I have given a hostage to Fortune, and am on my way to "success." Barring unreasonable disaster, it is not likely that I shall ever again go penniless. I shall fall short of the capitalist's swollen splendor, but good jobs of one kind and another will be mine until I am senile.
Naturally my viewpoint will change; the brain will grow obese concerning the athletics of so-called failure, those leaps and sprints, joyous or desperate, and the long cross-country grind, customary to the playboy spurred by visions of beauty and nightmares of the jail-hospital. My sense of proportion will come to lean as heavily to the west as it now veers widely to the east. The Doxology will then seem of more serious import than an organ grinder's tone on the first Spring day, and the outline of Mimi's transparent-fingered hand, against the light, less impressive than the portly figure of old Sen. Leatherweasand, shouting flubdub from the rostrum, over a glass of water.
I shall say to myself: "After all, there is a deal of satisfaction in being well-walleted," and to gay striplings: "Have a care lest you linger too long, a-sowing the wild barley." Those pursy, profitable days, and platitudinous evenings! May the Elder Gods — Pan who pipes magical airs in Boetian fields and owl-eyed Minerva — be kind and not desert me utterly in my plutocratic need.
It is possible that I can perform a service by recording, fresh, the impressions of failure. The American business stories which I have read might appropriately be entitled: "How Granther Got His Million — After Getting." The frontispiece appears in sepia, either ultra-naturally with a Chesterfield in hand and another behind the ear, or as an imitation of an old woodcut, with a one-inch collar and a flat tie the size of my fist.
Our neurotic system of business affects many of us like an apple-corer, removing core and seeds, and leaving a whole characterless pulp. Thus Granther, reminiscing of the vital years, is unable to remember how he felt. One supposes that he would never have cursed his boss, behind the latter's back, with full-mouthed oaths, for a slave-driver, or threw away a job to save a friend, or used a woman's influence to steal a better one. Invariably, to read him is to find Granther sanding the sugar as the grocer's clerk, but he is an octogenarian, toothless and bewigged, mumbling thumb-stained moral axioms over the barrel, and not the cheerful boy who in reality grinned cynically at the deception. Of course it became necessary for him, in order to reach his pinnacle, to omit all spontaneous feelings except avarice, yet never tell me that the pruning was not done gradually, with halts and heartaches.
The gradual dehumanization of the human race is chiefly responsible, one guesses, for the artificiality of our business system — for the sassy switchboard gels and telephonic disarray; the silly glass coops and sekketaries; the whole maze of humbug, discourtesy and inefficiency encountered by ordinary wanderers in our commerce as she is perpetrated throughout this Land of the Free. Granther resembles the ostrich, which thrusts its head into the sand and imagines its tail feathers hidden, until some brutal man, who doesn't play the game according to the rules, plucks them away.
Happily for Granther, the rules are generally observed. In fact it is only foolish to break them, in growing fat by following them, with tongue in cheek. Take, for example, the process of getting a job in the upper hound stratum, where the current remuneration may range from thirty-five to a hundred and fifty units per week, thus covering a majority of the supposedly intelligent citizens who are under patriotic obligation to register and vote, but who do not.
There are two standard ways of obtaining such a job: through influence, and by pavement-pounding. The first is an unexciting method, out of the province of the present commentator, who has had no noble sponsors. The second includes the agency (thumbs down!), the advertisement, and the circular letter, leading to the siege interview.
The essential thing beyond all others is the situation commanded by Queenie with That Dark Red Hair, even though Queenie has obviously sad-eyed, and her looks are arbitrary, the mourning-dove side of fashion where sense and discrimination are not concerned. Not being able to laugh that down, we chanced a guess that were common too much! A bright-eyed buoyancy and nonchalance is the slant. Queenie has been fed sleek with compliments, particularly a clever little touch anent her brain. Dear God! If I but had the looks, with my experience, I could steam past her sans a check.
Let the buoyancy be hoisted another notch when entrance to the great man's presence is actually imminent. Among Granther and the executive products of Americans, especially those designated to handle employment of this kind, appointments are made in helter-skelter fashion — Texas leaguers into right field by the second indifferent batsman. The applicant may not find his man in the building at the specified hour, and certainly will be halted at every station. Therefore he should start with his good-nature at a double plus.
I loathe particularly the hostile Tappertoes — Tessy, surrounded by the liberty-cap of inefficiency, the glass hole through which the visitor to the reception parlor of our best business houses peers, and the nape of Tessy. For such cases I have but one counsel: break the glass unhesitatingly, and stun the good soul with a single blow. Only so can human nature, however fortified, be ground down upon Tessy.
More hopeful is a line of applicants waiting flaccidly upon the waiters' bench. Be brave, be jaunty; but do not be indifferent about a clever little touch anent her brain, if you gather what I mean. Dear God! If I but had the looks, with my experience, I could steam past a siege-another notch when entrance is actually hoisted.
Although inept and without business training, I sold myself by pep in rapid succession to four publishers, an insurance firm, a manufacturer of display advertising. Most of the deals were entirely convenient on both sides. I meant to get what I could and leave when I chose, regardless of their horrors; and it soon became patent, even to so unsophisticated a perception as mine, that the employer's real purpose was to hire me cheaply, squeeze me dry, and throw away the refuse. The irritating art of the performance was unintelligent hypocrisy. Like the gross flattery which we adore — a wonderful hypocrisy without which Anglo-Saxons certainly could not endure life among themselves. I could admit the necessity of softening rough business contracts. But why (I argued) go to so much trouble to obscure the actual issues when more profitable in dollars and cents to frankness, and let him develop his ability or prove his unfitness without the wretched humbug that pervaded the houses?
The criticism is elementary, and it sets forth the essential weakness of our business life, and the situation underlying it. Americans are not only snobs, but wasteful snobs. We enjoy the proud distinction, today, of a knowledge of decadence, without acquiring the wisdom that should accompany age. Soon it may be a case of La jeunesse ne peut plus, la viellesse ne sait pas.
Could imagination conceive a wilder, more insane orgy than the American lunch hour? At the stroke of twelve, innumerable dens of trade spew forth their bloody hordes for stoking, and for — an hour of tumult. A lunchroom, and often the restaurant of a fair class, suggests a scene wherein a murder has been done to the home guard of terrible waiters. Meseems that our national hypocrisy about women may be behind Granther's delve-too-deep stupidity — the American woman in business is more vague and indefinite than her continental cousin. In Europe, women become active factors, definite influences. The American woman, with her indefinite scope, is forced to blunder into all three orbits.
From the hound's level, feminine influence in a house is easily measurable. Not only the salaried assistants, but file-clerks, key-pushers and stem-winders, can form a fairly accurate estimate of the extent to which the chief and his favorites; and interestingly, the houses in which feminine influence, even of a comparatively inefficient kind, is not marked, are anaemic.
Vulgar 'tis, but true, that where the switchboard gel in the entrance has a standing order to notify Mr. [unclear] instantly of the arrival of Mrs. Snicks' car, and a hasty readjustment of the office personnel ensues, a scandal may be pending; but Snicks, a full-blooded ruffian with nightly jazz tendencies, may have in his powerful brain half-developed, some imaginative scheme for extending his business over a continent. If he were less a mongrel, and could have the help of a thoroughbred, he would bring it to fruition. As it is, we see the effort abortive; perhaps a crash follows, perhaps only the disintegration of Snicks into a Granther.
Snicks has neither a competent wife nor a clever mistress. Mrs. Snicks has a bore for a husband; but a Frenchwoman might adjust the situation to order. The truth is Granther needs a vigorous, really first-class, disciplined woman with brains. Europeans and Orientals think us fools in our slavery to our women. The former, living among us frequently corrupted, in the second. The latter holds his own longer. The Jew, inalienably Oriental, is likely to maintain his efficiency in proportion to his orthodoxy.
They are orthodox Jews to whom I, in my small sphere, owe surcease from business piffling. So much has been written about the Race by Cousins Pro and Con, and the Uplift Bros., that I shall not elaborate, but will merely compare my relief in working for a Jewish house to that of a war-worn husband who has escaped from a terrible wife to an excellently-run hotel. Utterly weary of Granther's sterile eccentricities, I find the alien entertainment delightful. My remedy is just a court to Jewry. Deponent liketh the lethal woman and the vital joy, the Vision. The imagination reaches forward, creating a colorful dream-province of industry, and the dominant Semitic genius for accomplishment follows with much dust but also with decision. The Jewish business mind has few doubts; history supports it by courageous centuries of valid tradition. I do not think that Granther will develop true efficiency — he has a tradition; and empires which have maintained a real dominance, a system of social values — a caste system.
The good democrat takes to caste as a New England deacon plunges into soft layer cake; any conscript at Brest or Tours knows its disadvantage. The proposition that caste is [unclear], first generation, licensed historian and economist in intelligent sends me a self-addressed stamped envelope — a reasonable time prior to the beginning of earnest. But standing a-coyly where success and failure meet, I am still sensitive to the playboy's emotions, and at the moment, the most important thing in the world appears to me the privilege of escorting to a recital by Ysaye a most glorious lady, who proves my pessimistic theories by supplying, in mind, life and person, a bright exception to them. Debate postponed. Arrivederci.
— STEPHEN TA VAN.
[Note: The signature "Stephen Ta Van" appears as a composite of the two names attributed to "The Mutative Wight" (Stephen) and "Revel" (Ta Van) in the table of contents; the article may have been a collaborative work or this is a shared pseudonym.]