Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage)

by H. L. Mencken

  Suddenly it dawned upon me – I was too dull or it was too hot for me to see it sooner—that what we were talking about was really not what we were talking about at all. I began to observe Valentino more closely. A curiously naïve and boyish young fellow, certainly not much beyond thirty, and with a disarming air of inexperience. To my eye, at least, not handsome, but nevertheless rather attractive. There was some obvious fineness in him; even his clothes were not precisely those of his horrible trade. He began talking of his home, his people, his early youth. His words were simple and yet somehow very eloquent. I could still see the mime before me, but now and then, briefly and darkly, there was a flash of something else. That something else, I concluded, was what is commonly called, for want of a better name, a gentleman. In brief, Valentino’s agony was the agony of a man of relatively civilized feelings thrown into a situation of intolerable vulgarity, destructive alike to his peace and to his dignity—nay, into a whole series of such situations.

  It was not that trifling Chicago episode that was riding him; it was the whole grotesque futility of his life. Had he achieved, out of nothing, a vast and dizzy success? Then that success was hollow as well as vast—a colossal and preposterous nothing. Was he acclaimed by yelling multitudes? Then every time the multitudes yelled he felt himself blushing inside. The old story of Diego Valdez once more, but with a new poignancy in it. Valdez, at all events, was High Admiral of Spain. But Valentino, with his touch of fineness in him—he had his commonness, too, but there was that touch of fineness – Valentino was only the hero of the rabble. Imbeciles surrounded him in a dense herd. He was pursued by women—but what women! (Consider the sordid comedy of his two marriages—the brummagem, star-spangled passion that invaded his very death-bed!) The thing, at the start, must have only bewildered him. But in those last days, unless I am a worse psychologist than even the professors of psychology, it was revolting him. Worse, it was making him afraid.

  I incline to think that the inscrutable gods, in taking him off so soon and at a moment of fiery revolt, were very kind to him. Living, he would have tried inevitably to change his fame—if such it is to be called—into something closer to his heart’s desire. That is to say, he would have gone the way of many another actor—the way of increasing pretension, of solemn artiness, of hollow hocus-pocus, deceptive only to himself. I believe he would have failed, for there was little sign of the genuine artist in him. He was essentially a highly respectable young man, which is the sort that never metamorphoses into an artist. But suppose he had succeeded? Then his tragedy, I believe, would have only become the more acrid and intolerable. For he would have discovered, after vast heavings and yearnings, that what he had come to was indistinguishable from what he had left. Was the fame of Beethoven any more caressing and splendid than the fame of Valentino? To you and me, of course, the question seems to answer itself. But what of Beethoven? He was heard upon the subject, viva voce, while he lived, and his answer survives, in all the freshness of its profane eloquence, in his music. Beethoven, too, knew what it meant to be applauded. Walking with Goethe, he heard something that was not unlike the murmur that reached Valentino through his hospital window. Beethoven walked away briskly. Valentino turned his face to the wall.

  Here was a young man who was living daily the dream of millions of other young men. Here was one who was catnip to women. Here was one who had wealth and fame. And here was one who was very unhappy.

  An American Bonaparte

  From the American Mercury, Dec., 1924, pp. 444–46.

  Bonaparte died June 28, 1921

  SO far, to my considerable amazement, no vandalic psychographer has violated the tomb of one of the strangest Americans ever seen on land or sea, to wit, the Hon. Charles Joseph Bonaparte, LL.D., Secretary of the Navy and later Attorney-General in the Cabinet of the illustrious Roosevelt I. This neglect is hard to understand, for he was unquestionably sui generis – a truly fabulous compound of Sicilian brigand and Scotch bluenose, a pawky and cruel wit and yet the most humorless of men, a royalist in his every instinct and yet a professional democrat and Puritan wowser all his days long. When he died, alas, he was already forgotten, but he surely deserves to be blown up with literary gases and made to dance before connoisseurs of the preposterous and incredible.

  Bonaparte was a grandson of that younger brother of Napoleon I who married the fair Betsy Patterson, of Baltimore, daughter to an eminent Babbitt of the time, Scotch in origin. This young brother, Jerome, deserted Betsy at Napoleon’s order, but not before she became the mother of a son. The son, who called himself Jerome Bonaparte-Patterson, was the father, in his turn, of two sons, one of whom was Charles Joseph. Betsy herself, after Jerome deserted her, returned to America, and lived to a great age. She did not die, in fact, until 1879, and during her last years she accumulated a very large property. Old Baltimore remembered her as she plodded about the town in rain and shine, collecting her rents. She took charge of the education of her grandsons, sent Charles Joseph to Harvard, set him up as a lawyer, and when she died left him a million in gilt-edged real estate.

  The other grandson, Jerome Napoleon, was never heard of, but Charles Joseph began to make a noise in his native Baltimore in the 70s, when he was just out of Harvard. The public school in America was then just getting on its legs, and Bonaparte, who had been brought up as a Catholic, was violently against it. His opposition, characteristically, was carried on in a very doctrinaire manner; he argued, in the end, that it was as outrageous for the State to supply free schools as it would be for it to provide free soup-houses. Some wit thereupon gave him the nickname of Soup-House Charlie, and it stuck to him for thirty years. But the public schools did not long detain him. In the early 80s, when Civil Service Reform began to be heard of, he joined its legions with a whoop, and thereafter, until his death, he spent half of his free energies bawling for the merit system in public office and the other half trying to wreck it as a Republican politician.

  It was through the National Civil Service Reform League that Roosevelt first came into contact with him. They had many things in common. Both were reformers who were yet adept at every trick of practical politics. Both sobbed for democracy, and distrusted the concrete democrat. Both consecrated themselves to Service, and were yet highly alert to the main chance. Bonaparte, I suspect, had secret doubts about Roosevelt, as he had about all men, but on Roosevelt’s side it was a genuine love affair. He not only admired Bonaparte’s caustic wit and immense (if disorderly) learning; he was also greatly flattered by the attentions of a man whom he looked upon as of royal blood. When he became President he put Bonaparte into the Cabinet at the first opportunity, and made frequent references thereafter to the fact that a member of an imperial house sat at his table. Bonaparte was the worst Secretary of the Navy ever heard of. It was not so much that he was incompetent as that he was indolent. For weeks running his attendance at his office was confined to an hour a day. He left Baltimore by the 11 o’clock train, got to Washington at noon, dashed to the Navy Department, and then caught the 1 o’clock train back to Baltimore. Only on Cabinet days did he linger longer in the capital.

  Nevertheless, Roosevelt was delighted with him, and presently made him Attorney-General. In this high office his indolence was of the utmost value to all predatory gentlemen of wealth. He sat for three years, and during the whole time the trusts were well and happy. Nevertheless, there is a record that, on one occasion, at least, he bestirred himself. This was when Roosevelt made one of his periodical onslaughts upon the anarchists—the predecessors, in political buncombe, of the modern Reds. Certain Italian at Paterson, N.J., printed a small anarchist newspaper, in Italian, and sent it through the mails. It had only the most meagre circulation, and its contents were so mild that prosecuting the editors was out of the question, but Roosevelt wanted to make a sensation by barring it from the mails. The problem was put up to Bonaparte as Attorney-General. After weeks of cogitation he produced an opinion which, years later, was to be the foundation-stone of a
ll the patriotic endeavors of Burleson, Palmer, Daugherty and Burns. In brief, he decided that, while there was no warrant in law for barring the paper from the mails, it should be done anyhow, for the Italians who ran it would have no practicable means of redress after the business was accomplished. In other words, he laid down the rule that it is all right to invade a citizen’s right so long as he can’t help himself. This principle, which Roosevelt adopted instantly and gladly, is now embodied in many of the decisions of our highest courts, and is thus firmly established in American jurisprudence. Roosevelt and Bonaparte put it there.

  Bonaparte, as I have said, was a Catholic. In fact, he was a very earnest one, and was never absent from his pew in the Baltimore Cathedral at high mass on Sunday morning. But he had more Scotch blood in him than Latin, and so he became, in his old age, that strangest of hybrids, a Catholic Puritan. Had he lived long enough and kept his vigor he would have been the most violent of Prohibitionists. As it was he, he specialized in the pursuit of the scarlet woman. For years he was one of the chief backers of the Baltimore Anti-Vice Society, and his enthusiasm kept up even after the grand archon of the organization, a Methodist clergyman, had been taken in homosexual practises at the Y.M.C.A. and had to leave town between days. It was common gossip in Baltimore that the Bonaparte estate included a number of old rookeries that were rented by ladies of joy. Nevertheless, Bonaparte demanded the blood of these fair creatures in season and out of season, and in the end he stirred up the town to such an extent that vice was formally prohibited and abolished, absolutely and forever. From that day to this, so I hear, not a single act of illicit carnality has ever been perpetrated in Baltimore.

  Bonaparte lived to be nearly seventy, and died childless and relatively poor. His property had gradually slipped through his fingers, though he was the most assiduous of business men, and seldom missed a day at his office. It was only in public office that he was indolent. He belonged to all known reform organizations, made endless speeches against public and private sin, and wrote incessantly. His style was extremely florid and complex. It was common for him to write sentences of five hundred words. In my newspaper days I often handled his pronunciamentoes. Not infrequently I would make two or three paragraphs out of a single sentence. But for all this copiousness he wrote clearly: his longest sentence, given wind enough, could be parsed. His books, once widely read by believers in the reforms he advocated, are now forgotten. His speeches and essays moulder in newspaper files. Few persons seem to recall him at all.

  Yet he was an enormously racy and amusing fellow and his story, done with any sort of skill, would make an extremely interesting book. I mention one thing more about him, and then resign him to the literary anatomists. He got into the Roosevelt Cabinet mainly, if not solely, because he was a Bonaparte: the fact caressed Roosevelt’s vanity. The same fact got him an audience the moment he was out of Harvard, and so opened the way for his career as a reformer. All his life he was chiefly conspicuous, not on his own account, but as the grandnephew of Napoleon I. Nevertheless, the relationship seemed to interest him personally not at all. He never made any public reference to it; he never visited France, nor had any visible communication with the rest of the Bonaparte family. Once, denounced as a Frenchman and hence sinful, he defended himself by maintaining that he hadn’t a drop of French blood—that he was Italian and Scotch. Beyond that, so far as I know, he never mentioned the Bonapartes.

  Sister Aimée

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Dec. 13, 1926. This was written at the height of La McPherson’s stormy career. Earlier in 1926 she had mysteriously disappeared, and there was a dreadful hullabaloo among her customers. When she returned just as mysteriously she told an incredible tale of having been kidnapped. It was soon established that she had been on a love-trip with one of her employés, a baldheaded and one-legged electrician, and she was thereupon charged with perjury and put on trial. She escaped easily enough, but the scandal badly damaged her business, and she was soon supplanted as the ranking ecclesiastic of the United States by Bishop James Cannon, Jr. She died, almost forgotten, in 1944

  THE REV. sister in God, I confess, greatly disappointed me. Arriving in Los Angeles out of the dreadful deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, I naturally made tracks to hear and see the town’s most distinguished citizen. Her basilica turned out to be at a great distance from my hotel, far up a high hill and in the midst of a third-rate neighborhood. It was a cool and sunshiny Sunday afternoon, the place was packed, and the whisper had gone around that Aimée was heated up by the effort to jail her, and would give a gaudy show. But all I found myself gaping at, after an hour, was an orthodox Methodist revival, with a few trimmings borrowed from the Baptists and the Holy Rollers—in brief, precisely the sort of thing that goes on in the shabby suburbs and dark back streets of Baltimore, three hundred nights of every year.

  Aimée, of course, is richer than most evangelists, and so she has got herself a plant that far surpasses anything ever seen in shabby suburbs. Her temple to the One God is immensely wide—as wide, almost, as the Hippodrome in New York—and probably seats 2,500 customers. There is a full brass band down in front, with a grand piano to one side of it and an organ to the other. From the vast gallery, built like that of a theater, runways run along the side walls to what may be called the proscenium arch, and from their far ends stairways lead down to the platform. As in many other evangelical bull-rings, there are theater seats instead of pews. Some pious texts are emblazoned on the wall behind the platform: I forget what they say. There are no stained-glass windows. The architecture, in and out, is of the Early Norddeutscher-Lloyd Rauchzimmer school, with modifications suggested by the filling-stations of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. The whole building is very cheaply made. It is large and hideous, but I don’t think it cost much. Nothing in Los Angeles appears to have cost much. The town is inconceivably shoddy.

  As I say, Aimée has nothing on tap to make my eyes pop, old revival fan that I am. The proceedings began with a solemn march by the brass band, played about as well as the average Salvation Army could have done it, but no better. Then a brother from some remote outpost filed down the aisle at the head of a party of fifty or sixty of the faithful. They sang a hymn, the brother made a short speech, and then he handed Aimée a check for $500 for her Defense Fund. A quartet followed, male, a bit scared, and with Army haircuts. Two little girls then did a duet, to the music of a ukulele played by one of them. Then Aimée prayed. And then she delivered a brief harangue. I could find nothing in it worthy of remark. It was the time-honored evangelical hokum, made a bit more raucous than usual by the loud-speakers strewn all over the hall. A brother who seemed to be a sort of stage manager held the microphone directly under Aimée’s nose. When, warmed by her homiletic passion, she turned this way or that, he followed her. It somehow suggested an attentive deck steward, plying his useful art on a rough day. Aimée wore a long white robe, with a very low-cut collar, and over it there was a cape of dark purple. Her thick hair, piled high, turned out to be of mahogany brown. I had heard that it was a flaming red.

  The rest of the orgy went on in the usual way. Groups of four, six, eight or twenty got up and sang. A large, pudgy, soapy-looking brother prayed. Aimée herself led the choir in a hymn with a lively tune and very saucy words, chiefly aimed at her enemies. Two or three times more she launched into brief addresses. But mostly she simply ran the show. While the quartets bawled and the band played she was busy at a telephone behind the altar or hurling orders in a loud stage-whisper at sergeants and corporals on the floor. Obviously, a very managing woman, strongly recalling the madame of a fancy-house on a busy Saturday night. A fixed smile stuck to her from first to last.

  What brought this commonplace and transparent mounte bank to her present high estate, with thousands crowding her tabernacle daily and money flowing in upon her from whole regiments of eager dupes? The answer, it seems to me, is as plain as mud. For years she had been wandering about the West, first as a side-show
wriggler, then as a faith healer, and finally as a cow-town evangelist. One day, inspired by God, she decided to try her fortune in Los Angeles. Instantly she was a roaring success. And why? For the plain reason that there were more morons collected in Los Angeles than in any other place on earth—because it was a pasture foreordained for evangelists, and she was the first comer to give it anything low enough for its taste and comprehension.

  The osteopaths, chiropractors and other such quacks had long marked and occupied it. It swarmed with swamis, spiritualists, Christian Scientists, crystal-gazers and the allied necromancers. It offered brilliant pickings for real estate speculators, oil-stock brokers, wire-tappers and so on. But the town pastors were not up to its opportunities. They ranged from melancholy High Church Episcopalians, laboriously trying to interest retired Iowa alfalfa kings in ritualism, down to struggling Methodists and Baptists, as earnestly seeking to inflame the wives of the same monarchs with the crimes of the Pope. All this was over the heads of the trade. The Iowans longed for something that they could get their teeth into. They wanted magic and noise. They wanted an excuse to whoop.