Set Down by Major Owen Hatteras

The Smart Set/January, 1921

III. On Women

Scene: An automobile on the way to Longue Vue.

Mencken

That gal in the lavender frock standing on the steps of yonder chateau takes my eye. She is pretty, and she looks intelligent.

Nathan

It is the lavender frock, not the gal, that is pretty. You have arrived at an age where any woman wearing a colour other than black fetches you. That yon chicken looks intelligent, I do not gainsay. But why admire intelligence in a pretty woman? Does one ask that a Corot landscape be intelligent? Does one itch to have a song by Brahms stimulate one’s thoughts to speculations on basal metabolism, the theory of relativity, or the elimination of urticaria following injections of horse-serum? Simple beauty should be enough for any man. You are a hog.

Mencken

And you, my dear Confucius, are an acousticon. Why do you like female morons? Very simply, because they give you an opportunity to unload your repertoire of ponderous pishposh on them without shooting you in the eye with a pêche Melba, as an intelligent woman would.

Nathan

You are only half right, old seidel. Woman, as I see her, is a spectacle, not a chautauqua. Intelligence ruins a pretty woman, as intelligence ruins a pretty musical show.

Mencken

Intelligence does nothing of the sort. It is impossible for a sheer bonehead to be pretty. A pretty baby with a noodle crammed with nothing but air is like a beautiful sausage skin without any Frankfurter in it.

Nathan

We differ for a plain reason. What you seek in a girl is stimulation. What I seek is rest. When I want stimulation I drink half a dozen cocktails. They’re quicker—and cheaper.

Mencken

I don’t seek stimulation in a woman; I seek recreation. And I can’t find recreation unless my vis-à-vis has some sagacity. Beauty is not enough.

Nathan

What can be more recreative than that very beauty? Did you ever need a woman to hold your hand when your eyes were regaled by the beauty of the Austrian Tyrol or by the Champs Elysées in the spring when the yellow nightlights are on, or by a long blue-white stretch of sea and sand? Didn’t you find a greater companionship in this beauty than in any intelligent woman you ever met, and bought a bad dinner for?

Mencken

The answer is No. The more I ponder the great problems of being and becoming, the more I am convinced that mere pulchritude is dross. I have known in my time some very sightly damsels, and one or two of them have fallen for my blather and been at pains to be polite to me. But I remember them only visually, as spectacles without substance or significance, and, as you know, my sight is the least sensitive of all my five senses. I am, for one thing, almost colour blind. In my youth I acquired painfully, as one acquires table manners and the multiplication table, the news that certain colours clash—that no gentleman ever wears a purple tie with a blue shirt. But beyond that I have never gone. Stand me before a colour combination that is new to me, and I am flabbergasted. That is why I always wear blue clothes, blue shirts and blue cravats. They match my eyes and set off my ruddy, sclerotic complexion. All women regard me as a tasty fellow. The blue monotone somehow pleases them. They attach a psychic significance to it, and so think that I am blue internally, which also pleases them, for they like a sad boy—one who knows how to sigh. But the combination is really no more than a sort of refuge or trademark. Some men roll their eyes all the time, or talk business all the time, or are stewed all the time. I am simply in blue all the time.

Nathan

But you evade the issue. We are not discussing your personal beauty, but the beauty of the innumerable caravan of enterprising and ever-amusing females. What I dispute is your doctrine that pulchritude is not enough, that a pretty girl is not her own sufficient excuse for existence. Here, my dear Herr Kollege, you wander into metaphysical piffle. What joy could be more delicate than purely aesthetic joy? And where is that joy to be found in greater measure than in the presence of young and lovely women? Nothing else is half so beautiful—not the finest score of old Ludwig, or the finest canvas of Rembrandt, or the most purple passage in the old dramatists. I delight in gaping at pretty wenches.

Mencken

It is your calamity. It explains why you are so easily intrigued by what you call morons. I have often observed you with melancholy. There was, for example, that fair creature you met in Paris in 1917—the girl from Youngstown, Ohio, whose father broke his leg in the Hotel Continental. A lovely sight, I grant you—under glass. But what a mind! Apply the Binet-Simon test to such a blockhead and the indicator will show that she is less than one year old—in fact, that she will not be born until next December a year.

Nathan

Perhaps. But I didn’t admire her mind. I admired her externally—her complexion, her eyes, her hair, her youth.

Mencken

Youth, youth! What a delusion! You were born senile. You show all of an old man’s pathetic delight in mere youngness. To all of that I am anaesthetic. The women that you admire are, roughly speaking, about half the age of those that I admire. What puzzles me is this: why do you stop at twenty? If a girl of twenty, as you say, is twice as charming as a woman of forty, then a child of ten should be twice as charming as a girl of twenty.

Nathan

It sometimes is. I like children. They are naive and often amusing—in a Rabelaisian way.

Mencken

And always ignorant, stupid, selfish and piggish. Children should be confined in public institutions. They feed upon flattery. They make intolerable noises. They smell badly. They are devoid of humour. Describe a child, and you have described a Socialist. If God blessed me with a child tomorrow, I’d sell it for a mess of pottage.

Nathan

See Freud, chapter ten, verse sixteen. You are talking nonsense. Worse, it is nonsense with a sinister inner meaning. You are actually a good family man gone to waste. You should have married at twenty-five and gone in for raising cannon-fodder. I never knew a more domestic man. The things you admire in women are not the attributes of a pretty girl, but those of a middle-aged multipara. You lately confided to me that you wear flannel pajamas on your sleeping-porch in Baltimore. I venture to say that you could almost bring yourself to admire a woman who wore flannel nightgowns.

Mencken

Bah! You betray one of the weaknesses of your case. What you admire in a woman is the clothes rather than the woman. Young girls wear bright colours, and so they take your eye. You constantly remind me of a small boy following a circus band-wagon. Let the gal be flashy enough, and you succumb instantly. Your delight in women is chiefly visual. Mine is chiefly aural: I judge them by what they say, and by the tone in which they say it. Clangtint is what fetches me. I could never resist a girl with a low and musical voice. Perhaps that is why I am so exogamous. The American woman pitches her voice too high.

Nathan

That is American credo No. 762. The shrillest voices are those of French women. If the voice is the true test, then my coloured charwoman, Mrs. Evelyn Jones, is the loveliest creature in New York. She has a superb Bierbass. I often listen with delight as she mops up my bathroom singing, “Oh, How I Love Jesus.” But as for me, I think she is too fat.

Mencken

Excuse me. I am a Southerner, and hate all coons, however meritorious. In fact, the more meritorious they are, the more I am bound to hate them. No Southern idealist ever objects to a Moor who is poor, shiftless, ignorant, ragged and spiritless. What he objects to is the Moor who begins to show dignity, efficiency and self-respect. Thus I am permitted to admire Mrs. Jones as a charwoman, but forbidden to admire her as a vocalist. Let her sing so beautifully that she reduces you to sobs, I must nevertheless maintain that she has the voice of a Follies girl.

Nathan

Even so. But which would you rather look at, a Follies girl or Schumann Heink? You say that my eyes deceive me, that let a girl make up like a plate of French pastry and at once I hear the coo of angels in her voice and the gurgle of philosophers in her discourse. You seek to tangle up the issue, and save your own face. It is, as I have said, of no moment to me whether a girl has a voice like a second-hand trombone or the mind of a flagpole painter, so long as she is pretty enough, and keeps her mouth shut. My eye is interested in neither elocution nor profundity. You look at a woman through your ears. Which is like looking at perfume or smelling music.

Mencken

You are reduced to sneers. My syllogisms fetch you.

Nathan

They fetch me exactly as I am fetched by ipecacuanha.

Mencken

(Suddenly leaning halfway out of the automobile.)

There! There!

Nathan

(Peering through the rear window.)

Where? Which one?

Mencken

The one with the yellow hat.

Nathan

O mon Dieu! That I saw her be­fore you did—a decrepit old baggage. She is thirty-four if she is a day.

Mencken

Well, what of it? Are you so steeped in darkness that you are unaware that a handsome woman reaches her maximum between thirty and thirty-five? At the moment, I can’t recall ever encountering a woman under thirty who was genuinely worth looking at.

Nathan

Spare me the details! I may burglarize the nursery, as you say, but I at least avoid the dissecting-room.

Mencken

Your tastes remain crude and untutored. You like the gross, lush beauty of youth—the beauty of a dahlia in full bloom. When you are as old as I am, and have seen as much of the world, and suffered and sorrowed as much, you will begin to realize that beauty is at its best at the moment it is first touched by decay—that the rose showing a petal that has begun to shrivel is infinitely more delicate and lovely than all the dahlias in all the funeral wreaths at all the Odd Fellows’ funerals ever pulled off. So with a woman. The thing that makes her perfect is the first appearance of fine lines around the eyes. They give her a touch of melancholy—and melancholy is absolutely essential to the highest sort of beauty. Why is a melody by Schubert the most beautiful thing ever devised by man? Because there is always wistfulness in it. The lady who has begun to oxidize has the same ineffable charm. She is perfect, and she is transient. She won’t last, and she knows it. This sense of mortality is what gives women their final charm. The young girl is simply unable to imagine her own decay. The egoism of youth protects her. Hence she may be pretty, but she can never be romantic. But an oldish gal who spends a sad hour before her mirror every morning, gently cursing God—a fully adult creature whose heart has begun to be aware of that ominous sinking, that far-away and gaseous feeling, that sensation of rats gnawing at the soul—this is the one for Henry. The beauty of such a woman often grows almost transcendental. She seems to carry with her an aura of downright ghostliness. She is as romantic as the Acropolis, or “Heart of Darkness,” or the slow movement of Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony. And her conversation is shot through with the same profound and charming melancholy. What could be more beautiful than to talk to such a woman? One stands fascinated before her gentle disillusionment, her resigned agnosticism. An hour with her is as fascinating as an hour of Eighteenth Century music.

Nathan

And as depressing. I prefer the scherzo to the largo. My everyday life is such a curse, what with my incessant malaises, my enormous expenses and the harsh need to labour, that I like the women I meet to be gay. Give me a jolly cutie, and I’ll let you have all your Acropolises. I don’t ask a woman to stimulate me to lofty reflection; even purely aesthetic reflection is too much. All I ask is that she entertain my eye, and divert my thoughts from my troubles. You say that you view women as recreations. Well, what recreation can there be in contemplating the gradual oxidation of an eyeball, the conversion of a soft pink skin into a leather of unstable colloids, the slow curing of a head of hair, as hops and tobacco are cured? If you regard that sort of thing as charming, then all I can say is that you are morbid, and should put your feet into a wine-bucket of mustard-water before retiring. Could one dance with such a pessimist as you depict? Or take her to a roof-show? Or give her a buss behind the ear in a taxicab?

Mencken

Your notions grieve me greatly. Give sober heed to your own words! What sort of ideal do you hold up? What is the kind of joy-in-women that you describe? It is, in every detail, precisely and exactly the kind that is sought by a moving-picture actor or a curb-broker.

Nathan

In God’s name, no! The joy-in-women that I describe is rather precisely and exactly the kind that is sought by an intelligent man on a holiday. You get tired of your frequent railroad trips to Baltimore, your 1906 Panama hat, the bust of Louisa M. Alcott in your workroom, your purple socks, escaloppes of veal à la Creole, your hay-fever. I, on the other hand, simply get tired of my intelligence.

Mencken

But how does your intelligence get a vacation with the kind of girl you describe? If I sat down with that kind it would take all my intelligence to reconcile me to the abject depths to which I had permitted myself to sink. Intelligence is diverted only by intelligence. Imagine an intelligent man finding abstraction on a merry-go-round!

Nathan

Very well. Go on. I have imagined it.

Mencken

Go back to the question of the moving picture actor and thé curb-broker. What is your idea of what such dolts seek in woman, since you appear to disagree with me?

Nathan

It is impossible for an imbecile like a moving-picture actor or curb-broker to be a connoisseur of that imbecility of woman that is responsible for so much of her charm. Only an intelligent man can accurately and sympathetically appreciate such imbecility, as only a practised critic of the theater can accurately and sympathetically appreciate the art of such tomfoolery as George Bickel’s. The ignoramus sees in a pretty moron only a pretty moron. The student sees in her the highest of all the feminine arts, the art of artlessness. That it is not voluntary, nor a consciously achieved art, doesn’t matter. Helen Green didn’t know she was creating literature when she set down literally the imbecilities of imbecile telephone girls and vaudevillians, nor did the ignoramuses who read her. In the same way ————- is a literary artist. If I ever set her ignorance and imbecility literally down on paper, it will be her ignorance and imbecility that will be literature. I’ll be merely the recorder. It will be her own lack of ideas and lack of intelligence that will produce the work of art, not I.

Mencken

In other words, you now proceed to flapdoodle—the inevitable refuge of a man worsted in argument. Surely you don’t ask me to accept all that fol-derol about raw materials being literature as serious doctrine, to be weighed gravely. I hope you respect my years too much to unload any such hokum on me in sober earnest. I tell you in all friendship that you ought to drink more. You are suffering from alcohol starvation, and the fact is showing itself in your mental processes. As you know, I am a particular believer in the virtues of malt liquor. I drink every drink known, and have secret means of obtaining all of them even today, but I am thoroughly convinced that malt does me more good than any other—that the rest are merely luxuries and dissipations, whereas malt is as necessary to me as honey to the bee or hell to the Christian. Take it away from me, and I’d gradually subside to the level of an ordinary literary snob.

Nathan

I hope I do not offend you when I opine that many of your failings are due to the overuse of malt—for example, your sentimentality. You have, with all possible respect, a somewhat beery mind.

Mencken

You don’t offend me. I admit it. More, I am glad of it. It has brought me happiness.

Nathan

And purple socks. Nevertheless—

Mencken

I’ll come to that in a moment. What I desire to say now is that even the large and refined delight that I take in feminine society is principally due to malt. Women who are genuinely intelligent are very rare in such societies as you and I frequent. Your reaction to the fact you have described: that is, you observe them as idiots, and have convinced yourself that they are amusing as idiots. My own reaction is different. Before I engage an unknown woman in conversation, I drink a few Humpen of malt. The result is invariable, and very agreeable. A veil rises before my eyes, and through it she appears to be not only beautiful, but also sagacious. Even when she begins to quote Arthur Brisbane, Walter Pater and Nietzsche, I am delighted. Thus I enjoy feminine society much more than you do, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and my sum of happiness is much augmented. In the same way, and for the same reason, I enjoy Italian opera more than you do. If I drank well-water and then went to hear “Traviata,” I’d burst into laughter and be thrown out of the opera house, an obviously unpleasant experience. As it is, I drink half a case of ale, applaud, and am popular and happy.

Nathan

In brief, it is better to be beery and happy than sober and full of sorrow. You have never grown up. You still spout Omar Khayyam, very badly done into prose.

Mencken

Not at all. The antithesis is fallacious. It is not between being beery and being sober, but between being beery and being bad-ginny or worse-vinous. One must drug one’s self somehow to bear life at all—that is, in New York.

Nathan

What a mind to become drugged on 2 per cent lager! Why not try lemon pop, or Moxie?

The Chauffeur

Here you are, gents.

(They climb out.)