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diff --git a/75507-0.txt b/75507-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..23f8385 --- /dev/null +++ b/75507-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,1688 @@ + +*** 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 *** |