From Pillar to Post: Leaves from a Lecturer's Note-Book

From Pillar to Post: Leaves from a Lecturer's Note-Book
John Bangs

Bangs John Kendrick

From Pillar to Post: Leaves from a Lecturer's Note-Book

I

GETTING USED TO IT

"I cannot imagine a more disagreeable way of qualifying for the income tax," said one of America's most noted after-dinner speakers to me when at a chance meeting he and I were discussing the joys and woes of the lecture platform. I must admit that in a way I sympathized with him; for I knew something of the sufferings endured for days and nights prior to one's own public appearance as an after-dinner or platform speaker.

There was a time many years ago, upon which I look back with wonder that I ever came through it without nervous prostration, when I suffered those selfsame mental agonies as the hour approached for the fulfilment of one of those rash promises which men fond of the sound of their own voices make months in advance to those subtle flatterers who would lure them from the easy solitudes of silence into the uneasy limelight of after-dinner oratory. Not without reason has a certain wit, whose name is unfortunately lost to fame, referred to the chairs behind the guest table on the raised platform at revelries of this nature as "The Seats of the Mighty and Miserable."

These sufferings involve a loss of appetite for days in advance of the event; a complete derangement of the nervous system, with no chance of recovery for at least ten days preceding the emergent hour, since sleep either refuses to come to one's relief altogether, or coming brings in its train a species of nerve-racking dream which leaves the last estate of the weary slumberer worse than the first. The complication is far more difficult to handle than that involved in the maturity of a promissory note which one is unable to meet; for there are conditions under which a tender-hearted creditor will permit a renewal of the latter sort of obligation, and this thought provides some sort of rift in the cloud of a debtor's despair.

But in the matter of public speaking there is no such comforting possibility. Nothing short of inglorious flight, painful accident, or serious illness, can save the signer of that promissory note for twenty-five hundred personally conducted after-dinner words from being called upon to pay in full the moment the note falls due. He can't even plead to be permitted the payment of one paragraph on account, and the balance in thirty days.

The contract can neither be evaded, postponed, nor sublet. It is then or never with him, and while no great harm would come to the world if ninety-nine and seven-eighths per cent. of the after-dinner speeches of the ages had gone unspoken, no man of the right, forward-looking, upstanding sort, whether his speeches be good, bad, or, like the most of them, merely indifferent, may wilfully or comfortably permit a promise of that nature to go to protest.

Yes, I sympathized with that excellent gentleman. I have known him to take to his bed three days before the ordeal, tremblingly approach the banquet board, rise to his feet, his nerves taut as a G string, his knees quaking in the merciful seclusion of the regions under the table, and then, with hardly a glimmering of consciousness of what he was doing or saying, his whole being thrilled with terror, acquit himself brilliantly, to return home at the conclusion of his trial physically and nervously prostrated.

One of the happiest recollections of my platform work, nevertheless, had to do with just such a shivering, quivering condition. It was many years ago – back in the mid-'90's of the last century, that so-called crazy end-of-the-century period, which inspired Max Nordau's depressing treatise on Degeneracy, and yet now seems so gloriously sane in contrast to what is going on in the world at the present time.

In some mysterious fashion I had succeeded in writing what the literary world is pleased to term a "best seller," and was in consequence enjoying a taste of that notoriety which inexperienced youth so often confounds with immortality. One result was a tolerably persistent demand that I exhibit myself at one of those then popular functions known as Authors' Readings. This was a form of entertainment almost as barbarically cruel as those ancient ceremonies in which Christian martyrs were thrown into an arena to demonstrate their powers in combatting irritated tigers, and such other blood-thirsty beasts of the jungle as the ingenious fancy of the management might suggest. It was, in a manner of speaking, a sort of Literary Hagenbeck Show, whither the curious among the readers of the day were lured in sweet Charity's name by the promise of a personal performance by real literary lions, with an occasional wild goose or two wearing temporarily the gorgeous plumage of the Birds of Parnassus, thrown in to make the program longer.

Invited to take part in one of these affairs, and feeling that for posterity's sake it was my duty to rivet my firm grasp upon Fame by keeping such company as my remotest great-grandchild could wish to have me known by, I carelessly accepted as if it were easy to comply, and all in the day's work of a new sun dawning upon the horizon of letters.

But when the fateful evening arrived a "change came o'er the spirit of my dream." Two dread situations arose which bade fair to drive me either into the nearest sanatorium, or to the obscurity of the deepest available jungle. Had I yielded to my immediate impulse, I should have flown as far afield as the Virginia negro who, upon being advised to leave town lest he suffer certain extreme penalties for his misdeeds, replied that he was "gwine, an' gwine so fur it'll cost nine dollars to send a postal card back."

On one side of the curtain at the great metropolitan hall where the Readings were to be held sat nearly three thousand hungry readers, waiting to see six unhappy authors prove whether or no they could read their own productions and survive; and on the other side of the curtain were five real Immortals and my sorely agitated self. My fellow sufferers that night were Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, Dr. Henry Van Dyke, William Dean Howells, the lamented Frank R. Stockton, and the ever unforgettable Mrs. Julia Ward Howe.

It was rather godlike company for a mere mortal like myself, and as I gazed upon them I realized, perhaps for the first time, the magnificent distances that lie between Yonkers-on-Hudson and Parnassus-by-Helicon. Frozen from heel to toe by the thought of having to appear before so vast and critical an audience, the complete refrigeration of my nervous system was accomplished by the thought of even temporary association with those fixed stars in the firmament of American Letters. Instead of a burning torch on the heights of Olympus, I felt myself more of a possible cinder in the public eye. One might be willing to appear before a Court of Literary Justice in the company of any one of them, but to assume equality with five such household words all at once, and especially before an audience many of whose members had from time immemorial known me as "Johnny" – well, to speak with frankness, it got on my nerves.

My condition was like that foreshadowed by a good old neighbor of mine up on the coast of Maine, who when I asked him one morning if he ever felt nervous when the thunder was roaring, and the lightning was striking viciously, replied, "No, I hain't never felt nervous: I'm jest plain dam skeert to death!" If the exits from the stage had not been guarded, I should have fled; but there was no escape, and while I awaited my turn to go out upon the platform I paced the back of the stage, concealed from the public gaze by a drop scene, shaking from head to foot with a nervous chill. I can scarcely even now bring myself to believe that there was a seismograph anywhere between the northern and southern poles so callous as to fail to register my vibrations.

It became evident as the moment approached that I should be utterly unable to go out upon the platform and do anything but dance: not after the graceful manner of Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Castle, but of Saint Vitus himself. To have held a book, even so light a one as my own, in my shaking hand would have been physically impossible, and then, just as I was about to seek out the chairman of the committee of arrangements, and plead a sudden stroke of some sort, I felt a womanly arm thrust through my own, and a soft white hand was laid gently and soothingly upon my wrist. I glanced to my side, and there stood Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, her lovely eyes full of sympathy, touched with a joyous reassuring twinkle.

"Oh, Mr. Bangs," said she, with a slight catch and tremor in her voice, "do you know I am so nervous about going out before all those people to-night that I really believe I shall have to borrow some of your manly courage and strength to carry me through!"

A marvelous transformation of nervous attitude was the immediate result, a determination to rush to the aid of a lady flying a signal of distress summoning all my latent courage to her cause. A realization of the lovely tactfulness of her approach and its true significance, and the prompt response of my sense of humor, not yet quite dead, to the exact facts of the situation, made a man of me for the time being – a man who would dare the undarable, attempt the unattainable, and if need be, as the eloquent African preacher once observed, "onscrew the onscrutable." Nervousness, cowardice, muscular vibrations, and all disappeared like the mists of the night before the radiance of the dawn in the face of that gracious woman's tactful humor, and later on I went forth to my doom so brazenly, and smiling so confidently, that one critic in the next morning's newspaper intimated without much subtlety of phrasing that I enjoyed myself far more than my audience did.

It would be too much to say that Mrs. Howe's timely intervention on my behalf effected a permanent cure of my nervousness in platform work; but it has helped me much to overcome it; for many a time since, when through sheer weariness, or for some purely psychological reason, I have approached my work with uneasy forebodings, the memory of that delightful incident has come back to me, and I have invariably found relief from my fears in the smile which it never fails to bring to my lips, and to my spirit as well.

I do not know that it would be a good thing for any public speaker ever to approach the emergent hour with entire assurance and utterly calloused nerves. Such a condition might well bespeak an indifference to the work in hand which would result either in a purely mechanical delivery, or one so careless as to destroy the effect of the lecturer's most valuable asset – a sympathetic personality. I recall far back in my college days, in the early '80's of the last century, meeting at one of my fraternity conventions that inspiring publicist, the late Senator Frye of Maine. In the course of a pleasant chat, having myself to appear before the convention with a committee report the following morning, and feeling a trifle uncertain as to how I was going to "come through," I asked the senator if he was ever a victim to nervousness when making a public address, and his answer was very suggestive.

"Always, my lad," said he, "always! I have been making public speeches off and on now for twenty-five or thirty years, and even to-day when I rise up to speak in the United States Senate, or on the stump, my knees shake a little under me. And I'm glad they do, Son," he went on significantly; "for if they didn't, I should begin to feel that the days of my usefulness were over, for it would mean that I really didn't care whether I got through safely or not."

So it was that up to a certain point I sympathized with my friend the distinguished after-dinner speaker when he intimated that the lecture platform was no bed of roses. For one of his nervous organization and temperament it would be impossible. It would make a nervous wreck of him in a short while, and in the end would shorten his life, even as it has shortened the span of many another robust spirit; such as the late Alfred Tennyson Dickens, for instance, who in very truth succumbed to the exactions of travel and of a lovely hospitality that he knew not how to resist.

But for myself there is so much in the work that is inspiring, so much that is pleasing in the human relationships it makes possible, that but for the discomforts of travel I could really feed upon it spiritually, and seek no happier diet. I defy any man to be a pessimist on the subject of American character after a season or two on the lecture platform; provided of course that he is a reasonably sympathetic man, and is so constituted in matters social that he is what the politicians call a "good mixer."

To the man who is not interested in the human animal, and insists upon judging all men by his own rigid and narrow standards, measuring souls by a yardstick, as it were, the work can never be a joy; but if he is broad enough to take people as he finds them, looking for the good that lies inherent in every human being, and judging them by the measure of their capacity to become what they were designed to be, and are honestly trying to be, then he will find it full of a living and a loving interest almost equal to that of the "joy forever."

Pasted in my spiritual hat is a little rime by one whose name modesty forbids my mentioning, running:

I can't be what Shakespeare was,
I can't do what great folks does;
But, by Ginger, I can be
ME!
And among the folks that love me
Nothin' more's expected of me.

The wandering platform speaker who will heed the intimations of that little rime, and seize the friendships in kind that surely await his coming in all parts of this great, genial country of ours, will find a wondrous store of happiness ready to his hand. If in addition to this he will cultivate the habit of looking for good in unpromising places, and of resolutely refusing to admit the power of small irritations to destroy his peace of mind, he will get along nicely. The latter of course requires resolution of a kind that is persistent in the face of unremitting annoyances. To say that these annoyances do not exist would be idle; but not half so idle as the act of giving them controlling importance in the making or the unmaking of a day's happiness.

The sooner one who travels the Platform Path learns to suspend judgment as to his fellow beings, and to suspect the fallacy of the obvious, the better it will be for him, and for his personal comfort. The first conspicuous lesson I had in this particular was out in Arizona on my first extended tour in our wonderful West in 1906. I found myself one afternoon on my way from Los Angeles to Phœnix. After having satisfied the inner man with an excellent Fred Harvey luncheon – an edible oasis always in a desert of indigestibility – I had retired to the smoking car for that spiritual refreshment which comes from watching the smoke wreaths curl upward from the end of a good cigar.

Unhappily for the quality of that refreshment, I was no sooner seated in the smoking room that I perceived that I was surrounded by men who, judging by surface indications, were hopeless vulgarians. Among them were three especially whose conversation was even lower than their brows. I think I can best describe their conversation by saying that in all probability Boccaccio's lady companions out Fiesole way, at the time of the plague that drove the Florentine Four Hundred beyond the city limits, would have fled blushingly before it, taking refuge by preference in the pure, undefiled Rolloisms of the Decameron itself; while poor old Rabelais, not always a master of reticence in things better left unsaid, would, I am sure, have joined a literary branch of the I. W. W. in sheer rebellion, rather than sully the refinement of his pen by taking down any part of it.

One has to listen to a great deal of this sort of thing en route, and pending the discovery of some kind of vocal silencer that shall render such communications as noiseless as they are corrupting to good manners, or a portable muffler which the unwilling listener may place over his ears, the wandering platform performer who has not yet reached a point where he can give up his cigar and be happy must needs endure them. Indeed he is doing well if he is not lured into a shamefaced enjoyment of such talk; for it must be admitted that some of the traveling companions one meets thus by chance have rare powers as story-tellers, and pour forth at times most objectionable periods with a smiling enthusiasm almost fetching enough to tempt a Simeon Stylites down from the top of his pillar into the lower regions of their alluring good fellowship.

Neither a prig nor a prude am I; but on this particular occasion the gross results of the conversation were so very gross as to preclude the possibility of there being any "net proceeds" of value, and I fled.

On returning to my place in the sleeper I noticed in the section directly across the aisle a handsome Englishwoman, traveling with no other companion than a little daughter, a child of about three and a half years of happy, bubbling youth. The little one was seated on her mother's lap, and was enjoying a "let's pretend" drive across country, using the maternal lorgnette chain in lieu of the ribbons wherewith to guide her imaginary steeds.

An hour passed, when a boisterous laugh from the rear of the car indicated the approach of the three barbarians of the smoker, who to my disgust a moment later settled themselves in the section directly in front of mine, and to my dismay began apparently to take a greater interest in the lady across the aisle than the ordinary usages of polite human intercourse warranted, lacking a formal introduction.

I have never posed as a Squire of Dames, and I have a wholesome distaste for such troubles as an unseeing eye enables a man to avoid; but the intrusion of these Goths, not to say Vandals, upon the lady's right to travel unmolested was so obvious that I couldn't help seeing and inwardly resenting it. The woman herself treated the situation with becoming coolness and dignity, showing only by a slight change of color, and now and then a vexed biting of the lips, that she noticed it at all; but the cooler she became the more strenuous became the efforts of the barbarians to "scrape an acquaintance."

I held an inward debate with myself as to my duty in the premises. I did not care to get into a row; but the ogling soon became so pronounced that it really seemed necessary to interfere. I reached out my hand to ring for such reinforcements as the porter and the conductor might be able to bring to our assistance, when to my astonishment the worst offender of the three rose from his seat, and stepped quickly to the lady's side – and then there was revealed to me the marvelous wisdom of the old injunction, "Judge not, that ye be not judged"; for the supposed ruffian, whom I would a moment before have willingly, and with seeming justification, thrown bodily from the train, with the manner of a Chesterfield in the rough lifted his hat and spoke.

"You will excuse me for speaking to you, ma'am," he said, and there was a wistful smile on his lips and a tenderness in his eye worthy of a seemingly better cause, "but I'm – I'm what they call a drummer, a traveling man, and I've been away from home for three months. I've got a little girl of my own at home about the same age as this kid of yours, and I tell you, ma'am, you'd ease off an awful case of homesickness if you'd let me play with the little lady just for a few minutes."

The mother's heart seemed to go right out to him, as did mine also. She smiled graciously, and handed over her little daughter to the tender mercies of that group whose presence I had fled only a short while before – and for the rest of the afternoon that Pullman sleeper was transformed into a particularly bright and joyous nursery that echoed and reëchoed to the merry laughter of happy childhood.

If there is an animal of any kind in the zoos of commerce that those men did not impersonate during the next two or three hours I do not know its name, the especially objectionable barbarian transforming himself instantly on demand into an elephant, a yak, a roaring lion, a tiger, or a leopard changing its spots as actively as a flea, and all with a graceful facility that Proteus himself might well have envied. And later, when night fell, and weariness came with it, in the dusk of the twilight it was indeed a pretty sight to me, and a sight that smote somewhat upon my conscience for my over-ready contempt of the earlier afternoon, when my gaze fell upon the figure of an exhausted drummer, his eyes half-closed, sleepily humming a tender lullaby to a tired little golden-haired stranger who lay cuddled up in his arms, fast asleep, with her head upon his breast.

I like to think that that little incident was a valuable contribution to my education in the science of brotherhood. It has not perhaps produced in my soul a larger tolerance of the intolerable in casual conversation, but it has served to warn me against the dangers of snap judgments, and has certainly broadened my sympathies in respect to my fellow man in my chance meetings with him upon the highways and byways of life, whence sometimes, in the loneliness of my wanderings, I have gathered much comfort, and reaped harvests in friendliness which otherwise I might have lost.

II

SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY

In traveling about the country, and especially in the South, I have been impressed with the wisdom of the character in Owen Wister's delightful story of "The Virginian," who when another man applied an unspeakable name to him leveled a revolver in the speaker's face, and said, "When you call me that, say it with a smile!" (I quote from memory.) A moment on the road is made cheerful or difficult by the manner in which things are said, and the wanderer's homesickness is either relieved or deepened by the manner of a chance remark, which brings cheer if it be smiling, and a deeper sense of loneliness if it be otherwise.

Throughout the South I have never felt quite so far away from home as in some parts of New England less than a hundred miles from my own rooftree, and I think that this is due largely to the positive effort on the part of the average Southern man or woman to maintain the traditional courtesy and hospitality of the South toward the stranger within its gates. It is only semi-occasionally that one finds in some sour-natured relic of other days any other attitude than that of smiling welcome, and even with the thermometer ranging close to the zero mark I have learned why the Southland is in spirit anyhow the "Land of Roses."

It must be admitted, however, that when the departure from the attitude of cordiality is made it is done thoroughly, and with a sort of reckless truculence which the wary traveler will be wise to ascribe solely to its individual source.