H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/May 15, 1916

In that literary space or hiatus considered in the first of these articles—to wit, the space between the novels frankly addressed to the defective and the books which hang upon the outer battlements of literature—there is plenty of elbow room, and so it is not strange to find it occupied by compositions of widely varying species. On the one hand, we have the sweetly scandalous melodramas of Hall Caine and the pornographic piffle of Elinor Glyn, Robert W. Chambers, Reginald Wright Kauffman, Elizabeth Robins, Owen Johnson et al.—stuff that differs in degree, though scarcely much in kind, from the musk-scented garbage one finds in the magazines for shopgirls. And on the other hand, we have the uplifting balderdash of the two Porter ladies, and the mystical rumble-bumble of Will Levington Comfort, with its grotesque idealization of das ewig Weibliche, and its stale poll-parroting of incomprehensible Hindu “philosophy.” In the middle ground stand MacGrath, Davis, McCutcheon, Earl Derr Biggers, Oppenheim, Harold Bindloss, Louis Joseph Vance, Emerson Hough, makers of third-rate romances, reincarnations of Ouida and F. Marion Crawford; and the sentimentalists, Marjorie Benton Cooke, Ralph Henry Barbour, L. M. Montgomery, Maria Thompson Davies, u. s. w. Many styles; many brands of sweetness! The swing is far from a detective story by Mary Roberts Reinhart to the “Bambi” of Miss Cooke, but there is room for it. The best-seller fanatic has a changing taste, not only from year to year, but even from month to month. The same cerebrum that is made to seethe by the virtuous carnalities of Kauffman and the Glyn can be made to purr tomorrow by the saccharine banalities of a new “Rosary” or “Pollyanna.” But always there must be sentiment, and always there must be hope. “Sister Carrie” was killed by that depressing last chapter, with poor Carrie in her rocking chair by the window; if the book is read at all by respectable folk, it is read in a spirit of surreptitious adventure, as naughty day-school boys read the Old Testament.

§2.

Structurally, these best-sellers all show their kinship with the most elementary fable of the world. The story of Cinderella appears in them time after time: it is, when all is said and done, the best story ever devised by man, and as my gifted corpsbruder, George Jean Nathan, is fond of arguing, it has never failed on the stage. Without Cinderella and the Fairy Prince, many very good plays have died on their first nights; but with that lovely pair even the worst has made money. The tale has gone over into the fundamental race-myths, and is at the heart of Christian legend. What else is in the vanilla-flavored novels of W. J. Locke, albeit he commonly puts Cinderella into pantaloons? What else is in all the tales of working girls, pursued and won by dashing young millionaires? To it add the Wagner cum Niebelung doctrine of redemption by love, and you have two-thirds of the popular tales of love. And to help out there are scores of other tried and true fables. In Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter’s “Laddie,” a memorable success, one finds the story of Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet—with a happy ending, of course! She adds some other favorites: the Infant Terrible, the Innocent Condemned, Old Mother Hubbard. In the “Just David” of the other Porteress we go back to Cinderella, with some scent of Little Red Ridinghood. In all the novels of Richard Harding Davis it is Jack the Giant-Killer. In Jack London it is an amalgam of Captain Kidd and Tristan and Isolde: his books are dime-novels for the fair and forty. Old bones are always boiling in the pot-au-feu; one sniffs paleozoic smells. I have, in my long days of reviewing, renewed acquaintance with Hänsel and Gretel, the lady of Coventry, Iago, Parsifal, Don Giovanni, Sir Galahad, Tartuffe, Prometheus, Gog and Magog and the Three Wise Men. The Count of Monte Cristo still lives! I have met him 10 times within a year. . . .

§3.

But let us look into a typical popular success, high-piled upon the book counters and sonorously hymned in the Bookman. Call it “Bambi,” by Miss Cooke, an orthodox mixture of Cinderella and Little Red Ridinghood. The heroine, it appears, is Miss Francesca Parkhurst, only daughter (and child) of the eminent but somewhat balmy mathematician, Prof. James Parkhurst, Ph.D. This Professor Parkhurst, as Bambi herself says, knows more about mathematics than the man who invented them, but outside the domain of figures his intellect refuses to function. Thus he always forgets to go to his lecture room unless Bambi heads him in the right direction at the right hour, and if it were not for her careful inspection of his make-up he would often set off with his detachable cuffs upon his ankles instead of upon his wrists, and the skirts of his shirt outside instead of inside his breeches. In a word, he is the standard college professor of the bestsellers—the genial jackass we know and love of old. The college professor of the stern, cold world, perhaps, is a far different creature. I once knew one who played the races and was a firstrate amateur bartender, and there is record of another who went into politics and clawed his way to a very high office, indeed. But in romance, of course, no such heretics are allowed. The college professor of American fiction is always an absent-minded old fellow who is forever stumbling over his own feet, and he always has a pretty daughter to swab up his waistcoat after he has dined and to chase away the ganovim who are trying to rub him and to fill his house with an air of innocent and youthful gayety.

§4.

Naturally enough, this Professor Parkhurst is not at all surprised when Bambi tells him that she has decided to marry young Jarvis Jocelyn, the rising uplifter, nor even when she tells him that Jarvis knows nothing about it, nor even when she kidnaps Jarvis while he is in a state of coma and sends for a preacher and marries him on the spot, or even when she puts him to bed a cappella on the third floor of the house, and devotes her honeymoon to gathering up and sorting out the flying pages of the Great Drama that he is writing. College professors of the standard model do not shy at such doings. Like babes in arms, they see the world only as a series of indistinct shadows. It would not have made much impression upon him when she shanghais Jarvis and interns the poor fellow in a garret and kicks up a scandal that shakes the whole town. He is dimly conscious that something is going on, just as an infant is dimly conscious that it is light at times and dark at times, but farther than that he recks and wots not.

And what does Bambi do next? Next she grabs a pencil and a pad of paper and dashes off a short story of her own, with herself, Jarvis and the professor as its characters. Then she tires of it and puts it away. Then one day she picks up a New York magazine containing an offer of $500 cash for the best short story submitted in competition. Then she gets out her story, has it typewritten and send its in. Then—what! Have you guessed it? Clever, indeed! Yes, even so; then she wins the prize. And then, tucking Jarvis under her arm, she goes to New York and tries to sell the Great Drama. And then she spends a week of sitting in the anterooms of theatrical managers. And then, being published under a nom de plume, she finds herself an anonymous celebrity and is hospitably received by the genial Bob Davis, editor of Munsey’s. And then another and much more elegant magazine editor—no doubt Charles Hansom Towne, thinly disguised—falls in love with her and gives her many valuable pointers. And then of the Frohmans proposes to have her story dramatized, and she lures him into offering Jarvis the job and then pitches in and helps to perform it. Then the play makes a tremendous hit on Broadway, and she confesses the whole plot, and Jarvis falls desperately in love with her, and we part from them in each other’s arms. . . .

§5.

Another: “The Calling of Dan Matthews,” by the opulent Harold Bell Wright, perhaps the most successful of all the best-seller writers, not even excepting Chambers. Much fun is poked at him; he becomes a sort of national joke. Nevertheless, his books continue to sell enormously, and as for me, I can find nothing in them more absurd than the stuff one encounters in the works of rival fictioneers—for example, Marie Corelli, Oppenheim, the Glyn, or either of the Mesdames Porter. The million who actually read him seem to take him seriously enough. At all events, his publishers find it worth while to print a somewhat elaborate biography of him, heavily illustrated. On page 5 there is a photograph showing “the author starting to the express office, miles away over the desert, to forward his manuscript by express to the publishers.” As a work of art the picture has merits, but as a likeness it is a failure, for the camera was set up astern of the author, and we see only the back of his neck and the hindquarters of his mustang. Below the photograph is another showing “the combined study and studio built by the author’s own hands,” and a footnote on the opposite page gives information that “the exposure was taken (sic) from the southeast.” A careful study of the shadows on the building reveals the fact that the exposure was also “taken” in the morning—probably at some time between 10 and 11 o’clock. We know, too, that the author was not laboring inside at the time, for we are told on another page that “at such times a small flag floats over the study.” “When at work he will not permit interruption, but when the flag is lowered you will be greeted, if you call, with a smile and a hearty welcome.” It is not likely, however, that many visitors call, for the Tecolata Rancho—that is the name of the author’s principality—is in Southern California, “a few miles north of the Mexican border,” and “just beyond Death Valley.”

§6.

Many interesting and even astonishing facts regarding the author are set forth in this little book. He is the father, it appears, of half a dozen novels, and all of them are extraordinary successes. “That Printer of Udell’s” is one of them. He spent three years writing it and put a lot of happy thoughts into it, but several publishers, with characteristic stupidity, declined it. Then, fortunately enough, it fell into the hands of a Chicago firm, which accepted it with alacrity. “By the time the first copy was offered for sale nearly $10,000 had been expended in plates, advertising, etc.” But the money was well invested, for since then “this splendid story has reached a sale of over 100,000 copies.” The author’s next effort, “The Shepherd of the Hills,” took even longer to produce—four years, to be exact. He was “tendered a fabulous sum by the Book Supply Company for its sole ownership, but he wisely preferred its publication on a royalty basis.” No doubt he has a fat bank account by now. Let us hope so.

Several pages of epigrams from “The Calling of Dan Matthews” enable the lazy investigator to absorb the proteids of the book without running the risk of getting its bones into his tonsils. An example: “Whatever or whoever is responsible for the existence of such people and such conditions is a problem for the age to solve. That fact is, they are here.” Marcus Aurelius himself could not have put it better. It has the universal applicability of a strophe from the Book of Proverbs. You can substitute any names you want for “such people” and anything you want for “such conditions,” and the truth of the saying will still be overpowering. Try it with Hall Caine and cholera morbus. Try it again with Dr. Billy Sunday and the whole-tone scale. Try it yet again with the Hon. Tom Hare and cruelty to animals. A man capable of thinking such thoughts is assuredly wasting his time on best-sellers.

§7.

But I am forgetting “The Calling of Dan Matthews”—and on second thoughts I decide to spare you its plot. Let the opening sentences suffice, with their Schoenbergian muddling of tenses: “This story began in the Ozark Mountains. It follows the train that is nobody knows how old. But mostly this story happened in Corinth.” . . . A fermata here!