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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75507 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+  Transcriber’s Note
+  Italic text displayed as: _italic_
+
+
+
+
+  PISTOLS FOR TWO
+
+  BY
+  OWEN HATTERAS
+
+  [Illustration: Decoration]
+
+  NEW YORK    MCMXVII
+
+  ALFRED · A · KNOPF
+
+
+
+
+_Published, September, 1917_
+
+
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+  GEORGE JEAN NATHAN                                                   5
+
+  H. L. MENCKEN                                                       21
+
+
+
+
+PISTOLS FOR TWO
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Biography fails, like psychology, because it so often mistakes
+complexity for illumination. Its aim is to present a complete picture
+of a man; its effect is usually to make an impenetrable mystery of
+him. The cause of this, it seems to me, lies in the fact that the
+biographer always tries to explain him utterly, to account for him in
+every detail, to give an unbroken coherence to all his acts and ideas.
+The result is a wax dummy, as smooth as glass but as unalive as a dill
+pickle.
+
+It is by no such process of exhaustion that we get our notions of
+the people we really know. We see them, not as complete images, but
+as processions of flashing points. Their personalities, so to speak,
+are not revealed brilliantly and in the altogether, but as shy things
+that peep out, now and then, from inscrutable swathings, giving us
+a hint, a suggestion, a moment of understanding. Does a man really
+know what is going on in his wife’s mind? Not if she _has_ a mind.
+What he knows is only that infinitesimal part which she reveals,
+sometimes deliberately and even truculently, but more often naïvely,
+surreptitiously, accidentally. He judges her as a human being, not by
+anything approaching entire knowledge of her, but by bold and scattered
+inferences. He sees her soul, in so far as he sees it at all, in the
+way she buttons her boots, in the way she intrigues for a kiss, in
+the way she snaps her eye at him when he has been naughty—interprets
+her ego in terms of her taste in ribbons, the scent of her hair, her
+quarrels with her sisters, her fashion of eating artichokes, her skill
+at home millinery, the débris on her dressing table, her preferences in
+the theater, her care of her teeth.
+
+Thus, by slow degrees, he accumulates an image of her—an image changing
+incessantly, and never more than half sensed. After long years,
+perhaps, he begins to know her after a fashion. That is, he knows how
+many shredded wheat biscuits she likes for breakfast, how much of his
+business she understands, how long she can read a first-class novel
+without napping, what she thinks of woolen underwear, the New Irish
+Movement, the family doctor, soft-boiled eggs, and God....
+
+I enter upon these considerations because I have been employed by a
+committee of _aluminados_, heeled well enough to pay my honorarium,
+to conjure up recognizable images of MM. George Jean Nathan and H.
+L. Mencken, that their scattered partisans and the public generally
+may see them more clearly. The job has its difficulties, for save in
+their joint editorial concern with _The Smart Set_ magazine and their
+common antipathy to certain prevailing sophistries, they are no more
+alike than a hawk and a handsaw. But in one other thing, at least,
+they also coalesce, and that is in the paucity of news about them.
+Most other magazine editors are constantly in the papers—discoursing
+on the literary art, agitating for this or that, getting themselves
+interviewed. These twain, however, pursue a more _pianissimo_ course,
+and so not much is known about them, even inaccurately....
+
+
+II
+
+The job invites. One reads regularly what magazine editors think of
+their contributors, but who ever reads what magazine contributors—of
+whom I, Hatteras, am one—think of their editors? A vast and
+adventurous field here enrolls itself, believe me. I know, more or less
+intimately, most of the editors of the great American periodicals, and
+I am constantly amused by the inaccuracy of the prevailing notions
+about them—notions diligently fostered, in many cases, by their own
+more or less subtle chicane. Consider, for example, the dean of the
+order, M. George Harvey, of the _North American Review_. His portrait
+shows a thoughtful old gentleman reading a book, his forefinger pressed
+affectionately against his right frontal sinus. Recalling the high
+mental pressure of his daily concerns, one concludes at once that he is
+struggling through Talboys Wheeler’s epitome of the Maha-Bhārāta, or
+Locke’s “Conduct of the Understanding.” But I have it from the Colonel
+himself—a confidence quite spontaneous and apparently sincere—that
+at the precise moment the photographer squeezed the bird he was
+thinking—what? Simply this: how much prettier Mlle. Mary Pickford would
+be if her lower limbs were less richly developed laterally. The book
+was the _Photoplay Magazine_.
+
+Again, there is M. Robert H. Davis, editor of the Munsey publications.
+The official views of M. Davis depict him as a man of the great
+outdoors, a stalker of the superior carnivora, a dead shot, a fisher of
+tarpons and sharks, a rover of the primeval forests. He is dressed up
+like a cover of _Field and Stream_, a doggish pipe in his mouth, his
+tropics formidably encircled by cartridges and fish worms. But what
+are the facts? The facts are that Davis does all his fishing in the
+Fulton Market, and that the bear-skin which in his pictures he is seen
+holding triumphantly at arm’s length actually graces his library floor
+and was bought at Revillon Frères. He is a God-fearing, mild-mannered,
+and respectable man, an admirer of Elihu Root, a Prohibitionist, a
+member of the Red Cross and the S. P. C. A. The only actual hunting he
+ever does is to hunt for someone to agree with him that M. Irvin Cobb
+is a greater man than Mark Twain or Dostoievsky. And when it comes to
+fishing, he has said all he has to say when he brings up a couple of
+sardellen out of the mayonnaise.
+
+Yet again, there are such fellows as Doty, of the _Century_; Towne,
+of _McClure’s_; Bok, of the _Ladies’ Home Journal_; Siddall, of the
+_American_; and Fox, of the _Police Gazette_. Doty prints Edith
+Wharton and Rabindranath Tagore—and reads, by choice, H. C. Witwer
+and Selma Lagerlöf. Fox collects Chinese jades and Sheraton chairs,
+and is a member of the Lake Mohonk Conference. Siddall used to be
+a hoochie-coochie sideshow ballyhoo with Ringling’s Circus. Towne,
+throwing off the editorial mask of moral indignation, writes tender
+triolets in the privacy of his chambers. Bok, viewed popularly as a
+muff—the wags of the National Press Club once put him down as one of
+the ladies entertained by them—is a rough, wild creature, a huge,
+knobby Hollander, with a voice like an auctioneer’s. And Eastman of the
+_Masses_, the prophet of revolt, the savior of the oppressed—what of
+Eastman? Eastman, _au naturel_, gives no more damns for the oppressed
+than you or I. His aim in life, the last time I met him in society,
+was to find a chauffeur who was not a drunkard and had no flair for
+debauching the parlor-maids. On this theme he pumped up ten times the
+eloquence he has ever emitted over Unearned Increments and Wage Slaves.
+
+
+III
+
+In a similar way are the MM. George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken
+misviewed. And it is because I see here an opportunity to experiment
+with my private theory of biography that I enter with some enjoyment
+the enterprise, thus thrown on me, of exhibiting the facts. To this
+end, I herewith present a list of the things I happen to know about
+the two gentlemen in question, leaving whoever cares for the job to go
+through it and construct for himself a definite and symmetrical effigy.
+So:
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE JEAN NATHAN
+
+
+He was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, February 14 and 15 (the stunning
+event occurred precisely at 12 midnight) 1882.
+
+His boyhood ambition was to be an African explorer in a pith helmet,
+with plenty of room on the chest ribbon for medals that would be
+bestowed upon him by the beauteous Crown Princess of Luxembourg.
+
+He was educated at Cornell University and the University of Bologna, in
+Italy.
+
+He is a man of middle height, straight, slim, dark, with eyes like the
+middle of August, black hair which he brushes back _à la française_,
+and a rather sullen mouth.
+
+He smokes from the moment his man turns off the matutinal showerbath
+until his man turns it on again at bedtime.
+
+He rarely eats meat.
+
+He lives in a bachelor apartment, nearly one-third of which is occupied
+by an ice-box containing refreshing beverages. On the walls of his
+apartment are the pictures of numerous toothsome creatures. He is at
+the present time occupied in writing a book describing his sentimental
+adventures among them.
+
+He has published the following books: “Europe After 8:15,” in
+collaboration with Mencken and Mr. Willard Huntington Wright; “Another
+Book on the Theater,” “Bottoms Up,” and “Mr. George Jean Nathan
+Presents.”
+
+He has written for almost every magazine in America, except _Good
+Housekeeping_ and _The Nation_.
+
+He dresses like the late Ward McAllister and wears daily a boutonnière
+of blue corn flowers.
+
+He dislikes women over twenty-one, actors, cold weather, mayonnaise
+dressing, people who are always happy, hard chairs, invitations to
+dinner, invitations to serve on committees in however worthy a cause,
+railroad trips, public restaurants, rye whisky, chicken, daylight, men
+who do not wear waistcoats, the sight of a woman eating, the sound
+of a woman singing, small napkins, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Tagore,
+Dickens, Bataille, fried oysters, German soubrettes, French John
+Masons, American John Masons, tradesmen, poets, married women who
+think of leaving their husbands, professional anarchists of all kinds,
+ventilation, professional music lovers, men who tell how much money
+they have made, men who affect sudden friendships and call him Georgie,
+women who affect sudden friendships and then call him Mr. Nathan,
+writing letters, receiving letters, talking over the telephone, and
+wearing a hat.
+
+In religion he is a complete agnostic, and views all clergymen with a
+sardonic eye. He does not believe that the soul is immortal. What will
+happen after death he doesn’t know and has never inquired.
+
+He is subject to neuralgia. He is a hypochondriac and likes to rehearse
+his symptoms. Nevertheless, a thorough physical examination has shown
+that he is quite sound. His Wassermann reaction is, and always has
+been, negative. He is eugenically fit.
+
+He never reads the political news in the papers. He belongs to a
+college fraternity and several university societies.
+
+The room in which he works is outfitted with shaded lamps and heavy
+hangings, and somewhat suggests a first-class bordello. He works with
+his coat on and shuts the windows and pulls down all the curtains.
+He writes with a pencil on sheets of yellow paper. He cannot use a
+typewriter.
+
+He detests meeting people, even on business, and swears every time
+a caller is announced at _The Smart Set_ office. He never receives a
+woman caller save with his secretary in the room.
+
+He wears an amethyst ring. In his waistcoat pocket he carries an
+elegant golden device for snapping off the heads of cigars. He has his
+shoes shined daily, even when it rains.
+
+Like the late McKinley, he smokes but half of a cigar, depositing
+the rest in the nearest spitbox. Like Mark Twain, he enjoys the more
+indelicate varieties of humor. Like Beethoven, he uses neither morphine
+nor cocaine. Like Sitting Bull and General Joffre, he has never read
+the Constitution of the United States.
+
+He bought Liberty Bonds. He can eat spinach only when it is chopped
+fine. He knows French, Latin, Italian, and German, but is ignorant of
+Greek. He plays the piano by ear.
+
+In his taste in girls, he runs to the _demi-tasse_. I have never heard
+of him showing any interest in a woman more than five feet in height,
+or weighing more than 105 pounds.
+
+An anarchist in criticism, he is in secret a very diligent student
+of Lessing, Schlegel, Hazlitt, and Brandes. His pet aversion, among
+critics, was the late William Winter.
+
+He has no interest in any sport, save tennis and fencing, and never
+plays cards. He never accepts an invitation to dinner if he can avoid
+it by lying. He never goes to weddings, and knows few persons who marry.
+
+As a critic, he has been barred from many theaters. A. L. Erlanger, in
+particular, is a manager who views him as a colleague of Mephisto.
+
+He eats very little.
+
+He drinks numerous cocktails (invariably the species known as “orange
+blossom,” to which he has added two drops of Grenadine), a rich
+Burgundy, and, now and then, a bit of brandy.
+
+He once told me that he had no use for a woman who wasn’t sad at
+twilight.
+
+He has two male companions—so many and no more: Mencken and John D.
+Williams, the theatrical producer. He is rarely seen with any other.
+
+He was born, as the expression has it, with a gold spoon in his mouth.
+He has never had to work for a living.
+
+He works daily from 10 A.M. until 5 P.M. He plays from 5:30 until 8:30.
+Evenings, he spends in the theater. After the theater, he has supper.
+He retires anywhere from 11 P.M. to 3 A.M.
+
+He has made many trips abroad and has lived at different times in
+France, England, Germany, Italy, Austria, the Argentine, India, Japan
+and Algiers.
+
+He fell in love at first sight in 1913 with a flower girl in the
+Luitpold Café in Munich, but the hussy was distant.
+
+He would rather have Lord Dunsany in _The Smart Set_ once than William
+Dean Howells a hundred times.
+
+He often writes sentences so involved that he confesses he himself
+doesn’t know what they mean.
+
+He admires Max Beerbohm, Conrad, Dr. Llewellys Barker, Mozart, the
+Fifth and Ninth Symphonies and the songs in “Oh, Boy,” sardines,
+ravioli, Havelock Ellis chocolate cake, Molnar, Hauptmann, Royalton
+cigars, Anatole France, _Simplicissimus_, _E. W. Howe’s Monthly_,
+an eiderdown blanket and a hard pillow, a thick-toothed comb and
+stiff brush, Schnitzler, bitter almond soap, George Ade, Richard
+Strauss, Pilsner, Huneker, Florenz Ziegfeld, Edwin Lefèvre’s story
+“Without End,” the quartette in the Piccadilly in London, the Café
+Viel in Paris, the overcoat shop in the Stefansplatz in Vienna, the
+strawberries in the Palais de Danse in Berlin.
+
+He believes, politically, in an autocracy of the elect, for the elect,
+and by the elect.... His father was a Democrat.
+
+He has written one play, “The Eternal Mystery,” which was produced on
+the Continent in 1914 and in America in 1915. He has forbidden the
+production of the play henceforth in any American city save Chicago,
+in which city anyone who chooses may perform it without payment of
+royalties.
+
+In 1904 he won the Amsler gold medal for proficiency with the foils.
+He studied fencing under Lieutenant Philip Brigandi, of the Italian
+cavalry, and Captain Albert Androux, the celebrated French master of
+foils.
+
+Fifteen minutes in the sun gives his complexion the shade of mahogany;
+twenty minutes, the shade of Booker T. Washington.
+
+He wears the lightest weight underwear through the coldest winter.
+
+He owns thirty-eight overcoats of all sorts and descriptions. Overcoats
+are a fad with him. He has them from heavy Russian fur to the flimsiest
+homespun.... He owns one with an alpine hood attachment.
+
+He belongs to several metropolitan clubs, but never enters them.
+
+He has never been in jail. He has been arrested but once: at the age of
+twenty for beating up a street-car conductor.
+
+He always has his jackets made with two breast pockets: one for his
+handkerchief, the other for his reading glasses. The latter are of the
+horn species.
+
+His telephone operator, at his apartment, has a list of five persons
+to whom he will talk—so many and no more. He refuses to answer the
+telephone before five o’clock in the afternoon.
+
+His favorite places of eating in New York are the Café des Beaux Arts,
+the Kloster Glocke, and the Japanese Garden in the Ritz.
+
+He can down several hundred olives at a single sitting.
+
+He knows more about the modern foreign theater than any other American.
+
+He is a lineal descendant of Petöfi Sándor, the national poet of
+Hungary, and of Thomas Bourgchier, archbishop of Canterbury.
+
+An examination of his blood, on July 1, 1917, showed: Hb., 111%; W.
+B. C., 8,175. A phthalein test showed: 1st hr., 50%, 2d hr., 20%;
+total, 70%. Blood pressure: 129/77. Gastric analysis: Free HCl, 11.5%;
+combined, 20%. No stasis. No lactic acid.
+
+He entered the New York Public Library for the first time on March 7,
+1917, being taken there by A. Toxen Worm, of Copenhagen.
+
+He never accepts a dinner invitation until invited three separate
+times, and then usually sends his regrets at the last moment.
+
+The living Americans who most interest him are Josephus Daniels and
+Frank A. Munsey.
+
+The only poet that he admires is John McClure. He seldom reads poetry.
+He has never read “Paradise Lost.”
+
+He never visits a house a second time in which he has encountered dogs,
+cats, children, automatic pianos, grace before or after meals, women
+authors, actors, _The New Republic_, or prints of the Mona Lisa.
+
+He is not acquainted with a single clergyman, Congressman, general, or
+reformer. He has never met any of the Vice-Presidents of the United
+States.
+
+He is free of adenoids.
+
+His knee jerks are normal.
+
+He has never been inside a church.
+
+He has been writing dramatic criticism for thirteen successive years,
+and in that time has seen more than 3000 plays in America, 400 in
+England, and 1900 on the Continent. He has simultaneously syndicated
+critical articles to as many as forty-two newspapers, and has served as
+dramatic critic to seven metropolitan magazines.
+
+In 1910, on a wager, he wrote sixteen magazine articles in a single
+month.
+
+Among his short stories are “D. S. W.,” “Nothing to Declare,” “But I
+Love Her,” “The Soul Song,” “The Triple Expense,” etc.
+
+Among his most widely quoted retorts is that made by him to the
+newspaper interviewer who asked him if it was true that a disgruntled
+theatrical manager named Gest had alluded to him as a “pinhead.”
+“That,” replied Nathan, “is on the face of it absurd. ‘Pinhead’ is a
+word of two syllables.”
+
+He once observed that the reason the galleries of our theaters, as our
+theatrical managers lament, are no longer filled with newsboys is that
+all the newsboys are now theatrical managers.
+
+He wrote the introduction to Eleanor Gates’ play, “The Poor Little Rich
+Girl.”
+
+He is the first American critic to have written of the dramatists
+Molnar, Brighouse, and Bracco.
+
+His mother’s family were the pioneer settlers of Fort Wayne, Indiana.
+His father’s family were figures in the continental world of letters.
+His father spoke eleven languages, including the Chinese.
+
+He frequently spends an entire afternoon polishing up a sentence in one
+of his compositions. And he often stops writing for a couple of days,
+or as long as it takes him, to hit upon an appropriate adjective or
+phrase.
+
+He never writes love letters, and seldom reads them.
+
+He cannot operate a motor car, or cook anything, or wind a dynamo, or
+fix a clock, or guess the answer to a riddle, or milk a cow.
+
+He regards camping out as the most terrible diversion ever invented by
+man.
+
+He knows nothing of country life, and cannot tell a wheat field from
+a potato patch. He regards all deciduous trees as oaks, and all
+evergreens as cedars.
+
+He has yet to drink his first glass of Hires’ Root Beer.
+
+He regards Al Woods as the most competent commercial manager in the
+American theater.
+
+His library contains every known book on the drama published in the
+English, French, German, and Italian languages.
+
+He owns many of the original Dunsany manuscripts.
+
+Accused by certain of his critics of a flippant attitude toward the
+drama, he in reality takes the drama very seriously. The theater, on
+the other hand, he regards four out of five times as a joke.
+
+He concurs in the Walpole philosophy that life is a tragedy to him who
+feels and a comedy to him who thinks.
+
+He is a good listener. His invariable practice with talkers is to let
+the latter talk themselves out and then, after a moment’s studious
+silence, to nod his head and say yes. He never argues, never disagrees,
+no matter how bizarre the conversationalist’s pronunciamentos.
+
+The Paris journal, _Le Temps_, frequently translates his critical
+articles and quotes from them copiously.
+
+He owns an autographed photograph of the Russian mystic, Rasputin,
+presented to him by the latter six years ago.
+
+He dislikes all forms of publicity. He has an aversion to
+self-advertisement that amounts almost to a mania. He believes, with
+Mencken, that whom the gods would destroy, they first make popular.
+
+He takes a companion with him to the theater only on rare occasions. He
+uses the extra seat sent him by the managers as a depository for his
+hat and overcoat.
+
+He always has thirty or forty lead pencils beside him when he writes.
+The moment one becomes a trifle dull he picks up another. He cannot
+sharpen the pencils well enough to suit himself and has the job done by
+his secretary.
+
+He hasn’t the slightest intention of ever getting married.
+
+He believes that the motor trip from Watkins Glen to Elmira, in New
+York State, is the most beautiful in America.
+
+Among the Presidents of the United States he admires most—and by long
+odds—the late Grover Cleveland.
+
+He believes the dirtiest spot in the world to be the Azores.
+
+He believes Shaw’s “Cæsar and Cleopatra” to be the best modern British
+play, Brieux’s “Les Hannetons” the best modern French play, and
+Dunsany’s “Gods of the Mountain” the best modern Irish play.
+
+He gets squiffed about once in six weeks, usually in company with John
+Williams. He has a headache the next day.
+
+He carries a tube of menthol in his pocket and sniffs at it forty times
+a day.
+
+He has been writing his monthly article for _The Smart Set_ since 1909.
+He and Mencken became editors of the magazine in August, 1914.
+
+He began his career as a man of letters by reporting for the New York
+_Herald_. He reads the _Times_ and _Globe_ daily.
+
+Among his critical contemporaries in New York he has the highest
+respect for Louis Sherwin. Of American dramatists he most admires Avery
+Hopwood. Of American dramatic critics his vote is probably for Henry T.
+Parker, of the Boston _Transcript_.
+
+In his own opinion, the best thing he has ever written is “The Eternal
+Mystery.”
+
+He has never been to Washington, nor to California, nor to Boston.
+
+He has never made a speech, nor delivered a lecture, nor sat on a
+committee. He has never subscribed to a charity fund.
+
+He wears a No. 14½ collar and No. 7¼ hat. His favorite soup is _Crême
+de Sante_.
+
+The only author he ever invites to his office is Harry Kemp. He detests
+Kemp’s poetry.
+
+The temperature of his daily bath is 67 degrees.
+
+A practitioner of preciosity in style, he nevertheless dictates
+business and social letters in a “would say” manner, and has his
+secretary sign them.
+
+In 1900 he fought a duel with pistols outside of Florence, Italy, and
+was wounded in the left shoulder. He is still a trifle lame from the
+wound.
+
+Returning to America in 1912 on the _Philadelphia_, during a rough
+passage he was the only passenger on the ship to appear in the dining
+saloon for four successive days. With three of the stewards, he passed
+the time by improvising a bowling alley in the saloon, utilizing
+mutton chops for the pins and oranges for the balls. The latter were
+automatically returned to the bowlers by the ship’s periodical pitch
+backward.
+
+He has had the same barber for fourteen years. Curiously enough, the
+barber’s name is George J. Nath.
+
+His valet’s name is Osuka F. Takami. The latter has a penchant for
+polishing Nathan’s patent leather boots with the sofa pillows.
+
+He has seen only one vaudeville show in the last eight years.
+
+He believes that Herma Prach is the prettiest girl on the Viennese
+stage and Gladys Gaynor the prettiest on the London stage. He has never
+seen a pretty girl on either the Berlin or Paris stage.
+
+His headquarters in London is the Savoy; in Berlin, the Adlon; in
+Vienna, the Grand; in Paris, the Astra.
+
+He has never eaten a pickled eel, calf’s brains, chicken livers, or
+tongue.
+
+He has never been in a Childs’ restaurant or in Rector’s.
+
+He is of a nervous temperament and the slightest sound during the night
+wakes him up.
+
+He looks seven years younger than he is.
+
+He has been shot at three times in America, but never hit.
+
+He likes chop suey, spaghetti, French pastry, horseradish sauce, Welsh
+rarebits, oysters _à la Dumas_, raw tomatoes, stuffed baked potatoes,
+green peppers, broiled lobster, halibut, mushrooms cooked with caraway
+seeds, and chipped beef.
+
+His favorite American city is Philadelphia. His favorite French,
+Barbizon. His favorite German, Munich. His favorite English, Leeds.
+
+He covered murder trials in various parts of the country for the
+New York _Herald_ during the years of his preparation for dramatic
+criticism.
+
+He wears tan pongee silk shirts in summer.
+
+The New Yorkers he admires most are W. R. Hearst, Arthur Hopkins, and
+M. Alevy, the eminent _maître d’hôtel_ of the Café des Beaux Arts.
+
+He is the only American dramatic critic who has never succumbed to the
+Augustus Thomas, Granville Barker or Belasco rumble-bumble.
+
+He is entirely ignorant of mathematics, geology, botany, and physics.
+Like Mencken, however, he is a good speller, and is privy to the
+intricacies of punctuation.
+
+The name of the girl who manicures his nails is Miss Priscilla Brown.
+She is an orphan.
+
+The claret he commonly serves to his guests costs eighty-five cents a
+gallon, in quarts. He buys the labels separately.
+
+His favorite hospitals are the Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, and Galen
+Hall, in Atlantic City. Whenever he is ill he goes to one or the other.
+
+Since 1901 he has loved seventeen different girls, and still remembers
+the names of all of them, and their preferences in literature, food,
+and wines. Of the seventeen, fourteen are happily married, one has been
+married and divorced, and the rest have gone West.
+
+He owns three watches, seventeen scarf-pins, and nineteen pairs of
+shoes.
+
+His skull is sub-brachycephalic, with a cephalic index of 83.1. His
+cranial capacity, by the system of Deniker, is 1756 cc. His nose is
+mesorhinian, and his nasal index is 46.2. The ratio between the length
+of his radius and that of his humerus is as 73 is to 100.
+
+By the Binet-Simon test his general intelligence is that of a man of
+117 years.
+
+His voice is a baritone, with a range of one octave and two tones.
+
+He never answers questions put to him in letters.
+
+A friend presented him several years ago with a set of O. Henry, which,
+try as he will, he can’t get rid of.
+
+He would rather eat a salt-sprinkled raw tomato still hot from the sun
+than a dinner from the hand of a French chef.
+
+He has everything he wears made to his order, save his belts and his
+socks. He never buys even a hat that is ready-made.
+
+He has written under the pseudonyms of George Narét, Rupert Cross, and
+William Drayham.
+
+He has been denounced in the New York newspapers, during his career
+as dramatic critic, by three playwrights, five theatrical managers,
+eight actresses, twenty-two actors, and almost everyone connected with
+vaudeville.
+
+He likes garlic, but refrains from eating it.
+
+He has read Max Beerbohm’s “Happy Hypocrite” thirteen times.
+
+Like Mencken, he is subject to periodic attacks of melancholia.
+
+He has visited every American resort north of Old Point Comfort—and
+thinks them all pretty bad.
+
+He believes the Ritz, in Philadelphia, to be the best hotel in America.
+
+He believes the Hudson Theater, in New York, to be the most comfortable
+theater in America.
+
+Several years ago, seeking isolation in which to finish a piece of
+work, he decided to shut his eyes, run his finger down a New York
+Central time-table, and go to the place opposite the name of which his
+finger would come to a halt. His finger stopped opposite an exotic
+something named New Paltz.... The first person he saw when he got off
+at the New Paltz station was the man he had roomed with in his junior
+year at college.
+
+He has said that “cleverness” consists merely in saying the wrong thing
+at the right time.
+
+He owns three suits of evening clothes.
+
+He wears pongee pajamas.
+
+His one-act play, “The Eternal Mystery,” which was suppressed in
+New York and Detroit, created more discussion than any one-act play
+produced in America in the last dozen years.
+
+He is kind to dogs, babies, and negroes. He has never given a street
+beggar a cent.
+
+Among his closest friends in Europe are Ballington Booth, Jack Johnson,
+and M. Philippe Cartier, in charge of the malt department on the Orient
+Express.
+
+His most ingenious piece of dramatic criticism was his criticism of
+the writings of Augustus Thomas, in which he proved that Thomas’ plays
+would be better if they were played backward.
+
+His hair grows so quickly that he has to get a hair-cut every ten days.
+
+His father’s first name was Charles; his middle name, Narét.
+
+He likes hot weather, the hotter the better.
+
+He believes the island of Bermuda to be the most beautiful spot on
+earth. He would like to live there—if he couldn’t live in Munich.
+
+He once wrote an article on The Department of the Interior for
+_Munsey’s Magazine_. He gave the proceeds, by way of atonement, to the
+First Baptist Church of Asbury Park.
+
+He knew Evelyn Nesbit when she was a baby.
+
+He believes that twelve per cent of all reformers and uplifters are
+asses, and that the rest are thieves.
+
+He wears low, Byronic collars and rather gaudy neckties.
+
+In philosophy he is a skeptical idealist, believing that the truth is
+an illusion and that man is a botch. He has read the works of Kant,
+Fichte, and Locke, but can’t remember what was in them. He regards
+Schopenhauer, on the woman question, as a sentimentalist whistling in
+the dark.
+
+His knowledge of economics is extensive, and he once wrote a pamphlet
+against David Ricardo. It has been translated into French, German, and
+Bohemian.
+
+He has never written any poetry in English, but published a slim volume
+of Petrarchan sonnets in Italian during his student days in Bologna.
+The only copy of this book known to exist is in the library of Balliol
+College, Oxford. The author’s own copy was lost in the burning of the
+Hôtel de France at Lausanne, in the winter of 1903.
+
+He is an excellent Latinist and has translated Albius Tibullus.
+
+His favorite opera is Gluck’s “Iphigénie in Tauris.” He once traveled
+from Nice to Dresden to hear it. His chief abomination in the opera
+house is “The Jewels of the Madonna.”
+
+While on the staff of the New York _Herald_, James Gordon Bennett
+offered him the post of London correspondent. The emolument proposed,
+however, made Nathan laugh.
+
+He owns three top hats, fourteen walking sticks, and two Russian
+wolf-hounds.
+
+He writes with a Mikado No. 1 lead-pencil.
+
+He is on good terms with but two members of his family.
+
+He reads, on the average, one hundred and fifty foreign plays every
+year.
+
+He has read every book on the drama published in America, England,
+France, and Germany since 1899.
+
+He uses Calox tooth powder, Colgate’s shaving soap, a double strength
+witch hazel, a Gillette razor, and Kitchell’s Horse Liniment. He has
+never taken quinine, Peruna, Piso’s Cough Syrup, Sanatogen, asperin,
+morphine, opium, or castor oil—but he has taken everything else.
+
+He believes Mencken eats too much.
+
+He has been inoculated against typhoid.
+
+He once, as a boy, ran a railroad locomotive from Cleveland, Ohio, to
+Chagrin Falls, Ohio, killing only two cows.
+
+He gets a cinder in his eye on an average of twice a day.
+
+He can drink anything but sweet cordials.
+
+With his meals, he uses Cross and Blackwell’s chow-chow.
+
+In his undergraduate days he was an editor of all the Cornell
+University papers.
+
+He wrote articles on the theater for the old _Harper’s Weekly_ for four
+years.
+
+He knows three jockeys, eight bartenders, one murderer, two sea
+captains, three policemen, one letter carrier, and one politician.
+
+He is a warm friend of Detective William J. Burns.
+
+He likes buttermilk.
+
+Christmas costs him, on the average, about a thousand dollars.
+
+For the last two years he has received weekly anonymous letters from
+some woman in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who signs herself with the
+initials “L. G.”
+
+He is writing the introduction to Arthur Hopkins’ new book on the drama.
+
+He has not ridden a horse since May 22, 1908.
+
+In October, 1912, he and his broker were wrecked off Barnegat in the
+latter’s yacht, _Margo I_, and were rescued via a breeches buoy by the
+Barnegat life-saving crew.
+
+He never reads popular novels.
+
+Mr. Winthrop Ames has invited him to write a satirical review for his
+Little Theater in New York and Nathan is planning to do the thing
+during 1918.
+
+He eats two raw eggs a day to put on weight.
+
+When the victim of a bad cold and unable to smoke, he chews soft
+licorice candy while writing.
+
+He believes that George Bickel is the funniest comedian on the American
+stage, that Arnold Daly is the best actor, that Margaret Illington is
+the best actress.
+
+He has never written a thing that, upon rereading after its appearance
+in print, didn’t seem to him to be chock full of flaws.
+
+He is lucky at games of chance, though he seldom plays. In 1912 he won
+$2,000 in the Havana lottery.
+
+He owns six belts, one of them presented to him by Gabriele D’Annunzio
+and made of wolf hide.
+
+He is in favor of universal military service, imperialism, and
+birth-control, but is opposed to woman suffrage, the direct primary,
+and prohibition.
+
+His usual pulse is 71 a minute. After drinking it rises to 85.
+
+He keeps no books of account, and does not know his exact income. As a
+means of defense against sudden calamity he keeps $3000 in gold in a
+safe deposit vault.
+
+His favorite name for girls is Helen.
+
+If he could rechristen himself, he would choose the given name of John.
+
+He pronounces his middle name, not in the French manner, but to rhyme
+with bean.
+
+He is a third cousin of Signor Enrico Nathan, the late Socialist mayor
+of Rome. His uncle, Dr. Émile Nathan van der Linde, _privat docent_ in
+anthropology at Leyden, was killed by savages in Borneo in 1889, while
+a member of the Oesterling exploring expedition.
+
+He has never visited the battlefield at Gettysburg.
+
+
+
+
+H. L. MENCKEN
+
+
+He was born at Baltimore on Sunday, September 12, 1880, and was
+baptized in the Church of England.
+
+He was educated at the Baltimore Polytechnic, and is theoretically
+competent to run a steam engine or a dynamo, but actually is quite
+incapable of doing either.
+
+Down to the age of fifteen it was his ambition to be a chemist, and
+to this day he is full of fantastic chemical information and fond of
+unloading it. At the age of fourteen he invented a means of toning
+photographic silver prints with platinum.
+
+The family business was tobacco, and he was drafted for it on leaving
+school. He became a journeyman cigar-maker, and can make excellent
+cigars to this day. But when chemistry and business died out,
+literature set in, and he took to journalism.
+
+At the age of twenty-three he was city editor and at twenty-five
+managing editor of the Baltimore _Herald_, now defunct—the youngest
+managing editor of a big city daily in the United States.
+
+He printed a book of poems at twenty-two—now a rare _bibelot_. He was
+“discovered,” as the saying is, by Ellery Sedgwick, now editor of
+the _Atlantic Monthly_, but then running _Leslie’s Monthly_. He and
+Sedgwick have remained on friendly terms to this day, but he sometimes
+writes for the _Atlantic_.
+
+In 1900, having read Lafcadio Hearn’s “Two Years in the French West
+Indies,” he shipped on a banana boat for the Spanish Main, and has
+returned to the West Indies three times since.
+
+He is five feet, eight and a half inches in height, and weighs about
+185 pounds. In 1915 he bulged up to 197 pounds. Then he took the Vance
+Thompson cure and reduced to 175, rebounding later.
+
+The things he dislikes most are Methodists, college professors,
+newspaper editorials (of which, in his time, he has written more than
+10,000), Broadway restaurants, reformers, actors, children, magazine
+fiction, dining out, the New Freedom, prohibition, sex hygiene, _The
+Nation_, soft drinks, women under thirty, the nonconformist conscience,
+Socialism, good business men, the moral theory of the world, and the
+sort of patriotism that makes a noise.
+
+Among the men he admires are Joseph Conrad, W. R. Hearst, E. W. Howe,
+Richard Strauss, Anatole France, and Erich Ludendorff—this last because
+he is a great general and has never uttered a single word of patriotic
+or pietistic cant. He likes Dreiser, but does not admire him.
+
+His taste in female beauty runs to a slim hussy, not too young, with
+dark eyes and a relish for wit. He abhors sentimentality in women,
+holding that it is a masculine weakness, and unbecoming the fair. He
+seldom falls in love, and then only momentarily.
+
+He wears buttoned shoes because he cannot tie shoe laces. Neither can
+he tie a dress tie; if there is no one to tie it for him he has to miss
+the party. In general, he is almost wholly devoid of manual dexterity,
+though he can play the piano well enough to entertain himself, and is a
+good sight reader.
+
+The only art that ever stirs him is music. He views literature
+objectively, almost anatomically. He is anæsthetic to painting. His
+favorite composers are Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Brahms, and Richard
+Strauss. He detests Tschaikowsky and Rossini, and likes Wagner better
+out of the opera house than in it. In his youth he wrote waltzes. He
+abominates song and piano recitals and oratorios. He has a pretty
+extensive knowledge of musical technique, and knows a sound sonata from
+a bad one. When he improvises it is usually in F major. He has a poor
+ear and cannot tune a fiddle.
+
+He drinks all the known alcoholic beverages, but prefers Pilsner to
+any other; a few seidels make him very talkative. In the absence of
+Pilsner, he drinks Michelob. He seldom drinks at meals and often goes
+three or four days without a drink. In wine, he likes whatever is red
+and cheap. He detests champagne, Scotch and rye whisky, and gin, though
+he drinks them all to be polite. He has a good head, and is not soused
+more than once a year, usually at Christmas.
+
+He has good eyes and a gentle mouth, but his nose is upset, his ears
+stick out too much, and he is shapeless and stoop-shouldered. One could
+not imagine him in the moving pictures. He has strong and white, but
+irregular teeth.
+
+He wears a No. 7½ hat. He is bow-legged. He is a fast walker. He used
+to snore when asleep, but had his nasal septum straightened by surgery,
+and does so no longer.
+
+He takes no interest whatever in any sport. He played baseball as a
+boy, but hasn’t seen a game for ten years, and never looks at the
+baseball news in the papers. He cannot play tennis or golf, and has
+never tried. He knows nothing of cards. He never bets on elections or
+horse-races. He never takes any exercise save walking.
+
+He rejects the whole of Christianity, including especially its ethics,
+and does not believe that the soul is immortal. His moral code is from
+the Chinese and has but one item: keep your engagements. He pays all
+bills immediately, never steals what he can buy, and is never late for
+an appointment. He has missed but one train in his life.
+
+He believes in war so long as it is not for a moral cause. He advocates
+universal military training on the ground that it causes wars.
+
+His table manners are based upon provincial French principles, with
+modifications suggested by the Cossacks of the Don.
+
+When at home he arises at eight sharp every morning, and is at his desk
+at nine.
+
+He likes to go motoring at night, and often sets out alone at midnight.
+
+He takes a half hour’s nap every afternoon. He can sleep anywhere and
+at almost any time.
+
+He has eleven uncles and aunts and eighteen cousins, and has never
+quarreled with any of them.
+
+He has been inoculated against typhoid and hay fevers.
+
+He is a prompt correspondent, and answers every letter the day it is
+received.
+
+He keeps his watch on an old-fashioned clothes-press in his workroom,
+and winds it every time he looks at it.
+
+He detests windy days. As between heat and cold, he prefers heat.
+
+He never preserves love letters, and never writes them.
+
+His tonsils have been cut out. His Wassermann reaction is and always
+has been negative. He has a low blood pressure. His heart and kidneys
+are normal.
+
+His favorite hotel is the Bayrischer Hof at Munich. After that he ranks
+them in the following order: the Adlon, Berlin; the Palace, Madrid; the
+Paladst, Copenhagen; the Statler, Buffalo; the Edouard VII, Paris.
+
+He says the best place to eat in the whole world is at the basement
+lunch counter of the Rennert Hotel, Baltimore. The best things to order
+there are oyster potpie, boiled turkey with oyster sauce, Virginia ham
+and spinach, and boiled tongue.
+
+He owns ten suits of clothes, and wears them seriatim. All of them are
+of summer weight. He never wears heavy clothes.
+
+He never wears patent leather shoes, even with dress clothes. He wears
+horn spectacles for reading, but never otherwise.
+
+Between 1899 and 1906 he wrote and published thirty-five short stories.
+Since 1906 he has written none.
+
+For five years he contributed a daily article to the Baltimore _Evening
+Sun_. His total writings for newspapers run to nearly 10,000,000 words.
+He has reported three national conventions and nine executions.
+
+His one-act play, “The Artist,” has been translated into German,
+Dano-Norwegian, Italian, and Russian.
+
+He has twice voted for Roosevelt, not by conviction, but because he
+believes Roosevelt gives a better show than any other performer in the
+ring. In politics he is a strict federalist.
+
+He advocates woman suffrage on the ground that, if women voted,
+democracy would be reduced to an absurdity the sooner.
+
+He is very polite to women, particularly if he dislikes them, which is
+usually.
+
+He owns the original manuscript of “Sister Carrie,” presented to him by
+Dreiser.
+
+He is a nephew of the late Right Rev. Frederick Bainville
+Mencken, bishop of Akkad _in partibus infidelium_. This uncle was
+disinherited by his grandfather as a result of a family dispute over
+transubstantiation.
+
+His pet literary abominations are “alright” (as one word) and the use
+of “near” as an adjective. He will never speak of or to an author who
+uses either.
+
+His favorite eating places in New York are Rogers’, the Kloster Glocke,
+the Lafayette, and the Café del Pezzo.
+
+The cities he likes best are Munich, Chicago, Baltimore, and London.
+He dislikes Paris, Rome, Berlin, and New York—the last-named so much
+that, whenever he has any work to do, he goes to Baltimore to do it.
+
+He was an intimate friend of the late Paul Armstrong for many years and
+never quarreled with him.
+
+In his own opinion, the best thing he has ever written is “Death: a
+Discussion” in his “Book of Burlesques.”
+
+He wears B. V. D.’s all the year round, and actually takes a cold bath
+every day.
+
+He never has his nails manicured, but trims them with a jacknife.
+
+Every Saturday night he spends the time between 8 and 10 playing music,
+and the time between 10 and 12 drinking Michelob. He plays second piano.
+
+He has received three proposals of marriage, but has never succumbed.
+He has never seduced a working girl. He has no issue.
+
+He works in his shirt-sleeves and sleeps in striped pajamas.
+
+He wears Manhattan garters, No. 15½ Belmont collars, and very
+long-tailed overcoats. His plug hat, which he wears but two or three
+times a year, has a flat brim, like that of a French comedian.
+
+He is smooth-faced and shaves every morning with a Gillette safety
+razor. Once, while in Paris, he grew a yellow moustache and goatee.
+They lasted, however, but two weeks.
+
+He has lived in one house in Baltimore for 34 years. In it he has 3000
+books.
+
+He owns the largest collection of Ibseniana in the world, including
+autographs, first editions, and other rarities. Part of it is in
+Baltimore, part in Copenhagen, part in Munich, and part in Geneva.
+
+He reads German and Norwegian fluently, French, Spanish, Italian, and
+Latin less fluently, and makes shift to sweat through the following:
+Russian, Greek, Dutch, Rumanian, Serbian, Czech, Sanskrit, Assyrian,
+Hungarian, and Swedish.
+
+His favorite American poet is Lizette Woodworth Reese. He and she have
+lived in the same city for years, but they have never met.
+
+His total receipts in royalties on his books, in fifteen years, have
+been $172.50.
+
+His personal funds are invested in bonds of the Pennsylvania Railroad,
+the Midvale Steel Company, and the Danish, Chilean, and Swiss
+governments.
+
+During his newspaper career he was American correspondent of the
+Hongkong _Press_, the Kobe _Chronicle_, and the Colombo (Ceylon)
+_Observer_.
+
+One of his fads is theology. He understands its technical terminology,
+and is sometimes consulted on difficult points by both Catholic and
+Protestant clergy.
+
+Down to July 7, 1913, he employed suspenders to hold up his trousers.
+Being then convinced by Nathan that such appliances had a socialistic
+smack, he abandoned them for a belt.
+
+He reads an average of ten books a week, in addition to those he goes
+through for reviewing purposes. The subjects he affects are theology,
+biology, economics, and modern history.
+
+He has never read George Eliot, or Jane Austen, or Bulwer-Lytton. He
+has never been able to read Dostoievsky, or Turgeniev, or Balzac. His
+favorite writers, as a youth, were Thackeray, Huxley, and Kipling.
+He seldom reads newspapers. The only magazines he ever looks at are
+the _Smart Set_, _Ed Howe’s Monthly_, the _Country Gentleman_, the
+_Masses_, the _Seven Arts_, and the _Ladies’ Home Journal_.
+
+He has a wide acquaintance among medical men and knows a good deal
+about modern medical problems. His advice is often sought by persons
+seeking treatment; he gives it copiously.
+
+He knows mathematics up to plane geometry and trigonometry. He knows
+philosophy, chemistry, and history, but is ignorant of physics and
+grammar. He can draw with some skill, and was once a good mechanical
+draftsman. He is an excellent speller and knows how to punctuate.
+
+In philosophy he is a strict mechanist of the Loeb-Haeckel school. In
+psychology he leans toward Adler. He questions pragmatism, but admits
+its workableness. He is an advocate of absolute free speech in all
+things—and exhibits the utmost intolerance in combatting those who
+oppose it.
+
+He believes and argues that sex is a vastly less potent influence in
+life than the Puritans and psychanalysts maintain. He advocates the
+establishment of lay monasteries for men who care for neither God nor
+women.
+
+When he is at home he lunches at noon and dines at six. He never eats
+between meals. He never takes a drink before dinner save when on
+holiday.
+
+He most often begins his letters to men with the salutation “My dear
+Mon Chair.” To women, “My dear Mon Chairy.”
+
+A March ago, he attempted to give up smoking and sought to alleviate
+his longing for the weed by sucking slippery elm. He was again pulling
+at a stogie the following month.
+
+He has probably done more for talented young writers who have tried in
+vain to get a hearing with publishers than any other American critic.
+Of all those whom he has helped to obtain an hospitable ear, only one
+has ever so much as thanked him.
+
+He forgives anything in a friend—theft, perjury, or stupidity—anything
+save hypocrisy. But he has no use for loyalty in others. “Loyalty,” he
+says, “is the virtue of a dog.”
+
+He pokes fun at modern musical comedy, particularly the music thereof.
+Yet he has never heard “Sari” or “The Purple Road,” or the best of the
+last dozen scores of Victor Herbert.
+
+He believes, with Nathan, that the three best stories printed in _The
+Smart Set_ under their joint editorial direction have been “The Exiles’
+Club,” by Dunsany; “Ashes to Ashes,” by James Gardner Sanderson; and
+“The End of Ilsa Menteith,” by Lilith Benda. He believes, like Nathan,
+that the most charming sentimental story printed in _The Smart Set_ has
+been Lee Pape’s “Little Girl.” He believes, with Nathan, that the best
+epigram has been that sent in by an anonymous contributor: “When love
+dies there is no funeral. The corpse remains in the house.”
+
+He met Nathan for the first time in the chateau of the Comtesse Hélène
+de Firelle in the valley of the Loire, on August 10, 1906. Three days
+later they left together for a trip to Munich, to drink the waters.
+
+One of his best pieces of humor is a pun on “_non compos mentis_.” I
+cannot print it.
+
+A healthy man, he yet complains hourly of imaginary ailments.
+
+He has never seen Coney Island.
+
+When in his cups, he imagines himself a proficient bass singer.
+
+In the last three years he has been to the theater but once. On this
+occasion he accompanied Nathan to a piece called “Common Clay.” He
+remained twenty minutes.
+
+He uses handkerchiefs two feet wide.
+
+He always fights with Nathan for the bar or dinner check. His records
+of victories is eight per cent.
+
+Like Nathan, he dislikes to talk about business affairs or to listen
+to anyone talk about business affairs. Both he and Nathan leave their
+finances entirely in the hands of their competent partner, E. F.
+Warner.
+
+He and Nathan plan some day to collaborate on a satirical farce with
+scenes laid in a Turkish harem.
+
+In conversation he is given to an immoderate employment of the word
+“bemuse.”
+
+He believes the following to be his best epigram: “An
+anti-vivisectionist is one who gags at a guinea pig and swallows a
+baby.” To the contrary, I believe his best to be: “The charm of a man
+is measured by the charm of the women who think that he is a scoundrel.”
+
+He wrote dramatic criticisms in Baltimore for four years. At the end of
+that period, unable longer to bear the idiocies of the local theaters,
+he inserted a $200 half-page advertisement in each of the Baltimore
+newspapers to the effect that he would cause the arrest of the next
+manager who sent him tickets.
+
+He loves cocoanut pie.
+
+He smokes cigarettes only on rare occasions. He is not used to them
+and, on such occasions, holds the cigarette gingerly, as if it were
+going to bite him.
+
+Present at a mixed conversation, he frequently dozes off to sleep.
+
+When in New York, every night before retiring he eats a dozen large
+clams.
+
+He never drinks beer save in seidels.
+
+He has been to the Horse Show but once. On this occasion he remained
+three minutes.
+
+He does not dance.
+
+In Paris, in 1913, he hailed Nathan on the latter’s way to Southampton
+with this wireless: “Get off Cherbourg and come direct Paris. Have
+discovered place where they have good beer.”
+
+He is unable to sit at table upon finishing dinner. With the arrival of
+the finger-bowl he is off for a walk.
+
+He is, at bottom, a sentimentalist. True, he has no use for such
+things as babies, love stories (however good), or the Champs Élysées
+in the springtime (once while walking up the boulevard with Nathan he
+deplored the absence on it of a first-class drugstore), yet he succumbs
+moistly to Julia Sanderson singing, “They Wouldn’t Believe Me,” to a
+cemetery in the early green of May, to the lachrymose waltz from “Eva,”
+which he plays upon the piano in a melancholious _pianissimo_, and to
+any poem about a dog (however bad).
+
+His trousers are never creased. His clothes are always of a navy blue
+shade. He never wears a waistcoat. He buys the best cravats that can be
+obtained for fifty cents.
+
+He loves liqueurs, preferably _crême de cacao_. They always make him
+feel badly the next morning.
+
+He has written the following books: “A Book of Prefaces,” “A Little
+Book in C Major,” “A Book of Burlesques,” “The Battle of the
+Wilhelmstrasse,” “The Artist,” “The Gist of Nietzsche,” “The Philosophy
+of Friedrich Nietzsche,” “Europe after 8:15” (in collaboration with
+Nathan and Wright), “Men _vs._ the Man” (in collaboration with R. R. La
+Monte), and “George Bernard Shaw: His Plays.” The latter was the first
+book on Shaw ever published.
+
+He eats and enjoys all varieties of human food. There is no dish that
+he doesn’t eat. He has eaten snails, frogs, eels, octopus, catfish,
+goat meat, and Norwegian cheese. He thinks that the best roasts are the
+English, the best table wines the Spanish, the best pastry the Danish,
+the best soups the German, and the best cooking the French.
+
+He has visited the following countries: England, Holland, Norway,
+Denmark, Italy, Germany, Austria, Russia, Spain, France, Switzerland,
+and Cuba. He has never been in Canada or Mexico, and has never been
+further West than St. Louis.
+
+He has been under rifle and shell fire in this war, on the eastern
+front, and was glad to get under cover. He has been in France,
+Germany, and Russia during the war. He was nowhere mistaken for a spy,
+and was always treated courteously. He says that 99 per cent of the
+authors of war books are liars.
+
+His family is well-to-do, and he has never been dead broke.
+
+He has never seen a moving picture show.
+
+He is opposed to vice crusades, holding that the average prostitute is
+decenter than the average reformer. He ascribes the crusading spirit,
+following Freud, to a suppressed and pathological sexuality.
+
+He wears (and owns) no jewelry whatever, not even a scarfpin, but he
+sports a formidable Swiss watch, with a split second hand and a bell
+that strikes the quarter hours. He never wears gloves save in intensely
+cold weather.
+
+He owns and drives a 1916 Studebaker car, and never has it washed.
+
+Once, on receiving an amorous _billet doux_ from a fair admirer, he
+sent it back to the writer with a _Smart Set_ rejection slip.
+
+He frequently carries on a perfectly innocent conversation with Nathan
+in a low stage whisper, thus lending to his most trivial remarks a
+secret and sinister import.
+
+He introduced the new widespread use of “jitney” as an adjective. He
+also coined the words “smuthound” and “snouter,” both designating a
+“malignant moralist”—another of his invention.
+
+While playing the piano, he keeps the loud pedal glued to the floor
+from _couvert_ to _coda_.
+
+He and Nathan, in all the years of their friendship, have quarreled but
+once. This was in the late summer of 1916, when Mencken was suffering
+from a violent attack of hay fever and insisted upon going to bed one
+night at eleven o’clock, thus leaving the disgusted Nathan to kill
+time as best he could until midnight, at that period his hour for
+retiring.
+
+He never wears rubbers, carries an umbrella, or wears a mackintosh. He
+likes to walk in the rain and get wet.
+
+He alludes to all actors as “cabots.” For the plural of “genius” he
+uses “genii.”
+
+He travels with a suitcase large enough to transport a circus.
+
+At the age of twenty-nine he was invited to join the Elks.... The
+judge, a friend of his, reduced the charge from “assault with intent to
+kill” to “assault and battery.”
+
+He has never had typhoid fever, smallpox, cholera, scarlet fever,
+arthritis, appendicitis, or delirium tremens. He has never had a
+headache. He can digest anything.
+
+He has been involved, in his time, in eight lawsuits, and has won them
+all, chiefly by perjury.
+
+His first name is Henry; his middle name, Louis. He never spells them
+out, signing himself always simply H. L.
+
+He drinks a brand of cheap claret which he lays in in shipments of ten
+cases.
+
+He has presented the steward of the Florestan Club, of Baltimore, with
+a bronze medal for reviving Maryland hoe cake.
+
+A life-long opponent of Puritanism in all its forms, he is on good
+personal terms with many Puritan reformers, and always reads the tracts
+they send to him.
+
+He has been arrested four times, once in Paris, once in Copenhagen, and
+twice in America. He was acquitted each time, though guilty.
+
+He complains ceaselessly over what it costs him to live. Yet he is
+a liberal fellow and keeps Nathan supplied with cigars. The cigars,
+however, are not to Nathan’s taste.
+
+He is an omnivorous borrower of matches.
+
+He washes his hands twenty-four times a day.
+
+He writes directly upon the typewriter, never longhand. He signs all
+his letters with the episcopal “Yours in Xt.”
+
+For the last four years he and Nathan have been planning a motor trip
+through Virginia. They will never make it, both agree emphatically.
+
+His favorite dish is anything _à la Créole_.
+
+He once brought from abroad, as a gift to his negro cook, three dozen
+strings of Venetian beads. She is a strict Baptist and declined to wear
+them.
+
+His favorite novel is “Huckleberry Finn”; his favorite name for a
+woman, Maggie.
+
+He often goes without breakfast, and never eats more than an apple and
+a slice of dry bread.
+
+He and Nathan have their secretaries in _The Smart Set_ offices keep
+a list of forty-two bad writers. Opposite the name of each of the
+forty-two is the fine one must pay the other if the name is uttered by
+either.
+
+He slicks his hair down like the actor who plays the heroic lieutenant
+in the military dramas.
+
+He likes to ride down Fifth Avenue in a victoria.
+
+He owns a plaid shirt. He wears it.
+
+He has worn the same straw hat for five years. He cleans it every
+spring with a tooth-brush dipped in bicarbonate of soda and Pebeco
+tooth paste. Each spring he buys a new tooth-brush.
+
+He writes in a bare room. There is no carpet or rug on the floor. The
+only pictures on the wall are portraits of his great-great-grandfather,
+Ibsen, Conrad, Marcella Allonby, Mark Twain, and Johannes Brahms.
+
+He sleeps on a sleeping porch adjoining his office. He uses, as a
+blanket, a Persian shawl presented to him by the late Lafcadio Hearn.
+
+He has read 9872 bad novels during his active life as a literary
+critic.
+
+He is an artist of no mean ability. His portrait of Nathan, reproduced
+in the Chicago _Daily News_ in May, 1917, attracted wide attention
+and, among other things, brought him requests for sittings from Hamlin
+Garland, William Lyon Phelps, and Robert B. Mantell.
+
+He clips the ends off his cigars with his side teeth.
+
+He has written under the pseudonyms of William R. Fink, William
+Drayham, John F. Brownell, Harriet Morgan, W. L. D. Bell, Gladys
+Jefferson, and Baroness Julie Desplaines.
+
+He sees nothing beautiful about the Hudson from Riverside Drive, but
+believes St. Thomas’s to be one of the most beautiful churches in the
+world.
+
+He collects odd pieces of furniture, Japanese wood carvings, and bad
+plaster of paris casts.
+
+He knows two actors, George Fawcett and Frank Craven.
+
+He was taught how to swim by John Adams Thayer.
+
+He is the author of a farce that has played on Broadway for one hundred
+nights. To this authorship, no one save Nathan, James Huneker, A. H.
+Woods, and myself have been privy.
+
+His high-water marks in the matter of malt bibbing are as follows:
+Pschorrbräu, Munich, 8 _masses_ in two hours and seven minutes;
+Appenrodt’s, Paris, 9 _seidels_ in one hour and a quarter; Lüchow’s,
+New York, 13 _seidels_ and one glass in one hour, twenty-one minutes
+and twelve seconds. Timers: Pschorrbräu, Arthur Abbott, H. B. M.
+vice-consul; Appenrodt’s, Pierre Disdebaux, of Marseilles, France;
+Lüchow’s, Theodore Dreiser, of Warsaw, Indiana, U. S. A.
+
+He was a regular reader of the _Boston Transcript_, the New York
+_Times_, and the _Youth’s Companion_, up to the age of ten.
+
+He believes W. L. George to be the best of the younger English
+novelists.
+
+His signature runs up hill.
+
+He has been cured of hay-fever and is at present writing a pamphlet
+extolling the discoverers of the cure.
+
+He admires the kind of Munich “art” that is sold in the Fifth Avenue
+shops at $4.35 the picture.
+
+He likes to look in shop windows. He has never ridden in a Ferris Wheel.
+
+He laments the fact that he gets no exercise and contemplates fixing up
+a carpenter shop in the basement of his house in Baltimore, so that he
+may saw and chop his arms back into muscular shape.
+
+He numbers the paragraphs of his letters and never writes more than six
+paragraphs.
+
+The English critics hailed his Nietzsche book as the best thing of its
+sort that had come out of America.
+
+He has never read Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” or “Pericles, Prince
+of Tyre.”
+
+He believes that all fat women are sentimental and says that the
+publisher who will edit a magazine for this clientèle will make a
+fortune. Inasmuch as magazine fiction heroines are at present always
+slim, elf-like creatures, he contends that the sentimental fat girl
+never gets a fair chance to enjoy herself, and that, accordingly, a
+magazine with no heroine weighing less than one hundred and ninety
+pounds would in one year put Cyrus K. Curtis in the pauper class.
+
+Like Nathan, he believes that the theory that it is difficult to
+make money is poppycock. If one is willing to give the public what
+it wants, anyone—argue these two—can get rich very quickly. To prove
+their contention, they outlined plans for several cheap magazines three
+years ago, which, upon being put into circulation, proved immediate and
+overwhelming successes. Mencken and Nathan, at the end of six months,
+sold their joint interest for $100,000. They argue that the thing is as
+simple as rolling off a log, and that any person who is interested in
+this sort of thing may become a Street-and-Smith or Munsey overnight.
+
+At the age of nineteen, he invented a slot machine for the vending of
+patent medicines on excursion boats.
+
+He has read “Huckleberry Finn” twenty-seven times. He reads the book
+once a year, regularly.
+
+He has never seen Mrs. Castle, Mary Garden, Ann Pennington, Maurice and
+Walton, Mary Pickford, or Secretary Lansing.
+
+He has shaken hands with Billy Sunday.
+
+Wherever he goes he carries a Corona typewriter. He paid $50 cash
+for it, but nevertheless he has given the manufacturers an eloquent
+testimonial. He writes on cheap newspaper copy-paper.
+
+He is fond of candy.
+
+He is an ardent defender of organized charity, arguing that it helps
+progress by making charity difficult and obnoxious.
+
+He is often mistaken for a misogynist. He is actually a strict
+monogamist. He believes that all men are naturally monogamists, and
+that polygamy is due to vanity.
+
+He began to edit the plays of Ibsen in 1910, but abandoned the
+enterprise after he had issued “A Doll’s House” and “Little Eyolf.”
+
+He is a bitter opponent of Christian Science, and has written all sorts
+of things, from epigrams to long articles, against it.
+
+The La Mencken cigar, once popular throughout the South, was not named
+after him, but after his father.
+
+He is a good sailor, and has been seasick but once—on a 1000-ton
+British tramp in a West Indian hurricane.
+
+In blood he is chiefly Saxon, Danish, Bavarian, and Irish—no
+Anglo-Saxon, no Prussian, no Latin. The portraits of his Saxon
+forefathers show strong Slavic traces. He is the present head of the
+family. A Mencken, in the seventeenth century, founded the first
+scientific review in Europe. Another was privy councilor to Frederick
+the Great. Another was rector of the University of Leipzig. Yet another
+was chief justice of the supreme court there. A Mlle. Mencken was the
+mother of Bismarck.
+
+The Menckenii were converted to Christianity in 1569, but returned
+to paganism during the Napoleonic wars, in which twelve of them were
+killed and sixty-three wounded.
+
+The present Mencken is an amateur of military science, and has written
+a brochure, privately printed, on the Battle of Tannenberg.
+
+He writes very slowly and laboriously, save when writing for
+newspapers. Then he is highly facile, and can turn out a two-column
+article in three hours. He has never learned to dictate.
+
+He used to have a mole on the back of his neck, but had it removed in
+the summer of 1913.
+
+He is not afraid of the dark, or of spiders, or of snakes, or of cats.
+He likes dogs better than any other animals, and regards them as more
+respectable than men.
+
+If he could choose another given name it would be Francis.
+
+He owns two hundred acres of land near Innsbruck, in the Tyrol, and
+will build a bungalow on it after the war.
+
+He is a violent anti-Socialist, as “Men _vs._ the Man” shows, but he
+reads all the new Socialist books.
+
+In American history the men he most admires are Washington, Jefferson,
+Hamilton, and Cleveland. He has a low opinion of Lincoln, Jackson, and
+Bryan.
+
+He is handy with horses, and can drive four-in-hand.
+
+He detests cut flowers, carpets, the sea-shore, hotels, zoological
+gardens, the subway, the Y. M. C. A., literary women, witch hazel,
+talcum powder, limp leather bookbindings, aerated waters, bottled
+beer, low collars, public libraries, and phonographs.
+
+He is a Cockney, and prefers the city to the country.
+
+He never wears tan shoes.
+
+He can swallow castor oil without disgust and without needing a chaser,
+but he never does so.
+
+Next to Pilsner and Burgundy (or, in wartime, Michelob) his favorite
+drink is city water direct from the tap—no ice.
+
+He chews cigars.
+
+He is a very fast reader and can get through a two hundred-page book in
+an hour.
+
+
+IV
+
+So much for my observations and investigations of the two gentlemen,
+MM. Nathan and Mencken. I have told you, not everything that is known
+about them, nor even all that I know myself, but enough, I hope, to
+enable you to conjure up colorable images of them. As I have said, it
+is by such small and often grotesque lights that character is genuinely
+illuminated—not by the steady and distorting glare of orthodox
+biography. It remains for me to tell you how they do their joint
+work—work which rests upon the apparently perilous basis of an absolute
+equality of authority, for each owns exactly the same amount of stock
+in _The Smart Set_ Company that the other owns, and each is editor
+equally with the other, and both derive from the property exactly the
+same revenue, to a cent.
+
+Their system is very simple and admirably workable. When either, by
+any internal or external process, generates an idea for the conduct of
+the magazine, he lays it before the other in all its details. This is
+always done in writing; never orally. If the other approves the idea he
+writes upon the brief the words “Nihil obstat,” and it is forthwith
+executed. If, on the contrary, he disapproves, he indorses it with
+the word “Veto” and it is returned. The same idea may be revived by
+its author thirty days later, but not before. If thrice vetoed it is
+forever banned. The office records for the past three years yield the
+following:
+
+                Plans Proposed  Approved  Vetoed
+  By Nathan           18           13        5
+  By Mencken          12            8        4
+
+In the handling of manuscripts they pursue a somewhat analogous system.
+Mencken never reads manuscripts while in New York; all such work he
+does in Baltimore. As the offerings of authors are received in the
+office they are scrutinized by Nathan’s secretary, and the following
+classes are weeded out and immediately returned:
+
+ Mss. written in pencil or with green, purple, or red typewriter
+ ribbons.
+
+ Mss. fastened together with ribbons or pins.
+
+ Mss. radiating any scent or other odor.
+
+ Mss. of plays which begin with soliloquies into a telephone.
+
+ Mss. bearing the recommendations of the editors of other magazines.
+
+ Mss. accompanied by letters of more than one hundred words.
+
+ Mss. accompanied by circulars advertising books written by their
+ authors or by other printed matter.
+
+ Mss. of poetry by poets whose names do not appear upon a list in the
+ possession of the secretary.
+
+Once this preliminary clearing out is accomplished, the manuscripts
+that remain are shipped to Mencken, and he reads them within twenty
+four hours. Those that he rejects are returned to their authors. Those
+that he approves are returned to Nathan, with the Dano-Norwegian word
+“bifald,” signifying assent, written across the first page of each.
+They are then read by Nathan, and if he agrees they are purchased and
+paid for at once. If he disagrees they are returned without further
+process. Once a manuscript is bought it goes to Mencken a second time,
+and he reads it again. If he finds that it needs revision in detail,
+it is turned over to his private secretary and valet, an intelligent
+Maryland colored man named William F. Beauchamp, a graduate of Harvard.
+After it has passed through Beauchamp’s hands it is set up in type. In
+case Mencken deems it necessary to reject a manuscript by an author
+who must be treated politely, he sends it back with a note putting
+the blame on Nathan. In case Nathan, in like circumstances, votes no,
+he blames it upon Mencken. This, of course, is lying, but in the long
+run it amounts to the truth. The two never discuss manuscripts; they
+simply vote. They never buy anything from personal friends. They have a
+strict agreement, in fact, that each will automatically veto anything
+sent in by an author with whom he is on good terms. This agreement is
+never violated. Nathan, for example, has a brother who, under a _nom
+de plume_, is a frequent contributor to the leading magazines, but
+is barred from _The Smart Set_ by the relationship. In the same way
+Mencken was, until recently, the intimate friend and confidant of an
+eminent woman novelist, but her work has never appeared in _The Smart
+Set_.
+
+When Mencken is in New York, he and Nathan meet at _The Smart Set_
+office every day, including Sunday, at 10 A.M., and spend two hours
+discussing the minor business of the magazine. At noon they proceed
+to Delmonico’s and have luncheon, returning at 3 P.M. They finish all
+business by 4:30, when they leave the office. They often dine together
+and spend the evening together, but they never discuss office matters
+at such times. They never invite authors to luncheon or dinner and
+never accept invitations from them. They never attend literary parties
+or visit studios. They are not acquainted with any of the literary
+lions of New York, saving only Dreiser and Huneker.
+
+Thus these meritorious _redacteurs_ live and have their being. Neither
+belongs to a literary clique; neither subscribes to a clipping bureau;
+neither ever sits on a committee or joins a movement; neither needs
+money; neither ever borrows anything or asks a favor; neither is
+accountable to anyone; neither is ever indignant; neither gives a damn.
+
+
+
+
+  Transcriber’s Notes
+
+  pg 29 Changed: The End of Ilsa Mentieth by Lilith Benda
+             to: The End of Ilsa Menteith by Lilith Benda
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75507 ***
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+      Pistols For Two | Project Gutenberg
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+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75507 ***</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 85%">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="">
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h1>PISTOLS FOR TWO</h1>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center no-indent lh">BY<br>
+<span class="fs120">OWEN HATTERAS</span></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdc">NEW YORK</td>
+<td><img src="images/ititle.jpg" alt="Decoration" style="width: 100px"></td>
+<td class="tdc">MCMXVII</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="center no-indent wsp fs150">ALFRED · A · KNOPF
+</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center no-indent fs80"><em>Published, September, 1917</em></p>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs80">PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<table class="autotable lh">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdr fs70">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">George Jean Nathan</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#GEORGE_JEAN_NATHAN">5</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">H. L. Mencken</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#H_L_MENCKEN">21</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</span></p>
+
+<p class="center no-indent wsp fs150">PISTOLS FOR TWO</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="r65">
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="I">I</h3>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Biography</span> fails, like psychology, because it so
+often mistakes complexity for illumination. Its
+aim is to present a complete picture of a man;
+its effect is usually to make an impenetrable mystery of
+him. The cause of this, it seems to me, lies in the fact
+that the biographer always tries to explain him utterly,
+to account for him in every detail, to give an unbroken
+coherence to all his acts and ideas. The result is a wax
+dummy, as smooth as glass but as unalive as a dill pickle.</p>
+
+<p>It is by no such process of exhaustion that we get our
+notions of the people we really know. We see them, not
+as complete images, but as processions of flashing points.
+Their personalities, so to speak, are not revealed brilliantly
+and in the altogether, but as shy things that peep
+out, now and then, from inscrutable swathings, giving
+us a hint, a suggestion, a moment of understanding.
+Does a man really know what is going on in his wife’s
+mind? Not if she <em>has</em> a mind. What he knows is only
+that infinitesimal part which she reveals, sometimes
+deliberately and even truculently, but more often naïvely,
+surreptitiously, accidentally. He judges her as a human
+being, not by anything approaching entire knowledge
+of her, but by bold and scattered inferences. He sees
+her soul, in so far as he sees it at all, in the way she buttons
+her boots, in the way she intrigues for a kiss, in the way
+she snaps her eye at him when he has been naughty—interprets<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</span> 
+her ego in terms of her taste in ribbons,
+the scent of her hair, her quarrels with her sisters, her
+fashion of eating artichokes, her skill at home millinery,
+the débris on her dressing table, her preferences in the
+theater, her care of her teeth.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, by slow degrees, he accumulates an image of
+her—an image changing incessantly, and never more
+than half sensed. After long years, perhaps, he begins
+to know her after a fashion. That is, he knows how many
+shredded wheat biscuits she likes for breakfast, how
+much of his business she understands, how long she can
+read a first-class novel without napping, what she thinks
+of woolen underwear, the New Irish Movement, the
+family doctor, soft-boiled eggs, and God....</p>
+
+<p>I enter upon these considerations because I have been
+employed by a committee of <i lang="es" xml:lang="es">aluminados</i>, heeled well
+enough to pay my honorarium, to conjure up recognizable
+images of MM. George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken,
+that their scattered partisans and the public generally
+may see them more clearly. The job has its difficulties,
+for save in their joint editorial concern with <cite>The Smart
+Set</cite> magazine and their common antipathy to certain
+prevailing sophistries, they are no more alike than a
+hawk and a handsaw. But in one other thing, at least,
+they also coalesce, and that is in the paucity of news
+about them. Most other magazine editors are constantly
+in the papers—discoursing on the literary art,
+agitating for this or that, getting themselves interviewed.
+These twain, however, pursue a more <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">pianissimo</i> course,
+and so not much is known about them, even inaccurately....</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>The job invites. One reads regularly what magazine
+editors think of their contributors, but who ever reads
+what magazine contributors—of whom I, Hatteras, am<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</span>
+one—think of their editors? A vast and adventurous
+field here enrolls itself, believe me. I know, more or less
+intimately, most of the editors of the great American periodicals,
+and I am constantly amused by the inaccuracy
+of the prevailing notions about them—notions diligently
+fostered, in many cases, by their own more or less
+subtle chicane. Consider, for example, the dean of the
+order, M. George Harvey, of the <cite>North American Review</cite>.
+His portrait shows a thoughtful old gentleman reading
+a book, his forefinger pressed affectionately against his
+right frontal sinus. Recalling the high mental pressure
+of his daily concerns, one concludes at once that he is
+struggling through Talboys Wheeler’s epitome of the
+Maha-Bhārāta, or Locke’s “Conduct of the Understanding.”
+But I have it from the Colonel himself—a
+confidence quite spontaneous and apparently sincere—that
+at the precise moment the photographer squeezed
+the bird he was thinking—what? Simply this: how
+much prettier Mlle. Mary Pickford would be if her lower
+limbs were less richly developed laterally. The book was
+the <cite>Photoplay Magazine</cite>.</p>
+
+<p>Again, there is M. Robert H. Davis, editor of the
+Munsey publications. The official views of M. Davis
+depict him as a man of the great outdoors, a stalker of
+the superior carnivora, a dead shot, a fisher of tarpons
+and sharks, a rover of the primeval forests. He is dressed
+up like a cover of <cite>Field and Stream</cite>, a doggish pipe in his
+mouth, his tropics formidably encircled by cartridges
+and fish worms. But what are the facts? The facts
+are that Davis does all his fishing in the Fulton Market,
+and that the bear-skin which in his pictures he is seen
+holding triumphantly at arm’s length actually graces
+his library floor and was bought at Revillon Frères. He
+is a God-fearing, mild-mannered, and respectable man,
+an admirer of Elihu Root, a Prohibitionist, a member
+of the Red Cross and the S. P. C. A. The only actual<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</span>
+hunting he ever does is to hunt for someone to agree
+with him that M. Irvin Cobb is a greater man than
+Mark Twain or Dostoievsky. And when it comes to
+fishing, he has said all he has to say when he brings up a
+couple of sardellen out of the mayonnaise.</p>
+
+<p>Yet again, there are such fellows as Doty, of the
+<cite>Century</cite>; Towne, of <cite>McClure’s</cite>; Bok, of the <cite>Ladies’
+Home Journal</cite>; Siddall, of the <cite>American</cite>; and Fox, of
+the <cite>Police Gazette</cite>. Doty prints Edith Wharton and
+Rabindranath Tagore—and reads, by choice, H. C.
+Witwer and Selma Lagerlöf. Fox collects Chinese jades
+and Sheraton chairs, and is a member of the Lake Mohonk
+Conference. Siddall used to be a hoochie-coochie sideshow
+ballyhoo with Ringling’s Circus. Towne, throwing
+off the editorial mask of moral indignation, writes tender
+triolets in the privacy of his chambers. Bok, viewed
+popularly as a muff—the wags of the National Press
+Club once put him down as one of the ladies entertained
+by them—is a rough, wild creature, a huge, knobby
+Hollander, with a voice like an auctioneer’s. And Eastman
+of the <cite>Masses</cite>, the prophet of revolt, the savior of
+the oppressed—what of Eastman? Eastman, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">au naturel</i>,
+gives no more damns for the oppressed than you or
+I. His aim in life, the last time I met him in society,
+was to find a chauffeur who was not a drunkard and had
+no flair for debauching the parlor-maids. On this theme
+he pumped up ten times the eloquence he has ever emitted
+over Unearned Increments and Wage Slaves.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>In a similar way are the MM. George Jean Nathan
+and H. L. Mencken misviewed. And it is because I
+see here an opportunity to experiment with my private
+theory of biography that I enter with some enjoyment
+the enterprise, thus thrown on me, of exhibiting the facts.
+To this end, I herewith present a list of the things I<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</span>
+happen to know about the two gentlemen in question,
+leaving whoever cares for the job to go through it and
+construct for himself a definite and symmetrical effigy. So:</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="GEORGE_JEAN_NATHAN">GEORGE JEAN NATHAN</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>He was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, February 14 and
+15 (the stunning event occurred precisely at 12 midnight)
+1882.</p>
+
+<p>His boyhood ambition was to be an African explorer
+in a pith helmet, with plenty of room on the chest ribbon
+for medals that would be bestowed upon him by the
+beauteous Crown Princess of Luxembourg.</p>
+
+<p>He was educated at Cornell University and the
+University of Bologna, in Italy.</p>
+
+<p>He is a man of middle height, straight, slim, dark,
+with eyes like the middle of August, black hair which he
+brushes back <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">à la française</i>, and a rather sullen mouth.</p>
+
+<p>He smokes from the moment his man turns off the
+matutinal showerbath until his man turns it on again at
+bedtime.</p>
+
+<p>He rarely eats meat.</p>
+
+<p>He lives in a bachelor apartment, nearly one-third of
+which is occupied by an ice-box containing refreshing
+beverages. On the walls of his apartment are the pictures
+of numerous toothsome creatures. He is at the
+present time occupied in writing a book describing his
+sentimental adventures among them.</p>
+
+<p>He has published the following books: “Europe After
+8:15,” in collaboration with Mencken and Mr. Willard
+Huntington Wright; “Another Book on the Theater,”
+“Bottoms Up,” and “Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents.”</p>
+
+<p>He has written for almost every magazine in America,
+except <cite>Good Housekeeping</cite> and <cite>The Nation</cite>.</p>
+
+<p>He dresses like the late Ward McAllister and wears
+daily a boutonnière of blue corn flowers.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</span></p>
+
+<p>He dislikes women over twenty-one, actors, cold
+weather, mayonnaise dressing, people who are always
+happy, hard chairs, invitations to dinner, invitations to
+serve on committees in however worthy a cause, railroad
+trips, public restaurants, rye whisky, chicken, daylight,
+men who do not wear waistcoats, the sight of a woman
+eating, the sound of a woman singing, small napkins,
+Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Tagore, Dickens, Bataille, fried
+oysters, German soubrettes, French John Masons,
+American John Masons, tradesmen, poets, married
+women who think of leaving their husbands, professional
+anarchists of all kinds, ventilation, professional music
+lovers, men who tell how much money they have made,
+men who affect sudden friendships and call him Georgie,
+women who affect sudden friendships and then call him
+Mr. Nathan, writing letters, receiving letters, talking
+over the telephone, and wearing a hat.</p>
+
+<p>In religion he is a complete agnostic, and views all
+clergymen with a sardonic eye. He does not believe
+that the soul is immortal. What will happen after death
+he doesn’t know and has never inquired.</p>
+
+<p>He is subject to neuralgia. He is a hypochondriac
+and likes to rehearse his symptoms. Nevertheless, a
+thorough physical examination has shown that he is
+quite sound. His Wassermann reaction is, and always
+has been, negative. He is eugenically fit.</p>
+
+<p>He never reads the political news in the papers. He
+belongs to a college fraternity and several university
+societies.</p>
+
+<p>The room in which he works is outfitted with shaded
+lamps and heavy hangings, and somewhat suggests a
+first-class bordello. He works with his coat on and shuts
+the windows and pulls down all the curtains. He writes
+with a pencil on sheets of yellow paper. He cannot use
+a typewriter.</p>
+
+<p>He detests meeting people, even on business, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</span>
+swears every time a caller is announced at <cite>The Smart Set</cite>
+office. He never receives a woman caller save with his
+secretary in the room.</p>
+
+<p>He wears an amethyst ring. In his waistcoat pocket
+he carries an elegant golden device for snapping off the
+heads of cigars. He has his shoes shined daily, even
+when it rains.</p>
+
+<p>Like the late McKinley, he smokes but half of a cigar,
+depositing the rest in the nearest spitbox. Like Mark
+Twain, he enjoys the more indelicate varieties of humor.
+Like Beethoven, he uses neither morphine nor cocaine.
+Like Sitting Bull and General Joffre, he has never read
+the Constitution of the United States.</p>
+
+<p>He bought Liberty Bonds. He can eat spinach only
+when it is chopped fine. He knows French, Latin,
+Italian, and German, but is ignorant of Greek. He plays
+the piano by ear.</p>
+
+<p>In his taste in girls, he runs to the <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">demi-tasse</i>. I have
+never heard of him showing any interest in a woman
+more than five feet in height, or weighing more than
+105 pounds.</p>
+
+<p>An anarchist in criticism, he is in secret a very diligent
+student of Lessing, Schlegel, Hazlitt, and Brandes. His
+pet aversion, among critics, was the late William Winter.</p>
+
+<p>He has no interest in any sport, save tennis and fencing,
+and never plays cards. He never accepts an invitation
+to dinner if he can avoid it by lying. He never goes to
+weddings, and knows few persons who marry.</p>
+
+<p>As a critic, he has been barred from many theaters.
+A. L. Erlanger, in particular, is a manager who views
+him as a colleague of Mephisto.</p>
+
+<p>He eats very little.</p>
+
+<p>He drinks numerous cocktails (invariably the species
+known as “orange blossom,” to which he has added
+two drops of Grenadine), a rich Burgundy, and, now and
+then, a bit of brandy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</span></p>
+
+<p>He once told me that he had no use for a woman who
+wasn’t sad at twilight.</p>
+
+<p>He has two male companions—so many and no more:
+Mencken and John D. Williams, the theatrical producer.
+He is rarely seen with any other.</p>
+
+<p>He was born, as the expression has it, with a gold spoon
+in his mouth. He has never had to work for a living.</p>
+
+<p>He works daily from 10 <span class="allsmcap">A.M.</span> until 5 <span class="allsmcap">P.M.</span> He plays
+from 5:30 until 8:30. Evenings, he spends in the theater.
+After the theater, he has supper. He retires anywhere
+from 11 <span class="allsmcap">P.M.</span> to 3 <span class="allsmcap">A.M.</span></p>
+
+<p>He has made many trips abroad and has lived at different
+times in France, England, Germany, Italy, Austria,
+the Argentine, India, Japan and Algiers.</p>
+
+<p>He fell in love at first sight in 1913 with a flower girl
+in the Luitpold Café in Munich, but the hussy was
+distant.</p>
+
+<p>He would rather have Lord Dunsany in <cite>The Smart
+Set</cite> once than William Dean Howells a hundred times.</p>
+
+<p>He often writes sentences so involved that he confesses
+he himself doesn’t know what they mean.</p>
+
+<p>He admires Max Beerbohm, Conrad, Dr. Llewellys
+Barker, Mozart, the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies and
+the songs in “Oh, Boy,” sardines, ravioli, Havelock Ellis
+chocolate cake, Molnar, Hauptmann, Royalton cigars,
+Anatole France, <cite>Simplicissimus</cite>, <cite>E. W. Howe’s Monthly</cite>,
+an eiderdown blanket and a hard pillow, a thick-toothed
+comb and stiff brush, Schnitzler, bitter almond
+soap, George Ade, Richard Strauss, Pilsner, Huneker,
+Florenz Ziegfeld, Edwin Lefèvre’s story “Without End,”
+the quartette in the Piccadilly in London, the Café Viel
+in Paris, the overcoat shop in the Stefansplatz in Vienna,
+the strawberries in the Palais de Danse in Berlin.</p>
+
+<p>He believes, politically, in an autocracy of the elect,
+for the elect, and by the elect.... His father was a
+Democrat.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span></p>
+
+<p>He has written one play, “The Eternal Mystery,”
+which was produced on the Continent in 1914 and in
+America in 1915. He has forbidden the production of
+the play henceforth in any American city save Chicago,
+in which city anyone who chooses may perform it without
+payment of royalties.</p>
+
+<p>In 1904 he won the Amsler gold medal for proficiency
+with the foils. He studied fencing under Lieutenant
+Philip Brigandi, of the Italian cavalry, and Captain
+Albert Androux, the celebrated French master of foils.</p>
+
+<p>Fifteen minutes in the sun gives his complexion the
+shade of mahogany; twenty minutes, the shade of Booker
+T. Washington.</p>
+
+<p>He wears the lightest weight underwear through the
+coldest winter.</p>
+
+<p>He owns thirty-eight overcoats of all sorts and descriptions.
+Overcoats are a fad with him. He has them
+from heavy Russian fur to the flimsiest homespun....
+He owns one with an alpine hood attachment.</p>
+
+<p>He belongs to several metropolitan clubs, but never
+enters them.</p>
+
+<p>He has never been in jail. He has been arrested but once:
+at the age of twenty for beating up a street-car conductor.</p>
+
+<p>He always has his jackets made with two breast pockets:
+one for his handkerchief, the other for his reading glasses.
+The latter are of the horn species.</p>
+
+<p>His telephone operator, at his apartment, has a list
+of five persons to whom he will talk—so many and no
+more. He refuses to answer the telephone before five
+o’clock in the afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>His favorite places of eating in New York are the
+Café des Beaux Arts, the Kloster Glocke, and the Japanese
+Garden in the Ritz.</p>
+
+<p>He can down several hundred olives at a single sitting.</p>
+
+<p>He knows more about the modern foreign theater
+than any other American.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span></p>
+
+<p>He is a lineal descendant of Petöfi Sándor, the national
+poet of Hungary, and of Thomas Bourgchier, archbishop
+of Canterbury.</p>
+
+<p>An examination of his blood, on July 1, 1917, showed:
+Hb., 111%; W. B. C., 8,175. A phthalein test showed:
+1st hr., 50%, 2d hr., 20%; total, 70%. Blood pressure:
+129/77. Gastric analysis: Free HCl, 11.5%; combined,
+20%. No stasis. No lactic acid.</p>
+
+<p>He entered the New York Public Library for the first
+time on March 7, 1917, being taken there by A. Toxen
+Worm, of Copenhagen.</p>
+
+<p>He never accepts a dinner invitation until invited
+three separate times, and then usually sends his regrets
+at the last moment.</p>
+
+<p>The living Americans who most interest him are
+Josephus Daniels and Frank A. Munsey.</p>
+
+<p>The only poet that he admires is John McClure. He seldom
+reads poetry. He has never read “Paradise Lost.”</p>
+
+<p>He never visits a house a second time in which he has
+encountered dogs, cats, children, automatic pianos,
+grace before or after meals, women authors, actors,
+<cite>The New Republic</cite>, or prints of the Mona Lisa.</p>
+
+<p>He is not acquainted with a single clergyman, Congressman,
+general, or reformer. He has never met any
+of the Vice-Presidents of the United States.</p>
+
+<p>He is free of adenoids.</p>
+
+<p>His knee jerks are normal.</p>
+
+<p>He has never been inside a church.</p>
+
+<p>He has been writing dramatic criticism for thirteen
+successive years, and in that time has seen more than
+3000 plays in America, 400 in England, and 1900 on
+the Continent. He has simultaneously syndicated critical
+articles to as many as forty-two newspapers, and has
+served as dramatic critic to seven metropolitan magazines.</p>
+
+<p>In 1910, on a wager, he wrote sixteen magazine articles
+in a single month.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span></p>
+
+<p>Among his short stories are “D. S. W.,” “Nothing
+to Declare,” “But I Love Her,” “The Soul Song,” “The
+Triple Expense,” etc.</p>
+
+<p>Among his most widely quoted retorts is that made by
+him to the newspaper interviewer who asked him if it
+was true that a disgruntled theatrical manager named
+Gest had alluded to him as a “pinhead.” “That,” replied
+Nathan, “is on the face of it absurd. ‘Pinhead’ is a
+word of two syllables.”</p>
+
+<p>He once observed that the reason the galleries of our
+theaters, as our theatrical managers lament, are no
+longer filled with newsboys is that all the newsboys are
+now theatrical managers.</p>
+
+<p>He wrote the introduction to Eleanor Gates’ play,
+“The Poor Little Rich Girl.”</p>
+
+<p>He is the first American critic to have written of the
+dramatists Molnar, Brighouse, and Bracco.</p>
+
+<p>His mother’s family were the pioneer settlers of Fort
+Wayne, Indiana. His father’s family were figures in the
+continental world of letters. His father spoke eleven
+languages, including the Chinese.</p>
+
+<p>He frequently spends an entire afternoon polishing
+up a sentence in one of his compositions. And he
+often stops writing for a couple of days, or as long as
+it takes him, to hit upon an appropriate adjective or
+phrase.</p>
+
+<p>He never writes love letters, and seldom reads them.</p>
+
+<p>He cannot operate a motor car, or cook anything, or
+wind a dynamo, or fix a clock, or guess the answer to
+a riddle, or milk a cow.</p>
+
+<p>He regards camping out as the most terrible diversion
+ever invented by man.</p>
+
+<p>He knows nothing of country life, and cannot tell a
+wheat field from a potato patch. He regards all deciduous
+trees as oaks, and all evergreens as cedars.</p>
+
+<p>He has yet to drink his first glass of Hires’ Root Beer.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span></p>
+
+<p>He regards Al Woods as the most competent commercial
+manager in the American theater.</p>
+
+<p>His library contains every known book on the drama
+published in the English, French, German, and Italian
+languages.</p>
+
+<p>He owns many of the original Dunsany manuscripts.</p>
+
+<p>Accused by certain of his critics of a flippant attitude
+toward the drama, he in reality takes the drama very
+seriously. The theater, on the other hand, he regards
+four out of five times as a joke.</p>
+
+<p>He concurs in the Walpole philosophy that life is a
+tragedy to him who feels and a comedy to him who
+thinks.</p>
+
+<p>He is a good listener. His invariable practice with
+talkers is to let the latter talk themselves out and then,
+after a moment’s studious silence, to nod his head and
+say yes. He never argues, never disagrees, no matter
+how bizarre the conversationalist’s pronunciamentos.</p>
+
+<p>The Paris journal, <cite>Le Temps</cite>, frequently translates his
+critical articles and quotes from them copiously.</p>
+
+<p>He owns an autographed photograph of the Russian
+mystic, Rasputin, presented to him by the latter six
+years ago.</p>
+
+<p>He dislikes all forms of publicity. He has an aversion
+to self-advertisement that amounts almost to a mania.
+He believes, with Mencken, that whom the gods would
+destroy, they first make popular.</p>
+
+<p>He takes a companion with him to the theater only on
+rare occasions. He uses the extra seat sent him by the
+managers as a depository for his hat and overcoat.</p>
+
+<p>He always has thirty or forty lead pencils beside him
+when he writes. The moment one becomes a trifle dull
+he picks up another. He cannot sharpen the pencils
+well enough to suit himself and has the job done by his
+secretary.</p>
+
+<p>He hasn’t the slightest intention of ever getting married.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span></p>
+
+<p>He believes that the motor trip from Watkins Glen
+to Elmira, in New York State, is the most beautiful in
+America.</p>
+
+<p>Among the Presidents of the United States he admires
+most—and by long odds—the late Grover Cleveland.</p>
+
+<p>He believes the dirtiest spot in the world to be the
+Azores.</p>
+
+<p>He believes Shaw’s “Cæsar and Cleopatra” to be the
+best modern British play, Brieux’s “Les Hannetons”
+the best modern French play, and Dunsany’s “Gods of
+the Mountain” the best modern Irish play.</p>
+
+<p>He gets squiffed about once in six weeks, usually in
+company with John Williams. He has a headache the
+next day.</p>
+
+<p>He carries a tube of menthol in his pocket and sniffs
+at it forty times a day.</p>
+
+<p>He has been writing his monthly article for <cite>The Smart
+Set</cite> since 1909. He and Mencken became editors of
+the magazine in August, 1914.</p>
+
+<p>He began his career as a man of letters by reporting
+for the New York <cite>Herald</cite>. He reads the <cite>Times</cite> and
+<cite>Globe</cite> daily.</p>
+
+<p>Among his critical contemporaries in New York he
+has the highest respect for Louis Sherwin. Of American
+dramatists he most admires Avery Hopwood. Of
+American dramatic critics his vote is probably for Henry
+T. Parker, of the Boston <cite>Transcript</cite>.</p>
+
+<p>In his own opinion, the best thing he has ever written
+is “The Eternal Mystery.”</p>
+
+<p>He has never been to Washington, nor to California,
+nor to Boston.</p>
+
+<p>He has never made a speech, nor delivered a lecture,
+nor sat on a committee. He has never subscribed to a
+charity fund.</p>
+
+<p>He wears a No. 14½ collar and No. 7¼ hat. His favorite
+soup is <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Crême de Sante</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span></p>
+
+<p>The only author he ever invites to his office is Harry
+Kemp. He detests Kemp’s poetry.</p>
+
+<p>The temperature of his daily bath is 67 degrees.</p>
+
+<p>A practitioner of preciosity in style, he nevertheless
+dictates business and social letters in a “would say”
+manner, and has his secretary sign them.</p>
+
+<p>In 1900 he fought a duel with pistols outside of
+Florence, Italy, and was wounded in the left shoulder.
+He is still a trifle lame from the wound.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to America in 1912 on the <em>Philadelphia</em>,
+during a rough passage he was the only passenger on
+the ship to appear in the dining saloon for four successive
+days. With three of the stewards, he passed the time
+by improvising a bowling alley in the saloon, utilizing
+mutton chops for the pins and oranges for the balls. The
+latter were automatically returned to the bowlers by
+the ship’s periodical pitch backward.</p>
+
+<p>He has had the same barber for fourteen years. Curiously
+enough, the barber’s name is George J. Nath.</p>
+
+<p>His valet’s name is Osuka F. Takami. The latter has
+a penchant for polishing Nathan’s patent leather boots
+with the sofa pillows.</p>
+
+<p>He has seen only one vaudeville show in the last eight
+years.</p>
+
+<p>He believes that Herma Prach is the prettiest girl on
+the Viennese stage and Gladys Gaynor the prettiest on
+the London stage. He has never seen a pretty girl on
+either the Berlin or Paris stage.</p>
+
+<p>His headquarters in London is the Savoy; in Berlin,
+the Adlon; in Vienna, the Grand; in Paris, the Astra.</p>
+
+<p>He has never eaten a pickled eel, calf’s brains, chicken
+livers, or tongue.</p>
+
+<p>He has never been in a Childs’ restaurant or in Rector’s.</p>
+
+<p>He is of a nervous temperament and the slightest
+sound during the night wakes him up.</p>
+
+<p>He looks seven years younger than he is.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span></p>
+
+<p>He has been shot at three times in America, but never
+hit.</p>
+
+<p>He likes chop suey, spaghetti, French pastry, horseradish
+sauce, Welsh rarebits, oysters <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">à la Dumas</i>, raw
+tomatoes, stuffed baked potatoes, green peppers, broiled
+lobster, halibut, mushrooms cooked with caraway seeds,
+and chipped beef.</p>
+
+<p>His favorite American city is Philadelphia. His
+favorite French, Barbizon. His favorite German,
+Munich. His favorite English, Leeds.</p>
+
+<p>He covered murder trials in various parts of the country
+for the New York <cite>Herald</cite> during the years of his preparation
+for dramatic criticism.</p>
+
+<p>He wears tan pongee silk shirts in summer.</p>
+
+<p>The New Yorkers he admires most are W. R. Hearst,
+Arthur Hopkins, and M. Alevy, the eminent <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">maître d’hôtel</i>
+of the Café des Beaux Arts.</p>
+
+<p>He is the only American dramatic critic who has never
+succumbed to the Augustus Thomas, Granville Barker
+or Belasco rumble-bumble.</p>
+
+<p>He is entirely ignorant of mathematics, geology,
+botany, and physics. Like Mencken, however, he is a
+good speller, and is privy to the intricacies of punctuation.</p>
+
+<p>The name of the girl who manicures his nails is Miss
+Priscilla Brown. She is an orphan.</p>
+
+<p>The claret he commonly serves to his guests costs
+eighty-five cents a gallon, in quarts. He buys the labels
+separately.</p>
+
+<p>His favorite hospitals are the Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore,
+and Galen Hall, in Atlantic City. Whenever he
+is ill he goes to one or the other.</p>
+
+<p>Since 1901 he has loved seventeen different girls, and
+still remembers the names of all of them, and their preferences
+in literature, food, and wines. Of the seventeen,
+fourteen are happily married, one has been married and
+divorced, and the rest have gone West.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span></p>
+
+<p>He owns three watches, seventeen scarf-pins, and
+nineteen pairs of shoes.</p>
+
+<p>His skull is sub-brachycephalic, with a cephalic index
+of 83.1. His cranial capacity, by the system of Deniker,
+is 1756 cc. His nose is mesorhinian, and his nasal index
+is 46.2. The ratio between the length of his radius and
+that of his humerus is as 73 is to 100.</p>
+
+<p>By the Binet-Simon test his general intelligence is
+that of a man of 117 years.</p>
+
+<p>His voice is a baritone, with a range of one octave
+and two tones.</p>
+
+<p>He never answers questions put to him in letters.</p>
+
+<p>A friend presented him several years ago with a set
+of O. Henry, which, try as he will, he can’t get rid of.</p>
+
+<p>He would rather eat a salt-sprinkled raw tomato still hot
+from the sun than a dinner from the hand of a French chef.</p>
+
+<p>He has everything he wears made to his order, save
+his belts and his socks. He never buys even a hat that
+is ready-made.</p>
+
+<p>He has written under the pseudonyms of George Narét,
+Rupert Cross, and William Drayham.</p>
+
+<p>He has been denounced in the New York newspapers,
+during his career as dramatic critic, by three playwrights,
+five theatrical managers, eight actresses, twenty-two
+actors, and almost everyone connected with vaudeville.</p>
+
+<p>He likes garlic, but refrains from eating it.</p>
+
+<p>He has read Max Beerbohm’s “Happy Hypocrite”
+thirteen times.</p>
+
+<p>Like Mencken, he is subject to periodic attacks of
+melancholia.</p>
+
+<p>He has visited every American resort north of Old
+Point Comfort—and thinks them all pretty bad.</p>
+
+<p>He believes the Ritz, in Philadelphia, to be the best
+hotel in America.</p>
+
+<p>He believes the Hudson Theater, in New York, to be
+the most comfortable theater in America.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span></p>
+
+<p>Several years ago, seeking isolation in which to finish
+a piece of work, he decided to shut his eyes, run his
+finger down a New York Central time-table, and go
+to the place opposite the name of which his finger
+would come to a halt. His finger stopped opposite
+an exotic something named New Paltz.... The first
+person he saw when he got off at the New Paltz station
+was the man he had roomed with in his junior year
+at college.</p>
+
+<p>He has said that “cleverness” consists merely in
+saying the wrong thing at the right time.</p>
+
+<p>He owns three suits of evening clothes.</p>
+
+<p>He wears pongee pajamas.</p>
+
+<p>His one-act play, “The Eternal Mystery,” which was
+suppressed in New York and Detroit, created more discussion
+than any one-act play produced in America in
+the last dozen years.</p>
+
+<p>He is kind to dogs, babies, and negroes. He has never
+given a street beggar a cent.</p>
+
+<p>Among his closest friends in Europe are Ballington
+Booth, Jack Johnson, and M. Philippe Cartier, in charge
+of the malt department on the Orient Express.</p>
+
+<p>His most ingenious piece of dramatic criticism was
+his criticism of the writings of Augustus Thomas, in which
+he proved that Thomas’ plays would be better if they
+were played backward.</p>
+
+<p>His hair grows so quickly that he has to get a hair-cut
+every ten days.</p>
+
+<p>His father’s first name was Charles; his middle name,
+Narét.</p>
+
+<p>He likes hot weather, the hotter the better.</p>
+
+<p>He believes the island of Bermuda to be the most
+beautiful spot on earth. He would like to live there—if
+he couldn’t live in Munich.</p>
+
+<p>He once wrote an article on The Department of the
+Interior for <cite>Munsey’s Magazine</cite>. He gave the proceeds,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span>
+by way of atonement, to the First Baptist Church of
+Asbury Park.</p>
+
+<p>He knew Evelyn Nesbit when she was a baby.</p>
+
+<p>He believes that twelve per cent of all reformers and
+uplifters are asses, and that the rest are thieves.</p>
+
+<p>He wears low, Byronic collars and rather gaudy neckties.</p>
+
+<p>In philosophy he is a skeptical idealist, believing that
+the truth is an illusion and that man is a botch. He
+has read the works of Kant, Fichte, and Locke, but can’t
+remember what was in them. He regards Schopenhauer,
+on the woman question, as a sentimentalist whistling
+in the dark.</p>
+
+<p>His knowledge of economics is extensive, and he once
+wrote a pamphlet against David Ricardo. It has been
+translated into French, German, and Bohemian.</p>
+
+<p>He has never written any poetry in English, but published
+a slim volume of Petrarchan sonnets in Italian
+during his student days in Bologna. The only copy of
+this book known to exist is in the library of Balliol College,
+Oxford. The author’s own copy was lost in the burning
+of the Hôtel de France at Lausanne, in the winter of
+1903.</p>
+
+<p>He is an excellent Latinist and has translated Albius
+Tibullus.</p>
+
+<p>His favorite opera is Gluck’s “Iphigénie in Tauris.”
+He once traveled from Nice to Dresden to hear it. His
+chief abomination in the opera house is “The Jewels of
+the Madonna.”</p>
+
+<p>While on the staff of the New York <cite>Herald</cite>, James
+Gordon Bennett offered him the post of London correspondent.
+The emolument proposed, however, made
+Nathan laugh.</p>
+
+<p>He owns three top hats, fourteen walking sticks, and
+two Russian wolf-hounds.</p>
+
+<p>He writes with a Mikado No. 1 lead-pencil.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span></p>
+
+<p>He is on good terms with but two members of his
+family.</p>
+
+<p>He reads, on the average, one hundred and fifty foreign
+plays every year.</p>
+
+<p>He has read every book on the drama published in
+America, England, France, and Germany since 1899.</p>
+
+<p>He uses Calox tooth powder, Colgate’s shaving soap,
+a double strength witch hazel, a Gillette razor, and Kitchell’s
+Horse Liniment. He has never taken quinine,
+Peruna, Piso’s Cough Syrup, Sanatogen, asperin, morphine,
+opium, or castor oil—but he has taken everything
+else.</p>
+
+<p>He believes Mencken eats too much.</p>
+
+<p>He has been inoculated against typhoid.</p>
+
+<p>He once, as a boy, ran a railroad locomotive from
+Cleveland, Ohio, to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, killing only
+two cows.</p>
+
+<p>He gets a cinder in his eye on an average of twice a
+day.</p>
+
+<p>He can drink anything but sweet cordials.</p>
+
+<p>With his meals, he uses Cross and Blackwell’s chow-chow.</p>
+
+<p>In his undergraduate days he was an editor of all the
+Cornell University papers.</p>
+
+<p>He wrote articles on the theater for the old <cite>Harper’s
+Weekly</cite> for four years.</p>
+
+<p>He knows three jockeys, eight bartenders, one murderer,
+two sea captains, three policemen, one letter
+carrier, and one politician.</p>
+
+<p>He is a warm friend of Detective William J. Burns.</p>
+
+<p>He likes buttermilk.</p>
+
+<p>Christmas costs him, on the average, about a thousand
+dollars.</p>
+
+<p>For the last two years he has received weekly anonymous
+letters from some woman in Bridgeport, Connecticut,
+who signs herself with the initials “L. G.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span></p>
+
+<p>He is writing the introduction to Arthur Hopkins’
+new book on the drama.</p>
+
+<p>He has not ridden a horse since May 22, 1908.</p>
+
+<p>In October, 1912, he and his broker were wrecked off
+Barnegat in the latter’s yacht, <em>Margo I</em>, and were rescued
+via a breeches buoy by the Barnegat life-saving crew.</p>
+
+<p>He never reads popular novels.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Winthrop Ames has invited him to write a satirical
+review for his Little Theater in New York and Nathan
+is planning to do the thing during 1918.</p>
+
+<p>He eats two raw eggs a day to put on weight.</p>
+
+<p>When the victim of a bad cold and unable to smoke,
+he chews soft licorice candy while writing.</p>
+
+<p>He believes that George Bickel is the funniest comedian
+on the American stage, that Arnold Daly is the best
+actor, that Margaret Illington is the best actress.</p>
+
+<p>He has never written a thing that, upon rereading
+after its appearance in print, didn’t seem to him to be
+chock full of flaws.</p>
+
+<p>He is lucky at games of chance, though he seldom
+plays. In 1912 he won $2,000 in the Havana lottery.</p>
+
+<p>He owns six belts, one of them presented to him by
+Gabriele D’Annunzio and made of wolf hide.</p>
+
+<p>He is in favor of universal military service, imperialism,
+and birth-control, but is opposed to woman suffrage,
+the direct primary, and prohibition.</p>
+
+<p>His usual pulse is 71 a minute. After drinking it
+rises to 85.</p>
+
+<p>He keeps no books of account, and does not know his
+exact income. As a means of defense against sudden
+calamity he keeps $3000 in gold in a safe deposit vault.</p>
+
+<p>His favorite name for girls is Helen.</p>
+
+<p>If he could rechristen himself, he would choose the
+given name of John.</p>
+
+<p>He pronounces his middle name, not in the French
+manner, but to rhyme with bean.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span></p>
+
+<p>He is a third cousin of Signor Enrico Nathan, the late
+Socialist mayor of Rome. His uncle, Dr. Émile Nathan
+van der Linde, <em>privat docent</em> in anthropology at Leyden,
+was killed by savages in Borneo in 1889, while a member
+of the Oesterling exploring expedition.</p>
+
+<p>He has never visited the battlefield at Gettysburg.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="H_L_MENCKEN">H. L. MENCKEN</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>He was born at Baltimore on Sunday, September 12,
+1880, and was baptized in the Church of England.</p>
+
+<p>He was educated at the Baltimore Polytechnic, and
+is theoretically competent to run a steam engine or a
+dynamo, but actually is quite incapable of doing either.</p>
+
+<p>Down to the age of fifteen it was his ambition to be a
+chemist, and to this day he is full of fantastic chemical
+information and fond of unloading it. At the age of
+fourteen he invented a means of toning photographic
+silver prints with platinum.</p>
+
+<p>The family business was tobacco, and he was drafted
+for it on leaving school. He became a journeyman
+cigar-maker, and can make excellent cigars to this day.
+But when chemistry and business died out, literature
+set in, and he took to journalism.</p>
+
+<p>At the age of twenty-three he was city editor and at
+twenty-five managing editor of the Baltimore <cite>Herald</cite>,
+now defunct—the youngest managing editor of a big
+city daily in the United States.</p>
+
+<p>He printed a book of poems at twenty-two—now a
+rare <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">bibelot</i>. He was “discovered,” as the saying is, by
+Ellery Sedgwick, now editor of the <cite>Atlantic Monthly</cite>,
+but then running <cite>Leslie’s Monthly</cite>. He and Sedgwick
+have remained on friendly terms to this day, but he
+sometimes writes for the <cite>Atlantic</cite>.</p>
+
+<p>In 1900, having read Lafcadio Hearn’s “Two Years
+in the French West Indies,” he shipped on a banana boat<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span>
+for the Spanish Main, and has returned to the West
+Indies three times since.</p>
+
+<p>He is five feet, eight and a half inches in height, and
+weighs about 185 pounds. In 1915 he bulged up to 197
+pounds. Then he took the Vance Thompson cure and
+reduced to 175, rebounding later.</p>
+
+<p>The things he dislikes most are Methodists, college
+professors, newspaper editorials (of which, in his time,
+he has written more than 10,000), Broadway restaurants,
+reformers, actors, children, magazine fiction, dining out,
+the New Freedom, prohibition, sex hygiene, <cite>The Nation</cite>,
+soft drinks, women under thirty, the nonconformist conscience,
+Socialism, good business men, the moral theory
+of the world, and the sort of patriotism that makes a
+noise.</p>
+
+<p>Among the men he admires are Joseph Conrad, W. R.
+Hearst, E. W. Howe, Richard Strauss, Anatole France,
+and Erich Ludendorff—this last because he is a great
+general and has never uttered a single word of patriotic
+or pietistic cant. He likes Dreiser, but does not admire
+him.</p>
+
+<p>His taste in female beauty runs to a slim hussy, not
+too young, with dark eyes and a relish for wit. He abhors
+sentimentality in women, holding that it is a masculine
+weakness, and unbecoming the fair. He seldom falls
+in love, and then only momentarily.</p>
+
+<p>He wears buttoned shoes because he cannot tie shoe
+laces. Neither can he tie a dress tie; if there is no one
+to tie it for him he has to miss the party. In general,
+he is almost wholly devoid of manual dexterity, though
+he can play the piano well enough to entertain himself,
+and is a good sight reader.</p>
+
+<p>The only art that ever stirs him is music. He views
+literature objectively, almost anatomically. He is anæsthetic
+to painting. His favorite composers are Beethoven,
+Haydn, Mozart, Brahms, and Richard Strauss.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span>
+He detests Tschaikowsky and Rossini, and likes Wagner
+better out of the opera house than in it. In his youth
+he wrote waltzes. He abominates song and piano recitals
+and oratorios. He has a pretty extensive knowledge of
+musical technique, and knows a sound sonata from a
+bad one. When he improvises it is usually in F major.
+He has a poor ear and cannot tune a fiddle.</p>
+
+<p>He drinks all the known alcoholic beverages, but
+prefers Pilsner to any other; a few seidels make him
+very talkative. In the absence of Pilsner, he drinks
+Michelob. He seldom drinks at meals and often goes
+three or four days without a drink. In wine, he likes
+whatever is red and cheap. He detests champagne,
+Scotch and rye whisky, and gin, though he drinks them
+all to be polite. He has a good head, and is not soused
+more than once a year, usually at Christmas.</p>
+
+<p>He has good eyes and a gentle mouth, but his nose is
+upset, his ears stick out too much, and he is shapeless
+and stoop-shouldered. One could not imagine him in
+the moving pictures. He has strong and white, but
+irregular teeth.</p>
+
+<p>He wears a No. 7½ hat. He is bow-legged. He is a
+fast walker. He used to snore when asleep, but had his
+nasal septum straightened by surgery, and does so no
+longer.</p>
+
+<p>He takes no interest whatever in any sport. He
+played baseball as a boy, but hasn’t seen a game for ten
+years, and never looks at the baseball news in the papers.
+He cannot play tennis or golf, and has never tried. He
+knows nothing of cards. He never bets on elections or
+horse-races. He never takes any exercise save walking.</p>
+
+<p>He rejects the whole of Christianity, including especially
+its ethics, and does not believe that the soul is immortal.
+His moral code is from the Chinese and has
+but one item: keep your engagements. He pays all bills
+immediately, never steals what he can buy, and is never<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span>
+late for an appointment. He has missed but one train
+in his life.</p>
+
+<p>He believes in war so long as it is not for a moral cause.
+He advocates universal military training on the ground
+that it causes wars.</p>
+
+<p>His table manners are based upon provincial French
+principles, with modifications suggested by the Cossacks
+of the Don.</p>
+
+<p>When at home he arises at eight sharp every morning,
+and is at his desk at nine.</p>
+
+<p>He likes to go motoring at night, and often sets out
+alone at midnight.</p>
+
+<p>He takes a half hour’s nap every afternoon. He can
+sleep anywhere and at almost any time.</p>
+
+<p>He has eleven uncles and aunts and eighteen cousins,
+and has never quarreled with any of them.</p>
+
+<p>He has been inoculated against typhoid and hay fevers.</p>
+
+<p>He is a prompt correspondent, and answers every
+letter the day it is received.</p>
+
+<p>He keeps his watch on an old-fashioned clothes-press
+in his workroom, and winds it every time he looks at it.</p>
+
+<p>He detests windy days. As between heat and cold,
+he prefers heat.</p>
+
+<p>He never preserves love letters, and never writes them.</p>
+
+<p>His tonsils have been cut out. His Wassermann
+reaction is and always has been negative. He has a low
+blood pressure. His heart and kidneys are normal.</p>
+
+<p>His favorite hotel is the Bayrischer Hof at Munich.
+After that he ranks them in the following order: the
+Adlon, Berlin; the Palace, Madrid; the Paladst, Copenhagen;
+the Statler, Buffalo; the Edouard VII, Paris.</p>
+
+<p>He says the best place to eat in the whole world is
+at the basement lunch counter of the Rennert Hotel,
+Baltimore. The best things to order there are oyster
+potpie, boiled turkey with oyster sauce, Virginia ham
+and spinach, and boiled tongue.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span></p>
+
+<p>He owns ten suits of clothes, and wears them seriatim.
+All of them are of summer weight. He never wears
+heavy clothes.</p>
+
+<p>He never wears patent leather shoes, even with dress
+clothes. He wears horn spectacles for reading, but
+never otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>Between 1899 and 1906 he wrote and published thirty-five
+short stories. Since 1906 he has written none.</p>
+
+<p>For five years he contributed a daily article to the
+Baltimore <cite>Evening Sun</cite>. His total writings for newspapers
+run to nearly 10,000,000 words. He has reported
+three national conventions and nine executions.</p>
+
+<p>His one-act play, “The Artist,” has been translated
+into German, Dano-Norwegian, Italian, and Russian.</p>
+
+<p>He has twice voted for Roosevelt, not by conviction,
+but because he believes Roosevelt gives a better show
+than any other performer in the ring. In politics he is
+a strict federalist.</p>
+
+<p>He advocates woman suffrage on the ground that, if
+women voted, democracy would be reduced to an absurdity
+the sooner.</p>
+
+<p>He is very polite to women, particularly if he dislikes
+them, which is usually.</p>
+
+<p>He owns the original manuscript of “Sister Carrie,”
+presented to him by Dreiser.</p>
+
+<p>He is a nephew of the late Right Rev. Frederick Bainville
+Mencken, bishop of Akkad <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">in partibus infidelium</i>.
+This uncle was disinherited by his grandfather as a
+result of a family dispute over transubstantiation.</p>
+
+<p>His pet literary abominations are “alright” (as one
+word) and the use of “near” as an adjective. He will
+never speak of or to an author who uses either.</p>
+
+<p>His favorite eating places in New York are Rogers’,
+the Kloster Glocke, the Lafayette, and the Café del
+Pezzo.</p>
+
+<p>The cities he likes best are Munich, Chicago, Baltimore,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span>
+and London. He dislikes Paris, Rome, Berlin, and
+New York—the last-named so much that, whenever
+he has any work to do, he goes to Baltimore to do it.</p>
+
+<p>He was an intimate friend of the late Paul Armstrong
+for many years and never quarreled with him.</p>
+
+<p>In his own opinion, the best thing he has ever written
+is “Death: a Discussion” in his “Book of Burlesques.”</p>
+
+<p>He wears B. V. D.’s all the year round, and actually
+takes a cold bath every day.</p>
+
+<p>He never has his nails manicured, but trims them with
+a jacknife.</p>
+
+<p>Every Saturday night he spends the time between
+8 and 10 playing music, and the time between 10 and 12
+drinking Michelob. He plays second piano.</p>
+
+<p>He has received three proposals of marriage, but has
+never succumbed. He has never seduced a working
+girl. He has no issue.</p>
+
+<p>He works in his shirt-sleeves and sleeps in striped
+pajamas.</p>
+
+<p>He wears Manhattan garters, No. 15½ Belmont collars,
+and very long-tailed overcoats. His plug hat, which he
+wears but two or three times a year, has a flat brim, like
+that of a French comedian.</p>
+
+<p>He is smooth-faced and shaves every morning with a
+Gillette safety razor. Once, while in Paris, he grew a
+yellow moustache and goatee. They lasted, however,
+but two weeks.</p>
+
+<p>He has lived in one house in Baltimore for 34 years.
+In it he has 3000 books.</p>
+
+<p>He owns the largest collection of Ibseniana in the
+world, including autographs, first editions, and other
+rarities. Part of it is in Baltimore, part in Copenhagen,
+part in Munich, and part in Geneva.</p>
+
+<p>He reads German and Norwegian fluently, French,
+Spanish, Italian, and Latin less fluently, and makes shift
+to sweat through the following: Russian, Greek, Dutch,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span>
+Rumanian, Serbian, Czech, Sanskrit, Assyrian, Hungarian,
+and Swedish.</p>
+
+<p>His favorite American poet is Lizette Woodworth
+Reese. He and she have lived in the same city for years,
+but they have never met.</p>
+
+<p>His total receipts in royalties on his books, in fifteen
+years, have been $172.50.</p>
+
+<p>His personal funds are invested in bonds of the Pennsylvania
+Railroad, the Midvale Steel Company, and the
+Danish, Chilean, and Swiss governments.</p>
+
+<p>During his newspaper career he was American correspondent
+of the Hongkong <cite>Press</cite>, the Kobe <cite>Chronicle</cite>,
+and the Colombo (Ceylon) <cite>Observer</cite>.</p>
+
+<p>One of his fads is theology. He understands its technical
+terminology, and is sometimes consulted on difficult
+points by both Catholic and Protestant clergy.</p>
+
+<p>Down to July 7, 1913, he employed suspenders to hold
+up his trousers. Being then convinced by Nathan that
+such appliances had a socialistic smack, he abandoned
+them for a belt.</p>
+
+<p>He reads an average of ten books a week, in addition
+to those he goes through for reviewing purposes. The
+subjects he affects are theology, biology, economics, and
+modern history.</p>
+
+<p>He has never read George Eliot, or Jane Austen, or
+Bulwer-Lytton. He has never been able to read Dostoievsky,
+or Turgeniev, or Balzac. His favorite writers, as
+a youth, were Thackeray, Huxley, and Kipling. He
+seldom reads newspapers. The only magazines he ever
+looks at are the <cite>Smart Set</cite>, <cite>Ed Howe’s Monthly</cite>, the <cite>Country
+Gentleman</cite>, the <cite>Masses</cite>, the <cite>Seven Arts</cite>, and the <cite>Ladies’
+Home Journal</cite>.</p>
+
+<p>He has a wide acquaintance among medical men and
+knows a good deal about modern medical problems. His
+advice is often sought by persons seeking treatment;
+he gives it copiously.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span></p>
+
+<p>He knows mathematics up to plane geometry and
+trigonometry. He knows philosophy, chemistry, and
+history, but is ignorant of physics and grammar. He
+can draw with some skill, and was once a good mechanical
+draftsman. He is an excellent speller and knows how
+to punctuate.</p>
+
+<p>In philosophy he is a strict mechanist of the Loeb-Haeckel
+school. In psychology he leans toward Adler.
+He questions pragmatism, but admits its workableness.
+He is an advocate of absolute free speech in all things—and
+exhibits the utmost intolerance in combatting those
+who oppose it.</p>
+
+<p>He believes and argues that sex is a vastly less potent
+influence in life than the Puritans and psychanalysts
+maintain. He advocates the establishment of
+lay monasteries for men who care for neither God nor
+women.</p>
+
+<p>When he is at home he lunches at noon and dines at
+six. He never eats between meals. He never takes a
+drink before dinner save when on holiday.</p>
+
+<p>He most often begins his letters to men with the salutation
+“My dear Mon Chair.” To women, “My dear
+Mon Chairy.”</p>
+
+<p>A March ago, he attempted to give up smoking and
+sought to alleviate his longing for the weed by sucking
+slippery elm. He was again pulling at a stogie the
+following month.</p>
+
+<p>He has probably done more for talented young writers
+who have tried in vain to get a hearing with publishers
+than any other American critic. Of all those whom he
+has helped to obtain an hospitable ear, only one has ever
+so much as thanked him.</p>
+
+<p>He forgives anything in a friend—theft, perjury, or
+stupidity—anything save hypocrisy. But he has no
+use for loyalty in others. “Loyalty,” he says, “is the
+virtue of a dog.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span></p>
+
+<p>He pokes fun at modern musical comedy, particularly
+the music thereof. Yet he has never heard “Sari” or
+“The Purple Road,” or the best of the last dozen scores
+of Victor Herbert.</p>
+
+<p>He believes, with Nathan, that the three best stories
+printed in <cite>The Smart Set</cite> under their joint editorial direction
+have been “The Exiles’ Club,” by Dunsany; “Ashes
+to Ashes,” by James Gardner Sanderson; and “The End
+of Ilsa Menteith,” by Lilith Benda. He believes, like
+Nathan, that the most charming sentimental story
+printed in <cite>The Smart Set</cite> has been Lee Pape’s “Little
+Girl.” He believes, with Nathan, that the best epigram
+has been that sent in by an anonymous contributor:
+“When love dies there is no funeral. The corpse remains
+in the house.”</p>
+
+<p>He met Nathan for the first time in the chateau of
+the Comtesse Hélène de Firelle in the valley of the Loire,
+on August 10, 1906. Three days later they left together
+for a trip to Munich, to drink the waters.</p>
+
+<p>One of his best pieces of humor is a pun on “<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">non compos
+mentis</i>.” I cannot print it.</p>
+
+<p>A healthy man, he yet complains hourly of imaginary
+ailments.</p>
+
+<p>He has never seen Coney Island.</p>
+
+<p>When in his cups, he imagines himself a proficient
+bass singer.</p>
+
+<p>In the last three years he has been to the theater but
+once. On this occasion he accompanied Nathan to a piece
+called “Common Clay.” He remained twenty minutes.</p>
+
+<p>He uses handkerchiefs two feet wide.</p>
+
+<p>He always fights with Nathan for the bar or dinner
+check. His records of victories is eight per cent.</p>
+
+<p>Like Nathan, he dislikes to talk about business affairs
+or to listen to anyone talk about business affairs. Both
+he and Nathan leave their finances entirely in the hands
+of their competent partner, E. F. Warner.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span></p>
+
+<p>He and Nathan plan some day to collaborate on a
+satirical farce with scenes laid in a Turkish harem.</p>
+
+<p>In conversation he is given to an immoderate employment
+of the word “bemuse.”</p>
+
+<p>He believes the following to be his best epigram: “An
+anti-vivisectionist is one who gags at a guinea pig and
+swallows a baby.” To the contrary, I believe his best
+to be: “The charm of a man is measured by the charm
+of the women who think that he is a scoundrel.”</p>
+
+<p>He wrote dramatic criticisms in Baltimore for four
+years. At the end of that period, unable longer to bear
+the idiocies of the local theaters, he inserted a $200 half-page
+advertisement in each of the Baltimore newspapers
+to the effect that he would cause the arrest of the next
+manager who sent him tickets.</p>
+
+<p>He loves cocoanut pie.</p>
+
+<p>He smokes cigarettes only on rare occasions. He is
+not used to them and, on such occasions, holds the cigarette
+gingerly, as if it were going to bite him.</p>
+
+<p>Present at a mixed conversation, he frequently dozes
+off to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>When in New York, every night before retiring he
+eats a dozen large clams.</p>
+
+<p>He never drinks beer save in seidels.</p>
+
+<p>He has been to the Horse Show but once. On this
+occasion he remained three minutes.</p>
+
+<p>He does not dance.</p>
+
+<p>In Paris, in 1913, he hailed Nathan on the latter’s
+way to Southampton with this wireless: “Get off Cherbourg
+and come direct Paris. Have discovered place
+where they have good beer.”</p>
+
+<p>He is unable to sit at table upon finishing dinner. With
+the arrival of the finger-bowl he is off for a walk.</p>
+
+<p>He is, at bottom, a sentimentalist. True, he has no
+use for such things as babies, love stories (however good),
+or the Champs Élysées in the springtime (once while<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span>
+walking up the boulevard with Nathan he deplored the
+absence on it of a first-class drugstore), yet he succumbs
+moistly to Julia Sanderson singing, “They Wouldn’t
+Believe Me,” to a cemetery in the early green of May, to
+the lachrymose waltz from “Eva,” which he plays upon
+the piano in a melancholious <i lang="es" xml:lang="es">pianissimo</i>, and to any poem
+about a dog (however bad).</p>
+
+<p>His trousers are never creased. His clothes are always
+of a navy blue shade. He never wears a waistcoat.
+He buys the best cravats that can be obtained for fifty
+cents.</p>
+
+<p>He loves liqueurs, preferably <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">crême de cacao</i>. They
+always make him feel badly the next morning.</p>
+
+<p>He has written the following books: “A Book of
+Prefaces,” “A Little Book in C Major,” “A Book of
+Burlesques,” “The Battle of the Wilhelmstrasse,” “The
+Artist,” “The Gist of Nietzsche,” “The Philosophy of
+Friedrich Nietzsche,” “Europe after 8:15” (in collaboration
+with Nathan and Wright), “Men <em>vs.</em> the Man” (in
+collaboration with R. R. La Monte), and “George Bernard
+Shaw: His Plays.” The latter was the first book on
+Shaw ever published.</p>
+
+<p>He eats and enjoys all varieties of human food. There
+is no dish that he doesn’t eat. He has eaten snails,
+frogs, eels, octopus, catfish, goat meat, and Norwegian
+cheese. He thinks that the best roasts are the English,
+the best table wines the Spanish, the best pastry the
+Danish, the best soups the German, and the best cooking
+the French.</p>
+
+<p>He has visited the following countries: England,
+Holland, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Germany, Austria,
+Russia, Spain, France, Switzerland, and Cuba. He has
+never been in Canada or Mexico, and has never been
+further West than St. Louis.</p>
+
+<p>He has been under rifle and shell fire in this war, on
+the eastern front, and was glad to get under cover. He<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span>
+has been in France, Germany, and Russia during the war.
+He was nowhere mistaken for a spy, and was always
+treated courteously. He says that 99 per cent of the
+authors of war books are liars.</p>
+
+<p>His family is well-to-do, and he has never been dead
+broke.</p>
+
+<p>He has never seen a moving picture show.</p>
+
+<p>He is opposed to vice crusades, holding that the average
+prostitute is decenter than the average reformer. He
+ascribes the crusading spirit, following Freud, to a suppressed
+and pathological sexuality.</p>
+
+<p>He wears (and owns) no jewelry whatever, not even
+a scarfpin, but he sports a formidable Swiss watch, with
+a split second hand and a bell that strikes the quarter
+hours. He never wears gloves save in intensely cold
+weather.</p>
+
+<p>He owns and drives a 1916 Studebaker car, and never
+has it washed.</p>
+
+<p>Once, on receiving an amorous <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">billet doux</i> from a fair
+admirer, he sent it back to the writer with a <cite>Smart Set</cite>
+rejection slip.</p>
+
+<p>He frequently carries on a perfectly innocent conversation
+with Nathan in a low stage whisper, thus
+lending to his most trivial remarks a secret and sinister
+import.</p>
+
+<p>He introduced the new widespread use of “jitney” as
+an adjective. He also coined the words “smuthound” and
+“snouter,” both designating a “malignant moralist”—another
+of his invention.</p>
+
+<p>While playing the piano, he keeps the loud pedal glued
+to the floor from <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">couvert</i> to <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">coda</i>.</p>
+
+<p>He and Nathan, in all the years of their friendship,
+have quarreled but once. This was in the late summer
+of 1916, when Mencken was suffering from a violent
+attack of hay fever and insisted upon going to bed one
+night at eleven o’clock, thus leaving the disgusted Nathan<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span>
+to kill time as best he could until midnight, at that period
+his hour for retiring.</p>
+
+<p>He never wears rubbers, carries an umbrella, or wears
+a mackintosh. He likes to walk in the rain and get wet.</p>
+
+<p>He alludes to all actors as “cabots.” For the plural
+of “genius” he uses “genii.”</p>
+
+<p>He travels with a suitcase large enough to transport
+a circus.</p>
+
+<p>At the age of twenty-nine he was invited to join the
+Elks.... The judge, a friend of his, reduced the charge
+from “assault with intent to kill” to “assault and battery.”</p>
+
+<p>He has never had typhoid fever, smallpox, cholera,
+scarlet fever, arthritis, appendicitis, or delirium tremens.
+He has never had a headache. He can digest anything.</p>
+
+<p>He has been involved, in his time, in eight lawsuits,
+and has won them all, chiefly by perjury.</p>
+
+<p>His first name is Henry; his middle name, Louis. He
+never spells them out, signing himself always simply
+H. L.</p>
+
+<p>He drinks a brand of cheap claret which he lays in
+in shipments of ten cases.</p>
+
+<p>He has presented the steward of the Florestan Club,
+of Baltimore, with a bronze medal for reviving Maryland
+hoe cake.</p>
+
+<p>A life-long opponent of Puritanism in all its forms, he
+is on good personal terms with many Puritan reformers,
+and always reads the tracts they send to him.</p>
+
+<p>He has been arrested four times, once in Paris, once in
+Copenhagen, and twice in America. He was acquitted
+each time, though guilty.</p>
+
+<p>He complains ceaselessly over what it costs him to live.
+Yet he is a liberal fellow and keeps Nathan supplied
+with cigars. The cigars, however, are not to Nathan’s
+taste.</p>
+
+<p>He is an omnivorous borrower of matches.</p>
+
+<p>He washes his hands twenty-four times a day.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span></p>
+
+<p>He writes directly upon the typewriter, never longhand.
+He signs all his letters with the episcopal “Yours
+in Xt.”</p>
+
+<p>For the last four years he and Nathan have been
+planning a motor trip through Virginia. They will
+never make it, both agree emphatically.</p>
+
+<p>His favorite dish is anything <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">à la Créole</i>.</p>
+
+<p>He once brought from abroad, as a gift to his negro
+cook, three dozen strings of Venetian beads. She is a
+strict Baptist and declined to wear them.</p>
+
+<p>His favorite novel is “Huckleberry Finn”; his favorite
+name for a woman, Maggie.</p>
+
+<p>He often goes without breakfast, and never eats more
+than an apple and a slice of dry bread.</p>
+
+<p>He and Nathan have their secretaries in <cite>The Smart
+Set</cite> offices keep a list of forty-two bad writers. Opposite
+the name of each of the forty-two is the fine one must
+pay the other if the name is uttered by either.</p>
+
+<p>He slicks his hair down like the actor who plays the
+heroic lieutenant in the military dramas.</p>
+
+<p>He likes to ride down Fifth Avenue in a victoria.</p>
+
+<p>He owns a plaid shirt. He wears it.</p>
+
+<p>He has worn the same straw hat for five years. He
+cleans it every spring with a tooth-brush dipped in
+bicarbonate of soda and Pebeco tooth paste. Each
+spring he buys a new tooth-brush.</p>
+
+<p>He writes in a bare room. There is no carpet or
+rug on the floor. The only pictures on the wall
+are portraits of his great-great-grandfather, Ibsen,
+Conrad, Marcella Allonby, Mark Twain, and Johannes
+Brahms.</p>
+
+<p>He sleeps on a sleeping porch adjoining his office. He
+uses, as a blanket, a Persian shawl presented to him by
+the late Lafcadio Hearn.</p>
+
+<p>He has read 9872 bad novels during his active life
+as a literary critic.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span></p>
+
+<p>He is an artist of no mean ability. His portrait of
+Nathan, reproduced in the Chicago <cite>Daily News</cite> in May,
+1917, attracted wide attention and, among other things,
+brought him requests for sittings from Hamlin Garland,
+William Lyon Phelps, and Robert B. Mantell.</p>
+
+<p>He clips the ends off his cigars with his side teeth.</p>
+
+<p>He has written under the pseudonyms of William R.
+Fink, William Drayham, John F. Brownell, Harriet
+Morgan, W. L. D. Bell, Gladys Jefferson, and Baroness
+Julie Desplaines.</p>
+
+<p>He sees nothing beautiful about the Hudson from
+Riverside Drive, but believes St. Thomas’s to be one of
+the most beautiful churches in the world.</p>
+
+<p>He collects odd pieces of furniture, Japanese wood
+carvings, and bad plaster of paris casts.</p>
+
+<p>He knows two actors, George Fawcett and Frank
+Craven.</p>
+
+<p>He was taught how to swim by John Adams Thayer.</p>
+
+<p>He is the author of a farce that has played on Broadway
+for one hundred nights. To this authorship, no one save
+Nathan, James Huneker, A. H. Woods, and myself have
+been privy.</p>
+
+<p>His high-water marks in the matter of malt bibbing
+are as follows: Pschorrbräu, Munich, 8 <em>masses</em> in two
+hours and seven minutes; Appenrodt’s, Paris, 9 <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">seidels</i>
+in one hour and a quarter; Lüchow’s, New York, 13
+<i lang="de" xml:lang="de">seidels</i> and one glass in one hour, twenty-one minutes
+and twelve seconds. Timers: Pschorrbräu, Arthur
+Abbott, H. B. M. vice-consul; Appenrodt’s, Pierre
+Disdebaux, of Marseilles, France; Lüchow’s, Theodore
+Dreiser, of Warsaw, Indiana, U. S. A.</p>
+
+<p>He was a regular reader of the <cite>Boston Transcript</cite>, the
+New York <cite>Times</cite>, and the <cite>Youth’s Companion</cite>, up to the
+age of ten.</p>
+
+<p>He believes W. L. George to be the best of the younger
+English novelists.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span></p>
+
+<p>His signature runs up hill.</p>
+
+<p>He has been cured of hay-fever and is at present writing
+a pamphlet extolling the discoverers of the cure.</p>
+
+<p>He admires the kind of Munich “art” that is sold in
+the Fifth Avenue shops at $4.35 the picture.</p>
+
+<p>He likes to look in shop windows. He has never
+ridden in a Ferris Wheel.</p>
+
+<p>He laments the fact that he gets no exercise and contemplates
+fixing up a carpenter shop in the basement of
+his house in Baltimore, so that he may saw and chop
+his arms back into muscular shape.</p>
+
+<p>He numbers the paragraphs of his letters and never
+writes more than six paragraphs.</p>
+
+<p>The English critics hailed his Nietzsche book as the
+best thing of its sort that had come out of America.</p>
+
+<p>He has never read Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis”
+or “Pericles, Prince of Tyre.”</p>
+
+<p>He believes that all fat women are sentimental and
+says that the publisher who will edit a magazine for this
+clientèle will make a fortune. Inasmuch as magazine
+fiction heroines are at present always slim, elf-like creatures,
+he contends that the sentimental fat girl never
+gets a fair chance to enjoy herself, and that, accordingly,
+a magazine with no heroine weighing less than one hundred
+and ninety pounds would in one year put Cyrus K. Curtis
+in the pauper class.</p>
+
+<p>Like Nathan, he believes that the theory that it is
+difficult to make money is poppycock. If one is willing
+to give the public what it wants, anyone—argue these
+two—can get rich very quickly. To prove their contention,
+they outlined plans for several cheap magazines
+three years ago, which, upon being put into circulation,
+proved immediate and overwhelming successes. Mencken
+and Nathan, at the end of six months, sold their joint
+interest for $100,000. They argue that the thing is
+as simple as rolling off a log, and that any person who<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span>
+is interested in this sort of thing may become a Street-and-Smith
+or Munsey overnight.</p>
+
+<p>At the age of nineteen, he invented a slot machine for
+the vending of patent medicines on excursion boats.</p>
+
+<p>He has read “Huckleberry Finn” twenty-seven times.
+He reads the book once a year, regularly.</p>
+
+<p>He has never seen Mrs. Castle, Mary Garden, Ann
+Pennington, Maurice and Walton, Mary Pickford, or
+Secretary Lansing.</p>
+
+<p>He has shaken hands with Billy Sunday.</p>
+
+<p>Wherever he goes he carries a Corona typewriter. He
+paid $50 cash for it, but nevertheless he has given the
+manufacturers an eloquent testimonial. He writes on
+cheap newspaper copy-paper.</p>
+
+<p>He is fond of candy.</p>
+
+<p>He is an ardent defender of organized charity, arguing
+that it helps progress by making charity difficult and
+obnoxious.</p>
+
+<p>He is often mistaken for a misogynist. He is actually
+a strict monogamist. He believes that all men are
+naturally monogamists, and that polygamy is due to
+vanity.</p>
+
+<p>He began to edit the plays of Ibsen in 1910, but
+abandoned the enterprise after he had issued “A Doll’s
+House” and “Little Eyolf.”</p>
+
+<p>He is a bitter opponent of Christian Science, and has
+written all sorts of things, from epigrams to long articles,
+against it.</p>
+
+<p>The La Mencken cigar, once popular throughout the
+South, was not named after him, but after his father.</p>
+
+<p>He is a good sailor, and has been seasick but once—on
+a 1000-ton British tramp in a West Indian hurricane.</p>
+
+<p>In blood he is chiefly Saxon, Danish, Bavarian, and
+Irish—no Anglo-Saxon, no Prussian, no Latin. The
+portraits of his Saxon forefathers show strong Slavic
+traces. He is the present head of the family. A Mencken,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span>
+in the seventeenth century, founded the first scientific
+review in Europe. Another was privy councilor to
+Frederick the Great. Another was rector of the University
+of Leipzig. Yet another was chief justice of the
+supreme court there. A Mlle. Mencken was the mother
+of Bismarck.</p>
+
+<p>The Menckenii were converted to Christianity in
+1569, but returned to paganism during the Napoleonic
+wars, in which twelve of them were killed and sixty-three
+wounded.</p>
+
+<p>The present Mencken is an amateur of military science,
+and has written a brochure, privately printed, on the
+Battle of Tannenberg.</p>
+
+<p>He writes very slowly and laboriously, save when writing
+for newspapers. Then he is highly facile, and can turn
+out a two-column article in three hours. He has never
+learned to dictate.</p>
+
+<p>He used to have a mole on the back of his neck, but
+had it removed in the summer of 1913.</p>
+
+<p>He is not afraid of the dark, or of spiders, or of snakes,
+or of cats. He likes dogs better than any other animals,
+and regards them as more respectable than men.</p>
+
+<p>If he could choose another given name it would be
+Francis.</p>
+
+<p>He owns two hundred acres of land near Innsbruck,
+in the Tyrol, and will build a bungalow on it after the
+war.</p>
+
+<p>He is a violent anti-Socialist, as “Men <em>vs.</em> the Man”
+shows, but he reads all the new Socialist books.</p>
+
+<p>In American history the men he most admires are
+Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Cleveland. He
+has a low opinion of Lincoln, Jackson, and Bryan.</p>
+
+<p>He is handy with horses, and can drive four-in-hand.</p>
+
+<p>He detests cut flowers, carpets, the sea-shore, hotels,
+zoological gardens, the subway, the Y. M. C. A., literary
+women, witch hazel, talcum powder, limp leather bookbindings,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span>
+aerated waters, bottled beer, low collars, public
+libraries, and phonographs.</p>
+
+<p>He is a Cockney, and prefers the city to the country.</p>
+
+<p>He never wears tan shoes.</p>
+
+<p>He can swallow castor oil without disgust and without
+needing a chaser, but he never does so.</p>
+
+<p>Next to Pilsner and Burgundy (or, in wartime, Michelob)
+his favorite drink is city water direct from the tap—no
+ice.</p>
+
+<p>He chews cigars.</p>
+
+<p>He is a very fast reader and can get through a two hundred-page
+book in an hour.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>So much for my observations and investigations of
+the two gentlemen, MM. Nathan and Mencken. I have
+told you, not everything that is known about them, nor
+even all that I know myself, but enough, I hope, to enable
+you to conjure up colorable images of them. As I have
+said, it is by such small and often grotesque lights that
+character is genuinely illuminated—not by the steady
+and distorting glare of orthodox biography. It remains
+for me to tell you how they do their joint work—work
+which rests upon the apparently perilous basis of an
+absolute equality of authority, for each owns exactly
+the same amount of stock in <cite>The Smart Set</cite> Company
+that the other owns, and each is editor equally with the
+other, and both derive from the property exactly the
+same revenue, to a cent.</p>
+
+<p>Their system is very simple and admirably workable.
+When either, by any internal or external process, generates
+an idea for the conduct of the magazine, he lays
+it before the other in all its details. This is always done
+in writing; never orally. If the other approves the idea
+he writes upon the brief the words “Nihil obstat,” and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span>
+it is forthwith executed. If, on the contrary, he disapproves,
+he indorses it with the word “Veto” and it
+is returned. The same idea may be revived by its author
+thirty days later, but not before. If thrice vetoed it is
+forever banned. The office records for the past three
+years yield the following:</p>
+
+<table class="autotable">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdc">Plans Proposed</td>
+<td class="tdc">Approved</td>
+<td class="tdc">Vetoed</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">By Nathan</td>
+<td class="tdc">18</td>
+<td class="tdc">13</td>
+<td class="tdc">5</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">By Mencken</td>
+<td class="tdc">12</td>
+<td class="tdc">8</td>
+<td class="tdc">4</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>In the handling of manuscripts they pursue a somewhat
+analogous system. Mencken never reads manuscripts
+while in New York; all such work he does in
+Baltimore. As the offerings of authors are received
+in the office they are scrutinized by Nathan’s secretary,
+and the following classes are weeded out and immediately
+returned:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Mss. written in pencil or with green, purple, or red
+typewriter ribbons.</p>
+
+<p>Mss. fastened together with ribbons or pins.</p>
+
+<p>Mss. radiating any scent or other odor.</p>
+
+<p>Mss. of plays which begin with soliloquies into a telephone.</p>
+
+<p>Mss. bearing the recommendations of the editors of
+other magazines.</p>
+
+<p>Mss. accompanied by letters of more than one hundred
+words.</p>
+
+<p>Mss. accompanied by circulars advertising books
+written by their authors or by other printed matter.</p>
+
+<p>Mss. of poetry by poets whose names do not appear
+upon a list in the possession of the secretary.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Once this preliminary clearing out is accomplished, the
+manuscripts that remain are shipped to Mencken, and he
+reads them within twenty four hours. Those that he rejects<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span>
+are returned to their authors. Those that he approves
+are returned to Nathan, with the Dano-Norwegian word
+“bifald,” signifying assent, written across the first page
+of each. They are then read by Nathan, and if he agrees
+they are purchased and paid for at once. If he disagrees
+they are returned without further process. Once a
+manuscript is bought it goes to Mencken a second time,
+and he reads it again. If he finds that it needs revision
+in detail, it is turned over to his private secretary and
+valet, an intelligent Maryland colored man named
+William F. Beauchamp, a graduate of Harvard. After
+it has passed through Beauchamp’s hands it is set up in
+type. In case Mencken deems it necessary to reject a
+manuscript by an author who must be treated politely,
+he sends it back with a note putting the blame on Nathan.
+In case Nathan, in like circumstances, votes no, he blames
+it upon Mencken. This, of course, is lying, but in the
+long run it amounts to the truth. The two never discuss
+manuscripts; they simply vote. They never buy anything
+from personal friends. They have a strict agreement,
+in fact, that each will automatically veto anything
+sent in by an author with whom he is on good terms.
+This agreement is never violated. Nathan, for example,
+has a brother who, under a <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">nom de plume</i>, is a frequent
+contributor to the leading magazines, but is barred from
+<cite>The Smart Set</cite> by the relationship. In the same way
+Mencken was, until recently, the intimate friend and confidant
+of an eminent woman novelist, but her work has
+never appeared in <cite>The Smart Set</cite>.</p>
+
+<p>When Mencken is in New York, he and Nathan meet
+at <cite>The Smart Set</cite> office every day, including Sunday, at
+10 <span class="allsmcap">A.M.</span>, and spend two hours discussing the minor business
+of the magazine. At noon they proceed to Delmonico’s
+and have luncheon, returning at 3 <span class="allsmcap">P.M.</span> They
+finish all business by 4:30, when they leave the office.
+They often dine together and spend the evening together,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span>
+but they never discuss office matters at such times. They
+never invite authors to luncheon or dinner and never
+accept invitations from them. They never attend
+literary parties or visit studios. They are not acquainted
+with any of the literary lions of New York, saving only
+Dreiser and Huneker.</p>
+
+<p>Thus these meritorious <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">redacteurs</i> live and have their
+being. Neither belongs to a literary clique; neither
+subscribes to a clipping bureau; neither ever sits on a
+committee or joins a movement; neither needs money;
+neither ever borrows anything or asks a favor; neither
+is accountable to anyone; neither is ever indignant;
+neither gives a damn.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter transnote">
+<h2 class="bold fs150 wsp">Transcriber’s Notes</h2>
+
+<table class="autotable lh">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">pg 29 Changed:</td>
+<td class="tdl">The End of Ilsa Mentieth by Lilith Benda</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">to:</td>
+<td class="tdl">The End of Ilsa Menteith by Lilith Benda</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+</div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75507 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #75507 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75507)