For a mess of stuff you did for Hone’s Weekly, it says here.
LAMB
Well, I’ll be darned. Why, I dashed that off in about an hour a week. Was always late with my copy, too. Hone used to get crazy.
POE
He’d be crazier if he knew that it was worth forty-eight grand now.
SWIFT
You weren’t such a big money-maker as a subject, though, Charlie. That thing Bill Wordsworth did about you after you died got only a measly twenty-five hundred.
LAMB
You mean “Ode to the Memory of Charles Lamb”?
SWIFT
Look – he remembers the title!
LAMB
I never cared very much about that myself. It didn’t seem to me that Bill did all he might have done with the material.
WORDSWORTH
(putting down his newspaper)
No? Well, I did all I felt like doing. I had to have something in for the Christmas number and that was all I could think of. They already had a poem scheduled on Milton, which was what I wanted to do.
LAMB
I would say that a poem by you on Milton would be worth about seven dollars now – on the original papyrus.
WORDSWORTH
(going back to his newspaper)
Yeah?
SHELLEY
I’m surprised to see that the original manuscript of Keats’s “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill” got only $17,000.
(As the others are talking, SHELLEY repeats, a bit louder)
I’m surprised to see that the original manuscript of Keats’s “I stood tip-toe” got only $17,000.
SWIFT
I heard you the first time, Bysshe. You’re surprised that Keats’s “I stood tip-toe” got only $17,000.
SHELLEY
Yes. I always rather liked that. Nothing wonderful, of course, but, if my stuff got $68,000, I should think that Keatsie’s would get more than $17,000.
SWIFT
That was just a few lines of Keats, Bysshe, and stuck into an ordinary edition of his works. Yours was the whole, uncut volume of Queen Mab – a very fine thing purely from the book-making standpoint, I daresay. Anything that’s uncut always gets more money.
POE
By the way, whoever owned that originally didn’t think a hell of a lot of it, did he? Not to cut the leaves, I mean.
SHELLEY
It was probably one of those copies the publishers sent me for gifts which I never gave away.
SWIFT
Any time you ever gave away a book.
SHELLEY
(ignoring him)
Say, what do you know about this! It says that Queen Mab got the highest price ever paid for a book at an auction. That doesn’t seem believable, does it? I mean, Queen Mab wasn’t my best, by a long shot.
SWIFT
The Gutenberg Bible got more.
SHELLEY
Yes, but I mean literature.
SWIFT
Oh, the Gutenberg Bible was just a stunt of typesetting, I suppose?
SHELLEY
You know very well what I mean, Dean. I think the Bible is a fine book, a great book, but, after all, the big price that it brought was, in a way, due partly to the fact that Gutenberg set it up. You know that.
POE
I’ve been adding it up, boys, and right here in this room there is represented about $160,000. What about another round?
TENNYSON
Not for me, thanks. Not in the middle of the day.
POE
Well, $160,000 is a lot of money. We can’t let it pass unnoticed. . . Waters! Another round of the same.
WATERS
Yes, sir. . . .
(aside to POE)
Was that last round yours, Mr. Poe?
POE
(looking in his wallet)
Why, er – sure! Sure thing! Just put it on my account, Waters.
WATERS
(aside to POE)
You’re posted, Mr. Poe. I’m sorry.
POE
By George, that’s right. Well – er – Never mind, then, Waters. Er – Dean, you don’t happen to have – er –
SWIFT
Awfully sorry, old boy. You couldn’t have struck me at a worse time – just charge it to me, Waters – oh, that’s right – I forgot. I’m posted right now.
(LAMB and WORDSWORTH, sensing trouble, have slipped quietly away to lunch.)
SHELLEY
I really ought to pay for the whole thing, you know, winning all that money. Next time, I shall insist.
(A new member who has been looking at the magazines all during the conversation approaches the group.)
NEW MEMBER
I hope you’ll pardon me, gentlemen, but I couldn’t help overhearing. I hope you’ll allow me to pay for the drinks today. My manuscripts wouldn’t bring much in the open market right now, but they didn’t do so badly in the original sale. . . . Waters, will you please bring another round for us all and charge the whole thing to me – Mr. Hopwood, you know. Mr. Avery Hopwood.
WATERS
Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Hopwood.
(The drinks are brought and the gentlemen carry them in to lunch with them.)
SHELLEY
(exiting with the rest)
I really don’t understand it, though, for Queen Mab was never one of my favorites.
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Imagination
In The Bathroom
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One of the three hundred and eight (1930 census figures) troubles with American home life today is the alarming spread of Home-Making as an Art. For the past fifteen or twenty years our Little Women have been reading so many articles in the women’s magazines warning them against lack of Imagination in the Home that they have let their imaginations get the upper hand and turn them into a lot of Hans Christian Andersens. All that is needed is a band of dwarfs to make any modern home a Rumpelstiltskin’s castle which, at the stroke of midnight, turns back into a pumpkin again.
Before Home-Making became an Art, Mother used to feel that she had done pretty well if she and Annie could get the furniture all back into place (and by “into place” is meant “into place again“) after the spring and fall house-cleaning, with perhaps fresh tidies on the backs of the chairs every so often. Things had to go back pretty much where they came from, for the casters had dug little round holes in the carpet, and you wouldn’t want to have the place looking like a clam flat.
The only imagination that was necessary in the preparation of the food was to find enough; for in the days before dieting set in Daddy and the boys and girls stopped at nothing in the way of loading up, short of foundering with all on board.
But gradually the home-making experts have got their propaganda across, flooding the country with photographs of armchairs planted with geraniums and luncheon tables in pantalets, telling the young wives who are just beginning to worry about that far-away look in George’s eyes that the trouble was lack of Imagination in fixing up the Nest. So the young wives have become Imagination-conscious.
On looking back over the past ten years, the arrival of chintz would seem to have been the first indication that things were going imaginative on us. The first designs in chintz curtains and sofa coverings were very mild, perhaps little spatterings of buttercups on a black field, or, in the more radical households, medium-sized poppies; but, compared with the old white lace curtains which used to hang in the bay window back of the rubber plant and were held back in place by a gold ball and chain, they were pretty hot stuff. I remember, back in 1915, a man whose mother came to visit him in his new home (she had never met his wife before) and, after one look at the chintz curtains, she took him upstairs and asked him if he was sure just who his wife’s people were. She thought he had married a Chinese girl.
Today those very same chintz curtains would be considered fit only for a mortuary home (or undertaking parlor, as we used to call it: the development of underta
king parlors into mortuary homes would make a story on Home-Making in itself).
As the tide of originality swept on, the poppies began getting larger and larger until the design became one big red poppy with here and there a bit of background which hardly knew that it was a background on the same piece of goods. This obviously would never do, for the next step would have been all poppy, or just a good old-fashioned red curtain, which was exactly the thing they were trying to get away from.
You have to look out for that in modern decoration. Beyond a certain point you swing right around back into Grandma’s house again.
I have an article before me, written in one of the Home-Making sections of a Sunday paper, which begins as follows:
Color everywhere in the house is the keynote in present-day decorating – from the basement to the attic, from the foyer hall to the back door. Even the kitchen is as gay as a flower garden, for pots and pans have been glorified. Gone are the days of all-white bathrooms. . . .
Is that a terrifying prospect or isn’t it? “Gone are the days of all-white bathrooms,” are they? Well, not in my house. The bathroom is a sacred place, not merely a room where you rush in to wash your hands before a meal. (And, incidentally, a lady member of the party has asked me to inquire why it is that the men-folk always wait until dinner has been announced before rushing up to wash their hands.)
“They have all the time in the world after they get home,” says this lady member of the party, “in which to fix up for dinner. But they sit down and read the evening paper, or dawdle around with the radio, or even just smoke a cigarette standing in the middle of the living room, until somebody says, ‘Dinner is ready.’ Then they say, ‘I’ll be right down,’ tear upstairs into the bathroom, and start splashing about with the soap and guest towels until you would think they were doing the week’s wash. In the meantime the soup is stone cold.”
And I, equally incidentally, would like to ask why, in housekeepers’ parlance, everything has to be “stone cold” when it is the man’s fault? They are just “cold” when it is anybody else’s fault, but when the man is to blame they are “stone cold.”
To get back into the bathroom. I like a good warm bathroom, with plenty of light, in which I can sing Old Man River (and, boy, can I take those low notes in Old Man River in a good resonant bathroom! Paul Robeson is a tenor compared with me some mornings); and I like a room in which I can lie in the tub and read until well parboiled, sometimes getting nice big blisters on the pages with wet fingers, or, if very tired, perhaps dropping the whole book into the water; and I don’t want to have the feeling, every time I look up, that I am taking part in the first act of the Ziegfeld Follies with Joseph Urban looking on.
I once spent a week-end in a house where the bathroom was so stage-struck that I couldn’t even get the cold water to run.
The towels were lavender and the curtains were pink and green and the tub was a brilliant yellow with mottlings of a rather horrid chocolate running through it. I tried running a bath with my eyes shut, but as soon as the water hit the porcelain it began to boil, and even if I had been able to draw a decent bath that a healthy man could get into, I couldn’t have kept my eyes on the book for fear that a Chinese dragon would pop out from some of the decorations and get into my slippers.
I finally went back into my room and took a sponge bath from the faucet.
I have dwelt so long on the bathroom end of Home-Making as an Art because the bathroom seems to me to be the last stronghold of the old-fashioned man. If they take our bathrooms away from us we might as well all dress in harlequin costumes and throw confetti all day instead of going to work. Imagination is all right in the living room, where we can keep our eyes shut. But please, modern home-makers, leave us our white bathrooms, where we can use the towels without feeling that we are wiping our hands on a Michelangelo and look at the walls without going into a pirouette. No wonder so many men live in Turkish baths!
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Music Heavenly Maid
* * *
Sunday afternoons used to be ideal for home-work. No automobile horns outside, no old ladies with hand-organs, no telephone calls, almost, you might say, no home-work. Even in the midst of my furious attack on the Muse on Sunday afternoons I used to catch between forty and forty-five winks.
But with the advent of the Philharmonic concerts on the radio, Sunday afternoon has become one of the noisiest periods of the week. I have nothing against symphonies, and am sure that their being broadcast is a great thing for the public taste in music. All that I am saying is that they are noisy, especially if you happen to be in the next apartment. It may be high-class noise, but it cannot be denied that it is noise, and distracting noise.
The people in the next apartment love symphonies. I also think that they are either deaf or unaware that a radio can be turned down simply by adjusting that little dingus at one side. There are times, during the final movements of a symphony, when I rather expect to see them all come hurtling through the wall, bringing great slabs of plaster with them, so great is the force of the sound waves generated. I often picture them in there, cowering down close to the rugs to escape being blown about the room by the blast which comes out of the loud-speaker.
Today I am embarking on a little piece called “Changing Science,” in which I shall attempt to prove that most of the science which was taught in our school days is already so out of date that it seems hardly worth while to teach it to the children today, as in another twenty years it is sure to sound like arguments that the Earth is flat. (Perhaps, in twenty years, it will have been proven that the Earth IS flat.)
The Philharmonic is, at the same moment (4.25 P.M.) embarking on the overture to “Euryanthe,” by Weber. I know what it is, because I just heard the announcer say so through the wall. You see, there is nothing that is kept from me. However, I will do my best on “Changing Science.”
Most of us remember having been taught about the molecule when we were in school. Practically none of us remembers that the average diameter of gas molecules was said to be about one three-hundred-millionths of an inch . . . Boy, is that kettle-drummer having a good time? Or rather, those kettle-drummers. There must be 50 of them. Go it, you sons-of-guns! Beat their hides off! At-a-boy! I hope your wrists drop off.
Well, whether a molecule is one three-hundred-millionths of an inch or not, along came a lot of things that were smaller. Atoms, electrons, eons, ions, uons and sometimes wons and yons. This made more or less of a bum out of the molecule, but still . . . What’s the matter? Have they stopped playing? They shouldn’t do that. They shouldn’t bang so loud and then stop suddenly. That’s worse than keeping it up, for it makes people in the next apartment wonder . . .
Oh, no! There they go again! The brasses! Dear old brasses! Say, they certainly know how to blow, those boys. Hot dickety! It must be fun to have a horn, and, once you are sure of your note, to give it the works like that. You’d have to be pretty sure of your note, though, because if you put your eyeballs and temples and neck-chords into blowing it and it turned out to be the wrong note, you would sound pretty silly. I am not so sure that one of those horns has got it right yet . . . Oh, I guess he’d have to, or he wouldn’t be playing in the Philharmonic. It’s probably my fault . . .
They’ve died down again. Quick, now; get a couple of words written!
On glancing through my old Physics book I find . . . Too late! They’re at it again! I wonder if I were to go to the door and ask those people in the next apartment if they had ever heard of “loud” and “soft” if they would be offended. I would do it very nicely. I might even go in and show them about turning the dingus, and while I was at the controls I might fix the damn thing so that it would never play again . . . Wait a minute! It sounds like the coda they are going into. The same note twenty-five times usually means that they are nearing the end.
Why is it that a composer never seems able to finish an overture? They act as if they had got going and
didn’t know how to stop. They come to the end with a series of tremendous bangs – and then go right on with another series of the same bangs. This one now has reached thirty-seven bangs on the same note – now it’s forty-two, just while I have been writing. Bang-bang-bang-bang! There! Bangbang! No – one more! Bangbang!
Well, I guess they’re through now for a minute, but I’ve lost interest in “Changing Science.” I might as well turn my own radio on and catch “Concertstueck,” also by Weber. Perhaps someone in the apartment on my other side is trying to do some work.
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Perrine’s Return
* * *
STAR MISSING
FOR TWO GENERATIONS
RETURNS AS ONE OF COMET TRIO
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. (A.P.) The spectacle of three comets swinging through the skies is afforded astronomers for the first time in many years. To the two comets, Skjellerup’s and Baade’s, that have been under observation for weeks, another was added today. The tailed star known as Perrine’s, making another visitation to our stellar system after an absence of two generations, has been sighted again.
“Well, if it isn’t old Perrine’s!” said Skjellerup’s. “Come here, you old son-of-a-gun you, and give an account of yourself. Where have you been all these generations?”
“Oh, just flying around,” said Perrine’s, secretively.
“A likely story!” said Baades. “Just flying around with what?”
“Say, look here,” protested the wanderer, “can’t a comet go off by himself once in a while without being ragged all over the place and put through the third degree the minute he gets back?”
“O-ho, touchy, is he? If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a touchy comet. You must remember, Perry, that if we wanted to, we could find out exactly what you’ve been doing. All we have to do is look on the records at the Harvard Observatory and there it is in black and white, probably with her name and everything.”
Chips Off the Old Benchley Page 11