H.L. Mencken

The American Mercury/December, 1928

WITH this issue THE AMERICAN MERCURY completes its fifth year. Its friends, no doubt, will be glad to hear that it comes to this interesting age in the best of health, and with every hope of afflicting the right-thinking for a long while to come. It has paid off every cent of the capital invested in it, it has no debts, and it is showing a profit—not large, but still safe, steady and sufficient. Its circulation has now gone beyond that of any save a few magazines of its class, and its readers show a charming disposition to stick to it, so that the turnover is small. That portion of its circulation which is represented by annual subscribers continues to grow, both absolutely and in relation to the total monthly sale. Its advertisers, having discovered by experience that it reaches a class of readers who want things of merit and are able to buy them, patronize it faithfully, and many of them increase their bookings of space. In brief, the position of the magazine is sound and satisfactory. It does not presume to rival True Stories or The Saturday Evening Post, but within its own field it is well fortified, and the hopes of those volunteer morticians who have so often announced or predicted its failure seem doomed to disappointment. Several flattering but naive imitations of it have appeared, and it has obviously influenced the format and contents of more than one of its elders, but so far there is no sign that its readers fail to distinguish between the simon pure article and the second best.

The basic programme of the magazine continues to be as it was at the start. Its appeal is not to the great mass of Americans, but to the minority which stands clear of the prevailing national superstitions. It has no desire to organize the members of that minority in any way, either as to ideas or as to acts; it simply aims to give them accurate and realistic news of what is going on in the country, with as much good humor as possible, and to entertain them pleasantly with competent writing. Because of the fact that many of the men and ideas it has brought to autopsy enjoy the protection, in the general press of the nation, of somewhat formidable taboos, the impression has gained some ground that it is engaged in a lofty campaign of iconoclasm, or, as the barbaric phrase now goes, debunkification. In this there is a considerable inaccuracy. THE AMERICAN MERCURY is not dedicated to reforming the United States or to saving the human race. It believes, indeed, that most reformers are frauds, and it has given over a great deal of its space to setting forth the evidence against this or that one. But it holds that even reformers have human juices in them, and so it has tried to exhibit their fraudulence, and that of the other varieties of quacks, without indignation, and above all without any bawling for the police.

In this benign work it has covered a considerable range, and tried to proceed with a reasonable impartiality. The chiropractors and the Socialists, the Holy Rollers and the homeopaths, the pacifists and the spiritualists have all taken their turns upon its operating table. It has exhibited, mainly in their own words, the dreams and imbecilities of the prophets of high-powered salesmanship, vocational guidance, osteopathy, comstockery, and pedagogy. It has brought to notice, in the chaste, dispassionate manner of the clinic, the hallucinations of Rotary, the Gideons, the D. A. R., the American Legion, the League of American Penwomen, the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, and a multitude of other such klans and sodalities, many of them highly influential and all of them amusing.

Its theory is that quacks give good shows, and offer salubrious instruction, if only in the immemorial childishness of mankind. Nor are all of them clad in obvious motley. They exist within the circle of the American Medical Association as well as under rustic flambeaux, and in the great universities as well as beneath the banners of Communism, Kiwanis and the New Thought. To these austerely respectable quacks, in particular, loving attention has been given.

Naturally enough, there have been outbursts of rage against this free-and-easy flouting of idealists, and sometimes that rage has gone to the extent of reprisals. The wowsers of Boston, offended by certain animadversions upon their chicaneries, tried to bar the magazine from that great city, and when their effort failed sought the reinforcement of the Post Office Department, with its crew of pious Coolidge men. But the magazine continues to circulate in Boston, and to go through the mails.

The Methodist brethren, characteristically, have turned for revenge to lying: their various Christian Advocates lately announced that the magazine was on the rocks and for sale. But it continues to be printed and to prosper. Rotary and Kiwanis began by hinting broadly that it was backed by Russian gold, but of late their orators have invented the doctrine that what they call its “attacks” are sanitary and hence to be welcomed—that the effect of “Americana” will be to purge all the tin-pot luncheon clubs of folly and false pretenses, and so make them bigger and better.

This last is an unkind cut, but THE AMERICAN MERCURY will survive. It surely has no desire to improve Rotary. The lily is gilt enough. All it asks is that the brothers do as well hereafter as they have done in the past.

II

But this business of setting forth pleasantly the aims and achievements of the national zanies, aesthetic, commercial, patriotic, political, scientific, military, theological and philosophical—this business, after all, has been one of the least of the magazine’s concerns. It has given a great deal more space to something quite different, namely, to introducing one kind of American to another. It has ranged the country for interesting men and women, and it has let them, when they were articulate, tell their own stories. Not many of them have been persons of any prominence, and very few of them have had any previous experience as writers. They have run the whole scale from visionaries to criminals, from heroes to poor fish. But all of them, writing out of their own lives, have written with that earnest simplicity which is beyond all art, and some of their papers have been among the most interesting and moving things the magazine has printed.

The case of Mr. James Stevens is in point. His first contribution dealt with his adventures and observations as a lumberman in the Northwest. He was working at the time in a lumber-mill, and there was a sharp reality in his story that no professional writer save the most adept could have hoped to match. The response of readers was immediate, and he was encouraged to try his hand further. Presently he was retelling the legends of Paul Bunyan, the fabulous hero of the Western lumberman, and those legends, a bit later, made a book. It was a substantial success, and since then he has written other books, and shown marked and rapid progress as a writer. But when he made his first appearance in THE AMERICAN MERCURY it was as a workman in a lumber-mill.

The magazine, since its beginning, has steadily sought out such unspoiled and amusing men, and has not hesitated to employ spies to track them down. Several of its most interesting contributors have been gentlemen suffering imprisonment for lamentable crimes. One of them, Mr. Ernest Booth, is serving a life sentence. His first article, “We Rob a Bank,” was a fascinating and brilliant piece of self-revelation. More effectively than a hundred somber tomes on crime and its causes, it threw a light into the mind of the professional criminal. It was not only a good story; it was a capital piece of writing. Mr. Booth followed it with several other excellent articles, but is unable to go further because of a rule adopted by the California prison authorities, forbidding prisoners to send out MSS. This rule has also greatly damaged another man of promise, Mr. Robert J. Tasker, whose two articles, “The First Day” and “A Man is Hanged,” will be remembered. But Mr. Tasker had finished his first book, “Grimhaven,” before the rule was promulgated, and it has just been published.

Many other personal narratives have been printed. They have ranged from a charmingly philosophical essay, by a country doctor, upon the difficulties and compensations of his modest situation to a poignant paper by the daughter of an evangelical clergyman, discussing realistically the pains of life in a Southern parsonage. Mrs. Sanger, the birth controller, has described her adventures with the Puritans who have sought to put her down. An architect has told of his encounters with prehensile union leaders. Mr. Owen P. White has recalled the Texas of his youth, now standardized and gone. Mr. Walt McDougall, the veteran cartoonist, has done the story of the old Park Row. Men of business and affairs—for example, Mr. Dane Yorke, and Mr. Henry Tetlow—have discussed the arts and mysteries they know. Mr. Gregory Mason has contributed the gay reminiscences of a Chautauqua lecturer. Bishop Charles Fiske has discoursed gloomily upon the sorrows of his exalted office. Messrs. Jim Tully and Henri Tascheraud have told their barbaric tales of the road. Mr. Herbert Asbury has shaken the adjherents of a great communion and delighted the rest of us with his “Up from Methodism.”

The roll is a long one, and it will be extended hereafter. Despite the ironing-out process, life in America continues to be infinitely various. There are thousands of back-waters that remain to be explored. There are many adventures that have yet to find their bards.

III

THE AMERICAN MERCURY has not neglected belles lettres, but it makes no apology for devoting relatively little space to mere writing. Its fundamental purpose is to depict and interpret the America that is in being; not to speculate moonily about Americas that might be, or ought to be. It would print more short stories if more good ones could be found. But not many are being written in the United States today. There are, or would seem to be, two reasons for this. One is that the form is probably in decay—that all of its potentialities have been worked out, and nothing remains save to chase tails. Various ardent experimentalists try to overcome or evade its natural limitations, but none of them, so far, has solved the problem. The other reason is that the market for bad short stories is so wide and lucrative at the moment that only romantic idealists try to write good ones. On the one hand there is the demand of the magazines of huge circulation for standardized stuff that will interest their vast herds of morons and offend no one—in other words, for trash that may be turned into movie scenarios. And on the other hand there is the demand of the innumerable all-fiction magazines for trade goods on an even lower level—stories, indeed, for readers who are just able to read at all.

These markets offer good livings to multitudes of diligent hacks. They inevitably lure and debauch the young writer, save he be of extraordinary resolution. He may get ready money for any MS. in the guise of fiction, however bad it may be; if he is able to put a certain low plausibility into it he may get a very handsome honorarium. Thus the flow of stories of any honesty and dignity is less than it used to be, and it seems doomed to be still less hereafter. THE AMERICAN MERCURY prints good ones when it can find them, but finding them is not an easy task. Of a hundred that come to it from volunteer contributors, not five are even second-rate; yet many of them appear later on in other magazines— sometimes in magazines of considerable pretensions—and apparently they are consumed with satisfaction. But THE AMERICAN MERCURY is not addressed to the sort of reader who consumes them.

In the field of poetry there are similar doldrums. An immense mass of verse is being written, but not one percent of it has any merit whatsoever. The poets, after a long and bitter battle over forms, now devote themselves mainly to pawing over the debris of the combat. At intervals a thing as sound and brilliant as Mr. James Weldon Johnson’s “Go Down, Death,” makes its appearance, but the intervals seem to grow longer. There was a time, nine or ten years ago, when poetry appeared to be enjoying a renaissance in America, but the promise of that time has not been fulfilled. The new poets who were then thrown up did all their best work in the swing of the movement; the moment it began to lose momentum they took refuge in formula; and of late little of any interest has come from them.

But in this direction THE AMERICAN MERCURY still cherishes certain hopes. Poets are always the forerunners of a literature. Its first lispings are done in numbers. Thus an effort has been made to induce some of the poets of yesterday to experiment in prose, and not infrequently the result has been very gratifying. Meanwhile, the later bards, in so far as they show any skill at all, are accorded a certain hospitality—perhaps rather more than they deserve. The magazine, more than once, has printed passable poetry. It will print better when better is written

IV

The five years have been busy ones, but amusing. The charm of the grab-bag is in every editor’s daily toil. For weeks he plows hopelessly through heaps of dull and depressing stuff, and then, on some gloomy morn, there arrives the pearl of great price. It may come in wholly unheralded, or it may come in as the end product of long months of effort and negotiation. Not uncommonly an article is rewritten four or five times before it takes on a pleasing shape, and even then it may need a great deal of editorial work before it is ready for type. Worse, it may be rewritten four or five times, and grow progressively more hopeless. Such are the hazards of an editor’s life. Its compensations come when a new note, clear and charming, is sounded in the office—when there appears out of nowhere the ever-enchanting marvel of a new writer who has something really interesting to say, and knows how to say it.

THE AMERICAN MERCURY has been more fortunate than most magazines in this respect. Its departures from the old formula have naturally attracted to it a great many contributors with novel and striking ideas. Some of them have been old hands and some of them have been novices. It owes its substantial success to their collaboration. It has tried to repay them by finding a civilized and highly intelligent audience for them, sufficiently large to get them something approaching general notice.

The response of its readers has been hearty and generous. They have borne its occasional vagaries patiently, and they have supported it with extraordinary fidelity. I can only assure them, at the end of five years, that there is no letting down of the original striving. Plans of improvement are in contemplation, and they will be executed as the chance offers. THE AMERICAN MERCURY will be a great deal better magazine hereafter than it has ever been in the past. H. L. M.