The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. Will Cuppy
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he discovered, were the quietest hours in the Village apartment which he inhabited during the last twenty years of his life. Cuppy hated noise in all forms, and throughout those twenty years he was tortured daily by the sounds which issued from a school playground directly adjoining the building in which he lived. From his small terrace he was also subjected to the wailing of numerous babies in nearby buildings. Yet he never thought of moving. His only positive action against these young adversaries was to buy a New Year’s Eve noisemaker – the kind that uncoils when you blow into it. When he couldn’t stand the wailing another minute, he’d get out his noisemaker and blow it several times in the direction of the crying child. Then he felt better.
When he grew irritated with the adults with whom he had to deal in his writing assignments, he would compose devastating letters to the offender or offenders, address the envelopes, apply the stamps, and leave the letters on the table near his door, to be mailed. Then the next day he would tear them up.
Beneath the gruff exterior he often affected, Cuppy was a thoroughly generous, kindly human being. He pretended he hated people, and, in fact, he was genuinely uneasy about meeting new people – he was afraid they might not like him or that they’d take up a lot of his time. His friends, though, were constantly receiving funny little presents from kaleidoscopes to hen-shaped milk-glass salt cellars. His Christmas cards were sent out around July 4; their good wishes applied either to the previous Christmas or to the coming one, however his friends chose to regard the matter.
His two favorite places on earth were the Bronx Zoo, where he felt really relaxed, and his shack, Chez Cuppy (or Tottering-on-the-Brink), on Jones’s Island, a few miles east of Jones Beach. Here Cuppy would revert to his earlier days as a hermit, sometimes for several weeks at a stretch. The trip was too much trouble for just a weekend, since Cuppy would have to carry, in large suitcases, a sizable supply of canned goods, books, and index-card-file boxes.
Cuppy has a devoted following, in England and Australia as well as in this country, but he was convinced that no one had ever heard of him. Any evidence to the contrary pleased him very much. The high point of his life, he once said, was the moment when he was walking along Park Avenue with Gene Tunney, then heavyweight champion of the world, and someone passing said to her companion, “Why, there’s Will Cuppy.”
But Cuppy was often equally set up by a lack of recognition. I know he would have been delighted by the error on the part of the newspaper to which he had contributed for twenty years, in its early morning editions following his death. The picture labeled “Will Cuppy” accompanying the obituary was of someone else.
On Cuppy’s death I inherited the job of assembling his material for publication. Except for the war years, I had been in almost daily communication with Cuppy by phone ever since he started on this book in the summer of 1933. These talks always concerned whatever he was working on at the moment.
Sometimes, before the call was completed, there might be a brief reference to some happening in the day’s news. But Cuppy really wasn’t interested in the front pages of the daily papers. Anything that happened after the eighteenth century left him cold. In fact, the farther back in history he went, the more his enthusiasm grew.
I can’t help wishing that this book had been available in history class when I first learned about these famous personages – in a somewhat different, and far less illuminating, perspective. The historians whose works I was forced to read seemed to lose sight of the fact that their subjects were human beings. Cuppy never lost sight of it for a minute.
In closing, I’d like to express my thanks to my wife, Phyllis, who spent many evenings and weekends going through dozens of Cuppy’s two hundred file boxes and deciphering his scrawls, and to Alan Rosenblum, Cuppy’s lawyer, who helped make publication possible at this early date.
FRED FELDKAMP
New York, N.Y.
PART I
IT SEEMS THERE WERE
TWO EGYPTIANS
Cheops, or Khufu Hatshepsut
CHEOPS, OR KHUFU
EGYPT HAS BEEN CALLED the Gift of the Nile. Once every year the river overflows its banks, depositing a layer of rich alluvial soil on the parched ground. Then it recedes and soon the whole countryside, as far as the eye can reach, is covered with Egyptologists.
From the remotest times Egypt has been divided into two parts, Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. Lower Egypt is the part at the top of the map, so you have to travel south to find Upper Egypt. This seems perfectly all right to the inhabitants because the Nile rises in the south, and when you go up the river, naturally, you go south, finally arriving in Upper Egypt, with Lower Egypt away up north.1
Egypt was also divided politically until Menes, King of Upper Egypt, went up and conquered Lower Egypt and founded the First Dynasty of Upper and Lower Egypt in 3400 B.C.2 Menes is said to have been devoured by a hippopotamus, a rather unlikely story, since this animal is graminivorous and has never been known to eat anybody else. Modern scholars, therefore, were inclined to regard Menes as a myth until recently, when it was pointed out that a slight error in the feeding habits of the hippopotamus does not necessarily prove that Menes never existed. Egyptologists are beginning to see this as we go to press. 3
The Egyptians of the First Dynasty were already civilized in most respects. They had hieroglyphics, metal weapons for killing foreigners, numerous government officials, death, and taxes.4
Some of the Egyptians were brighter than others. They invented mosquito netting, astrology, and a calendar that wouldn’t work, so that New Year’s Day finally fell on the Fourth of July. They believed that the sun went sailing around Egypt all day on a boat and that a pig ate the moon every two weeks.5
Naturally, such people would wish to record their ideas, so that others could make the same mistakes. Their hieroglyphics, or picture writing, consisted of owls, canaries, garter snakes, and the insides of alarm clocks.
Properly speaking, civilization is what we have today, but it is nice to know that more than fifty centuries ago they were beginning to be more like us in a tiny country many thousands of miles from New York.6 Some authorities believe the Sumerians were civilized before the Egyptians were. I don’t, myself. I have a feeling that the Sumerians will blow over. 7
In spite of this excellent start, little of importance happened in Egypt until the Third Dynasty, when Imhotep the Wise, architect and chief minister to King Zoser, invented the pyramid, a new kind of huge royal tomb built of stone and guaranteed to protect the body of the Pharaoh and a large amount of his property against disturbance for all time. That is to say, Imhotep the Wise originated the idea of concealing the royal corpse and his treasure in a monument so conspicuous that it could not possibly be missed by body snatchers and other thieves.8 Of course the pyramids were always robbed of their entire contents, but the Pharaohs went right on building them for several centuries before they noticed the catch in this way of hiding things.
Imhotep’s pyramid was not much good, really, for the steps, or terraces, were not filled in, and it was less than 200 feet high. Snefru, founder of the Fourth Dynasty, made a better one with smooth sides, filling in the steps with bricks, which, unfortunately, soon fell out.9 Snefru is now known merely as the father of Khufu,10 or Cheops, as the Greeks called him,11 builder of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, once 481 feet high and still rising 450 feet with the top gone. Although this structure failed as a tomb, it is one of the wonders of the world even today because it is the largest thing ever built for the wrong reason.12
Cheops