never-mind-it girl.
And the modern never-mind-it girl of today has just come to the point where the fun leaves off. Why? For the simple reason that the modern boy doesn’t mind it. When men and women start cutting all the nonsense out of one another, there’s pretty soon nothing left. There is certainly very little left of the love business. So that when the boy begins leaving out all the stars and ocean nonsense, he begins leaving out the girl too. As the process continues, and he leaves out the moonlight and the solitude and even the occasional bouquet of flowers, the girl dwindles and dwindles in his feelings, till at last she does become a mere point in his Consciousness, next to nothing. And not until she is a blank, blank, blanketty nothing to him, emotionally (except perhaps a residual irritant) does she wake up and realize that it has happened. In urging him to cut out all the nonsense she has cut herself out, completely. For in some strange way, she herself was the very nonsense she was so anxious to eliminate. When a woman gets into a critical mood, all a man’s feelings about her will seem to her nonsense, sickening nonsense
. She amputates herself from the boy’s consciousness, and then stares at the blank where she ought to be. She stares at it helpless and paralysed, and has not the faintest idea what to do about it. She has reached the point where she is nothing, blank nothing to the man. The eliminating process has been so complete. And then, she begins to be nothing to herself.
For the bitter truth of a woman is that if she is nothing, or as good as nothing, to any man, she soon becomes nothing to herself. She becomes nothing to herself, and turns into one of these bitter women who assert themselves all the time, with a hammering self-assertion because they are nothing; or she hitches on to a job, and hopes to justify her existence in work, or in a cause; or she repents, not in sack-cloth and ashes, but in the prettiest frock she can find, and sets out once more in the hope that some boy will feel a bit of nonsense about her. And this time, she is not going to cut out all the nonsense. She is pining now to be treated to a little stars and ocean stuff, to be mixed up with the moon, and given a bouquet of flowers.
• • •
For after all, there is a difference between sentiment and sentimentality. And if the boy is sufficiently moved by the presence of the girl really to feel an emotion at the sight of the stars sinking over the ocean, that’s one to the girl. It’s a piece of flattery. A woman has a hold over a man, in the long run, not by her power of brutally and pointedly coming to the point and cutting all the rest out, but by her power of calling up in him all kinds of emotions which to her are perhaps irrelevant and nonsensical—have nothing to do with her—but which in the boy are just the natural reaction to the presence of the woman who really touches him. The more associations a woman can evoke in a man—associations with stars, ocean, moon, violets, humanity, the future, and so on—the stronger is her hold.
But women are not fools for very long. They soon learn their lesson, and the moment they have learnt their lesson, they change. The girl who was so smart cutting out all the nonsense of stars and ocean, in the boy, will change like a shot, and be considerably more humble about stars and ocean, once she realizes that she has reduced herself to a nonentity. And the moment she realizes it, she will begin the cycle all over again.
IF YOU ARE GOING TO ANTIBES
ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT
FROM JULY 1929
They tell me there is a woman living in a small frame house in a Montana village who has expressed no intention whatever of going to Antibes this summer. I have heard no explanation of this bizarre uniqueness of hers, have received, as yet, no details to account for what does seem at first blush a somewhat too studied effort to be conspicuous. Perhaps she has a morose aversion to human society. Then again she may be merely destitute. Or, haply, bedridden.
The tendency of the aforesaid human society to gather each summer in a kind of hilarious, moist and irresponsible congestion at that once obscure point on the Riviera is a quite recent deflection in the drift of peoples over the face of the earth. Of course the Azure Coast has long been a favourite picnic ground for the idle. For generations the Russian gentry would leave their cherry orchards to shift for themselves and hide on the Riviera from the unkindness of the Muscovite winters. Even now, the Blue Train from Paris discharges their grandchildren onto the station platform at Nice, but, in the whirligig of time, these come to go on as extras in one of Master Ingram’s movies.
• • •
Then, in his day, the foxy grandpa of the present Prince of Wales so relished this eternal playground that his memory still haunts the Esterel, and a singularly depressing statue of him adds just the needed note of ugliness to the pleasing prospect at Cannes. But these, mind you, were always winter visitors. Indeed, the momentum of the tradition that the Riviera is peculiarly a Winter resort is still so strong that not until December does Monaco really bestir itself, flinging wide the doors of the opera house, stripping the shrouding dust-cloths from the tables in the Sporting club, and extracting a little something from the till at the Casino to subvene the Imperial Russian Ballet, which is now, alas, neither imperial, Russian, nor (according to its sterner critics) a ballet.
But two or three years ago it dawned abruptly on the world’s floating population that whereas the Riviera was pleasant enough in Winter—preferable, certainly, to Archangel or Sitka, or even Utica, New York—it is incomparably more agreeable in the Summer, when the skies are always smiling and the malachite green of the Mediterranean invites you to the most delightful swimming to be had anywhere in the world. How abrupt this discovery was, I myself can testify, for when I was in Antibes in June, 1925, some six guests—people like Roland Young and the progeny of Robert Benchley and other persons of no social importance whatever—rattled around in the vast spaces of the Grand Hôtel du Cap, their footfalls echoing hollowly in its deserted corridors. Only three years later I lived to see the once abject management explaining patiently to one Bernard Shaw that they had no room for him.
I never did understand why anyone ever went in the Summer months to the northern coast of France, where the only sound is the ceaseless complaint about the weather, pierced from time to time by the shrieks of discomfort from those foolhardy enough to go swimming in the Channel, which is about as suitable for that purpose as a pool of iced tea. I suppose they continued supinely to go there because, having been to the Riviera in the Winter, they assumed that they must go somewhere else in the Summer. How they chanced upon the dazzling discovery that there really was no law compelling them to do so, remains one of the minor mysteries of our time. For centuries they had deserted the mid-Summer loveliness of the Riviera for no other reason than the interesting and incontestable, but somewhat irrelevant, fact, that it was also a pleasant spot in Winter. I doubt if any generalship was employed in creating the recent stampede in the other direction. Indeed, I am quite sure that neither the startled and unprepared hotels nor the Départment de Tourisme had anything to do with deflecting the crowd. That deflection, which appears to have been self-starting, therefore throws no light on the art of propaganda. It really belongs, rather, in a footnote to the volume called The Manners and Customs of Sheep.
I feel I shall fail ignominously in any attempt to tell you what you—all of you, that is, except the aforesaid Montana recluse—will find as ingredients of an Antibes Summer. I glance back over the weeks in June, July and August that I spent there last year and wonder which bright-coloured piece out of the rag-bag of my experiences would best serve as an illustration of an Antibes day.
• • •
Amphibious days they are, in a land where bathing suits are de rigueur until sundown, and luncheon guests bring with them only a pair of pajamas to change to coyly behind the nearest rock or syringa bush. Then come cool, fragrant nights of moonlight and nightingales, with whizzing motor rides along the Middle Corniche to Monte Carlo, and low traffickings with the door man at the Casino for the loan of a necktie wherewith to conceal one’s base intention to violate the Casino’s solemn rule against gambling in a sport shirt. I seem to remember libations served to guests still dripping from the sea under the willow trees at Charles Brackett’s villa—libations of Black Velvet, a sinister potion compounded of champagne and stout, and so inflammatory of one’s sense of power that, after only three glasses, I challenged a passing mass of peasant strength to a wrestling bout, and spent the next ten days nursing a broken rib.
Or mint smashes, served at a cozy bar in the Street of the Marble Cross in Nice, where the patron, as he crushes the mint leaves, reminisces of the eighteen years he spent as steward of the Whitehall Club in New York.
Or perhaps you would rather savour the sight of that eternal miracle, Mary Garden, casually riding an aquaplane over the turquoise sea as the easiest way of running over to luncheon at Somerset Maugham’s, whose white Moorish villa on the Cap Ferrat is so built against the side of a hill that you can step from the swimming pool onto its roof, and peer into the study with the Gauguin window, brought all the way from Tahiti.
Then I seem to remember tea with Frank Harris in his flat at Nice—a Frank Harris grown gentler with age and a little bewildered that the world is not remuneratively interested in his amorous memoirs, but still defiantly dressed like a river-boat gambler of the 70’s, and reciting in his matchless voice the lovely scraps of Shakespeare which he seems to clink fondly in his hand as a miser clinks his gold pieces.
Or luncheon with Shaw, the latter finding the wordless, saucer-eyed and uproarious Harpo Marx an ideal listener for his anecdotes, but confessing next day to a slight embarrassment. Frank Harris, Maugham, young Michael Arlen and Lloyd Osborne, Rebecca West and Scott Fitzgerald—such Riviera fauna were sufficiently docketed in his mind. But Harpo Marx? What had he written?
Or little dinners up in the hills at Saint-Paul-du-Var, with the Alpine foothills turned amethystine in the sunset, with wine-stains on the red-checkered table-cloths, with pigeons wheeling unceasingly overhead, and dogs dozing dreamlessly on the terra cotta tiles.
• • •
Or big dinners at the Cap itself, hellishly frequent dinners given by hostesses giddy with the new grandeur of having enough servants for once in their lives. The last one I went to—a vast, jostling convention of tables set upon the riparian rocks—comes back to me in odd, freakish wisps of memory. There is Elsie de Wolfe, for instance, summoning her car and departing in medium-high dudgeon just as the cocktails are being served. She had been asked for 8.30. Now, at 10, the first course is not yet on the tables, and a lady has her digestion to think of. The hostess is furious, and so am I—furious because I didn’t think of it first.
Endless chatter, clinking glasses, then suddenly, at midnight, a group puts out to sea in a chugging motor boat. In it is Gertrude Sanford, of Amsterdam, New York, and Addis-Ababa, Abyssinia.