THE MONSTER

Deems Taylor

1    He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body ― a sickly little man. His nerves were bad. He had skin trouble. It was agony for him to wear anything next to his skin coarser than silk. And he had delusions of grandeur.

2    He was a monster of conceit. Never for one minute did he look at the world or at people, except in relation to himself. He believed himself to be one of the greatest dramatists in the world, one of the greatest thinkers, and one of the greatest composers. To hear him talk, he was Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Plato, rolled into one. He was one of the most exhausting conversationalists that ever lived. Sometimes he was brilliant; sometimes he was maddeningly tiresome. But whether he was being brilliant or dull, he had one sole topic of conversation: himself. What he thought and what he did.

3    He had a mania for being in the right. The slightest hint of disagreement, from anyone, on the most trivial point, was enough to set him off on a harangue that might last for hours, in which he proved himself right in so many ways, and with such exhausting volubility, that in the end his hearer, stunned and deafened, would agree with him, for the sake of peace.

4    It never occurred to him that he and his doing were not of the most intense and fascinating interest to anyone with whom he came in contact. He had theories about almost any subject under the sun, including vegetarianism, the drama, politics, and music; and in support of these theories he wrote pamphlets, letters, books ... thousands upon thousands of words, hundreds and hundreds of pages. He not only wrote these things, and published them ― usually at somebody else’s expense ― but he would sit and read them aloud, for hours, to his friends, and his family.

5    He had the emotional stability of a six-year-old child. When he felt out of sorts, he would rave and stamp, or sink into suicidal gloom and talk darkly of going to the East to end his days as a Buddhist monk. Ten minutes later, when something pleased him he would rush out of doors and run around the garden, or jump up and down off the sofa, or stand on his head. He could be grief-stricken over the death of a pet dog, and could be callous and heartless to a degree that would have made a Roman emperor shudder.