Complete Stories (80 page)
Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca
They just work those little curly heads of theirs to the bone striving to get a shock into every sentence. It is rough going, this living up to all their press notices, but the girls never fall down on the job. They are conscientious to a somewhat grave fault about giving their audience its money’s worth in thrills; but then, it’s in one of the finest little causes in the world.
So they do their stuff valiantly, running on just the way the heroines do in the prom-girl school of fiction—for, after all, who are they that they should make a liar out of literature? It is rather evident that for all their appearance of fresh—to put it mildly—youth, there are some pretty fairly sable pasts attached to them. They let fall with many an ugly thud hints of hands held and dances cut, and they don’t mind how far out of their way it takes them if they can bring it to your attention that they have plumbed life right to the depths and are fully able to fill in the missing letters in the word “d--n.” They watch hopefully for any signs of grogginess that their unconventionalities may cause in the listener, pausing eloquently after each of their most telling nifties, as who should say, “Hear that one? Pretty snappy work, eh?” It is more fun to listen to them chattering away so freely and frankly; it is all just as impromptu as the Passion Play.
If you want to be as good as hand in glove with the intellectual side of things, too, Tommy can give you the chance of a lifetime to take a look at the younger intelligentsia. He counts any number of clear-eyed young rebels among his intimates.
NOTHING LEFT BUT THE RIVERBut I shouldn’t, if I were you, go in expecting them to turn out to be regular little balls of fire. If at any time you entertained the idea of painting your district red they aren’t really the boys that you would call in to help you out with the job. They are scarcely the logical persons that you would select for the post of trying out new steps on the table or holding up any silk hats to be kicked. They seem to be always rather low in their minds, and there is a general air about them as if the chambermaid had neglected to dust that morning. The farthest that they go in the way of whooping things up is to give an occasional short laugh of quiet contempt.
For you might just as well be all set, before you meet them, to find them pretty seriously displeased with the way things are being done. It is all very well for you to be apologetic and to beg them to give the world just one more chance to try to be a better boy, but it’s no use. They are definitely off everything, and that’s flat. You are given the choice between taking it and letting it alone, reading from left to right.
They are in an especially depressed state about America. They stack right up with its severest pals and best critics. The country has turned out to be a practically total loss—no art, no literature, no folk dancing, no James Joyce, no appreciation, no native basketry, nothing; just so much real estate, inhabited by a lot of people who follow the comic strips, present automobiles to baseball players and keep conscientious track of what film will be shown at the local Bijou Dream the week after next.
The boys can’t even drag much hope out of the thought that their brave little band of youthful cognoscenti will put the country on its feet. After all they are but a thin red line; and Babbitts multiply so rapidly. It looks really as if there were nothing much left but the river.
Almost any night you can see the young intelligentsia gathered up at Tommy’s, a sort of intellectual Kiddies’ Klub, you might call it. There they all are, tots in their waning twenties and early thirties—the cunningest age, I often say it is; just the time when they’re into everything—kidding back and forth about poetry and art and sex until it’s long past the time for the sandman to come. And you will find things will work out considerably prettier for you if, when they get fairly started interchanging good ones, you don’t even attempt to put up your glove and intercept the talk. Just let it whistle on over your head, and maybe if you sit quiet you will be able to pick up something rather snappy to take home to the family.
And the kiddies seldom fail to toss off a few ideas that are guaranteed to knock you, if not cold, at least pretty uncomfortably chilly. They usually start off in lighter vein with some comical cracks at the aged. There is not much in this life that can win a snicker from them, but they do have to indulge in a rousing smile when they think of those poor old souls of forty-five and forty-seven trying to stagger along in the wake of progress. Yet they are a bit worked up over it, too, even though they are the first to see its humorous side. You gather that growing old is something that people do just to be mean.
Some of the boys, in fact, take the thing so much to heart that they come right out and say their highest hope is that someone will be public-spirited enough to come along and shoot them before they reach forty. And it looks from here like a pretty good ten-to-three bet that they will get their wish.
But it is when they cease bantering and get down to the really deep stuff that they will open your eyes for you. Many a night will you spend tossing on a hot pillow after these little ones have shown up life to you as it really is. Disillusioned is no name for them; you might just as well go right ahead and call them cynical, for short.
It all comes out with a rush, once they get started. They come clean with the news that war is a horrible thing, that injustice still exists in many parts of the globe even to this day, that the very rich are apt to sit appreciably prettier than the very poor. Even the tenderer matters are not smeared over with romance for them. They have taken a calm look at this marriage thing and they are there to report that it is not always a lifelong trip to Niagara Falls. You will be barely able to stagger when the evening is over. In fact, once you have heard the boys settling things it will be no surprise to you if any day now one of them works it all out that there is nothing to this Santa Claus idea.
What with keeping up with the Hollywood society notes and with remembering to feed Fluff and Chum, the family brace of goldfish, I don’t, myself, have much time for sitting and dreaming in the candle-lit gloaming. But when I do get a moment to myself I lavish it upon wondering what people used to get excited about before the present younger generation came along. Maybe it is not safe to trust in memories of departed youth, yet it seems that all this about things being so different from what they were when grandma was a girl is something of an overstatement. Where the boys and girls of grandma’s day made their big mistake was in using the wrong kind of advertising. If ever a man deserved firing it was their press agent.
I don’t know who it was that started the nation-wide publicity campaign for our present young folks. But you couldn’t ask to see a sweeter job, no matter who did it. And all novel stuff too. Not a milk bath or a jewel robbery in the lot.
GETTING THEMSELVES CONDEMNEDThe commercial genius who began the grand work of selling this younger generation to the public went right ahead on the principle that, after all, there is but one sure way to get people talking—simply give them something to talk about; and then you can retire to the country estate and go in for raising double petunias, comfortably sure that your work will be carried right along for you.
One hearty look back at the way things were done in grandma’s day convinced the publicity agent for the modern young that that was no way to crash into the news. It may have been all very well, but it never set people to gathering in little knots on street corners, talking the matter over in hushed voices. Then, according to popular folklore, girls were gentle and low-voiced, ready to faint at the drop of a garter, unable to feel really themselves without their flannel petticoats, given to modest white muslin dresses, with perhaps a bunch of daisies at the belt if they wanted to go in strong for sex appeal. The young men of the period were honest and noble and true, kind to the antique and the bedridden, and lips that touched lip stick should never touch theirs. Nothing could have been sweeter of course in its way, but it never accomplished anything notable toward getting them into the contemporary topics of the day.
Once it was seen where the boys and girls of ye olden daye fell down it was virtually no trouble at all to get the current young out of the amateur class. All they had to do was to capitalize their goings-on instead of their virtues, and the thing was done. As soon as they could get themselves condemned by press and pulpit they would be all set. The only things they needed were a snappy trade name—“flapper” fixed half of that up fairly well, though they never did do the right thing by way of the male clients—and a couple of good catchy slogans, such as, “Well, I don’t know what the young people are coming to, I’m sure” and “What on earth can their fathers and mothers be thinking of?”
There was nothing more to it. The business of being young ranked in American industries right after automobile manufacture.
And no one knows better than you yourself how prettily the drive worked. There has been nothing like it since the gold rush.
In the first place the news broke just at the right time. It was an off season, as you might say. Laddie Boy had barely come to his decision to take up a political career. There was nothing really worth while in the way of a war on the engagement pad—just a few bush-league events in the Balkans and the regular Turkish daily dozen. Hollywood was still regarded as one of those quaint little Western towns where men were men and women were women. The public was just about ripe for something to talk about after the children had gone upstairs to bed.
Then the incoming fashions helped the young people’s cause along. Bobbed hair and short skirts were news items, and the you-just-know-she-doesn’t-wear-them movement was budding into vogue. Rolled stockings appeared on every hand—there isn’t the slightest need for being silly about it; you know perfectly well what I mean.
Women’s clubs all over the country passed resolutions stating that they never in all their lives had seen anything like it, they declared they hadn’t. People with a gift for looking on the bright side of things ascribed it to the general clutter left by the war and promised that everything would be all right as soon as business was able to come downstairs and sit up in an easy-chair propped up with pillows again.
SOFT FOR THE TIRED AUTHORSAnd all the tired authors regarded the news about the younger set as being sent to them direct from heaven by special assignment. The market was all clogged up with stories about young A.E.F. lieutenants and beautiful Y.W.C.A. girls; stories full of such racy bits of army slang as “buddies” and “Sammies” and “Come on, men, it’s the zero hour, so let’s go over the top with the best of luck”; stories crowded with realistic word pictures of kindly old French peasants who refused to accept money from the grateful Yankee boys, and of privates who went about imploring a chance to die for their superior officers. It was like a day in the country for the overworked writers to fall on a nice timely topic, rough enough to have a widespread appeal, yet safely out of the asterisk class.
It is no news to you to say that they made the most of it. You couldn’t pick up a magazine without finding a minimum of three stories founded on the scandalous doings of the modern young, all pointing the moral that things are not what they used to be when Madison Square was considered uptown.
As publicity it was so much velvet for the younger generation. And you have to admit that Tommy Clegg and his friends stood up under all the talk pretty gamely. They shrank from the blinding glare of the limelight much as Miss Pola Negri shudders back from it. If they felt from time to time that the service was beginning to slack up a bit they rushed right in just like one of the family and helped out by providing a little more advertising copy for the firm. You couldn’t have wanted to see a nicer spirit of cooperation.
Even Constant Readers and Pro Bono Publicos got the idea of the thing and wrote indignant letters to their favorite papers, demanding that immediate steps be taken to do something about our boys and girls—put them out to sea in an open boat, say, or call out the militia and turn machine guns on them or give them some little hint like that.
The lurid doings of the younger set got into the circulating libraries, reached the footlights, eventually were taken up by the moving-picture scenario fitters. Unfortunately, by the time a national evil gets taken up by the movies in a serious way it is but tepid dog so far as its news interest is concerned. That is just the next step before it belongs to the ages.
But don’t, whatever you do, utter any words of condolence to Tommy and his playmates on that score. For they still regard themselves and their activities as authentic front-page stuff.
The Saturday Evening Post,
April 28, 1923
April 28, 1923
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