A Miscellany (Revised) Read online

  I could go on about this intellectual giant all night, but circumstances over which I unhappily have no control prevent me. What is the use of mincing matters? None. To put it frankly and fearlessly: our time is short, gentlemen; so let us, without more ado, turn to rubber.

  There has recently been circulated a vile and insidious rumour which is absolutely without foundation of any sort, to the effect that rubber is dangerous if completely swallowed. I want to squash that rumor now, if it’s the last thing I do on earth; and I want to squash it dead. I want to brand it as an infamous, uncalled-for, irresponsible falsehood; a damnable, dirty, inexcusable, unjustified, cowardly, mean, sneaking, outrageous lie. It is NOT true that rubber is harmful to the human organism in any way, shape or manner. Not only is rubber not harmful, but rubber is positively and always beneficial and helpful to the organism. If we do not eat rubber instead of bread, if our systems do not crave rubber in place of cheese, if (at the present comparatively low stages of human evolution) rubber is not actually nourishing, you may be sure of one thing, which incidentally is an absolute fact: that it is the human body’s fault; it is our fault, yours and mine, for which we should hide our heads in shame forever—but it is not rubber’s.

  Now that I have wiped that filthy lie out of existence, I will come back to my subject with renewed vigour.—Fired by the magnetic spark of his electric genius, William (in a kind of dream) took in his strong right hand a piece of rubber. And just what does that mean? What is rubber, gentlemen? Commercially, of course, rubber is important; it is even more than important: it is—thanks to the ingenuity of one man’s brain—a mammoth industry. But I am not speaking commercially. Because I am a businessman, the business point of view doesn’t limit me. If I were a crack-brained Ph. D., with a warped mind chuck-full of rusty ideas and musty languages and dusty theories—if (to put it briefly) I were a doddering nitwit, an obsolete flapdoodle, or a denatured, book-bitten kewpie-above-the-ears—I would be so balled up in my own particular existence that I couldn’t step outside my subject and touch the real, throbbing vital things of life. But I am no professor, gentle­men: far from it. Those things may worry some old dubs but not yours truly. The tragedies of Sophocles do not keep me awake. Dante may have invented Hell but he doesn’t cut any ice with me, no sir. I am just a plain simple businessman, and therefore an unprejudiced man, a liberal man, a wide-awake, two-fisted, American go-getter of a human being who doesn’t view the life of this day and time through the foggy spectacles of the misty past, and who doesn’t go to a dinner party without his necktie, and who doesn’t forget his wife’s name when he wants to introduce her to a friend. That’s the kind of a fellow I am. And being that kind of a fellow I face the music. With a supreme effort, summoning all my strength, spurning the purely commercial aspects of the topic, I look straight into its very essence with an unforgiving eye. Clenching my teeth, I say to myself: William Adams-Wiggley took a piece of rubber in his hand—and since we all know what Adams-Wiggley’s hand really is, there remains for us (if we are conscientious, open-minded, out-spoken, free-thinking beings) only one course: and that course is, to ask ourselves—what is really rubber? There lies the question, the gauntlet, the challenge: rubber. What is it? You may seek to dodge, to prevaricate, to equivocate, to pick up your traps and slink out the back door, but you cannot, you shall not, evade me. I repeat, I reiterate, I place before you for the last time the burning question in its lowest terms: what is rubber?

  Gentlemen, if we are sincere, if we are honest, and (above all) if we are Americans, there can be for us only one answer. Let us not, then, be afraid. Let us rather look the thing bravely in the face; let us stand firm; let us lift our heads high, and answer, in one unanimous and fearless voice which can be heard all over the entire civilized and uncivilized globe: “Rubber is almost nothing!” It is used upon our lowest extremities, the feet. It is associated with such disagreeable and abnormal phenomena as sleet, slush, and mudpuddles. In common parlance, “to rubber” is a term of frank opprobrium. As a material substance, rubber is humble, debased, downtrodden. And yet the seer, William Adams-Wiggley, in his vision took rubber.

  When we have recovered from our astonishment at this colossal condescension, such as only a truly and really big and great man would have been capable of, let us endeavour to pursue the subject further, with a view to ultimately approaching that mysterious and enchanted island, that dazzling bourne, that Ultima Thule of all mortal observation—a Great Man’s Soul. Let us curb our surprise, lest we miss yet larger surprises. Let us collect ourselves: let us ask, is that all? I answer, no. That is indeed not all. Rubber, that despised product, is far from all. William took in his right hand rubber, but in his left hand what did he take?

  He took mint.

  What, mint?

  Yes, mere mint. Unbelievable, but true. And what is mint? An incomplete, partial, weakly thing—the final syllable of “peppermint.” A fragile partner in that verbal marriage whereof “julep” is the better half. A vulgar mispronunciation of “meant.” Look at it any way, from any angle, any side: the verdict is inescapable—mint is unquestionably and unutterably the mental and spiritual and moral and physical inferior even of rubber. If rubber were something, mint would be nothing; but since rubber is nothing, folks, mint does not exist: mint is less than nothing.

  When William took rubber in his right hand—poor, humble, abused, foolish, worthless rubber—the vegetable kingdom swooned with a legitimate pleasure in all its infinitely variegated interstices. The skunk cabbage turned to the summer squash and whispered—what is this? The poison ivy vine forgot to poison. The heart of the lemon stood still. I am very sure all these things happened and many more. But when Adams-Wiggley extended his other, or left, hand—and (with a smile gracious and benign) picked between his merciful third finger and his gentle thumb a piece, a leaf, a fragment, of unutterable, common, merest mint—then, gentlemen, it is no exaggeration to say that there occurred an unforgettable moment in human history.

  I will leave you with that idea. Since words are, at best, futile things, I will not try to describe the indescribable. But I cannot refrain from mentioning one more point, in connection with the lovely marriage of mint and of rubber: I must needs call to your attention the final dilemma with which William was confronted, and how he found the way out as no one else could have found it. After the process of rubberizing mint and minting rubber had been carefully perfected, Adams-Wiggley gazed with a proud eye upon the product of this unique combination, and pondered the question of a name for his wondrous invention. Well, what did he do? Did he brand it with a complicated, sophisticated, unpronounceable title, like the Greek and Latin teachers do their stick-in-the-mud treatises? Did he endow it with a jaw-breaking appellation, a big word, which nobody but three men in all God’s creation could understand? Not he! He wasn’t that small. He knew humanity, and he loved it, just as he knew nature and loved her. He wanted to find a name which everybody—no matter what language they spoke, what creed they subscribed to, how much their income was—could understand and speak: and, above all, he wanted to be downright fair. Rubber and mint had appeared to him in a vision, robbing him of his deepest gloom. He was grateful, and he was a gentleman. He wanted to be perfectly fair and square with rubber and with mint. He wanted to represent them equally, and not to slight either of them. You and I would not have thought of so delicate a point, but he did. In his heart of hearts, pulsing with a love for all created and uncreated things alike, there gushed that sublime and almost unattainable ambition. I say “almost,” since for genius nothing is unattainable. Genius can walk erect where lesser minds crawl on all fours, and fly where others limp. The works of Harold Bell Wright, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Elbert Hubbard, are a proof; but William Adams-Wiggley is the greatest proof of all. For, after infinite researches, involving the best power of his accumulated mind, upon the practically insurmountable problem—in a lightning flash of blinding intuition he discovered the solution of the supposedly impregna
ble difficulty, the just and equal way out of the awe-inspiring dilemma: the double cognomen which would make both mint and rubber rejoice forever—Chewing Gum!

  Now just a word about the actual effect of chewing gum on the world at large: chewing gum has improved living conditions all over the world fifteen per cent, has given the rudiments of education and culture to thousands upon thousands of workless and ignorant aborigines, has created in the midst of the impenetrable jungle a series of model communities equipped with every outlet, orifice, comfort, and even luxury, which our twentieth-century super-civilization can invent—pianolas, phonographs, radios, electric lights, automatic garbage cans, telephones and telegraphs, sane dance halls, hygienic soda fountains, collapsible bungalows, and stropless safety razors. But to enumerate these trifling benefits is to convey only an atom, a molecule, an ohm, of the actual truth. Chewing gum has done these things, of course, but (as everybody from the illiterate savage of the Peruvian pampas to the most highly cultured savant of the Académie Française knows) chewing gum has done more—a million times more. Chewing gum won the last war, and will win the next. If the sticks of chewing gum which are manufactured in just one of the Adams-Wiggley factories during an ordinary eight-hour day were put end to end, they would form a highway to the furthest star which the most powerful telescope has ever perceived. But statistics are merely statistics, so let us rather turn to the man himself.

  William Adams-Wiggley, at the age of thirty-six, has made thousands of millions of millions of billions of lips, jaws, and mouths—all over the entire planet, throughout the five nations, the seven seas, the neutral air, the kindly earth—move in rhythmic sequence and keep time perfectly all together without one single error or mistake, just like they were the countless feet of heros advancing into battle. Yes, gentlemen, that’s what Adams-Wiggley has really accomplished. In a word, in a nutshell, in a je ne sais quoi, he has put into people’s mouths, everywhere, in all weathers—into my mouth and your mouth, gentlemen—what had hitherto been considered only suited to an old pair of shoes on a nasty day. Isn’t it beautiful? Doesn’t it simply prove what genius really is? Genius doesn’t despise a thing because it looks lowly or has been maltreated and spat upon—no. A genius isn’t going to take anybody’s word for something: he’s going to go right to the bottom of the problem, and find out for himself what the facts are. That’s what Shakespeare did, and Beethoven, and Edison, and Einstein, and all the real geniuses. And that’s what William Adams-Wiggley—last but not least—did.

  In closing, I call upon you to consider this man’s achievement from the standpoint of Christianity: I want you to ask yourselves, what is the highest duty which a person conscious of The Master’s teachings can possibly perform? There is but one answer: to raise up, to comfort, to pity. That being understood, let us now—with bated breaths and heads reverently bowed—consider for the last time William Adams-Wiggley, and let us ask, in a devout whisper: is William Adams-Wiggley a Christian?

  Is he, gentlemen?

  I’ll say so. I’ll say there are mighty few folks living or dead who can compare with him in that respect. Think it over for yourselves—you’ll see what I mean. You’ll see, for the first time, how—as a Christian—William looked about him; how his mild, fearless, honest, noble, Christian eye searched everywhere for not just one but two altogether humble and utterly unhappy and entirely miserable specimens of plant life. Because he himself was a big, blue-eyed, strong-minded, broad-shouldered, right-thinking, clean-minded Christian man, he wanted to discover the only completely despised twins of the vegetable world—and, because he was a Christian, he did.

  But that, my friends, isn’t all. Adams-Wiggley wasn’t one of those fly-bitten, moth-eaten, idealistic Christians who never got into any action for fear of dirtying their cowardly hands: not he. When William found an intolerable injustice rankling right under the very nose of countless generations of purblind humanity, he wasn’t content with wringing his hands and making a fuss—no sir: he did something about it. In other words, he had the real Christian spirit, and he showed it. I’ll say that’s a big thing to do; and I’ll say that the man who did that thing is a big man and a big Christian. I’ll say that—if to pity and to comfort and to raise up the fallen are the real Christian virtues—no man ever breathed who had more of the real Christian virtues than William Adams-Wiggley; and that’s what I mean when I tell you that, although he is a noble and wonderful man and a great and exalted genius, he is first of all, and par excellence, a Christian. So long as the sun and the moon persist, gentlemen, so long as a fact is a fact and a lie is a lie, there can be no getting away from the truth and, in this case, the plain, unvarnished, unadulterated, ineradicable, irremediable, unalterable, absolute truth is simply this: mint and rubber were in trouble, and—just because he was a Christian—Adams-Wiggley pitied rubber and pitied mint. That, gentlemen, is the utterly naked truth.

  But let us not forget something else. Because the inventor of that practically blessed substance, that almost sacred commodity, that miraculous substitute for deviltry and idleness, that glorious panacea for all human and inhuman ills—chewing gum—is not an ordinary, humdrum, noncommittal, happy-go-lucky, nonchalant Christian like you or me, but a Christian who takes his religion seriously, who practises his lofty aims and lives his unimpeachable ideals—because, in short, William Adams-Wiggley is that extraordinary, far-sighted, richly gifted, unshakable, almost extinct kind of Christian to whose alert and luminous and vibrant being the slightest injustice of whatever variety constitutes an irrevocable challenge—only because of this, gentlemen—the superman, the genius, the Christian of Christians, William Adams-Wiggley, did something which common-or-garden men and lackadaisical Christians such as you and me would not, and could not, do—he raised up mint: he comforted rubber.

  From Vanity Fair, April 1925.

  1. Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vegetables.

  SEVEN SAMPLES OF DRAMATIC CRITICISM

  In the best and most highly approved Metropolitan manner

  Editor’s Note: When Vanity Fair suggested to Mr. E. E. Cummings that he give us his impressions anent the current American drama, the author of “&” replied—with a startling absence of subterfuge—that he would be happy to accept our invitation on one condition: viz., that he should not be expected to go to see any of the seven plays we wished reviewed, adding that he had never attended the theatre in his life and could not find any particular reason for doing so now, particularly as he studiously read all the New York dramatic critics and knew the métier thoroughly. Incredible as such a purely medieval statement may appear in the renaissance of this ultra-enlightened epoch, its veracity is irrevocably substantiated by the infra-mendacious tidbits which follow.

  I. BOOM BOOMED

  How Much Assassination is a play which is surely worth going to see. My throat specialist was particularly moved, and spent half the last appointment describing to me exactly why the production is a human document. As nearly as I can make out, I agree with him; although it seems he was in the air forces. No one who ever went over the top, which neither of us did, can fail to be amused by the dialogue between Rinehart and Belasco, or is it between Buffalo Bill and General Pershing? We forget which, unfortunately. Anyhow, the idea is there; and that man who did the ape in All God’s Chillun Got Wings is a remarkable actor in every way, and some of the slang just makes you want to stand up and say, “Let there be no more war!”

  II. CLAPTRAP BEARNAISE

  Pink Thunder from start to finish is a gripping melodrama in which frankly tropical lust is forcefully contrasted with intrinsic spiritual affection. The action—which reaches a heart-rending climax on the summit of Popocatepetl—is essentially a struggle between two women, one of whom is certainly no worse than she should be, for the possession of Peter Thomson, a missionary who is torn by conflicting emotions. Thrill-ridden scenes succeed each other with an agonizing rapidity, until Lucille Stingray (played to almost unendurable perfection by Mischa Elman)
bribes a bloodthirsty tribe of Peruvian headhunters to abduct the sleeping heroine, for whom, until this dreadful moment, Peter—absorbed in the excruciating convolutions of his own ubiquitous conscience—had cherished merely a vague, unrecognizable emotion. The crisis, however, precipitates love; and the apostle is supplanted by the man. In a delirium of perspicuity, scarce knowing what he does, Michael Arlen as Peter rescues Isabel who faints with pleasure in his arms: whereupon, overcome—in what would appear to be the supreme moment of his life—by mingled inhibitions, the young man turns his back on temptation, gives himself (in an agony of remorse) to Lucille, and promptly jumps into the infernal fires of the volcano, which go out, causing the superstitious aborigines to hail him as a god. This sacrilege brings the devotee to his true senses—a fascinating psychological twist, for which the author (Miss Marianne Moore) is to be unstintingly congratulated—and he immediately, to everyone’s relief, inherits sixteen million dollars, kisses June Walker, embraces the American flag, and lives happily ever after as innumerable spectators swarmingly exeunt from New York’s best ventilated theatre.

  III. STRUT YOUR STUFF

  Strut Your Stuff is a typical revue with Ethel Barrymore and the costumes—consisting of paper napkins, accurately and painstakingly designed by Claude Bragdon, beautifully photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, and capably produced by Edward Royce.

  IV. LOVE’S COMING OF AGE

  Hairy Jones’ Desire under the Elms is a play in the manner of Greek tragedy about a monkey who is also a Negro in which little is left to the imagination. Hairy Jones (not to be confused with Robert Edmond Jones who did his level best with the somewhat slanting elms) after being born (in New England) becomes “dif’rent.” During all the rather long next, or third, act, the heroine alternately dabbles in incest and hides peanuts under a rug to amuse her doting grandfather who, we are given to understand, hangs himself in a shop window on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street to the dulcet thuddings of a tom-tom, as the curtain falls and subscribers exchange looks all over the Provincetown Theatre. But this is not the point of the production by any means, for the author is far from being one whom mere mute inglorious melodrama satisfies. Rather are we presented with a continuous cross section of the Oedipus complex as it occurs in a mixture of the African galley slave with the gorilla who has become a typical citizen of New Bedford, Massachusetts, during those old whaling days when might made wrong. The cast is excellent, Mary Garden excelling in the difficult part of Liz, while Sir Al Forbes-Robertson Jolson’s portrayal of the ambigeneric hero is a triumph of tact, vigour, and nuance; and profusely illustrated brochures, entitled “Anthony Comstock’s Reminiscences, or Tramping on Life” are distributed (gratis) to members of the audience, at each and every performance which I myself enjoyed very much.