Are You An Average Man?

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1064, 30 August 1930, Page 18

Are You An Average Man?

No !- — We Are All Eccentric Says Thomas Burke, English Novelist

Thomas Burke, author of "Limehouse Nights." and other tales, contributes this entertaining article to the “Sunday News. Hms E was an ordinary and {ft respectable draper in a I small Midland town, and | be had parted from his l\ wife. She sued him for support. Just before the case came on he met with a motoring accident, in which the first joints of the fingers of one hand were taKen off. On receipt of the summons he packed the severed joints in a box and posted them to his wife with this message: “Here’s a bit of your pound of flesh.” I haven’t invented that. It was reported in the Press late last year, and the man was not a

coarse and violent \brute. lie was a nice, well-behaved, reasonable Englishman who had a sudden moment of bad temper, and indulged it in this rather horrid fashion. He was not unique. Nice, wellbehaved and reasonable people are continually doing little wayward things of this sort. In al! Sorts of Worlds Moving as I do in all sorts of worlds, and making acquaintance among all classes and conditions, I have met people of such extravagant colour of character that if I presented any of them in a novel the critics would tell me to concentrate on life, not on pantomime, and to take my characters from the everyday world, not the lunatic asylum. But, alas! these limited creatures, whose view of life is clouded by the covers of a book, do not know that the everyday world is far too-purple for the pale pages of fiction. We are all eccentric, and perhaps the most eccentric are those who appear most conventional. I know a serious and intelligent doctor, with a large practice in one of the more expensive suburbs. Nobody could be more grave and conventional in appearance than this doctor.

Yet, whenever his wife’s relaiives visit the house, he goes to the draw-ing-room, stands before the fireplace, takes from his pocket a foolscap document, which he bought specially for these occasions, and reads it aloud to them. It is a copy of the Riot Act, which, as you probably know, calls upon unlawful assemblies to disperse under pain of physical force. You could'nt put -that in a serious novel. Another case from my family circle occurs to me. A serious old lady of 68, a keen student of economics, and the author of some pamphlets on the subject, was found lying beside her bed with a fractured rib. In her hand she held a mouth-organ. When asked how the accident happened, and why the mouth-organ, she explained that she suffered from sleep-

lessness, and that she found that it soothed her, in the wakeful hours o£ the night, to play soft tunes on a mouth-organ. She had got out of bed to get her mouth-organ when she slipped. The spectacle of this grave old lady sitting up in bed playing a mouth-organ would be almost incredible if one did not know that it was true. Impossible In a Novel That, too, would he impossible in a novel, for in a novel characters must be consistently grave or consistently farcicaj, which human creatures never are. „ I have met many well-known people who are popularly said to be eccentric, but their eccentricities have never surprised me. They are conventional eccentricities, and one suspects that "they are deliberately assumed. But the eccentricities of the ordinary man are not assumed; they are native to him, and, because he is accepted as ordinary, his eccentricities are all the more surprising. Gerard de Nerval, walking through the streets of Paris, leading a lobster on a string, does not surprise, because the business is deliberately and publicly done with the intention of surprising. And the minor artists of Chelsea and the minor poets of

Bloomsbury equally fail to aston me with their little oddities. I was surprised when I heard th story of a staid, conventional man known on the Stock Exchange « was found one evening by a friend who had called in for a chat, sitthie in a chair with one arm the chair. Keeping Him At Home Calmly, as though talking of th. weather, he explained that his wife had objected to his going out. aftedinner, because it meant that he did not return till after midnight. she had therefore adopted this means ot keeping him at home; and this head of a busines employing 70 clerks, aid known as a powerful and ruthleg. mau in his world, had tamely suh mitted to this ridiculous captivity. If you saw that man in the trail or in the street, you would sar“There goes the average man.” his appearance and his general behav. iour you would be right; but then comes this little fact which cuts hin out of that category—a category i s which nobody fits.

No man will admit that he himsell is an average man; that distinction he gives to the man next door. Bn; if he knew the full truth about the life of the mau next door, he would have to admit that that man, too, wa; out of the running. As we all are. When We Are Ourselves

We are average men only j t moments, and for purposes of genera: citizenship. When we are really ourselves we are fantastically eccentric. When we say that another person a eccentric we are only saying that h? is doing something that appears to ui to be silly. But everything that I do, or that you do, appears to be sill; to some people.

Some may think it that a serious and elderly woman should play a mouth-organ in bed. But a me, that is no sillier than collectin? foreign postage stamps, or snuf boxes, or first editions, or sitting for hours watching men play with baa and balls, or paying out money to prove how sincerely you believe that | one horse can run faster than other horses. My Daily Day If I were to give a detailed description of my daily day, numbers of people would say: “What an eccentric fellow!” And I should resent the remark. To myself I appear to be a very ordinary fellow. We all do. We all like to think that we are normal, but none of us is, and if ever we did find a really normal man we should all agree that he was a lunaric who ought to be put under control. We all diverge, not only from the common norm, but from the norm of our own character, and we pass more of our lives in the divergence than in the centre.We are all eccentric; all of us, tha: ! is, who do what we want to do. with* out considering whether, in our stj iit is “done.” In other words, all ; ns who are really alive.