Further Foolishness | Page 2

line of English?"
"Churl!" said Swearword, "it is Anglo-Saxon."
"You're a liar!" shouted the Saxon, "it is not. It is Harvard College,
Sophomore Year, Option No. 6."
Swearword, now in like fury, threw aside his hauberk, his baldrick, and
his needlework on the grass.
"Lay on!" said Swearword.
"Have at you!" cried the Saxon.
They laid on and had at one another.
Swearword was killed.
Thus luckily the whole story was cut off on the first page and ended.
(III) A CONDENSED INTERMINABLE NOVEL
FROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE OR A THOUSAND PAGES
FOR A DOLLAR
NOTE.-This story originally contained two hundred and fifty thousand
words. But by a marvellous feat of condensation it is reduced, without
the slightest loss, to a hundred and six words.
(I)
Edward Endless lived during his youth in Maine, in New Hampshire, in
Vermont, in Massachusetts, in Rhode Island, in Connecticut.
(II)
Then the lure of the city lured him. His fate took him to New York, to
Chicago, and to Philadelphia.
In Chicago he lived, in a boarding-house on Lasalle Avenue, then he
boarded-- in a living-house on Michigan Avenue.
In New York he had a room in an eating-house on Forty-first Street,
and then-- ate in a rooming-house on Forty-second Street.
In Philadelphia he used to sleep on Chestnut Street, and then-- slept on

Maple Street.
During all this time women were calling to him. He knew and came to
be friends with-- Margaret Jones, Elizabeth Smith, Arabella Thompson,
Jane Williams, Maud Taylor.
And he also got to know pretty well, Louise Quelquechose, Antoinette
Alphabetic, Estelle Etcetera.
And during this same time Art began to call him-- Pictures began to
appeal to him. Statues beckoned to him. Music maddened him, and any
form of Recitation or Elocution drove him beside himself.
(III)
Then, one day, he married Margaret Jones. As soon as he had married
her He was disillusioned. He now hated her.
Then he lived with Elizabeth Smith-- He had no sooner sat down with
her than-- He hated her.
Half mad, he took his things over to Arabella Thompson's flat to live
with her.
The moment she opened the door of the apartment, he loathed her. He
saw her as she was.
Driven sane with despair, he then--
(Our staff here cut the story off. There are hundreds and hundreds of
pages alter this. They show Edward Endless grappling in the fight for
clean politics. The last hundred pages deal with religion. Edward finds
it after a big fight. But no one reads these pages. There are no women
in them. Our staff cut them out and merely show at the end--
Edward Purified-- Uplifted-- Transluted.
The whole story is perhaps the biggest thing ever done on this continent.
Perhaps!)

II. Snoopopaths; or, Fifty Stories in One
This particular study in the follies of literature is not so much a story as
a sort of essay. The average reader will therefore turn from it with a
shudder. The condition of the average reader's mind is such that he can
take in nothing but fiction. And it must be thin fiction at that--thin as
gruel. Nothing else will "sit on his stomach."
Everything must come to the present-day reader in this form. If you
wish to talk to him about religion, you must dress it up as a story and
label it _Beth-sheba_, or _The Curse of David_; if you want to improve

the reader's morals, you must write him a little thing in dialogue called
_Mrs. Potiphar Dines Out_. If you wish to expostulate with him about
drink, you must do so through a narrative called _Red Rum_--short
enough and easy enough for him to read it, without overstraining his
mind, while he drinks cocktails.
But whatever the story is about it has got to deal--in order to be read by
the average reader--with A MAN and A WOMAN, I put these words in
capitals to indicate that they have got to stick out of the story with the
crudity of a drawing done by a child with a burnt stick. In other words,
the story has got to be snoopopathic. This is a word derived from the
Greek--"snoopo"--or if there never was a Greek verb snoopo, at least
there ought to have been one--and it means just what it seems to mean.
Nine out of ten short stories written in America are snoopopathic.
In snoopopathic literature, in order to get its full effect, the writer
generally introduces his characters simply as "the man" and "the
woman." He hates to admit that they have no names. He opens out with
them something after this fashion: "The Man lifted his head. He looked
about him at the gaily bedizzled crowd that besplotched the midnight
cabaret with riotous patches of colour. He