Does Life Exist After Marriage

Before introducing the guest speaker, Major Baxter asked Colonel Geo. A. Drew, K.C., to present a motion to the meeting, in view of the fact that this was the date on which the Annual Meeting of the Club should be held.

Colonel Drew moved that the Annual Meeting of the Empire Club be adjourned until the last meeting of the Club in April of 1934, to avoid any change in the Constitution and any difficulty in regard to dues.

The motion was seconded by Mr. John D. Spence and declared carried.

Major Baxter expressed the regret of The Empire Club that the sudden illness of Mr. James D. Mooney, who had been scheduled to speak, had prevented him from being present but that Mr. H. Napier Moore, Editor of MacLean's Magazine, had consented, at the late hour of ten minutes to twelve o'clock, to act as a substitute for Mr. Mooney.

Mr. H. NAPIER MOORE: Mr. President and Gentlemen of The Empire Club: I think that both Major Baxter and myself are in somewhat the same position as the stranger who arrived in New York at the lower end of Manhattan on his first visit, and having spent the day in going from one downtown speakeasy to another downtown speakeasy, was rather befuddled as evening set in. He got into a taxicab, without much idea as' to where ha m as going and after ambling around for some time in the machine, he finally got out up in Harlem, the negro district of New York, though he had no idea whatsoever as to where he was.

To his astonishment, every one he passed on the street was coloured. He couldn't figure it out at all. Everywhere he looked he saw black faces. Ultimately, he turned into a moving picture theatre. The girl who sold him his ticket was coloured; the ticket chopper was coloured; the usher who took him to his seat was coloured; and as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom" he found, to his increasing astonishment that the entire audience was composed of coloured people.

He stole out and, going down the street, he passed what looked to be a speakeasy (that was a week ago) and he went in. He noticed that everyone in the place was coloured. Nevertheless, he slaked his thirst and came out again, down the street until, finally, he came to a restaurant. He went in and the girl at the cash desk was coloured; the head waiter was coloured. He took him to a table where coloured waiters attended him and as he looked down the dining-room, he saw nothing but black faces and he got more confused than ever, when suddenly, through the haze, he saw a white face, belonging to a white man and he got up and weaved his way through the crowd until he came to the white man. He held out his hand and said, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" (Laughter.)

So, after two or three hours of black gloom, Major Baxter finally found his "Dr. Livingstone".

To come to a person at ten minutes to twelve on the morning on which a speech is to be delivered at one fifteen, leaves a speaker in somewhat of an awkward position. I, therefore, cannot address you today on any profound subject. It takes at least an hour and a half thoroughly to understand such a subject as taxation or national debt I couldn't begin to talk to you about Disarmament under at least forty-five minutes, and I am somewhat thrown on my resources. I notice that Mr. Mooney was to speak to you on "International Trade". He is connected with the automobile industry and I can not take his place in that direction because the only familiarity I have with automobile statistics is that if every car manufactured in Canada was placed end to end in one long line, my car would be the last one in the line.

I notice, too, that Mr. Mooney is also a writer of books and so I shall take my cue from that angle of Mr. Mooney's endeavour. I am also connected in an international trade. I am connected with a matter which includes considerable selling anal much buying from year to year and year after year. That is the purchase of stories, particularly fiction, and I thought that for a moment or two today, I might try to answer a question that is frequently put to a magazine editor and that is: "Why on earth do you buy the stuff you print?" They ought to read some of the stuff that we read but don't print! The question is put frequently: "Why in every issue must you have these saccharine love stories?" I think that is a question that deserves an answer.

I am quite sure, if it had been advertised that I was to speak here on that subject, the place would have been packed.

I shall not attempt for a moment to pose as a Dorothy Dix; rather, shall I be guided by a very wise citizen of the United States who died recently, the late Henry Van Dyke, who expressed the opinion that falling in love with a girl in a book was perhaps the safest way of falling in love.

Truth is merely fiction with a slightly better reputation and as my daily duties consist of prolonged bouts of meditation over what goes on in the stories, I propose to turn the love story inside out and examine some of the reasons why they appear in every issue of the magazine and why the public can't possibly get along without them. I also hope to offer an explanation of the fact that nine out of ten love stories end in wedding bells. Very seldom, indeed, does one learn what happens to Phyllis and Hector after they are married, and the question is

"Does Life exist after marriage?"

It is rather difficult to trace the origin of the love story. Thousands of years ago they were being told in Indian stories, with pretty much the same plot as we read today, but the real forerunner of the love story that ends with wedding bells was evolved in England as recently as the early part of the nineteenth century.

Now, love stories between one country and another show a marked variation. You can almost tell the nationality from the type of love story they read, on pretty much the same line as you tell the nationality of a nation from the type of its beverages. The English love story of the nineteenth century was the natural product of a country in which, theoretically, at least, most people married for love. In continental countries in which marriages of convenience were, and in some cases still are, the rule, and in which it is not, therefore, taken for granted that the wedding is the end of a perfect love story, novelists and short story writers were then in the habit of frequently choosing as their theme a passion that begins rather than a passion that ends in marriage.

All these differences really don't go very deep. Fundamentally, all short stories are the same, in that they have as their basis or corner stone, whether they are printed in Scandinavia or in North America, they have as their corner stone, "woman". They do that because woman is the most attractive thing in the world and the reason that she is the most attractive thing is because she is the most widely advertised thing in the world. It is because of the virtues and attributes of centuries of advertising in poetry and prose and, in later years, in toothpaste advertisements. They have become associated with the fair sex to such an extent that our heroine has become one or other of certain types. I shall try to out line the various types that invariably appear in a short story:

There is the type of girl who, as the story opens, seems to be the frivolous, flirting flapper; as you get on, you find that in reality she is a hundred percent virtuous as the wicked college boy discovers on his way home and he also, at the end of the story, turns out to be pure gold.

You have another type of girl who never changes at all. She is the quiet, lovely girl, the innocent girl, the one-man girl. She never changes. It is true, the hero may be sidetracked by the vamp--one of these women with the magnetic personality. Everything she has on is charged. (Laughter.) But the vamp, in the long run, either dies or reveals herself in her true colours and the hero goes back to the standfast who has never relinquished her adoration for him.

Then, you have the sun-burned, athletic, reckless, daring, out-of-doors woman., untamed and beautiful, who goes after her mate and wins by sheer courage. She is what we call "the Mounted Police girl"-"she gets her man!"

Then we have the girl, the usually beautiful pleasure seeking girl, who burns the candle at both ends and also in the middle, who is devoted to cocktail parties and flirtations, but deep down, the story reveals, she is fond of children and loves dumb animals. She is invariably lifted from the depths to the status of dignified motherhood by the only man she ever truly loved.

And, also, there is the girl who appears at the beginning of the story as a school teacher, as a governess, as a brow-beaten secretary. She is always regarded by the other characters as being plain and you find that she has devoted her life to the care of orphans or stray dogs. And then she meets a man who loves her for her soul alone, and when she takes off her large horn-rimmed glasses and shakes down her curls, you discover that in reality she is beautiful.

Then, we have the ultra-modern girl, the very sophisticated type of girl who, in the last paragraph, finds out that her dear old mother was right after all.

They are all the same, these endings. They all close with the sun going down in a great red ball behind the horizon" and as he spoke, his voice was trembling, "My Darling, my hands are empty"-Well, you know how they do it! (Laughter.)

Then, we come to the male types. They are also classified in different divisions. You have the young man who returns to the small town from the big city, disillusioned and comical, to find his childhood sweetheart is waiting for him beside the old brook, and in all the years of his absence has been turning the family grist mill, knowing that some day he would return to her.

We have the strong, silent man, quite inarticulate until in a moment of great danger, he finds the girl in his arms and he hisses--that type always hisses-words of undying affection.

Next, you have the breezy type of hero who carries all before him. His line is usually to dash into a department store and buy everything on the counter, give it to the poor overworked salesgirl and take her off at five o'clock to be married around the corner.

Then, we have the son of the wealthy family who dares all and goes through the mill or the doughnut factory to demonstrate to the girl he loves that he has the stuff in him, after all.

You sometimes have a worm who turns and suddenly bursts into his employer's office and demands an increase in salary, spurred on by visions of the boss's daughter waiting until he has proved his wood.

All this is relished because it takes people out of themselves. People will only read a story in which there are characters they, themselves, would like to be. That is why editors very rarely buy stories in which there are no pleasant people, because the woman or the man who reads them visualizes herself or himself as the character that is garbed in velvets and plushes and pulls out a glittering rapier on the slightest provoction. The dash and the romance lingers on.

Stories change as conditions change and sometimes authors and illustrators get an idea of what the trend is going to be by watching little paragraphs ire the newspapers or watching the trends on the street. I venture to say that the stories of the next six months will have a direct connection with the latest film star to appear in the firmament, a lady by the name of Mae West. I will explain that, in case there should be any doubt. Mae West introduced a new style. She made it smart to be pleasantly plump. Ire Paris, some society leader staged a party at which all the guests were wearing "Diamond Lil" costumes. The couturiers in Paris developed a style and you see it reflected about you in a more feminine style. The result is that the wise editor says to his authors, "People are going back to the kind of thing that was fashionable in the nineties. They are going back to romance, for the love story has no jazz angles". And he says to his illustrator--"Bill, the next time you illustrate the love story, put an extra few pounds on the heroine". That is merely incidental.

To come back to our theme: Why do most short stories end with wedding bells? Both husbands and wives, no matter how old they may get, think of their courtship days as probably the most romantic days in their careers and in the type of things that ends with wedding bells, they recapture some of that spirit. Very few people realize that there is any real thrill to be had in studying the reaction of little Arthur to the mumps; and it is difficult to get a story plot out of ceaseless weeks of skittling and scratching and saving that Martha must go through in order to get a new vacuum cleaner. Therefore, the author of that type of fiction gets his romance by bringing in a third party. He brings in the old triangle--the married girl who finds it increasingly dull to be washing dishes and darning socks, and strikes up an affair with the insurance collector who calls weekly, and just as she is about to fly with him, the little tot in a sleeping suit toddles out and says, "Mother, is Daddy coming home?" Arid then she realizes that Jim is the only true man for her and she sticks to him.

You have the story which involves the husband whose wife never understands him-the type who goes into a hosiery shop and the girl behind the counter says, "Do you want the hose for your wife or shall I show you something better?" (Laughter.)

Another type of story is that based on the parsimonious husband who is constantly worried and harried by a wife who is extravagant to say the least. There are a lot of funny ideas about extravagant wives, and most magazine editors have come to regard them with some suspicion. In my experience I have never seen a woman waste two dollars worth of shotgun shells to get a twenty cent rabbit! (Applause.)

Summed up in general terms, we consider that courtship is really the short story of life and that what happens after marriage is the fact article.

As to fiction developed in Hollywood, of course a Hollywood marriage always ends with a comma, but we consider that married life is the fact article because fact articles are read for a much longer period of time than are the fiction stories.

Some wives say that they read their husbands like a book. They don't really. They skip the parts they don't like in a book; they linger over them in their husbands. (Laughter.)

But the wife can't always go on being the gorgeous heroine and the husband can't always continue to be the dashing cavalier, so in the finer works of fiction, we settle down to a study and a presentation of the more lasting and the finer qualities. I can think of nothing at the moment that is more impressive than the story of the marriage in Cavalcade, which probably many of you saw. It was one of the most striking revelations as to the dignity and the peace and happiness of mind that can be secured in the ideal happy marriage.

I met with a striking example of those finer qualities this spring in the Maritime Provinces. I had gone from Digby around to the gap to a little fishing hamlet on the shore of the Bay of Fundy. All winter long they are cut off from communication, except by fishing boats with the mainland. They are a fine people. They fish throughout the winter and they are content and happy with very little. The family about which I am speaking is a family by the name of Casey. They had an experience that stresses the point I am trying to leave with you. Casey and his brother went out fishing one afternoon in their small fishing boat, equipped with a small motor but otherwise open, with the exception of a small deck in the bow of the boat. A storm came up suddenly, as they do in that neighborhood" bringing with it, ice and snow and sleet. The waves rose high with extraordinary rapidity and they deemed it wise to attempt to get back to the harbour but the wind being in the wrong direction, and the sea with it, kept carrying them back further and further from the pier until they were practically out of sight of land. The waves were washing over the boat and freezing until the entire upper structure of the craft was coated with ice. They dropped their anchor and as the gale increased and there was danger of the cables parting and being driven back on the shore, they took turns all through the night to lie flat on this small deck and ease off the anchor rope as the ship lifted through the onrush of the waves.

Casey had to go and chop his brother free; when he came to relieve him he was frozen to the deck. All the next morning they stayed there. Word of their plight in some way reached the shore and a life boat was sent out and brought them in about three o'clock the following afternoon.

Casey went to bed. The next morning when he got up and came out to the verandah of the house, a friend of mine was waiting to see him and to discuss his experience of the previous hours with him and she said, "Mr. Casey, you must have had a terrifying time", and Casey shrugged his shoulders and said, "The Missus had the worst of it."

That is the quality to which I refer and when the question is put to me, "Does Life exist after Marriage?", I think you know by this time what my answer invariably is. (Prolonged Applause).