by S. T. Joshi
The Collected Drama of
H. L. Mencken
Plays and Criticism
Edited by S. T. Joshi
THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC.
Lanham • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
2012
Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Group, Inc.
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Copyright © 2012 by S. T. Joshi
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis), 1880–1956.
[Plays.]
The collected drama of H.L. Mencken : plays and criticism / edited S.T.
Joshi.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8108-8369-7 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8108-
8370-3 (ebook)
I. Joshi, S. T., 1958- II. Title.
PS3525.E43A6 2012
812'.52—dc23
2012009729
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America.
Introduction
S. T. Joshi
One does not generally associate the great American journalist Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956) with the theater, but during at least the first twenty years of his career he expressed great interest in drama—American, British, and European—and actually wrote a succession of amusing and satirical plays, culminating in the full-length farce Heliogabalus (1920), cowritten with his longtime colleague George Jean Nathan. Most of his other plays were included in A Book of Burlesques (1916; rev. ed. 1920), but have otherwise not been reprinted; and his essays on drama—a selection of which is included in the second part of this book—have, by and large, not been available since their appearance in magazines and newspapers of a century or more ago.
Mencken’s literary career began when, in early 1899, well before his nineteenth birthday, he was hired as a cub reporter for the Baltimore Herald. In March of that year, he began publishing short unsigned articles on exactly the subjects one might expect a novice to be assigned: sermons by local pastors, a performance by John Philip Sousa’s band, the graduation of the senior class of the Colored High School, and so forth. Soon afterward, Mencken began publishing signed articles of a far more substantial and creative sort, ranging from poetry (gathered in his first volume, Ventures into Verse, 1903) to several columns of humorous sketches (“Rhyme and Reason,” “Knocks and Jollies”), as well as several comic short stories, including a long-running series, “Untold Tales,” that ran for thirty-three segments from May 1901 to February 1902, chiefly focusing on satires of local politicians. That humor and satire were the predominant focus of these pieces is no accident: throughout his journalistic career, Mencken was far more the outspoken and often outrageous polemicist than the objective reporter.
In Newspaper Days (1941) Mencken notes that he began his work as theater critic as early as September 19011 ; but the first theater review that exists in Mencken’s own clippings of his Herald work (now at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore) dates to September 6, 1904, when he wrote an unsigned review of The Serenade, a light opera by Victor Herbert and Harry B. Smith. The plays Mencken covered during the years 1904–1906 are rarely notable—they constitute a low period in American drama prior to the emergence of Eugene O’Neill. Mencken, his critical skills honed at an early age through voracious reading, boasted that he once “wrote twenty-three unfavorable notices in a row”2 for the Herald. Even the British and European plays that Mencken covered have by and large been expunged from the repertoire, with the obvious exception of several Shakespeare plays that Mencken reviewed in late 1904 and early 1905.
It does seem, however, that this extensive work as drama critic led to Mencken’s first prose volume—George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905), which he began in 1904. Shaw’s plays had only begun appearing on the London stage in 1892, but very quickly thereafter, with such triumphs as Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1894), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), and Man and Superman (1903), he had become the most renowned playwright in English. And yet, Mencken’s book was the first full-length treatise on his work, and it covered his novels and other writings as well as each of his plays published or produced up to that time. This remarkably astute treatise, written by a man not yet twenty-five who had never attended college, is a testament to the keenness of Mencken’s critical judgment: not only does he analyze Shaw’s work meticulously, but he places it in the broader context of the intellectual and cultural tendencies of the time, in particular the furor created by Darwin’s theory of evolution. (It is no accident that Mencken’s next book was an exhaustive study of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.)
There is no question that Mencken had by this time absorbed the work of the most revolutionary dramatist of the age—Henrik Ibsen. Indeed, he later admitted that, as early as the 1902–1903 theatrical season, he had assisted Will A. Page—former drama critic of the Washington Post and subsequently a “pressagent” (what we would today call a publicist) for a stock company organized by George Fawcett—in putting on a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts in Baltimore, with the well-known actress Mary Shaw playing the lead role. Mencken provides a pungent account of its reaction in the local press after opening night:
The next day the critic of the Sun deplored “the revolting theme” and “the ghastly story,” and the American and News lamented that such immoral and pathological stuff should be shown in a Christian city, but . . . I beat the drum for it in the Herald, and Baltimore received it without any further sign of moral trauma.3
It is unfortunate that Mencken’s notice has not yet come to light.
Mencken’s books on Shaw and Nietzsche apparently helped him land a position as book reviewer for the Smart Set, a role he filled every month from November 1908 until December 1923 (he also coedited the magazine, with George Jean Nathan, from late 1914 to the end of 1923). It was here that he found an additional forum to promote or demote the dramatists he favored or disdained. In particular, he found much of the work of such contemporary Europeans as Gerhart Hauptmann, Hermann Sudermann, and August Strindberg bracing and substantial. Mencken recognized that these playwrights constituted an important advance in realism over the “well-made plays” of Eugène Scribe, Victorien Sardou, and such of their English followers as Henry Arthur Jones and Arthur Wing Pinero; and although Ibsen, Hauptmann, Eugène Brieux, and others, as well as Shaw, used elements of the well-made play in their own work—particularly in matters of overall dramatic construction—they also broached controversial subjects boldly and unflinchingly. Mencken regarded them as largely equivalent to the social realists in the novel—Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and such later American writers as Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Willa Cather.
Mencken also found time to write dramatic criticism in his newspaper work. Although he claimed that he never wrote a formal drama review after the Herald collapsed in 1906, he did ultimately write any number of articles on drama afte
r he began working for the Baltimore Sun in 1906. In 1910 he wrote several articles on Shakespeare, Shaw, and general theatrical topics for the newly established Baltimore Evening Sun, including the delightful “A Plea for Comedy,” where he makes a case for the unaffected enjoyment of the low comedy and slapstick of vaudeville. Throughout his life there was a curious dichotomy in Mencken’s temperament between appreciation of high art and popular entertainment—something that can also be seen in his enjoyment of the grammatical and syntactical irregularities of the “American language,” irregularities that he generally eschewed using in his own prose.
On occasion, however, Mencken did more than merely fill the role of drama critic. In 1909 he assisted Holger A. Koppell in producing new translations of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Little Eyolf. The two contemplated translating the entirety of the Ibsen corpus and publishing each of the plays as a separate volume, but other, cheaper editions (especially those by William Archer) caused the publisher, John W. Luce, to terminate the series. A few years later, in 1913, Mencken wrote a lengthy preface to a new translation of Brieux’s Blanchette and The Escape by Frederick Eisemann. His devotion to Ibsen can be seen in his exhaustive account of the writing and staging of A Doll’s House (“Et-Dukkehjemiana”), published in Theatre for August 1910.
By the 1910s Mencken had recognized that dramatic literature in the West had risen exponentially in quality, and he spoke with increasing enthusiasm of the work of such playwrights as Percy MacKaye, John Galsworthy, J. M. Synge, and Lord Dunsany. At the same time, amusingly enough, his view of his former idol George Bernard Shaw had dimmed a trifle, as he claimed to detect in Shaw a growing tendency to be a kind of Polonius—one who expresses “the obvious in terms of the scandalous.” By the end of the decade Mencken’s interest in drama in general appears to have waned. Although he published several of Eugene O’Neill’s early plays in the Smart Set, he reviewed only three—Thirst, The Moon of the Caribbees, and The Emperor Jones—in his Smart Set review columns; and he reviewed nothing of O’Neill’s in his decade of reviews for the American Mercury (1924–1933).
Mencken’s own playwriting is, as stated earlier, an offshoot of his comic and satirical impulses. In particular, the institution of marriage—which Mencken claimed to regard with the loftiest of cynicism from his earliest days as a journalist—comes in for withering disdain in such pieces as In the Vestry Room (1910), Asepsis (1913), and The Wedding: A Stage Direction (1915). Mencken took pride in his role as unregenerate bachelor, and even the unsigned editorials he wrote for the Sun and the Evening Sun—editorials that theoretically articulated the papers’ official stance on topics of the day—took repeated aim at the purported disadvantages of marriage for the male of the species.
Another target of Mencken’s satire is the stodginess of the average American in the face of art, history, and natural beauty. This kind of satire—a satire that makes no bones about declaring fools to be fools—is not held in much favor by the guardians of democracy, but Mencken regarded it as a legitimate weapon against the aggressive anti-intellectualism so frequently exhibited by his countrymen. It enters into such plays as Seeing the World (1913) and Death: A Philosophical Discussion (1914) as well as his first play, The Artist: A Drama without Words (1909), although this play is largely a send-up of the “artistic temperament” and the hollowness of music critics.
Mencken, like Shaw, did not fail to address the sensitive subject of religion in his plays, most notably in Heliogabalus. The genesis of this play is of interest. Mencken had become acquainted with George Jean Nathan (1882–1958) no later than 1908, when they had both become reviewers for the Smart Set, Mencken covering books and Nathan the drama. They had already collaborated on Europe After 8:15 (1914; also containing contributions by Willard Huntington Wright), and they would collaborate again on the slim volume Pistols for Two (1917), in which each wrote a flippant biography of the other. Indeed, Mencken refused to accept the editorship of the Smart Set in 1914 unless Nathan agreed to be coeditor.
In 1918 the two writers worked together on a new translation of Ludwig Thoma’s play Moral, but this was never published. The work on this project, however, led Mencken to suggest that they write a play of their own: “My experience with Moral had somehow convinced me that writing a play was easy, and I offered to wager Nathan we could turn one out in a couple of month s.”4 In the event, Mencken wrote the first draft in six weeks. “The idea of the play was mine and so was most of the writing, but Nathan . . . made some good suggestions when the time came for the final revision.”5 For all Nathan’s experience as a drama critic, Mencken came to the conclusion that “he really had no capacity for dramatic writing.”6
The play is a burlesque not only on religion—Heliogabalus, one of the most decadent and dissipated of the Roman emperors, briefly falls in love with a Christian woman but is so repulsed by her tiresomely inflexible sexual morality that he eventually sends her packing—but on the drama itself; or, rather, on what Mencken repeatedly called “trade goods,” the standard work of art (whether it be a novel or a play or a film) that deliberately aims to please an audience of the foolish and the uncultured. Mencken also realized that, because of the heavy censorship that was still dominant in both English and American theaters at the time, the play had little chance of being produced without being immediately shut down by the guardians of morality; so he made a point of refusing any offers to stage it. Such an offer actually came from his old colleague Will A. Page, who offered $10,000 for the American rights; but, although Nathan was in favor of the proposal, Mencken vetoed it. Some years later, William Gillette and John Barrymore expressed interest, but nothing came of it. The play did get translated into German7 and, upon publication, excited some little interest among German theatrical producers; but this also came to nothing. And yet, the play reveals sure-handed dramatic technique and a rollicking humor that would seem to make it eminently stageworthy.
H. L. Mencken is not likely to challenge Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, or Edward Albee in the ranks of American dramatists, but his own dramatic writing is unfailingly amusing and engaging and displays the extent of his study of the dramatic writing of Ibsen, Shaw, and the other playwrights he discussed in the early decades of his career. And his drama criticism is likewise shrewd and perspicacious. Mencken revealed an enviable ability, in all his critical work, to distinguish the brilliant from the mediocre, the innovative from the hackneyed, the genuinely revolutionary from the calculatingly controversial. His work in drama, both as creator and as critic, has received far less attention than it deserves, and it is hoped that this volume will help to redress the balance. Mencken was a pioneering journalist, an astute literary and cultural critic, and a pungent satirist, and he chose to apply his literary gifts to the drama for the better part of two decades; for that reason alone his plays and drama criticism gain an importance that we should acknowledge.
A Note on the Texts
The texts of The Artist: A Drama without Words, Seeing the World, Asepsis: A Deduction in Scherzo Form, Death: A Philosophical Discussion, and The Wedding: A Stage Direction have been taken from the second edition of Mencken’s A Book of Burlesques (New York: Knopf, 1920). The text of In the Vestry Room has been taken from the Baltimore Evening Sun (30 May 1910); its formating has been minimally modified to harmonize with that of the other plays. The text of Heliogabalus has been taken from the first edition (New York: Knopf, 1920).
The texts of the essays that constitute Part II of this book have been taken from the magazines and newspapers in which they originally appeared, as indicated in the notes. I have preserved Mencken’s usage of double quotation marks for play titles, although in my own introduction and notes I employ the more conventional italics. In the review columns from the Smart Set, I have removed publication data that Mencken had provided for books under review; book titles were also printed in small caps, but I have printed them in normal roman type.
My notes seek to provide background information on the writ
ing of the plays and essays and to elucidate historical, literary, and other elements in them that may not be widely known. In some of the essays Mencken has cited so many names that it is not always easy to provide information about every one of them; but most of these names are easily located in reference works. It should be noted that the section on Mencken’s essays constitutes only a small proportion of his complete writings on the drama and, for reasons explained in the introduction, does not include any of his early drama reviews (Baltimore Herald, 1902–1906).
Part I
The Plays
The Artist: A Drama without Words
CHARACTERS:
A Great Pianist
A Janitor
Six Musical Critics
A Married Woman
A Virgin
Sixteen Hundred and Forty-three Other Women
Six Other Men
PLACE—A City of the United States.
TIME—A December afternoon.
(During the action of the play not a word is uttered aloud. All of the speeches of the characters are supposed to be unspoken meditations only.)
A large, gloomy hall, with many rows of uncushioned, uncomfortable seats, designed, it would seem, by some one misinformed as to the average width of the normal human pelvis. A number of busts of celebrated composers, once white, but now a dirty gray, stand in niches along the walls. At one end of the hall there is a bare, uncarpeted stage, with nothing on it save a grand piano and a chair. It is raining outside, and, as hundreds of people come crowding in, the air is laden with the mingled scents of umbrellas, raincoats, goloshes, cosmetics, perfumery and wet hair.
At eight minutes past four, THE JANITOR, after smoothing his hair with his hands and putting on a pair of detachable cuffs, emerges from the wings and crosses the stage, his shoes squeaking hideously at each step. Arriving at the piano, he opens it with solemn slowness. The job seems so absurdly trivial, even to so mean an understanding, that he can’t refrain from glorifying it with a bit of hocus-pocus. This takes the form of a careful adjustment of a mysterious something within the instrument. He reaches in, pauses a moment as if in doubt, reaches in again, and then permits a faint smile of conscious sapience and efficiency to illuminate his face. All of this accomplished, he tiptoes back to the wings, his shoes again squeaking.
