The Damned Effrontery of the Two-a-Day

Being a Pursuit of the Elemental and Vulgar in Refined Vaudeville

GILBERT SELDES

THE narrator of the following episode is Mr. Percy Hammond of the New York Tribune; the stars are Montgomery and Stone; the Mr. Mansfield is Richard himself again, the actor who played Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde better than Thomas Shea did:

"As the stars appeared in the last act in evening dress, Mr. Mansfield turned to me and with venomous indignation said, 'That is damned effrontery!' It seemed to be Mr. Mansfield's belief that mere dancers had no right to wear the vestments of refined society."

A week or so before Mr. Hammond published these exquisite lines, Mr. Simeon Strunsky of the New York Evening Post, alluded to "the intellectualist rush to be elemental and almost vulgar, which has recently elevated Krazy Kat and Miss Fanny Brice to very near the topmost rank in American art." And, if I may anticipate further reference to Mr. Joe Cook, that is why, ladies and gentlemen, in writing about vaudeville, I shall not imitate Mr. Arthur Symons.

Writers on vaudeville have owed more to Mr. Symons even than to Heywood Broun. Mr. Broun made the discovery, while trying to complete his education in aesthetics, that an artist was anyone in vaudeville except the trained seals. Mr. Symons' portion was greater. To him one owed that peculiarly attractive attitude of sentimental reminiscence which he took up, perhaps borrowed, and which has remained the classic attitude. Mr. Symons, as I recall, did it very well. But the attitude is unsatisfactory because it invokes, in dealing with the most immediate of the minor arts, more than a share of the pathos of distance. One has to say something about the acts and numbers of a better day; in America one is almost compelled to lug in the commedia dell'arte. Yet the time must come when one can say, "Vaudeville could never have been worse than this—or for that matter, never better." The moment must come in the history of culture when vaudeville can be taken without comparisons for what it is.

That is how I propose to take it. In my youth I saw little of it and cared less. I recall a skit called Change Your Act or Go Back to the Woods; among the Fours observed there may have been Cohans; there was, I remember, The Man Who Made the Shah of Persia Laugh; once I saw an artist in pantomime. Yet I am not moved to beat my breast and begin Einst in meinen Jugendjahren. Nothing I have heard leads me to believe that there were better days in vaudeville than those which open wide over Joe Cook and Fanny Brice and the Six Brown Brothers and the Rath Brothers and the team of Williams and Wolfus and the masterly jazz players and Harry Watson, Jr., as Young Kid Battling Dugan, and Messrs. Moss and Frye, who ask how high is up.

The Civilized Fake

THESE, it would appear, stand at the end of the rush to be elemental and almost vulgar. It must have been in the same rush that the genteel tradition in America lost its hat. Mr. Strunsky is quite right in discerning an intellectualist rush; but he is an impatient observer because he does not see what it is from and he misrepresents a little what it is to. Weak-minded intellectuals have always yearned for the abysmal, the vulgar, and the primitive; alert ones have frequently found or tried to find in the commoner expressions of the artistic impulse some relief from the unmitigated tedium of the professionally second rate in the higher arts.

They have known that rag-time, circuses, slapstick, burlesque, and the like, whatever their faults may be, are seldom pretentious, seldom vulgar in the sense that The End of a Perfect Day and the Albert Memorial are vulgar; not, in short, faux bon. The civilized fake, and not the civilized original, has driven them off. It is possible to play Bach and Berlin in succession, and to care for both, and it isn't to escape from the majestic purity of Bach that one goes in for jazz; it is to escape from Puccini.

I have written before of Mr. George Herriman's Krazy Kat and I hope some day to honor myself in paying proper honors to Miss Brice; the occurrence of their names in connection with Mr. Strunsky's pejorative use. of the words elemental and vulgar can only be a pretext for making one thing clear. The two characteristics of Krazy Kat are fantasy and irony, neither of them precisely elemental; the drawing is simple, and very little that is simple can be offensivly vulgar; apart from the occasional banality of an idea—and which of us has three hundred and sixty-five beautybright profound ideas annually?—there is nothing approaching vulgarity in Krazy Kat except the fact that it is a comic, appearing in a Hearst paper, read with pleasure by a comparatively large number of people. According to the genteel tradition these three quite extraneous circumstances make it impossible for the Kat to be anything but vulgar, while the exhibitions of oil paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy are beyond cavil refined. According to it, also, vaudeville is per se and eternally undignified, ignoble, cheap, flat—I must use the word again, vulgar.

Miss Brice Demolishing the Concert Room

THIS habit of judging a thing by its source and circumstance is exactly what even an amateur intellectual himself would call vulgar. It is a refusal to keep the mind on the object; it escapes individual judgment by absorbing itself in secondary effects. Forget the circumstances and set a bust by Mrs. Clare Sheridan beside a piece of African sculpture or one by Gaston Lachaise, or compare an art-smock with either a real peasant's blouse or a real Parisian creation and the whole mystery of the elemental, the civilized, and the faked will be revealed. Listen to a spiritual and then to Kiss Me Again and you will understand with the swift joy of release why there is such a rush to hear Miss Fanny Brice demolish that song and the whole tedious business of polite concert-room vocalism (it isn't singing) in one exquisite moment of burlesque.

Exquisite? Yes. For a moment. In that particular song she presses on and goes far: the subject requires it. But as a parodist she is exquisite because with the utmost economy of means she creates the original in the very process of destroying it. That is only part of her work. In such a number as her current vamp she does three things: recites a parody, imitates the moving picture vampire, and creates through these another, a truly comic, character. She has notable restraint, not only in, say, Mon Homme, which she takes lento affettuoso, but in the Florodora Baby where her mastery of pathos in humor is superb. This is not the place to analyze and praise her work; the quality which makes her so important as an example of vaudeville is the refinement of her method, a thing which has nothing whatever to do with being refined. I venture to think that whatever her innate taste may be (and I fancy it is not less than average) the unerring taste of her impersonations has been achieved through the purely technical mastery which she has developed. I mean, seriously, that the vaudeville stage makes such demands upon its artists that they are compelled to perfect everything.

They have to do whatever they do swiftly, neatly, without lost motion; they must touch and leap aside: they dare not hold an audience more than a few minutes, at least not with the same stunt; they have to establish an immediate contact, set a current in motion, exploit it to the last possible degree in the shortest space of time. They have always to be "in the picture"; the vaudeville stage gives them seemingly endless opportunities, but it holds to strict account; it permits no fumbling and there are no reparable errors.

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I face here willingly the protest of intelligent men and women who have gone to vaudeville to hear or see one number and have been compelled to see some of the dreariest aesthetic dancing, to hear the most painfully polite songs, to witness drama. If vaudeville requires half of what I have said, how do these get in and get by? With the foreknowledge that paradox was not invented by Mr. Chesterton, and therefore without shame, I declare that they are a concession, to debased public taste. Note well that all the culture-elements in vaudeville, the dull and base and truly vulgar ones, are importations. The dance that is appropriate to the vaudeville stage is the stunt dance; the music that fits is rag-time or jazz; the playlet (witness the success of A Slice of Life) is burlesque. Yet the necessity to pretend to give culture is so great that one actually hears vaudeville defended because among its native acts appear tableaux vivants of Landseer or because a legitimate actor brings to the common herd scraps and snatches of Les Misérables.

But the part that is pure, I am convinced, is rarely matched on any other stage: certainly not in the legitimate, in the serious artistic playhouse, where knowing one's job perfectly and doing it simply and unpretentiously is precisely the rarest thing in the world, Possibly in revue and musical comedy, both of which draw much from vaudeville. They draw, they set off, but they do not incorporate. The best acts retain a fierce individuality. And the best act of all they have not yet seduced from their natural allegiance, nor will not, I hope.

Joe Cook's One-Man Show

I REFER to the one-man vaudeville show of Joe Cook. No one who has seen him can doubt his pre-eminence, (I count Miss Brice apart.) But it is necessary to see him on the same bill with, for example, Miss Ethel Levey, to realize how good he is. Miss Levey is what most vaudeville players aspire to be; Joe Cook is what they ought to be. Corrupted by her triumphs abroad Miss Levey returns still magnificent, but no longer vaudeville; she has the grandeur of a star and appears in full stage with a grand piano and lights and draperies —and recites a dramatic monologue! And sings Love's Old Sweet Song. Now and again flashes of burlesque reveal her ancient flavor; but it is an axiom in vaudeville that you can't be good in it if you are too good for it. Mr. Cook is not. Mr. Cook is perfect.

Yet to give the quality of his perfection is difficult. He is versatile, but not in the manner of Sylvester Schaeffer, He is a master of parody and burlesque, yet not in the fashion of Charles Withers; his delicate impersonations have an ease and certainty far beyond the studies of Chic Sale. Essentially what distinguishes Joe Cook is that he is very wise and slightly mad, and his madness is not the "dippy" kind so admirably practised by Frank Van Hoven, the magician. It is structural. Mr. Cook's is probably the longest single act in vaudeville, and after it is over he saunters into one or more of the acts that follow his on the programme, as his fancy takes him.

His own begins as a running parody of old-time vaudeville, beginning with the musicians coming out of the pit, through the magician and the player of instruments to—but no one has ever discovered where it does go to. For after the card tricks—the ace of spades is asked for and, as he remarks after five minutes of agonized fumbling behind his back, the ace of spades is asked for and practically at a moment's notice the ace of spades is produced; and it never is—Mr. Cook finds it necessary to explain to the audience in one of the most involved pieces of nonsense ever invented why he will not imitate four Hawaiians playing the ukulele. After that literally nothing matters. He might be with Alice in Wonderland or at a dada ballet or with the terribly logical clowns of Shakespeare. I think that Chaplin would savor his humors.

In an art which is hard and bright and tends to glitter rather than radiate, he has a gleam of poetry; but he is like the best of poets because there are no fuzzy edges, no blurred contours; he is exact and his precision is never cold, He holds conversations of an imbecile gravity: How are you? How are you? Fine, how's yourself? Good And you? Spendid. How's your uncle? I haven't got an uncle. Fine, how is he? He's fine. How are you? He is amazingly inventive, creating new stunts, writing new lines, doing fresh business from week to week. His little bits are like witty epigrams in verse, where the thing done and the skill of the method coincide and pleasing separately please more by their fusion. His sense of the stage is equalled by but one man I have ever seen: George M. Cohan.

I cannot now mention lesser names, Some of those named above approach Mr. Cook and some, being specialists, are actually outside his orbit. But because he has in him a little of everything which makes vaudeville precious, those who have a little of him in their work are good and they know it. A secondary pleasure to describe them; they exist, actually and at this moment. And the best of them prove the entire case for vaudeville, because they are almost all burlesquers,—and vaudeville is the only genre I know which can live by burlesquing itself.