20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or David Copperfield Read online

  “Now we must get together in the fall,” you say. “I am in the book. The first time you come to town give me a ring and we’ll go places and see things.” And you promise to do the same thing whenever you happen to be in Grand Rapids or Philadelphia. You even think that you might make a trip to Grand Rapids or Philadelphia especially to stage a get-together.

  The first inkling you have that maybe you won’t quite take a trip to Grand Rapids or Philadelphia is on the day when you land in New York. That morning everyone appears on deck dressed in traveling clothes which they haven’t worn since they got on board. They may be very nice clothes and you may all look very smart, but something is different. A strange tenseness has sprung up and everyone walks around the deck trying to act natural, without any more success than seeming singularly unattractive. Some of your bosom friends, with whom you have practically been on the floor of the bar all the way over, you don’t even recognize in their civilian clothes.

  “Why, look who’s here!” you say. “It’s Eddie! I didn’t know you, Eddie, with that great, big, beautiful collar on.” And Eddie asks you where you got that hat, accompanying the question with a playful jab in the ribs which doesn’t quite come off. A rift has already appeared in the lute and you haven’t even been examined yet by the doctors for trachoma.

  By the time you get on the dock and are standing around among the trunks and dogs, you may catch sight of those darling people, the Dibbles, standing in the next section under “C,” and you wave weakly and call out, “Don’t forget, I’m in the book!” but you know in your heart that you could be in a book of French drawings and the Dibbles wouldn’t look you up – which is O. K. with you.

  Sometimes, however, they do look you up. Perhaps you have parted at the beach on a bright morning in September before you went up to get dressed for the trip to the city. The Durkinses (dear old Durkinses!) were lying around in their bathing suits and you were just out from your last swim preparatory to getting into the blue suit.

  “Well, you old sons-of-guns,” you say, smiling through your tears, “the minute you hit town give us a ring and we’ll begin right where we left off. I know a good place. We can’t swim there, but, boy, we can get wet!”

  At which Mr. and Mrs. Durkins scream with laughter and report to Mr. and Mrs. Weffer, who are sitting next, that you have said that you know a place in town where you can’t swim but, boy, you can get wet. This pleases the Weffers, too, and they are included in the invitation.

  “We’ll have a regular Throg’s Point reunion,” Mrs. Weffer says. Mrs. Weffer isn’t so hot at making wisecracks, but she has a good heart. Sure, bring her along!

  Along about October you come into the office and find that a Mr. Durkins has called and wants you to call him at his hotel. “Durkins? Durkins? Oh, Durkins! Sure thing! Get me Mr. Durkins, please.” And a big party is arranged for that night.

  At six o’clock you call for the Durkinses at their hotel. (The Weffers have lost interest long before this and dropped out. The Durkinses don’t even know where they are – in Montclair, New Jersey, they think.) The Durkinses are dressed in their traveling clothes and you are in your business suit, such as it is (such as business is) . You are not quite sure that it is Mrs. Durkins at first without that yellow sweater she used to wear all the time at the beach. And Mr. Durkins looks like a house-detective in that collar and tie. They both look ten years older and not very well. You have a feeling that you look pretty seedy, too.

  “Well, well, here we are again! How are you all?”

  “Fine and dandy. How are you – and the missus?”

  “Couldn’t be better. She’s awfully sorry she couldn’t get in town tonight. (You haven’t even told her that the Durkinses were here.) What’s the news at dear old Throg’s Point?”

  “Oh, nothing much. Very dead after you left.”

  “Well, well – (A pause.) How have you been anyway, you old son of a gun?”

  “Oh, fine; fine and dandy! You all been well?”

  “Couldn’t be better. What was going on at the old dump when you left? Any news? Any scandal?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Well, well – Not a thing, eh? – Well, that’s the way it goes, you know; that’s the way it goes.””

  “Yes, sir, I guess you’re right – You look fine.”

  “Feel fine – I could use a little swim right now, though.”

  “Oh, boy, couldn’t I though!” (The weather being very cold for October, this is recognized by both sides as an entirely false enthusiasm, as neither of you ever really cared for swimming even in summer.)

  “How would you like to take a walk up to Sammy’s for a lobster sandwich, eh?”

  “Say, what I couldn’t do to one right now! Boy! Or one of those hot dogs!”

  “One of Sammy’s hot dogs wouldn’t go bad right now, you’re right.”

  “Well, well – You’ve lost all your tan, haven’t you?”

  “Lost it when I took my first hot-water bath.”

  This gets a big laugh, the first, and last, of the evening. You are talking to a couple of strangers and the conversation has to be given adrenalin every three minutes to keep it alive. The general atmosphere is that of a meeting in a doctor’s office.

  It all ends up by your remembering that, after dinner, you have to go to a committee meeting which may be over at nine o’clock or may last until midnight and they had better not wait for you. You will meet them after the theater if you can. And you know that you can’t, and they know that you can’t, and, what is more, they don’t care.

  So there you are! The example that I gave has been rather long; so there isn’t much room left for a real discussion of the problem. But the fact remains that people are one thing in one place and another thing in another place, just as a hat that you buy in the store for a natty gray sport model turns out to be a Confederate general’s fatigue-cap when you get it home. And if you know of any explanation, I don’t care to hear about it. I’m sick of the subject by now anyway.

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  A Short History

  of American Politics

  * * *

  Those of you who get around to reading a lot will remember that a history of American politics was begun by me several chapters back – or rather, an introduction to such a history was written. Then came the Great War. . . brother was turned against brother, father against father; the cobblestones of the Tuileries were spattered with the blood of the royalists, and such minor matters as histories were cast aside for the musket and ploughshare. In crises such as that of March, 1928, the savants must give way to the men of action.

  Now that the tumult and the shouting have died, however, the history of American politics can be written. The only trouble at present is that I have lost the introduction I wrote several months ago. It must have fallen down behind the bureau and the wall of the Kremlin.

  To write another introductory preface would be silly, and that is the reason I have decided to write one. The other one was probably not much good, anyway. So while you all go ahead and read the other pages of this volume, I will write another introduction to a history of American politics. (That is, I will if I can get this stuff off the keys of my typewriter. Either somebody has rubbed candy over each key while I have been dozing here or the typewriter itself has a strain of maple in it and is giving off sap. I have never run across anything like it in all my experience with typewriters. The “j” key looks so sticky that I am actually afraid to touch it. Ugh!)

  Well, anyway—

  A History of American Politics

  (2 vol., 695 pp. 8vo. . . . 100 to 1 to show.)

  INTRODUCTION

  The theory of political procedure in those countries in which a democratic form of government obtains is based on the assumption that the average citizen knows enough to vote. (Time out for prolonged laughter.)

  The Ideal State of Plato, as you will remember (you liar! ) , was founded on quite a different principle
, but, if you will look at Greece today you will see that something was wrong in that principle, too. Plato felt – and quite rightly – that Truth is the Ultimate Good and that the Ultimate Good is Truth – or the Idea. (Check one of these three.) Now – in the Ideal State, granted that the citizens keep away from the polls and mind their own business, we have an oligarchy or combination of hydrogen atoms so arranged as to form Truth in the Abstract. Of course, Plato wrote only what he had learned from Socrates, and Socrates, like the wise old owl that he was, never signed his name to anything. So that left Plato holding the bag for an unworkable political theory which has been carried down to the present day.

  Aristotle followed Plato with some new theories, but as he dealt mostly with the Drama and Mathematics, with side excursions into Bird Raising and Exercises for the Eye, we don’t have to bother with his ideas on Government. I don’t remember what they were, in the first place.

  This brings us up to 1785, when the United States began to have its first political prickly-heat. It may have been a little before 1785 (I am working entirely without notes or reference books in this history), but 1785 is near enough, for the Revolution didn’t end until around 1782, or 1780, and that would leave a couple of years for George Washington to begin his two terms as President and get things good and balled up. So we will say 1785.

  Here we are, then, a new country, faced with an experiment in government and working on nothing sounder than a belief that the average voter is entitled to have a hand in the running of the State. The wonder is that we have got as far as we have – or have we?

  Now, in this introduction I have tried to outline the main influences in political thought which culminated in the foundation of our form of government. I have omitted any reference to Leboeuf and Froissart, because, so far as I know, Leboeuf and Froissart never had any ideas on the subject; at any rate, not the Leboeuf that I knew. I have not gone into the Hanseatic League or the Guild System, not through any pique on my part, but because, after all, they involved a quite different approach to the question of democratic government and I couldn’t find any pictures which would illustrate them interestingly. If, however, any of my readers are anxious to look up the Hanseatic League, I can refer them to a very good book on the subject called “The Hanseatic League.”

  I can not bring to a close this preface to my history, inadequate as it is, without acknowledging the customary debt of gratitude to France.

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  The Bridge of Sans Gene

  Being a Report of the European Hike of Gene Tunney and Thornton Wilder, Written in the Manner of One of Them – You Must Guess Which

  * * *

  PART ONE

  Don Gene

  The reputation of Don Gene Tunney, campeón del mundo, arose from three sources: a powerful right, a roving left, and an incurable reverence for the classics. Citizens who had seen him fighting in the prize-ring doubted that he could read; those who had seen him under a catalpa tree with a book doubted that he could fight. And yet Don Gene went on fighting and reading, pleasing nobody, least of all his opponents.

  His mind was filled with naive speculations: as to the authenticity of the second half of “A Winter’s Tale”; as to the all-but-obscured date on the first folio of Machiavelli’s “Prince”; as to the probable course and potential discomfort of the freckled fist belonging to the new Desfiador. To all of these, and many more problems, Don Gene turned an ingenuous attention. And, in the meantime he lived immaculately, read much, and punched a large, harassed leather bag.

  It was not strange, therefore, that people who read but little themselves, or those who lived maculately, or those who punched no bags, should look askance at this young man who did all three. There is no more suspicious character in the world, nor one more worthy of ill-natured surveillance, than the man whose life is an open book.

  PART TWO

  El Novelista

  Members of the American Academy at Rome at the beginning of the third decade of the Twentieth Century recall a quiet young man named Wilder who wrote. Everyone knew that one day he would do something great and everyone was very kind and misunderstanding. And so when, a little later, the young man finished an excellent novel, there was great searching of hearts among the members of the American Academy at Rome; for it was found that the novel was dedicated to them. As is often the case with excellent books, this one was read by such as were implicated, by the young man’s relatives, and by nobody else.

  El Novelista Wilder re-introduced delicacy in style to a world which had long been living in squalid sin with realism; he re-wrote his first drafts; he polished his adjectives with meticulous and loving care; he took pains with his work in violation of all the rules of his craft. Later he was to have the distinction of being the first writer in history who, having described one of his characters as being master of lovely phrases, proceeded to fortify his description by actually giving her lovely phrases to use. It is true, in his first book he affected a confusing disdain for quotation-marks; but the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts and as youth grows older its thoughts come closer.

  From Rome, Novelista Wilder emerged with a modest knowledge of mankind, a curiosity as to its navigation, and a commission to instruct the youth of his native land in such matters as he himself had learned at the supple knee of William Lyon Phelps. Peace was in him; things were not going badly. Serene in his conviction that he had presuffered the penalties of gregariousness, he settled down to a platonic strolling through academic groves; he took his time; eventually he wrote another book, which, because of its exquisite treatment of certain Peruvian eccentrics, was awarded a prize for the novel best fostering the standards of North American home-life.

  PART THREE

  The Prize-Writer and the Prize-Fighter

  How it was that Don Gene Tunney and El Novelista came to cross the sea together, nobody knew; how it was that they ever met at all, nobody seemed able to say. It was one of those spectacular partnerships by which Nature proves that she knows her Thoreau. Only those who have walked can ride; only those who have ridden can walk.

  And so it was that one warm afternoon late in the third decade of the Twentieth Century the two were overheard in conversation as they sat resting under the hedge which bordered the estate of Don Speranza Machihembrada y Pegujalero. Don Speranza, being a man of affairs, happened to be in his garden opening letters; he listened to the voices for two reasons: first because they interested him; second, his alternative was to listen to the voice of his conscience, always a tiring conversationalist.

  “It seems to me,” one voice was saying, “that if Shakespeare had meant ‘Nerissa’ to imply suicide he would have written it into the play. I cannot take Royce’s notation as an established fact.”

  The other voice waited; there was a pause.

  “A short punch is sometimes more effective than a wide swing,” the second voice was speaking now. “Look, if you will, at the blow which settled the South American Firpo. Not more than a six-inch arc.”

  “A literary man en tour with a boxer,” said Don Speranza to himself. “An odd combination; or perhaps not so odd. I will see for myself and perhaps add them to my collection.” Don Speranza had the second finest collection of ivory rabbits in all Spain; the other, and still finer collection, belonged to him also.

  The first voice spoke again; it told of the theory held by Gilbert Murray that in Book 22, Line 52 of the Iliad the comma should come after δσμοισιυ, making it read “Sorrow”; of the contemporary account which told of Milton’s being drunk, not blind; of the lost page of Tasso which held the key to the puzzling use of the subjunctive in dealing with Orlando’s love for Wordsworth’s “Lucy.”

  To these, and many other, observations the second voice interposed its owner’s belief that within two more rounds in Chicago Dempsey would have gone to his long home; that a “one-two,” if properly timed, is the most effective form of fisticuff; that the “rabbit-punch,” no mat
ter how prolonged, serves only as an incentive to its victim.

  On hearing these words as he made his way through the hedge, Don Speranza gave thought to the problem of salutation which confronted him. “The one who speaks of Shakespeare and Tasso,” he said to himself, “must be the literary man. Being a literary man myself, having written a preface to the Granada edition of ‘Pepita Jimenez,’ I will address myself to him first.” It will be seen from this that Don Speranza thought things out; his mind was two-edged and keen; he also had the third finest collection of ivory rabbits in all Spain.

  Now according to all satirical badinage in the land of Don Gene’s birth, where he was known as the reading-fighter or the fighting-reader, this account should end with Don Speranza’s discovery that the one who spoke of Shakespeare and Tasso was the boxer; that the one who spoke of fisticuffs, the writer. Such tales have a way of so ending. But life itself has a confusing tendency to be conventional; life itself is possessed of little satire. And Don Speranza was right; it was El Novelista who spoke of Milton; the one who recalled Dempsey was Don Gene, the boxer. And so all three made merry until long after sundown; El Novelista telling of Chaucer; Don Gene of Heeney; Don Speranza of ivory rabbits, of which he had the fourth finest collection in all Spain.

  Some say that we shall never know what to think about our fellowmen, and some say, on the contrary, that the world is a crystal for those who will look into it. And why should it not be so; or, if you will, why should it?

  * * *

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