Aurora Dawn by Herman Wouk Page B

artists today must be crowd pleasers, and its the opinion
     of the crowd that artists are a little crazy, so a man of talent who plays up to that opinion will unquestionably make more
     money than one who doesn’t. He’ll be talked about and he’ll gain stature. Mike stumbled on this open secret in Paris when
     he was nineteen. Have you ever seen the ballet he designed, “Chanson de MoiMême”?
    (Laura said that she had not; and, shifting a little in her corner of the sofa, she tucked her famous legs under her skirt,
     folded her hands in her lap, and regarded English with the clear, serious eyes of a listening child.)
    Well, at the time, he was in the thick of the impecunious artistic set that you used to find sitting around in front of the
     Dôme in the evenings, drinking
fines
and arguing about everything. He fell into the hands of a celebrated première danseuse, who was well on the nostalgic side
     of thirty, and he became a pet of the ballet people. The choreographer of the company was inspired to do a ballet based on
     Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”; and, thanks to the intervention of the danseuse, Mike was commissioned to try his hand at
     the
décor
.
    He was an entirely irresponsible kid then, spoiled both by his talents and his attractiveness. He had come to Paris after
     working in an advertising agency for a year, just long enough to accumulate the money to travel, and in that year, by the
     way, he acquired his single vicious prejudice: get him started on the subject of advertising, sometime, if you want a jeremiad.
     Anyway, in Paris he habitually followed only impulse in whatever he did. In designing the ballet he was seized with the whim
     of taking the title literally, and he proceeded with some pains to sketch out a weird, extravagant set consisting of nothing
     but reproductions of himself. The center piece was a colossal bust of Mike Wilde with the lower part formalized into a Greek
     temple; the trees were graceful, gnarled versions of himself; even the rocks were worked into profiles of him; and the dancers
     all wore masks in his likeness. Well, Freud was a fad then, ten years ago, so the choreographer was rapturous, and worked
     out a dance on the theme of Narcissus which really wasn’t bad. The ballet was a sensation in France and in America. It’s odd
     that you never saw it.
    (“I was twelve years old ten years ago,” said Laura demurely, “and the ballet didn’t stop in Albuquerque.”)
    At any rate Mike found himself and his work suddenly in demand. He had the pleasure of selling to dealers who had snubbed
     him, the very pieces they had dismissed. The newspapers also came after him, and Mike, realizing that they were looking for
     bizarre behavior and ideas, just gave rein to himself and furnished them with all the copy they could use.
    You’ve seen his Bible. He did most of it before the ballet, as an exercise in dramatic sketching and coloring, and I’ve always
     thought the pictures ordinary; they bear many traces of his advertising drudgery, in fact. When he came to America with the
     ballet, he was approached by one of those enterprising publishers who make a business of exploiting a new genius or a new
     word game each year. He promptly hauled out his portfolio of Bible pictures, to the ecstasy of the publisher. Mike won’t admit
     it, but I’m sure he put in the controversial pieces that brought all the bishops and ministers down on him–Ruth at Boaz’ feet,
     Judah and Tamar, that scandalous Magdalene, and so forth–
after
he’d sold the portfolio to the publisher. He did once tell me that he inserted the portrait of himself in Old Testament dress
     as Bezalel, the divine artist of the Tabernacle, because he thought “the excitement would make the book go better.” Of course,
     you know what happened. It sold more than half a million copies, and it still goes into a new edition each year–all at eight
     dollars a copy.
    (“My father preached a sermon in