Complete Stories (79 page)

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Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca

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And our own crowd never disappoints, once it is established on the porch. Seen there, Mrs. Eddy again becomes a striking figure of a woman; Mrs. Rinse and Mrs. Grew hurry to tell her how simply great she looks with her face fuller. Mrs. Rinse is as frilled and as frolicsome as ever; her friends are amazed at the ladylike strides she has made in her singing. Mrs. Grew’s sports costumes are even more dashing; the other two ladies simply can’t say enough in favor of them.
Mr. Grew and Mr. Rinse resume their places as undisputed screams, and Mr. Eddy sprinkles words of hope about the future of the financial world.
Even at the first moment of the first meeting of the summer it is just as though the members of our own crowd had never been parted. They go right on with their badinage from where they left off, and it seems to go over bigger every season. Really, so close do they go as the summer dashes by that when the day after Labor Day arrives it doesn’t seem as if they could rip themselves apart.
Indeed, they probably couldn’t, and still live, if they did not hold tight to the annual thought of the practically countless times that they would get together during the winter.
 
The Saturday Evening Post,
October 21, 1922
Professional Youth
 
If you want to take home to the folks some of the real inside stuff about this younger generation that has been breaking into the news so much lately, you owe it to yourself to start the thing off right by meeting Tommy Clegg. He is just the boy to come stealing down the winding staircase and let you in on the ground floor. For Tommy is one of the charter members of the Younger Generation, Inc.
Now, I shouldn’t want you to go away with the notion that Tommy is the boy who invented youth. He himself would laughingly deny it if you were to walk up to him on the street and ask him to tell you flatly, one way or the other, did he or didn’t he.
But he was well up in the van when it came to cashing in on the idea. Tommy and his little playmates don’t regard being young as just one of those things that are likely to happen to anybody. They make a business of it.
And Tommy Clegg did much to put the current younger generation on a business basis. He is in a practically perfect position to do some invaluable work in the way of getting the firm’s name before the public. As a sort of side line to his regular job of being just a kiddie, Tommy is engaged in giving literature a series of shoves in the right direction. It was but three or four short years ago that he first toddled to his little desk, seized his pen in his chubby fist and proceeded to knock American letters for a row of cloth-covered volumes of Louisa M. Alcott. And just take a look at him today—one of the leading boy authors, hailed alike by friends and relatives as the thirty-one-year-old child wonder.
Perhaps you have read his collected works, that celebrated five-inch shelf. As is no more than fair, his books—
Annabelle Takes to Heroin, Gloria’s Neckings,
and
Suzanne Sobers Up
—deal with the glamorous adventures of our young folks. Even if you haven’t read them, though, there is no need for you to go all hot and red with nervous embarrassment when you are presented to their author. Tommy will take care of all that for you. He has the nicest, most reassuring way of taking it all cozily for granted that not a man or a woman and but few children in these loosely United States could have missed a word that he has written. It grinds the ice practically to powder the moment you meet him.
HOW TOMMY PREPARES FOR EMERGENCIES
 
Probably you have it all worked out by this time that Tommy is not his official title. You seldom said a truer word. He signs his works in full—almost to repletion, in fact—Thomas Warmington Clegg, Junior.
But he wants all the world to think of him as just Tommy. He presses you to try to be a child again, along with him, and go ahead. He bucks you up by explaining that everybody calls him just Tommy—and when he says “everybody” you get a more than fair idea that it is no mere figure of speech. There is a largeness about it that hints pretty strongly to you that he includes such people as Gloria Swanson and Secretary Hughes and all the severely crowned heads of Europe. You have to fight hard to keep the tears back when you realize that there he is, urging you to string right along with the big boys and call him Tommy too.
But democratic—that’s Tommy all over. Scarcely 85 per cent of his success has gone to his head. He doesn’t take any more credit for what he has done than if he were Thackeray.
There is a pleasingly boyish sound about “Tommy” that makes it, really, more a trade-mark than a name. And Tommy Clegg, who has one of the best little business heads you ever saw in your life, isn’t the boy to overlook that. Youth, as we got to saying only about five minutes ago, is his dish. It was a rough day for him when he found it was no longer practicable for him to go about in rompers and carry a pail and shovel.
He can hardly keep from breaking down and taking a good laugh, he tells you, every time he thinks how funny it is for a child like him to be sending belles-lettres for a loop, the way he does. But you mustn’t think he takes it too personally. He simply sets it down as additional proof of what the present younger generation can do, once it gets into its stride. Perhaps at the moment you may not be able to recall ever having seen any pictures of Keats with a long white beard, either; but that, as Pat said to Mike while they were walking down the street one day, is neither here nor there. I’m not quite sure if it was Tommy that started it, but there seems to be a pretty persistent rumor going the rounds of our boys and girls that nothing was ever written prior to a couple of years ago.
You will find it rather uphill work, at first, to draw Tommy out about himself and his achievements. He may even wait to be introduced to you before he tells you, with an almost fanatical regard for detail, who he is, what he does and how much he gets for it. From there he will go on and show you a full line of samples, just so there will be no chance of your getting any wrong ideas about his work.
For Tommy never runs the risk of going out without taking along a few manuscripts; an author never knows, these days, when somebody is going to rush up to him in the Subway or on Forty-second Street or up at the Polo Grounds and ask him to give a reading. And it doesn’t do any harm to be prepared, so that he can start right off, the minute anybody drops a hat. In case of any tie he usually slips a couple of photographs in his pocket, too, for he might run into Jeritza or Queen Mary or Peggy Hopkins Joyce any time, on a ferry or at the movies, and there they would be, begging him for some little keepsake, and how would he feel if he had to confess that he had gone and left his photographs in his other clothes?
They are pretty striking, too, these pictures of Tommy. Taken in profile, they are, and so that there won’t be any confusion in the beholder’s mind he is shown holding a pen and bending musingly over a fair, broad sheet of paper—just as a barber, say, might be photographed dreamily regarding a razor and strop.
As special correspondent from the front line of the younger generation, Tommy naturally strives to give the public—his public, he calls it tenderly—a good all-round view of the boys and girls. Sometimes his stories show them as clear-eyed young rebels—Tommy loves that one—facing life with sparkling eyes, their shining eyes undimmed by mists of sentiment and conventionality. He intimates pretty definitely that they are so many white hopes, and now that they have come along to take hold of things it’s going to be just the dandiest of all perfectly corking little worlds. Tommy uses these tales of his to get into circulation some of his more revolutionary ideas. It makes you stop and give a hearty gasp when you realize how daring is the viewpoint of these young ones of today. Looking facts squarely in the face isn’t the half of it. These clear-eyed heroes and heroines as good as come right out and say that there are two sexes, that youth is not apt to last a lifetime, that parents are occasionally slightly out of touch with the activities of their children, that spring is one of the pleasantest of the seasons and that there have been several known cases where love did not endure after the first forty or fifty years. It gives all the old theories rather a nasty shake-up, that’s what it does.
But startling as these stories are, there doesn’t seem to be any noticeable clamor for the moving-picture rights to them. As publicity for the younger set they are all very well, of course, as far as they go, but they don’t catch the out-of-town trade. There isn’t, as you might say, a headache in a barrelful of them.
THE GOINGS-ON OF THE YOUNGER SET
 
Tommy, who has his lighter side, too, is better able to show some of his real stuff when he writes, not of clear-eyed young rebels but of cock-eyed ones. There are few that can tie him when it comes to describing night life in the country clubs and the merry romps of the light-hearted girls and boys, so full of mischief and gin. You get the impression from these works that an evening with the younger generation is like something between a Roman bath and one of King Alphonso’s little vacations at Deauville. Rouge flows like water in Tommy’s pages, and cigarettes and cocktails circulate as freely as hard-boiled eggs at brookside picnics. Things, according to the author, look pretty black; he broadcasts the grim warning that conditions are getting no better rapidly and that decadence, as those outside the younger generation know of it, is still in its infancy.
And as the farmer said when his wife, who had long been subject to deathlike epileptic seizures, finally died during one of them, “That’s more like it.” That’s the stuff that got the boys and girls before the public. Those are the stories that have done much to make it common gossip that you never saw your mother behaving herself that way when she was a girl.
Tommy Clegg, being, as you might put it, one of the members of the firm, knows what he is talking about when he tells of the goings-on of the younger set. As soon as you meet some of his friends you can see that his characters are drawn practically from life.
He has several playmates who are carving out quite a name for themselves as lost souls. With the engaging frankness so characteristic of the modern young, they sit right down and tell you all about themselves without so much as a flinch; it just seems as if they couldn’t bear to think of your going along from day to day without knowing the worst about them. They are too far gone to conceal their shame. It is almost as if they wore on their chests a large placard with “Look at me—I’m terrible” lettered upon it.
You cannot conscientiously feel that you have any working knowledge of what life among the Apaches is like until you have heard these boys repeat a few of their favorite selections. It comes out that one orgy after another is bogey for them and their regular bedtime is all hours, at the earliest. They confide that you could count on the thumbs of one hand the number of sober breaths that they have drawn since they got out of grammar school. Rather uncomfortably blood-chilling are the tales they tell of the crimes that they have committed when the beast in them was unleashed by the Haig boys; how they paid a hansom driver to let them climb up in his seat and take the reins, or went right up to a policeman and asked him how he got that way, or drove around and around the park in an open taxicab, singing “Lord Geoffrey Amherst” in harmony close to the point of stuffiness. You gather from the general trend of the conversation that the next step for them will be the gutter. It seems to be a hospitably wide-open secret that if it wasn’t for them, bootlegging in America would be on the rocks today.
And it is little short of devastating to see how bitterly hardened they are to the effects of strong drink. You never in your life saw an uglier crack tendered than the old one about its taking more than one swallow to make a snootful. One high ball, and the boys get right up and do impersonations of Charlie Chaplin; two, and they have to be held back from going out and taking over the railroads. The person who got up the line about not knowing where the younger generation is coming to certainly worked the whole thing into a nut-shell.
Some of the young ladies of Tommy’s circle, too, make it their whole career to drive home to you the startling truth that things are not what they used to be when grandma was a girl. “Daring” is no word for them. You can’t steal a look at them any time of the day but what they are being just as daring and modern and unconventional as it is possible to be and still stay out of Bedford. And just as unconscious of the effect they are creating as if they were doing it all before a camera too.
GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS
 
The funny thing is that if you took only a quick glance at them you would think they were nothing more than regular girls. They may run a bit to trick earrings, and it is evident that much of this talk about rouge and lip sticks has its foundation in fact; but there is nothing, really, that you wouldn’t see right in your own home. They seem to be coming along pretty nicely with their inhaling, yet it isn’t anything to write to the papers about. It has been several years since there was any cause for any grave alarm about tobacco’s stunting their growth.
It is in their conversation that the girls get in some of their snappiest work. Bright as a dollar bill, they are, every one of them; and frank—well, there isn’t a slang phrase that they would stop at. It is pointed out at some length in many modern literary works that there are few things sweeter and more wholesome than the girl of today’s attitude toward sex. She just looks unflinchingly at the thing with those widely advertised clear eyes of hers, remarks, in effect, “So that’s what all the fuss is about!” and calls it a day. And you can see from these friends of Tommy’s that the rumor has not been exaggerated in the least. There is no unwholesome mystery about sex to them; in fact so healthy, so buxom almost is their attitude toward it that they seldom if ever talk about anything else. If sex should suddenly be abolished the girls could never make another sapient crack.

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