I thus beg the question, but explain the actor. He is this silly youngster grown older, but otherwise unchanged. An initiate of a profession requiring little more information, culture or capacity for ratiocination than of the lady of joy, and surrounded in his workshop by men who are as stupid, as vain and as empty as he himself will be in the years to come, he suffers an arrest of development, and the little intelligence that may happen to be in him gets no chance to show itself. The result, in its usual manifestation, is the average bad actor—a man with the cerebrum of a floor-walker and the vanity of a bishop. The result, in its highest and holiest form, is the actor-manager, with his retinue of press-agents, parasites and worshiping wenches—perhaps the most preposterous and awe-inspiring donkey that civilization has yet produced.
The relatively greater intelligence of actresses is easily explained. They are, at their worst, quite as bad as the generality of actors. There are she-stars who are all temperament and balderdash—intellectually speaking, beggars on horseback, servant girls well washed. But no one who knows anything about the stage need be told that it can show a great many more quick-minded women than intelligent men. And why? Simply because its women are recruited, in the main, from a class much above that which furnishes its men. It is, after all, not unnatural for a woman of considerable intelligence to aspire to the stage. It offers her, indeed, one of the most tempting careers that are open to her. She can hardly hope to succeed in business, and in the other professions she is an unwelcome and much-scoffed-at intruder, but on the boards she can meet men on an equal footing. It is, therefore, no wonder that women of a relatively superior class often take to the trade. Once they embrace it, their superiority to their male colleagues is quickly manifest. All movements against puerility and imbecility in the drama have originated, not with actors, but with actresses—that is, in so far as they have originated among stage folks at all. In the days when Ibsen was new in the world, his pioneers were such women as Helena Modjeska, Agnes Sorma and Janet Achurch; the men all hung back. Ibsen, it would appear, was aware of this superior alertness and took shrewd advantage of it. At all events, all his best acting parts are feminine ones.
The Comedian
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 18, 1929
THE ACTING that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings actually comport themselves in crises, but simply how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true. But it is lower than either of those arts, for it is forced to make its gaudy not-true absurd by putting it alongside the true. There stands Richard Cœur de Lion—and there, plainly enough, also stands a poor ham. Relatively few reflective persons seem to get any pleasure out of acting. They often, to be sure, delight in comedians—but a comedian is not an actor: he is sort of reductio ad absurdum of an actor. His work bears the same relation to acting properly so called as that of a hangman, a midwife or a divorce lawyer bears to poetry, or that of a bishop to religion.
Arrière-Pensée
From PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES, 1924, p. 116.
First printed in the Smart Set, April, 1919, pp. 51–52. With additions from the Smart Set, Nov., 1919, pp. 141–43
MEN of all other trades always contemplate the actor with lifted eyebrow and superior snort; I myself, casting about for chances to prove my own lofty quality, have had at him many a time, hissing at him and mocking him. But on blue days it often occurs to me that nine-tenths of this unanimous masculine scorn may be buncombe—that other men dislike actors, not because they are intrinsically disgusting, but because women like them—in brief, because of jealousy. For women do like them; it would be silly to deny it; not even aviators are such heroes at tea-parties; a women’s club favored with a lecture on Shakespeare by Lionel Balderdash turns out to the last flapper and grandma.
Well, what is the attraction? An actor is empty of ideas; he is bombastic; he is ignorant; he is lazy; he is got up absurdly; he has the manners of a head waiter or a fashionable gynecologist. And yet the gals indubitably incline toward him. No doubt the answer, like most answers to human riddles, is very complex; one cannot hope to put it into a sentence. Part of it, I fancy, is to be found in this fact: that the actor is free from the smell of commerce and yet shows none of the social detachment that goes with the authentic professions. The average American woman is tired of business men and their ways. Her husband is typically a business man; his friends are business men; most of the men she meets are business men. She knows, by long experience, what oafs they are; she knows that they are as hollow as so many jugs; she revolts against their naïve stupidity and sentimentality. But when she turns to superior classes of men she immediately misses something. These men are quite as intelligent as she is, and hence do not take her seriously; her whole technique thus goes to pieces. Here the actor, like the clergyman, comes to the bat. Putatively a professional man and showing some of the outward signs of a professional man, he is yet as simple-minded at bottom as a cheesemonger. Thus, when he turns his blather upon a woman, he gives her the illusion that she is beset by a man who is at once intellectual and idiotic, her full equal and her abject slave—in brief, by the ideal of her dreams. And to help out this benign hallucination there is the actor’s elaborately urgent, creamy, unctuous and flattering manner—a thing as much a part of his stock in trade as his shaven upper lip, his broad a or the perfect hang of his pantaloons.
Also, there is something more, and it was once revealed to me in the confidences of a theatrical manager, couched in the following terms: “Let me ask you a question. At what time of the day do men and women begin to meet socially? Is it in the morning? No; all men are too busy. Is it in the early afternoon? No, for the same reason. Social relaxation begins, in Christendom, at about five o’clock. Well, now consider an actor’s day. Say there is no matinée. He gets up at 2 p.m., eats breakfast, reads the Morning Telegraph for an hour, bathes, shaves, spends half an hour selecting his cravat, and then goes out. Consider, now, his advantage when he encounters women. He has just shaved. All other men have been shaved eight or nine hours before. They are beginning to look scrubby and dirty. But the actor is as spick and span as a hard-boiled egg. And that is what fetches women. They like a man who is courageous. They like to be noticed by a man who is prominent. But most of all they like a man who has just come out of a barber-shop. There is your whole story.”
Nevertheless, I still seem to detect the faint glare of something else over the horizon. Men may dislike actors because women like them, but they also dislike them on their own account. Perhaps the really fundamental objection to them, stripping the business of all mere sophistry and snobbery, is that they give away the idiotic vanity of the whole male sex. An actor is simply a man who, by word and strut, says aloud of himself what all normal men think of themselves. Thus he exposes, in a highly indiscreet and disconcerting manner, the full force of masculine vanity. But I doubt that he exaggerates it. No healthy male is ever actually modest. No healthy male ever really thinks or talks of anything save himself. His conversation is one endless boast—often covert, but always undiluted. Even his theology is seldom more than a stealthy comparison of himself and God, to the disadvantage of God.… The youngest flapper knows all this. Feminine strategy, in the duel of sex, consists almost wholly of an adroit feeding of this vanity. Man makes love by braggadocio. Woman makes love by pretending to believe.
Oratory
From the American Mercury, Dec., 1924
THE THEORY that the ancient Greeks and Romans were men of a vast and ineffable superiority runs aground on the fact that they were great admirers of oratory. No other art was so assiduously practised among them. Today we venerate the architects and dramatists of Greece far more than we venerate its orators, but the Greeks themselves put the orators first, and in consequence much better records of them are preserved today. But oratory, as a matter of fact, is the lowest of all the arts. Where is it most respected? Among savages, in and out o
f civilization. The yokels of the open spaces flock by the thousand to hear imbeciles yawp and heave; the city proletariat goes to political meetings and glues it ears to the radio every night. But what genuinely civilized man would turn out to hear even the champion orator of the country? Dozens of the most eminent professors of the art show off their tricks every day in the United States Senate. Yet the galleries of the Senate, save when news goes out that some Senator is stewed and about to make an ass of himself, are occupied by Negroes who have come in to get warm and hand-holding bridal couples from rural North Carolina and West Virginia.
The Libido for the Ugly
From FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS, PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES,
1927, pp. 187–93
ON a Winter day some years ago, coming out of Pittsburgh on one of the expresses of the Pennsylvania Railroad, I rolled eastward for an hour through the coal and steel towns of Westmoreland county. It was familiar ground; boy and man, I had been through if often before. But somehow I had never quite sensed its appalling desolation. Here was the very heart of industrial America, the center of its most lucrative and characteristic activity, the boast and pride of the richest and grandest nation ever seen on earth—and here was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn that it reduced the whole aspiration of man to a macabre and depressing joke. Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination—and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats.
I am not speaking of mere filth. One expects steel towns to be dirty. What I allude to is the unbroken and agonizing ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness, of every house in sight. From East Liberty to Greensburg, a distance of twenty-five miles, there was not one in sight from the train that did no insult and lacerate the eye. Some were so bad, and they were among the most pretentious—churches, stores, warehouses, and the like—that they were downright startling; one blinked before them as one blinks before a man with his face shot away. A few linger in memory, horrible even there: a crazy little church just west of Jeannette, set like a dormer-window on the side of a bare, leprous hill; the headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at another forlorn town, a steel stadium like a huge rat-trap somewhere further down the line. But most of all I recall the general effect—of hideousness without a break. There was not a single decent house within eye-range from the Pittsburgh suburbs to the Greensburg yards. There was not one that was not misshapen, and there was not one that was not shabby.
The country itself is not uncomely, despite the grime of the endless mills. It is, in form, a narrow river valley, with deep gullies running up into the hills. It is thickly settled, but not noticeably overcrowded. There is still plenty of room for building, even in the larger towns, and there are very few solid blocks. Nearly every house, big and little, has space on all four sides. Obviously, if there were architects of any professional sense or dignity in the region, they would have perfected a chalet to hug the hillsides—a chalet with a high-pitched roof, to throw off the heavy Winter snows, but still essentially a low and clinging building, wider than it was tall. But what have they done? They have taken as their model a brick set on end. This they have converted into a thing of dingy clapboards, with a narrow, low-pitched roof. And the whole they have set upon thin, preposterous brick piers. By the hundreds and thousands these abominable houses cover the bare hillsides, like gravestones in some gigantic and decaying cemetery. On their deep sides they are three, four and even five stories high; on their low sides they bury themselves swinishly in the mud. Not a fifth of them are perpendicular. They lean this way and that, hanging on to their bases precariously. And one and all they are streaked in grime, with dead and eczematous patches of paint peeping through the streaks.
Now and then there is a house of brick. But what brick! When it is new it is the color of a fried egg. When it has taken on the patina of the mills it is the color of an egg long past all hope or caring. Was it necessary to adopt that shocking color? No more than it was necessary to set all of the houses on end. Red brick, even in a steel town, ages with some dignity. Let it become downright black, and it is still sightly, especially if its trimmings are of white stone, with soot in the depths and the high spots washed by the rain. But in Westmoreland they prefer that uremic yellow, and so they have the most loathsome towns and villages ever seen by mortal eye.
I award this championship only after laborious research and incessant prayer. I have seen, I believe, all of the most unlovely towns of the world; they are all to be found in the United States. I have seen the mill towns of decomposing New England and the desert towns of Utah, Arizona and Texas. I am familiar with the back streets of Newark, Brooklyn and Chicago, and have made scientific explorations to Camden, N. J. and Newport News, Va. Safe in a Pullman, I have whirled through the gloomy, God-forsaken villages of Iowa and Kansas, and the malarious tide-water hamlets of Georgia. I have been to Bridgeport, Conn., and to Los Angeles. But nowhere on this earth, at home or abroad, have I seen anything to compare to the villages that huddle along the line of the Pennsylvania from the Pittsburgh yards to Greensburg. They are incomparable in color, and they are incomparable in design. It is as if some titanic and aberrant genius, uncompromisingly inimical to man, had devoted all the ingenuity of Hell to the making of them. They show grotesqueries of ugliness that, in retrospect, become almost diabolical. One cannot imagine mere human beings concocting such dreadful things, and one can scarcely imagine human beings bearing life in them.
Are they so frightful because the valley is full of foreigners—dull, insensate brutes, with no love of beauty in them? Then why didn’t these foreigners set up similar abominations in the countries that they came from? You will, in fact, find nothing of the sort in Europe—save perhaps in the more putrid parts of England. There is scarcely an ugly village on the whole Continent. The peasants, however poor, somehow manage to make themselves graceful and charming habitations, even in Spain. But in the American village and small town the pull is always toward ugliness, and in that Westmoreland valley it has been yielded to with an eagerness bordering upon passion. It is incredible that mere ignorance should have achieved such masterpieces of horror.
On certain levels of the American race, indeed, there seems to be a positive libido for the ugly, as on other and less Christian levels there is a libido for the beautiful. It is impossible to put down the wallpaper that defaces the average American home of the lower middle class to mere inadvertence, or to the obscene humor of the manufacturers. Such ghastly designs, it must be obvious, give a genuine delight to a certain type of mind. They meet, in some unfathomable way, its obscure and unintelligible demands. They caress it as “The Palms” caresses it, or the art of the movie, or jazz. The taste for them is as enigmatical and yet as common as the taste for dogmatic theology and the poetry of Edgar A. Guest.
Thus I suspect (though confessedly without knowing) that the vast majority of the honest folk of Westmoreland county, and especially the 100% Americans among them, actually admire the houses they live in, and are proud of them. For the same money they could get vastly better ones, but they prefer what they have got. Certainly there was no pressure upon the Veterans of Foreign Wars to choose the dreadful edifice that bears their banner, for there are plenty of vacant buildings along the track-side, and some of them are appreciably better. They might, indeed, have built a better one of their own. But they chose that clapboarded horror with their eyes open, and having chosen it, they let it mellow into its present shocking depravity. They like it as it is: beside it, the Parthenon would no doubt offend them. In precisely the same way the authors of the rat-trap stadium that I have mentioned made a deliberate choice. After painfully designing and erecting it, they made it perfect in their own sight by putting a completely impossible pent-house, painted a staring yellow, on top of it. The effect is that of a fat woman with a black eye. It is that of a Presbyterian grinning. But they like it.
Here is something that the psychologists have so
far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth. The etiology of this madness deserves a great deal more study than it has got. There must be causes behind it; it arises and flourishes in obedience to biological laws, and not as a mere act of God. What, precisely, are the terms of those laws? And why do they run stronger in America than elsewhere? Let some honest Privat Dozent in pathological sociology apply himself to the problem.
1 This was written in 1923. It goes without saying that the art gallery I protested against was duly built, and that it has since cost the taxpayers of Baltimore many millions. Meanwhile, Henry Walters, a rich distiller and railway magnate, had been accumulating a really distinguished collection in the town, and when he died in 1931 not only left it to the municipality but also provided funds for its maintenance in perpetuity. So Baltimore now has two art galleries—the one superb and perhaps incomparable in the United States, and the other a helter-skelter assemblage of left-overs, largely filled with Modernist trash. The former costs the taxpayer nothing; the latter mulcts him for more and more every year.
XXIX. BUFFOONERIES
Death: a Philosophical Discussion
From A BOOK OF BURLESQUES, 1916, pp. 11–23.
First printed in the Smart Set, Dec., 1914, pp. 213–16
The back parlor of an American home. A dim suggestion of festivity: strange chairs, the table pushed back, a decanter and glasses. A heavy, suffocating, discordant scent of flowers—roses, carnations, lilies, gardenias. A general stuffiness and mugginess, as if it were raining outside, which it isn’t.
Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage) Page 65
