Aurora Dawn (16 page)

On the left side of the red-headed Sphinx sat Andrew Reale, and beside him, due to the numerical unbalance of males and females,
was placed Mr. Leach. The sad downward lines of Leach’s face were softened by the alchemist warmly at work in his veins, and
he occasionally interjected a remark in the main conversation which indicated that it was no mean mother-wit that he had dammed
and channelized into the uses of advertising. The ring on his finger rotated in a steady, mellow motion. As to Mrs. Van Wirt,
Carol had shown her shrewdness in seating her on Leach’s left hand, next to Father Stanfield; for that lady was bulging, brightly-clad,
middle-aged, and of an inoffensive church-going suburbanity–of all the females of the party, much the safest for insulating
the unpredictable preacher–a layer of lead to screen the X-ray of his feared humor.

This, then, was the array of the dinner.

What a tangled knot of interest and passion was here, in this gathering, this blithe rectangle of fourteen polite people!
Supposing that human relationships, instead of being impalpable tensions of spirit, had suddenly materialized at this table
in the form of colored silken threads, a color for each feeling–red for desire, blue for greed, yellow for fear, green for
hate, black for envy, brown for disgust, orange for pride, purple for deceit, and, of course, white for love–would they not
have had a most gorgeous and not-to-be-unraveled skein among them? Reader, if such a materialization were a risk that all
such gatherings faced, with how many of our friends would you and I sit down to dinner? Has a soul walked the ground since
time began, all of whose threads, going and coming, would be white?

The fowl had been served; roast duck
à l’orange
, hugely successful, and quickly reduced to many little heaps of bones. Talmadge Marquis rose, glass in hand. “Ladies and
gentlemen,” said he, “I’m a man of few words.” He proceeded to prove this assertion in a tribute, lasting seventeen minutes,
to “that great religious leader, Father Stanfield,” to “that great financier and patron of the arts, Steve–you don’t mind
my calling you Steve in front of friends–English,” to “that great artist and painter, once you get to know him, Mike Wilde,”
and to “this great staff of advertising people who have put across this great show”; his words were few, a vocabulary of possibly
two hundred, or one hundred ninety-six if “an-honor-and-a-privilege” were regarded as one (as Mr. Marquis clearly regarded
it); so few, that he contrived to fill out seventeen minutes only by the most ingenious permutations and combinations of them.

At last he sat down amid approving murmurs. Now Michael Wilde, at the other end of the table, cleared his throat, and, rubbing
his fingers around the brim of a wine glass, began–

But what comes now is crucial. Let us draw the fresh breath of a new chapter.

The Dinner Party: II—Containing Michael Wilde’s

famous “Oration Against Advertising.”

W
E EXIST IN A
curiously touchy age. No work of fiction dares to peep out on the stage of literature today without first timidly poking
forth from the side of the proscenium a placard proclaiming that the story to follow is a lie from one end to the other, and
that no person in it actually lived or lives. Now I freely affirm that this history is truth, every word of it, and that every
character in it is a breathing human being whom I have seen and talked to, and whom I have named by name. Let any impostor
who has the conceit to imagine that one of my people is a parody of himself, beware; I shall bring him to justice for defaming
my work by implying that any part of this serious narrative belongs in the frivolous racks of fiction.

MICHAEL WILDE’S ORATION AGAINST ADVERTISING

(Running his fingers absently around the brim of a wine glass, Michael Wilde began thus:)

Marquis, while you were talking I looked around this table and saw that with the exception of the ladies, a banker and two
men of God–Stanfield and myself–everyone here wins subsistence through the activity called advertising. Now, I realize that
you invited me in the absence, enforced by your sedentary ways, of stuffed tiger heads or other trophies on your walls, a
live artist being the equivalent of a dead beast as a social ornament. I will not question your motive because it has given
me a chance to do a beautiful and good thing. I should like to entreat all these gentlemen to redeem the strange, bittersweet
miracle of their lives, while there is yet time, by giving up the advertising business at once.

Has it ever occurred to any of you gentlemen to examine the peculiar fact that you find bread in your mouths daily? How does
this happen? Who is it that you have persuaded to feed you? The obvious answer is that you buy your food, but this just states
the question in another, less clear way, because money is nothing but an exchange token. Drop the confusing element of money
from the whole process, and the question I’ve posed must confront you bleakly. What is it that you do, that entitles you to
eat?

A shoemaker gives shoes for his bread. Well. A singer sings for her supper. Well. A capitalist leads a large enterprise. Well.
A pilot flies, a coal-miner digs, a sailor moves things, a minister preaches, an author tells stories, a laundryman washes,
an auto worker makes cars, a painter makes pictures, a street car conductor moves people, a stenographer writes down words,
a lumberjack saws, and a tailor sews. The people with the victuals appreciate these services and cheerfully feed the performers.
But what does an advertising man do?

He induces human beings to want things they don’t want. Now, I will be deeply obliged if you will tell me by what links of
logic anybody can be convinced that your activity–the creation of want where want does not exist–is a useful one, and should
be rewarded with food. Doesn’t it seem, rather, the worst sort of mischief, deserving to be starved into extinction?

None of you, however, is anything but well fed; yet I am sure that until this moment it has never occurred to you on what
a dubious basis your feeding is accomplished. I shall tell you exactly how you eat. You induce people to use more things than
they naturally desire–the more useless and undesirable the article, the greater the advertising effort needed to dispose of
it–and in all the profit from that unnatural purchasing, you share. You are fed by the makers of undesired things, who exchange
these things for food by means of your arts, and give you your share of the haul.

Lest you think I oversimplify, I give you an obvious illustration. People naturally crave meat, so the advertising of meat
is on a negligible scale. However, nobody is born craving tobacco, and even its slaves instinctively loathe it. So the advertising
of tobacco is the largest item of expense in its distribution. You must wage continual war against the natural cleanliness
of human beings, or the use of nicotine would almost stop. It follows, of course, that advertising men thrive most richly
in the service of utterly useless commodities like tobacco or under-arm pastes, or in a field where there is a hopeless plethora
of goods, such as soap or whisky.

But the great evil of advertising is not that it is unproductive and wasteful; were it so, it would be no worse than idleness.
No. Advertising blasts everything that is good and beautiful in this land with a horrid spreading mildew. It has tarnished
Creation. What is sweet to any of you in this world? Love? Nature? Art? Language? Youth? Behold them all, yoked by advertising
in the harness of commerce!

Aurora Dawn!
Has any of you enough of an ear for English to realize what a crime against the language is in that very name? Aurora
is
the dawn! The redundancy should assail your ears like the shriek of a bad hinge. But you are so numbed by habit that it conveys
no offense. So it is with all your barbarities. Shakespeare used the rhyming of “double” and “bubble” to create two immortal
lines in Macbeth. You use it to help sell your Dubl-Bubl Shampoo, and you have no slightest sense of doing anything wrong.
Should someone tell you that language is the Promethean fire that lifts man above the animals, and that you are smothering
the flame in mud, you would stare. You are staring. Let me tell you without images, then, that you are cheapening speech until
it is ceasing to be an honest method of exchange, and that the people, not knowing that the English in a radio commercial
is meant to be a lie, and the English in the President’s speech which follows, a truth, will in the end fall into a paralyzing
skepticism in which all utterance will be disbelieved.

God made a great green wonderland when he spread out the span of the United States. Where is the square mile inhabited by
men wherein advertising has not drowned out the land’s meek hymn with the blare of billboards? By what right do you turn Nature
into a painted hag crying “Come buy”?

A few heavenly talents brighten the world in each generation. Artistic inspiration is entrusted to weak human beings who can
be tempted with gold. Has advertising scrupled to buy up the holiest of these gifts and set them to work, peddling?

And the traffic in lovely youth! By the Lord, gentlemen, I would close every advertising agency in the country tomorrow, if
only to head off the droves of silly girls, sufficiently cursed with beauty, who troop into the cities each month, most of
them to be stained and scarred, a few to find ashy success in the hardening life of a model! When will a strong voice call
a halt to this dismal pilgrimage, this Children’s Crusade to the Unholy Land? When will someone denounce the snaring allurements
of the picture magazines? When will someone tell these babies that for each girl who grins on a magazine cover a hundred weep
in back rooms, and that even the grin is a bought and forced thing that fades with the flash of the photographer’s bulb, leaving
a face grim with scheming or heartbreak?

(At this moment the former Flame Anders had the ill luck to upset a glass of wine in a purple waste on the white cloth. The
painter continued on, unheeding; it is questionable whether he would have heeded the simultaneous sudden deaths of the entire
party.)

To what end is all this lying, vandalism, and misuse? You are trying to Sell; never mind what, never mind how, never mind
to whom–just Sell, Sell, Sell! Small wonder that in good old American slang “sell” means “fraud”! Come now! Do you hesitate
to promise requited love to miserable girls, triumph to failures, virility to weaklings, even prowess to little children,
for the price of a mouth wash or a breakfast food? Does it ever occur to you to be ashamed to live by preying on the myriad
little tragedies of un-fulfillment which make your methods pay so well?

Why are we all here tonight, if not to celebrate the ultimate outrage of advertising: the people’s yearning toward God harnessed
to make them yearn toward a toilet article? You, Reale, have been rendered so insensitive by your education and environment–for
I think you are not truly bad–that you are proud of the device with which you made this improper thing possible, instead of
burning with shame at it. What if Father Stanfield in his innocence is satisfied that he is doing no merchandising for you?
You know better, for you yourself arranged to place another Aurora Dawn program ahead of the Fold hour, and that scheme was
in your mind when you signed the Father to appear on a program nominally without sales lectures. It was not well done. It
was crafty. You spoke with a divided tongue to a simple man, and won him to your uses. It will profit you nothing at the last,
because wickedness is empty.

I trust that I am offending everybody very deeply. An artist has the privileges of the court fool, you know. I paint masterpieces
because I see with a seeing eye, an eye that familiarity never glazes. Advertising strikes me as it would a man from Mars,
and as it undoubtedly appears to the angels: an occupation the aim of which is subtle prevarication for gain, and the effect
of which is the blighting of everything fair and pleasant in our time with the garish fungus of greed.

If I have made all of you, or just one of you, repent of this career and determine to seek decent work, I will not have breathed
in vain today.

* * *

Coming to this good-natured conclusion, Michael Wilde gravely poured himself a glass of wine, and proceeded with composure
to cool his throat. The company sat in stupid silence. Van Wirt’s jaw, which had dropped open in the first minutes of the
painter’s rodomontade, still hung so loosely that it seemed a little push would set it swinging gently up and down. Marquis
had gradually turned a vivid scarlet, such as is produced by the boiling of shellfish. Stephen English and Andrew Reale were
impassive, but Father Stanfield scowled and worked his laced fingers violently against each other. The powerful partnership
of Grovill and Leach was singularly affected. Grovill, whose eyes had met his wife’s at the instant of her spilling of the
wine, had sunk in his chair, looking old and ill; while Leach’s face was lit with a peculiar inner glare, and his ring rotated
rapidly in a reverse direction for the first time in years. The hush that followed the harangue had lasted for an eternity
audibly recorded by the house clock as some forty seconds in length, when Stephen English turned to the painter and said,
in a matter-of-fact, friendly tone, “Mike, it’s a pity that talk doesn’t register on canvas. If piffle were painting, you’d
be Michelangelo.”