• CULLED FROM THE APOPHTHEGMS OF WIZARD MARCHBANKS •
Be most alert when most victorious, for though you may not hit your adversary when he is down, it is considered plucky in him to kick you.
(February 20 to March 21)
PISCES IS the sign of the Crossed Fish. As in the case of Capricorn, Wizard Marchbanks advises you to make the best of this, and in particular to take fullest advantage of the cool temperament and the calmly reflective eye with which nature has endowed you. Always remember that the Crossed Fish are moving in two directions and one of them is inevitably the opposite direction from whatever trouble may be brewing. Because you are elusive and slow to take a bait you may miss some of the spectacular fun of life, but you will find your amusement in observing what happens to those born under more impetuous signs. It is especially necessary for the Pisces-born to be careful in marriage and business associations, for any prolonged association with a Hot Water Aquarian will prove disturbing if not downright fatal. The Virgo- and Cancer-born should be more in your line, and in the professional world accountancy, corporation law and other pursuits which are in the world but not of it should prove most congenial to you.
• ENCHANTMENT-OF-THE-MONTH •
Your lucky colours—or to be more scientific about it, your planetary colours—are blue, violet and grey. Your lucky flowers are a miserable collection—mignonette, jessamine and yarrow. This last is the familiar weed Milfoil; Wizard Marchbanks declines to be drawn into any discussion of what distinguishes a flower from a weed. Your lucky stones are the pearl, the chrysolite, and—rather curiously—“all unpolished blue and black gems.” Chrysolite is a silicate of magnesia and iron which is found in lava and is not very interesting; pearls are much better. Perhaps it would be wiser to wear your unpolished gems under your clothes; it is one of the painful facts of life that gems look like other pebbles until they are cut and polished, and a necklace of dingy pebbles might win you a reputation for eccentricity which you would be unable to support. People born under Pisces are supposed to have a lively sense of the ridiculous; this should prevent you from making any extravagant and unsuitable parade of your supposedly lucky adornments.
• HEALTH HINTS FOR THOSE BORN UNDER PISCES •
Your weak spot is your chest, and you must be on guard against colds. It is also asserted that people born under this sign are more susceptible to liquor than others, and if this is true, it is unlucky indeed, for how can you keep colds at bay without the most popular of all medicines for cold prevention, cold treatment, and convalescent encouragement? However, medical science has recently come to the aid of astrology by asserting that onions, and garlic in particular, are prophylactics against colds. Therefore, when you go to a cocktail party, load up on the pickled onions, and leave the drinks alone. Accept a martini, but when you have eaten the onion, pour the drink into a vase of flowers. It is not true that onions give you an offensive breath. People who have eaten onions may have a bad breath the next day, but the odour of fresh onion is rather agreeable than otherwise. Your plan, clearly, is to eat onions every day, and in bad weather wear a little bunch of garlic tied around your neck. Disguise it, if you like, with some blossoms of yarrow.
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• FROM MY NOTEBOOKS •
HABILOGRAPHY / For some time several newspapers that I read have been publishing hokum by graphologists, who profess to estimate character by handwriting. It is not to be compared with my own, recently-developed study of Habilography, or the Reading of Character by Clothing. I can tell volumes about a man by the ties he wears, and I place women by their shoes. The number, and nature, of the pens and pencils a man carries in his waistcoat pocket affords deep insight into his character, and a woman who wears junk jewellery combined with genuine fine stones lays bare her soul to my searching eye. What can a woman conceal from the trained Habilographer, as he mentally estimates the variations of her hemlines? And socks, those windows of the soul, usually tell me more about a man than I really want to know. What is more truly characteristic of a human being than the draperies he sees fit to assume, the ornaments he chooses, and the way in which he has assembled the junk which conceals four-fifths of his person? Graphology—bah! Habilography—aha!
THE PAST REARRANGED / I was looking at some records today, belonging to a friend who collects oddities for the gramophone, and was interested in a series called Immortal Voices and History Making Events. It was an odd jumble, but I found a record of Sarah Bernhardt reciting a Prayer for Our Enemies, and put it on. Amid the rustling and scratching inseparable from old recordings there was barely audible a passionate, female voice, speaking—or to be exact, howling—in French. In the descriptive note which went with the thing Sarah Bernhardt was described as “a great lady of the American stage,” and thus France was robbed of one of its glories. The US and the USSR between them are dividing not only the earth, but the past thereof.
ORGY / To a movie called Faust and the Devil, made in Italy, which I enjoyed greatly, and particularly an Orgy scene, where Faust made genteel and ineffective plays for several girls in filmy frocks. The Devil, meanwhile, sat at a table loaded with goodies, but ate nothing save a few grapes. Watching his weight, I suppose. Have not seen an Orgy in a movie since the days of the silent film; they often had Orgies, and they always took the form of a light meal, eaten in the company of jolly girls in peek-a-boo nighties. I have never been at an Orgy, though I suppose my garbage this morning filled the neighbourhood with dark suspicion.
LIFE AND ART / To Ottawa to attend a performance of a play by my old friend Apollo Fishorn, the Canadian playwright. Fishorn got on the train at Smith’s Falls, with a live hen in a net, and a basket of fresh eggs, which he said he was taking to the actors, who appreciate these little comforts from the farm. He also had a carpet bag with a bad catch, which kept falling open and revealing the sorriest pair of pyjamas I have ever seen.… I liked the play, but joining a party of knowledgeable persons in the lobby at one of the intervals, I learned that there was too much talk in it, and not enough action. Now this puzzles me. There are only a very few kinds of action which can be shown on the stage. Love is a great theme of playwrights, but if they try to develop it as action rather than as talk, the censor cracks down. Murder is good, but if you murder more than one person an act, people think you are trying to be Shakespeare, and complain. I mentioned this criticism to Fishorn, and he sighed, and said: “Yes, but life is 99 per cent talk. Look at the people who want more action in my play; what are they doing? Talking! What are you doing? Talking!” And sure enough when I caught sight of myself in a mirror, he was right.
BUILT-IN LSD / The charm of LSD, I gather from some excitable pieces for and against that have been in the papers, is that it enables the user to see deeper into inanimate things, to perceive colours more splendidly and sounds more ravishingly, than most people. It dawns upon me that it gives something of the perception of an artist—specifically a poet; indeed, it brings back something of the clean vision of childhood. I can recall, at a very early age, standing transfixed before a peony, feeling myself drawn into its gorgeous colour; I know I was very young at the time, for the peony and I were about the same height. But the important thing is that I can still do this, with sight and sound, when I choose, so it is very easy for me to go on a trip—which I believe is the expression now for this sort of experience. But one does not always enjoy it. “If a monkey looks into a mirror, no apostle will look out,” says Lichtenberg, one of my favourite philosophers. We all have a good deal of monkey in us, and when he is uppermost we should be very careful about seeking extensions of experience.
DOGS ON THE UP-AND-UP / For years people have belaboured me about what they consider to be my disrelish for dogs; not only do they love dogs—I must love them too. But recently a philosopher friend (well, as much a friend as any real philosopher ever permits himself to be, for fear of accidents) took up the fight. “Dogs relate us to the chthonic realm,” said he, “and without some measure of chthonicity you
are an imperfect human being.” He thought to bamboozle me with his fancy Greek word, but I already knew it, and what is more, I pronounce the initial “ch” which is more than he could do because he always has catarrh. It just means “of the lower world,” and the lower world is much in fashion these days. But I know dogs. They are aware that they belong to a lower world, and are trying to improve themselves by begging upper-world food, lolling in upper-world chairs, and snuffling wetly at upper-world ankles (from which they proceed upward until outraged modesty demands that I give them a kick in the slats). Dogs are trying to take over, and I know it. Not that a dogocracy could be much worse than what we have now.
BLESS YOU! / Since childhood’s happy hour I have been the possessor of a particularly loud sneeze. It is not the loudest in the world; an Irishman I have known for many years has a super-sneeze which he heralds with a plaintive cry, somewhat like that of an epileptic just before a seizure, and beside him I am but a child in sternutation. But I am a pretty good sneezer, and kindly people say “God bless you” in awed voices, after they have crawled from under the tables where they have taken shelter. This custom of blessing a sneezer is said to have originated with Saint Gregory the Great, though the Romans said “Absit Omen,” which is as near as a Roman ever got to blessing anybody. My Jewish friends, of course, say “Gesundheit” and one of them explained to me that it is an old Jewish belief, traceable to the Cabbala, that when a man sneezes his soul flies out of his mouth for an instant (presumably on an elastic) and in that fateful twinkling a demon may rush into his body, cut the elastic, and take charge. I know a good many people whose general hatefulness, contrariety and all-round objectionableness may well be the result of a sneeze during which the blessing was forgotten.
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• FROM MY FILES •
To Apollo Fishorn, ESQ.
Dear Mr. Fishorn:
I am ashamed that a young Canadian playwright such as yourself should write to me complaining that he cannot think of a theme for a major work.
Out of pity for you, I suggest the following: the steps by which the barbarous mediaeval treatment of insane persons was supplanted by our modern comparatively humane methods. That would make a fine chronicle play. And don’t forget that the Quakers were the first people to establish a hospital in which the insane were treated as human beings with personal preferences and rights. It is a matter of history that Quakers spent many hours finding out from their patients what they liked to eat, instead of giving them dirty skilly in dippers. And there is one of your best scenes, roughly like this:
SCENE: a cell in a Quaker hospital. Mad Bess is happily banging her head against the wall. Enter a Quaker.
QUAKE: Peace be upon you, woman. Prithee give over. Thee will injure thee’s brainpan.
MAD B: Yahoo! Cockyolly, cockyolly!
QUAKE: Tell me, prithee, dost thee like marmalade or jam on thee’s breakfast toast?
MAD B: They say the owl was a baker’s daughter.
QUAKE: Very like, dear sister. But speaking of breakfast toast-
MAD B: Come, my coach. Good night, ladies, good night.
QUAKE: It may be as thee says. But in the morning, dost thee like jam or marmalade on thee’s breakfast toast?
(Enter Elizabeth Fry, the great Quaker humanitarian)
E. FRY: How fares the work, brother?
QUAKE: But tardily, sister. This dear sister here cannot say whether she wants jam or marmalade on her breakfast toast.
E. FRY: Come sister, I am Elizabeth Fry. Tell me what thee wants on thee’s toast.
MAD B: Oh, so you’re one of the Frys, are you? Then bring me a great big delicious, steaming, vitamin-packed cup of Cadbury’s breakfast cocoa!
(Confusion; Elizabeth Fry and Quaker look pained, and Mad Bess strikes the wall again with her head; the wall breaks through; she escapes.)
There; you see how impressive it could be? Shame on you for despairing.
S. Marchbanks.
*
To Genghis Marchbanks, ESQ.
Dear Cousin Genghis:
I am laid low with a cold on my chest which I have been treating with medicated steam. How do you suppose the notion took hold of the gullible public that steam was good for such afflictions? For three days I have lived in an atmosphere like that of a Turkish bath, and I think I am worse, if anything. I have a roaring cough, and pains in my back and legs as though dozens of malignant gnomes were prodding me with old-fashioned bone hairpins. Other gnomes are busy among my tripes with knitting needles.
Steam has been my watchword in such afflictions since I was a boy. I well recall that when I lived in England a friend of mine burst into my room one day as I sat with a towel over my head inhaling the balsam fumes from a fragrant jug; he crept away on tiptoe, and told me afterward that he thought I was at some sort of special worship—a Canadian Day of Atonement—or perhaps weeping uncontrollably into the jug. But I have never found steam of much use. My face takes on a swollen, boiled look, and that is all. Still, steam is as good for a cold as anything else the medical profession has dreamed up.
Yours from the fog,
Samuel.
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To Mervyn Noseigh, M.A.
Dear Mr. Noseigh:
No no; I am not in the least offended by your letter asking about my sex life. I fully realize that no study of an author, living or dead, is of any value without this sort of saucy exploration. And my disenchantment has undoubtedly had more effect on literature than anything since Henry James had his mysterious misadventure.
Like every Canadian of my generation, I picked up my knowledge of Sex in the gutter. I well remember the day I did so. There it was, a torn scrap of print, fluttering on the very edge of a manhole. I picked it up, and studied it with care. So far as I could make out, much of it was in foreign languages—squiggly scripts that meant nothing to me; but there was a little left of the English section, and from it I discerned that headaches, a furred tongue, and occasional spots before the eyes were signs of—the fragment was torn at that point, but it was obviously Sex.
From that time forward I made discreet enquiries of every attractive girl I met about her headaches; they never had any. Once I reached a point of intimacy where I was able to ask a marvellous girl to show me her tongue; it was as clean as could be, so obviously I had been misled about her feelings for me, and broke off the affair with a heavy heart.
Years later I discovered that what I had found in the gutter was part of the literature that comes wrapped around bottles of Eno’s Fruit Salts.
Such are the tragedies that maim the lives of millions.
Yours in total disillusion,
Samuel Marchbanks.
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To Waghorn Wittol, ESQ.
Dear Mr. Wittol:
It was a pleasure to encounter you at the theatre, but where was Mrs. Wittol? I thought I saw her with another gentleman, but very likely I was mistaken. I was much impressed by the melodrama in which a man shared with his wife the secret of a murder, and in which his wife contrived his death by a clever device. But you know, Wittol, I think that there is an even more exciting melodrama to be written about married life. What about a play in which a man and his wife, discovering that they are boring each other, set out on a race as to which can bore the other to death first?
Think of the scenes which such a drama could contain! The great scene in which the wife tells her husband the plot of a movie she has seen: he falls asleep, coma seems about to supervene until, with a tremendous effort, he rouses himself and retorts with a description of his bridge game at the club, recalling each hand in detail; she tumbles forward in her chair, and is seen to reach for the cyanide bottle. But no! She still has some fight left in her, and begins to read a letter from her mother, who is shuffle-board champion of St. Petersburg, Fla. You see the plan? A tournament of boredom! Hollywood would jump at it, but I think the Little Theatres ought to have it first.
My regards to Mrs. Wittol, when next you see her.
Samuel Marchbanks.
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To Chandos Fribble, ESQ.
Dear Fribble:
During the last few days I have received a horrifying number of invitations and supplications from people who want me to join or support something new. They all appear to want to create something which has never been known on earth before. But not me. I am sick of novelties—or what pass for novelties among easily-satisfied people. And for that reason I am organizing a one-man Society for the Resurrection and Preservation of Words which Have Been Permitted to Lapse into Unmerited Disuse. Let’s deal with something old, for a change.
There are many such words, and from time to time I may issue bulletins about them. But for the time being these will do:
(1) HUZZA: an excellent word which has been dropped in favour of “hurrah.” But huzza has a nice, genteel air about it; it expresses enthusiasm, but not too much. It is the ideal word to use when, for instance, somebody suggests that you go for a good long tramp in the country, just as you have settled down for a nap in your chair. It is a good word to shout, in a well-controlled voice, when unpopular officials pass you in a procession. My typewriter ribbon has just broken, and luckily I have another, which I shall have to put in the machine myself, getting my hands dirty and abrading my temper. Huzza!
(2) HOSANNA: another useful word of praise, expressing goodwill without overdoing it. It has hardly been used in ordinary speech since the following limerick was current, around 1905:
There was a young maiden named Anna
Who sang as a High Church soprana;
When she fell in the aisle
The Dean said with a smile,
“We have heard, now we see, your hosanna!”
(3) HEYDAY: the dictionary calls this “an exclamation of gaiety or surprise.” Yes, but not of ecstatic gaiety or complete surprise. This seems to me to be just the word to use when unwrapping a gift of handkerchiefs which looks precisely like handkerchiefs, which has been presented to you by somebody who always gives you handkerchiefs.