The Human Touch

I was One of the more than three hundred persons who attended the testimonial dinner to Thomas Mann, self-exiled German author and thinker, at the Plaza Wednesday evening. It was a very swanky occasion, weighty with literature and philosophy and leavened in spots by the wit of our own Mayor and of Princeton’s dean. If, from the balcony where the press table was placed, you had thrown a stone down into the dining room, you might easily have hit a publisher, an author, a man of affairs and business like Edward Filene, or, more fortunately, the ubiquitous Fannie Hurst.

My education, like other wonders, never ceases. I learned anew things I had known before but the things learned anew sometimes gain the force of a first impression. I learned anew that testimonial dinners never start on time, and that if you customary dining hour is half-past six, or, at the katestm seven, and a dinner scheduled to begin at eight does not start until nine, it isn’t such a bad idea to have two hot dog and a glass of orangeade at seven-thirty at the Nedick stand at 23rd street and Broadway, en route to the bus which was to take me to the Plaza.

I could have my hot dogs all the more easily as I attended the dinner in violation of the unwritten law that no matter how hot it is, You must wear full dress at a testimonial dinner to Thomas Mann. I May have been a little uncomfortable in my embarrassment at finding myself so overwhelmingly outnumbered by the full dress suits, but as the evening wore on, I became more comfortable and less embarrassed, especially after the arrival of the only two others at the dinner garbed in ordinary street clothes, reporters both, one of whom confessed to me, between the fish and chicken, that the reason he wasn’t wearing dress suit was because he had burst through the seams the last time he wore it.

I ALSO CONFESS

Which touching, or rather ripping, experience led me to make the confession that the reason I wasn’t wearing a dress suit-apart from the weather-was that after the Einstein concert the effort of launching myself into a taxicab ripped, in a vulnerable sport, the one and only dress suit I ever wore, and unlike the Spanish-American War correspondent who put in bill after bill for horses short under him, I wasn’t going to put in bills for suits ripped over me. In the light of which confession, you will realize how pleased I was at the Mann dinner to be told by acquaintances who had not seen me for a long time that I was losing weight. there is no shorter road to my affections than to tell met I am getting thinner.

I Learned also that the most interesting table at a testimonial dinner is that at which the reporters are seated. The talk at that table, if your fellow-newsmen aren’t utter dubs, flows with iconoclastic freedom/ Reporters are rarely under the necessity of maintaining false fronts and fake dignity; they do not have to treat softly for fear of saying something offensive, and they are happily free of illusions concerning the so-called eminences who sit at speaker’s tables. More than one pair of emo###ent ears would have burned had they heard the things said between courses at the Press Table, or heard the sotto voce remarks that punctuated the pauses on the speech of the dreary and flatulent John Erskine. There is perhaps at the press table a greater camaraderie from the sense of common work and shared problems, whereas, at other tables, the banker, if he is sociable, may have to force his mood and conversation into a channel of conversation suitable to the understanding of, say, the bridge-builder, while the department store owner would have to guard himself against the tendency to say too much to the banker, and the painter might be bored by the patronizing tone of the man who had once bought a picture.

GENTLEMEN, THE MAYOR

I learned also that we have a Mayor of varied and flexible interests and supple and clever speech. It was obvious that he was not the kind of Mayor who would get his address for the visiting literary celebrity mixed up with the speech to be made in honor of the town’s winning baseball team. And it was obvious that he hadn’t come to the Plaza for the votes he could get out of the occasion, either. I learned also that you cannot have a reception or a testimonial dinner without seeing the wide white face of the almost near-absent Fannie Hurst and perhaps the occasion wouldn’t be kosher if she weren’t present. Newspapermen, with their objection to the stereotyped and the repetitious, would like to see a new face in place of hers, but it’s nobody’s business, I suppose, if she chooses to accept, rather than reject, invitations.

Some of the things I learned at the Mann dinner were not in the nature of private accretions of knowledge, but were learned in common, in class, so to speak. We learned, all of us, that on the night of his fifty-ninth birthday, which last Wednesday was, Thomas Mann had enough breath in him to blow out, with one puff, all of the fifty-nine candles on his birthday cake and the at when, fter Erskine’s talk, the whole dining room rose, as one man, as a way of doing him obeisance, Mann appeared visibly moved. we were all witness also to the first attempt of Thomas Mann to speak English in public, even if it was from typescript.

THE MAYOR IS INTERESTED

And while he was speaking this English of his, so stiff and awkward and academic that some of the reporters became frantic with the effort of getting it straight from his lips, it was a delight to observe the fascinated interest with which Mayor LaGuardia was hanging on his words. (for the Mayor did not rush off once he had done his speaker’s chore, but stayed on to the end.) For what Mann was saying was in effect an affirmation of the values of the spirit, and of justice and of peace against all the values that Nationalism was emphasizing in these days, and an expression of the hope that America, unlike the Old World, would continue to exalt the values of independence and freedom of the spirit.

In a secondary sense, Alfred A. Knopf, publisher, was also the object of adulation. John Erskine, for example, spoke in Such fulsome terms about him that one of the crass pressmen was certain Mr. Knopf was going to be Mr. Erskine’s next publisher. From his own author, Thomas Mann, the praise for Mr. Knopf came with a more impersonal bouquet, for the man of imagination and the poet that Mann is saw in his publisher’s gestures of hospitality and enterprise indication of the temperament belonging to the poet and man of imagination in action. I have been informed that Mr. Knopt blushed a little at the praise.