ii · Section 3

ii

The other way of breathlessness is laughter.

“Laughter, holding both his sides,” sang Milton; and, in fact, I once knew a man who sat at a dinner or some place between Don Marquis and Pelham Grenville (P. G.) Wodehouse. It is not necessary to recall what happened to him. Let us draw a veil, and proceed. Don (perhaps you recall it) was under the necessity of conducting a guessing contest in a New York newspaper. The purpose was to guess his real name. People refused to believe that he could be Don Marquis. The Supreme Court, in a case brought as a test, has since decided that such incredulity is not a sign of moral turpitude. Even Donald Robert Perry Marquis, held the Court (seven to two; Holmes, J., and Brandeis, J., dissenting), does not sound sufficiently possible, especially when the evidence shows that he was born in Walnut, Bureau County, Illinois. The Court ruled that Don was conceivably a literary hoax, but that his play, _The Old Soak_, was the real thing and within the Amendment. Popular rather than judicial cognisance has extended to the other and uncollected works of Don Marquis, such as _Prefaces_, his stories in _Carter and Other People_, his truth-telling about a young woman called _Hermione_, his newly rededicated record of _The Cruise of the Jasper B._, his iliad of _Noah an’ Jonah an’ Captain John Smith_, his poetry in _Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady and Famous Love Affairs_, etc., etc. You have read Anatole France’s _The Revolt of the Angels_, but are you familiar with Don’s _The Revolt of the Oyster_, I ask you? Or _Pandora Lifts the Lid_, by Christopher Morley, writing under the auspices of Don Marquis? Or _The Almost Perfect State_, a vision vouchsafed exclusively to Mr. Marquis?

The truth is, there is a good deal of Mark Twain in Don Marquis. Don is usually as good as ever Mark was and in some cases a good deal superior--and throughout, more genuine. When I make the comparison I am thinking of the best Mark Twain, the satirist and not too easily satisfied thinker; neither the embittered and savage pessimist of those final years nor the facile (too facile) humourist. Marquis, who can sustain the severer comparison with Twain, can also well sustain the comparison on the lighter side; for Don is a humourist, too. The point is in the “too.” And the exemplification may be sought in (let us say) _The Almost Perfect State_. “No matter how nearly perfect an Almost Perfect State may be, it is not nearly perfect enough unless the individuals who compose it can, somewhere between death and birth, have a perfectly corking time for a few years.... In the Almost Perfect State every person shall have at least ten years before he dies of easy, carefree, happy living.” A place of pay-as-you-enter wars; a heaven where everyone is an aristocrat and there are no professional reformers--in short, a Marquisate. Where Don differs from Mark Twain is in being a poet who sometimes uses poetry as the medium of his expression--see _Dreams and Dust_ and his _Poems and Portraits_. Christopher Morley (whose essay on Don Marquis, in _Shandygaff_, deserves to be read) has coaxed Don into a Frank R. Stocktonish enterprise in _Pandora Lifts the Lid_, with its narrative of seven young women snatched from the shades of a young ladies’ seminary and--. But as I write, Pandora has lifted the lid on a crack only.

P. G. Wodehouse is another matter, a chap over whose books thousands of people have found themselves unable to keep straight faces. Yet, not long ago, writing in the London Sphere, Clement K. Shorter declared he had never read a single one of the more than twenty Wodehouse yarns. He had never read _Jeeves_, or that new one, _Leave It to Psmith_, or _Mostly Sally_, or _Three Men and a Maid_, or _The Little Warrior_, or A _Damsel in Distress_, or _Piccadilly Jim_--think of it! Or no, don’t think of it. It won’t bear thinking of, it won’t really. The Wodehouse novels, though in most respects like those jolly things he writes to go with music by Jerome Kern, have now and then a page that dips far below the surface of fun into something very deep and true to the inwardness of human nature. Such are some bits in _The Little Warrior_, and such are the more tragic moments for Sally in _Mostly Sally_; and yet Mr. Wodehouse brings his story up again quickly like a diver clutching a pearl and rising up through clear water to sparkling and sunlit air. It is the prettiest talent imaginable, and I can think of no other contemporary writer of light fiction who has the same dexterity.