“Shut your face, Kewpie-doll. I like to talk. For instance, Ike? Well, for instance, suppose I didn’t like Ibsen–”
“Ibsen is good,” said Ike.
“Sure he’s good, but suppose I didn’t like him. Suppose I wanted to stop people from seeing his plays. It would do me no good whatever to tell them so. But if I sold them the idea that you’re just as great as Ibsen–pretty soon they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”
“Jesus, can you?”
“It’s only an example, Ike.”
“But it would be wonderful!”
“Yes. It would be wonderful. And then it wouldn’t matter what they went to see at all. Then nothing would matter–neither the writers nor those for whom they wrote.”
“How’s that Ellsworth?”
“Look, Ike, there’s no room in the theater for both Ibsen and you. You do understand that, don’t you?”
“In a manner of speaking–yes.”
“Well, you do want me to make room for you, don’t you?”
“All of this useless discussion has been covered before and much better,” said Gus Webb. “Shorter. I believe in functional economy.”
“Where’s it covered, Gus?” asked Lois Cook.
“‘Who had been nothing shall be all,’ sister.”
“Gus is crude, but deep,” said Ike. “I like him.”
“Go to hell,” said Gus.
Lois Cook’s butler entered the room. He was a stately, elderly man and he wore full-dress evening clothes. He announced Peter Keating.
“Pete?” said Lois Cook gaily. “Why, sure, shove him in, shove him right in.”
Keating entered and stopped, startled, when he saw the gathering.
“Oh…hello, everybody,” he said bleakly. “I didn’t know you had company, Lois.”
“That’s not company. Come in, Pete, sit down, grab yourself a drink, you know everybody.”
“Hello, Ellsworth,” said Keating, his eyes resting on Toohey for support.
Toohey waved his hand, scrambled to his feet and settled down in an armchair, crossing his legs gracefully. Everybody in the room adjusted himself automatically to a sudden control: to sit straighter, to bring knees together, to pull in a relaxed mouth. Only Gus Webb remained stretched as before.
Keating looked cool and handsome, bringing into the unventilated room the freshness of a walk through cold streets. But he was pale, and his movements were slow, tired.
“Sorry if I intrude, Lois,” he said. “Had nothing to do and felt so damn lonely, thought I’d drop in.” He slurred over the word “lonely,” throwing it away with a self-deprecatory smile. “Damn tired of Neil Dumont and the bunch. Wanted more uplifting company–sort of spiritual food, huh?”
“I’m a genius,” said Ike. “I’ll have a play on Broadway. Me and Ibsen. Ellsworth said so.”
“Ike has just read his new play to us,” said Toohey. “A magnificent piece of work.”
“You’ll love it, Peter,” said Lancelot Clokey. “It’s really great.”
“It is a masterpiece,” said Jules Fougler. “I hope you will prove yourself worthy of it, Peter. It is the kind of play that depends upon what the members of the audience are capable of bringing with them into the theater. If you are one of those literal-minded people, with a dry soul and a limited imagination, it is not for you. But if you are a real human being with a big, big heart full of laughter, who has preserved the uncorrupted capacity of his childhood for pure emotion–you will find it an unforgettable experience.”
“Except as ye become as little children ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven,” said Ellsworth Toohey.
“Thanks, Ellsworth,” said Jules Fougler. “That will be the lead of my review.”
Keating looked at Ike, at the others, his eyes eager. They all seemed remote and pure, far above him in the safety of their knowledge, but their faces had hints of smiling warmth, a benevolent invitation extended downward.
Keating drank the sense of their greatness, that spiritual food he sought in common here, and felt himself rising through them. They saw their greatness made real by him. A circuit was established in the room and the circle closed. Everybody was conscious of that, except Peter Keating.
Ellsworth Toohey came out in support of the cause of modern architecture.
In the past ten years, while most of the new residences continued to be built as faithful historical copies, the principles of Henry Cameron had won the field of commercial structures: the factories, the office buildings, the skyscrapers. It was a pale, distorted victory; a reluctant compromise that consisted of omitting columns and pediments, allowing a few stretches of wall to remain naked, apologizing for a shape–good through accident–by finishing it off with an edge of simplified Grecian volutes. Many stole Cameron’s forms; few understood his thinking. The sole part of his argument irresistible to the owners of new structures was financial economy; he won to that extent.
In the countries of Europe, most prominently in Germany, a new school of building had been growing for a long time: it consisted of putting up four walls and a flat top over them, with a few openings. This was called new architecture. The freedom from arbitrary rules, for which Cameron had fought, the freedom that imposed a great new responsibility on the creative builder, became mere elimination of all effort, even the effort of mastering historical styles. It became a rigid set of new rules–the discipline of conscious incompetence, creative poverty made into a system, mediocrity boastfully confessed.
“A building creates its own beauty, and its ornament is derived from the rules of its theme and its structure,” Cameron had said. “A building needs no beauty, no ornament and no theme,” said the new architects. It was safe to say it. Cameron and a few men had broken the path and paved it with their lives. Other men, of whom there were greater numbers, the men who had been safe in copying the Parthenon, saw the danger and found a way to security: to walk Cameron’s path and make it lead them to a new Parthenon, an easier Parthenon in the shape of a packing crate of glass and concrete. The palm tree had broken through; the fungus came to feed on it, to deform it, to hide it, to pull it back into the common jungle.
The jungle found its words.
In “One Small Voice,” subtitled “I Swim with the Current,” Ellsworth Toohey wrote:
“We have hesitated for a long time to acknowledge the powerful phenomenon known as Modern Architecture. Such caution is requisite in anyone who stands in the position of mentor to the public taste. Too often, isolated manifestations of anomaly can be mistaken for a broad popular movement, and one should be careful not to ascribe to them a significance they do not deserve. But Modern Architecture has stood the test of time, has answered a demand of the masses, and we are glad to salute it.
“It is not amiss to offer a measure of recognition to the pioneers of this movement, such as the late Henry Cameron. Premonitory echoes of the new grandeur can be found in some of his work. But like all pioneers he was still bound by the inherited prejudices of the past, by the sentimentality of the middle class from which he came. He succumbed to the superstition of beauty and ornament, even though the ornament was of his own devising, and, consequently, inferior to that of established historical forms.
“It remained for the power of a broad, collective movement to bring Modern Architecture to its full and true expression. Now it can be seen–growing throughout the world–not as a chaos of individual fancies, but as a cohesive, organized discipline which makes severe demands upon the artist, among them the demand to subordinate himself to the collective nature of his craft.
“The rules of this new architecture have been formulated by the vast process of popular creation. They are as strict as the rules of Classicism. They demand unadorned simplicity–like the honesty of the unspoiled common man. Just as in the passing age of international bankers every building had to have an ostentatious cornice, so now the coming age ordains that every building have a flat roof. Just as the imperialist era of humanity required that every house have corner windows–symbol of the sunshine distributed equally to all.
“The discriminating will see the social significance eloquent in the forms of this new architecture. Under the old system of exploitation, the most useful social elements–the workers–were never permitted to realize their importance; their practical functions were kept hidden and disguised; thus a master had his servants dressed up in fancy gold-braided livery. This was reflected in the architecture of the period: the functional elements of a building–its doors, windows, stairways–were hidden under the scrolls of pointless ornamentation. But in a modern building, it is precisely these useful elements–symbols of toil–that come starkly in the open. Do we not hear in this the voice of a new world where the worker shall come into his own?
“As the best example of Modern Architecture in America, we call to your attention the new plant of the Bassett Brush Company, soon to be completed. It is a small building, but in its modest proportions it embodies all the grim simplicity of the new discipline and presents an invigorating example of the Grandeur of the Little. It was designed by Augustus Webb, a young architect of great promise.”