Marching to the Canon by Scott Messing

Author:Scott Messing [Messing, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781580468817
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Group Ltd

Literary Ephemera

The imagined treatments of the Marche militaire in the foregoing survey were published over a forty-year span. Before embarking on a summation, however, a more elastic definition of literature—one that goes beyond the genres of short story, novel, and drama that were actually published or performed—permits the addition of a couple of other works. One is an example of true ephemera: a humorous account from a daily newspaper whose details may or may not have been invented. The other comes from a notebook whose contents were never used by its author for one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century fiction.

On October 22, 1907, the New York Sun, one of the city’s leading daily newspapers, published a story whose protagonist was the comptroller for the city, Herman Metz. The unnamed writer reported that Metz had decided that the best method to determine the low bid for the Board of Education’s purchase of fifty pianos for the public schools would be for him to test one instrument in his Broadway office. Readers of the newspaper were well aware that Comptroller Metz had a reputation for zealously guarding the city purse. Earlier in the week, he had declared his opposition to issuing any more contracts for public improvements unless they were deemed necessities, and the paper quoted him: “We have already spent too much money on fancy improvements, and it is time that a stop was put to reckless expenditure of money. . . . I want to say right now that for the present I am going to quit registering new contracts and I don’t give a damn how much of a howl is raised over it.”62 The lengthy narrative of events once the piano is brought into the finance department is rich in humorous details worthy of Twain:

The typewriters one by one grew still. Pens were held motionless over inkwells at every desk. Secretary Stanton remarked “Shush, everybody, please,” and as he walked over the Chambers street side of the big office to close the windows so that the vulgar clack of the flat wheels on the horse rigs would be softened down to a mere accompaniment, he looked daggers toward a young clerk in the corner who was sharpening a pencil.

And then the Comptroller’s head dropped on his heaving chest, and he closed his eyes for a long time. When he raised his head at last and opened his eyes, with a sigh his hands were poised above the keys as if he knew not what to play. But now he caught a misty glimpse, through eyes swimming with tears, at his framed cerfiticate of membership in the old Guard that hangs above the instrument; and then, soft and low at first like the far tramp of warriors came the opening militant bars of the Schubert-Tausig march.

They were tramping into the streets of Paris again, those Prussian soldiers, just as they did to those same glorious choirs a generation ago. “Heavens, Mame, you can see them,” breathed Lillie Cooper, the stenographer next to the door but two in the typewriting room.

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