Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage)

by H. L. Mencken

  All these yarns were fictions. Crane was actually the son of a respectable burgher in New Jersey and his mother was a member of the Methodist Church. If he drank somewhat freely when he was in funds, then so did all the other newspaper reporters of his era. If he borrowed money when he was out of a job, then ditto, ditto. If he took drugs, it was only to relieve his frequent and distressing infirmities, of which the last was the tuberculosis pulmonalis which took him off. As for his offenses against sex hygiene, they were chiefly imaginary. All through his youth he was romantically in love with a lady visibly his senior, and before he was much beyond 25 he married another lady still more his senior. In brief, a somewhat banal life. Even his war adventures were far less thrilling in fact than in his florid accounts of them. When he went to the Greek-Turkish War he came to grief because he could speak no language save English; when he went to the Spanish-American War he came down with severe cramps and had to be nursed by his fellow-correspondents.

  But Crane could write, so some of his books have outlived their time. It was his distinction that he had an eye for the cold, glittering fact in an age of romantic illusion. The dignified authors of that time were such shallow, kittenish fellows as Howells, F. Hopkinson Smith and Frank R. Stockton, with Richard Watson Gilder as their high priest. The popular authors revolved around Richard Harding Davis. Crane’s first writings alarmed Howells and shocked Gilder, but gradually a gang of younger men gathered around him, and before he died he was a national celebrity—in fact, a sort of American Kipling. He was, indeed, the head and forefront of the Young America movement in the middle nineties. No man of that movement was more vastly admired, and none has survived with less damage. How far would he have got if he had lived? It is useless to speculate. He died, like Schubert, at 30. He left behind him one superlatively excellent book, four or five magnificent short stories, some indifferent poems and a great mass of journalistic trash. The Gilders of his time left only trash.

  Hamlin Garland

  From SIX MEMBERS OF THE INSTITUTE, PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES, 1919, pp. 134–38. Garland was born in 1860 and died in 1940. In one of his later books – I think it was My Friendly Contemporaries, 1932 – he got revenge for the following by plastering me violently. It was by no means my first onslaught on him. I began by denouncing his The Shadow World in the Smart Set for Feb., 1909, pp. 153–54, only four months after I had set up shop as a reviewer. He was greatly overestimated in his lifetime, mainly because of his energy and effrontery as a literary politician. His actual talents were very meagre, and he was shabby and devious as a man

  THE CASE of Garland belonged to pathos in the grand manner, as you will discover on reading his autobiography, “A Son of the Middle Border.” What ailed him was a vision of beauty, a seductive strain of bawdy music over the horizon. That vision, in his youth, tore him from his prairie plow and set him to clawing the anthills at the foot of Parnassus. He became an elocutionist. He aspired to write for the Atlantic Monthly. He fell under the spell of the Boston aluminados of 1885, which is as if one were to take fire from a June-bug. Finally, after embracing the Single Tax, he achieved a couple of depressing story-books, earnest, honest and full of indignation.

  American criticism, which always mistakes a poignant document for esthetic form and organization, greeted these moral volumes as works of art, and so Garland found himself an accepted artist. No more grotesque miscasting of a diligent and worthy man is recorded in profane history. He had no more feeling for the intrinsic dignity of beauty, no more comprehension of it as a thing in itself, than a policeman. He was a moralist endeavoring ineptly to translate his messianic passion into esthetic terms, and always failing. “A Son of the Middle Border,” undoubtedly the best of all his books, projects his failure brilliantly. It is, in substance, a document of considerable value—a naïve and often highly illuminating contribution to the history of the American peasantry. It is, in form, a thoroughly third-rate piece of writing—amateurish, flat, banal, repellent. Garland got facts into it; he got the relentless sincerity of the rustic Puritan; he got a sort of evangelical passion. But he couldn’t get any charm. He couldn’t get any beauty.

  In such a career, as in such a book, there is something profoundly pathetic. One follows the progress of the man with a constant sense that he was steering by faulty compasses, that fate led him into paths too steep and rocky—nay, too dark and lovely—for him. An awareness of beauty was there, and a wistful desire to embrace it, but the confident gusto of the artist was always lacking. What one encountered in its place was the enthusiasm of the pedagogue, the desire to yank the world up to the soaring Methodist level, the hot yearning to displace old ideas with new ideas, and usually much worse ideas, for example, the Single Tax and spook-chasing. The natural goal of the man was the evangelical stump. He was led astray when those Boston Brahmins, enchanted by his sophomoric platitudes about Shakespeare, set him up as a critic of the arts, and then as an imaginative artist. He should have gone back to the saleratus belt, taken to the chautauquas, preached his foreordained perunas, got himself into Congress, and so helped to save the Republic from the demons that beset it. What a gladiator he would have made against the White Slave Traffic, the Rum Demon, the Kaiser!

  His worst work, I daresay, is in some of his fiction, but my own favorite is “The Shadow World,” a record of his communings with the gaseous precipitates of the departed. He took great pains at the start to assure us that he was a man of alert intelligence and without prejudices or superstitions. He had no patience, it appeared, with those idiots who swallowed the buffooneries of spiritualist mediums too greedily. For him the scientific method—the method which examines all evidence cynically and keeps on doubting until the accumulated proof, piled mountain-high, sweeps down in an overwhelming avalanche.… Thus he proceeded to the haunted chamber and began his dalliance with the banshees. They touched him with clammy, spectral hands; they wrung music for him out of locked pianos; they threw heavy tables about the room; they gave him messages from the golden shore and made him the butt of their coarse, transcendental humor. Through it all he sat tightly and solemnly, his mind open and his verdict up his sleeve. He was belligerently agnostic, and called attention to it proudly.… Then, in the end, he gave himself away. One of his fellow “scientists,” more frankly credulous, expressed the belief that real scientists would soon prove the existence of spooks. “I hope they will,” said the scientific Mr. Garland.

  Henry James

  From the Smart Set, Nov., 1920, pp. 140–41

  HENRY JAMES would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs from the Chicago stockyards. Finding New England all culture and no soul, he decided to escape, but he made the mistake of going in the wrong direction. In London he was in exactly the same situation as a young Westerner in Boston—that is, he was confronted by a culture more solid and assured than his own. It kept him shaky all his life long; it also kept him fawning, as his letters inconveniently reveal. He died a sort of super-Howells, with a long row of laborious but essentially hollow books behind him. The notion that James was a master mind is confined to the sort of persons who used to regard Browning as the greatest of poets. He was a superb technician, as Joseph Conrad has testified, but his ideas were always timorous; he never overcame his bashfulness in the presence of such superior fauna as the Lord Chancellor, the Master of Pembroke and Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Thus his painful psychologizings, when translated into plain English, turn out to be chiefly mere kittenishness—an arch tickling of the ribs of elderly virgins—the daring of a grandma smoking marijuana. But I believe that the makings of a genuinely first-rate artist were in James, and that Chicago would have developed him. What he needed was intimate contact with the life of his own country. He was unhappy in New England because he was an American, and New England, then as now, was simply a sort of outhouse of old England—a Devil’s Island of intellectual poor relations, eternally wearing out the English chemises and pantaloons of season before last. A very defective psychologis
t, he made the blunder of jumping from the frying pan into the fire. The West would have amused, intrigued and finally conquered him. He would have been a great artist in his own country.

  Dreiser

  From the American Mercury, March, 1926, pp. 379–81. A review of An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser; two volumes; New York, 1926. Dreiser died in 1945

  WHATEVER else this vasty double-header may reveal about its author, it at least shows brilliantly that he is wholly devoid of what may be called literary tact. A more artful and ingratiating fellow, facing the situation that confronted him, would have met it with a far less difficult book. It was ten years since he had published his last novel, and all his old customers, it is reasonable to assume, were hungry for another—all his old customers and all his new customers. His publisher, after a long and gallant battle, had at last chased off the comstocks who sought to hamstring him. Rivals, springing up at intervals, had all succumbed. The Dreiser cult, once grown somewhat wobbly, was full of new strength and enthusiasm. The time was thus plainly at hand to make a ten-strike. What was needed was a book full of all the sound and solid Dreiser merits, and agreeably free from the familiar Dreiser defects—a book carefully designed and smoothly written, with no puerile clichés in it and no maudlin moralizing—in brief, a book aimed deliberately at readers of a certain taste, and competent to estimate good workmanship. Well, how did Dreiser meet the challenge? He met it, characteristically, by throwing out the present shapeless and forbidding monster—a heaping cartload of raw materials for a novel, with rubbish of all sorts intermixed—a vast, sloppy, chaotic thing of 385,000 words—at least 250,000 of them unnecessary. Such is scientific salesmanship as Dreiser understands it. Such is his reply to a pleasant invitation to a party.

  The plot is extremely simple. Clyde Griffiths, the son of a street preacher in Kansas City, revolts against the piety of his squalid home, and gets himself a job as bellboy in a gaudy hotel. There he acquires a taste for the luxuries affected by traveling salesmen, and is presently a leader in shop-girl society. An automobile accident, for which he is not to blame, forces him to withdraw discreetly, and he proceeds to Chicago, where he goes to work in a club. One day his father’s rich brother, a collar magnate from Lycurgus, N. Y., is put up there by a member, and Clyde resolves to cultivate him. The old boy, taking a shine to the youngster, invites him to Lycurgus, and gives him a job in the factory. There ensues the conflict that makes the story. Clyde has hopes, but very little ready cash; he is thus forced to seek most of his recreation in low life. But as a nephew to old Samuel Griffiths he is also taken up by the Lycurgus haut ton. The conflict naturally assumes the form of girls. Roberta Alden, a beautiful female operative in the factory, falls in love with him and yields herself to him. Almost simultaneously Sondra Finchley, an even more beautiful society girl, falls in love with him and promises to marry him. Clyde is ambitious and decides for Sondra. But at that precise moment Roberta tells him that their sin has found her out. His reply is to take her to a lonely lake and drown her. The crime being detected, he is arrested, put on trial, convicted, and electrocuted.

  A meagre tale. Hardly more, in fact, than the plot of a three page story in True Confessions. But Dreiser rolls it out to such lengths that it becomes, in the end, a sort of sequence of serials. The whole first volume, of 431 pages of small type, brings us only to the lamentable event of Roberta’s pregnancy. The home life of the Griffithses in Kansas City is described in detail. We make intimate acquaintance with the street preacher himself, a poor fanatic, always trusting in the God who has fooled him incessantly, and with his pathetic, drab wife, and with his daughter Esta, who runs away with a vaudeville actor and come home with a baby. There ensues a leisurely and meticulous treatise upon the life of the bellboys in the rococo Green-Davidson Hotel—how they do their work, what they collect in tips, how they spend their evenings, what sort of girls they fancy. The automobile accident is done in the same spacious manner. Finally, we get to Lycurgus, and page after page is devoted to the operations of the Griffiths factory, and to the elegant doings in Lycurgus society, and to the first faint stirrings, the passionate high tide, and the disagreeable ebb of Clyde’s affair with Roberta. So much for Volume I: 200,000 words, In Volume II we have the murder, the arrest, the trial and the execution: 185,000 more.

  Obviously, there is something wrong here. Somewhere or other, there must be whole chapters that could be spared. I find, in fact, many such chapters—literally dozens of them. They incommode the action, they swamp and conceal the principal personages, and they lead the author steadily into his weakness for bana! moralizing and trite, meaningless words. In “The ‘Genius’ ” it was trig that rode him; in “An American Tragedy” it is chic. Did chic go out in 1896? Then so much the better! It is the mark of an unterrified craftsman to use it in 1926 – more, to rub it in mercilessly. Is Freudism stale, even in Greenwich Village? Ahoy, then, let us heave in a couple of bargeloads of complexes—let us explain even judges and district attorneys in terms of suppressions. Is the “chemic” theory of sex somewhat fly-blown? Then let us trot it out, and give it a polishing with the dish-rag. Is there such a thing as sound English, graceful English, charming and beautiful English? Then let us defy a world of scoundrels, half Methodist and half esthetic, with such sentences as this one:

  The “death house” in this particular prison was one of those crass erections and maintenances of human insensibility and stupidity principally for which no one primarily was really responsible.

  And such as this:

  Quite everything of all this was being published in the papers each day.

  What is one to say of such dreadful bilge? What is one to say of novelist who, after a quarter of a century at his trade, still writes it? What one is to say, I feel and fear, had better be engraved on the head of a pin and thrown into the ocean: there is such a thing as critical politesse. Here I can only remark that sentences of the kind I have quoted please me very little. One of them to a page is enough to make me very unhappy. In “An American Tragedy” – or, at all events, in parts of it—they run to much more than that. Is Dreiser actually deaf to their dreadful cacophony? I can’t believe it. He can write, on occasion, with great clarity, and even with a certain grace. I point, for example, to Chapter XIII of Book III, and to the chapter following. There is here no idiotic “quite everything of all this,” and no piling up of infirm adverbs. There is, instead, straightforward and lucid writing, which is caressing in itself and gets the story along. But elsewhere!…

  Thus the defects of this gargantuan book. They are the old defects of Dreiser, and he seems to be quite unable to get rid of them. They grow more marked, indeed, as he passes into later life. His writing in “Jennie Gerhardt” was better than his writing in “The ‘Genius,’ ” and so was his sense of form, of structure. But what of the more profound elements? What of his feeling for character, his capacity to imagine situations, his skill at reaching the emotions of the reader? I can only say that I see no falling off in this direction. “An American Tragedy,” as a work of art, is a colossal botch, but as a human document it is searching and full of a solemn dignity, and at times it rises to the level of genuine tragedy. Especially the second volume. Once Roberta is killed and Clyde faces his fate, the thing begins to move, and thereafter it roars on, with ever increasing impetus, to the final terrific smash. What other American novelist could have done it? His method, true enough, is the simple, bald one of the reporter—but of what a reporter! And who could have handled so magnificently the last scenes in the death-house? Here his very defects come to his aid. What we behold is the gradual, terrible, irresistible approach of doom—the slow slipping away of hopes. The thing somehow has the effect of a tolling of bells. It is clumsy. It lacks all grace. But it is tremendously moving.

  In brief, the book improves as it nears its shocking climax—a humane fact, indeed, for the reader. The first volume heaves and pitches, and the second, until the actual murder, is full of psychologizing tha
t usually fails to come off. But once the poor girl is in the water, there is a change, and thereafter “An American Tragedy” is Dreiser at his plodding, booming best. The means are often bad, but the effects are superb. One gets the same feeling of complete reality that came from “Sister Carrie,” and especially from the last days of Hurstwood. The thing ceases to be a story, and becomes a harrowing reality. Dreiser, I suppose, regards himself as an adept at the Freudian necromancy. He frequently uses its terms, and seems to take its fundamental doctrines very seriously. But he is actually a behaviorist of the most advanced wing. What interests him primarily is not what people think, but what they do. He is full of a sense of their helplessness. They are, to him, automata thrown hither and thither by fate—but suffering tragically under every buffet. Their thoughts are muddled and trivial—but they can feel. And Dreiser feels with them, and can make the reader feel with them. It takes skill of a kind that is surely not common. Good writing is far easier.

  The Dreiserian ideology does not change. Such notions as he carried out of the experiences of his youth still abide with him. They take somewhat curious forms. The revolt of youth, as he sees it, is primarily a revolt against religious dogmas and forms. He is still engaged in delivering Young America from the imbecilities of a frozen Christianity. And the economic struggle, in his eye, has a bizarre symbol: the modern American hotel. Do you remember Carrie Meeber’s first encounter with a hotel beefsteak in “Sister Carrie”? And Jennie Gerhardt’s dumb wonder before the splendors of that hotel in which her mother scrubbed the grand staircase? There are hotels, too, and aplenty, in “The Titan” and “The ‘Genius’ ”; toward the end of the latter there is a famous description, pages long, of the lobby of a New York apartment house, by the Waldorf-Astoria out of the Third avenue car-barn. It was a hotel that lured Jennie (like Carrie before her) to ruin, and it is a hotel that starts Clyde Griffiths on his swift journey to the chair. I suggest a more extensive examination of the matter, in the best Dreiser-Freud style. Let some ambitious young Privat Dozent tackle it.