Mark Dunn - Ibid - A Life

Sunday, July 20, 1930. I rise and rush with a tripping, stumbling gait to the Founder’s Oak only to find that the devil boy is still there, with father nowhere in sight and no one but me exercising any concern whatsoever for all that the beautiful tree represents. The sheer weight of this most horrible realization is simply too much for me. Suddenly the world darkens and recedes and I feel my whole body slipping into the abyss of unconsciousness. When I awake I am in a hospital bed taking an injection in the buttocks by a nurse who says it will calm me. Soon I feel a soft solace enfolding me. Shortly thereafter I am visited by Mr. Blashette who assures me the boy will be down by the end of the day. And I rejoice with tears and strange hula-like movement of the arms which I seem to do spontaneously and to my intense mortification.

24. Clara’s literary circle continued to expand.Figel, research notes from Clara! The Musical. A frequent visitor with adjunct status was poet Davy Kreis who several years later, inspired by the free verse epic Paterson by William Carlos Williams, wrote the three-volume nearly unreadable Bayonne. It received the 1949 Mrs. Delwood Dandle Poetaster Prize. I sought a copy of the encyclopedia-length poem to excerpt, but was unsuccessful. The New York Public Library’s Rare Books Division reportedly had a set in the early 1950s. It vanished at some point during the intervening years. It is hard to know the exact date of its disappearance, since it was never requested. Librarian John Rathe remembers that the volumes had at one point been used as improvised stepladder to assist diminutive researchers in reaching the division’s water fountain.

A side note: Mrs. Delwood Dandle is considered by some to be the world’s worst published poet. It has been surmised that her only book of poems was given a limited printing by Caven-Mulgrove Publishing to satisfy publisher Brennan Mulgrove’s gambling debts. Delwood (also known as “Squeaks”), a loan shark of the Damon Runyon school, worked out a deal to prevent Mulgrove, with his well-documented weakness for long shots at Belmont, from getting his legs broken.

A selection from her poem, “Little Birdy” follows.

Little birdy, why doth thou sing

So sweet thy song of mirth?

The sunny morning smileth.

Is that not enough?

Thy song is gilding

to a lily white.

Little Birdy, banish night.

Morning come.

You maka me hum.

Sweeta little birdya.

Mrs. Dandle never explains why her narrator suddenly lapses into a harlequin Italian accent. Equally inexplicable is Dandle’s decision to illustrate the poems with pictures from the children’s book The Five Chinese Brothers .

25. “The Cossacks’ names were Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.”Luddy Greco’s Diary, 28 July1932. Jonathan had arrived at the Bonus Expeditionary Force’s encampment in Washington, D.C. only hours before the World War I veterans who had gathered there to demand early payment of the soldier’s bonus due them in 1945, were routed by forces led by General MacArthur under orders from President Hoover. Former doughboy-pals Jonathan, Greco, and Darrell Delehanty were in the midst of trading war stories when 700 troops, aided by tanks, cavalry and machine guns, drove the three, along with thousands of unemployed veteran protestors (and many of their families) from their nation’s capital.

Jonathan promptly returned to New York, writing in his own diary the next day only the words, “Dark day for America.”

Luddy, scarred by memory of that day, became a Communist, and eventually moved to the Soviet Union.

Delehanty remained silent.

MacArthur and his majors Patton and Eisenhower went on to serve their fellow citizens with distinction in the Second World War, their part in the brutal Bonus Army pogrom all but forgotten.

26. Caldwell wasn’t mathematically giftedReinhold, The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o , 202–205. Dandy-D’s chief financial officer’s oft-repeated claim that he had “no head for numbers” was a constant source of frustration for Jonathan who worked hard to convince shareholders and the business press that Caldwell loved nothing more than pulling the public leg. My research has revealed that Caldwell’s lack of confidence in his own numerical abilities can be traced to an incident in the summer of 1934 during a family vacation trip to Atlantic City. As the C.F.O dozed on the beach, one Vivienne Falconi (a vacationer from Newark) accidentally dropped a copy of Anthony Adverse upon his head. Caldwell lay hospitalized and comatose for two days. (Hearing of the unfortunate occurrence, the 1,224-page best seller’s author Hervey Allen sent a get-well card that read, “Perhaps I should have written the thing in installments.”)

Regaining consciousness, Caldwell came to the horrible realization that he had forgotten the number between six and eight. Asked to count to ten by the attending physician, he would either leave out the number seven entirely, or replace it with one of many nonsense words, e.g.: “four, five, six, fish-twaddle, eight.” Eventually Caldwell and the number seven were reacquainted and he came to utilize it just as extensively as he had before the accident. But a happy ease and total comfort around numbers for one of Jonathan’s most trusted lieutenants was never to return. Jonathan didn’t seem to mind. The following exchange from 1937 is recounted by a window washer who happened to be conveniently stationed within earshot. Buddy Browar, Eavesdropping on the Captains of Industry: Thirty years of Soap and Corporate Dope (Cincinnati: Mayer Z. Oats Publishing, 1946), 129–132.

“Your mistakes notwithstanding, Caldy, we’re still in the black. That’s all that matters. Hey, maybe I ought to drop a few books on some other heads around here. Lately, Dougherty has been cruising for a big ol’ head-butt with Margaret Mitchell.”

To which Caldwell jocularly responded, “All one thousand thirty—”

“Seven,” Jonathan inserted, helpfully.

“Yes. Seven. Pages of it. You thought I was going to say ‘fish twaddle,’ didn’t you?”

A nod. A chuckle. An affectionate cuff under the chin for President Blashette’s odd little C.F.O.

It is here that my presence was detected and the blinds hastily drawn.

27. Dingleberry also proved to a problem.Reinhold, The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o , 218-19.

28. The antisocial behavior continued, then abated.Ibid., 219. However, on occasion, something would set off Dandy-de-odor-o’s director of personnel, and he would return to the periphery of his early sociopathic behavior. As late as March1975, Dingleberry was roughly escorted from a suburban multiplex theatre after hurling a boot at the screen upon which the critically panned film musical Mame was being projected. Although he quickly retrieved the boot and apologized to those nearby who felt threatened by it, Dingleberry’s continued mumbled imprecations against Gene Saks and Lucille Ball for ’this protracted cinematic fart,” clearly showed that the man continued to live on the narrow brink of rage.

29. There was little doubt that Jonathan was snubbing Nelson Rockefeller.Diary entries and correspondence detail the reason for Jonathan’s refusal to shake the young businessman’s hand at the gala. Jonathan, though no fan of Lenin, felt that Rockefeller’s “baby with the bathwater” approach to resolving the issue of whether Diego Rivera should be allowed to include the image of the Soviet dictator within the massive Rockefeller Center mural, was pure aestheticide. It set a dangerous precedent, opening the way for the destruction of any art with which those in positions of power did not agree, the end result being the loss of artistic freedom for all.