To-morrow ALL my life I’ve liked the Back of a magazine. Some black-browed Wednesday I purchase a magazine, a fifteen-cent one, and read it through. I read the stories and they deeply engage or lightly interest me. I read the ‘special articles’ and if they tell about flying machines or wild birds or hospitals or woman-prisoners in penitentiaries they charm or absorb my thoughts. I look at the illustrations and try to decide whether they are art or science or mechanism. I read the verse and if it’s poetry it exhilarates me as if closed shutters were opened to let Day into a gloomy Room. Then I read the advertisements in the Back and they do all of those things to me in comforting life-giving oxygen-furnishing ways. Each advertisement is a short story with an eerie little ‘plot’ in it: each is a special article full of purpose: each is fruitful poetry: and in my two hands I all-but have and hold those wonderful Things they exploit. They make me feel it’s my birthday and I’m presented a wealth of lavish gifts. They make me feel it’s all a world of playthings. They make me feel like a baby with a rattle, a ball and a hoop of bells. I like everything in the Back of a magazine. I like the Revolvers, handsome plausible short-barreled Revolvers with pictures of ordinary people in dim-lit midnight bedrooms, and ordinary expected-looking burglars climbing in windows—Revolvers of ten shots and of six, and of different calibers, and all of them gleamingly mystically desirable: I like the Soaps, smooth amorous appetizing Soaps, some in luxurious Paris packets, and others spread out in blue water and rosy foam, splashed in by athletic Archimedesque young men and fat creamy babies and slim beautiful ladies—Mary Garden Soap of pungent delicious scent, tar Soap for the long lovely hair of girls, austere Ivory Soap—It floats: I like the Rubber Heels of resilient charm so tellingly pictured and described that at once I desire them beneath my spirit-heels—springy and solid and thick and firm: I like the Tooth-pastes and Tooth-powders and Tooth-lotions in tubes and tins and bottles, each bearing beneficent messages to the human white teeth of this world—one unfailing kind coming lyrically out like a ribbon and lying flat on the brush: I like the foods—of miraculous spotless purity and enticement—Biscuits and Chocolate and Figs, and Foie-gras in thick glossy little pots, so richly pictured and sung that merely to let my thoughts graze in their pasturage fattens my Heart: I like the men’s very thin the Back, the Back, the Back of a magazine— There’s no sadness and no terror in the Back of a magazine. And it is for Everybody, Everybody. A million people read a story in the middle of the magazine and half the million readily miss its point. But a single tin of Talcum Powder in the Back—the whole million note that and miss nothing in it: it gets to them both on and under their skin. Some of the million read a ten-line poem in vers libre in the front of the magazine—and nine-tenths of their number are hard-put to it: the mentalities of this human race being mostly shops shut down. It is something pregnant and prophetic to a poet, merely musical to a plain prose writer, arrant folly to a telephone girl, amusing nonsense to a butcher, a comic fantasy to a milliner, a form of insanity to a plumber, an unknown tongue to a milk-man, a A thousand persons agree with an article about atavism in orang-outangs and ten thousand more quite refute it. But they all harmoniously commit suicide with the same make of Revolver—hammer the hammer—or get rousing drunk to the same degree with the same brand of high-powered whiskey—Wilson, that’s all. A countess, a courtesan and a convict-woman summarily pass over the front and middle of the magazine as containing nothing to their purpose. But like jungle denizens at their drinking pool the three of them meet hostilely on the common ground of a popular Cigarette featured in the Back—a blend to suit every taste—wherewith they unwittingly smoke away half their generic differentiations. The Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady anoint themselves nightly into a state of shining invisible kinship from separated twin jars of the same bewitching Cold Cream. I’m not sure myself and MissLily Walker of the Broadway chorus regard similarly a beauteous box of Rice Powder: she perchance would at once dash madly into it and powder herself o’er with it, whereas The front of the magazine may mean little to you and the middle of the magazine may mean nothing to me: the Back of it none of us escapes. It is for Everybody, Everybody. Even Senegambians: they can look at the pictures and marvel over them. I can there meet a Senegambian on the common ground of it might be a delicate transparent oval of Pears’ Soap, pretty as a jewel of price: perchance we would each unconsciously feel we wouldn’t be happy till we got it. It’s only as playthings I want the Things in the Back of a magazine. To me they are toys, lyrics of matter, food of the senses. The octroi would have no sympathy with my loiterings among their wares. It is a fÊte of my own, indolent and fanciful, unrecognized in commerce. Any article I may put to its forthright use in actuality becomes an idyllic toy when I find it in the Back of a magazine. The desirable Revolvers are not firearms with which to shoot myself and burglars, but only bijous to have and handle and caress. The So I play with my toys on black-browed Wednesdays. Some Wednesdays even fail to be black-browed because there are Backs to magazines. |