• OF HIS UNCONSCIONABLE HICCUPS •
THIS, YOU WILL be interested to hear, is my natal day, which finds me in good health and spirits, though a little inconvenienced with hay fever. I have been receiving congratulations and wishes that I might live for a thousand years with becoming modesty. At noon I attended a small testimonial luncheon given by the Marchbanks Humanist Party, which I ruined by getting hiccups. My hiccup is the equal of another man’s shriek, and when I begin a spell of hiccups I am likely to continue for an hour. Once, several years ago, I had to leave a dinner party because of hiccups, and walk a long distance to my lodgings, screeching loudly every few seconds. Policemen glared at me, dogs followed me, and old women wearing W.C.T.U. ribbons sneered at me, and pitied me in angry voices. But I was soberer than most judges, and an unhappy victim of circumstances. Life can be very cruel.
• OF CALENDAR REFORM •
I CHATTED THIS evening to a man who is in the calendar business and who tells me that one mighty industry recently distributed several hundreds of thousands of calendars in which April was credited with 31 days. This is probably the result of a secret coup by the calendar reformers. I do not personally favour calendar reform as I am a friend to inconvenience and inconsistency, believing that the illogicality of our present calendar serves as a useful reminder of the capriciousness of fate and the mutability of all things. The calendar reformers just want to be cosy. A pox on cosiness!
• OF LUMPISM •
I BECAME INVOLVED in an argument about modern painting, a subject upon which I am spectacularly ill-informed; however, many of my friends can become heated, and even violent on the subject and I enjoy their wrangles. In a modest way, I am an artist myself, and I have some sympathy with the Abstractionists, although I have gone beyond them in my own approach to art. I am a Lumpist. Two or three decades ago it was quite fashionable to be a Cubist, and to draw everything in cubes; then there was a revolt by the Vorticists who drew everything in whirls; we now have the Abstractionists who paint everything in a very abstracted manner. But my own small works (done on my telephone pad) are composed of carefully shaded, strangely-shaped lumps, with traces of Cubism, Vorticism and Abstraction in them for those who possess the seeing eye. As a Lumpist, I stand alone.
• OF UNIVERSITY VERSE •
I RECEIVED AN undergraduate magazine this morning, containing the kind of poetry which boys and girls write between eighteen and twenty-one, full of words like “harlot,” “stench,” “whore” and the like. The young have a passion for strong meaty words, and like to write disillusioned verses with jagged edges about the deceit and bitterness of life. I idly turned my hand to versifying, and produced this nice bit of undergraduate poetry, which I offer free to any university magazine:
DISILLUSION
Ugh!
Take it away!
Life—the thirty-cent breakfast
Offered to vomiting Man
In this vast Hangover—
The World.
Onward I reel
Till Fate—the old whore—
Loose or costive
Drops me in the latrine of Oblivion—
Plop!
I> have not lost the youthful, zestful university touch with a bit of verse.
• OF AN AGREEABLE PASTIME •
ON MY WAY HERE tonight I found that an icy crust had formed on all the snow, about an eighth of an inch in thickness, and as I trod it broke into large flat chunks, like dinner plates. I smashed a few of these, experimentally, and found it an admirable release from tension. I began to pretend that the chunks of ice were valuable pieces of china, and this was even more fun. “Here goes a Spode dinner plate!” I cried, and smashed it to smithereens. Then—“Bang goes a half dozen Crown Derby demi tasses!”—and bang they went. Next—“Here’s for those ruddy soup cups I’ve always hated!”—and an armful of them dispersed into atoms. It was glorious. I was a bull in a china shop—an embittered, vindictive bull, revenging itself for a thousand annoyances and injuries. I suppose that, by the time I had finished, I had destroyed about an acre of ice or $50,000 worth of china, and I felt fine. If people had more cheap releases of this kind, there would be fewer deaths from heart failure.
• OF BEETHOVEN’S WIT •
THE PAPERS TELL me that an admirer of Deanna Durbin’s has paid $60 for a lock of Beethoven’s hair to give her, to be added to her collection of musical relics. I hope he sniffed it before paying. It is well-known that Beethoven, who was a nasty man in many ways and possessed of a thoroughly Germanic sense of humour, was pestered all his life by women who wanted his hair, and on more than one occasion he cut a swatch off a goat and sent it to a fan, who presumably wore it in a locket, or sewed it into her corsets next to her heart. I doubt if the smell of goat would wear off, even after 150 years.
• OF HIS PROTEAN PERSONALITY •
ITRAVELLED BY train yesterday, and observed a remarkable change in my character, which would undoubtedly be of the deepest interest to psychologists, if I chose to make it public. There was a queue for the dining car, and as I stood in the narrow corridor, beside the axe, hammer, saw and crowbar which railways display in a little glass showcase (doubtless for sale to tourists) I imagined, and mentally ate, several meals, wondering meanwhile how the gluttons in the diner could take so long. It was sheer malignance, I decided. But when at last I was shown to a table I forgot all this, chose my meal with a gourmet’s care, and then ate it as much like a gourmet as its decidedly poor quality permitted, forgetting all about the needy wretches in the corridor. But when I passed them on my way out their fiery and indignant eyes burned through my waistcoat, giving me heartburn.
• OF HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM •
THE DIFFERENCES between Montreal and Toronto are basic and significant. In Montreal I see dozens of men wearing wigs, and almost as many who obviously wear corsets. In the Queen City of the Trillium Province wigs are a great rarity, and prolapsed abdomens are commonplace. The shiny dome, the swaying paunch—these are marks of respectability in Toronto, and are carefully cultivated; a special wax is used by Toronto barbers for polishing those heads, and the tailors cut the trousers in such a way as to throw the bay window into prominence. They seem to say, “I am a plain, blunt fellow and I scorn subterfuge; the flesh may be weak, but the spirit is of brass.” In Montreal, on the contrary, fanciful wigs are worn by old men, and cruel stays are endured by them, as a tribute to the charm of youth and beauty. Your Montreal man, at thirty or so, cries to the Fleeting Moment in the words of Faust, “Ah, stay, thou art so fair!” and then he buys anything he can get which will keep up a pretence—however scarecrow-like—of youth. It is the old conflict of Hebraism and Hellenism, and upon the whole I plump for Hellenism, even when it means wigs and circingles.
• OF MEAD, OR METHEGLIN •
SOMEBODY HAS sent me a clipping which attempts to prove that the drinking of mead was given its deathblow by the Reformation. The implication is that the Reformation was therefore a Bad Thing. It may be so. I can never decide the matter to my own satisfaction. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I am a rollicking Chestertonian medievalist, shrieking against the Reformation, exulting in any manifestation of unreason, and shoving wads of my shirttail into delicate machines to harm them and show their inferiority; on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday I am a fiery-eyed Puritan, attempting to reconcile modern progress with the blackest Old Testament morality, and yelling for a church which is both completely secular and all-powerful. On Sundays I rest from these theological exercises and read Voltaire.… As for mead, I have been told that it is a delectable drink, and I suppose that my Welsh ancestors drank it out of the horns of rams, in true Celtic style. But they were hearty, outdoors types, innocent of the complications which beset a man today, and I suppose that if one of them had a horrible mead hangover nobody noticed it, or mistook his mutterings for poetry.
• OF SCIENCE •
I SEE IN THE paper that a celebrated Canadian educator said today that no on
e should consider himself educated unless he has some knowledge of science. I wonder if I am educated, by this standard? As a schoolboy I failed with monotonous regularity in chemistry, but I was rather good at physics, which seemed to me to make more sense. Chemistry appeared to consist of efforts to make crystals in a test-tube—efforts which were doomed to failure because the tube was wet, or the chemicals old, or simply because I put too much of something in the mixture. But physics was good fun, permitting me to blow bugles in the classroom (to learn about sound) and to slop happily with acids (to produce electricity) and to grind the cranks of old rusty machinery in order to study the centrifugal principle. My present knowledge of science is not profound; when a car will not go I know enough to say, “Dirt in the gas-line” in a weighty manner, and I can replace a fuse, if goaded to it. I also know that the pressure of the atmosphere on my body is 14 pounds to the square inch (or is it an ounce to every fourteen pounds of body?) All I know about atoms is that they are teeny-weeny. Does this make me educated? Don’t answer.
• OF INTERESTING PHONIES •
CANADA IS growing up. Why? Because we are beginning to have interesting phonies upon our national horizon. Of late I have seen two or three good examples of the Phoney Westerner. This type is interesting, for although he comes from the West, he is a business man, in no way different from his Eastern counterpart. But he wears a big hat, and a horse-head pin in his tie, and he is very, very breezy. He walks with the gait of a man who is carrying a keg between his thighs, and this is meant to suggest a familiarity with horses. He is full of tangy, open-air oaths and he treats women as though they were idiots, this being his way of showing respect for their purity. He corresponds to that American type, the Phoney Southerner. We shall see more of him, as time passes, and the West becomes more and more sophisticated.
• A BAS LES ANIMAUX! •
I ATE MY FIRST Canadian margarine today and found it disappointing. It was neither the nauseous concoction of train-oil and soap which the dairymen had led me to expect, nor did it taste of glorious liberty and the Triumph of the People over Vested Interests. It just tasted like butter. And yet this might have been expected. Surely man can produce, by scientific means, something as good, or better than the goo which a cow exudes without using her mind at all? Having beaten the cow at her own game, Triumphant Man will march onward to the synthetic egg and then to laboratory-made beef-steak. At the moment a whole large class of society is doomed to coddle and valet a lot of idle, ungrateful animals. Get rid of the animals, say I! Kick them back into the forests whence they came! They have leeched and battened upon man for aeons, but their day is done. In the world to come there will be no farmers—only scientists, leaning on the gates of their laboratories, yammering about the low prices they get for their stuff, and whining if it is suggested that they pay income tax.
• OF BABY TALK •
A MAN WAS HOLDING forth to me before dinner about how much he disliked baby-talk; anyone who used baby-talk to a dog, or a woman, or even a baby, was in his opinion a contemptible creature, capable of any inanity. But I am not so sure. I don’t care for men who have no silliness in them, and I have known some men of remarkable character who were not above a spell of baby-talk, upon a proper occasion. And indeed that wonderful man Dean Swift used a lot of very babyish baby-talk in his letters to Esther Johnson, whom he called “Stella.” One winces a little as one reads it, but one winces far more sharply when one thinks what Swift might have become if he had not been able to let himself go in that manner. There is a certain spiritual indecency in overhearing any man talking baby-talk or making love, but that does not mean that it is wrong or indecent of him to do so.
• A RETURN TO THE GOLDEN AGE •
A FRIEND WAS telling me today about a little girl he knows who was sent some handkerchiefs for her birthday. “Look, Mummy,” cried the moppet in amaze; “cloth kleenex!” This child will be an ideal citizen of the Age of Substitutes, into which we are fast moving. For a time we shall use nothing except foods, fabrics and substances which have been made in imitation of the age-old gifts of nature. Then as time passes, distinguished scientists will discover that a cloth of superior properties can be made from the wool of sheep, that amusing drinking cups can be made from the horns of beasts, and that a piquant beverage can be produced by allowing honey to ferment. And thus, by the roundabout methods which appeal to scientists and worshippers of Progress, we shall return to the Golden Age. I hope that I live long enough to see it.
• OF THE LANGUAGE OF STAMPS •
YEARS AGO I possessed a dictionary in the back of which was some information about the language of flowers; it appeared that the most complex messages could be expressed by a properly composed bouquet. Mind you, those speaking floral tributes might not always be pleasing to the eye: to say, “I shall love you till death; meet me at the hollow oak tomorrow evening; my laundry has come back and I shall wear a clean shirt,” one might have to combine a pansy, a gladiolus and a truss of Baby’s Breath—a difficult bunch to make presentable. Later I learned that there is also a language of stamps; if the stamp is stuck on the envelope cockeyed it means, “I despise you” or “I adore you,” according to the way the King’s head is pointing. There are other variations, some of which I invented myself. To omit the stamp from the letter altogether means “You are richer than I am and can well afford to pay double postage.” To glue a cancelled stamp on a letter means “I am in revolt against our Country’s fiscal system.” To draw spectacles on the King’s head means “I harbour subversive opinions.”
• OF TATTOOING •
I SEE THAT THE art of tattooing is said to be in decline. When I lived in England I passed No. 72 Waterloo Road every day on my way to work, where a great artist in this field, G. Burchett, had his atelier. I never ventured inside, but I admired the rich display of designs in the window, and sometimes I would see a man going in or coming out, wearing a special defiant look. I am too timid to do anything so irrevocable as to have my hide ornamented but I understand and sympathize with those who do so. The ordinary designs—fouled anchors, flags, ships, naked women and the like—obviously would appeal to many men; but who, I wondered, took up G. Burchett’s offer to tattoo the Apostle’s Creed on his chest, or his thigh? Did divinity students creep through the door at night, for this service? Or did atheists cause themselves to be so tattooed that whenever they sat down they affronted, so to speak, the whole of Christendom? Perhaps I shall never know.… No madam, I did not know that your husband is a clergyman.… Yes, as a child I often sat upon the whole of Holy Writ, in large print and fully illustrated, in order that I might reach the level of the dinner table.… Very well, if you choose to take that attitude.
• A GIFT TO HOLLYWOOD •
ISEE THAT A family has died of carbon monoxide poisoning at a place called Ingomar, in Pennsylvania. Was the town named after the old play of Ingomar adapted by Maria Lovell from the German drama by Eligius Franz Joseph Munch-Bellinghausen, called Der Sohn der Wildnis which was popular from 1842 until the beginning of this century? Ingomar is such tripe that I wonder why the movies do not do a version of it. Ingomar is a wild man of the woods, who laughs a great deal until he meets a very civilized girl who quickly has him twining rose wreaths, working 16 hours a day as a farm hand, and eating cooked food. Then he stops laughing, and realizes that in Civilization Woman has the Upper Hand (a philosophy widely popular on this continent at the moment). A movie of this piece, with Bing Crosby as Ingomar (singing Boo-boo-boo instead of laughing) and Joan Fontaine as the Civilized Maiden should prove one of Hollywood’s most successful boob-squeezers and I give them the idea free.
• OF HISTORICAL NOVELS •
THE LADY ON my right who has had quite a bit of experience of lending libraries tells me that a great many people demand a historical novel, “but not too far back,” for week-end reading. Now why “not too far back”? Perhaps because of the widespread belief that people who lived long ago were not as smart as we are, an
d did not do very interesting things. Modern historical novels have spread the delusion that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries people gave all their time to sex, and in the nineteenth century devoted themselves wholly to sex and adventures, such as building railroads. But previous to the seventeenth century people had neither sex nor railroads, and were consequently of no interest to anyone, even themselves.
• OF TALKING DOLLS •
I WATCHED A very small child playing with a Mama-doll this afternoon; when the doll emitted its painful, catlike cry (as much like the squeal of an overloaded stomach as the voice of a child) the face of the tot would be filled with concern, and it would stare deeply into the eyes of its toy, obviously wondering what ailed it. I take a mild interest in dolls and I am always a little irked when I hear the Mama-doll referred to as a triumph of American ingenuity. As a matter of fact it was invented by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who died in 1838 and was a German; he is best known for his invention of the Maelzel Metronome, to the nagging tick-tock of which millions of music students have practised their pieces. He was an inventor and handyman of unusual ability, and among other things he invented an ear-trumpet which his friend Beethoven wore for many years; it was an awesome crumpled horn which was affixed to the head with a clamp. Maelzel’s Mama-doll may have had a better voice than the modern product, for it contained a more elaborate works, and it could also say “Papa.”