Читать книгу Alarms and Diversions - James Thurber - Страница 12

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Now that the reflective years are upon me, I spend considerable time in my study chair, and the avenues and byways of meditation take me into curious but familiar places, inhabited by all kinds of persons, from the immortal to the forgotten. One of the forgotten, except by a few historians and other scholars, and me, is Colonel Thomas Hamilton, of His Britannic Majesty’s armed forces. Thomas Hamilton visited the young United States in the early eighteen-thirties and went back to England to write a book about our ancestors, entitled “Men and Manners in America.” It seems to me that “Americans Have No Manners” would have been a more apt title for the Colonel’s book, which was first published in 1833, just one year after Mrs. Trollope’s famous attack on our flaws and foibles and females. It was, as literary historians know, an era of thrust and parry across the Atlantic, and the English had the best of it until Nathaniel Hawthorne slashed back at them with his “Our Old Home,” in the eighteen-sixties. Colonel Hamilton was not only more fastidious than the other social critics on either side, he also had the queasiest stomach, and the year he spent among us could well be described as perfectly dreadful. He was repelled by almost everything he saw and heard, from the way Americans “drink” boiled eggs to the grammar and the personal habits of President Andrew Jackson, a soldier whose fame is likely to outlive the Colonel’s by a good ten thousand years, if there is that much planetary time left.

I looked up the Colonel’s book in my library the other day and found it buried between “Sybil’s Garden of Pleasant Beasts” and Francis Winthrop Palfrey’s “The Antietam and Fredericksburg.” (I’ve got to get at that shelf one of these days and separate the blood from the fantasy.) I began rereading some passages I had indignantly marked in the Hamilton book nearly twenty years ago. My copy of “Men and Manners” is a later edition, published in 1843, and in it Hamilton really let himself go. In telling about the first of a couple of informal calls he made at the President’s home, the British officer wrote, “He chews tobacco, and kept rolling an enormous quid about in his mouth. He makes sad mistakes, too, in grammar, and asked me about my servitude in the army. The house was dirty, and gave you the impression of a large, ill-furnished, and ill-kept hotel.” Of his second visit (I don’t know why he kept going back) the Colonel wrote, “The conversation for the first quarter of an hour was about the state of his bowels, the failure of calomel, the success of salts.” The Colonel also had ungallant things to say about American ladies and about what he regarded as the slovenly carriage of our West Point cadets, and he took a few stabs at our politicians and statesmen. He was appalled by attacks on their character in the public prints. “The candidate for Congress or the Presidency is broadly asserted to have picked pockets or pocketed silver spoons,” the Colonel wrote. I think it was in 1940 that I encountered a repercussion of this statement in, of all places, one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays. The American poet and philosopher in this essay tells about calling on William Wordsworth in the summer of 1833, or just about the time the Colonel’s book was being talked about in England. Here is what Wordsworth told his visitor: “My friend Colonel Hamilton, at the foot of the hill, who was a year in America, assures me that the newspapers are atrocious, and accuse members of Congress of stealing spoons.” This constitutes the only piece of nineteenth-century literary research I have ever done, and if I have gone considerably out of my way to get it in, I trust that I shall be forgiven.

The great poet’s friend and neighbor who lived at the foot of the hill, among the trodden ways, so long ago, happened to be in New York City during the celebration of Evacuation Day, more than a hundred and twenty years ago. This holiday, now as forgotten as the mocking Colonel’s satire, celebrated, “in profuse and patriotic jollification,” the departure of the British Army at the end of the Revolutionary War. Evacuation Day was first celebrated in 1783, and the jubilation began with the official raising of the American flag at the Battery, where once the British colors had boldly flown. This ritual was continued every year until 1847. By that time, the tumult and the shouting had long since died down and the significance of the occasion was growing dim. Besides, the chill of late November in the city must have taken the edge off an outdoor show of patriotic fervor as the decades rolled by. Furthermore, the flag that had been raised at the Battery for so many years got burned, I don’t know how, and this seems to have formed a good excuse for summer soldiers and sunshine patriots to stay home and drink their rum or Madeira in front of the fireplace. Those two beverages, as you shall see, symbolized for Colonel Hamilton labor and the leisure class. The celebration he witnessed was a kind of double feature, and I’ll let the Colonel take it from there. “On the present occasion,” he wrote, “it was determined, in addition to the ordinary cause of rejoicing, to get up a pageant of unusual splendour, in honour of the late revolution in France. This revolution, I was informed, originated exclusively in the operative class, or workies, as they call themselves, in contradistinction to those who live in better houses, eat better dinners, read novels and poetry, and drink old Madeira instead of Yankee rum. The latter and more enviable class, however, having been taught caution by experience, were generally disposed to consider the present congratulatory celebration as somewhat premature. Finding, however, that it could not be prevented, they prudently gave in, and determined to take part in the pageant.” (Karl Marx was about fifteen years old when the Colonel’s book came out, and I don’t suppose he ever read it; if he had, the term “workies” might have given him a stroke and saved the world most of the hell it is going through now.)

Our dashing Colonel, who was the author of a novel called “Cyril Thornton,” fancied himself as a colorist in prose, and he did noisy justice to the Evacuation Day parade, even dropping in a little Greek, which I mercifully omit from his description: “At length the sound of distant music reached the ear; the thunder of the drum, the contralto of the fife, the loud clash of cymbals, and, first and furthest heard, the spirit-stirring notes of the trumpet.... On they came, a glorious cavalcade, making heaven vocal with sound of triumph, and earth beautiful with such colouring as nature never scattered from her pictured urn. And first appeared, gorgeously caparisoned, a gallant steed bestrode by a cavalier, whose high and martial bearing bespoke him the hero of a hundred fights....” There is a great deal more of this, but let us turn for a moment to another writer’s comments on the long lost holiday. The late George Templeton Strong was one of many old Madeira drinkers, or non-workies, who deplored the passing of Evacuation Day. His diary sorrowfully traces its decline. In 1835, he made this entry: “Glorious Evacuation Day ... it allows us to kick up our heels all day at our leisure.” Clearly, the jugs were still being brought out, more than fifty years after the first flag-raising ceremony. On November 23, 1836, Mr. Strong yelped, “Diabolical outrage! They are not going to give us Evacuation Day--horrible! We shall have to take it!” Six years later, in 1842, he wrote, “It a’nt the Evacuation Day of ten years ago--its glories have departed and nobody thinks about it now.”

Many a regional holiday, I have no doubt, has bloomed and gone to seed in America, leaving only a faint trace in the pages of old diaries and almanacs. Repudiation Day, for example, was once a time of riotous carryings-on in Frederick, Maryland, and the surrounding county. On November 23, 1765, about eight years before Barbara Frietchie was born, that proud and valiant county was the first to repudiate the British Stamp Act, levied by England under King George III. I don’t know how long this great day was wildly celebrated, but it is probable that the hell-raising, in its heyday, outdid the noise of Evacuation Day farther north, for New York celebrated a departure, but Maryland remembered an injustice. (Thanksgiving would have joined these two dead holidays in 1859 if the aldermen of Washington, D.C., had had their way. They voted, seven to five, to abandon the Day on the ground that it promoted “drunkenness and disorder,” and had been established by “New England people” and, the insinuation was, you know how they are.)

The Stamp Act the Marylanders couldn’t abide placed a tax of one shilling on every pack of playing cards and ten shillings on every pair of dice. No American would long tolerate any such tampering with his games of chance or skill. The Repudiation Act roared that “all proceedings shall be valid and effectual without the use of stamps.” After that, a gentleman was on his own, and what he did with cards or dice was no affair of the royal government. What the American Housewife did about tax-free gambling was a private matter, and history has not recorded it. There were surely only a few doxies in the colonies who played cards for profit, and probably none at all addicted to dice. It is different today, and has been ever since the Girl of the Golden West cheated the sheriff at poker and won the life of her lover. Once I played cards with my wife at a café in France. The proprietor wandered over to our table and asked if he could examine the ace of clubs. I picked it out of my wife’s full house, with which she had just beat my two pair, and let him see it. He handed it back, bowed, smiled graciously, begged a thousand pardons, and went away. We looked at the ace of clubs together. It bore a stamp showing that the French tax on playing cards had been paid--without rioting in the streets, the deposing of a cabinet, or the firing of a single shot. Par exemple!

Here I am, somewhat to my own surprise, in modern France, after starting from New York in 1783, but this is a casual journey, and we shall now visit Ohio momentarily on our way toward the future. They used to celebrate the birthday of President McKinley out there, on January 29th, and all the gentlemen of the city burst into bloom that day, each one wearing a red carnation, the late President’s favorite flower, in his lapel. Oh, I suppose there were a few followers of William Jennings Bryan whose coats were not in blossom. The day had been forgotten before I reached long trousers, and you could no longer tell a Republican from a Democrat on sight.

This brings us to the future, a vast, untrammelled domain, where a man’s freedom of thought and action is secure, since nobody has yet devised a method of convicting anyone for what he is probably going to think or do. Several undeclared holidays that might well fit into the American years to come have occurred to me during my contemplations.

Liability Day, for example, could be set aside--say, in January--as the one day of the year during which senators and congressmen would be deprived of immunity and could be sued for libellous remarks made on the floor of the Senate or House. On this day, the kind of senator or congressman that boldly asserts he will be glad to repeat his remarks in private, and practically never does, would be given a chance to prove his courage in full view and hearing of his colleagues, the press, and the visitors’ gallery. I doubt whether anything will ever come of this suggestion--unless, of course, it is added to my dossier in the files of the F.B.I.

I don’t suppose anything will ever come of Immunity Day, either, but I shall outline my concept of it anyway. On this national holiday, all bars and saloons would be open from 12:01 a.m. until midnight, and our present habit of accusing virtually everybody of practically everything would be not only encouraged but officially condoned. This annual occasion should have a salubrious psychological effect upon the populace by legally releasing inhibitions and repressions. Many persons, in our era of fear and hysteria, are afraid to say what they think about public figures and national affairs, and have become neurotic victims of ingrown reticence, no longer able to tell discretion from timidity, or conviction from guilt. A day of freewheeling criticism would cut down the work of the psychiatrists, thus enabling them to take time out for lunch. On Immunity Day, any citizen could say anything he wanted to about anything or anybody, even Formosa and Chiang Kai-shek, without danger of being hauled to the lockup. This might eliminate--for one day, at least--such incidents as the arrest of a lady and gentleman a year or so ago for discussing the Chinese situation in a public restaurant in Houston, Texas.

Fact Day, to be celebrated on June 21st, a week after Flag Day, should be a day on which only the proved is tolerated, but the truth must, in every instance, be constructive and favorable to those who are criticized. If you know anything good about anybody, it should be generously spoken on Fact Day, without a sniff, leer, wink, or raised eyebrow. Fact Day speakers at rallies or banquets or open-air meetings should attempt to revive in the minds of their listeners the old, abandoned American assumption of innocence, pointing out that guilt is not a matter of guesswork or conjecture, but of proof.

National Misgiving Day, to be held on the last Thursday of October, a month before Thanksgiving Day, could be the occasion for the assembling of American families for the purpose of pooling and enunciating their accumulated doubts, suspicions, and apprehensions, with a view to throwing out, in sober family council, any that may have grown out of mistaken identity, bad telephone connections, hearsay, conclusion jumping, change of life, hyperthyroidism, cussedness, political ambition, malice, animosity, pride, envy, anger, or temporary or permanent loss of mind, grip, or bearings. Misgivings that turn out to be well founded should be carefully examined and appraised by the elder and soberer members of households before they are telephoned to the F.B.I., told to the corner druggist, or passed on to United States senators. Misgiving Day would give the faltering American family a nationally sponsored reason to reassemble and to get to know each other better.

Emergence Day, which could be coincidental with Groundhog Day, would direct nationwide attention to persons who have been falsely accused of undermining or overthrowing, and have holed up in their houses or apartments with the blinds pulled down, the doors locked, and the telephone disconnected. If they have been wrongfully shadowed or tailed and, on emerging, see their shadow or tail, they shall have the right and duty to point out such shadow or tail to the constabulary or other duly constituted authorities, who must then put a shadow on the tail, or a tail on the shadow, and trace it to its lair, or liar. Games for Emergence Day parties instantly suggest themselves, but I shall leave the working out of the rules for such games to persons better qualified for merriment than I am. Nobody would be arrested on Emergence Day for anything he had not done or for anything he had once thought.

It is not my intention to urge the reinstatement of Evacuation Day as an annual occasion for fun and games or rum and Madeira in New York City, since I believe that New Yorkers can get along on the Fourth of July in their celebration of the defeat of the British. The old, lost holiday has, however, given me an idea for Evaluation Day. J. Edgar Hoover and the F.B.I. properly and soundly object to the evaluation of dossiers on suspected persons by the police or other investigatory organizations, but this has left many of us with what might be called moist qualms. These come from too much worry about who is going to do the evaluating, and we who are susceptible to the galloping jumps or the chattering jitters sometimes have nightmares about going through life completely unevaluated. In my own anxiety dream, I am caught with a Russian passport while wearing only the top of my pajamas, usually in the lobby of the Hotel Sheraton-Astor. Just what will take place on Evaluation Day I have not yet worked out in my mind, and I think the arrangements should probably be left to some federal commission, appointed for the purpose. Don’t ask me who is going to evaluate the evaluators. I don’t know. I am just a writie.

After this piece appeared in The New Yorker in 1955, the late Henry Pratt Fairchild, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at New York University, wrote the editors as follows:

James Thurber, in “A Holiday Ramble,” makes one erroneously optimistic statement. He says:

This brings us to the future, a vast, untrammelled domain, where a

man’s freedom of thought and action is secure, since nobody has yet

devised a method of convicting anyone for what he is probably going

to think or do.

It may be that nobody has devised such a method, but our legislators in Washington act as if they had. The Internal Security Act of 1950, commonly referred to as the McCarran Act, provides, in Sec. 104. (a), that during an emergency the Attorney General or his representative is authorized to issue

(1) a warrant for the apprehension of each person as to whom there

is reasonable ground to believe that such person probably will engage

in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of espionage

or sabotage....

and that such persons are to be confined in “places of detention.”

Mr. Thurber is not to be blamed. He is probably one of the 99 44/100 per cent of the population who do not know that we have such a law. They should.