Pul-ease, Madame Glyn
This story is long but it’s a fun little adventure across an interesting time in American history. We start with an entry in Mark Twain’s autobiography, dated January 13, 1908:
Two or three weeks ago Elinor Glyn called on me, one afternoon, and we had a long talk, of a distinctly unusual character, in the library. It may be that by the time this chapter reaches print she may be less well known to the world than she is now, therefore I will insert here a word or two of information about her. She is English. She is an author. The newspapers say she is visiting America with the idea of finding just the right kind of a hero for the principal character in a romance which she is purposing to write. She has come to us upon the storm-wind of a vast and sudden notoriety. The source of this notoriety is a novel of hers called “Three Weeks.” In this novel the hero is a fine and gifted and cultivated young Englishman of good family, who imagines he has fallen in love with the ungifted, uninspired, commonplace daughter of the rector. He goes to the Continent on an outing, and there he happens upon a brilliant and beautiful young lady of exceedingly foreign extraction, with a deep mystery hanging over her. It transpires, later, that she is the childless wife of a king, or kinglet—a coarse and unsympathetic animal whom she does not love. She and the young Englishman fall in love with each other at sight. The hero’s feeling for the rector’s daughter was pale, not to say colorless, and it is promptly consumed and extinguished in the furnace-fires of his passion for the mysterious stranger—passion is the right word; passion is what the pair of strangers feel for each other, and which they recognize as real love—the only real love, the only love worthy to be called by that great name—whereas the feeling which the young man had for the rector’s daughter is perceived to have been only a passing partiality. The queenlet and the Englishman flit away privately to the mountains and take up sumptuous quarters in a remote and lonely house there—and then the business begins. They recognize that they were highly and holily created for each other, and that their passion is a sacred thing; that it is their master by divine right, and that its commands must be obeyed. They get to obeying them at once, and they keep on obeying them, and obeying them, to the reader’s intense delight and disapproval; and the process of obeying them is described, several times, almost exhaustively, but not quite—some little rag of it being left to the reader’s imagination, just at the end of each infraction, the place where his imagination is to take up and do the finish being indicated by stars. The unstated argument of the book is that the laws of Nature are paramount, and properly take precedence of the interfering and impertinent restrictive statutes obtruded upon man’s life by man’s statutes.
Here is an excerpt from Glyn’s “Three Weeks” to illustrate Twain’s rather perfunctory and unmoved description. The emphases are my caprice:
He had no desires except to do what she would do, so they landed for lunch at one of the many little inviting hotels which border the lake in sheltered bays. All through the meal she entertained him with subtle flattery, drawing him out, and making him shine until he made flint for her steel. And when they came to the end she said with sudden, tender sweetness:
“Paul—it is my caprice—you may pay the bill to-day—just for today—because—Ah! you must guess, my Paul! the reason why!”
And she ran out into the sunlight, her cheeks bright pink.
But Paul knew it was because now she belonged to him. His heart swelled with joy—and who so proud as he?
She had gone alone up a mountain path when he came out to join her, and stood there laughing at him provokingly from above. He bounded up and caught her, and would walk hand in hand, and made her feel that he was master and lord through the strength of his splendid, vigorous youth. He pretended to scold her if she stirred from him, and made her stand or walk and obey him, and gave himself the airs of a husband and prince.
And the lady laughed in pure ecstatic joy. “Oh! I love you, my Paul—like this, like this! Beautiful one! Just a splendid primitive savage beneath the grace, as a man should be. When I feel how strong you are my heart melts with bliss!”
And Paul, to show her it was true, seized her in his arms, and ran with her, placing her on a high rock, where he made her pay him with kisses and tell him she loved him before he would lift her down.
And it was his lady’s caprice, as she said, that this state of things should last all day. But by nighttime, when they got to Flüelen, the infinite mastery of her mind, and the uncertainty of his hold over her, made her his Queen again, and Paul once more her worshipping slave.
* * * * *
This kind of writing, and perhaps her future Hollywood adjacency, later earned Glyn—two decades after her death—a mention in the 1962 film version of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man,” whispered in the library between the misunderstood Marian and the misunderstanding Mrs. Shinn:
Twain continues:
Madame Glyn [née Sutherland] called, as I have said, and she was a picture! Slender, young [mid-40s to Twain’s 70s], faultlessly formed and incontestably beautiful—a blond, with blue eyes, the incomparable English complexion, and crowned with a glory of red hair of a very peculiar, most rare, and quite ravishing tint. She was clad in the choicest stuffs and in the most perfect taste. There she is—just a beautiful girl; yet she has a daughter fourteen years old. She isn’t winning; she has no charm but the charm of beauty, and youth, and grace, and intelligence and vivacity; she acts charm, and does it well; exceedingly well, in fact, but it does not convince; it doesn’t stir the pulse, it doesn’t go to the heart; it leaves the heart serene and unemotional. Her English hero would have prodigiously admired her; he would have loved to sit and look at her and hear her talk, but he would have been able to get away from that lonely house with his purity in good repair, if he had wanted to.
I talked with her with daring frankness, frequently calling a spade a spade instead of coldly symbolizing it as a snow-shovel: and on her side she was equally frank. It was one of the damnedest conversations I have ever had with a beautiful stranger of her sex, if I do say it myself that shouldn’t. She wanted my opinion of her book, and I furnished it. I said its literary workmanship was excellent, and that I quite agreed with her view that in the matter of sexual relation man’s statutory regulations of it were a distinct interference with a higher law—the law of Nature. I went further, and said I couldn’t call to mind a written law of any kind that had been promulgated in any age of the world in any statute book or any Bible for the regulation of man’s conduct in any particular, from assassination all the way up to Sabbath-breaking, that wasn’t a violation of the law of Nature—which I regarded as the highest of laws, the most peremptory and absolute of all laws—Nature’s laws being in my belief plainly and simply the laws of God, since He instituted them—He and no other—and the said laws, by authority of this divine origin taking precedence of all the statutes of man. I said that her pair of indelicate lovers were obeying the law of their make and disposition; that therefore they were obeying the clearly enunciated law of God, and in His eyes must manifestly be blameless.
Of course what she wanted of me was support and defence—I knew that, but I said I could not furnish it. I said we were the servants of convention; that we could not subsist, either in a savage or a civilized state, without conventions; that we must accept them and stand by them, even when we disapproved of them; that while the laws of Nature—that is to say the laws of God—plainly made every human being a law unto himself, we must steadfastly refuse to obey those laws, and we must as steadfastly stand by the conventions which ignore them, since the statutes furnish us peace, fairly good government, and stability, and therefore are better for us than the laws of God, which would soon plunge us into confusion and disorder and anarchy, if we should adopt them. I said her book was an assault upon certain old and well established and wise conventions, and that it would not find many friends, and, indeed would not deserve many.
Feminist writer and scholar Dame Rebecca West, writing in the weekly Freewoman (October 3, 1912), accuses Glyn and others of having the intellect and ethic for genius artistic output yet either starting too late or diffidently stopping short, in this moment, out of pride, and a marcescence of unnecessary guilt:
Another vice incident to woman at present is spiritual pride. She has found the first steps of man’s journey upwards quite easy. He had pretended they were difficult, so he gets what he deserves if woman assumes that all the other steps are just as easy, and that the government of Empire is as easy as getting a University degree. This attitude is a little irritating. Everything becomes so simple. . . .
The extremely depressing career of Woman, who left the garden of Pleasure because Duty with his white, clear features came and looked at her, and who decided to seek the land of Freedom down the banks of Labour through the waters of Suffering, seems to be planned by use and wont rather than by the findings of an individual and inquiring morality. Just as the kind-hearted outside broker, on his way home from the bucket shop, tries to save his soul by giving his spare pennies to any drunken beggar he passes, so women try to earn salvation quickly and simply by giving their souls up to pain. It may only be a further development of the sin of woman, the surrender of personality.
Miss Louise Heilgers’ novel, “The Naked Soul,” is another example of the “so simple” attitude . . . Miss Heilgers belongs to that school of fiction led by Victoria Cross, Elinor Glyn, and Dolf Wyllarde, who imagine that by cataloguing stimuli, one can produce a feeling of stimulation: as though one could convey the joys and miseries of drunkenness by enumerating the public-houses in the Harrow Road.
Here is the end of the interview with Glyn and Twain, from Twain’s memory:
She said I was very brave—the bravest person she had ever met (gross flattery which could have beguiled me when I was very young); and she implored me to publish these views of mine—but I said “No, such a thing is unthinkable.” I said that if I, or any other wise, intelligent, and experienced person, should suddenly throw down the walls that protect and conceal his real opinions on almost any subject under the sun, it would at once be perceived that he had lost his intelligence and his wisdom and ought to be sent to the asylum. I said I had been revealing to her my private sentiments, not my public ones; that I, like all the other human beings, expose to the world only my trimmed and perfumed and carefully barbered public opinions and conceal carefully, cautiously, wisely, my private ones. . . .
She believed that when a man held a private unpleasant opinion of an educational sort, which would get him hanged if he published it, he ought to publish it anyway, and was a coward if he didn’t.
Glyn went ahead and published her remembered version of Clemens’s words, in a small 1908 pamphlet.
I must write of the interesting time I had with Mark Twain who sent to ask me to go and see him, as he had been ill and could not come out to see me. I went at half after three and stayed until five. I wish there had been a phonograph to take down what he said. I will try to report it accurately.
He is a dear old man with a halo of white silky hair and a fresh face, and the eyes of a child which look out on life with that infinite air of wisdom one sees peeping sometimes from a young pure soul. To find such eyes in an aged face proves many things as to the hidden beauties in the character. Mark Twain was dressed in putty-coloured—almost white—broadcloath, very soigne and attractive looking. We sat on a large divan, and he gave orders that we were not to be disturbed; and then, after a few more or less ordinary exchanges of sentences, he began about “Three Weeks,” which was the subject he had asked me to come and discuss with him. He proceeded to hold forth, almost as if he were addressing an audience very slowly, choosing words, and slightly gesticulating with one hand, while he held a cigar with the other, which he smoked most of the time. He began—
“I have read the book, and I like it, manner and matter. It is a fine piece of writing; but I see why the public condemn it and call it immoral.” I said “Why?” Then his face became whimsical.
“Because you have shown what is God’s law against man’s law, and in this crazy world, and from their most ancient religious books downwards, every volume that is written, every law that is made, is to trample under foot God’s laws, and the laws of Nature. Every human creature—as every animal—obeys a law of instinct. We could almost class the animals by describing their instincts. The tiger is ferocious, the rabbit is timid—each has its characteristics—its law, which it obeys; given it in the beginning, we presume, by an all-wise Creator. We, who are descended from all the higher animals, have in us a conglomeration of these instincts—these laws—to obey. One man is more ferocious, so that at the least irritation he sees red and wants to kill. Another firm is timid, and does not want to combat anything. Neither are in this frame of mind all the time. They have others from their conglomerated ancestry; but, all are obeying laws beyond themselves. And when God created beings with the force, and the passion, and the strength of ‘Paul’ and your ‘Lady,’ they were obeying a natural law in their instant coming together. God was to blame—if any blame is to be attached to a noble realization of his law—in bringing them together. They were obeying laws, unknown to themselves; and no strength of will, and no convention, could have kept those two apart, because the law of God and Nature in them was to bring it to the highest point—or recreation [reproduction]—the absolute law of Nature.”
“There is, however, another law of Nature, equally strong, which is the love of parents for children. If the ‘Lady’ had had a child by her husband, the King, then two ‘laws’ woud have been in conflict, because her mother-instinct would have been to protect that child, and not to injure it by scandal or disgrace. But she had no child; therefore, there was this immense unfettered force of the first great law of all things, to give herself to her mate.”
“In this topsy-turvy, crazy, illogical world, Man has made laws for himself. He has fenced himself round with them, mainly with the idea of keeping communities together, and gain for the strongest. No woman was consulted in the making of laws. And nine-tenths of the people who are daily obeying—or fighting against—Nature’s laws have no real opinion. Opinion means deduction, after weighing the matter, and deep thought upon it. They simply echo feeling, because for generations forbears have laid something down as an axiom. They do not investigate or weigh for themselves. The axiom of the forbears was, ‘It is immoral to follow God’s law, unless bound by man’s law and a wedding ring.’ Therefore, at once, without a moment’s thought of their own reasoning, the situation of ‘Paul’ and his ‘Lady’ is condemned—and you have written an immoral book, because you saw more clearly, and wrote of God’s law.”
“In September of 1908, the little pamphlet Mark Twain on Three Weeks again appeared on Twain’s doorstep—this time in the hands of a newspaper reporter requesting a comment:”
I am not well pleased with her conduct in publishing in a printed pamphlet . . . a private conversation which I had with her; also for making me talk in the first person, when she could not by any possibility reproduce the words I used, since she did not take me down in shorthand.
She put into my mouth humiliatingly weak language, whereas I used exceedingly strong language—much too strong for print, and also much too indelicate for print—a fact which she has fully recognized by not reproducing any of it.
Inadequate as was her report of my sermon, she got at a good part of the substance of it, but she left out its only worthwhile feature—which was the argument I offered that her book was a mistake, since, while it uttered a very large truth, it was a sort of truth which the world for wise reasons lets on to be unaware of and does not talk publicly about—a sort of truth which is best suppressed, because it is not a wholesome one and its discussion is much more likely to do harm than good.
I think Mrs. Glyn originated the idea of getting you to publish that private conversation. It has the look of it. I think she gave you that typewritten report of it. It looks like the very one she showed to me the time I told her it was a quite extraordinary piece of misreporting, and much below her literary capabilities.
I am afraid she wants another advertisement of her book. I am sorry, for it is a very harmful and very readable book, though I did not pay it the extravagant compliments which she has put into my mouth.
There, I think of nothing further to say. And it is just as well, for your space is valuable and so is my time.
Elinor Glyn eventually became a potent force in early Hollywood, crafting titillating and tasteful and now time-honored scenes of sexual passion and female sexual independence for audiences with one foot in the Victorian Era and one in the Progressive. She even wrote a book called “It” that became a 1927 silent movie.
Writer and critic Dorothy Parker had this to say about Glyn’s ‘it’-ness:
I have read but little of Madame Glyn. I did not know that things like “It” were going on. I have misspent my days. When I think of all those hours I flung away in reading William James and Santayana, when I might have been reading of life, throbbing, beating, perfumed life, I practically break down . . .
“To have ‘It,’” she says, and is she the girl that knows? “the for-tunate possessor must have that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes.” (Pul-ease, Madame Glyn, Pul-ease!) “He or she must be entirely unselfconscious and full of self-confidence, indifferent to the effect he or she is producing, and uninfluenced by others.” (Why, it’s Levine, that’s who it is, it’s Levine.) “There must be physical attraction, but beauty is unnecessary. Conceit or self-consciousness destroys ‘It’ immediately. In the animal world, ‘It’ demonstrates” (sic. Sic as a dog.) “in tigers and cats—both animals being fascinating and mysterious and quite unbiddable.” So there you have it, in a cocoanut-shell. Now we can go on with the story . . .
There was this girl, Ava Cleveland, and her brother Larry. Larry had It something terrible, and he also had a little way of taking opium. (Oh, please wait a minute. I think I’m going to be able to use “opium” in a sentence. I opium mother is feeling better. No, I guess I’m not, either.) Ava was young and slender and proud. And she had It. It, hell; she had Those.
But Ava was worried. There was that big bill at the dressmaker’s. And she had been unlucky at baccarat, lately. And she and Larry were but hangers-on of the rich. You see, as one of Madame Glyn’s characters explains, “Their father never brought them up to do anything, and then died.” Died happy, you gather from this succinct biography, in the knowledge of a task accomplished, and nothing more to do. . . .
It goes on for nearly three hundred pages, with both of them vibrating away like steam-launches. . .
Do you wonder that I am never going to read anything else?
