THE HUMAN PAGEANT

Who is not fascinated with the variety of people in the world? For years I’ve collected literary celebrations of the human pageant — a bookish variation on watching people on the street. Here are a few of my favorites:

Virginia Woolf, from Orlando: “At the carnival in the Royal enclosure in London: “…the couple lingered there, shouldered by apprentices; tailors; fishwives; horse dealers; cony catchers; starving scholars; maid-servants in their whimples; orange girls; ostlers; sober citizens; bawdy tapsters; and a crowd of little ragamuffins…– all the riff-raff of the London streets indeed was there, jesting and jostling, here casting dice, telling fortunes, shoving, tickling, pinching…”

James Joyce, one of many examples from Ulysses: “To tell the truth he was mean in fortunes and for the most part hankered about the coffeehouses and low taverns with crimps, ostlers, bookies, Paul’s men, runners, flatcaps, waistcoaters, ladies of the bagnio and other rogues of the game…”

Joyce again, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen “enumerates glibly his father’s attributes”:

“A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past.”

Van Wyck Brooks, describing the societies that descended upon Concord during the glory days of the transcendentalists, from The Life of Emerson:

“The reformers thronged the roads. The Chardon Street Convention in Boston had assembled a thousand messiahs from the woods and mountains. Dunkers, Muggletonians, Agrarians, Abolitionists, Groaners, Come-outers. Every village crossroads in New England had contributed a voice and a scroll.

“They roamed about the countryside in long gowns and with hair over their shoulders, and many a strange apparition haunted Emerson’s house. The vegetarians came…and those who would not eat rice because it was raised by slaves; and those who would not wear leather… and those who rejected vegetables the roots of which grew downward.

“The Phrenologists came too, and the Mesmerists, and the Homeopaths, and the Swedenborgians. And the Rat-Hole Spiritualists whose gospel came by taps in the wall and thumps in the table-drawer – wizards that peeped and muttered… New types, desires that had never been voiced before in prosaic America. What were they seeking, these young men, what were they feeling, thinking, for what were they groping?”

Cormac McCarthy, from Suttree, in which protagonist Cornelius Suttree casts his lot with “thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots, and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.”

Henry Miller, from Tropic of Capricorn: “I heard men beg for work who had been Egyptologists, botanists, surgeons, gold miners, professors of Oriental languages, musicians, engineers, physicians, astronomers, anthropologists, chemists, mathematicians, mayors of cities and governors of states, prison wardens, cowpunchers, lumberjacks, sailors, oyster pirates, stevedores, riveters, dentists, painters, sculptors, plumbers, architects, dope peddlers, abortionists, white slavers, sea divers, steeplejacks, farmers, cloak and suit salesmen, trappers, lighthouse keepers, pimps, aldermen, senators, every bloody thing under the sun…”

Saul Bellow, from Mr. Sammler’s Planet: “What one sees on Broadway while bound for the bus. All human types reproduced, the barbarian, redskin, or Fiji, the dandy, the buffalo hunter, the desperado, the queer, the sexual fantasist, the squaw; bluestocking, princess, poet, painter, prospector, troubadour, guerrilla, Che Guevara, the new Thomas a Becket. Not imitated are the businessman, the soldier, the priest, and the square.”

Saul Bellow again, from Henderson the Rain King:  “…I have made a thorough study of the types, resulting in an entire classification system, as: The agony. The appetite. The obstinate. The immune elephant. The shrewd pig. The fateful hysterical. The death-accepting. The phallic-proud or hollow genital. The fast asleep. The narcissus intoxicated. The mad laughers. The pedantics. The fighting Lazaruses. Oh, Henderson-Sungo, how many shapes and forms! Numberless!”

Director Elia Kazan, in a letter urging Tennessee Williams to add a speech “in praise of bohemianism” to his play Camino Reel:
“A dying race call them what you will: romantics, eccentrics, rebels, Bohemians, freaks, harum-scarum, bob-tail, Punchinellos, odd-ducks, the out-of-steps, the queers, double-gated lechers, secret livers, dreamers, left-handed pitchers, defrocked bishops… the artists, the wanderers, the would-be wanderers, the secret wanderers, the foggy-minded, the asleep on the job, the loafers, the out-and-out hobos, the down and out, the grifters and drifters, the winos and boozers, the old maids who don’t venture to the other side of their windows, the good for nothings, the unfenceables, the rebels inside, the rebels manifest.”

And the soliloquy it inspired Tennessee Williams to write: “God bless all con men and hustlers and pitchmen who hawk their hearts on the street, all two-time losers who’re likely to lose once more, the courtesan who made the mistake of love, the greatest of lovers crowned with the longest horns, the poet who wandered far from his heart’s green country and possibly will and possibly won’t be able to find his way back, look down with a smile tonight on the last cavaliers, the ones with the rusty armor and soiled white plumes, and visit with understanding and something that’s almost tender those fading legends that come and go in this plaza like songs not clearly remembered.”