Dodsworth quotes

To define what Sam Dodsworth was, at fifty, it is easiest to state what he was not.

He was none of the things which most Europeans and many Americans expect in a leader of American industry.

He was not a Babbitt, not a Rotarian, not an Elk, not a deacon. He rarely shouted, never slapped people on the back, and he had attended only six baseball games since 1900.

He played golf reasonably well, and did not often talk of his scores. He liked fishing-camps in Ontario, but never made himself believe that he preferred hemlock boughs to a mattress.

He was common sense apotheosized, he had the energy and reliability of a dynamo, he liked whisky and poker and pâté de foie gras, and all the while he dreamed of motors like thunderbolts, as poets less modern than himself might dream of stars and roses and nymphs by a pool.

A crisis in life had been forced on him, for his Revelation Company was being absorbed by the Unit Automotive Company—the imperial U.A.C., with its seven makes of motors, its body-building works, its billion dollars of capital.

He was not happy about it, when he let himself think abstractly.

But he was extremely well trained, from his first days in Zenith High School, in not letting himself do anything so destructive as abstract thinking.

Sam clumped upstairs and found Fran, very brisk, fairly cheerful, still in her brocade dressing-gown but crouching over her desk, dashing off notes:

They were part of a booming industrial flood which was sweeping over him. They would give him a larger house, a yacht, but They would not give him work that was really his own.

He had helped to build a machine which was running away from him.

He had no longer the dignity of a craftsman. He made nothing; he meant nothing; he was no longer Samuel Dodsworth, but merely part of a crowd vigorously pushing one another toward nowhere.

They would give him a larger house, a yacht, but They would not give him work that was really his own. He had helped to build a machine which was running away from him. He had no longer the dignity of a craftsman.

He made nothing; he meant nothing; he was no longer Samuel Dodsworth, but merely part of a crowd vigorously pushing one another toward nowhere.

He wandered to the window. In that blast of snow, the shaft of the Plymouth National Bank Building was aspiring as a cathedral; twenty gray stories, with unbroken vertical lines swooping up beyond his vision into the snowy fog.

… entered the warmth of the big house, when he sat in the library alone (Fran was not yet back from the Children’s Welfare Bridge), with a whisky-soda and a volume of Masereel woodcuts, when he considered his deep chair and the hearth-log and the roses,

Sam felt the security of his own cave and the assurance to be found in familiar work, in his office-staff, in his clubs, his habits and, most of all, his friends and Fran and the children.

He regarded the library contentedly: the many books, some of them read—volumes of history, philosophy, travels, detective stories; the oak-framed fireplace with a Mary Cassatt portrait of children above it; the blue davenport; the Biedermeyer rug from Fran’s kin in Germany; the particularly elaborate tantalus.

And too brightly she added, “Don’t drink too much tonight. It’s all right with people like Tub Pearson, but Judge Turpin is so conservative—I know he doesn’t like it.”

She had a high art of deflating him, of enfeebling him, with one quick, innocent-sounding phrase.

By the most careless comment on his bulky new overcoat she could make him feel like a lout in it;

Let the underlings finish up. Dear, it’s because I do love you that—Do you think you’ll ever learn to enjoy leisure, to enjoy just being yourself and not an office? You’re not going to make me feel guilty for having dragged you away, are you?”

“By God, I’ll enjoy life if it kills me⁠—and it probably will!” he grumbled.

“You’ve got to give me time. I’ve started this business of being ‘free’ about thirty-five years too late. I’m a good citizen. I’ve learned that Life is real and Life is earnest and the presidency of a corporation is its goal.

… make more passionate lives merely by running away to a more complex and graceful civilization, had been as sophomoric as the belief of a village girl that if she could but go off to New York, she would magically become beautiful and clever and happy.

He had, for a few days, forgotten that wherever he traveled, he must take his own familiar self along, and that that self would loom up between him and new skies, however rosy.

It was a good self. He liked it, for he had worked with it. Perhaps it could learn things.

… thousands of acres of Welsh coal land, he owned Woughton Hall in Kent and a tall, bleak-faced house in Eaton Square, he owned the famous mare Capriciosa III, and he owned a position in the Liberal Party immediately after that of Asquith and Lloyd George.

He himself was owned by his wife.

Lady Ouston was a beautiful woman and very commanding. She had a high, quick, passionate voice and many resolute opinions.

… she did explorers and chemists and the few authors who understood morning coats, she had never stooped to fill her drawing-room by exhibiting cubist painters, Hindu nationalists, American cowboys, or any of the other freaks whereby rival professional hostesses attracted the right sort of people.

And her dinners were admirable. You could be sure of Napoleon brandy, the cousin of a duke, and the latest story about the vulgarity of New York.

It was not to one of Lady Ouston’s very best dinners, with a confidential cabinet minister present, that Lockert persuaded her to invite the Dodsworths, but it was quite a good, upper-middle dinner, with Clos-Vougeot and the master of a Cambridge college.

In their apartment she nuzzled her cheek against his shoulder, whispering,

“Oh, I’d just like to crawl inside you and be part of you. Don’t ever let me go!”

The Ouston debacle considerably checked Fran’s social career, though Lockert continued their mentor. He came to tea the next day, casual as ever, and drawled:

“I know,” said Fran.

“You love America⁠—except for the food, the manners, and the people.”

“At least, there’s one American that I esteem highly!” said Lockert, and his glance at her was ardent.

When he had established Fran in a chair on the boat deck, amid piles of snobbish blond luggage, he slipped down to the bar.

There is about a ship’s bar, any bar of any ship, however small, a cheerfulness unknown elsewhere in life’s dark and Methodist vale.

It has the snug security of an English inn, with a suggestion of adventure as the waves flicker past the portholes, as you speculate about the passengers—men coming from China and Brazil and Saskatchewan, men going to Italy and Liberia and Siam.

Isn’t it adorable! Isn’t it too exciting! Oh, the darling funny little zincs! And the Cointreau ads, instead of chewing gum! These bald-faced high white houses! Everybody so noisy, and yet so gay! Oh, I adore it!”

But for Sam it was a motion picture produced by an insane asylum; it was an earthquake with a volcano erupting and a telephone bell ringing just after he’d gone to sleep; it was lightning flashes and steam whistles and newspaper extras and war.

Their taxicab, just missing an omnibus, sliding behind its rear platform. A policeman, absurdly little, with an absurd white baton. Two priests over glasses of beer at a café. Silver gray everywhere, instead of London’s golden brown.

He heard, without quite knowing that he heard them, the cannon of the Emperor who was a Revolutionist. He heard things that Samuel Dodsworth did not know he had heard or ever could hear.

“Gee, Fran, this town has been here a long time, I guess,” he meditated. “This town knows a lot,” said Samuel Dodsworth of Zenith. “Yes, it knows a lot.”

And, a little sadly, “I wish I did!”

Making up a vast part of all save this last of the Parises are the Americans.

Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.

It is a joyous town, and its chief joy is in its jealousies. Every citizen is in rivalry with all the others in his knowledge of French, of museums, of wine, and of restaurants.

the next they went off (and sometimes she was simple and gay enough to let him carry sandwiches somewhat mussily in his pocket) to explore the Forest of Fontainebleau, and they laughed as they walked through groves shivering with April.

He was becoming acquainted with her and, sometimes, slightly, with himself.

He saw little enough of Frenchmen outside of hotel-servants, waiters, shopmen, but what he did see of them, what he saw of the surface of French life, puzzled him.

But after a fortnight he could enter the lounge, ignore the human furniture, and rustle his newspaper with almost as much relaxation as he had felt in his library in Zenith.

He was becoming accustomed to the home of the homeless.

He discovered slowly, and always with a little astonishment, that the French were human, even according to the standard of the United States of America.

He dreaded these new obligations.

“So far as I can see,” he brooded, “travel consists in perpetually finding new things that you have to do if you’re going to be respectable.”

Fran was polite to the Princess Maravigliarsi with a cold politeness which indicated to Sam that she was impressed. But it was to a certain Madame de Pénable that she gave most of her attention.

how hard it was to be honest about one’s own self—maybe not all—fun putting business across, too—but she’d been the chief reason for it, anyway. As for his friends—Why, he’d’ve chucked even Tub, if Fran hadn’t liked him!

Fran! That just the other day had been a girl, cool and sparkling and strange, on the Canoe Club porch⁠—

Good Lord, the Canoe Club had burned down twenty years ago.

Fran! That just the other day had been a girl, cool and sparkling and strange, on the Canoe Club porch—

Good Lord, the Canoe Club had burned down twenty years ago.

In the radiant May of Paris, with the horse chestnuts out on the Champs Élysées, he sat huddled, feeling cold.

Yet when he had gone abroad, they had interviewed him as a Representative American Business Man—

He was frightened by his drop into insignificance.

At half-past three he was startled and cheered by a telephone-call:

Was it because the little people, dark and insignificant in the cathedrals, were yet dignified, self-possessed, seeking the ways of God, whereas here they were busy with the ludicrous activity of insects?

He fancied that this was veritably the temple of a new divinity, the God of Speed.

Of its adherents it demanded as much superstitious credulity as any of the outworn deities—demanded a belief that Going Somewhere, Going Quickly, Going Often, were in themselves holy and greatly to be striven for.

He blasphemed against it now, longing for the shabbiest bar on the raggedest side street of Paris.

He shook his great shaggy head as he looked down on traveling-salesmen importantly parading before bag-laden redcaps, on fagged brokers with clanking bags of golf sticks, on fretful women, contemptuous overdressed women, and sleek young men in white knickerbockers.

They seemed to him driven to madness by the mad God of Speed that themselves had created—and Sam Dodsworth had created.

Tub Pearson was on the threshold, grinning.

“Well, you fat little runt!” said Sam, which meant, “My dear old friend, I am enchanted to see you!”

And Tub gave answer, “You big stiff, so they couldn’t stand you in Yurrup any more, eh? So you had to sneak back here, eh? You big bum!”

… also owned, as a more speculative interest, a share of a resort hotel near Zenith, and on his way to America he had persuaded himself that, with his newly educated knowledge of food and decoration and service, he would be able to improve this hotel.

It was quite a bad hotel, and very profitable.

He had a meal there, two days after arriving in Zenith, and it was terrible.

If sometimes Sam found himself wishing for Ross Ireland’s melodramatic talk about revolutions and lost temples, if sometimes Tub seemed rather provincial, Sam was thoroughly scandalized, and rebuked himself, “Tub’s the best fellow in the world!”

It is doubtful whether he was the more disturbed by finding that he could get along without Tub or by finding that Tub could get along without him.

Believing from Sam’s first enthusiastic foreign letters that he would not return from Europe this year, Tub had planned with Dr. Hazzard a month’s motoring-golfing expedition. They were excited about it.

He saw, slowly, that none of his prosperous industrialized friends in Zenith were very much interested in anything whatever. They had cultivated caution until they had lost the power to be interested.

They were like old surly farmers.

The things over which they were most exclamatory—money, golf, drinking—didn’t fascinate them as brushstrokes or woodwinds fascinated the peering Endicott Everett Atkins;

The arts, to them, consisted only of jazz conducive to dancing with young girls, pictures which made a house look rich, and stories which were narcotics to make them forget the tedium of existence.

They did things, they rushed, they supervised, they contended⁠—but they were not interested.

However difficult Fran might be at times, pondered Sam, however foolish Madame de Pénable with her false hair and her false gigolos, however pompous and patronizing Mr.

He was invited to view the Gardens with the president, and afterward he spent a good deal of time walking through them, talking to architects, to carpenters, to gardeners. Otherwise he merely waited.

He was very good at waiting.

Twice a week letters from Fran had drawn him toward her and toward Europe. Her first letter had come on the day of his arrival in Zenith:

Since the days of Alexander the Great there has been a fashionable belief that travel is agreeable and highly educative.

Actually, it is one of the most arduous yet boring of all pastimes and, except in the case of a few experts who go globetrotting for special purposes, it merely provides the victim with more topics about which to show ignorance.

He knows all the facts about nineteen countries, except the home-lives, wage-scales, exports, religions, politics, agriculture, history and languages of those countries. He is as valuable as Baedeker in regard to hotels and railroads, only not so accurate.

He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.

Four hundred pictures all on a wall are four hundred times less interesting than one picture; and no one knows a café till he has gone there often enough to know the names of the waiters.

If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs.

To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.

Actually, most of those afflicted with the habit of traveling merely lie about its pleasures and profits.

Actually, most of those afflicted with the habit of traveling merely lie about its pleasures and profits.

They do not travel to see anything, but to get away from themselves, which they never do, and away from rowing with their relatives⁠—only to find new relatives with whom to row.

They travel to escape thinking, to have something to do, just as they might play solitaire, work crossword puzzles, look at the cinema, or busy themselves with any other dreadful activity.

Her Italian! She knew a hundred words! Villas! They’d never seen a Riviera villa from a more intimate position than the outside wall!

He reflected that Fran had an unsurpassed show-window display but not much on the shelves inside.

Then he was angry with himself; then he pitied her; then loved her for her childish shrillness of make-believe, her eagerness to be noticed and admired.

then, in a month, she let them lie unopened. And once, apropos of a gesticulating operatic baritone, she began making fun of Israel’s ardors. … He would almost have been gladder, Sam sighed, if she had enough loyalty to remember Arnold longer.

She was lovely quicksilver, but quicksilver is hard for a thick hand to hold.

He noted, too, her pretentiousness when she was with people like Mrs. Cortright. Fran let it be known that she herself was of importance. She rebuked people who—never having seen her before—failed to know that she was an expert at tennis, French and good manners.

… didn’t exactly say it, but she spoke as though ruddy old Herman Voelker, her respectable sire, had been at least a baron, and she was forever laughing at this fellow-traveler as being “common” and approving that other as being of “quite a good family—quite decent.”

She was like a child boasting to a playmate of her father’s wealth.

But he felt it with a brooding pity that made him the fonder—made it the harder for him to fight his way free from her capricious domination of his life.

Kurt von Obersdorf was perhaps forty.

He was a tall, loose, lively man, with thick black hair. He had dignity enough, but he was full of laughter, and you felt that by choice he would like to be a clown.

He made love to every woman and made friends with every man.

But Europe, she believes that a Voltaire, a Beethoven, a Wagner, a Keats, a Leuwenhoeck, a Flaubert, give drama and meaning to life, and that they are worth preserving—they and the people who understand and admire them!

Europe! The last refuge, in this Fordized world, of personal dignity.

And we believe that is worth fighting for! We are menaced by the whole world. Yet perhaps we shall endure … perhaps!

the horribly lifelike trousers swaying against the wall, the valises wedged under the little folding table by the window, the litter of newspapers and cigarette butts.

The train was loud with fury; it carried him on powerless; life carried him on powerless.

Without Fran, he felt small, callow, defenseless. Why was he venturing to Paris, alone? He knew no French, really; he knew little of anything in Europe. He was marooned.

…

Samuel Dodsworth, so abnormally flushed that no friend of his hearty triumphant days would have recognized him

, sitting on the edge of his bed, his hair wild and his pajamas wrinkled, smoking cigarettes, longing to telephone from Paris to Berlin and tell Fran that he hoped she would be the Countess Obersdorf, and kept from it chiefly by the thought that …

Of most of them, had you demanded a description from him after the journey, he would have said, “Oh, they looked about like anybody else, I guess—why?”

He saw them not as trees walking but as clothes sitting.

But the incredible jar of being dismissed by Fran, the opening of his eyes to the possibilities of misery in the world, made him feel the universal pathos of things more sensitively than he had even on the exalted night when he had first beheld …

He cursed himself for his weakness; he sought to sink himself in an enormous volume on English Gardens and Domestic Architecture of the Eighteenth Century; he sought to recapture a longing for the Orient; and it was in vain.

Bluntly, he could not go off to the Far East and leave Fran unprotected.

Oh, he told himself she did not need protection.

He moved back into Venice, to the Bauer-Grünwald which, despite a German atmosphere which too readily reminded him of his Berlin debacle, was more welcoming than the Royal Danieli.

Venice is the friendliest city in the world.

There are other cities in which friendlier people may be found, but in Venice it is the city itself, the spectacle of the Piazza San Marco, the cozy little streets, the open-fronted shops of the coppersmiths, the innumerable churches that are always open, the alternately …

“Oh … I suppose America terrifies me. I feel insecure there. I feel everybody watching me, and criticizing me unless I’m buzzing about Doing Something Important—uplifting the cinema or studying Einstein or winning bridge championships or breeding Schnauzers or something. And there’s no privacy, and

I’m an extravagant woman when it comes to the luxury of privacy.

”

At home, they would.

It’s only in Europe that you can have the joy of anonymity, of being lost in the crowd, of being yourself, of having the dignity of privacy!

”

“I’ve learned that even a fairly good garage boss like myself isn’t much good at deciding between Poiret and Lanvin, or between Early English and Decorated.

No American business man ought to go abroad, ever, except to a Rotary convention, or on a conducted tour where he’s well insulated from furriners.

Upsets him. Spoils his pleasure in his own greatness and knowledge! … What have I learned? Let’s see: The names of maybe fifty hotels, of which I’ll remember five, in a few years. The schedules of half a dozen de luxe trains.

Cortright, would say? Was it possible that it took more courage to be a hobo, deliberate, out and out, than to go on living like a respectable manufacturer while he ached like a Verlaine?

Was dry rot really braver than a moist and dripping rage of defiance?

He was so tired of dragging out his little soul and worrying over it! If he could only be laughing, unthinking, with Tub Pearson. Or if Mrs. Cortright had been willing to dine with him—

Was it possible that it took more courage to be a hobo, deliberate, out and out, than to go on living like a respectable manufacturer while he ached like a Verlaine? Was dry rot really braver than a moist and dripping rage of defiance?

He was so tired of dragging out his little soul and worrying over it!

If he could only be laughing, unthinking, with Tub Pearson. Or if Mrs. Cortright had been willing to dine with him—

“I suppose it’s rather ludicrous, my trying to give advice—and my own life such a mess that I endure it only by getting rid of all ambition, all purpose, and just floating, trying to get along with as little complication as possible.”

They talked slowly, and mostly they talked in silence.

It was tranquil in that vast cool room above the Grand Canal. Out on the harbor, bands of singers in gondolas chanted old Italian ballads. They were, actually, rather commercialized, these singers;

“Yes, if I had a place of my own there.

Here, everything decays⁠—lovely decay, but I’m tired of being autumnal.

I’d like hot summer growing and spring budding for a change—even if the cornstalks were ugly!”