I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (9 page)

 

College: a fountain of knowledge where all go to drink.

HENNY YOUNGMAN

O
n March 7, 1850, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts rose from his seat in the Senate to make what he thought would be the speech of his career. He talked for three and a half hours in support of Kentucky Senator Henry Clay's “Compromise of 1850,” arguing that it was pointless to oppose slavery in the Southern states, or even to argue against its extension into the new territories in the American Southwest. Webster took the view that plantation owners were entitled to safeguard their property, and even went so far as to advocate a rigorous enforcement of the recently passed fugitive slave statutes.

News of the speech was quickly telegraphed back to Massachusetts, a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. Most people in the region were stunned, leading one commentator to say—metaphorically—that the speech had slammed into New England with the fury of a hurricane. Many Bay State luminaries made impassioned attacks on Webster. Horace Mann called the speech “a vile catastrophe.” John Quincy Adams described “the gigantic intellect, the envious temper, the ravenous ambition, and the rotten heart
of Daniel Webster.” And Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most famous New Englander of the time, wrote:

 

The word
liberty
in the mouth of Mr. Webster
sounds like the word
love
in the mouth of a courtesan.

 

After Emerson shared the analogy with a few friends, it quickly began to be whispered throughout New England. As often happens, the quotation got simplified as it was passed along, and most people were just as likely to hear it this way:

 

The word
liberty
in the mouth of Mr. Webster
is like the word
love
in the mouth of a whore.

 

The impact was dramatic. With his political base in shambles, Webster resigned three months later. Almost immediately, historians began to refer to “the speech that lost a Senate seat.” What they generally fail to mention, however, is the role that a few critical and insulting remarks—and one spectacular anaogy—played in the process.

Disparaging remarks are such a staple of life that we hear them every day without recognizing that so many of them are metaphorical. As a child, I routinely heard people question the sanity of others by saying things like
he's got a screw loose
or
she has bats in the belfry
. And over the years an entire class of idiomatic expressions—all metaphorical—have been created to describe a deficiency of intelligence:

 

He doesn't have all his marbles.

She's not playing with a full deck.

He's one brick short of a load.

She's a few grapes short of a bunch.

The elevator doesn't go all the way to the top.

The stairs don't go all the way up to the attic.

The lights are on, but there's nobody home.

The political arena has been filled with memorable metaphorical insults. In 1897, Theodore Roosevelt, a thirty-nine-year-old assistant secretary of the Navy, was itching for the United States to rid the Western hemisphere of European colonialism, particularly Spain's involvement in Cuba. The hawkish Roosevelt believed a powerful show of force was required, but President William McKinley favored a diplomatic approach to the problem. In a rare display of candor from a junior official in any presidential administration, Roosevelt said of McKinley:

 

He shows all the backbone of a chocolate éclair.

 

In April 1898, shortly after the sinking of the U.S. battleship
Maine
in Havana harbor, Congress declared war on Spain. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Roosevelt, who quickly resigned his post and eagerly volunteered for action. Within weeks, Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt transformed a collection of college athletes, cowboys, policemen, and miners into a fighting group that went on to achieve lasting glory as the Rough Riders. Roosevelt was lionized in the American press, and his status as a war hero guaranteed a successful political future. In 1900, despite his many qualms about McKinley, Roosevelt was persuaded to become the vice-presidential running mate. They won the election, of course, and after McKinley's assassination in 1901, Roosevelt became the twenty-sixth president of the United States, the youngest man, at age forty-two, to serve in the office.

As president, Roosevelt continued to use metaphors about
backbone
and
spine
, believing they were great shorthand terms for courage (or the lack of it). In another example, he said of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.:

 

I could carve out of a banana
a justice with more backbone than that.

 

The theatrical and entertainment world is filled with magnificent metaphorical insults. Many come from critics, whose reviews have contained some real gems:

 

She was good at playing abstracted confusion
in the same way a midget is good at being short.

CLIVE JAMES,
on Marilyn Monroe

He played the King as though under the momentary apprehension
that someone else was about to play the Ace.

EUGENE FIELD,
reviewing Creston Clarke as King Lear

Her voice sounded like an eagle being goosed.

RALPH NOVAK,
on Yoko Ono

Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's dirty water.

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT,
on Marcel Proust

Sometimes the recipients of reviews have fired back in similar ways, as when the American playwright David Mamet described two influential critics this way:

 

Frank Rich and John Simon are
the syphilis and gonorrhea of the theater.

 

Metaphorical insults are generally directed at people, but every now and then, we come across examples of what might be called impersonal invective:

 

Like two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof.

THOMAS BEECHAM,
on the harpsichord

A war between architecture and painting
in which both come out badly maimed.

JOHN CANADY,
on the Guggenheim Museum

A monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.

PRINCE CHARLES,
on a proposed addition to London's National Gallery

Analogies and metaphors can be used to deliver compliments as well as insults. Garrison Keillor once said that Alfred Kinsey was to sex what Columbus was to geography. In his 2001
Jazz
documentary, filmmaker Ken Burns said of Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong:

 

Armstrong is to music what Einstein is to physics
and the Wright Brothers are to travel.

 

And Nunnally Johnson offered this tribute to Marilyn Monroe:

 

She is a phenomenon of nature,
like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon.
You can't talk to it. It can't talk to you.
All you can do is stand back and be awed by it.

 

Sometimes the compliments have a double-edged quality, as when John Mason Brown said of Dorothy Parker:

 

To those she did not like, she was a stiletto made of sugar.

 

More metaphorical compliments can be found in other chapters of the book, but in the remainder of this chapter you will find only examples of words being used as weapons—and all will be expressed metaphorically.

 

A beautiful palace without central heating.

ANONYMOUS,
on Clare Booth Luce

According to Luce's biographer, Sylvia Jukes Morris, this was a popular saying about Luce. If you know a great beauty—or a handsome man—who lacks warmth and sensitivity, you won't find a better metaphorical insult.

 

A one-man slum.

ANONYMOUS,
on Heywood Broun

Broun was a rotund man who was notorious for his disheveled appearance. He was once described this way, and it followed him for the rest of his life.

 

The glittering structure of her cultivation sits on her novels
like a rather showy icing that detracts from the cake beneath.

LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS,
on Edith Wharton

America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.

FRÉDÉRIC-AUGUSTE BARTHOLDI

Bartholdi was a nineteenth-century French sculptor who loved America but was turned off by its citizens' disgusting personal habits, especially tobacco chewing. His most famous work, a statue he titled Liberty Enlightening the World, was a mouthful for everyday Americans, who since 1886 have informally referred to it by the name it has today: the Statue of Liberty. Another European aesthete who loved Americans but detested tobacco chewing—and
the spitting associated with it—was Oscar Wilde. The practice inspired his famous metaphorical remark, “America is one long expectoration.”

 

His mind had one compartment for right and one for wrong,
but no middle chamber where the two could commingle.

HOWARD K. BEALE,
on Andrew Jackson

This is an extaordinary description of a black-and-white thinker by a respected twentieth-century historian who wrote insightfully about many American leaders. Jackson, like so many either-or thinkers, was also stubborn—a characteristic also captured by Beale: “He could bear insult, personal danger, obloquy; but he could not yield his point.”

 

Her singing reminds me of a cart coming downhill with the brake on.

THOMAS BEECHAM,
on an unidentified soprano in
Die Walkyre

She has a face that belongs to the sea and the wind,
with large rocking-horse nostrils,
and teeth that you just know bite an apple every day.

CECIL BEATON,
on Katharine Hepburn

Getting kicked out of the American Bar Association
is like getting kicked out of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

MELVIN BELLI

This was Belli's clever way of saying “no big deal” to American Bar Association president Walter Craig, who suggested that Belli's membership in the ABA might be revoked when Belli made intemperate and unprofessional remarks after his client Jack Ruby was convicted of murdering Lee Harvey Oswald. Belli, the flamboyant “king of torts,” had described the Dallas trial as “the biggest kangaroo-court disgrace in the history of American law.”

 

His mind was like a Roquefort cheese,
so ripe that it was palpably falling to pieces.

VAN WYCK BROOKS,
on Ford Madox Ford

Ricardo Montalban is to improvisational acting
what Mount Rushmore is to animation.

JOHN CASSAVETES

Why refer to an actor as
wooden
or
stiff
when you can say something like this?

 

He occasionally stumbled over the truth,
but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.

WINSTON CHURCHILL,
on Stanley Baldwin

He is the only bull that brings his own china shop with him.

WINSTON CHURCHILL,
on John Foster Dulles

This is a clever alteration of
bull in a china shop
, which means being clumsy or reckless in situations that call for grace or delicacy. Churchill used it to describe the performance of U. S. Secretary of State Dulles in the post-World War II years.

 

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams
is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.

AARON COPLAND

Toward the end of her life she looked like a hungry insect
magnified a million times—a praying mantis that had forgotten how to pray.

QUENTIN CRISP,
on Joan Crawford

He festooned the dung heap on which he had placed himself with sonnets
as people grow honeysuckle around outdoor privies.

QUENTIN CRISP,
on Oscar Wilde

A day away from Tallulah is like a month in the country.

HOWARD DIETZ,
on Tallulah Bankhead

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

GEORGE ELIOT,
in
Adam Bede
(1859)

This is how the line is usually presented, but the full original passage is even more interesting. As Mr. and Mrs. Irwine discuss Mrs. Poyser, he says: “Her tongue is like a new-set razor. She's quite original in her talk, too; one of those untaught wits that help to stock a country with proverbs. I told you that capital thing I heard her say about Craig—that he was like a cock, who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow. Now, that's an Aesop's fable in a sentence.”

 

The Love Machine
is a far better book than
Valley (of the Dolls)…
It is still, to be sure, not exactly a literary work.
But in its own little sub-category…
it shines, like a rhinestone in a trash can.

NORA EPHRON,
on Jacqueline Susann's
The Love Machine (1969)

He looks like the guy in a science-fiction movie
who is the first to see the Creature.

DAVID FRYE,
on President Gerald Ford

He's like a man who sits on a stove
and then complains that his backside is burning.