Читать книгу Alarms and Diversions - James Thurber - Страница 6

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Surgical science, still achieving, still pursuing, has successfully replaced a section of the femoral artery in a human leg with a tube made of nylon, and the medical profession confidently prophesies for the near future a practicable aorta made of the fabric known as orlon. We are all so used to the heart as a lyrical organ, made of the stuff that breaks, that a metaphorical shift to a heart made of the stuff that tears, or rips, or has to be hemstitched, may have a strange and disastrous effect on writers and composers. It has already had its effect on me, getting into my daydreams and nightmares. In one of the latter, a bearded doctor, fiercely grinning, asked me, “Do you know how to tell your wife from the children’s toys?” and startled me wide awake just before dawn. This fragment of dream was probably the associative product of the orlon surgical technique and Eugene Field’s creatures of gingham and calico. (It wasn’t until later that I heard about the new orlon-filled toys.) All I need to make a chaos out of my already tormented nights is a dream world of patchwork girls, indestructibly fabricated females with a disconcerting froufrou deep inside their organdie in place of the old-fashioned pulse beat.

One night, I dreamed I was at this party. A young lady had been carelessly flung onto the sofa beside me, her long legs loosely intertwined and her stuffing showing plainly at one shoulder seam. “You’re losing your sawdust,” I told her anxiously. “Nonsex,” she said, and I suddenly realized that she and all the other women guests were dolls. Such a dream could be construed as meaning that I have reached the time of life when I seek to deny the actuality of the American Woman and to reduce her to the level of an insentient plaything. Actually, the latent meaning of this dream goes far deeper than that, and consists of a profound anxiety on my part as to what would happen to our world if the stature of Woman decreased.

A lovely woman with a taffeta xiphisternum might conceivably make this artificiality a part of her mysterious allure--I have known the kind of lady whose charm could even take the ugliness out of a thrug sutured with silk to her thisbe--but a gentleman of like kidney, let us say, could surely never regain the position he held in our competitive society before his operation. Man is used to being repaired with silver plates and pins, and it is doubtful whether his ego could long sustain a body consisting largely, or in part, of dress material. It may be, then, that a gradual textilization of the human species is one of the desperate strategies of Nature in her ceaseless effort to save our self-destructive race from the extinction of which it seems so massively enamored. Nature and I have long felt that the hope of mankind is womankind, that the physically creative sex must eventually dominate the physically destructive sex if we are to survive on this planet. The simplest things last longest, the microbe outlives the mastodon, and the female’s simple gift of creativity happily lacks the ornaments and handicaps of male artifice, pretension, power, and balderdash.

Nature (I do not say God, because I think protective Providence washed Its hands of us long ago) realizes that we have to be turned into something as durable as the toughest drygoods if we are to endure the wear and tear caused by the frightened tempo of our time. Men and women--the former because they think the Devil is after them, the latter merely to hold their own--make the revolving doors of our office buildings whirl at a dangerous and terrifying rate of speed as they rush lickety-split to their lunches, return hellbent to their desks, and fling themselves recklessly homeward at twilight to their separate sorrows. It is the men who are the casualties of this pell-mell, the men who are caught in the doors and flung to the floors, and it is the women who pick them up, or at least it is the women who pick me up. Once the ladies have become compounded largely of bland but durable textiles, they will outlive the once stronger sex even more easily than they do now. Nature, prefiguring the final disappearance of the male, has aided science in solving the problem of the continuation of the human being with her usual foresight, by establishing the ingenious, if admittedly stuffy, technique of artificial insemination. It is only a question of time before the male factor in the perpetuation of the species becomes a matter of biological deep freeze, an everlasting laboratory culture, labelled, controlled, and supervised by women technicians.

The male, continuously preoccupied with his own devices and his own mythical destiny, polysyllabically boasting of his power and purpose, seems blithely unconscious of the conspiracy of Nature and women to do him in. He does not seem to know that he is doomed to go out like a light unless he abandons the weapons and the blue-prints of annihilation. Woman says little about it, but she does not intend to be annihilated by Man, even if she has to get rid of him first to save herself. This is not going to be as difficult for her to face as one might think, for her ancient dependence on the male began slowly to turn into disdain about a.d. 135, according to Dr. Rudolph Horch, who makes the astounding statement that the female’s sexual interest in her mate has decreased seventeen and two-tenths per cent since September, 1929. The female has greater viability than the male, Dr. Horch reminds us, and the male knows this when he puts his mind to it, which he naturally does not like to do. I once asked a distinguished obstetrician which he would rather be called upon to deliver, male quintuplets or female quintuplets. He began with the usual masculine circumlocutions, pointing out that there are no dependable statistics, on a large scale, dealing with the relative viability of the sexes. “Let me put it this way,” I said. “Two women are about to give birth to quintuplets, and by means of some hypothetical prescience it has become known that one is going to have five boys and the other five girls. Which would you rather deliver if you were called upon to make a choice?” “The girls,” he said.

It may come down, in the end, to a highly dramatic sex crisis. Man is forever discovering some new and magnificent miracle weapon or miracle drug, and it is possible that he may soon stumble upon an undreamed-of mineral, of which there will be just enough in the world to create a drug that could cure everybody of everything or to manufacture a bomb capable of blowing the planet into fragments the size of Cuba. The ultimate struggle for possession of the precious material would divide men and women into two warring camps. I have the confidence to believe that the creative females would defeat the destructive males and gain control of the miracle substance.

I no longer see the faces of men and women at the parties I attend, or in the streets I walk along, or the hotel lobbies I sit in, but I hear their voices more clearly than ever. The voices of the women, it seems to me, have taken on a new and quiet quality--a secret conspiratorial tone, the hopeful and reassuring note of a sex firmly dedicated to the principle of not being blown into fragments. For centuries Woman has been quietly at work achieving her present identity. Not many years ago the Encyclopaedia Britannica listed nothing under “Woman,” but merely said “See Man.” The latest Oxford English Dictionary, however, gives woman twelve columns to man’s fifteen. The development of her name from Old English through Middle English to Modern English is fascinating to trace in the O.E.D. She began as “wife,” became “wifman” and underwent seventeen other changes until the word “woman” came into use about the year 1400. Most writers, glibly discussing the origin of the word over their brandy, contend that it derives from the derogatory phrase “with man” or the physiological “wombman.” They don’t know what they are talking about. Earlier male writers, equally mistaken, declared the word derived from “woe to man” or “wee man.” Some of them were serious, others merely kidding, in the immemorial manner of the superior male.

I’m glad to report that the feminist Flecknor took a fairer view in 1653 when he wrote: “Say of Woman worst ye can, what prolongs their woe, but man?” In the past three hundred years the importance of women has often been derided by men, from J. Clarke’s “A Woman, asse, and walnut-tree, the more you beat the better be” to Noel Coward’s “A woman should be struck regularly like a gong.” But there were wiser men who spoke of the female of the species with proper respect, and even fear. It was Congreve who wrote the almost invariably misquoted “Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d, Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorned,” and in 1835 Hook recognized the stature of the female with “A girl of seventeen is a woman, when a man of seventeen is a boy.” Thirty-two years later, English law under Queen Victoria formally defined the female: “Woman shall mean a Female of the Age of Eighteen Years or Upwards,” and twenty years after that, the British female legally became a woman at the age of sixteen, while males of the same age were still regarded as schoolchildren.

It was in the 1890’s that the old-fashioned dependent woman was scornfully rejected by her own sex as the “cow-woman,” and “new woman” and even “new womandom” came into common and spirited use. Ninety years before that decade of the self-assertive woman, J. Brown had arrogantly written, “No ecclesiastical power can reside in a heathen, a woman, or a child.” Fortunately for his peace of mind, he didn’t live to see the female become the residence of practically any power you can name. She is now definitely here to stay, whereas the decline of the male, even the actual decadence of the insecure sex, has been observed by alarmed scientists in a score of other species. A certain scorpion, for example, disappears with his mate after a ritualistic courtship dance, and is never seen again. The female, though, emerges from the honeymoon, fit as a fiddle and fresh as a daisy. And there is a certain female fish in the waters of the sea who has reduced the male to the status of a mere accessory. She actually carries him about with her, for occasional biological use, in the casual way that a woman carries a compact or a cigarette lighter in her handbag. There are dozens of other significant instances of the dwindling of the male in the animal kingdom, but I am much too nervous to go into them here. Some twenty years ago, a gloomy scientist reported, “Man’s day is done.” Woman’s day, on the other hand, is, by every sign and token, just beginning. It couldn’t happen to a nicer sex.

In case you have always wondered why the o in women is pronounced differently from the o in woman, the Oxford Dictionary has a theory about that, as about everything else. The change is the result of the associative influence of certain other pairs of words, singular and plural, such as foot and feet, and tooth and teeth. The women will now please keep their seats until the men have left the auditorium. They need, God knows, a head start.