Nonsenseorship

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Title: Nonsenseorship

Author: G. G. Putnam and Others

Editor: G. G. Putnam

Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6678]

This file was first posted on January 12, 2003

Last Updated: July 2, 2013

Language: English

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NONSENSEORSHIP

SUNDRY OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING PROHIBITIONS INHIBITIONS AND ILLEGALITIES

By G. G. Putnam and Others

CONTRIBUTORS:

   HEYWOOD BROWN

   GEORGE S. CHAPPELL

   RUTH HALE

   BEN HECHT

   WALLACE IRWIN

   ROBERT KEABLE

   HELEN BULLITT LOWRY

   FREDERICK O'BRIEN

   DOROTHY PARKER

   FRANK SWINNERTON

   H. M. TOMLINSON

   CHARLES HANSON TOWNE

   JOHN V. A. WEAVER

   ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

   and the AUTHOR of THE MIRRORS of WASHINGTON

   Edited by G. P. P.

Illustrated By Ralph Barton

(Illustrations not available in this edition)

WE HAVE WITH US TODAY

At current bootliquor quotations, Haig & Haig costs twelve dollars a quart, while any dependable booklegger can unearth a copy of Jurgen for about fifteen dollars. Which indicates, at least, an economic application of Nonsenseorship.

Its literary, social, and ethical reactions are rather more involved. To define them somewhat we invited a group of not-too-serious thinkers to set down their views regarding nonsenseorships in general and any pet prohibitions in particular.

In introducing those whose gems of protest are to be found in the setting of this volume, it is but sportsmanlike to state at the start that admission was offered to none of notable puritanical proclivity. The prohibitionists and censors are not represented. They require, in a levititious literary escapade like this, no spokesman. Their viewpoint already is amply set forth. Moreover, likely they would not be amusing.... Also, the exponents of Nonsenseorship are victorious; and at least the agonized cries of the vanquished, their cynical comment or outraged protest, should be given opportunity for expression!

Not that we consider HEYWOOD BROUN agonized, cynical, or outraged. Indeed, masquerading as a stalwart foe of inhibitions, he starts right out, at the very head of the parade, with a vehement advocacy of prohibition. His plea (surely, in this setting, traitorous) is to prohibit liquor to all who are over thirty years of age! He declares that rum was designed for youthful days and is the animating influence which made oats wild. After thirty, presumably, Quaker Oats....

And at that we have quite brushed by GEORGE S. CHAPPELL. who serves a tasty appetizer at the very threshold, a bubbling cocktail of verse defining the authentic story of censorious gloom.

Censorship seems a species of spiritual flagellation to BEN HECHT, who, as he says, ten years ago prided himself upon being as indigestible a type of the incoherent young as the land afforded. And nonsenseorship in general he regards as a war-born Frankenstein, a frenzied virtue grown hugely luminous; a snowball rolling uphill toward God and gathering furious dimensions, it has escaped the shrewd janitors of orthodoxy who from age to age were able to keep it within bounds.

Then RUTH HALE, who visualizes glowing opportunities for feminine achievement in the functionings of inhibited society. If the world outside the home is to become as circumscribed and paternalized as the world inside it, obviously all the advantage lies with those who have been living under nonsenseorship long enough to have learned to manage it.

WALLACE IRWIN is irrepressibly jocose (perhaps because he sailed for unprohibited England the day his manuscript was delivered), breaking into quite undisciplined verse anent the rosiness of life since the red light laws went blue.

I am not sure, as I write, that this article ever will be printed, says ROBERT KEABLE, the English author of Simon Called Peter. (It is). Mr. Keable, a minister from Africa, wrote of the war as he saw it in France, and in a way which offended people with mental blinders. He declares that the war quite completely knocked humbug on the head and bashed shams irreparably. Rebels, says he, meaning those who speak their mind and write of things as they see them, must be drowned in a babble of words.

And then HELEN BULLITT LOWRY, the exponent of the cocktailored young lady of today, averring that to the pocket-flask, that milepost between the time that was and the time that is, we owe the single standard of drinking. She maintains that the debutantalizing flapper, now driven right out in the open by the reformers, is the real salvation of our mid-victrolian society.

No palpitating defense of censorship would be expected from FREDERICK O'BRIEN of the South Seas, who contributes (and deliciously defines) a precious new word to the vocabulary of Nonsenseorship, Wowzer. The nature of a wowzer is hinted in a ditty sung by certain uninhibited individuals as they lolled and imbibed among the mystic atolls and white shadows:

   "Whack the cymbal! Bang the drum!

   Votaries of Bacchus!

   Let the popping corks resound,

   Pass the flowing goblet round!

   May no mournful voice be found,

   Though wowzers do attack us!"

DOROTHY PARKER gives vent to a poignant Hymn of Hate, anent reformers, who think everything but the Passion Play was written by Avery Hopwood, and whose dominant desire is to purge the sin from Cinema even though they die in the effort. I hope to God they do, adds the author devoutly.

From England, through the eyes of FRANK SWINNERTON, we glimpse ourselves as others see us, and rather pathetically. In days gone by, lured by reports of America's lawless free-and-easiness, Swinnerton says he craved to visit us. But no more. The wish is dead. We have become hopelessly moral and uninviting. I see that I shall after all have to live quietly in England with my pipe and my abstemious bottle of beer. And yet I should like to visit America, for it has suddenly become in my imagining an enormous country of 'Don't!' and I want to know what it is like to have 'Don't' said by somebody who is not a woman.

Also is raised the British voice of H. M. TOMLINSON, singed with satire. He writes as from a palely pure tomorrow when mankind shall have reached such a state of complete uniformity of soul, mind and body, that only a particular inquiry will determine a man from a woman, though it may fail to determine a fool from a man. Tomlinson's imagined nation of the future is as loyal and homogeneous, as contented, as stable, as a reef of actinozoal plasm. And over each hearth hangs the sacred Symbol—a portrait of a sheep.

Next is the usually jovial face of CHARLES HANSON TOWNE (that face which has launched a thousand quips) now all stern in his unbattled struggle with Prohibition, dourly surveying this land of the spree and home of the grave.... My children, says Towne, as they sip their light wine and beer... He is, at least, an optimist! But then, we are reminded he is also a bachelor.

In his own American language JOHN WEAVER pictures the feelings of an old-time saloon habitué when his former friend the barkeep, now rich from bootlegging, with a home on the Drive and all that, declares his socially-climbing daughter quite too good for this particular Old Soak's son. Weaver's retrospect of Bill's Place will bring damp eyes to the unregenerate:

   "So neat! And over at the free-lunch counter,

    Charlie the coon with a apron white like chalk,

    Dishin' out hot-dogs, and them Boston Beans,

    And Sad'dy night a great big hot roast ham,

    Or roast beef simply yellin' to be et,

    And washed down with a seidel of Old Schlitz!"

The Puritans disliked the theatre because it was jolly. It was a place where people went in deliberate quest of enjoyment. So says ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT, who emerges as a sort of economic champion of stage morality, though no friend at all of censorship. Despite the mot nothing risqué nothing gained, Woollcott emphatically declares the bed-ridden play is not, as a general thing, successful. A blush is not, of course, a bad sign in the box-office, says he, developing his theme, but the chuckle of recognition is better. So is the glow of sentiment, so is the tear of sympathy. The smutty and the scandalous are less valuable than homely humor, melodramatic excitement or pretty sentiment.

And last in this variegated and alphabeted company the anonymous AUTHOR OF THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON who views the applications of nonsenseorship from the standpoint of national politics.

G. P. P.

CONTENTS

WE HAVE WITH US TODAY

ORIGINAL CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

NONSENSEORSHIP

EVOLUTION

NONSENSEORSHIP

LITERATURE AND THE BASTINADO

THE WOMAN'S PLACE

OWED TO VOLSTEAD

THE CENSORSHIP OF THOUGHT

THE UNINHIBITED FLAPPER

THE WOWZER IN THE SOUTH SEAS

REFORMERS: A HYMN OF HATE

PROHIBITION

A GUESS AT UNWRITTEN HISTORY

IN VINO DEMI-TASSE

BOOTLEG

AND THE PLAYWRIGHT

THE ORACLE THAT ALWAYS SAYS NO

ORIGINAL CONTENTS

We Have With Us Today. G. P. P.

Evolution-Another of Those Outlines. GEORGE S. CHAPPELL

Nonsenseorship. HEYWOOD BROUN

Literature and the Bastinado. BEN HECHT

The Woman's Place. RUTH HALE

Owed to Volstead. WALLACE IRWIN

The Censorship of Thought. ROBERT KEABLE

The Uninhibited Flapper. HELEN BULLITT LOWRY

The Wowzer in the South Seas. FREDERICK O'BRIEN

Reformers: A Hymn of Hate. DOROTHY PARKER

Prohibition. FRANK SWINNERTON

A Guess at Unwritten History. H. M. TOMLINSON

In Vino Demi-Tasse. CHARLES HANSON TOWNE

Bootleg. JOHN V. A. WEAVER

And the Playwright. ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

The Oracle That Always Says No. THE AUTHOR OF THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON

ILLUSTRATIONS

George S. Chappell demonstrating his Outline of Censorship.

Heywood Broun finds America suffering from a dearth of Folly.

Ben Hecht chopping away at the ever-forgiving and all-condoning Bugaboo

of Puritanism.

Ruth Hale as a XXth Century woman guarding the Home Brew.

Wallace Irwin composing under the influence of synthetic gin and Andrew

Volstead.

Robert Keable urging the Automaton called Citizen to turn on his

oppressor.

Helen Bullitt Lowry watching Puritanism set the Flapper free.

Frederick O'Brien finds the South Seas purified and beautified by the

Missionaries.

Dorothy Parker hating Reformers.

Frank Swinnerton contemplating, from the Tight Little Isle, the two

classes of prigs developed by Prohibition; those who accept it and those

who rebel.

H. M. Tomlinson regarding, with not too great enthusiasm, the Perfect

State of the Future.

Charles Hanson Towne and the Law.

John V. A. Weaver noticing the bartender who has been thrown out of work

by Prohibition.

Alexander Woollcott rescuing the Playwright from the awful shears of the

Censor.

The Periscope of the Author of the Mirrors of Washington is turned

toward the Great Negative Oracle.

NONSENSEORSHIP

EVOLUTION

Another of Those Outlines

[Illustration: George S. Chappell demonstrating his Outline of Censorship.]

BY GEORGE S. CHAPPELL

I

When Adam sat with lovely Eve

   And, pressed his Primal suit,

There was a ban, if we believe

   Our Genesis, on fruit.

But did it give old Adam pause,

   This One and only law there was?

X

And then great Moses, on the crest

   Of Sinai, did devise

His tablets, acting for the best,

   (Though some thought otherwise).

At least he showed restraint, for then

   Man's sins were limited to Ten,

C

In later days the Romans proud

   Their famous Code began.

And lots of things were not allowed

   By just Justinian.

He wrote a list, stupendous long;

"One Hundred Ways of Going Wrong."

M

Napoleon, (see Wells's book)

   Improved the Roman plan

By spotting a potential crook

   In every fellow-man.

And by the Thousand off they went

   To jail, until proved innocent.

MDCCCCXXII

Now in the change-about complete

   Since Adam Passed from View.

For apples we are urged to eat

   And all else is taboo.

A Million laws hold us in thrall,

   And we serenely break them all!

NONSENSEORSHIP

[Illustration: Heywood Broun finds America suffering from a dearth of Folly.]

HEYWOOD BROUN

A censor is a man who has read about Joshua and forgotten Canute. He believes that he can hold back the mighty traffic of life with a tin whistle and a raised right hand. For after all it is life with which he quarrels. Censorship is seldom greatly concerned with truth. Propriety is its worry and obviously impropriety was allowed to creep into the fundamental scheme of creation. It is perhaps a little unfortunate that no right-minded censor