Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (21 page)

“Martin,” Emmeline said, “mother asked you a question.”

“Is it my turn?” Martin asked, looking up in surprise.

One winter day Martin picked Emmeline up at the Vanderlyn after work and took a long ride uptown in a hansom cab. It was already dark, snow glittered under the lamps in Madison Square Park. As a child he had always stopped at the park with his mother, so that the places beyond seemed to him not simply inaccessible but imaginary, like pictures of igloos or cactus flowers. Adulthood therefore was sheer magic: with a wave of the wand you summoned a cab and ventured into the imaginary world. He directed the cabby to go up Fifth Avenue and cut across the Park at Seventy-second Street. On one side the great palaces rose from the shadowy snow like presences glimpsed in mirrors. In the light of a streetlamp a bearded man in a shiny silk hat and a long coat with a black fur collar stood knocking his stick against the side of his snowy shoe. It occurred to Martin that Emmeline must be hungry, that he had forgotten about dinner. They turned into the Park; lights seemed to blink or tremble through faintly shaking black branches. Martin remembered riding in the Park on his wedding day, the purple flower, leafshade rippling on her white dress. On the other side of the Park the cab continued across town and turned up Riverside. Through the trees the river showed white and black: black water, white snow on ice. One by one the mansions behind their walls would melt away, they
were nothing but palaces of snow and ice. Through the side window he could see up ahead a faint glow from the building site.

The building had not yet risen above the ground; the hoarding rose higher than Martin’s head. He led Emmeline through a gate behind which a guard with a kerosene lantern sat in a wooden shack. At the edge of the great pit two big arc lights gave off a harsh white light. Below, sharp black shadows lay crisscrossed over a sunken world of steel columns and snowy wooden planks, through which openings gave glimpses of lower depths. Here and there men worked beside glowing lanterns.

Martin led Emmeline along the grassy side of the pit to a place where the columns and floors came up to ground level. He picked up a lantern and stepped out onto the snow-streaked planks. “It’s safe,” he said. “Are you willing?” Holding out the lantern by the handle, he took her hand and led her onto the temporary floor. The floor ended ten feet later; a ladder led down to the next level, which stretched halfway across the excavation. Holding out his lantern, he made his way down. At the bottom he stamped. “It’s safe,” he called up, but Emmeline had already started down. When she stood beside him she looked up and said, “It’s like a canyon.” “A poured concrete canyon,” Martin said, pointing to a half-finished wall behind scaffolding. A face looked down from above. “You want to be careful down there, Mr. Dressler. Slippery as all get-out.” “We’re fine,” Martin called, and gave a wave. At a black opening he shone the lantern at a ladder going down. “I think we’ll
be better off down there. Are you game?” He climbed down first, then held the lantern up for Emmeline, startled to see one of her button boots reaching down from shadowy shaking skirts. “Careful,” he called up. At the bottom she stamped snow from her boot and said, “Where now?” The darkness was broken here and there by patches of light from openings in the floor above. Shadowy steel columns rose up before them and in every direction. He led her along, holding up his lantern, past ladders and piles of lumber and a solitary black glove. “This will be the main shopping arcade,” Martin said, “with smaller branches running off. Watch it.” They were nearing an open end of the building. “Look!” cried Emmeline. She stepped to the last column and pointed down to moonlit rockpiles, swept her arm out at the shadowy moon-glittering far wall of the pit. “Come back!” Martin said. She turned and walked with him past dark columns glinting with lantern-light. Martin stopped and held up the lantern to Emmeline’s face. “Well? What do you think?” Her face in the light was so bright it looked wet. “I was right,” she whispered. “I was right, I was right.” He looked at her, not understanding. “What I said that time: it’s something you come across in a dream. It’s a castle in a forest.” He stared at her fiercely; she burst out laughing. “Oh come on,” she cried, “I want to keep going forever. Come on!” Her face was so bright that he had to lower the lantern.

“I
MAGINE TWO STONES
,” H
ARWINTON SAID
. “Gray, smooth, flattish: small enough to hold comfortably in your hand. There is nothing interesting about these stones. Now, imagine that I single out one of them. Either one will do. I describe the pleasing feel of the stone in my hand. I compare its color to the color of an exotic animal. I admire its remarkable shape. I say that this stone fills me with well-being and confidence. Then I tell you that you may have either of the two stones. Which one are you more likely to choose? That’s advertising.”

“But suppose one stone is really superior to the other?” Martin said.

“That’s an interesting fact. It may even be a useful fact,
a fact we can use. But it has nothing to do with the art of advertising.”

As Harwinton spoke, Martin was struck again by his extreme youthfulness: with his short sandy hair combed neatly to one side in the manner of a schoolboy, his light-blue blond-lashed eyes, and his small neat teeth, he looked no older than seventeen. In fact he was twenty-eight and reputed to be one of the best in the business. Harwinton had grown up in Indiana and attended the University of Minnesota, where a popular professor of psychology had given a series of lectures on the psychology of advertising, with special emphasis on the role of association in making ads memorable. He had made them read
The Principles of Psychology
by William James. Did Martin know the book? As Harwinton put it, his eyes were opened: advertising was a science, a system of measurable strategies for awaking and securing the attention of buyers. A study conducted by a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, had demonstrated that the right-hand pages of a magazine held the attention of readers more than the left-hand pages. Experiments aimed at gathering information about the attention value of particular kinds of space had shown that a full-page ad was more than twice as effective as a half-page ad. But size alone was only part of it: there was also the question of seizing the attention forcibly by an imaginative but experimentally verifiable use of words and pictures. One test showed that of fifty people who were asked to look through a magazine, immediately close it, and
name all advertisements remembered, twenty-three mentioned In-er-Seal, but only sixteen of those twenty-three knew that In-er-Seal was used for wrapping a biscuit, whereas all twenty of the people who remembered the Pears advertisement knew that Pears was a kind of soap. Harwinton had come to New York to work in one of the new ad agencies, where he had devised a successful campaign for a new kind of pink soap powder produced by a company determined to seize a portion of the market controlled by cleansers in cake form. A year later he had begun his own agency, with a staff of artists and copywriters and a specially trained band of researchers who prepared questionnaires, conducted scientifically controlled tests, and studied the effectiveness of particular ads on particular social and economic groups.

“At least you admit,” Martin said, “that there’a a difference between a cake of soap and an eighteen-story hotel.”

“Only a very small one. Let me explain something, Mr. Dressler. The world sits there. It may have a meaning. As a private citizen, I am entitled to believe that it does. But as an advertiser, I train myself to experience the world as an immense blankness. It’s my job to provide that blankness with meaning.”

“I’ll grant you the point. Still, you have to admit—”

“A man comes to me with a cake of scouring soap. He wants me to sell it for him. I see a white lump. It’s my job to make this white lump, which has no meaning, except in the most limited and practical sense, the most important
thing in the world. I create a meaning for it. I create desire. To have this soap is to have what Aristotle says all men desire: happiness.”

When Harwinton spoke, in his cool and precise way, he looked directly at Martin with his light-blue eyes, never once averting his gaze; and Martin noticed that when he spoke he never moved his long, well-manicured hands or his erect body.

“And you yourself don’t believe a word of it?”

“Belief has nothing to do with it. I present it. I create an illusion. We are speaking of art, Mr. Dressler. Let me ask you something. Do you believe that the actor on the stage is really a villain? Let me ask you something else. If he isn’t a villain, then is he a liar?”

Harwinton bent suddenly and removed from a drawer in his desk a thin black folder, which he passed across the desk to Martin. The folder contained a full-page magazine ad that Harwinton had designed for a new fountain pen with a hard rubber barrel—a pen no different, he assured Martin, from a dozen other fountain pens on the market. A frowning clerk was seated at a rolltop desk cluttered with pen nibs, his face and hands covered with black splotches of ink, his hair wild. Beside him, at a second desk, a handsome clerk with a mustache and a smile sat holding a fountain pen. He was speaking to a well-dressed woman with masses of dark hair pinned up under her ribboned hat, who was standing beside him and leaning over so that her elbows rested on the high back of his desk. What struck Martin was the tight corseting of the woman, her look of
dreamy adoration, her full bosom and well-defined rump, the slightly rakish look of the clerk with the fountain pen.

“I’ll order one of these,” Martin said, laughing and pointing to the woman. And at once he felt that he had said something crude, that Harwinton’s light smile was the smile an adult might give to a child who had said something forgivable but wrong. As if to escape judgment Martin looked away and glanced about the office, which seemed to contain nothing but Harwinton’s large flat-topped mahogany desk with its many drawers and, on the bare walls, a black-framed diploma from the University of Minnesota. The room made Martin think of a smooth-shaven face. The big bare desk stood across from an armchair for visitors, in which Martin sat, and it was only here that any concession had been made toward pleasure, for really it was a remarkably satisfying chair, upholstered in red silk plush and richly fringed, with a first-rate spring seat and spring back. Harwinton’s own chair was high-backed, straight, and wooden. The impression of bareness and sharp angles, the high hard chair, Harwinton’s close-trimmed hair and smooth upper lip, his tight-buttoned jacket and thin, almost bony fingers, all this made Martin think of a young monk or priest.

“You may be interested in other examples of our work,” Harwinton said, and bending over swiftly and precisely he removed from another drawer a heavy black folder. He opened it to reveal a collection of newspaper ads: ads for a blacking brush, an electric insole, a stick of graphite for bicycle chains, a wire rat trap with a coppered steel spring, a cherrywood stereographoscope mounted on a folding
rosewood frame on a polished nickel stand, a brick-lined heating stove with a sheet-iron ash pan and mica door, a double-door hardwood refrigerator with a porcelain-enameled water cooler and an extra-large ice chamber, a sewing machine with an automatic bobbin winder in a drop cabinet with carved panel doors. From another drawer Harwinton drew out a four-color poster showing an ad for a new carpet sweeper with a spring-action dumper and a rubber furniture protector—and now from drawer after drawer came bursts of color, a riot of bright designs, showing a copper-lined bathtub, a jar of brilliantine, a spring-wagon harness of oak-tanned leather, a cake of lemon-juice complexion soap, as if the secret life of the room were this hidden profusion of images, sprouting in the dark, multiplying, unstoppable, like scarlet secrets whispered in the darkness of the confessional. Martin lingered over one poster advertising a rubberized protective blanket for horses. It showed a rearing black horse under an Elevated track, with a bright red coal burning on its back. The horse’s nostrils were flared, its brilliant white teeth bared, its eyes wild with terror. Its head was twisted back, as if it were straining to bite the blazing coal. The delivery wagon was on two wheels and a barrel was about to topple into the street.

The two images—the crazed horse, the full-bosomed dreamy woman—stayed with Martin, mingling with a third: the light-blue blond-lashed eyes of Harwinton, under the smooth forehead with its sandy schoolboy’s hair.

“He reminds me of something very up-to-date and efficient,”
Martin said to Emmeline that evening, “like a typewriter or an electric circuit.”

“You don’t like him.”

“I don’t dislike him. He interests me. Harwinton is the future.”

“But I don’t have a sense of him. I don’t know what he’s like.”

“But that’s just the point. He isn’t ‘like’ anything. He reminds me of a boy I knew in third grade, William Harris was his name. He was a quiet boy, wrote very neatly, and kept to himself. I remember he wore very tight knee socks. No one disliked him, but no one really liked him either. He moved away the next summer, and when I tried to remember him in fourth grade, I couldn’t remember his face. I couldn’t remember anything he did. I could only remember that he was there.”