Read Ebook: The Borzoi 1920: Being a sort of record of five years' publishing by Aiken Conrad Contributor Cather Willa Contributor Dell Floyd Contributor Eliot T S Thomas Stearns Contributor Graves Robert Contributor Mencken H L Henry Louis Contributor Pound Ezra Contributor Van Vechten Carl Contributor Alfred A Knopf Inc

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Strip life of its color, mystery, infinitude; make it stale, make it grey, make it flat; rob the human being of his aura, deny him speech, quicken his movements into galvanic action; people a glaring parallelogram with these gigantic simulacra of men and women moved by sub-human motives; drug the tormented nerves with music, so that the audience shall not go mad--this is the movie as it is to me.

The other day I read a panegyric on the most beautiful of all moving pictures. I forced myself to sit through it though I could scarcely forbear shrieking aloud. It was an amusement seemingly devised for devils in hell.

Only degradation of the soul and a vast despondency result from this seeking joy in the pictured suffering wickedness, weakness of others; in this orgy of sex-sentimentality, silliness, meaningless violence. Such amusement either depraves the mind or arrests its action, and makes of the heart a mechanical toy which must be shaken violently before it will act.

Why do people go to the movies? Because their caged souls seek forgetfulness and joy as insistently as blind eyes yearn for light. But joy is such a stranger to them that they ignorantly mistake this owl-eyed Monster of Darkness for the Blue Bird of Happiness. I have asked many why they go to the movies, and have heard many reasons--most of them bad--but one answer recurs like a refrain: "There isn't any thing else to do." It reminds me of John Russel's reason why Eliza crossed the river on the ice. "The poor girl had no other place to go--all the saloons were closed."

Today all the saloons are closed, and professional philanthropy prides itself on the fact that more men go now to the movies. The saloon was an evil institution, but the prostitution of the mind is worse than any poisoning of the nerves.

The priests of the temple of the Movie Momus do not know that they are offering a form of amusement which stifles the mind and hardens the heart. Doubtless they believe the contrary, but it is a case of the blind led by the blind: Neither know where they are going, and each depends upon the other to lead the way. Producers, impresarios, scenario-writers have always their ears to the ground to catch the first faint rumble of condemnation or approval. Their business is frankly to assimilate the popular taste in order to reproduce it. But this taste is fickle, being that of a child with a digestion impaired by too much of the wrong kind of food. The movie public is like the Athenian populace always eager for "some new thing," and like the Roman mob it shows an insatiable greed for danger cruelty and destruction. Of daring it demands more daring; of beauty more nudity; of wickedness a deeper depth of wickedness; scenery must be ever more sumptuous, orgies more orgiastic, violence more violent. Lacking anything to turn its imagination away from these things, into some new channel, the public can only build high and higher this particular house of cards.

I hear in anticipation the crushing argument against my point of view: The Movies constitute the fourth largest industry in the world; they command the respect of governments, the service of the press, the participation of captains of industry, cabinet members, international bankers. But all this is quite beside the point, and reminds me of the answer once given to my criticism of an absurd soldiers' monument: "It cost fifty thousand dollars and was carved out of a single piece of granite that weighed ten tons."

The Movies too are carved out of a single piece of granite: the granite of ignorance of the obscure spiritual forces now active in the secret hearts of men.

On a vast scale, in infinite variety of detail, the Movies show

"The very age and body of the time its form and pressure."

May not the unforeseen, amazing, ultimate result be to recoil in horror from the image there presented? The Movies represent the quest of joy aborted. Perhaps their true purpose is to bring bitter, but salutary knowledge.

MAXWELL BODENHEIM

While poets have been placed by the critics in this or that category and have lent themselves more or less to the indignity, Maxwell Bodenheim has continued as he began, a poet of disturbing originality. Whether you like him or not, you cannot evade him. Let him once touch you and a perfume is upon you, pungent and yet faint, offensive and yet delicate, of the street and yet exotic. It is as if Pierian springs bubbled crystalline from the nearest sewer, forcing from you a puzzled and troubled enjoyment. It is as if a diamond leered or a rose exhaled sulphur or a humming-bird lanced your self-respect. It is a drunken thief's hand, still deft, in the poetic treasury; nuances pouring Niagaran; sensibilities crowding in masquerade; madness mocking sanity; ideas dancing nude through confetti; a falsetto growl; a whispered song; a rainbow in the loose:--and yet, all the while a human eye watching the incredible kaleidoscope, an eye that sees and makes you see likewise, good and evil, beauty and pain, opposing and commingling their designs. Historically Bodenheim's work is likely to share with Donald Evans' very different "Sonnets from the Patagonian" the distinction of having initiated in American poetry for better or worse the season and influence of fantastic impressionism. Evans has now become almost orthodox, his green orchid is put away; but Bodenheim still wears in his lapel the coloured ghost of a butterfly-wing whose veinings mock at human progress.

ON THE ART OF FICTION

One is sometimes asked about the "obstacles" that confront young writers who are trying to do good work. I should say the greatest obstacles that writers today have to get over, are the dazzling journalistic successes of twenty years ago, stories that surprised and delighted by their sharp photographic detail and that were really nothing more than lively pieces of reporting. The whole aim of that school of writing was novelty--never a very important thing in art. They gave us, altogether, poor standards--taught us to multiply our ideas instead of to condense them. They tried to make a story out of every theme that occurred to them and to get returns on every situation that suggested itself. They got returns, of a kind. But their work, when one looks back on it, now that the novelty upon which they counted so much is gone, is journalistic and thin. The especial merit of a good reportorial story is that it shall be intensely interesting and pertinent today and shall have lost its point by tomorrow.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole--so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page. Millet had done hundreds of sketches of peasants sowing grain, some of them very complicated and interesting, but when he came to paint the spirit of them all into one picture, "The Sower," the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable. All the discarded sketches that went before made the picture what it finally became, and the process was all the time one of simplifying, of sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves for one that was better and more universal.

Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand--a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods--or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values. The courage to go on without compromise does not come to a writer all at once--nor, for that matter, does the ability. Both are phases of natural development. In the beginning, the artist, like his public, is wedded to old forms, old ideals, and his vision is blurred by the memory of old delights he would like to recapture.

ASTONISHING PSYCHIC EXPERIENCE

I have a friend who, when she hears a strange voice on the telephone, can visualize the person--that is to say, she sometimes can, if it interests her. She half-closes her eyes, tilts her head back, stares away off into space; and then she slowly describes the appearance of whoever is telephoning, almost as well as though he or she were standing before her. It is one of those supernatural gifts that seem to our times so startling.

The reason I mention this is, that though I hadn't supposed I was that sort of person, I had one of these mysterious psychic visions myself, years ago. It came to me while I was reading Mr. Knopf's first announcements of books. I had never seen the man, never heard a word of what he was like, yet his image suddenly arose clear as a photograph before my inner eye. There he stood, tall and thin, an elder statesman, with a bushy white beard; round, glowing eyes, ivory skin; an animated savant.

He spoke in his circulars as a man of great taste and authority. I pictured him as a French Academician of American birth.

Then one evening I met Mr. Knopf--in the flesh, as we phrase it. I found he had changed. He was more human, and in a way more impressive, but less picturesque. Instead of being tall and thin he was of medium-size, strong, and well-formed. And he wasn't exactly what you'd call old: in fact he was in his twenties; and instead of a bushy white beard, he had only a small black moustache.

It is not for me to explain this astonishing and almost incredible discrepancy. I must leave that to the Psychical Research Society, to which I wish all success. The only way I can account for it is to suppose that Mr. Knopf has more than one personality. I admit I did not see in my vision the side he physically presents to the world. But it may be I am such a powerful psychic that I saw something deeper. I saw the more appropriate vehicle of his innermost soul.

We sat down for a talk. I tried out of courtesy not to use this power of mine any further. Even when I gave him my manuscript to publish, and we began to talk terms, I endeavoured not to peer into his heart. He gave me good terms however. He explained that his idea of a publishing house was a sort of a companionable enterprise, and that authors and publishers ought to be friends. They at least ought to try.

I carefully looked over his list to see who his author-friends were, and picked out one or two pretty rum ones and asked him about them. He admitted with composure that of course every man made mistakes. I said anxiously that I hoped I had made none in choosing him as my publisher. He said probably not; but it was harder for him to pick out the right authors. He added however that he had done very well--up to now.

We stared thoughtfully at each other....

I glanced at his list again. It did consist chiefly of quality belles lettres, after all. He really seemed to care about books. But then I wondered suspiciously if the very fact of his being so cultivated had made him a poor man of business. His appearance was certainly forceful and energetic, but nevertheless--

I decided to have one more vision. I half-closed my eyes, the way that friend of mine does, and tilted my head back. Mr. Knopf seemed surprised. I paid no attention to this, but coolly gazed right into his mind. It was a tall, roomy mind, with long rows of thoughts, like onions on rafters--thoughts of bindings and dogs and Archimedes and authors and what-not. In the middle was a huge pile of packing cases containing his plans and ambitions in the publishing world. I am sorry now I didn't unpack a few to see what they were, but they looked pretty solid; and I was distracted by seeing, way over in a corner, his thoughts of myself. As these were at that time rather mixed, I prefer not to describe them. My catching sight of them at all was merely one of those unhappy annoyances that must often upset a seer's life. It's one of the risks of the business.

As I gazed on, indignantly, something drew across his mind like a truck, only even more massive. I presently discerned that it was a large strong intention to go. Simultaneously--for the man is well coordinated--he said good-bye and went out.

I was left there alone in my rooms, with my weird psychic gift. I may add that after a brief contemplation of it, I rang for the janitor, and in spite of his bitter objections, transferred it to him.

MAX BEERBOHM

The very name of Max Beerbohm carries the mind back to the time when he first emerged as a literary figure--the time of the Yellow Book--the time of Whistler's letters and Swinburne's newest poem, of velvet jackets and plush knee-breeches, and foot-in-the-grave young poets who caroused mournfully at the sign of the Bodley Head. But it was above all the period of the Enoch Soameses who are celebrated by Max Beerbohm in his latest volume, "Seven Men"--an age of strange young Satanists who would be content with nothing less than founding a new English literature upon the cornerstone of their own thin sheaves of unintelligible poems. They are dead, now--they got tired of waiting for their immortality to begin--and forgotten, except for the wreaths of tender and ironic phrases which Max Beerbohm lays from time to time on their graves. He survives them, the Last of the Esthetes. And yet Enoch Soames would say bitterly that it was just like Fate that the Last of the Esthetes should be a man who never was an Esthete at all!

And there is something to the Enoch Soames point of view. Max Beerbohm's title to Estheticism is rather precarious. His words may be the words of Dorian Grey, but the laughter behind them is surely the laughter of Huck Finn! Yes, under the jewelled stylistic cloak of Max Beerbohm, what do you find but the simple-hearted amusement of a healthy child? From the story of the Young Prince in "The Complete Works of Max Beerbohm," to the celebrated Bathtub passage in "Zuleika Dobson," the whole effect consists in the sudden substitution of the obvious for the recherch?. You thought you were going to have to pretend to enjoy pickled nightingale's tongues, and you find--greatly to your relief--that it is just ice-cream-and-cake!

And yet his style cannot be said to be mere masquerade. Max Beerbohm, it is hardly to be doubted, loves the magic of word and phrase and rhythm as devoutly as any pure soul who ever took opium in an attic for art's sake.

He learned his manners from them; and a more graceful band of literary desperadoes never existed. Nothing could exceed the savoir faire with which they scuttled the traditions and made the familiar virtues walk the fatal plank. And so it is that when we read Max Beerbohm today, the superb gallantry of his style suggests that he is going to commit a felonious assault upon our most treasured ideals. But he never does. You are stopped by a gun-shot across your bow, and you prepare for the worst. But the worst is merely a jolly invitation in a boyish voice to a game of marbles.

The combination is irresistible.... I am reminded of an authentic tale of the South seas. A band of wicked mutineers set their captain and officers afloat in an open boat, and sailed to Pitcairn Island, where they proceeded to live in the most Nietzschean fashion imaginable, enslaving the natives, taking their wives away from them, and living in fabulous luxury. They were a fractious lot, however, and they quarrelled among themselves, and shot each other up, and went insane and committed suicide, until the natives got tired of it, and revolted and killed them all--all except one gentle person who had got mixed up with the mutineers by mistake. He was not a Nietzschean; he believed at heart in all the old-fashioned virtues. And where the Nietzscheans had failed, he succeeded--so notably that when the island was rediscovered half a century later, he was ruling there in a little peaceful paradise, the Last of the Mutineers. There is something about gentleness, it would seem, that makes for survival. And I like to think that Max Beerbohm remains with us to tell the story of quaint, devil-worshipping literary mutineers like Enoch Soames, precisely because he cannot bear ever to press home the shining blade of his wit to its most deadly extent--because he does not really want to hurt anybody after all, not even Enoch Soames.

JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

Yet even I have my one sufficiently quaint, sufficiently spicy reminiscence. And meet it is I set it down--partly because it seems too precious to die, even more because otherwise, as time shuffles the cards of our mortal anecdotage, it will be sure to turn up, with only the substitution of one name for another, as part of the mythos surrounding the late Jack London, or Richard Harding Davis, or some still flourishing nominee for an epitaph and an official biography.

It was three o'clock of a rainy summer morning in 1918. Hergesheimer and your present scribe were sleeping--or rather we were not--in the twin beds of a guest-room at San-Souci, in Hartsdale. A Nox Ambrosiana had been put behind us, and, we fatuously supposed, a few hours of ambrosial sleep lay ahead. It had been a great night, dedicated to much fine talk of Art, and as free from "the posings and pretensions of art" as Conrad's Preface to "The Nigger." But that is not the story.

Somewhere in the blackness under our opened windows, vocal in his forlornness, was Bistri, the flesh-and-blood original of the borzoi whose mere inadequate outline appears on a really amazing proportion of the most distinguished books now being published in These United States--or, if your literary capital be Arnold Bennett's, Those United States. This Bistri, a perfectly incredible yet perfectly actual milk-white creature of enormous size, decorative as a dryad, but possessed of something less than half a gill of brains within his extremely dolichocephalic head, was frank to assert--and reiterate--his disapproval of the pelting rain and his cynical disillusionment in respect to the kindly graces of humankind. The sound was like the ululating whimper of a punished child, only it hinted no promise of subsiding, ever.

The rest, after Gargantuan laughter, was silence.... Ah, but was it, quite? Or did the speaker of these words, also deeming them too precious to die, retail them at late breakfast to the mistress of the borzoi, even as their sole hearer presently reported them at earlier breakfast to the borzoi's master? It would be interesting to know--and not very surprising either way.

We can all see now, with the glib wisdom of after the event, that Mr. Hergesheimer's career before its one sharp early break is--comparatively--all promise, and after that break--comparatively--all performance. In "The Lay Anthony" and "Mountain Blood" one finds a slight uneasiness or unevenness of recital, the result, I think, of a subconscious attempt to make the manner dignify and sanction two performances not, in matter, quite good enough to receive that ultimate sanction, style. With and after "The Three Black Pennys," and very specially in "Java Head" and "Wild Oranges," which remain thus far the masterpieces of perfect formal integrity, this discrepancy is lost from the reckoning. The artist has an exigent discrimination of that which is good enough for him to touch, and his touch upon it is exquisite.

But in one respect, the betrayal of a born artist's susceptibility, the works of promise are at one with the works of performance. The man who could not help going out of his way, in "The Lay Anthony," to allude to "Heart of Darkness" as "the most beautiful story of our time," was simply predestined to write a book of which susceptibility to beauty should actually be the theme--as he did in "Linda Condon." And the man who, in "Java Head," achieved so supreme a saturation with the aromas and essences of loveliness, had prefigured his own future when, in "Mountain Blood," he wrote: "The barrier against which he still fished was mauve, the water black; the moon appeared buoyantly, like a rosy bubble blown upon a curtain of old blue velvet."

Just here, in the crystallization of his own sensitivity into the objective forms of beauty, lies the peculiar distinction of Hergesheimer. It is an aristocratic distinction. It is, if you go by the counting of tastes, a distinctly un-American trait. This fact it is, rather than any less fundamental consideration, which explains--even if it does not justify--those critics who even before they discover how to divide his name properly into syllables, discover that there is something slightly exotic about him. Exotic or autochthonous--what does it matter? The point is, Mr Hergesheimer's power "to make you hear, to make you feel ... before all, to make you see" is the condition of his success as a coiner of beauty. It is also his way, whatever way another artist may take, to reveal to us those glimpses of deep truth for which we may, indeed, have forgotten to ask, but for which, once they are opened to our sight, we can never forget to be grateful.

ON DRAWING

It is commonly said that everybody can sing in the bathroom; and this is true. Singing is very easy. Drawing, though, is much more difficult. I have devoted a good deal of time to Drawing, one way and another; I have to attend a great many committees and public meetings, and at such functions I find that Drawing is almost the only Art one can satisfactorily pursue during the speeches. One really cannot sing during the speeches; so as a rule I draw. I do not say that I am an expert yet, but after a few more meetings I calculate that I shall know Drawing as well as it can be known.

The first thing, of course, is to get on to a really good committee; and by a good committee I mean a committee that provides decent materials. An ordinary departmental committee is no use: generally they only give you a couple of pages of lined foolscap and no white blotting-paper, and very often the pencils are quite soft. White blotting-paper is essential. I know of no material the spoiling of which gives so much artistic pleasure--except perhaps snow. Indeed, if I was asked to choose between making pencil-marks on a sheet of white blotting-paper and making foot-marks on a sheet of white snow I should be in a thingummy.

Much the best committees from the point of view of material are committees about business which meet at business premises--shipping offices, for choice. One of the Pacific Lines has the best white blotting-paper I know; and the pencils there are a dream. I am sure the directors of that firm are Drawers; for they always give you two pencils, one hard for doing noses, and one soft for doing hair.

When you have selected your committee and the speeches are well away, the Drawing begins. Much the best thing to draw is a man. Not the chairman, or Lord Pommery Quint, or any member of the committee, but just A Man. Many novices make the mistake of selecting a subject for their Art before they begin; usually they select the chairman. And when they find it is more like Mr. Gladstone they are discouraged. If they had waited a little it could have been Mr. Gladstone officially.

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