The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (20 page)

A
HEALTH NUT
assailed me today. “Are you getting plenty of water?” said he. “You know, surely that you are about 70 per cent. water?” “You astonish me,” said I, determined not to encourage him. “Yep, maybe that’s why so many of your ideas are all wet,” he rejoined, and paused to guffaw foolishly at his own miserable witticism. “Your brain alone is 79 per cent. water,” he continued, “and 90 per cent. of your blood is water. Obviously you must take care to get lots of water.” “If you didn’t get enough water, is there any chance that you would dry up?” I asked, but he was too full of facts to be affected by sarcasm. “Really you are just a big lump of carbon, with a few salts and minerals thrown in,” he continued, “I could buy all your ingredients at a drug store for about sixty cents, and get enough free water out of a tap to mix them up.” “Vain man,” I cried, “in the hereafter we shall see what I am—a dollar’s worth of slops and condiments, or one of the Sons of the Morning. Go, pinhead, lock yourself in a room, and stay there until some inkling of the greatness of the human spirit dawns upon you, then see if you can buy THAT in a drug store.” He fled, hustling his
sixty cents’ worth of chemicals and his water down the street at about 15 m.p.h.

I
SAW A MOVIE
of Oscar Wilde’s play
An Ideal Husband
last week, and enjoyed it greatly. The movie reviewers had assured me that the piece was slow and dull, but I did not find it so. The plot and the dialogue were artificial, of course, but so are the plot and dialogue of all other movies; more artificiality on the Wilde level would improve the movies immensely. I have never understood why people object to artificiality; almost everything that has raised man above the beasts is artificial in some respect. I am an exceedingly artificial creature myself; my teeth are preserved artificially, and I have artificial aids for my eyes; I wear artificial coverings of cloth and leather upon my body; I eat no food which has not been artificially treated. And, unlike a great many of my hypocritical fellow creatures, I like frankly artificial entertainment.

Last night I went to a private showing of a Russian film
Ivan The Terrible
, which was one of the best films I have ever seen. True, I have never looked up the nostrils of so many Russians before, and I hope that it will be some time before I do so again, but it was a film after my own heart—full of poisoned wine, spies peeping around pillars, and people wearing trains approximately twenty feet long. This was artificiality on a grand scale. Ivan in the film bore no resemblance to the Ivan of history, who was as mimsy as a borogrove and spent his time alternately in doing unpleasant things and repenting, but it was a fine bit of propaganda and not more distorted than the
films we see about Lincoln and George Washington.… I was much impressed by the scene in which Ivan was cured of a severe illness by having a prayer book placed over his face. I shall try this on myself when next my ulcers go back on me.

L
AST WEEK END
I made my way to Toronto, to be present at the Dominion Drama Festival, an event which combines the pleasures of the most catholic of the arts with the thrill of horse-racing. The last day of the Festival was the best and there was wild excitement everywhere. After the adjudicator had announced the usual awards, I was called to the stage to make the Marchbanks Special Awards. These were:

I
PREPARED MY
Income Tax form today, and reflected that it costs me just about as much to be a Canadian as it would to be an Englishman, and twice as much as it would cost me to be an American. This is a time of year when I think sourly of Government expenditures. I reckon that my Income Tax pays the salary of one minor official, such as the censor of books. What does this minor official do for me that I should support him? Can I march into a government office, seek him out, and say, “You’re my man. I pay you. What are you doing, and are you making a decent job of it?” No, I cannot. Frankly I think it would be a good idea if every taxpayer were told what government stooge he maintained. Small taxpayers would then feel that they owned an eighth of a charwoman; modest taxpapers like myself would own petty officials; wealthy men, who pay a lot of taxes, would be alloted ten or twenty clerks, or a brace of deputy ministers. With this knowledge we could go to Ottawa from time to time and chivvy and nag our hirelings. Such a scheme would give a taxpayer some pride in his taxpaying and would greatly increase bureaucratic efficiency.

I
ATTENDED A BANQUET
last night at which an appropriate quantity of wine was consumed. But there were a number of people present who were plainly devotees of hard spirits, for they drank little or no wine, leaving it in their glasses. Now when the affair was over I noticed one of the cleaners collecting these remains in a large jug. Sherry, claret, and port were poured without discrimination into the mixture, which had the murky, threatening colour of cough medicine. What did he intend to do with it? I am convinced that
later, in some secret bower of his own—some sequestered broom closet or coenobitical lumber room—he drank the contents of that jug in which the conviviality of sherry, the sturdy manliness of claret and the episcopal blessing of port mingled in vinous kaleidoscope. I hope he had a good time, but I would not have his head on my shoulders this morning for a mine of gold.

I
WAS READING
Ben Jonson’s play
The Poetaster
this afternoon, and found this passage:

I had not thought that this special use of “the hell you will” was so old, for
The Poetaster
was written in 1601… . Well Madam, I see no reason for you to make a fuss. I thought that you would take an intelligent interest in the antiquity of a useful piece of profanity.

I
SHOVELLED A LOT
of snow today, and rather enjoyed it, though I had enough at least half an hour before the job was finished. But a friend of mine who sets up as a great authority on health tells me that snow shovelling is wonderful for sedentary workers, because it makes them use their Big Hinge. Apparently “Big Hinge” is what health maniacs call the waist, because it bends. If you use your Big Hinge a lot it squeezes your tripes, causes your juices to squish and slither about inside you, wrings out your liver and spleen,
and puts accordion pleats in your veriform appendix; it scrapes your epigastrium on your backbone and increases the traffic on your alimentary canal. No doubt this is all very fine, but I find that any prolonged use of my Big Hinge makes me extremely hungry, and by the time I have satisfied my hunger I have short-circuited all my inner workings, and my Big Hinge is incapable of moving more than a degree or two in any direction. My juices are solidified, my liver and spleen are like rocks; my appendix is throbbing like a Congo drum and my alimentary canal is closed to navigation. You can’t win in the fight for health.

I
TOYED WITH THE IDEA
of getting myself a bookplate today, to stick in the volumes which are beginning to crowd me out of the Towers. Yet I hate most bookplates; they are so stodgy and pretentious. So many of them are scratchy little engravings of shelves which appear to be weighed down with Books of the Month in rather bad condition, with
Ex Libris Mamie Klotz
in bad print at the bottom. Or even worse are those which show a monk poring over what appears to be an old-fashioned photograph album with
Joe Doakes, Hys Booke
in Gothic lettering upon it. I buy a good many second hand books, and several of them are defaced by these nasty stickers. Heaven forfend that I should inflict another upon the bookish world.

I
WAS INVITED
to a private showing of a sex education film this morning, along with prominent members of the clergy, judiciary, police chiefery and fire departmentery. This is because I am a Great Moral Force in my community. My sex education is now complete, and I have given my word of honour that, whatever temptations life throws in my way, I shall never have an illegitimate baby. I was fascinated by a distinction which the film insisted upon between “sentimental love” and “sensual love.” The former is what nice
people feel, and the latter is what low scoundrels feel. But my dictionary says that the “sensual” means “connected with the gratification of the senses,” and it has been my observation that when a young man monopolizes a girl’s time without making at least a half-hearted attempt to gratify a few of her senses (her passion for nut-fudge sundaes with chocolate and marshmallow sauce, for instance) she soon passes him up for a more adventurous fellow. The plain fact is that however hard a young man may try to live up to his Scout Oath, and to keep his love on a purely sentimental plane, girl’s don’t encourage him to do so. And just as well, too. There is a point beyond which purity should not be allowed to go.

N
OT ENOUGH
attention is paid to the negative side of fashion. Great effort is exerted to make people look smart, but somebody should face the fact that a lot of people will never be smart, and that they should be given some assistance in maintaining their fascinating dowdiness. Lists of the favourite colours of the dowdy ought to be published in
Vogue
: Fever Pink, Outcast Brown, Bile Yellow, Lustkiller Red, Linty Black, Housedust Grey, Skim Milk White, Pondweed Green—these colours are the favourites of thousands, and they ought to be identified and kept handy on the shelves of drygoods merchants. Some assistance should be given too to men who wear those ties which look as though they had been made out of a worn piece of carpeting; as such things are never seen in shops it must be that their wives make them; it would be a boon if some haberdashery were to take over this useful and profitable work. Shops now attract a certain trade by advertising that “Smart people shop here”:
think of the untapped source of trade which would be set flowing by an ad which declared that “Within these walls the invincibly dowdy will find everything they need”! … Oh, I assure you madam, I think your gown most becoming. What made you think otherwise.… I have observed that women have no knack for impersonal speculation.

A
S MY ALARM CLOCK
beat feverishly with its tiny fist upon its bell this morning, I stretched slothfully beneath the covers and mused on the flight of time. The people of the Balkans, I read somewhere yesterday, live to great ages. Their average life expectancy is 87. Some doctors think that this is because they eat a mysterious goo called Yoghurt, which resembles sour milk, and is said to keep senility at bay. I do not believe a word of it. My own theory is that the Balkans live to great ages because they never trouble to keep their tempers, because they never take baths, and because they never repress a nasty remark when they think of one. Our civilization is one which demands an unconscionable amount of holding-in; in the Balkans you never hold in anything. Holding-in creates horrid poisons which wear us out before our time. There are more deaths caused by ingrowing, suppurating self-control than the medical profession wots of.