Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 (20 page)

15

Endings and Farewells

IMMORTALITY

3/28/36

THE PUBLISHERS
of a forthcoming volume of poetry have advised us that by subscribing to it we can have our name “incorporated into the front matter of the book” along with the names of the other subscribers. This, of course, would immortalize us as a person who once read a book—or at any rate as a person who once
intended
to read a book. It is not the sort of immortality we crave, our feeling being that deathlessness should be arrived at in a more haphazard fashion. Loving fame as much as any man, we shall carve our initials in the shell of a tortoise and turn him loose in a peat bog.

THE LIFE TRIUMPHANT

7/17/43

THERE IS A MAN
in Indianapolis named William H. Fine, who writes me letters calling me a quitter. I have suffered under the sting of his lash for two or three years without saying anything in my own defense, but the time has come to reply. I am not a quitter and I feel that such a charge could be brought against me only by a person who is not in possession of the facts. Briefly, the facts are these:

I came to Fine's attention in the late nineteen-thirties, when I won a contest sponsored by a beer concern. I had to supply the last line of a poem and I did it satisfactorily. The prize was ten dollars. My success aroused Fine's interest, although he was clear out in Indianapolis, and he wrote congratulating me on my work and introducing himself as “America's Foremost Con-test Counselor.” Letter followed letter, and soon he had changed his tune and was upbraiding me for lying back on my oars after my early show of promise. Just this morning I heard from him again. His letter began, “A quitter never won any-thing but regrets” and then went on to describe the two distinct types of service Fine offers to contestants to enable them to win prize money. One type is for persons who enter contests regularly, persons for whom Fine has a real affection. The other type is for the flash-in-the-pan sort, the sort Fine thinks I am, the sort who wins one contest and then rests on his laurels. Fine prefers a plodder with guts and perseverance to a merely talented man who lacks staying quality.

The whole thing would be laughable if it were any charge but “quitting.” Fine assumes, somewhat presumptuously, that he knows all about me. He has sized me up as a one-timer, a one-prize Johnny. The plain fact is, I am a prize-winning fool, victor of a score of contests. Fine just happened to run across me in the beer job, but he was thirty years late. I began winning prizes in 1909, have been at it steadily ever since, and expect to win many more in years to come. At the moment I am vacillating between the Alexander Smith & Sons Carpet Co.'s thousand-dollar award for the best letter on “How We Hope to Fix Up Our Home After the War” and the Harper ten-thousand-dollar prize for the best novel by a writer who had not been published prior to January 1,1924. I shall enter one or the other. But that's in the future, of course, and has an element of uncertainty about it, whereas the past, my past, is something else again. My past is a kaleidoscope in which triumph follows triumph in intricate patterns of prodigious light. My past is an open book, which Fine obviously has not taken the trouble to read.

 

The first award I ever received for meritorious work was from the
Woman's Home Companion.
The year, as I say, was 1909, or “Oughty Nine” as it was then known. The prize was a copy of “Rab and His Friends,” by John Brown, M.D. I can't seem to recall what I had to do to win it, but I think likely it was a literary contest. I was something of a writer in those days, as well as a dabbler in the other arts. I still have the postcard which brought me the tidings of that first victory. It is signed “Aunt Janet.” “Assuring you of my constant interest in your work and hoping to see more of it from time to time, Very affectionately, Aunt Janet.”

Well, what about that, Fine?

What about the silver badge I copped from the St. Nicholas League?
*
What about the gold badge? Let me see your badge, Fine! I have a feeling you never even won honorable mention in the puzzles division. Who are you, anyway, to be calling me a quitter?

My next smashing success in the contest world came in my high-school days. New York State (or it might have been Cornell University, I can't seem to remember which) was holding out a pretty plum to the winners of a special examination which had been trumped up out of the entire field of human knowledge. The prize was six hundred dollars' worth of tuition, or fun, at Ithaca. There were four of these prizes to be distributed, one to each assembly district. I took the exam and finished in fifth place, which would have left me out in the cold but for a most unusual and suspicious occurrence. It seems, Fine, that somebody had just divided one of the assembly districts in two, making five districts. A quick stroke of the pen on a wall map somewhere, and I drew the six hundred dollars. That's the kind of contestant I am, buddies with Lady Luck, my mouth bulging with silver spoons. I have never known who was responsible for cutting the district in two but have always assumed it was one of my relatives. We were a close bunch and pulled together. Still, it was none of my business and I never pried into it.

The prize money took me to college, where I would have gone anyway, as I was a well-heeled little customer who had gone after the scholarship from pure greed. At Cornell I promptly set to work entering other contests. I went out for track, and I am sorry to say, Fine, that in this particular field your accusation is justified: I quit track. I quit all right, but it wasn't because I couldn't run fast, it was on account of a pair of track shoes I had bought from a merchant named Dick Couch. They didn't fit, that's the long and short of it. Whenever I wore them I was in torture, and I kept trying to persuade Couch to change them for another pair but he never would, so I spent all my time racing between Couch's store and my room in North Baker Hall and never had time to participate in any of the formal athletic contests. Of course, it is not for me to say that I would have won any of those races. Nevertheless, I was a swift thing on two legs and as light as a feather.

What about the way I came through with the winning sonnet in the Bowling Green contest in the old New York
Evening Post
? Surely you didn't miss that tourney, Fine? The track experience had been a hard blow but it didn't break my spirit and I did
not
quit. I was right in there pitching when Christopher Morley announced a sonnet contest. The prize was a book—one of his own, as a matter of fact. If you have never read that sonnet, Fine, get it and read it.
*
It will take your breath away. Meritorious as all hell. Fourteen big lines, every one of them a money-winner. Quitter, eh? Quitter my eye. Have you ever written a sonnet when your feet were killing you? A man who can go four years with a pair of track shoes that bind him across the toe and still turn out a workmanlike poem is no quitter. Not in my dull lexicon.

What about the first horse I ever bet on? That was in Lexington, Kentucky, where I had gone to seek my fortune in an atmosphere favorable to the competitive spirit. (I had held three or four jobs around New York that winter, but they were prosy things at best and I felt I was losing my fine edge so I got out.) My first horse was a female named Auntie May. She was an odd-looking animal and an eleven-to-one shot, but there was this to be said for her—she came in first. Perhaps you are the type of man, Fine, who doesn't recognize betting as a contest. You would if you had to run around the track twice, the way the horses did. Kentucky was lovely that spring. I got twenty-two dollars from the contest and would have let it go at that if I had not changed to fall in with some insatiable people who were on their way to Louisville to enter other contests. Sport of kings, Fine. I went along with them. It seems I got hooked in Louisville. The Derby was a little too big for me, I guess. Easy come, easy go. But I didn't quit. I was temporarily without money but I still had a sonnet or two up my sleeve. After the race I returned to my hotel (I didn't say I was registered there, I said I returned to my hotel) and wrote a fourteen-line tribute to Morvich, the winning horse, and later that evening sold it to a surprised but accommodating city editor. If you will look in the Louisville
Herald
for Sunday, May 14,1922, you will find my sonnet and will see how a young, inexperienced man can lose a horse race but still win enough money to get out of town. You needn't thumb all through the paper, Fine, it's right on the front page, in a two-column box.

Kentucky was indeed lovely that spring. Exhausted from my successes and my trials, I spent quite a while just wandering around the state and will always remember one little valley where the whippoorwills—but don't let me digress.

My next contest was in Minneapolis. True to form I blew into town just as a limerick contest was in full swing. I came through magnificently. The Minneapolis
Journal
was offering twenty-five dollars for a last line for a limerick, and I had that knack. A man has to live. The
Journal
was in search of a suitable conclusion for the following limerick:

 

A young man who liked to rock boats

In order to get people's goats

Gave just one more rock

Then suffered a shock

 

To thousands of residents of Minneapolis, this was a poser, but it was just my oyster. I sent in the surefire line “A bubble the spot now denotes.” It rhymed, it was the right metre, and it was catchy. It had the mark on it of an experienced prize-winner. Apparently there was no question among the judges, once they came upon it. From among the thousands of other entries, it stood out as though etched in flame. The money was very welcome, when I received it, and as a matter of fact I could have used fifty rather than twenty-five, because I managed to dislocate my elbow about that time (no contest, just straight sailing) and was in the clutches of a medical man. I often think of those other Minneapolitans who got only honorable mention from all the effort they put into that contest—Stephen H. Brown, O. A. Glasow, Minnie R. Long, V. M. Arbogast, Ì. D. Rudolph. Talented people, all of them, but lacking that curious spark that touches off a genuine money-winner.

 

After my Minneapolis triumph there was a lapse of several years, a dull period, Fine, when I lay fallow and roused myself only long enough to produce a few listless pentameters in praise of coffee for some sort of promotion scheme cooked up by the caffeine interests. But once a contestant always a contestant. In 1929 I was again active in prize circles. I won the gold watch offered by Franklin P. Adams for the best “Conning Tower” poem of the year.
*
What if the watch doesn't keep time any more, I won it, didn't I? Who wants to know what time it is? It's no trick, in this world, to find out what time it is—you can glance into any barbershop—the trick is to win something. Then the beer concern came along and I ran away with that. The end is not in sight. About a year ago I spent a good deal of time working on the Ten Crown Activated Charcoal Gum gold-watch award for the best line to go with “Ten Crown Gum Helps Keep Teeth White” but got distracted by the Harper-i25th-anniversary-twelve-thousand-dollar prize for the best piece of non-fiction. I hung fire so long I missed the bus in both contests. Chewing gum got scarce and the Ten Crown people either went off the air entirely or else my battery set got so run down I couldn't hear it any more, and the Harper offer expired.

This year, as I say, I am hesitating between the Alex Smith Dream Home contest and the Harper fiction thing. As I write this, I have only sixteen days to go on the Harper novel, but I have thought of a last line and I figure that if a man has a good last line he can build up the preliminary stuff in short order. I am also in line for an award from “Information Please”—they still have a question of mine. I asked them if they could tell the difference between a sow, a shoat, a boar, a pig, a hog, a gilt, and a barrow. So far they have not used the question and I can only assume that it is a little too hard for them. They're always shying away from things they don't know and getting back to Gilbert and Sullivan.

 

Well, I have spread my record before you, Fine. I'm not making any exorbitant claims for myself. In fact, I'm just an ordinary fellow in many ways, but I want to make it plain that this is not the record of a quitter and I shall expect you to stop using that word about me. When I decide to quit in the great contest of life, I'll drop you a card. Maybe I'll sign it Aunt Janet. Meantime, I'll thank you to mind your manners.

DOOMSDAY

11/17/45

THE WORLD
, says Wells,
*
is at the end of its tether. “The end of everything we call life is close at hand,” he writes in his last literary statement, distributed by International News Service. We note, however, that Mr. Wells went to the trouble of taking out a world copyright on his world's-end article. A prophet who was firmly convinced that the jig was up wouldn't feel any need of protecting his rights. We charge Mr. Wells with trying to play doom both ways.

 

Wells has been a good prophet, as prophets go, and his crystal-gazing is not to be sniffed at. And even lesser prophets, these days, can feel that “frightful queerness” that he says has come into life. At the risk, however, of seeming to suggest the continuance of life on earth, we must admit that we found the Wells article unconvincing in places. It is not clear yet, at any rate, whether the world is at the end of its tether or whether Wells is merely at the end of his. His description is not so much of the end of life in the world as of the end of his ability to figure life out. The two are not necessarily identical.

Wells is seventy-nine, and it is possible, of course, that he confuses his own terminal sensations with universal twilight, and that his doom is merely a case of mistaken identity. Most writers find the world and themselves practically interchangeable, and in a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs. We hope Mr. Wells is wrong for once and that man is not the suicide he looks at the moment. Man is unpredictable, despite Mr. Wells' good record. On Monday, man may be hysterical with doom, and on Tuesday you will find him opening the Doomsday Bar & Grill and settling down for another thousand years of terrifying queerness.