The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (12 page)

T
HE PAPERS
tell me that Queen Mary will be eighty next Monday. There is an interesting link between myself and the Queen Mother which I do not think Her Majesty would see any reason to suppress, and of which I am very proud. In the days when I earned my living in the disreputable but amusing profession of an actor I once played the role of Snout the Tinker in a production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at the Old Vic in London; Her Majesty brought her granddaughters to a matinee, and in one of the intervals summoned the stars of the play (I was not one of them) to her box. “You know, I once played in
The Dream
when I was a girl,” she said; “I played Snout.” When this news was told to me, I immediately prepared myself for a summons to the Royal Box, being sure that the Queen would wish to discuss the fine points of the role with me; after all it is not every day that a couple of veteran Snouts get together. But, alas, the summons never came. An oversight, no doubt, or some jealousy of me in Court circles.

I
WENT TO A CIRCUS
last night and the first thing on the programme was a girl who exhibited some trained goats. My mind immediately flew to Hugo’s
Notre Dame de Paris
, in which the heroine, Esmeralda, had a trained goat which could spell out the name of her lover, Phoebus de Chateaupers, which is no small feat, when you think about it. There are plenty of stenographers who couldn’t do as well. But the circus goats were not nearly so accomplished, and the act retired in disgrace after the star goat fell off a bar on which it was walking, and almost hanged itself in its halter.… There are people who object strongly to performances given by animals. Indeed, I believe that there is an organization called The Jack London Society, the members of which are pledged to rise and leave any place in which a performing animal appears—even if it be only on a movie screen. I think that is carrying humanitarianism to extremes. When I see a dog like Lassie or Rin-Tin-Tin in the films, I realize that it is the pampered darling of the studio, and has more money in the bank than I have, and probably rides to its job in a Dusenberg with special body work.

Y
ES
,
INDEED
it was a beautiful day—the first this summer—and I could do nothing but admire the weather. I strove to write, as usual, but, in Spenser’s lines:

I looked in my heart, but found nothing there save a great longing to be idle.

T
HE KING HAS MADE
Laurence Olivier a knight “in spite of the fact,” says one paper, “that Mr. Olivier was divorced in 1939.” I wonder if this is the first time that a divorced actor has been given such an honour? Usually theatrical knighthoods are distributed for good conduct more than for ability, and I have even heard wicked actors refer to such a knighthood, sneeringly, as The Order of Chastity. The first actor to be knighted was Henry Irving, about whom Queen Victoria had never heard anything bad, and who had in the highest degree the Victorian ability to look noble and spotless; his runnerup in the contest for the title of Most Respectable-Looking Victorian was, of course, Mr. Gladstone, and it is a well-known fact that the heads of the Landseer lions in Trafalgar Square are a composite portrait of Gladstone and Irving.

T
HE LADY ON MY LEFT
was telling me a few minutes ago two “cures” which were highly esteemed in the time of her grandmother (who was born in 1800). The first was a cure for “gathered face” (what we now call an abscessed tooth) and it consisted of digging up the skull of a dead horse and carrying it under the arm for a few days, or until the gathered face ungathered itself. The second was a sure cure for goitre, which was brought about by stroking the goitre six times with the hand of a dead Negro. In spite of occasional evidence to the contrary it seems to me that medicine has advanced a good deal in Ontario during the past 150 years. Hand a horse’s skull to a modern doctor, and he probably
wouldn’t recognize it as a valuable medicament at all; very likely he would make an ash tray out of it.… You wish I wouldn’t speak of such things? Very well, eat your sautéed brains in silence, madam.

I
WENT TO SEE
John Gielgud’s production of
Love For Love
last evening, and was carried away by the brilliance and artistic completeness with which it was presented. The drama, in its finest flights, gives me a satisfaction, an elation and a re-creation which makes the pleasures of the greatest music seem thin and chilly in comparison. Music is an intellectual extract of life; drama is life itself, raised to the highest pitch. I reflected also that great acting (and there were some rare examples of it in this play) makes heavy physical demands on the actor. To move with grace and vigour, to speak complex prose so as to be heard and understood everywhere in a large theatre, and to look exactly right at every moment of a long part requires no mean athletic equipment and physical stamina. How hard these actors worked, and yet how easy and inevitable seemed everything that they did! How strong an actor has to be, in every muscle, in order to be graceful without seeming affected! It is in this physical aspect of acting, as well as in imaginative grasp that our amateurs are disappointing.… It is not often that we see a play perfectly done in Canada, but when we do we chew the cud on it for months and sometimes for years.

I
visited many
antique shops by the wayside—not to buy, but to study the pathology of the antique business. I was interested to observe the emergence of the old
coal-oil lamp as an antique. Hideous brass contraptions with scrofulous shades were being offered at prices ranging upward from $10. I was staggered also to see that a particularly disagreeable type of lampshade, made apparently from vitrified mucous, which used to be seen hanging over the dining tables of misguided people, had acquired antique status. I nearly bought a marble statue about five feet tall of a girl clothed in the underwear of the ‘nineties (all painstakingly wrought in marble) for the garden at Marchbanks Towers, but did not do so, reflecting that it might inflame the passions of my neighbours, and that they might hurt their fingers attempting to pinch her marble prominences. I could, of course, keep her veiled in sacking except when my guests were those in whom the fires of passion had sunk to a mere clinker; they alone could view her unmoved.

As I left my hotel in Tarry town a boy carried my luggage to my car, making three journeys and puffing and blowing painfully. But when I handed him a tip he shrank back saying, “Oh no, I don’t want anything.” When I recovered my senses I grasped his hand, crying, “My boy, accept this $10 bill from S. Marchbanks, for you are a boy in a million; when you want to go to college, boy, or when you have to have an operation for hernia (which you soon will, if I am any judge) feel free to call upon me for any sum. Farewell, Great and Noble Boy!”… . I bought a paper, paying five coppers for it; two of them were Canadian (which I had not noticed) and the Pilgrim Father at the paper stand rebuked me in a strong Neapolitan accent. “Gimme real-a mon’,” he said; “I do’ want none o’ this.” His complaint was probably just, but his manner nettled me; I earn my living in the coinage he aspersed, and it bore my sovereign’s head upon it. So I snatched
my coppers, and gave him back his paper with a remark which was, I fear, too ironical for his blunted intellect to appreciate.… An international coinage might be a good scheme.

The heat was extreme, though no worse than in Canada, and I was happy to be suffering in a city which provided so many pleasant distractions. But in one restaurant where I dined an elderly lady had hauled her skirts to an unseemly elevation above her knees, apparently thinking that no one could see under her table. She was wrong; it was impossible to avoid seeing all. Time had not been kind to her underpinning and, like the confirmed moralist that I am, I reflected sadly that the human leg—so puissant an attraction in youth —can decline so lamentably in later years.

I reflected, adapting Joseph Campbell’s poem
The Old Woman
to my need.

There is no problem about spending Sunday agreeably in New York; hundreds of entertainments and pleasure domes are open—everything offers itself, in fact, which is described in Ontario as “the continental Sabbath.” On Sunday evening, I resorted to Nick’s the famous jazz temple in Greenwich Village, where the “Dixieland Style” is authoritatively exhibited by those Titans of the ’Twenties—Muggsy Spanier and Miff Mole. (Pee Wee Russell, who used to be with them, has gone to an opposition jazz joint.) The place was filled with hepcats, solemnly adoring the great men as they played. No cat was ever less hep than I, but I
enjoyed myself, and as he left the hall at interval time Muggsy adressed me personally! (He said, “Hello, there,” if you must know.) This gave me prestige with the rest of the audience, who took me for a foreign jazz expert (I hope). Yay, Muggsy! Yow, Miff!

As I walked along the street to buy some theatre tickets, two ladies of severe countenance commented on my appearance in loud and hostile voices. “Look at the great big Jew!” said one. “Yep, straight from Jew-roosalem,” agreed her companion. Now as I am a Brythonic Celt, and as anthropologists have assured me that this is obvious in every plane and angle of my head, I laughed very heartily at their stupidity, but it occurred to me that if I had really been a Jew, I should have been distressed and hurt by the nasty tone in which they spoke. Later in the day, on the East Side, I heard a young Jew haranguing a crowd through a microphone, asking for money which was to be used to pop off guns at just such Brythonic, Goidelic, Saxon, and Norman British Islanders as myself in Palestine. Thus in a single day I felt two kinds of bitter hatred directed against me, and it has given me a new notion of what a vile and ignoble thing racial hatred is.

From my hotel window I could see a man working inside the iron-work spire of St. Patrick’s; he looked oddly like a bird in a cage.… I went to see Victor Herbert’s
Sweethearts
, a decrepit musical comedy of the Early Beaded Lampshade Period, which Bobby Clarke had flogged into new and glorious life; he must be one of the funniest men now on the stage, I should think. The whole audience laughed, but behind me sat a Catholic priest whose laugh was as the laughs of ten ordinary men fused into one mighty roar of mirth. His laugh was as the laugh of ten because his heart was pure, I presume. At one point in the proceedings several
characters appeared upon the stage dressed as monks and sang a very funny song of an unclerical nature. Would the saintly man laugh, I wondered? Yes; he laughed like a train in a tunnel, or a department store Santa Claus. It did me good to hear such laughter. That man will go far, and will probably die an archbishop, if not a cardinal. The triple tiara, indeed, would not be disgraced by such a laugh.

One day I went to the Museum of Modern Art, and saw a number of interesting things, of which I liked an exhibition of children’s painting best. Then I visited the Museum’s cinema, in which it shows movies which have become the classics of their art; the film today was
Mädchen in Uniform
made in Germany in 1931. Technically it was terrible, but its story and acting were first-rate. I was particularly interested in the English captions which had been inserted to help those in the audience who knew no German. When the characters spoke quickly, or idiomatically, these aids were absent. But when a character said something crystal-clear, like “Ein Scandal!” a caption saying “A scandal!” was helpfully thrown in. Afterward I sat in the Museum garden, sipping iced tea and observing some of the most beautiful and smartly dressed women that I have ever seen. Why are women who know how to be ornamental so rare in Canada? Who can explain our national passion for dowdy utility?

I went to the Metropolitan Museum to see the Egyptian collection, which is beautifully displayed. But I arrived at four, and by half-past four the attendants were beginning to lock doors, shut gates, tap their feet, squeak their hollow teeth, and in other ways inform me that it was time to get out, although the Museum is open until five. This is the custom of museum attendants everywhere in the world.… I observed that in
the Metropolitan the attendants carry large pistols, presumably to blow the head off anyone who tried to run off with the tomb of King Washtup III, or any other such trifle. Gunplay in a place so filled with fragile objects and glass cases would be very good fun, and if it ever happens I hope that I am there to see.

I attended five musical shows (excluding opera) while I was in New York, and each one of them contained a song about a girl who was too good natured to resist men. My Ontario conscience led me to ask, “Does this mark a trend?” But my common sense said, “No such luck.” … Yes, I saw
Brigadoon
: it was a pleasant fantasy in which all the American singers adopted Scots accents, with varying degrees of success. I was astonished to find that the plot was pinched from a hideously sentimental story called
Germelshausen
, by Friedrich Ger-stacker, which I struggled with in Junior Matriculation German class. But there was some good sword-dancing and I saw a trick done with bagpipes which ought to be widely copied. Usually, when these things have finished playing, the piper permits them to subside with a noise like the death-rattle of an old cow; but the
Brigadoon
pipers seized their pipes sharply by the nozzle and hurried off the stage—presumably to exhaust them in the alley outside the theatre. This was both humane and musically effective.