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diff --git a/75507-h/75507-h.htm b/75507-h/75507-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2d3b97d --- /dev/null +++ b/75507-h/75507-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,2190 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html lang="en"> +<head> + <meta charset="UTF-8"> + <title> + Pistols For Two | Project Gutenberg + </title> + <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover"> + <style> + +body { + margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; +} + + h1,h2,h3 { + text-align: center; /* all headings centered */ + clear: both; +} + +p { + margin-top: .51em; + text-align: justify; + margin-bottom: .49em; + text-indent: 1em; +} + +hr { + width: 33%; + margin-top: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; + margin-left: 33.5%; + margin-right: 33.5%; + clear: both; +} + +hr.chap {width: 65%; margin-left: 17.5%; margin-right: 17.5%;} + +hr.r65 {width: 65%; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 17.5%; margin-right: 17.5%;} + +div.chapter {page-break-before: always;} +h2.nobreak {page-break-before: avoid;} + +table { + margin-left: auto; + margin-right: auto; +} +table.autotable { border-collapse: collapse; } + +.tdl {text-align: left; padding-left: .5em;} +.tdr {text-align: right;} +.tdc {text-align: center; padding-left: 1em;} + +.pagenum { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */ + /* visibility: hidden; */ + position: absolute; + left: 92%; + font-size: small; + text-align: right; + font-style: normal; + font-weight: normal; + font-variant: normal; + text-indent: 0; + color: #A9A9A9; +} /* page numbers */ + +.blockquot { + margin-left: 5%; + margin-right: 10%; +} + +.center {text-align: center;} + +.smcap {font-variant: small-caps;} + +.allsmcap {font-variant: small-caps; text-transform: lowercase;} + +/* Images */ + +img { + max-width: 100%; + height: auto; +} + +.figcenter { + margin: auto; + text-align: center; + page-break-inside: avoid; + max-width: 100%; +} + +/* Transcriber's notes */ +.transnote {background-color: #E6E6FA; + color: black; + font-size:small; + padding:0.5em; + margin-bottom:5em; + font-family:sans-serif, serif; +} + +.fs70 {font-size: 70%} +.fs80 {font-size: 80%} +.fs120 {font-size: 120%} +.fs150 {font-size: 150%} + +.no-indent {text-indent: 0em;} +.bold {font-weight: bold;} +.wsp {word-spacing: 0.3em;} + +p.drop-cap { + text-indent: 0em; +} +p.drop-cap:first-letter +{ + float: left; + margin: 0em 0.1em 0em 0em; + font-size: 250%; + line-height:0.85em; +} + +.upper-case +{ + text-transform: uppercase; +} + +h2 {font-size: 130%; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6em; word-spacing: .3em;} + +.lh {line-height: 1.5em;} + </style> +</head> +<body> +<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> + diff --git a/75507-h/images/cover.jpg b/75507-h/images/cover.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..86d85fc --- /dev/null +++ b/75507-h/images/cover.jpg diff --git a/75507-h/images/ititle.jpg b/75507-h/images/ititle.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..7668010 --- /dev/null +++ b/75507-h/images/ititle.jpg |
