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NEW YORK CITY
July 24
The Editors, The New Yorker,
GENTLEMEN:
I am extremely impressionable, and when someone with the
authority of Mr. Edmund Wilson tells me in a firm tone to
sit down and do a thing, I find myself sitting down and
doing it. In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Mr.
Wilson laid an injunction upon me and I instantly obeyed.
"Read," he commanded at the end of an article on Oscar
Wilde, "'The Picture of Dorian Gray' or even the best of his
fairy tales, 'The Birthday of the Infanta,' with the
Spirochaeta pallida in mind." I sat down and did it. As
well as I can, I shall try to give a clinical account of the
resulting experiment. It will not be easy, but I shall try.
In my customary armchair, with my pipe, an ashtray, and the
Spirochaeta pallida conveniently beside me, I took up
"The Birthday of the Infanta." I had read it before, but,
with Mr. Wilson's assistance, this moving fairy tale took on
an entirely new coloration. It was good, at first, to renew
my acquaintance with Wilde's story. I remembered of it
really no more than the wonderful last line, when the Dwarf
who had amused the Infanta lies dead. The highly bred little
Princess, I remembered, asks the Chamberlain why the Dwarf
will never dance again. "Because his heart is broken,"
answers the Chamberlain. The Infanta's rose-leaf lips curl.
"For the future, let those who come to play with we have no
heart!" she cries, and runs out of the garden, out of the
sight of the small, distorted body. That is the end I had
remembered, and as I sat down to obey Mr. Wilson, I
reflected that if the Dwarf, besides being so
preternaturally ugly, was also afflicted with Spirochaeta
pallida, it was possible that the Infanta, who lived
centuries before Ehrlich, meant something more by her remark
than appeared on the surface. But this prejudgment was
unfair to my experiment. It was unscientific. I dropped the
reflection and began to read clinically, just the four of us
together—the Dwarf, the Infanta, the S.p., and I.
I yielded once again to Wilde's magic as he describes the
birthday costume of the lovely child and the "sad,
melancholy King" watching her from a window of the palace.
The King is sad because he remembers his young Queen, who
came out of France, bore him the Infanta, and died six
months later, "before she had seen the almonds blossom twice
in the orchard, or plucked the second year's fruit from the
old gnarled fig-tree that stood in the centre of the now
grass-grown courtyard." It is a charming passage, but I
began to feel uneasy. "What did she die of?" I asked myself,
the Spirochaeta pallida in mind. I read on
tenaciously. It could not be that Mr. Wilson meant to waste
the S.p. on a dead Queen; that would make its
significance marginal. No, he must have meant it for someone
more important to the story, and it could only be the Dwarf,
who is its tragic hero. I read on, searching each phrase
with the intentness of a bacteriologist. The miniature
bullfight that is put on for the entertainment of the
Infanta, the singing of the gypsies, the bear that stands on
his head, the wizened apes who play amusing tricks—I
regarded them all as potential carriers. I really did my
best; I didn't let go of the Spirochaeta for an
instant. Finally, the Dwarf appears. I had always thought
him just an ugly dwarf, full of imagination and vitality and
romantic aspiration, and I had thought the Infanta extremely
snobbish. Wilde makes him physically very unappetizing, just
as Rostand gives Cyrano a too emphatic nose. (Horrid
thought: Did Cyrano have . . . ? But I put this out of mind.
I did not think Mr. Wilson would want me to digress. I stuck
to the Dwarf.) Now I imagined the Dwarf doing everything he
did, only with the addition of the S.p. I thought,
for example: Well, if the Dwarf had not been a dwarf—had he
been a Princeton athlete or intellectual, say—that would
have been nice for the Dwarf but it would have made it
awfully difficult for Wilde to keep the Infanta from falling
in love with him and marrying him, unless, of course, he had
shown that the Infanta was bored by his physical prowess or
irritated by his omniscience. But that would have been
another story, and Wilde seems to have shown an inclination
to write this one. And I am sure that he had the last
line in mind when he began. I withdraw that. I cannot be
sure, because I am not Mr. Wilson, but I think it is
possible. I could see, however, that the experiment I had
started on so hopefully was going to be difficult. I
challenge those who think it's a pushover to sit down and
read a fairy tale with the Spirochaeta pallida in
mind to try it.
I read on with a sense of growing defeat. There is the scene
in which all the flowers are angry at the Dwarf for being so
ugly. But when I read that "even the red Geraniums,
who did not usually give themselves airs, and were known to
have a great many poor relations themselves, curled up in
disgust when they saw him, and when the Violets meekly
remarked that though he was certainly extremely plain, still
he could not help it, they retorted with a good deal of
justice that that was his chief defect, and that there was
no reason why one should admire a person because he was
incurable," I stopped short. This was it, of course. The
Geraniums have the Spirochaeta pallida in mind. The
birds, who like the Dwarf because he dances and is gay, are
extremely superficial. So are the lizards, who "took an
immense fancy to him." It is the Geraniums who come through
with the diagnosis.
Of one thing I am certain: the Dwarf does not have the
Spirochaeta pallida in mind, because he loves the
Infanta and cherishes the delusion that she might love him
in return. Until the awful moment when he beholds his
ugliness in a mirror—when, for the first time, he gets some
notion of how he looks to other people, including the
Infanta—he is full of hope. Maybe, thought, the main symbol
is here. This is when he discovers what is really wrong with
him; he finds himself suddenly in the same dilemma as the
one in which Oswald finds himself in "Ghosts." At this
point, I found myself getting very irritated with Wilde. If
the Dwarf kills himself because he has Spirochaeta
pallida, why does Wilde drag the story on to the final
scene, in which the little Princess is petulant because he
won't get up and be jolly? Why does Wilde distort his ending
to make it seem that his concern is not so much with the
Dwarf as to score a point against the Little Princess? Why
does he imply, as the Infanta runs gaily out of the garden
at the end, that she will play with anyone in the future who
will amuse her and make no demands upon her beyond that,
Spirochaeta pallida or no Spirochaeta pallida?
Angrily, I threw "The Birthday of the Infanta" away. My
experiment was a success.
So far so good. I can take my orders (and I mean to) from
Mr. Wilson in the future, but how can I rectify the mistakes
I made in the past, when I was still on my own? There is the
case of W. Somerset Maugham. In Cambridge in I916, in the
Harvard Co-op, I picked up a second-hand copy of a novel
because I was attracted by its title, "Of Human Bondage." I
read it and thought it was remarkable. Recently, I read it
again and still thought it was remarkable. Ever since that
day in Cambridge, more than thirty years ago, I have been
reading Somerset Maugham with unquenched delight. But now
Mr. Wilson, in another article in The New Yorker,
tells me that Maugham is not a writer at all. His books are
not "written." What, then, have I been doing all these
years? What have I been reading? It is really an anomalous
situation. If, all these years, Mr. Maugham has not been a
writer, then I have not been a reader. What have I been? Who
am I? There are two comedies by Mr. Maugham, "Our Betters"
and "The Circle," which most playwrights and drama critics I
know consider among the hest comedies of this century. I
have seen many revivals of them and they have always
delighted me. But if they were not written, how did the
actors memorize them? Mr. Maugham's first novel, "Liza of
Lambeth," was published when he was twenty-three years old.
The authoritative critic of the time—of the time, that is,
before Mr. Wilson—was Sir Edmund Gosse. Since he did not
know that Mr. Maugham could not write—indeed, had not
written—he praised the book. A great many
critics, not including Mr. Wilson, and hundreds of so-called
readers, including myself, have since made the same
laughable mistake. I can't speak for the others, but as for
me, I want to square myself with Mr. Wilson. What steps
should I take now? I await instructions.
Respectfully,
S. N. BEHRMAN |
