Will Cuppy Tonight: "Lucrezia Borgia" (from "The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody")

No getting around it, the Borgias are hot. They've even got their own series coming up on Showtime, debuting April 3, with Jeremy Irons playing the patriarch of the clan, that sweetheart Rodrigo Borgia, better known to us by his later professional name, Pope Alexander VI. Always ahead of his time, Will Cuppy here offers a characteristically affectionate portrait of the apple of Rodrigo's . . . er, Pope Alex's eye, his cutie pie of a daughter, Lucrezia. It's in this piece, by the way, that Will describes the Italian Renaissance as "that great flowering of this and that."


"All children are natural, but some are more so than others and are therefore known as natural children. These appeared in large numbers during the Italian Renaissance, that great flowering of this and that, when men began to awaken to the possibilities of life as it might be lived if you went right ahead and lived it."

"Once away from her awful family, she was a different Lucrezia, devoting herself to her housework, her embroidery, deeds of charity and piety, and all like that."

-- Will Cuppy, in "Lucrezia Borgia"

LUCREZIA BORGIA
(from The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody)

Lucrezia Borgia was the natural daughter of Rodrigo Borgia and a lady called Giovannozza, or Big Jenny.¹ According to those who should know, she was just an ordinary girl, neither better nor worse than the average natural daughter, but there has been so much talk that no history would be complete without her. You would feel that something was missing.

Lucrezia was born in 1480, four years after Cesare, a natural son of the same parents. While they were at it, Rodrigo and Vannozza had a couple of other natural children, Giovanni and Goffredo, who never amounted to much.² Rodrigo had quite a few more by various lady friends whom I have been unable to trace with any degree of accuracy. He probably couldn't do it himself.

All children are natural, but some are more so than others and are therefore known as natural children. These appeared in large numbers during the Italian Renaissance, that great flowering of this and that, when men began to awaken to the possibilities of life as it might be lived if you went right ahead and lived it. Inevitably, natural children were soon popping up all over the place. This tendency among the Italians of that period may well be called the Spirit of the Renaissance.

Rodrigo Borgia was one of the key men in the movement. He was a gay old dog and liked to have beautiful ladies around him, the more the better.³ He would even date those to whom he had not been properly introduced, and the vital statistics would go up again. This was very wrong of Rodrigo, but he couldn't seem to help it. Perhaps he did not try. He liked blondes.⁴

Cesare was the really bad one. He was a dreadful bore, always talking of politics and social conditions. He was trying to establish a Borgian kingdom in central Italy or some such nonsense, a scheme which came to nothing because of the foolish methods he employed in the attempt. You, too, can do this if you read The Prince, or How to Wind Up behind the Eight Ball, by Machiavelli, one of Cesare's admirers, a volume still recommended by leading thinkers for reasons into which we need not go at the moment. It is one of the Hundred Great Books.⁵

Which brings us to the poisonings. We all know that the Borgias, especially Lucrezia, had a habit of poisoning all and sundry whenever they got the chance; only it doesn't seem to be strictly true. There is every reason to believe, if one goes into the matter at all, that Lucrezia never harmed a fly in all her born days. It may be that Rodrigo and Cesare slipped a little something into the wine at times when drinking with persons who had any money or property to confiscate or who were otherwise objectionable, but it has never been proved. It seems that there were occasional casualties during and after the Borgia banquets. So what? Could they help it if some of their guests dropped dead of old age?

Much has been written about the kind of poison employed by Cesare and Rodrigo. Some called it La Cantarella and said it was made by a secret process involving a dead pig or possibly a deceased bear.⁶ They also said it was capable of causing death after any interval desired by the party of the first part. If he wanted the victim to die three weeks from next Friday afternoon, he would give him some La Cantarella wound up for that particular period. I find there is only one poison of that kind, and it doesn't work.⁷ Let's not be too certain that Cesare and his father poisoned anybody at all with their Borgia bane. Besides, it was probably just good old arsenic.

As for Lucrezia, there wasn't even a rumor in her own day that the strawberries at her Wednesday luncheons were dipped in sugar of lead and the other dishes tastefully sprayed with antimony, hellebore, corrosive sublimate, and deadly nightshade, all popular Renaissance flavors. It is not recorded that she was ever caught furtively sprinkling a certain white powder labeled "La Cantarella -- For External Use Only" over everything in sight, nor was she always backing you into a corner and hissing, "Do have some of this delicious henbane, my own make." That was all thought up afterwards by somebody who, apparently, had nothing better to do.

So it does seem unfair for the newspapers to flash "Borgia Confesses!" and "Borgia Burns!" whenever a feminine mass poisoner has told all or has paid the penalty for her crimes. And they don't mean Rodrigo and Cesare. They mean Lucrezia. But just try to convince any acquaintance chosen at random that Lucrezia was all right. He'll only inquire, "Then what about all those funerals?" There must be an answer to that if one could think of it.

I'm afraid we must also give up the legend of Lucrezia's far too romantic temperament -- I mean the widespread belief that she was a little too friendly with Tom, Dick, and Arrigo. She was never accused of anything so awful as a love affair when she was a home girl in Rome, and you may be sure the neighbors were watching. She didn't seem to be even normally crazy about the boys, let alone a nymphomaniac from the cradle. Indeed, she was almost odd in that way. Out of tune with the times, you might say.

She was not an ugly girl, either, though she was not the raving beauty of song and story. She was fairly pretty, with a strong nose, a retreating chin, and eyes of indeterminate color. But she had a nice figure, and men of the Renaissance noticed those things. She also had bright yellow hair, which she washed once a week with a mixture of saffron, box shavings, wood ash, barley straw, madder, cumin seed, and one thing and another to bring out the hidden glints and restore its natural color. You left it on your head for twenty-four hours and washed it off with lye made of cabbage stalks, the only hazard of which was the second-degree burn. If your hair remained on the scalp, you were a blonde.

Some people still prefer to think of her as a brunette. If it makes them happy, that's all right with me.

Of course Lucrezia did marry a few times. Like a dutiful daughter and sister, she married whenever Rodrigo and Cesare told her to do so. They found her behavior in this respect very useful in their diplomatic work, and she didn't seem to care one way or the other. When the male Borgias had enough of any one union, they told her that would be all and she should marry somebody else. She did whatever they said. It was all the same to her.⁸

First of her husbands was Giovanni Sforza, natural son of Costanzo of Pesaro, a fellow with a full beard and the right party line at the time. They had a June wedding in 1493 and she left him four years later on the grounds, thought up by Rodrigo and Cesare, that he was incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial, and no fun to live with. Giovanni was hopping mad over it all and what he said about the Borgias is usually printed in Latin.⁹ This was the year in which Cesare murdered his older brother Giovanni, a stabbing case. Always up to something, that one.

Sforza's statements about the Borgias' home life, including charges I do not care to repeat, really started something from which the Borgian reputation never recovered. I wish I could assure you that the allegations were entirely false and that there were no further occasions for gossip, but then one runs into the mysterious infant born in Lucrezia's bedroom about a year after her husband had been sent on his way. Personally, I am not at all certain that this natural child was Lucrezia's, or that ---- I mean I'm surprised that I mention it. Besides, it was such a little one.

Next in line was Alfonso of Aragon, a natural son of Alfonso II of Naples, who was the natural grandson of Alfonso the Magnanimous. This made him the catch of the season.¹⁰ He was a pretty stripling of seventeen, extremely timid and given to running away from Lucrezia now and then. They always caught him and brought him back. He was not used to being married, and Cesare was always pushing him around. Pretty soon Lucrezia gave birth to a son who, as everybody hastened to remark, did not in the least resemble Alfonso. But Lucrezia was rather fond of her young husband, and the marriage might have grown into something fine and permanent if Cesare hadn't strangled him after a couple of years.¹¹

The third lucky man was Alfonso d'Este, son and heir of Ercole d'Este, Duke of Ferrara. This Alfonso was legitimate for a change and inclined to be uppish about it. He refused at first to marry into any Juke family,¹² but when the Borgias raised Lucrezia's dowry to $3,000,000 and threw in some land he decided to go through with it, as who wouldn't? The Este were all rather startled to find themselves in such company, as they were among the very best people, tracing their house back to Welf IV, or Guelph IV, than whom one cannot possibly have a more respectable person on one's family tree.¹³ Alfonso's sister Isabella, Marchioness of Mantua, was fit to be tied. She was so legitimate that it hurt.

Alfonso's father, Duke Ercole, took care of the business end and raised no difficulties about the more delicate point. He was a thorough man of the world. Before his marriage to Eleanora of Aragon, mother of Alfonso and Isabella, he sent her a portrait of himself and one of his natural daughters painted by Cosimo Tura. Eleanora was in raptures over the gift.

And so they were married by proxy on December 30, 1501, and Lucrezia made the long trip to Ferrara. She stopped just outside the city at the palace of Alberto d'Este, Duke Ercole's natural brother, and was entertained overnight by Lucrezia Bentivoglia, Ercole's natural daughter -- the girl of the portrait. Next day Alfonso came and took her to his own palace where, by a neat touch of history, she was greeted at the front door by the Countess of Carrara, the Countess of Uguzoni, and Bianca Sanseverino, the three natural daughters of Sigismundo d'Este, Ercole's legitimate brother. She felt quite at home from the first.

Our heroine spent the last seventeen years of her life in Ferrara as the dutiful if hardly adoring wife of Alfonso, and practically everybody agrees that she was as good as good can be all that time. Once away from her awful family, she was a different Lucrezia, devoting herself to her housework, her embroidery, deeds of charity and piety, and all like that. Her father died in 1503, some said by poison, and it was reported on excellent authority that seven devils were seen in his chamber at the moment of passing. They had come for him, I guess. After that everything went wrong for Cesare, who died a few years later in Spain. He hadn't been well for a long time. He had something you get from staying out nights.

Lucrezia became Duchess of Ferrara and a complete social success in 1505 when old Ercole died and Alfonso ascended the throne.¹⁴ Even Isabella rallied round, wouldn't you know it? It would have been too wonderful, if only Alfonso had been a little livelier. He was a sober-sided type, always busy at his cannon foundry or off to the wars, with no time for foolishness. Eventually, however, there were five children, four boys and a girl.

And what do you think Lucrezia did with her spare time? She went in for Renaissance culture, of which Ferrara was a regular hotbed, not quite the best, but fairish, and she found herself right in the middle of it, willy-nilly.¹⁵

She was much admired by the many poets who frequented the palace, especially at mealtimes, often inspiring them to poems of some length. If I know poets, they would read her their works by the hour, day, and week, year in and year out, all exactly alike, all extolling her beauty, intelligence, chastity, and modesty, somewhat as if these matters had been in considerable doubt, and all a little too long. It is worth noting here that none of these persons died of poison. If anybody ever asked for it -- well, there you are.

Among those who testified to Lucrezia's sterling qualities was the great Ludovico Ariosto, whose Orlando Furioso will hold an honored place among the world's poetic achievements as long as enough people like that sort of thing. You will recall that in the eighty-third stanza of the forty-second canto of his epic the master ranks Lucrezia, for all-around feminine virtue, even above the Lucrezia of old.¹⁶ As no breath of scandal ever sullied their relations, one gathers that the friendship was a bit on the dull side.

It is true that Lucrezia saw a lot of Pietro Bembo, the handsomest poet of his day and the smoothest courtier in Ferrara, a man who outshone Alfonso on every count and who seems to have aroused the duke's displeasure in some way. It is also a fact that Bembo left town hurriedly, a move which proves nothing whatever against him or the duchess. Perhaps he was going to Urbino anyhow. The incident hardly justifies us in believing, as so many people do, that whenever Alfonso was away from home Lucrezia would slip on something comfortable and curl up with a good author.

Of course Lucrezia was fond of Ercole Strozzi, too. He had written a Latin epigram comparing her to a rose, a compliment that might well turn a girl's head for the moment without necessarily bringing on a mad infatuation. As for Ercole, I am convinced from a study of the composition in question, with its careful diction and the usual allusion to Venus in exactly the right place, that any passion he felt for her was all in his head.

So one day Ercole and Lucrezia were strolling arm in arm through the gardens and forest paths of the ducal grounds, as they had been doing right along for some time. Early the next morning Ercole was found murdered near the palace -- whether he was coming or going is not quite clear — and some think he was stabbed by Alfonso, for the duke was jealous again. Alfonso could not write an epigram in Italian, let alone Latin. Well, I still believe that Lucrezia and Ercole had been up to no harm. And I know just what you are going to ask me: "Then what were they doing out in the woods all that time? Picking daisies?"

NOTES
¹ Or Vannozza for short.
² Vannozza was respectably married, though not to Rodrigo, when 
the kiddies arrived.
³ He was Spanish, you know.
⁴ Vannozza was a blonde, as was Giulia Farnese, mother of Laura
 Borgia, born in 1492, the year Rodrigo became Pope Alexander VI.
⁵ Niccolò Machiavelli was the natural son of Bernardo Machiavelli. 
He died in 1527 after taking too powerful a purgative.
⁶ Frederick Baron Corvo maizes a point, though not a decisive one, when he states that neither Rodrigo nor Cesare ever killed a bear. No bear, no poison, he argues.
⁷ Peter of Abano lists cats' brains as extremely lethal. Cats' brains are harmless if used in moderation.
⁸ A modern physician says that Lucrezia was "the neurasthenic, soft-fleshed, visceroptotic type of girl." I should not be in the least surprised.
⁹ His next wife told a different story, and they had a baby to prove it.
¹⁰ Some time before this, Alfonso's natural half sister Sancia had married Rodrigo's natural son Goffredo.
¹¹ In fairness it must be said that Cesare did not always commit his own murders. He had most of them done by one Micheletto, a natural son of Old Man Micheletto.
¹² You won't believe it, but the name of the Juke family was Juke, not Jukes. "Jukes" is the plural, see?
¹³ Queen Victoria herself was a Welf, or Guelph. She could have claimed relationship by marriage to Lucrezia Borgia if she had cared to do so.
¹⁴ Duke Ercole left his mark on Ferrara. Shortly before his death he issued an edict forbidding bakers to knead the dough with their feet.
¹⁵ Although the learned Isabella may have regarded her as slightly subhuman, intellectually speaking, you mustn't think that Lucrezia was completely illiterate. She owned seventeen books bound in purple velvet with gold and silver trimmings.
¹⁶ Oh, you know -- the one who was raped.

SUNDAY in THURBER TONIGHT: We dip into The Years with Ross.


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Will Cuppy Tonight: "Alexander the Great" (from "The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody")

"[Aristotle] taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons. . . .

"Alexander seldom killed his close friends unless he was drunk, and he always had a good cry afterwards. He was always weeping about something."

-- Will Cuppy, in "Alexander the Great"

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

Alexander III of Macedonia was born in 356 B.C., on the sixth day of the month of Lous.¹ He is known as Alexander the Great because he killed more people of more different kinds than any other man of his time.² He did this in order to impress Greek culture upon them. Alexander was not strictly a Greek and he was not cultured, but that was his story, and who am I to deny it?³

Alexander's father was Philip II of Macedonia. Philip was a man of broad vision. He drank a good deal and had eight wives. He subdued the Greeks after they had knocked themselves out in the Peloponnesian War and appointed himself Captain General so that he could uphold the ideals of Hellas. The main ideal of Hellas was to get rid of Philip, but he didn't count that one. He was assassinated in 336 B.C. by a friend of his wife Olympias.⁴

Olympias, the mother of Alexander, was slightly abnormal. She was an Epirote. She kept so many sacred snakes in her bedroom that Philip was afraid to go home after his drinking bouts.⁵ She told Alexander that his real father was Zeus Ammon, or Amon, a Graeco-Egyptian god in the form of a snake. Alexander made much of this and would sit up all night boasting about it.⁶ He once executed thirteen Macedonians for saying that he was not the son of a serpent.

As a child Alexander was like most other children, if you see what I mean. He had blue eyes, curly red hair, and a pink-and-white complexion, and he was small for his age. At twelve he tamed Bucephalus, his favorite horse. In the same year he playfully pushed Nectanebo, a visiting astronomer, into a deep pit and broke his neck while he was lecturing on the stars. It has never been entirely proved that Alexander shoved the old man. The fact remains that they were standing by the pit and all of a sudden Nectanebo wasn't there any more.

For three years, until he was sixteen, Alexander was educated by Aristotle, who seems to have avoided pits and the edges of roofs. Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons. He also said that the sheatfish is subject to sunstroke because it swims too near the surface of the water. I doubt it. In spite of his vast reputation, Aristotle was not a perfect instructor of youth. He had a tendency to wander, in the classroom and elsewhere. He didn't keep his eye on the ball.

With a teacher like that, one's values might well become warped. On the other hand, even Aristotle couldn't help some people.⁷ As soon as he had finished reading the Nicomachean Ethics, Alexander began killing right and left. He exterminated the Theban Sacred Band at the Battle of Chaeronea while his father was still alive, and then got some fine practice killing Thracians, Illyrians, and such others as he could find around home.⁸

He was now ready for his real career, so he decided to go to Asia where there were more people and more of a variety. After killing a few relatives who might have claimed the throne,⁹ he declared war on Persia and crossed the Hellespont to spread Hellenic civilization. The Greeks were embarrassed about this, but they couldn't stop him. They just had to grin and bear it.

Asia proved to be a regular paradise. In no time at all Alexander had killed Medes, Persians, Pisidians, Cappadocians, Paphlagonians, and miscellaneous Mesopotamians.¹⁰ One day he would bag some Galatians, the next he would have to be content with a few Armenians. Later, he got Bactrians, Sogdians, Arachosians, and some rare Uxians. Even then, an Uxian, dead or alive, was a collector's item.¹¹

Alexander put an end to the Persian Empire by defeating Darius in three important battles. This Darius was not the Darius, but only Darius Codomannus, or Darius III, who had been placed on the throne by Bagoas, a eunuch.¹² Bagoas had poisoned Artaxerxes III and his son Arses and had in turn been poisoned by Darius, just to be on the safe side.¹³ Darius was easy to defeat because you could always count on his doing exactly the wrong thing. Then he would whip up his horses and try to escape in his slow-motion chariot. He did this once too often.

The Persian army was all out of date. It relied chiefly upon the Kinsmen, who were allowed to kiss the King, and the Apple Bearers, or royal guard, who had golden apples on the handles of their spears. Darius believed that if he kept adding more Apple Bearers to his army the Persian Empire would never fall. But life is not like that. Apple Bearers are all right, if you know where to stop. After a certain point is reached, however, the law of diminishing returns sets in and you simply have too many Apple Bearers.

Darius also had chariots armed with scythes on each side for mowing down his enemies. These did not work out, since Alexander and his soldiers refused to go and stand in front of the scythes. Darius had overlooked the facts that scythed chariots are effective only against persons who have lost the power of locomotion and that such persons are more likely to be home in bed than fighting battles in Asia.

Alexander's best men were his Companions, or heavy cavalry, and his Phalangites, or improved Hoplites, who composed the Macedonian phalanx. There was some doubt about what the Hypaspists were expected to do. They acted as Peltasts at times and they could always run errands. Alexander never advanced without covering his rear. The Persians never bothered about that, and you see what happened to them.

At the Battle of Issus, Alexander captured Darius' wife and two daughters and the royal harem of 360 concubines¹⁴ and 400 eunuchs. He snubbed the harem, as did his inseparable friend and roommate Hephaestion, but the soldiers obtained many beautiful rugs. Alexander's project more than paid for itself, for he acquired valuables worth 160,000 Persian talents, or $280,000,000, in the cities of Susa and Persepolis alone. Unfortunately, much of this was stolen by Harpalus, a cultured Greek serving as imperial treasurer.

Alexander spent the next nine years fighting more battles, marching and countermarching, killing people at random, and robbing their widows and orphans.¹⁵ He soon grew tired of impressing Greek culture upon the Persians and attempted to impress Persian culture upon the Greeks. In an argument about this, he killed his friend Clitus, who had twice saved his life in battle. Then he wept for forty-eight hours. Alexander seldom killed his close friends unless he was drunk, and he always had a good cry afterwards.¹⁶ He was always weeping about something.¹⁷

Bucephalus died of old age and overwork in India, and the soldiers, who thought the whole business was nonsense, refused to march any farther.¹⁸ Three fourths of the soldiers died of starvation while returning through the Gedrosian Desert, but some of them finally got back to Susa and broke training. At this point Alexander and Hephaestion felt it was time to stop fooling around and get married, and they decided to marry sisters, so that their children would be cousins. Wasn't that romantic?

The girls they chose were Statira and Drypetis, the daughters of Darius, who had been waiting around ever since the old Issus days nine years before. I never heard how these marriages turned out. All of Alexander's biographers say that his nature was cool, if not perfectly frigid.¹⁹ He is said to have sinned occasionally, but he never quite got the hang of it. He was not unattractive, if you care for undersized blonds.²⁰ His physique was reported to
 be all right, what there was of it.^{21 I} have found no description of if Hephaestion's looks, but I gather he was tall, dark, and handsome.


Nothing much happened after the doings at Susa. Hephaestion died a few months later of drink and fever. Alexander passed away in Babylon from the same causes in the following year, 324 B.C. He was not quite thirty-three, and he had been away from home eleven years. He might have lived longer if he had not crucified his physician for failing to cure Hephaestion. Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Alexander's death left Macedonia rather at sixes and sevens. Roxana, Alexander's Bactrian wife, had Statira and Hephaestion's widow murdered and thrown down a well, and Sisygambis starved herself to death. Olympias executed Alexander's illegitimate and feeble-minded half brother Arrhidaeus and forced his wife to hang herself. Cassander executed Olympias, others murdered others, and it was all quite a mess.

Alexander's empire fell to pieces at once, and nothing remained of his work except that the people he had killed were still dead. He accomplished nothing very constructive.²² True, he cut the Gordian Knot instead of untying it according to the rules. This was a silly thing to do, but the Gordian Knot itself was pretty silly. He also introduced eggplant into Europe.

Just what this distressing young man thought he was doing, and why, I really can't say. I doubt if he could have clarified the subject to any appreciable extent. He had a habit of knitting his brows. And no wonder.

NOTES
¹ That is what the Macedonians called the month of Hecatombaeon, Plutarch says, and he ought to know.
² Professor F. A. Wright, in his Alexander the Great, goes so far as to call him "the greatest man that the human race has as yet produced."
³ He spoke what was known as Attic Greek.
⁴ After Philip's death, Olympias had one of his wives boiled alive. Shows what she thought of her.
⁵ Having real snakes at home does an alcoholic no good. It just complicates matters.
⁶ He got so that he believed it himself.
⁷ Some years later, when Aristotle asked his former pupil to find out what caused the rising of the Nile, Alexander answered correctly, stating that it was caused by rain. This pleased Aristotle very much,
 as he had worried about it for years and had almost given up in despair.
⁸ The Thebans were only Boeotians, generally regarded as oafs. Plutarch, however, denies this with some heat. Plutarch was a Boeotian.
⁹ He had also connived at the liquidation of Philip.
¹⁰ "He boldly proclaimed the brotherhood of man." -- F. A. Wright
¹¹ The Uxians, or Huxians, may have been the ancestors of the Loories.
¹² The name Bagoas is a shortened form of Bagadata, meaning Given by God. It was often applied to eunuchs for reasons I have been unable to check.
¹³ Xerxes I was poisoned by the eunuch Aspamithres. Eunuchs were widely employed as royal advisers, as they had more time to think.
¹⁴ Among the Persians, sixty or any multiple of sixty was regarded as lucky.
¹⁵ He was often extremely brutal to his captives, whom he sold into slavery, tortured to death, or forced to learn Greek.
¹⁶ He evened an old score by hanging the historian Callisthenes, a grandnephew of Aristotle. Callisthenes refused to prostrate himself in the Persian fashion, then Alexander refused to kiss him, and things went from bad to worse.
¹⁷ Alexander did not conquer the world, by any means, since he had never been in Italy, Gaul, or Spain, to mention a few places. He might have spared the tears about that.
¹⁸ Alexander had always been kind to Bucephalus, after whom he named a city. He named another after his dog Veritas and seventeen after himself.
¹⁹ "From the weaknesses of the flesh, to which many great men have been subject, he was almost entirely immune." — F. A. Wright
²⁰ There is probably no truth in that story about Alexander and Thalestris, Queen of the Amazons. Still, Thalestris usually got her own way.
²¹ He is said to have smelled like violets. I heard different.
²² But see F. A. Wright on Alexander s work "above all as an apostle of world peace."

TOMORROW in WILL CUPPY TONIGHT: "Own Your Own Snake" (from How to Become Extinct)


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Will Cuppy Tonight: "Cleopatra" (from "The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody")

CLEOPATRA

(from The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody)

Cleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt, was the daughter of Ptolemy XIII. The name of her mother is unknown and it doesn't matter, as nobody with a grain of sense would have bothered with Ptolemy XIII. He was called Ptolemy the Piper because he sat around playing the flute all day long. The Egyptians drove him out of the country, but of course he came back. He died in 51 B.C., leaving Egypt to Cleopatra and her ten-year-old brother, Ptolemy XIV.¹

Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIV were always quarreling, and she didn't seem to click with the right politicians.² Cleopatra was put off her half of the throne and fled to Syria to save her life. She was twenty-one years old at this time and very unhappy. She felt she was not getting anywhere.

Then Julius Caesar, greatest of the Romans, arrived in Egypt on business, and Cleopatra returned to see him about things.³ Cleopatra had herself carried into his presence in a roll of bedding and spent the rest of the night telling him about her trip. So he put her back on the throne with Ptolemy XV, another of her young brothers, Ptolemy XIV having been drowned somehow. Ptolemy XV didn't live long. Cleopatra poisoned him, but you mustn't hold it against her, for it was royal etiquette to poison as many of the family as you could. Cleopatra did not poison her sister Arsinoe. She had someone else do it.⁴

Caesar was fifty-four to Cleopatra's twenty-one, but he was still a ladies' man -- the thin, wiry type, and smallish. He stayed in Egypt from early October until late in June settling affairs of state. It was a boy and they called him Caesarion, or Little Caesar, so Cleopatra now regarded herself as practically engaged. Caesar might have married her, but he had a wife at home. There's always something.⁵

Like Alexander the Great, whom he much admired, Caesar believed in the divinity of his person, such as it was. He was bald when he knew Cleopatra and gray as a rat at the temples.⁶ He also had fits. Among his achievements may be mentioned a book about his massacres in Gaul and the total destruction of the Alexandrian library, which caught fire from sparks while he was burning some ships in the harbor. During Cleopatra's visit to Rome in 44 B.C. he was killed in the Senate House by some of his best friends. She left town hurriedly.⁷

Three years later Cleopatra met Mark Antony, a fat man with a beard. They hoped to conquer Asia and eventually rule the world, as she and Caesar had planned to do.⁸ It was mostly a business arrangement, since she needed protection in order to hold her throne and Antony could always use ready cash. The gossips, you may be sure, kept everlastingly at it. Antony and Cleopatra couldn't even have twins without causing a lot of talk.⁹ We should remember that Antony and Cleopatra were secretly married when the twins were only four years old.

Although he was no whiz mentally, Antony struck Cleopatra as a delightful companion. One never knew what he would do next and neither did he. Their liking for the same kind of fun helped a lot. They would disguise themselves in old clothes and run through the streets at night, knocking at doors and breaking windows and laughing like anything.¹⁰ They were made for each other.¹¹

Shortly after the birth of the twins, Antony went off somewhere to be defeated and stayed away for three years. Fulvia, his third wife, died at this point and he married Octavia, half sister of Octavian, one of his fellow triumvirs. Then he came back to Cleo. He was broke again. What is more, he married her without bothering to notify Octavia and stayed with her for the rest of his days off and on. They had another baby and sometimes Antony would try to conquer Asia, but that is easier said than done.¹²

As he entered the fifties, Antony grew fatter and lazier and drunker, and Cleopatra thought maybe it had all been a terrible mistake. The Romans were also fed up with events at Alexandria, and it wasn't long until Octavian, the nephew once removed and adopted son of Julius Caesar, defeated Antony at Actium. Some say Cleopatra hastened Antony's end by betraying him to Octavian, deserting him during the battle, and sending him a false message which caused him to commit suicide. Whatever really happened, she was only trying to get along.¹³

She might have come to terms with Octavian after that, but he couldn't see it that way. Octavian was a nasty fellow with fishy eyes, long woolen underwear, and high moral standards. He wanted to take Cleopatra to Rome and exhibit her as a captive, so she called it a day at the age of thirty-nine.¹⁴ She was the last Queen of Egypt, which became a part of Octavian's extremely boresome project, the Roman Empire.¹⁵

Cleopatra has been much envied for her sinful career as told in song and story, but there is no proof that she ever held hands with any man except skinny old Julius and foolish old Mark. If you still believe her life was one long orgy of amorous delights, that is your privilege. Opinions differ about her looks, even the color of her hair and the length of her nose. I say she was a striking brunette and that her nose was perfectly all right. She certainly never scared anybody when she was fixed up a bit.

Just for the record, the three children of Antony and Cleopatra were brought up by Octavia, Mark's long-suffering widow.¹⁶ Cleopatra Selene married Juba, the King of Numidia. Alexander Helios probably came to no good, and I seem to have lost track of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Octavian executed Caesarion. He would.

Octavian, as you may be aware, became the Emperor Augustus and is generally regarded as one of the leading figures of history. He ruled the Roman Empire for forty-odd years in spite of numerous chronic ailments which seem to have baffled the doctors of his day.¹⁷ Every spring he suffered from enlargement of the diaphragm. He also had a bad case of ringworm.¹⁸ This condition grew worse with the years and he feared to aggravate it by taking a bath. Perhaps it was just as well that he did not fall for Cleopatra. She had enough troubles without that.

NOTES
¹ The Ptolemies had once been pure Macedonian Greek. By now they were Grade B, if that.
² The boss of Egypt was Pothinus, a eunuch.
³ While in Gaul, Caesar had slaughtered a million men, women, and children and enslaved a million more. No other Roman had ever approached this figure.
⁴ The two little Ptolemies, XIV and XV, were not as wicked as most of the other Ptolemies. They were not old enough yet.
⁵ The first of Caesar's three marriages -- to Cornelia, a very rich girl -- resulted tragically. Sylla, Caesar's enemy, confiscated her dowry soon after the wedding.
⁶ This looks distinguished, if you have money.
⁷ James Anthony Froude held that the whole story of Caesar and Cleopatra was the invention of a later age. I forget how he explained their son.
⁸ I doubt if Cleopatra dissolved a pearl worth $375,000 in vinegar and drank it to impress Antony with her wealth and wastefulness. For one thing, pearls do not dissolve in vinegar.
⁹ The twins were named Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene.
¹⁰ Once when they were fishing, Cleopatra had a smoked herring tied to Antony's hook and they like to died laughing. Well, it was pretty amusing.
¹¹ When Antony was married to Fulvia, he would jump from behind the furniture and cry "Boo!"
¹² Antony often put his right elbow on his right knee and held his 
chin in his hand. Nothing came of it.
¹³ Antony's motto was "All for Love." See what happened?
¹⁴ I couldn't find out much about the asp. Sorry.
¹⁵ Octavian had a dummy of Cleopatra carried in his triumphal 
procession, with a synthetic asp attached to it. Nice man!
¹⁶ She also raised four of Antony's children by herself and Fulvia and three of her own by Marcellus. She took splendid care of them
 all, and one of the little darlings, her daughter by Antony, turned out to be an ancestor of the Emperor Nero. Everything Mark did was a mistake.
¹⁷ For a liver complaint, as Suetonius relates, "since hot fomentations gave him no relief, he was led by his physician Antonius Musa
to try cold ones."
¹⁸ The Roman dermatologists had a rather funny saying about their patients: "They never die and they never get well -- it's perfect!"

SUNDAY in WILL CUPPY TONIGHT: It's a Pliny the Elder special edition - "The Goose," "The Oyster," and "The Ostrich," all from How to Attract the Wombat


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY TONIGHT and WILL CUPPY TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Introducing "Will Cuppy Tonight"

"My philosophy of life can be summed up in four words: It can't be helped."

-- Will Cuppy, quoted by Thomas Maeder in his afterword
to The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody

It was my college roommate Brian, a classics major who went on to become a hotshot library scientist, who introduced me to Will Cuppy, whose astonishing lessons in natural history dealt extensively and, I'm afraid, rather harshly with the "learning" of the ancients. (Pliny the Elder was an especial trial for our Will, but I'm afraid Aristotle's ideas about natural history took quite a beating too.)

I've dusted off my copies of How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes, How to Become Extinct, How to Attract the Wombat, and of course the posthumously published Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, and this week we're going to take a quick peek. The Decline and Fall was published with an affectionate and informative introduction by Cuppy's friend and onetime editor Fred Feldkamp, who undertook the task of bringing the raw materials of the book to print, and I would surely offer it here except that a 1984 edition of the book came with an added afterword by Thomas Maeder which I think is even more valuable for readers unfamiliar with the subject. So tonight we launch "Will Cuppy Tonight" with that. -- Ken

"In the mid-thirties, he was fired after a three-week trial stint as a New York Post columnist because his editor felt that obscure, convoluted pieces on Victor Hugo, Lady Godiva, the planet Saturn, and various fish were not precisely the sort of topical witticisms the Post's subscribers were believed to prefer."

Afterword to The Decline and Fall
of Practically Everybody

by Thomas Maeder (1984)

In 1950 a group of V.I.P. wives was taken on a tour of NATO headquarters in Europe. Entering Dwight D. Eisenhower's office, they saw a single book lying on an otherwise empty desk, evidently a work of profound importance that consoled or inspired the Commander in Chief as he searched for a path to world peace. The book's rather disconcerting title was The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody.

It was not surprising that the book should be there: it was, after all, almost everywhere, being one of the major hits of the year. The Decline and Fall spent four months on the New York Times best-seller list, and Edward R. Murrow devoted more than two-thirds of one of his nightly CBS news programs to a reading from Will Cuppy's historical sketches, with his colleague Don Hollenbeck appending the footnotes. "It's the history book of the year," Murrow concluded. Scholars praised its impeccable accuracy, while critics and laymen applauded its humor, scarcely realizing that every fact it contained was correct. The book eventually went through eighteen hardcover printings and ten foreign editions before it, and its author, lapsed into temporary obscurity.

Will Cuppy, who died in September 1949, would have been astonished by the success his masterpiece achieved, and perversely gratified that his greatest recognition was posthumous. Although he enjoyed the great honor of being what one might call a humorist's humorist, admired and loved by P. G. Wodehouse, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, and Frank Sullivan, as well as by a tight circle of devoted fans, he was comparatively neglected, seemed to get forgotten when editors compiled humor anthologies, and was forced to depend upon wearisome hack work to earn a meager living. Cuppy, whose own woes were, as with many humorists, his primary source of material, enjoyed making his life out to be worse than it actually was. He depicted himself as the tortured plaything of fate and even postulated a tireless and ubiquitous Hate Cuppy Movement that forever dangled solvency just beyond his grasp and arranged disasters such as the 1929 stock market crash and the bombing of Pearl Harbor to take place just when his books came out so that everyone would be too worried to buy them.

Cuppy believed his luck was so rotten, as he lugubriously predicted to his friend and illustrator William Steig, that just when they were lowering him into the grave scientists would probably come boiling out of their laboratories exulting, "Eureka! we've got it -- the secret of eternal life!" Instead, the Hate Cuppy Movement took its parting shots when the New York Herald-Tribune, where Cuppy had been on staff for more than twenty-five years, printed the wrong man's photograph with his obituary and, through a series of grotesque errors, his cremated ashes were poured into a leaky shoebox and sent to his home town by parcel post while relatives waited with a hearse at the train station. And then, a year after dying in poverty, financial success. "Ah, well," as Will liked to say. "My philosophy of life can be summed up in four words: It can't be helped."

William Jacob Cuppy was born in Auburn, Indiana, on August 23, 1884, the son of Thomas Jefferson Cuppy, tool salesman, railroad man, grain trader, and lumber merchant. Thomas Cuppy was already listed on his son's birth certificate as a "traveling man," and his miscellaneous jobs took him farther and farther from home until one day he never came back. Will and his sister were thus raised by their mother, a strong-willed, overly attentive, and devout woman who ran a millinery shop and taught others to do fancywork and make Battenburg lace. Cuppy's chief memories of his midwestern childhood were pumping the organ at the Presbyterian church, carrying potato salad to church socials, and passing pleasant summers at his grandmother's farm, where he was scarcely allowed out of doors lest his supposedly fragile constitution be damaged by sun, heat, and exercise.

Cuppy attended the University of Chicago for twelve long years without much sense of purpose or even, he claimed, an awareness of why he was there. As an undergraduate he spent less time at his studies than on amateur theatrical productions, writing for the school paper, or at his job as campus correspondent for the Chicago Herald-Record. During his graduate years he was commissioned to write a book, Maroon Tales, about the hoary old traditions of the university, which at the time was only sixteen years old and had none. He accomplished this task by reading books about the eastern Ivy League schools, and inventing tales as similar to theirs as he could possibly contrive. Dismayed by the book's tepid reception, he returned to his studies, and several years later, in 1914, received a Master's in literature and set off east to seek fame and fortune by writing the Great American Drama.

In New York City, Cuppy caroused in Greenwich Village nightspots, wrote odds and ends for ad agencies and newspapers, and labored away at his dramatic masterpiece, with little tangible result. After four years, at age thirty-four, he ruefully concluded that he simply never could finish anything while subjected to the constant distractions of life in Manhattan, and he took the strange and radical step of becoming a hermit. The closest thing Cuppy could find to a desert atoll in the New York vicinity was Jones's Island, a thin barrier beach off the south shore of Long Island, populated only by the crew of the Zachs Inlet Coast Guard Station and, in the summer, by a few vacationers from the towns on the other side of South Oyster Bay. There, Cuppy stumbled on an abandoned clapboard, tarpaper, and tin sheeting shack. He arranged to buy it, and he moved in. It was his home for the next ten years. When it rained, water seeped through the three-layer roof. During storms, much of the island vanished under the waves, and Cuppy's shack nearly blew away. In the winter he took his vegetables to bed with him to keep them from freezing at night.

Cuppy admitted that, as hermit life went, he had it pretty easy. The Coast Guard station was just three hundred yards away, and the crewmen invited him over for chicken dinners, rowed him to shore when he had business in town, helped fix his pump, mended his roof, propped up his porch, painted his shack with assorted bright colors of leftover paint, and aided him with other complex mechanical tasks such as changing the ribbon on his typewriter. In exchange, Cuppy kept them amused with his odd wit and ineptitude. They suggested various names for the home of their curious neighbor -- "Castle Terrabil," "Dumbellton Grange," or "A Damned Old Hermit Lives in This Here Shack," but Cuppy himself finally gave it the label that most aptly described both the house and its inhabitant: "Tottering-on-the-Brink."

In 1922 Cuppy began writing newspaper book reviews, and from 1924 until his death he was a staff reviewer for the New York Herald-Tribune "Books" supplement. Every few weeks he took a sequence of rowboats, taxicabs, trains, and subways into Manhattan, where the ragged old anchorite emerged as a dandy, clad in an immaculate blue suit, looking for all the world like a prosperous banker. He would spend several days in town, visiting friends and attending to business before returning to his island retreat with a trunkload of books to review at $2 apiece. Initially he attempted to write fourteen reviews per week, but found that such high volumes of bad literature made him ill. To his lasting shame and disgust, when he was finally given a permanent column, it was "Mystery and Adventure," two categories which he despised, and he claimed to have created a convenient alter-ego who did the work for him -- Oswald Terwilliger, a bloodthirsty halfwit who loved mayhem of all kinds and whose vocabulary consisted exclusively of pulp review words such as "grand," "thrilling," and "unforgettable." Cuppy estimated that he eventually read nearly four thousand mystery books, and he always looked forward to the end of each workday, when he could curl up in bed with a good treatise on natural history.

From Jones's Island, Cuppy inundated his friends with letters detailing the eventful life of a modern hermit: speculations on such profound scientific enigmas as why all beaches slope down to the sea, inventories of the groceries that vacationers departing at summer's end donated to his collection box on the dock, complaints about passing rum-runners smuggling liquor into New York who shot out his windows for fun, and endless laments over his broken can opener, leaking mattress, his hypochondriacal afflictions, and life in general. Isabel Paterson, Will's closest friend, who wrote a Herald-Tribune column of literary gossip, regularly printed Will Cuppy anecdotes and quotes in her weekly articles, delighting readers who for years supposed that this improbable hermit with an obviously fictitious name was no more than a figment of her imagination. "I could only wish that this legend might persist," Cuppy humbly replied, "for I know of nobody at all of whose imagination I should feel prouder and more signally honored to be a figment."

Isabel Paterson urged Cuppy to give up his efforts at drama. This he would never do, and he continued to fiddle with the Great American Drama until the time of his death, when, after forty-five years of work, several hundred pages of variants on a first draft of Act I were found among his effects. Paterson was more successful in dragging articles out of him based on his humorous accounts of hermit life. She patiently helped to edit them, assured him they were funny, and convinced Horace Liveright to publish in book form a collection of them entitled How to Be a Hermit.

How to Be a Hermit appeared in 1929 to critical praise, particularly in the Herald-Tribune, where Cuppy contrived to review it himself. P. G. Wodehouse, who tried to arrange for an English edition of the book, later claimed it was one of his favorite volumes and that he reread it two or three times a year. But the timing of the book's publication was a bad joke, for when it appeared Cuppy's hermit life was coming to an end. Robert Moses had decided to transform Jones's Island, Cuppy's neglected, barren isle, into Jones Beach, eventually the most densely populated resort in the world. When the ice broke up in the spring of 1927, enormous dredges moved into South Oyster Bay, and to the dismay of poor Cuppy, who had a horror of any type of noise, they worked around the clock for the better part of a year, transforming the landscape around him. The elevation of the island was raised as much as twelve feet in some places, and during the summer of 1928 Cuppy watched hundreds of workers creep around his shack planting tufts of beach grass to hold the new sand hills in place. On the day the Wantagh Causeway to Jones Beach opened in August 1929, twenty-five thousand automobiles invaded Cuppy's kingdom, and in the park's first full holiday season there were one and a half million visitors.

When Cuppy was threatened with eviction from his shack, which was now in the middle of a state park, he wrote to Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, enclosing a copy of How to Be a Hermit and begging for mercy. Inexplicably, Moses, who had never stopped for anyone in his ruthless construction of bridges, highways, and parks, decided to let Will Cuppy remain in his shack; he called a special meeting of the Long Island Parks Commission and, to hear Cuppy tell it, they "unanimously decided that they wouldn't take the responsibility of adding any more worries to the life of a person who had so many troubles already." In a 1970 book on his career in public works, Moses, on his side, grudgingly conceded that "we made the right decision, but hermits must move a little further from town." The reprieve was only temporary, however, and Cuppy could never feel fully comfortable there afterwards. The Coast Guard station was demolished and replaced by Dump No. 2, and his home was overrun by squadrons of visitors with squealing kids who gaped through his windows and made disparaging remarks about the decor. In late 1929 he rented a fourth floor walk-up apartment at 130 West 11th Street in Manhattan and became an urban hermit instead, going out to the beach only occasionally thereafter, when he was exceptionally desperate for solitude.

On his return to civilization, Cuppy entered his most productive period. He wrote for a variety of magazines and newspapers, and in 1931 published How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes, the first book of his humorous trilogy on natural history, eventually followed by How to Become Extinct and How to Attract the Wombat. The success of this curious volume, much of which had originally appeared as a series of New Yorker articles, made his name known and enabled him to find sporadic jobs as a guest host on NBC radio shows. In 1933 he persuaded network executives to give him his own weekly fifteen-minute program, written entirely by him, in which he and an actress named Jeanne Owen carried on witty, rambling dialogues about Cuppy's hermit life, the animal world, and assorted historical figures. More often they discussed Cuppy's nearly inexhaustible supply of pet peeves, which included parrots, tripe, snails, fried bananas, sunsets, interior decorators, chintz, the classification of the bat as a mammal, the proliferation of French kings named Louis, the tendency of ham to curl in the skillet, pineapple pie, canaries, rain, umbrella-toting pedestrians, poetry, nightingales, love birds, detective stories, neighbors, beet picklers, parsnips, the world's lack of interest in atoms, and everyone's lack of interest in Will Cuppy himself. Cuppy's friends found the program tremendously funny, but the NBC executives couldn't decide whether it really was or not, nor even what it was in the first place, and after six months of moving it from one time slot to another in search of an audience, they cancelled the show.

Cuppy next took a stab at the lecture circuit -- a potentially lucrative business at the time -- but he was a nervous and erratic speaker. While he enjoyed enormous success for several weeks giving a comic monologue at Rockefeller Center's Rainbow Room, on another occasion he flopped so badly before the Ad Club in Rochester that by mutual consent he was not even paid, and he went down in the Ad Club's history book as the most terrified and execrable speaker they had ever seen. In a self-mocking lecture called "My Careers and What Happened to Them," Cuppy claimed that when he gave up lecturing he tried to break into Hollywood scriptwriting, but that the man he approached for a job walked out on him in the middle of lunch. If Cuppy never achieved the more widespread popular success enjoyed by some of his peers, it was due as much to his own oddities and unwillingness to compromise as to the insidious work of a Hate Cuppy Movement. Being a recluse, he tended not to mingle with the right people, or with many people at all, and was always thought a bit peculiar. He put off some people with his self-effacing warnings: when a New York Times editor solicited an article from him, Cuppy cautioned "that he was a very slow worker and wasn't too sure that people liked his kind of stuff any more." Others were annoyed by his constant complaints. His friends recognized as a running joke Cuppy's threats to poison himself or to slit his throat on the steps of the Herald-Tribune building if they didn't publish his reviews promptly, and after a time the "Books" staff benevolently sent him all works on poisons, hanging, and other means of extinguishing life. But this maudlin jesting was an uncontrollable and to some an unpleasant habit, and his career as a regular New Yorker contributor was damaged when he fought with Wolcott Gibbs after the latter took him to task for accompanying his manuscripts with little notes threatening to commit suicide if they were not accepted, or discreetly mentioning that his nonexistent wife and nine children were withering up and blowing away from hunger and lack of adequate medical care.

Worse, his fascination with abstruse topics earned him the reputation of being an intellectual, a lethal label for a humorist. In the mid-thirties, he was fired after a three-week trial stint as a New York Post columnist because his editor felt that obscure, convoluted pieces on Victor Hugo, Lady Godiva, the planet Saturn, and various fish were not precisely the sort of topical witticisms the Post's subscribers were believed to prefer. "I think Cuppy is a great humorist -- " the Post editor wrote to Will's agent, "probably the funniest man in the world -- but only a few of us will know that so long as he deliberately hides his light under a bushel of antiquities." Yet Cuppy refused to write about racehorses, politics, and movie stars, as was suggested. Instead, he became even more recondite.

Cuppy's last submission to the New Yorker was a fine example of his ability to turn pure fact into humor, but the reception it got there dismayed him. The Oxford English Dictionary, in its entry for "blanket," mentions that Thomas Blanket, "to whom gossip attributes the origin of the name, if he really existed, doubtless took his name from the article." In his "Footnote on Thomas Blanket," Cuppy assailed the O.E.D. editors for assuming, first, that Thomas did not exist, whereas he was a fully documented fourteenth-century Bristol corn merchant, and second, that if he had existed he had been too silly to think of a last name for himself until 1339 when, his corn export business prospering, he set up a factory to make cloth and saw blankets coming out of it. Cuppy proved to his own satisfaction, moreover, that there had been Blankets in Bristol long before Thomas, and that consequently, the O.E.D. notwithstanding, Thomas Blanket had probably gotten his name the way the rest of us do, from his parents, rather than from a bit of woollen goods.

The New Yorker returned Cuppy's article, not so much because they disliked it, but because, as editor Katharine S. White wrote, such made-up history based on imaginary sources was confusing and not quite their sort of thing. That the supremely fastidious New Yorker should have doubted the even more fastidious Will Cuppy was a dreadful blow, and after stewing for a few weeks, Cuppy wrote to Mrs. White, "I hate to clutter up your mail, but I did want you to know (just for the record) that it wasn't a 'made up' piece at all. You wouldn't think so if you knew of the ungodly amount of actual physical toil I went through with it, such as getting information from the British Museum and reading the archives of the city of Bristol. As it stands, it is a contribution to history of the most authentic nature -- but I thought I would make it funny, too. I intended it simply and solely as a few pertinent facts set down as lucidly as possible in order to right a great wrong, the smothering of Thomas Blanket (which now seems to have succeeded, and the truth will die with me)." He submitted nothing to the New Yorker after that.

Cuppy continued to contribute to assorted newspapers, and had regular pieces in his friend Fred Feldkamp's magazine For Men and in the Saturday Evening Post. How to Become Extinct appeared in 1941, and was reprinted soon afterwards in omnibus with his earlier animal book. But he was growing discouraged, and no longer sought fame and fortune in movies, radio, or anywhere outside his modest field of short magazine articles. In 1944, Cuppy was sixty years old, and his health was beginning to deteriorate. Some friends died and others went to war, and he felt alone and depressed. He and Isabel Paterson quarreled and never spoke to each other again. When the war ended, he said he felt that he had died, as though one of the bombs had killed him. The world of publishing underwent radical changes, and many of his old acquaintances at magazines were replaced by bright young faces. He began to say that he had written all he knew how to write, and that he was unable to do any more.

In 1949, just when he was making final corrections on the proofs of How to Attract the Wombat, Cuppy was threatened with eviction from his West 11th Street apartment. This inconvenience seemed catastrophic to Cuppy. He had spent most of his hours for the past twenty years in that apartment, and it had become an extension of himself. His new complaints to his friends, though, seemed to them almost indistinguishable from his routine, lifelong laments, and not until the last few days, when he sank into a depression so profound that not a spark of good humor could be drawn from him, did anyone suspect how distressed he truly was. On September 8, 1949, Cuppy took an overdose of sleeping pills, and he died, without regaining consciousness, eleven days later. Had he been able to explain his tragic end from beyond the grave, he would probably have said that it just seemed easier than moving.

As is mentioned in Fred Feldkamp's introduction to this book, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody was left incomplete at Cuppy's death. He had been under contract for this work, which he always considered to be his masterpiece, since the early 1930s, but he had substituted first one, then another book, forever renegotiating new deadlines and advances for The Decline and Fall. Rough versions of most of the pieces had appeared as short magazine articles, but he continued to expand and perfect them, and occasionally expressed doubt that he would ever be sufficiently satisfied to call his favorite book complete. Among the notes that he left at the time of his suicide were instructions concerning Decline and Fall.

Fred Feldkamp, Cuppy's literary executor, close friend, editor, and ardent admirer, devoted many months to the completion of The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. He had worked with Cuppy for many years, and was able to fashion rough fragments and voluminous notes into pieces faithful to Cuppy's style and thought, and which earned the acclaim that their author properly deserved. It is a pleasure to know that now, in the centennial year of Cuppy's birth and thirty-five years after his death, this superb book is again being offered to the public -- proof, perhaps, that the Hate Cuppy Movement has finally been beaten into submission while the Help Poor Old Cuppy Movement, which Will thought was on its last legs, has gained the ascendant at last.


TOMORROW in WILL CUPPY TONIGHT: "Are Wombats People?," the introductory piece from How to Attract the Wombat


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY TONIGHT and WILL CUPPY TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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