America and the Beautiful

An Inquiry Into the Ravages of a Nation With All the Money in the World, and Little Taste

COREY FORD

Shiraz, Persia.

THEY told me the story in Persia of a strange, sad rug which was being woven in the hills of Kashan. Not in the memory of my host had such a magnificent carpet been stretched upon the loom. He would say it was priceless. You Americans—he shrugged—you can afford to buy those things. For us it is something that only a Shah could own. Well.

The woman sat weaving in a tent of coarse black burlap in the center of a flat and pebbled plain. The hot sun and the cold wind were tempered by the screen of dark cloth, and they played in a checkered shadow gently upon the creation of silken threads which she guided hour by hour along her handmade loom. A child with grains of rice in the corner of its lip slept with two dogs before the charcoal fire; an iron bowl was half-full of rice beside it, and a china tea-pot blackened with soot simmered on the coals. The woman's fingers struck like accurate lightning against the strings of her loom; and her eyes wandered casually from her handiwork to the slow teapot, to a nursing she-goat on a pile of rugs in the far corner, to a triangle of light where one side of the burlap tent had been thrown back upon the roof and revealed the hot, uneasy plain where camels cropped the sparse grass, and the white tails of four antelopes bobbed into sight and out of sight in an indefinite distance. Rosecolored and pale green hills wavered above the blue mirage into a blue sky.

The rose and the green and the blue were still there, under her finger-tips, as her wandering eyes returned dully to the colored strands of silk which she knotted and pounded and wove with careful, definite rhythm into the carpet upon her loom.

The weave? My host spread his fingers in silence. You only see such carpets in Ispahan and in Kashan. Not the Sarouks, nor the long narrow Kureestans nor even the flowered Kermans are so fine as these rugs from the north. The delicate design, the tracery, the subtle overtones of color; frost upon plums, the hot dust against the sky; but you do not understand these things. It is the art and the beauty of the Orient brought to such a degree of perfection. Over five hundred knots to the square inch! He shook his head. By noon of each day the woman's finger-tips would bleed, and she would be forced to cease lest she should stain the silk. It was so fine, the weave. And the design?

My host smiled. You Americans—his smile faded—you have the money. You can buy what you want. In Persia, he said philosophically, we must live.

This magnificent rug, he explained slowly, had been ordered by the firm of A. K. Kazan and Co., a prominent importing house in America. They had purchased it for their client, one George McManus, creator of a widely syndicated cartoon in certain American newspapers. And the central design of the rug—supplied by Mr. McManus himself, and woven in bold relief against a background of delicate Persian blues—consisted of four burlesque characters from his comic-strip Bringing Up Father.

After due investigation I have every reason in the world to believe that this story is true. If so I think that something should be done at once about Bringing Up Mr. McManus.

And not only Mr. McManus. This wholesale prostitution of an art and a beauty which we can never hope to comprehend is by no means limited to a single disgraceful incident. Our vast American public, with all of the money in the world and none of the taste, has ravaged and abused and altered the products of the Orient until the genuine, today, is swept underfoot and forgotten in a mad rush to meet the latest American whim. Great swarms of tourists girdle the globe each year in a vast mid-winter picnic, romping thru the bazaars, plucking everything in sight, despoiling the temples, leaving in their wake a devastated area of broken dogwood, blossoms, trampled flower-beds, Lily cups, old newspapers and pop-bottles, littered evidence of the new American conquest of the East. Japan, India and Ceylon, China and Java have felt their enthusiasm; it is in the rug-markets of Persia that their brisk activities have centered.

We were squattedupon the floor of an empty, sunlit room, facing the savage blaze of a Persian court-yard in middle-afternoon. The unreal quality of sun on white walls was made more unreal by the indistinguishable tinkle of feminine voices about us, the flutter of whispers behind us, before us, always unembodied and unseen. Concealed eyes watched us steadily, present and invisible like stars at noon. Once the black veil of a truant daughter flashed briefly in a far window, and my host frowned at the quick laughter. It is a disgrace for the women of a Moslem family to be seen by a stranger. He shouted. The echoing court-yard filled its lungs with a sharp gasp, and then held its breath in strained, bursting silence. His frown slowly relaxed; my host poured hitter tea into two tiny glasses, and then continued with his conversation.

America loves beauty. Of course. He sipped his tea reflectively. America loves beauty; and she does not know what beauty is. Taste? My dear friend; he smiled. He was a rugmerchant. Had he not been himself often to New York? Had he not seen your Motion Picture Theaters? You have plenty of money in America; now you want to own the beauty that you cannot create. It is the way of the conquering race. Alexander led the Macedonians with flaming torches into the palace of Persepolis. He was not civilized; he destroyed the beauty. He did not carry it home.

My host was a rug-merchant. Well. He swirled the grounds in his teacup, and set it down patiently. And America buys the rugs. It is his duty to supply them. If the American market does not like a color, he cannot sell it to them. The weavers in Persia must perforce abandon that color. If America has another design which she prefers to the traditional Persian design, the weavers in Persia must abandon their familiar pattern to meet this new demand. Slowly, surely the old designs and colors are disappearing. My host tamped tan tobacco onto a folded paper; shrugged. In Persia we must live.

He ran his tongue along the edge of the rolled paper, and thrust the tip of the cigarette for a moment into the charcoal fire.

It seems in America you do not like the color blue in Persian rugs. Very well. For centuries the color blue has been the glorious light behind the Tree of Life pattern in our finest Kashans; tomorrow it shall give place to green, or red, or a bright yellow, if you say so.

On the other hand, it seems you are very fond in America of lavender. It is a color that we Persians do not like, and have never employed in our rugs; but what of that? Lavender is the twilight of Western cities, the haze of factory-smoke and industry and civilization. Persian mists upon the desert are blue as day. But no matter; America wants lavender. Vegetable dyes do not give a good color; then import analine. Analine dyes are forbidden by law; well, smuggle them. Use the alizarine dyes from Germany. Secure it any way we can. You have the money. You want lavender.

(Continued on page 96)

(Continued from, page 61)

Oh, by the way, and no more of the figured designs in the next shipment of rugs, if you please. Running deer and peacocks are simply not being done this year. Mrs. Fitz-Ritz has telephoned to say that she is very much disappointed in the Kerman with the flowered pattern and the bird-of-paradise center. It does not match her modern apartment on Sutton Place. Something plain and rather severe hereafter, if you please; plain diagonal stripes, perhaps, or alternate squares; linked M's and W's, circumflexes and V's. Do we object that the floral pattern is the tradition of the Kermans and Kashans, the luxurious oasis of roses and birds and fountains in a deep and burning desert of red? Well, that is our own look-out. Do we complain that in Persia we cannot make this harsh design of squares and diagonals? Well, that is also easily arranged; there is a designer in New York who will draw it for us. You will then mail this design to us in Persia, and we can copy it and send you the Persian rug. Very simple. And you will pay us well.

Well, what should we do? We must live. My host puffed his cigarette deliberately. In point of fact, we have no choice in the matter. Today the finest rugs in Persia are bought before they go on the looms. This is also true of most of the Chinese and Indian carpets. It is a good arrangement, in so far as the weaver is sure that her product will not be sold at a loss to beat about the shops of the Armenian merchants in Constantinople or Baghdad; but there is another side. Once this rug is bought, surely it belongs to the consumer in America. He is paying for it; and it is his privilege to have it made as he wants. If he prefers a back-ground of split-pea with tomatobisque rampant on a field of carrots, it is his privilege. Surely he can insist upon his initial being woven into the center. And what difference does it make to the weaver if he sends her a sample of his bedroom wall-paper to copy for the design? She will never see the rug again. And he is paying her well.

My host studied the red tip of his cigarette.

The Oriental merchant is an astute gentleman. He will meet bad taste half-way. He watches a group of American tourists pass the Kashmir wood-carving which he has placed on display in the front of his shop in Bombay, and light with predatory talons upon a battered and dirty wooden box before his desk, which he has carved with his pen-knife in odd moments when he was not sitting on it. Antique! Name your price! We'll pay it! The dazed merchant, fingering a roll of rupees which his wildest dreams had never dared visualize as the result of a single sale, pulls out another wooden box from the back of his shop, sits down on it limply, writes hasty instructions to his workshop in Srinagar to bury the next shipment of Kashmir wood-carving in the ground for a week, smear grease on it, and smash in the corners. Then he glances at the calendar, and takes out his pen-knife. There is another roundthe-world liner due next Tuesday.

It is this Story throughout the Orient The Americans have demanded the cheap and the spurious; the obliging Eastern merchants have seen that they got it. The Yokohama store-keeper has not watched in vain as the tourists paw aside his selection of genuine damascene cigarette-boxes of Japanese pattern, and bear off with glee a matchsafe with a girl's head or a cigar-case with reclining nudes. In Java the merchants have imported imitation batiks from Germany, for they appeal to the tourist-trade far more, with their savage color and primitive designs, than the native products. Indian brass-work today is turned on a lathe, and stamped with the commercial slogan "Made in India"; the visitors cannot get enough of it. In Baghdad the Iraq silver-ware carries the inlaid design of the American flag. See, memsahib. A genuine antique.

For America is earnest in her hypocrisy. My host tossed his cigarette into the coals. She wants to dictate the antiques that she buys; and yet she wants to feel that they are antiques. A genuine thing is still precious to her. She prescribes the colors she wants, she designs the pattern and the arrangement; but when the article arrives she shuts her eyes like a child and argues herself into believing that she has something rare and old and filled with the unfathomable mystery of the Orient. She wants to be fooled.

In-Persia, you have seen, it is the custom of the country to remove the shoes before entering a room. The guest scuffs to his host's door-step, executes an intricate step forward and backward at the same moment, and gracefully steps up out of his malachees onto the carpet, leaving them drawn up precisely side by side before the door, like twin taxis, ready for him to step down into once again when he leaves. Only the bare feet are allowed to walk upon the rich rugs in the house; and this constant polish of hundreds of naked soles has imparted to these old rugs, in the course oi years, a silken sheen and a lustre that no modern product can have.

And yet America wants it. She has seen this lustre of the antiques; and the modern rugs she buys must shine just as brightly. Consequently, before any Persian rug is put on sale in the States, it is invariably treated by the importer to an acid bath, an involved process of soaking and scrubbing and steaming which gives it the glow of cheap brilliantine, turns the delicate pastels into chromo reds and greens, and more often than not rots the threads and limits the wear of the carpet to years instead of centuries.

And America runs her finger over the glistening carpet she has bought, and sighs happily. A Persian rug! A genuine antique . . .

Well, the joke is on us both. My host rose to his feet.