There is little that could be called heroic about our hero at this point, but worse is coming, and that without delay. In descending to the next level of infamy, let us follow the example of an illustrious predecessor, and begin a new Canto.
CHAPTER 12
The Dinner Party: I—Containing a skein
of many colors.
NATUHAL PHILOSOPHY has reached a stage of progress at which it can predict with confidence that the mixing of certain substances will produce a material capable of detonating, to the detriment of the persistence of life and property within a known radius. Unfortunately, that branch of philosophy dealing with human reactions, known in our time as psychology, has arrived at no such level of certainty, human spirits proving, for some reason, less amenable to systematizing than gases or metals. That this is only a temporary setback, and that eventually science will be able to predict the behavior of a middle-aged Caucasian as accurately as it can that of hydrogen, no one doubts, but in the meantime the margin of uncertainty makes many undertakings risky, and not the least dangerous of these is the composition of a dinner party. Talmadge Marquis, no close reasoner on human relationships in any case, can therefore not be blamed for inadvertently compounding a brew of souls which went off with an explosion that shattered several lives and brought his own pleasure dome down on his head in a tinkling heap.
Andrew Reale and Honey Beaton, in evening dress, stood at the threshold of the Marquis home on East Seventieth Street in New York, on a warm and humid evening in early July. The old three-story house had been designed by a naïve architect of the last decade of the nineteenth century to whom walls were not walls unless they were soundproof, ceilings not ceilings unless twice a man’s height intervened between them and the floor, and fireplaces not fireplaces unless they were places for fires; while his taste in exterior decorations ran to such things as ornate ironwork and white stone lions. As Andrew rang the doorbell his fiancée glanced at the evidences of old fashion with surprise, for our hero had been praising the splendors of the Marquis establishment for a month. Andrew saw her expression and said quickly, “Pay no attention to the outside. It’s all been done over inside, and–” the opening of the front door interrupted his sentence and rendered further description unnecessary, for, as Laura stepped past the butler through the doorway, the wonder itself lay before her.
The brass horse in the hallway caught and held her eye immediately. He was not a horse as the lions were lions, ploddingly taken from life. Oh no! He stood on a severe table before a huge round bronze-tinted mirror imbedded in the dark blue wall, and he was a horse streamlined, unhorsified, geometrized until nothing equine of him remained but the toss of his head with which he looked back at his body, contemplating that arrangement of cones and cylinders with vacant dismay. Andrew took Laura’s arm and led her to the living room, where Marquis stepped out of the group of chatting and drinking guests to welcome them.
Laura’s eyes, as she entered the room, were treated to the sight of a riotous marriage of mathematical forms and pastel tints, a nuptial delirium of Euclid and Iris. The low tables were planes tangent to and resting on metal circles; the carpet was a vast gray square, innocent of designs; the chairs were upholstered green parabolas; the huge sofa was a hollowed tan parallelepiped; the drape masking the far end of the room was a single yellow oblong; the very flower vases and ash trays were coppery polygonal prisms; and all was lighted from concealed sources with a diffused radiance that cast nothing so irregular and uncalculated on the scene as a shadow. While Laura scanned these objects of her beloved’s admiration, the soul of the display came tripping up to greet them in the form of the fair Carol, climactically fashionable in a gray silk gown topped with a wine-red-lined cowl which she wore demurely over her jetty hair. She greeted Laura familiarly, for she had become friendly with her at Michael Wilde’s studio, where her presence as a worshipful art student had been tolerated by the painter while he was depicting Laura as “Charity.” Indeed, Wilde had at first taken some pleasure in reviling the youngster for being a parasite and in exhorting her to become a nun, but upon seeing that everything he said was received with groveling and meaningless admiration he left off the uncontested argument in disgust and had permitted the young ladies to chatter. Thus it was that these positive and negative poles in Reale’s career had become “Carol” and “Honey” to each other. The greeting of Laura by the young hostess was a long, effusive business, while the welcome to Andrew was a brief “Hello there” and a briefer squeeze of the hand, which was all very proper.
–The brass horse in the hallway–
Gathered around the honored guest of the evening in the center of the room, a knot of brilliantly bedight ladies and elegant gentlemen were all talking at once, and like a cornered bear among dogs, Father Stanfield loomed great among them, his shoulders as high as most of their heads–for you must know, reader, that this feast of Belshazzar was in celebration of the renewal of the contract between Aurora Dawn and the Faithful Shepherd, after twelve weeks of unique success, with a Hooley which still floated lonely as a cloud in the cerulean reaches of the high fifties, while the comedians and jazz singers whom he had overtopped bobbed impotently around thirty-five, like balloons which have reached a height where the thinness of the air nullifies the buoyancy of their gas. When Laura and Andy arrived, the Shepherd was undergoing a bantering attack for his views on ladies’ clothing and was defending himself with a high good humor which had already sent one blushing matron to the privacy of a bedroom to revise the steepness of her décolletage. The other guests, drinks in hand, pressed around him to argue and to laugh.
Now dinner was announced, and the banqueters, their souls wafted on the pleasant fumes of the red, brown, green, blue, yellow, purple, or orange versions of alcohol they had consumed, marched hilariously to the dining room, which might have shocked them, had they been in a less hedonic state, with the suddenness of its change in style from the living room; for it was “done” with painful authenticity in the English manner of a hundred and fifty years ago, as though the decorator had indulged a taste for allegory to testify that, however modern living might become, dining remained an old-style affair. Each guest was graciously pointed to a place by young Miss Marquis, and the dinner began.
It will be well to trace how the characters were disposed in this fatal symposium. At the head of the table sat Mr. Marquis, of course, and facing him at the other end was his winsome daughter, the cowl now thrown back from her raven coiffure. On Marquis’s right hand bulked Father Stanfield. On his left was a lady known to all present as Mrs. Towne: a tall, slender brunette of perhaps twenty-eight summers, who had little to say but said that little good-naturedly, and who had not been seen to arrive at the party, having been in the living room, very much at home, when the first guests came. Beside her sat Stephen English, and next to him, the fair Laura. Walter Grovill, the fat advertising man, giggled at Laura’s left side. In an effort to overcome his self-conscious stiffness at being in his master’s home he had rapidly swallowed four drinks, and his geniality-mechanism, broken loose from its moorings, was carrying him away helplessly. Next to him was Mrs. Leach, wife of his small, bitter partner, who seemed to have shrunk in the course of years from a normal stature to that of her spouse, acquiring all the discontented wrinkles of his face in so contracting. Since scarcely a day went by wherein this good wife did not calculate how much richer she would be, and how much more elaborate a household she could afford, if the advertising firm were Thomas Leach, Incorporated, instead of Grovill and Leach; and since she had already decided this evening that she could easily have a living room like Marquis’s were it not for the sums that went for Grovill’s salary and dividends; and since she hated Grovill with a separate, entirely altruistic hatred because of his recent marriage, for reasons which will be clear when the focus shifts to Mrs. Grovill; her juxtaposition to her husband’s friend depressed her far beyond the poor power of alcohol to add or detract, and rendered her fully qualified for the an
cient office of the Death’s head at the feast.
Between Mrs. Leach and Carol sat Michael Wilde, facing, as he protestingly pointed out, his own handiwork, the portrait of Marquis which hung on the wall opposite: “I’m perfectly familiar with the piece,” he said, “and placing me here is depriving someone else of the pleasure and profit of contemplating it”: but the wily Carol who directed the seating would have him no place but at her right hand. On her left sat Mr. Van Wirt, most unhappily sandwiched between Carol and the strange Mrs. Grovill. The latter, a very tall, strikingly handsome red-haired young lady about twenty-five years of age, was an old friend of Laura’s, and had been known in her days of work for the Pandar Model Agency as Flame Anders. Walter Grovill had wooed this auburn beauty doggedly for two years, and had been startled one day by a sudden and utter capitulation. Edith Grovill–for “Flame” had been quenched at the altar–worked as a model no more, dropped her former friends, acquired a rich wardrobe, and spent most of her time in shopping, or in lying around Grovill’s apartment in undress, reading novels. She also gained a singular reserve, and could go for days without speaking, except when addressed. At this dinner party she had not as yet voiced a syllable, having answered all greetings and gallantries with a mechanical but dazzling smile that was as acceptable as the best repartee of the newest wit in town. The astute reader will perceive with no further instruction why this creature was hated by the wife of her husband’s partner, and why Grovill, like a moon, received some of the reflected green rays of this hatred. But, we were sympathizing with Van Wirt. The efficient administrator was in a difficult case, since neither short arrogance nor scrambling humility, his two natural bearings, quite served with these two females, nor was his wide experience with demireps of much avail. Carol, in her determined prodding of Wilde to elicit remarks she might quote, ignored Van Wirt as though his chair had been vacant, while Mrs. Grovill paid no more heed to his hard-wrought pleasantries than if she had been deaf. To be simultaneously snubbed on the left hand and on the right by two beautiful young ladies is possibly the least congenial experience a man in his late forties can be made to undergo; and therefore, at least to the outward observer of the group at dinner, Van Wirt, of all present, was most to be pitied.
On the left side of the red-headed Sphinx sat Andrew Reale, and beside him, due to the numerical unbalance of males and females, was placed Mr. Leach. The sad downward lines of Leach’s face were softened by the alchemist warmly at work in his veins, and he occasionally interjected a remark in the main conversation which indicated that it was no mean mother-wit that he had dammed and channelized into the uses of advertising. The ring on his finger rotated in a steady, mellow motion. As to Mrs. Van Wirt, Carol had shown her shrewdness in seating her on Leach’s left hand, next to Father Stanfield; for that lady was bulging, brightly-clad, middle-aged, and of an inoffensive church-going suburbanity–of all the females of the party, much the safest for insulating the unpredictable preacher–a layer of lead to screen the X-ray of his feared humor.
This, then, was the array of the dinner.
What a tangled knot of interest and passion was here, in this gathering, this blithe rectangle of fourteen polite people! Supposing that human relationships, instead of being impalpable tensions of spirit, had suddenly materialized at this table in the form of colored silken threads, a color for each feeling–red for desire, blue for greed, yellow for fear, green for hate, black for envy, brown for disgust, orange for pride, purple for deceit, and, of course, white for love–would they not have had a most gorgeous and not-to-be-unraveled skein among them? Reader, if such a materialization were a risk that all such gatherings faced, with how many of our friends would you and I sit down to dinner? Has a soul walked the ground since time began, all of whose threads, going and coming, would be white?
The fowl had been served; roast duck à l’orange, hugely successful, and quickly reduced to many little heaps of bones. Talmadge Marquis rose, glass in hand. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said he, “I’m a man of few words.” He proceeded to prove this assertion in a tribute, lasting seventeen minutes, to “that great religious leader, Father Stanfield,” to “that great financier and patron of the arts, Steve–you don’t mind my calling you Steve in front of friends–English,” to “that great artist and painter, once you get to know him, Mike Wilde,” and to “this great staff of advertising people who have put across this great show”; his words were few, a vocabulary of possibly two hundred, or one hundred ninety-six if “an-honor-and-a-privilege” were regarded as one (as Mr. Marquis clearly regarded it); so few, that he contrived to fill out seventeen minutes only by the most ingenious permutations and combinations of them.
At last he sat down amid approving murmurs. Now Michael Wilde, at the other end of the table, cleared his throat, and, rubbing his fingers around the brim of a wine glass, began–
But what comes now is crucial. Let us draw the fresh breath of a new chapter.
CHAPTER 13
The Dinner Party: II—Containing Michael Wilde’s
famous “Oration Against Advertising.”
WE EXIST IN A curiously touchy age. No work of fiction dares to peep out on the stage of literature today without first timidly poking forth from the side of the proscenium a placard proclaiming that the story to follow is a lie from one end to the other, and that no person in it actually lived or lives. Now I freely affirm that this history is truth, every word of it, and that every character in it is a breathing human being whom I have seen and talked to, and whom I have named by name. Let any impostor who has the conceit to imagine that one of my people is a parody of himself, beware; I shall bring him to justice for defaming my work by implying that any part of this serious narrative belongs in the frivolous racks of fiction.
MICHAEL WILDE’S ORATION AGAINST ADVERTISING
(Running his fingers absently around the brim of a wine glass, Michael Wilde began thus:)
Marquis, while you were talking I looked around this table and saw that with the exception of the ladies, a banker and two men of God–Stanfield and myself–everyone here wins subsistence through the activity called advertising. Now, I realize that you invited me in the absence, enforced by your sedentary ways, of stuffed tiger heads or other trophies on your walls, a live artist being the equivalent of a dead beast as a social ornament. I will not question your motive because it has given me a chance to do a beautiful and good thing. I should like to entreat all these gentlemen to redeem the strange, bittersweet miracle of their lives, while there is yet time, by giving up the advertising business at once.
Has it ever occurred to any of you gentlemen to examine the peculiar fact that you find bread in your mouths daily? How does this happen? Who is it that you have persuaded to feed you? The obvious answer is that you buy your food, but this just states the question in another, less clear way, because money is nothing but an exchange token. Drop the confusing element of money from the whole process, and the question I’ve posed must confront you bleakly. What is it that you do, that entitles you to eat?
A shoemaker gives shoes for his bread. Well. A singer sings for her supper. Well. A capitalist leads a large enterprise. Well. A pilot flies, a coal-miner digs, a sailor moves things, a minister preaches, an author tells stories, a laundryman washes, an auto worker makes cars, a painter makes pictures, a street car conductor moves people, a stenographer writes down words, a lumberjack saws, and a tailor sews. The people with the victuals appreciate these services and cheerfully feed the performers. But what does an advertising man do?
He induces human beings to want things they don’t want. Now, I will be deeply obliged if you will tell me by what links of logic anybody can be convinced that your activity–the creation of want where want does not exist–is a useful one, and should be rewarded with food. Doesn’t it seem, rather, the worst sort of mischief, deserving to be starved into extinction?
None of you, however, is anything but well fed; yet I am sure that until this moment it has never occurred to
you on what a dubious basis your feeding is accomplished. I shall tell you exactly how you eat. You induce people to use more things than they naturally desire–the more useless and undesirable the article, the greater the advertising effort needed to dispose of it–and in all the profit from that unnatural purchasing, you share. You are fed by the makers of undesired things, who exchange these things for food by means of your arts, and give you your share of the haul.
Lest you think I oversimplify, I give you an obvious illustration. People naturally crave meat, so the advertising of meat is on a negligible scale. However, nobody is born craving tobacco, and even its slaves instinctively loathe it. So the advertising of tobacco is the largest item of expense in its distribution. You must wage continual war against the natural cleanliness of human beings, or the use of nicotine would almost stop. It follows, of course, that advertising men thrive most richly in the service of utterly useless commodities like tobacco or under-arm pastes, or in a field where there is a hopeless plethora of goods, such as soap or whisky.
But the great evil of advertising is not that it is unproductive and wasteful; were it so, it would be no worse than idleness. No. Advertising blasts everything that is good and beautiful in this land with a horrid spreading mildew. It has tarnished Creation. What is sweet to any of you in this world? Love? Nature? Art? Language? Youth? Behold them all, yoked by advertising in the harness of commerce!
Aurora Dawn! Has any of you enough of an ear for English to realize what a crime against the language is in that very name? Aurora is the dawn! The redundancy should assail your ears like the shriek of a bad hinge. But you are so numbed by habit that it conveys no offense. So it is with all your barbarities. Shakespeare used the rhyming of “double” and “bubble” to create two immortal lines in Macbeth. You use it to help sell your Dubl-Bubl Shampoo, and you have no slightest sense of doing anything wrong. Should someone tell you that language is the Promethean fire that lifts man above the animals, and that you are smothering the flame in mud, you would stare. You are staring. Let me tell you without images, then, that you are cheapening speech until it is ceasing to be an honest method of exchange, and that the people, not knowing that the English in a radio commercial is meant to be a lie, and the English in the President’s speech which follows, a truth, will in the end fall into a paralyzing skepticism in which all utterance will be disbelieved.