A Miscellany (Revised) Read online

  A tribute to a native artist, nurtured in Greenwich Village and Montmartre

  By P. H. Dunkels, N.G.

  Editor’s Note: The unexpected demise of Helen Whiffletree, the American poetess, who was accidentally shot by a gendarme while she was picking violets in the Bois de Boulogne, has saddened poetry lovers all over the world and deprived Vanity Fair of one of its most valued contributors. Wishing to give a slight token of our profound grief at Miss Whiffletree’s tragic disappearance from the field of letters, we asked the internationally known authority on literature, Professor P. H. Dunkels, of Colgate University, to write a brief biographical sketch and appreciation of his illustrious contemporary, Helen Whiffletree. It is our conviction that Professor Dunkels’ article, which we publish herewith, is fraught with comfort and happiness for the host of this poetess’s admirers, both here and in Europe. They number countless thousands.

  Helen Whiffletree was born amid lowly surroundings in the unlovely town of Arlington Heights, Massachusetts, on the seventeenth day of August, 1889, of Irish-Italian parents. Her mother, Gertrude Magee, was descended from a long line of brewers. Giuseppi Paladini, her father, rose to the position of first assistant dishwasher in the local automat restaurant, but apparently failed to make good.

  Confronted on every hand with hardships and privations, Helen set about at an early age to earn her own living. At the age of nine, she was supporting her indigent mother and seven sisters by selling newspapers, dressed in boy’s clothes. The natural elasticity of her spirits and the vivacity of her adolescent personality in general attracted the notice of Matthew Whiffletree, a St. Louis lumber merchant well past his dotage, who happened to buy a newspaper from Helen. After making the necessary inquiries, he adopted her as his own daughter and sent her to a number of expensive schools, including Brierley (where she distinguished herself by winning a scholarship, shortly before leaving under a cloud) and thence to Vassar.

  Early in her career, in fact while still in her teens at college, Helen Whiffletree wrote verse in which naiveté is carried to a pitch of unheard-of poignancy. As an example, I can do no better than quote eight lovely lines which appeared, over the signature “H. W.,” in the literary magazine of her alma mater, and which are entitled “Conversation.”

  “Quoth a busy bee

  To a butterfly

  ‘Honey make I

  And what maketh thee?’

  ‘Go ask a lily,’

  Was the sage reply

  Of the silly

  Butterfly.”

  To this, her collegiate period, belong also such lilting lyrics as “Sodom and Gomorrah,” “A Sparrow’s Christmas,” “Under the Mistletoe,” and the inimitable “Day-Dream”—her first experiment in the Petrarchan sonnet form; which, besides showing the influence of Keats, caused three leading New York critics to compare her to Mrs. Browning, Shakespeare and Sappho, respectively. Readers of Vanity Fair will doubtless pardon me for reminding them of the exquisite sextet:

  “I ope my windows to this April eve,

  Letting sweet twilight whisper o’er my soul

  Its wondrous secrets without more ado.

  Night from day’s sentence now doth seek reprieve,

  While—from the summit of yon wooded knoll—

  A final whippoorwill the ear doth woo.”

  Alexander Woollcott is said to have remarked, when the last line was recited to him for the first time by a friend in the course of a camping trip in the Canadian Rockies: “It hurts, it is so fine.”

  Having been dismissed from Vassar without her degree for an innocent girlish prank involving several of the best families of Cleveland, the poetess inhabited, in quick succession, Bangor, Topeka and Salt Lake City and arrived, penniless but exultant, in Greenwich Village, where she was immediately understood and vigorously acclaimed by an enthusiastic little coterie of struggling artists and models, many of whom lent her money in small quantities as a tribute to the surge of odes, triolets, rondels, rondeaux, chants royals, etc., etc., which poured from her teeming brain almost ceaselessly at this fecund time. In all these poems, the subject matter is, as might be expected, love in its multiple aspects, maternal affection and devotion to one’s fellow man (or woman) being particularly stressed. Three volumes of love songs—“Satyr,” “Chants and Reprisals,” and “Afternoon Sunlight”—saw the light of day via Boni & Liveright. Indeed, so prolific did her muse become, that these Greenwich Village poems alone outnumber the combined output of Whittier, Tennyson and Meredith. But more remarkable even than their numerosity is the technique of those creations. Note, for instance, the subtle mastery of a difficult form in this frolicsome “Triolet” from “Chants”:

  “Is my answer to Pedro

  Who offers bananas,

  ‘You make my heart bleed’—? No.

  Is my answer to Pedro,

  ‘One dozen’—? Indeed no!

  —‘Retro me, Satanas!’

  Is my answer to Pedro

  Who offers bananas.”

  From New York, where she divorced a banker and several noted theatrical producers, it was but a step to Paris and the Quar­tier Latin; where, in a modest little hotel off the Boulevard Montparnasse, our poetess finally found the perfect spiritual environment which she had ceaselessly craved and where her art attained to its full maturity. Although the singing syllables of Helen Whiffletree were already on the lips of more than ten thousand poetry lovers in America, it was in Paris that her real fame came to her. Eighteen months after leaving New York, this magnetic Sappho was the idol of the Rotonde and darling of the Dôme, to which latter café she dedicated several of her best-known sonnets.

  Meanwhile, in proportion as her reputation increased—while critics on both sides of the Atlantic were awarding her latest eight books a place beside the immortal works of Goethe, Anatole France and Donald Ogden Stewart—her personality assumed truly hypnotic proportions. From the very beginning, she had exercised a mysterious and compelling power over whomsoever she came in contact with; but Paris accentuated this power to an incredible degree. It is no exaggeration to say that the psychic influence of Helen Whiffletree is unsurpassed in the history of letters.

  My first experience with this emanation is unforgettable. It is all bound up with the tiptop of Montmartre—the famous Place du Tertre, overlooking Paris. Here, as is well known, all the Americans in the city (except those who are too involved in the delights of the grape to budge) wend their ubiquitous way, to dine and drink out-of-doors and be entertained by a motley crew of acrobats, musicians and prestidigitators. On the particular evening in question, the scene was of a more-than-typical picturesqueness. Anton Cul, the blind gipsy violinist, was weaving iridescent harmonies in one corner, despite the unbridled enthusiasm of the neighbouring spectators, who showered him with hundred franc notes, which were cleverly collected by a cocker spaniel furnished by the management, and deposited in the musician’s by-no-means-microscopic hat. On another part of the hilltop, a group of diners were applauding the prowess of Zizz, the Fire-Bird, who—having climbed on a somewhat rickety table—proceeded to balance upside-down on an ordinary champagne glass and at the same time to swallow lighted cannon crackers, pinwheels and even (to the horror of Marianne Moore, whom I particularly remarked) a roman candle. In yet another portion of the Place, Hermaphrodites, strong man of Constantinople, was throwing his three-hundred-pound wife slowly and rhythmically up into the April evening, only to catch her in one hand as she descended.

  All at once the violinist sank for support against the slight form of the cocker spaniel, which collapsed with a sharp whine, regurgitating two thousand francs—the Fire-Bird uttered a moan and rolled upon the ground, exuding rockets, mines and similar pyrotechnical monstrosities in every conceivable direction, to the vast embarrassment of the spectators—the strong man clasped his almost nonexistent occiput in both mammoth hands, uttering a terrible cry and paying no attention to his wife—who descended with her usual velocity and completely demolished elev
en bottles of champagne, a United States Senator, and Mrs. Cholmondley P. Biddle of Philadelphia and Newport.

  In the midst of the consternation caused by these unprecedented accidents, I lifted my eyes and beheld the incarnation of American patriotism stepping from a two-cylinder taxi: at the same moment, a hundred throats exclaimed “Helen Whiffletree!” The poetess (for it was indeed she) was attired in a red tamoshanter, a white cache-nez and sky-blue pyjamas. True to her ancestry, she carried under one arm the Decameron and under the other a nearly empty quart bottle labelled Hennessy Three Star. The striking beauty of her getup, as—“without more ado”—she produced a large harmonica and proceeded to sound the opening chords of the Star Spangled Banner, was accentuated by an exhilarating negligence of poise which, in another, might have been attributed to artificial stimuli rather than “divine fire.” But, while the sacred strains of O Say Can You burst upon the electrified assembly, along with memories of heroic self-sacrifice, unparalleled devotion and unstinting camaraderie, only one thing occurred to me; which was, that I owed it to posterity to preserve, at any cost, my first, virginal impression of this authentic genius. Accordingly I tore down the hill and into the Moulin Rouge, where my favourite waiter brought me the usual pen and ink.

  “The rest is silence.”

  From Vanity Fair, November 1925.

  YOU AREN’T MAD, AM I?

  Being certain observations anent the extremely modern art of “burlesk”

  As one of those helplessly observant individuals who are sometimes referred to as “modern” artists, I am confident that the art of burlesk (note the k) is particularly unobserved, both by “intelligent people” in general and by readers of Vanity Fair in particular. My aim in making this somewhat threatening statement is an innocent one. I merely wish to dissipate any and all illusions, on the part of my audience, as to the precise nature of “this little essay”: which is nothing more nor less than a series of observations.

  These observations, not unnaturally, have to do with the essence of the art in question. Supposing we assume (for the nonce) that burlesk is an art: how, then, does it fundamentally differ from other arts, such as painting, literature and the theatre?

  First let us take the art of three-dimensional painting. Here, as in “nature,” not only do we never see around a solid person or object, but the very solidity of the object or person is conditioned by our inability to see around it, her, or him. More simply, in the case of sculpture: only one aspect of a statue is presented to us—in perceiving the rest, we are compelled to lose sight of what we have already seen; to revolve the figure, or else move around it ourselves. But the graphic arts and the theatre have an analogous limitation—that is, a thing or character cannot possibly be presented as beautiful, noble, or desirable and also as ugly, ignoble and despicable.

  “Of course not!” my readers will exclaim: “because ‘ugly’ and ‘beautiful’ are opposities, just as ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ are opposites. Isn’t a weak drink the opposite of a strong one? Leaving out ‘black’ and ‘white,’ how can any American of this day and time, who hasn’t experienced a thoroughly ‘bad’ drink, talk about a ‘good’ one—and vice versa?”

  Dumbfounding as are these arguments, I must needs point out an important fact. Just as our fair land of dollars and no sense was not always blest with prohibition, even so language was not always blest with “opposites.” Quite the contrary. A certain very wise man has pointed out (in connection with the meaning of dreams) that what “weak” means and what “strong” means were once upon a time meant by one word. To understand this, it is quite unnecessary for us to try to imagine ourselves bloodthirsty savages of the forest primeval, or even to become psychoanalysts. All we have to do is to observe closely something which is flourishing under our very noses, today—the art of burlesk.

  For in burlesk, we meet with an echo of the original phenomenon: “opposites” occur together. For that reason, burlesk enables us to (so to speak) know around a thing, character, or situation. To put it a little differently: if the art of common-or-garden painting were like the art of burlesk, we should be able to see—impossibly enough—all the way around a solid tree, instead of merely seeing a little more than half of the tree (thanks to binocular parallax or whatever it is) and imagining the rest. This impossible knowing around, or nonimagining, quality, constitutes the essence of burlesk and differentiates it from certain better-understood arts.

  With the idea of making my point perfectly clear, I shall try to describe something which impressed me, at the time, as one of the most extraordinary experiences which I had ever had; something which happened, a few years ago, on the stage of that most extraordinary temple of burlesk, the National Winter Garden—then, as now, located at the corner of East Houston Street and Second Avenue, New York City—which institution I regard as superior to any other burlesk stronghold which I have yet inhabited, not excluding the Howard Atheneum, in Boston.

  The protagonist of the occasion was a famous burlesk star named Jack Shargel (since retired; at that date, as I believe, one of two very great actors in America, number two being Charlie Chaplin) and the experience was this: a beauteous lady (weighing several hundred pounds) hands the super-Semitic, black-derbied, misfit-clothed, keen-eyed but ever-imposed-on individual called Jack Shargel a red rose—Shargel receives her gift with a gesture worthy of any prince; cautiously escorts the flower to his far from negligible nose; rapturously, deliriously even, inhales its deep, luxurious, seductive, haunting fragrance; then (with a delicacy which Chaplin might envy) tosses the red rose exquisitely, lightly, from him. The flower flutteringly describes a parabola—weightlessly floats downward—and just as it touches the stage there is a terrific, soul-shaking, earthquake-like crash: as if all the glass and masonry on earth, all the most brittle and most ponderous things of this world, were broken to smithereens.

  Nothing in “the arts,” indeed, not even Paul Cézanne’s greatest painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire, has moved me more, or has proved to be a more completely inextinguishable source of “aesthetic emotion,” than this knowing around the Shargel rose; this releasing of all the un-roselike and non-flowerish elements which—where “rose” and “flower” are ordinarily concerned—secretly or unconsciously modify and enhance those rose—and flower—qualities to which (in terms of consciousness only) they are “opposed.”

  THE JEW COMEDIAN. With a delicacy which Chaplin might envy he tosses the red rose of burlesque, lightly, flutteringly from his hand.

  But hark—I can hear my readers exclaiming: “the idea of becoming pompous and highbrow on such a topic—when everybody is wise to the fact that burlesque shows are distinctly inartistic and frankly lowbrow affairs!”

  One moment: there are “burlesque shows” and this is thanks to the supporters of the National Winter Garden, Burlesk. But, granted that—on the surface—no two things could possibly seem more incompatible than burlesk (the original undiluted article) and “Art,” this is important only as proving how little “cultured” people observe for themselves and how consistently they are duped by preconceived notions. Should my readers take the trouble to examine, not conventional or academic “art,” but “modern” (also called “primitive”) art—art of today, art which is alive—they will discover that, in ridiculing the aesthetic significance of burlesk with a k, they are talking through their hats. For example: that favourite war cry of modern literature, le mot juste, is pre-eminently the war cry of burlesk, where we find in abundance such perfectly unambiguous statements as: “I’ll hit yer so hard yer shirt’ll roll up yer back like a windowshade!” Again, what is frequently referred to as “abstract,” “non-representative,” cubistic,” and even “futuristic,” painting is fundamentally similar to such a use of the American language as this (whereby a wronged husband describes what he did to his wife’s seducer—an artist, by the way—whom he found “standing on the brinkus of the Mrs. Sloppy river”): “so I pulled out my pickaxe and I cut his ear from throat to throat.”
Moreover, those of my readers who are already acquainted with the “neurotic” or “ultramodernistic” music of Arnold Schönberg will need no introduction to the agonizing tonality of those “sets” and “drops” among which the hero-villains of the burlesk stage shimmy, glide, strut and tumble.

  CLEO. The excessively mobile shimmy-dancer of burlesque who at an advanced stage of the dance exclaims: “Burn my clothes,—I’m in Heaven.”

  To sum up: the creations of the National Winter Garden possess, in common with the sculpture of Gaston Lachaise, the painting of John Marin and the music of Igor Stravinsky, the virtue of being intensely alive; whereas the productions of the conventional theatre, like academic sculpture and painting and music, are throughly dead—and since “art,” if it means anything, means TO BE INTENSELY ALIVE, the former constitute art and the latter are balderdash. Futhermore, the fact that this highly stylized, inherently “abstract,” positively “futuristic” art known to its devotees as burlesk is indubitably for the masses, knocks into a cocked chapeau the complaint of many so-called “critics” that “modern art” is “neurotic,” “unhealthy,” “insane,” “arbitrary,” “unessential,” “superficial” and “not for the masses.” My advice to anyone who doubts the validity of my assertions (which I repeat, are no more than firsthand observations) is: “get in to the Houston Street Home Of Burlesk As You Like It on a Saturday night (if you can) and then keep your eyes open!”

  Above the curtain you will perceive a scroll, proclaiming in ample letters:

  The Show Is

  The

  THING

  —Wm. Shakespeare

  I should have said, you will occasionally perceive this slogan; since a smoke screen, emanating from every known and unknown variety of nicotine-yielding device, renders the immortal “Wm.” ’s dictum somewhat transitory. You will also perceive an incomparable show, suggesting the theatre only in its time-length, an unparalleled concoction of “knowing around” incidents and happenings and occurrences and accidents; you will behold the anatomically unique chorus of 18 “National Wintergarden Rosebuds,” a first­rate burlesk cast including three excellent protagonists who may or may not be entitled “Scratch,” “(Stood) Ambrose” and “Goof,” several décors which rival Picasso’s setting for Erik Satie’s Parade (as originally performed in Paris by the Ballet Russe), syncopation ad libitum, absolutely authentic shimmying in triumphantly nonexistent costumes and—here we come to the sine qua non of the whole shebang—“Cleo,” concerning whose changement de nombril I have the honour to exclaim: “Burn my clothes; I’m in Heaven!”