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SEVENTEEN
What
a lovely, lovely word. What a lovely age. Seventeen. I hope June finds as
much fun at seventeen as I did. For me it was the opening of a new world:
out of school ... at work that I enjoyed ... on my first vacation . . . my
first serious romance— at least I thought at the time it was serious.
Her
name was Fay. That's all I remember. We met at a vacation farm outside
Collegeville, Pennsylvania. I was shy and reticent in those days—somehow
my friends snort derisively when I tell them of my early introversion; or,
if they're ladies, they slant a glance of genteel disbelief in my
direction—and for the most part I pursued my courtship within my own
heart. But not altogether.
We
were seventeen, Fay and I, when Gus Kahn and Charles Rosoff wrote the song
in 1924, and we thought it was written just for us.
"When
you and I were seventeen, and life and love were new___ "
Now
my song is the "September Song": "The days dwindle down to a
precious few." But on one score Kurt Weill was wrong. It's not such a
long, long time from May to September, Seventeen seems only yesteryear to
me . . . "that golden spring when I was king and you my beautiful
queen."
And
now my firstborn is seventeen, finishing secondary school, preparing for
college, a wealth of activity behind her that I never had, opportunities
denied me, or ungrasped by me. They should make her sojourn from May to
September happier, fuller, richer in enjoyment of life's pleasurable treasures
than mine. I hope so—and that's wishing her a lot.
While
I'm in this uncharacteristically tender mood, let me make an observation.
Lew Lehr used to say "monkeys are the craziest people." Seems to
me people are the craziest monkeys, at least so far as love is concerned.
Homo sapiens will scoff at such manifestations of love as the Rockefeller
romance, insisting it can't be real; will deride such great passions as
Bergman-Rossellini, smugly ignoring the fact that when Cupid bends that bow
he doesn't ask if his victim is eligible or worthy or even willing. Love is
real and irresistible, it would seem, only when it comes to ourselves.
Then we defend it and excuse any transgression in its name, offering to
ourselves the balm of palliation that we deny others.
I
am moved to discourse on this intriguing subject by a scented epistle from
one who complains of the unreasonable inconsistency of her philandering—
and now cuckolded— husband and asks in a plaintive aside: "Why are
husbands always so dull— your own, that is— while other women's husbands
are always so fascinating?"
One
question at a time, lady. That last crack opens up an interesting study of
its own.
But
for now I can give you no better answer to your first plaint than the
obvious, hackneyed— double standard. What's good for the gander is not
good for the goose under our scheme of things, unfair and defective as such
an arrangement might appear. I know men who never attempted to conceal
their infidelities, who actually flaunted them in their wives' faces and
thought it was great fun—until the inevitable result: mistreated,
neglected wife falls in love with someone more appreciative. Then friend
husband reacts in characteristic manly fashion, roaring with shocked pain,
self-righteously indignant, hurt, enraged, threatening, naively unable to
understand how such injustice could come to him.
How
demagogic can you be? And yet he's right; someone must uphold the sanctity
of marriage and the future of family life. Man is a polygamous animal, and
if he had his way, life would be one long bacchanal. Not all men, of course;
but it wasn't mere whimsy that set the pattern of things from Mohammedism to
Mormonism. Who ever heard of a harem of husbands?
So
woman, with all her progress and freedom in this so-called enlightened age,
cannot alter the way of nature. She can call to her hand all such weapons in
the arsenal of womanhood as cajolery, flattery, tears and threats, but in
the final analysis she must accept, licking her wounds and hiding her grief
behind a front of simulated ignorance for the sake of family and posterity.
Never may she retaliate in kind.
Don't
tell me it isn't fair; I know it very well. But it's the way of life, and a
fortunate way if our thin veneer of civilization is to remain unshattered,
separating us from the anarchy of unbridled instinct.
Does
new love, then, come only to men and unattached women? No. But wives must
sublimate their feelings, must close their minds to the blandishments of
"the wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, this senior-junior
giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid," as Berowne put it in Love's Labor's Lost.
Never may she echo Goneril in King Lear: "O' the difference of man and
man! To thee a woman's services are due: my fool usurps my bed."
Maybe
she can take refuge in the advice of Byron:
There
is a pleasure in the pathless woods; There is a rapture in the lonely shore;
There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its
roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more.
Salmagundi
Veterans'
organizations are demanding licensing of home builders .... Is television
improving? Even Berle looked good to me the other night. But then it was his
first show of the season. Maybe he'll revert to character. Jackie Gleason is
tops in my video book .... The Oscar Hammerstein story hit a new high in TV
entertainment, despite the presence of frozen-faced Sullivan. But how could
it miss, with that wonderful music? . . . Clifton Fadiman puts on a good
show, but he must be a very patient man. George Kaufman is as obstreperous
as Oscar Levant used to be. Well, Mary Astor liked him, so he must have
something .... "Place In the Sun" is high-powered drama, as anyone
who has read An American Tragedy realizes, and Montgomery Clift, Shelley
Winters and Elizabeth Taylor give effective portrayals. But in its lighter
moments it parades a nostalgic pageant of popular music of Dreiser's day.
All in all, an excellent, moving picture. The scene in Alice's room that
night with its tragic consequences was a masterpiece of suggestion, showing
how Hollywood has progressed in its handling of delicate situations. And how
far public opinion has advanced in permitting realism that only a few
years ago was taboo .... "Painting the Clouds With Sunshine" isn't
much, but it too offers a pleasant panorama of old time song hits, and
presents gorgeous Virginia Mayo, once merely Danny Kaye's foil, as MGM's
answer to Betty Grable. That "Birth of the Blues" number is real
Grableish, saucy and nasty. If only the doll could learn to act! Well, what
d'ya want, Corotis, egg in your beer? Or, as Falstaff put it in Merry Wives
of Windsor: "Pullet-sperm in your brewage!"
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