Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 (14 page)

If the Federal Trade Commission's charges are proved, the early advertising man who first had the Carter's Little Liver Pills account should certainly receive some sort of Congressional decoration for his unique contribution to American hokum. He should be posthumously awarded the coveted ribbon of the Order of the Purple Phrase.

STOCK MARKET ZIGZAGS

3/26/55

WE DON'T FULLY SUBSCRIBE
to the bald statement that confidence in this country's economy can be lost in a day. There are tangible assets that are not easily wiped out—the soil, the climate, the industrial vigor, the immense spirit of a people who won freedom through revolutionary zeal and are still willing to work at it. And there are intangibles that give the economy fertility and vitality. The stock market, which is a sort of horse track without the horses, does not deserve its wide reputation as a barometer. It sometimes sows the hurricane, instead of reporting the breeze. It is naturally flighty, because traders are noncreative people who rely for their security on the creativeness of others and who are therefore uneasy. Winchell
*
mentions a stock by name and a rainbow appears in the sky over Wall Street. But what the market does symbolize, in its nervous way, is the health-giving flexibility of capitalism—the trait that keeps our economy delicately balanced but that makes it a far better servant of the people than the state-driven economies that have hardly any elasticity at all. The other day, in San Diego, the American economy even adjusted to spring-time: work was halted on a seven-million-dollar building project to give a dove time to hatch her eggs. Our confidence in a society that observes this sentimental ritual and practices this fiscal folly cannot be toppled in a day. To talk of peace is not enough; we must hatch the egg of the dove.

SPLIT PERSONALITIES

2/19/55

IN THIS AGE OF TELEVISION
, this day of the spoken word and the fleeting image, we find ourself taking satisfaction in the printed word, which has a natural durability. Whenever we watch TV, we are impressed by two things: its effectiveness and its evanescence. It glides by and is lost. The printed word sticks around—you can walk into any library thirty years later, and there (for what it may be worth) it is.

The most puzzling thing about TV is the steady advance of the sponsor across the line that has always separated news from promotion, entertainment from merchandising. The advertiser has assumed the role of originator, and the performer has gradually been eased into the role of peddler. This is evident everywhere. The voices of radio and television are the voices of quick-change artists; they move rapidly from selling to telling and back to selling again. They are losing their sharpness because they have divided their allegiance. In 1925, when
The
New Yorker
was born, an artist was an artist, a writer was a writer, a newsman was a newsman, an actor was an actor. Today, every one of these people has developed a split personality and is hawking something besides his talent. A newscaster appears on the screen, and for a moment you don't know whether he has tidings about some offshore islands or tidings about an automobile's rear end. Usually he has both. A girl breaks into song, and for a moment you can't quite pin down the source of her lyrical passion. It could be love, it could be something that comes in ajar. Conscious or unconscious, there is an attempt to blur the line that the press has fought to hold. The line would have disappeared long since were the human voice capable of sounding the same in both its roles, but it isn't. When a man speaks words he has been paid to utter, praises something he gets money for praising, his voice invariably gives him away; it simply lacks the accents that reinforce a voice when it is expressing something that comes straight from head or heart. It seems odd to us that commerce should aspire to violate the line, blend the two voices. Yet it does. If the line were to disappear, if the voices should become indistinguishable, the show would be over.

MARKET WATCHERS

12/18/54

ON OUR WAY TO WORK
in the morning, we sometimes pass one of those temples where men sit meditating with their hats on, watching ticker reports projected on a screen. We stopped for a moment the other morning to kibitz: through the window we watched the watchers at their watching. The ticker was bringing news of cloudy conditions in the Middle West; rain was expected within forty eight hours and might have an effect on winter wheat. The watchers, some of whom looked as though they were merely taking refuge indoors from a rain of their own making, absorbed this piece of information solemnly. One man, nursing a cigar, closed his eyes as he tried to conjure up the significance of distant rain on distant wheat. What a strange little band of tardy pioneers they seemed, sifting the wind that failed to touch their cheeks as it blew across prairies they would never see! How sad they looked, these early-morning waifs—no parents, no homes, only a lighted screen on which prices rose and fell amid tidings of great gain!

11

Curiosities and Inventions

HOTSPUR THE SWIFT

3/16/29

TO TELL YOU WHAT
make of car Hotspur is, would be to make General Motors insanely jealous. That I must not do. Suffice it to say that Hotspur is a small car, whose leather seats smell. Even the rumble-seat smells, although it is right out in the open.

“Do the seats smell that way just while they are new,” I asked the salesman, “or will they always smell that way?”

“You won't notice it after the first five hundred miles,” he replied.

“I think my friends will, though,” I said.

 

It's four weeks since I drove Hotspur out of the agency, his windshield plastered with printed directions, his nickel headlights catching the last gleam of the twilight, his gas swashing around audibly in the gas tank, his right front fender grazing a lady on the sidewalk. They have been four ecstatic weeks. I have obeyed the rules which I found on the windshield, have religiously kept Hotspur down under thirty-five miles an hour, and now my purgatory nears an end, and I will soon be able to open him up to his full forty. The smell still lingers, and even on an open road, brisking right along, I can shut my eyes, inhale, and imagine I am seated in the lobby of a second-rate hotel.

My friends twit me about this smell, just as I expected they would. At first I was sensitive about it and was at the mercy of my joking passengers, but now I forestall their remarks. The moment a guest enters my automobile I turn immediately to him with my nose in the air and inquire: “Have you been around a stable, by any chance?” or: “Have you, do you suppose, something on the bottom of your shoe?” This unsettles the guest and usually he has a miserable time the entire trip.

Hotspur has other traits which my friends have found amusing, but it's surprising how quickly one builds up a defence against jests. Time was when almost anybody could have annoyed me by referring to a certain strange vibrant sound that occurs in Hotspur when he attains a middling speed. It is a noise which comes over him just at twenty-eight miles an hour—it hits him suddenly, and reminds me of the pleasant sound that wagons make when, from afar, you hear them crossing a wooden bridge in the country. When my friends mention the noise, I explain that it is a “harmonic,” a sympathetic over-tone that can occur only at a certain speed; with this as my theme I go on at some length, telling about musical harmonics and how, when you play a note on the piano, the octave will also vibrate, and I recite, too, instances of church windows being broken by organ notes, and other interesting phenomena of sympathetic vibration, until my friends soon become so absorbed in my discourse that they forget Hotspur's extraordinary unquiet. (Either that or they get out of the car altogether and beat their way home across country.)

 

So far, the rumble-seat has been used only by women and children. Opinions have differed about it. For the most part, the children have enjoyed it—welcoming, as children do, the terrible exposure in midwinter, the possibility of pneumonia and release from school, the sense of utter helplessness and bounce. The only lady who ever ventured into the rumble skinned her right knee getting in and her left knee getting out, thus preserving a kind of rough symmetry through it all. A day or two later I happened to be asking her to marry me, and mentioned that if she were my wife she could always ride in the rumble. “And open up all the old wounds?” she said, sadly.

She was a lovely person. I will always remember her. I will remember how she turned to me with a heroic little smile on her lips and said:

“The seat would be more comfortable if you wouldn't keep so many empty boxes and crates in there.”

“But there aren't any empty boxes and crates in there,” I replied, astounded.

“No, I suppose not,” she continued, thoughtfully, “and yet that's the impression one gets, somehow.”

 

A month has worked great changes in Hotspur's appearance. His nickel trimmings, that once blinded me with their early radiance, have toned down to the color and sheen of old candy-wrappers. His fenders, at first richly ebon, are now a pale pavement blue. In spirit, though, he is the same car. Lately it has seemed to me that he senses the approach of spring, for some-times, setting forth with him on one of those clear mornings that bleed the heart with the prick of distant and unmistakable crocuses, I have felt a little earthly shiver run through his frame, and he has leapt ahead with an urgency more than mechanical, an internal expansion not unlike my own.

BUY A BATTLESHIP?

11/30/29

WE ONCE SERIOUSLY CONSIDERED
purchasing the Levia-than
*
when it was on sale. Somehow we never went through with it. Now we see by the papers that the government is going to sell three obsolete cruisers at public auction. One of these would suit our needs even better than the Leviathan. We suspect it would be a lot of fun to own a battleship, be it ever so obsolete. It would bolster our ego. How pleasant to overhear young ladies whispering: “Not the Mr. Tilley who has the battleship?” Pleasant, and advantageous socially. It would be pleasant, too, to make use of our ship in connection with the sporadic activities of the regular Navy. We would like to come on a sham battle on a foggy day and sneak in with
our
cruiser to participate, first on one side then on the other, annoying admirals, confusing the issue. It may not be too late. About how much would a battleship be?

ANIMAL VOICES

2/8/30

WHEN THE NOON WHISTLE BLOWS
in Bronx Zoo, it starts the wolves howling. They point their noses high, their breath curls upward on the cold air, and they give tongue in the primeval forests of their cage. Movie people have been trying to record this performance in sound pictures, but without any luck—the wolves refuse to howl into a microphone. It's one of the little city problems that haven't been solved yet.

Animals are rather hard to take in sound pictures, Dr. Ditmars, the snake man, tells us. He has been making sound records of their voices for synchronization with his own moving pictures, and has recorded the sounds of most of the animals in the Park. Lions are disappointing—they sound like a cow, no majesty, only vaguely sad. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made a sound record, for its trademark lion, but gave it up, it sounded so feeble and un-metro-goldwyn-mayer. Camels are difficult, and better results are obtained by having a man make a noise like a camel than by taking the camel's voice itself. Strangely enough, one of the best sound artists is the rattlesnake—the sound record of a rattler is perfect. Dr. Ditmars experimented with a wooden rattle in front of the microphone, but could get nothing as good as the real thing. The hiss of the cobra is also rather nice.

A major difficulty is getting the animal to make any sound at all, animals having a penchant for absolute silence. There are different ways of stimulating them. To make a monkey scream with horror, you show it a live snake. To make it chatter with glee, you show it a banana. Tree toads won't perform until you begin sawing up a piece of bronze with a hacksaw—and that spoils the record. Dr. Ditmars wanted to make a katydid record and found that the only way he could induce the katydids to make their monotonous music was by placing other katydids on the outside of his studio, so that his subjects could hear the low distant sound of their love-making. This required a lot of katydids, and necessitated a trip to Wurtsborough Mountain in Jersey, where katydids can be captured at night in the scrub oaks on the mountainside.

According to Dr. Ditmars, the cleanest and most satisfactory way to record animal sounds is to stay away from the animals altogether, and summon a man named Phil Dwyer, who will make any noise you ask for, and who doesn't require any stimulus such as bananas or distant love-making. This Mr. Dwyer was the camel in a fine camel picture made by one of the movie companies. It would have been a great success as a topical picture except that in making up the film they put the camel voice (a mournful and very loud braying noise) on a kangaroo record. The result was surprising, zoologically, but the braying kangaroo appeared in two Broadway houses before the film company discovered its mistake. Natural history note: kangaroos do not make any noise.

THEN AND NOW

12/9/33

WE RAN ACROSS A
1908 Schwartz catalogue in the course of the week, and it was a lot of fun to compare it with the 1933 catalogue. Fundamentally, toys don't change as much as we imagine. In the current catalogue, for example, you read about a submarine “that dives and rises just like real ones.” This seems like ultra-modernity till you turn to the 1908 list and find the same submarine, for slightly less money. The same is true of a diver—a little man who goes to the bottom. Schwartz has one today for $1.50. You could have had a nice five-inch diver in 1908 for forty cents. There was a swimming doll in 1908, identical with today's swimming doll except for her bathing suit, which had a long skirt. There was a very good fireboat in 1908, which threw a stream of water, and a very good cow which gave milk. The 1933 catalogue speaks of a doll that “breathes,” but that idea isn't new, either. There used to be a doll that drank milk and wet its pants, and there still is. Farm sets haven't changed; and 1908 was full of jigsaw puzzles, bagatelle, and steam launches. Anchor blocks, those memorable little stone building blocks whose yellow arches, blue turrets, and red cubes formed the framework of our own childhood, are still going strong today; and to our notion nothing has come along which can touch them, in either beauty or practical possibilities.

Toys have, of course, been deluxed up considerably. Take the Irish Mail, a standard juvenile vehicle even in this scooter age. In 1908, evidences of effeteness were already apparent in the Irish Mail: a model came out called the Fairy Auto Car, which we remember very well because it had a clutch. Equipped with “cushion tires,” it sold for $13.50. Today, Schwartz sells a deluxe Mail, equipped with Goodyear pneumatic balloon tires, electric lights and horn, and front-wheel drive, for $38. The 1933 express wagon has streamlined wheel housings, like a pursuit plane, and one of the 1933 toy coupés is radio-equipped—that is, it gives forth music, like a taxicab. Locomotives on the modern electric railways give forth a chugging noise.

The toy that seems to have gone completely by the board is the tricycle, and by tricycle we don't mean velocipede. We mean the tricycle your sister had, with the two big rear wheels and the one little front wheel and the sway-back frame which gave it its ladylike appearance. The 1908 catalogue featured tricycles, but you never see one today. It took little girls many years to discover that the tricycle was a mechanically inefficient device requiring four times the steam to make it go that it ought to, but they finally found out.

Toys now are sanitary, de-luxe, and faithful miniatures; and a good many of life's little hazards have been eliminated for today's batch of youngsters. We are thinking particularly of the motorboat which goes a hundred and fifty feet, “then turns around and comes back.” Maybe we are crazy, but for us the rich charm of a mechanical boat used to be the delicious problem of retrieving it from mid-pond.

FITTING IN

6/9/34

THE COMPLAINT ONE OF OUR FRIENDS
makes about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars, and modern streamlined trains and cars is that all these
objets modernes,
while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances. Our professors of eugenics have dodged the whole issue. At the Chicago Fair, the noticeable thing about the circular houses of tomorrow was not how funny the houses looked but how funny the people looked in them. Must the next generation be as structurally inefficient, as architecturally inappropriate, as the present? Babies even at this late date are born with ears that stick out and catch the wind; the back of their head fails to come to a long sharp point. It often seems to us that the only people who really fit into the modern picture are certain department-store dummies and occasionally a pattern figure in a fashion magazine. The rest of us definitely don't belong.

SOOTHING THE CHICKENS

5/15/37

THE IMPERSONAL
, disjointed sound which radio in large doses makes immunizes the listener. We happen to know one set-owner who has found a practical use for this curious property. He is a Massachusetts poultry farmer who goes in for large-scale egg-raising. He discovered that if his hens were disturbed by a sudden noise in the night, egg production fell off sharply next day. So now he keeps a radio going quietly night and day among his hens, immunizing them against the virus of sound. It works perfectly. Let a door squeak on its hinges; the hens accept it as a sound effect. Somehow it gives us a secret, deep pleasure to know that a dramatized news broadcast, aimed to unnerve the rest of us, is definitely reassuring to a lot of sleepy fowl, dreaming of hawks and weasels in a henhouse far away.

THE OLD AND THE NEW

6/19/37

IN AN EXCURSION
along U. S. Highway É last weekend, we noted two interesting building operations. One was a theatre being built in the shape of a barn. The other was a restaurant being built in the shape of a diner. It is amusing to see these American forms, which were the result of vicissitudes, being perpetuated after the need is over. Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has some little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.

REVOLVING DOORS

4/1/44