I recall some years ago when I was in London Mr. Bok was much concerned about the street walkers of the Strand. A more vulturesome variety swarmed in Piccadilly Circus, but if my memory serves me it was those addicted to London’s most famous street that engaged his reformatory urge at the time. I have looked in vain for some account of it in this book and in the “Americanisation.” I am disappointed, for it would make an interesting companion chapter to “My Most Unusual Experience.” The same title might have been used were the prefix lopped from the third word.
This matter of hypocrisy and Edward Bok intrigues me; indeed I may say it engrosses me, for the moment. In one of the most naïf chapters that adult ever penned, the author points out that the Edward Bok, Editor of the Ladies Home Journal, and Edward W. Bok, “creator of the American Peace Award of $100,000, Donator of a window in The Nieuwe Kerk at Delft, and Knight of the Netherland Lion” are two different personalities. The tastes, outlook, and manner of looking at things of the former were totally at variance with those of the latter. In fact, the two personalities waged incessant warfare. “My chief difficulty was to abstain from breaking through the Editor and revealing my real self. Several times I did so, and each time I saw how different was the effect from that when the editorial Edward Bok had been allowed sway. Little by little I learned to subordinate myself and let him have full rein.”
Mr. Bok (the present one, for Editor Bok “has passed out of being as completely as if he had never been”) says it was a case of dual personality, and cites the notorious Miss Beauchamp sponsored by Dr. Morton Prince to support his contention. It won’t wash. Edward W. Bok knew that the things that Editor Bok did were oftentimes cheap, sensational, undignified, unworthy of his heritage, birth, nationality, accomplishments, ideals. But he knew also that when the Bok that was worthy of them dominated the Ladies Home Journal for six months and its sales dropped eighty thousand, that it was up to him to let some yellow into his lily white character, or else lose his job. And he turned on the saffron spigot. No, Mr. Edward W. Bok, that is not dual personality, and I who say it gave as many years to the study of double personality and cognate subjects as you did to journalism. Some will say it was hypocrisy. I say it was expediency, and it was your contribution to popular hedonism. You and another great journalist, Dr. Frank Crane, had found out what “the people” want and you gave it to them good and plenty. By so doing, you and he have set back the clock of culture in this country about a hundred years.
The average reader, with a mind of his own as to what constitutes good and bad literature, does not have to be warned as to the danger of books like Mr. Bok’s Twice Thirty. As a matter of fact, it is so unmeaning as to leave the reading public indifferent, but there is a latent danger in taking such writings indifferently. The same can be said of Dr. Crane’s books. They are harmless in themselves, but the public is already too much inclined to take short cuts to every goal of life; short cuts to fortune, to health, to taste and to culture. It is the duty of the critics to show the hollowness and the danger of taking Mr. Bok’s Twice Thirty seriously; of taking Dr. Crane’s Talks as guides in life; and of taking radios, victrolas and pianolas as forms of high art. Feeding the public what it wants is not always working for its best interest.
Diligent, careful reading of Twice Thirty has sufficed to convince me that Mr. Bok has never done anything that merited his disapproval. He may be sorry that he had a big head when he was born for it cost his mother a year on crutches, but he is not sorry he has one now. He is as satisfied with himself, his accomplishments and potentialities as was Nick Bottom, the weaver of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In truth Mr. Bok reminds me of Mr. Bottom. He could play Pyramus, and Thisby, and the roaring lion, and like Bottom he can take pains, be perfect.
There is a certain amount of irony in the quotations Mr. Bok has chosen to put at the head of each chapter, possibly to give the book an atmosphere of culture. The most irrelevant one, the least à propos, is Plutarch’s sentence, “Oh, that men would learn that the true speaker is he who speaks only when he has something to say.” If Mr. Bok had written this as an epitome at the beginning of his book, and if he had meditated the advice of Plutarch and applied it to his own case, we would certainly have been spared Twice Thirty.
Occasionally, an amusing experience, an interesting anecdote, or a touching remembrance form a high spot in the book, but they are few and far apart. What interest or originality is there in “There must be a to-day before there is a to-morrow.” “Life may depart, but the source of life is constant.” Or, “To-day I can and do sleep the clock around once and sometimes twice a week”? Most of the incidents in his book are of the sort that ask to be forgotten, and when they are related with a lack of style which makes them flat, with a lack of humour which makes them pathetic, and when they all tend to moralise and preach—the case is hopelessly lost. In fact, it may be true to say that, had Mr. Bok a spark of humour or a particle of wit, he would never have written Twice Thirty, nor would he have published the “Letter that his father slipped Tom when he left his mother for 'Somewhere in France.’” This letter is the most ludicrous and ridiculous thing that ever was done in a sober mood. It is meant of course to be touching, elevating, inspiring and to serve as a vade mecum to the young soldier, as an exorcism in time of temptation, and as a reminder of the “home-spirit” when the flesh should show itself weaker than the will. As it is, coming seven years after the end of the War, when the memories of the way in which the American soldiers understood the meaning of the word “leave” and the way in which they got acquainted with “life” is not yet gone, it is the most out of place document in the book.
It must be a satisfaction to know that, throughout his life, with only one exception, he has stood on the right side of it; that he has pointed out the right way; that he has been the good Samaritan to abandoned women, the successful prophet in his dealings with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the man of good judgment in his editorship of the Ladies Home Journal, the paragon of domestic qualities and the ideal father; yet, for our part, we feel that although Mr. Bok may be sincere in what he says, he does not say all, and what he does not say is exactly what we would like to know. There again we can point to the lack of harmony between his quotations and his achievement. “The author,” wrote Tolstoi, “who succeeds in his work is he who describes the interesting and significant things which it has been given him to observe and experience in his own life.” But the successful author is also he who reveals a soul to his readers, and that is where Mr. Bok fails lamentably. He reveals well enough the man a photograph would reveal, providing the photograph were taken at a time when he was ready to moisten his lips and look pleasant.
Mr. Bok has recorded his struggles and successes with evident veracity and truthfulness, but how much more interesting they would have been to us if he had transplanted them a notch higher in the field of the emotional and intellectual efforts. The price he paid for the plot of land on which his house stands, and the seven bath-rooms he had built in it mean much less than the development of his ego from the point when a ride on a truck which saved him a five-cent fare constituted happiness for him, to that he reached later when he wanted the best of everything and was in a position to demand it. It is a common occurrence to be born in poverty and it is an achievement to rise above it, especially when the advance has been made honestly and in the open; but the soul should develop in proportion as the opportunities afforded by better connections and associations increase, and that is just what Mr. Bok does not reveal in his book; his mind is still on the same level as that of the young messenger boy in the Telegraph Company and his soul is still contented with a ride on a truck, as it were.
Bok’s motto was “The good that I would I do; but the evil which I would not, that I do not,” a drastic revision of Paul’s confession.