• OF HIS ILLITERACY •
I WAS CORNERED earlier this evening by a man who told me that he had heard that I was a Great Reader, and would I, in that capacity, tell him what I considered the greatest book ever written? When attacked with such questions as this I am overcome with a profound weariness and a desire for escape, because whatever I say is bound to be disappointing. How could I tell him that I had read very few of what are called “the world’s classics,” that I have never got past the first chapter of War and Peace and that I have never read a novel by Dostoevski, or Thomas Mann, that I cannot abide Pilgrim’s Progress, that Henry James makes me snore, that I have never read Don Quixote without skipping, that I have never read any but the dirty bits of Rabelais, and that I hate all poetry written after the death of Tennyson? In my mind the words “classic” and “bore” merge all too readily. I am an ignoramus, and hypocritically ashamed of it.
• OF DISTRESSED FURNITURE •
I WAS TALKING to a man whose job it is to reproduce antique furniture, which he does remarkably well. When he has made a perfect piece, he then knocks a few bits out of it, scratches it and digs a hole or two in it. This process is called “distressing” the piece, he told me, and it is not to be confused with faking. There is no intention on his part of selling the distressed piece as a genuine antique, but he finds that people do not want antique reproductions which look too new. There is some moral obliquity in this matter, but I cannot discover exactly where it lies. The thing which interests me is that mankind does not yet appear to have improved upon the designs for chairs which were perfected in the eighteenth century. What is wrong? Has human inventiveness reached a dead end?
• OF A LAUGHABLE DELUSION •
NO MAN’S NEWSPAPER writings should be saved and produced in evidence against him. Take the case of G. B. Shaw, who served a term as a drama critic about 1895; today I was reading what he said about the first appearance of The Importance of Being Earnest; he did not think much of it; this play, which is now pretty generally acknowledged to be one of the great farces of our literature, appeared to Shaw to be old-fashioned—as if that made any difference, so long as it was good. But the funniest thing in the review is Shaw’s assertion that the comedy was not of a high order because he was not “touched” by it. It is a popular delusion (and therefore the last thing one would expect G.B.S. to embrace) that really funny things are also “touching.” Sentimental twaddle! And, by the way, was anybody ever touched by any of the comedies of old Barney Shaw, the Swan of the Liffey?
• OF KEROSENE •
AS THE ONTARIO Hydro is suffering from what certain advertisements (not theirs) call “waning powers and general debility” I have to install a kerosene heater in one room of my house which I used to heat with electricity. This has brought to my notice the appalling rise in the price of kerosene since my boyhood. In those days everybody had a large can of the stuff in the woodshed, with a potato stuck on the spout, and if a stove was not burning satisfactorily you poured a gallon or two of kerosene on the flames. Women were burned bald, doing this, and children were consumed like little phœnixes (although they never rose again from their ashes) and even fathers of households were Called to Their Reward blazing like heretics in the fires of the Inquisition, and shrieking to be extinguished. But with the cost of kerosene nowadays only the very rich would be able to afford this form of spectacular demise.
• OF THE PLEASURES OF SELF-PITY •
I LISTENED TO some people discussing an absent friend this afternoon, and as always on such occasions, they were much franker than if the friend had been within earshot. He was, they agreed, sadly given to self-pity; they seemed to regard this as a grave defect. I wonder why people are so down on self-pity? It is a cheap, agreeable amusement, requiring no elaborate equipment, like golf or polo. It imparts a pleasing melancholy to the countenance and a note of gentle charm to the voice. Most people despise self-pity in others because it makes them slightly uncomfortable, which is a selfish reason for disapproving of anything. But I have always found that there is nothing like a good wallow in self-pity when my spirits are low, and I do not grudge to others an indulgence which has given me so much harmless pleasure.
• OF TELEPHONIST’S NECK •
AT THE RISK of giving offence to any living descendants of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, I must confess that I hate and fear the telephone. There is something superstitious in my attitude toward it; I credit the thing with the ability to see, as well as hear. When I speak on the phone I wear a false smile; while I am listening I grin and nod my head and flash my eyes, to show it that I am paying attention. Real men of business, who are not afraid of phones, do not do these things. They grab the phone and spit in its face; I have even seen them grip the thing by pressing it into the flesh of their necks, and then use their hands to write, strike matches, and push buzzers. I have tried this neck trick once or twice myself, in a spirit of bravado, but I merely drop the phone, giving the impression on the other end of the wire that I have fainted, or been shot. My neck isn’t strong enough, or adhesive enough, I suppose. A deeply creased neck, with hundreds of tiny suckers in it, like the tentacle of an octopus, is what’s wanted.
• OF NUT INTEMPERANCE •
I WAS INVEIGLED yesterday to help a friend stretch some new canvas over the frame of a chair. I should have more sense than to get myself involved in tasks which lie beyond the limits which Nature has set upon my capabilities, but I never learn wisdom. We fastened the canvas on, and of course there was a bubble in it, so we chased the bubble up and down for an hour, pulling out nails and knocking them in again and getting them crooked and smashing our thumbs and growing very ill-tempered. To soothe our nerves we ate most of a heart-shaped box of salted nuts which he had given his wife as a Valentine; prohibitionists talk about the devilish hold which Demon Rum takes on its devotees, but it is a trifle compared with thralldom to the salted nut. We both tied on a sizeable nut bun, and the whites of our eyes were turning yellow before midnight.
• OF THE CHARMS OF PRISON •
EARLIER THIS EVENING I joined in a discussion as to whether hanging is not to be preferred to life imprisonment; they all thought that it was, particularly the ladies. But I am not so sure. Life is sweet, even when it is confined, and I am sure that if I were imprisoned for life I could, by various winning ways, get myself a soft job in the penitentiary library, or as the Warden’s chef, and contrive quite a pleasant existence. I would tell the warders funny stories, and suck up to the Chaplain so that he would let me play the organ on Sundays, and become the Prison Pet. In time I would be a “trusty,” perhaps even a stool-pigeon, and in the kingdom of the mind I should roam freely. So much for prison. But what of hanging? The trap drops, down I go, and then—? No, no; not for Marchbanks. Social security and a nice cell for him, every time.
• OF AN IMPROVING BOOK •
I WAS READING that great Canadian classic, Beautiful Joe by Marshall Saunders, to some children today. I had forgotten what a grisly book it is. Cruelty, drunkenness and meanness abound in it, which accounts for its popularity with the young, who love cheap sensationalism. But, oh how good the good people in it are! In one chapter a poor sailor boy, who owns a parrot, confesses to a clergyman that he calls his pet “Beelzebub.” This flummoxes the parson, and one of the parson’s little boys “turned away with his face a deep scarlet, and walked to the window murmuring ‘Beelzebub, Prince of Devils.’ ” How the child got this notion I do not know; an adherent of some church with a very loose theology, no doubt, for when I went to Sunday School “Beelzebub” meant “Prince of Flies,” and was considered a very third-rate sort of devil… In modern children’s books no boy ever flushes a deep scarlet; they are too dumb. The heroes and heroines of modern children’s books are all feeble-minded… But the good clergyman persuaded the sailor boy to rename his parrot “Bella,” thus whitewashing it. I never knew but one parrot, which was called “Stinker,” for the best of reasons. It lived in a pub.
&n
bsp; • OF IRREGULAR MENSURATION •
THAT GENTLEMEN over there, whom I met just before dinner, remonstrated with me about my careless statement, hastily thrown into the conversation, that Thackeray drank 1,500 bottles of wine a year; the correct figure, he said, was 500. This seems very likely, and I attribute my use of the larger figure to the rich generosity of my nature. I have never been good at remembering figures and statistics depress me. When I was a schoolboy I was the despair of the teachers of mathematics, and since my escape from the education-mills I have had as little as possible to do with their dismal mystery. When I have to estimate a yard of anything I do it by stretching whatever it is from the tip of my nose to the end of my outflung arm; when I have to estimate heights, I mentally judge how many times I could lie at full length in the distance to be measured. These are not the methods of an Isaac Newton, but they suffice for my humble needs. I live a non-mathematical life, full of uncertainty, unreason and delicious surmise.
• OF PASSION IN TORONTO •
I VISITED A famous Toronto confectioner’s this afternoon and found all the salesgirls wearing their coats and shivering with cold. One large window was out and was being replaced with a new sheet of plate glass. It appears that last night two men had an argument in front of the shop and one of them was thrown through the window, wrecking the pane and bringing about the ruin of two dozen Maids of Honour. Outside a young man walked by with his arm in a sling. “That’s the fellow who was hurt the other day by the young girl,” said one of the coated waitresses, but did not say how, or why. What violent creatures these Torontonians are! What passions smoulder beneath those flat bosoms, what rage lurks behind those lacklustre eyes! There is a Sicilian strain in the people of Toronto, ready at any moment to shatter their exterior of blanc-mange-like calm.
• OF STAGE IRISHMEN •
(A Weariness of the Flesh)
LAST WEEKEND I went to Kingston, to attend the Eastern Ontario Drama Festival. All these festivals have many factors in common. The small people are always seated behind the big people, and even the biggest people are apt to find themselves behind middle-sized people who have fuzzy hair or are wearing huge hats; the proportion of coughers in every festival is constant, and they whoop up the rags of their lungs with the same revolting relish year after year; the pictures of theological professors on the wall are as disapproving as ever, though as their paint fades they become more remote from the scene; the actors, whether they are playing earls or garbage men, are all linked in the same conspiracy never, under any circumstances, to polish their shoes; doors which opened inward at dress rehearsals show a baffling tendency to open outward at performances; and, among the audience, blood lust against the adjudicator rises hour by hour, as he probes the sore spots, the malformations and the tuberculous lumps of each festival offering with a pitiless finger. It is all fascinating but painful, and in Spain where the bullfight is enjoyed, drama festivals are strictly forbidden as inhumane.
I found time in the midst of the festival to make a hospital visit, and had a chance to observe several internes while cooling my heels in the halls. In the movies, whenever Gregory Gable or Clarke Peck pretends to be an interne, he wears a beautifully fitted white suit which shows his hairy forearms (and if a nurse had wool like that on her arms she would be thrown out of the profession as insanitary, but never mind that) and swathes his neck in a roundabout collar which gives him a fetchingly clerical look. But in real life internes tend to be fellows with no chests, and their pants have been so shrunk by the laundry that they walk as though they were being sawn in two, which is probably the case.… A festival actor confided to me today that he awoke this morning with a horrible headache, which was aggravated by a loud fiendish sneering noise near his pillow; as he painfully hoisted the lid of one gummy eye, he observed that the noise was made by a fizzing glass of bromo-seltzer which a kind friend had prepared for him. This just shows what sensitive fellows actors are.
A play about Irishmen, written by a man with a German name, engaged the attention of the festival-goers at a matinee. It made a liberal—not to say prodigal—use of a peculiar type of speech never heard in Ireland, or anywhere but in such plays as this. In this play, if one character said “Good morning” to another, he was likely to get some such answer as this: “Houly St. Pathrick, Barney O’Lunacy, sure and bedad tis yerself is just afther kissin’ the Blarney Stone, at all, at all!” I rather like plays in which pretty girls confess their readiness to be loved by anybody at all, and in which old Irishmen cry into red handerchiefs without any apparent reason, and in which policeman are much wittier than they ever are in real life—but I cannot bear these things when expressed in phoney Irish dialect. If I have to listen to more than one act of such stuff, sure an’ ’tis meself is the boyo that’s after throwin’ up in the aisle. So I crept from the scene, and refreshed myself by listening to a couple of real Irishmen who were digging a hole in the street nearby, and who conversed solely in grunts.
• OF ALL WEEKS’ WEEK •
I AM ALARMED by the increase of special “weeks.” “Eat an Apple Week,” “Immunization Week,” “Education Week,” “Sterilization Week,” “Swat the Fly Week,” “False Teeth for Pensioners Week”—there is no end to them. Every seven-day stretch is two or three “weeks.” There was a time when the Holy Church suffered from so many saints’ days that nobody was able to observe them all and do any work as well, and a calendar had to be arranged with a very few important saints who got a whole day to themselves, while the remainder were taken care of on All Saints’ Day, November 1. I recommend that an All Weeks’ Week be decided upon, and that every form of enthusiasm be given free rein while it is in progress. But once it is over there must be no “weeks” at all.
• OF IMPUDENT TRACTS •
AN ENVELOPE full of tracts came for me in the mail this morning. Tracts always ask foolish questions. “Are you on the way to Heaven?” said one of these. “Are you prepared to meet God?” said another. “Are you prepared for Eternity?” asked a third. “Are you going to a Christless grave?” enquires the last of the bunch. Really, I do not know the answers to these questions, and I doubt the ability of whoever writes the shaky English grammar of these tracts to answer them for me. I am not even prepared to meet Professor Einstein or Bertrand Russell; why should I vaingloriously assume that God would find me interesting? And I really cannot claim to be prepared for Eternity when I have so many doubts about today. I wish that whatever God-intoxicated pinhead directs these inquiries to me would cease and desist. In the struggle of the Alone toward the Alone, I do not like to be jostled.
• WHAT KILLED THE PARLOUR ORGAN •
AN OPPORTUNITY presented itself to play a reed organ, or “parlour” organ this afternoon, and I seized it eagerly, for it is many years since I had a whack at such an instrument. Really it is not more than a gigantic mouth-organ, blown by foot power. And what foot power! It is popularly believed that our grandmothers were un-athletic, but no girl who operated a parlour organ lacked exercise, pumping with her feet, clawing at the Vox Humana and Celeste stops with her hands and wagging her head to keep time. But the parlour organ went out when short skirts came in. Many a young fellow of the 90’s, charmed by his girl’s command of her organ, married her, only to discover on his wedding night that she had legs like an eight-day bicycle racer—the result of furious pedalling. When skirts were raised, the jig was up.
• OF SPORTS AND PASTIMES •
I HEARD LAST evening about a physical fitness test which was used in the Air Force, called the Harvard Step Test. Here it is: step on and off an ordinary kitchen chair once every second for three minutes. If, by the end of that time you have not dropped dead, your physical condition is satisfactory, and you probably will not drop dead until tomorrow. As soon as I heard of this I was agog to try it, and lasted splendidly for about twenty seconds; then I heard a sound in my ears like the boiling of a cauldron of maple sap, and I decided to sit down and accept a cool drink and a cigarette. Th
e only physical exercise at which I really excel is walking downstairs.
Many people complain to me that the world has become degenerate, and that we now rely on mechanical entertainments, instead of making our own fun. This is not true in one aspect of life, at least; nowadays we all make our own wrong numbers. There was a time, before the dial phone, when we relied on the operators at “Central” to get wrong numbers for us, and very good at it they were, too. But now we do it all by ourselves; somebody hoiked me out of bed at 7:10 this morning absolutely unaided.… Those “Central” girls developed wonderful voices and stupefying accents. One lifted the receiver from the hook. “Nubbaw?” said a voice. “9999,” one said. “Nyun, nyun, nyun, nyun,” said the voice, and after a few clicks one was talking to 9989, who had got out of his deathbed to answer the ring. Effete, dependent old days!