H.L. Mencken

The Smart Set/January, 1921

I

An American Novel

AFTER all, Munyon was probably right; there is yet hope. Perhaps Emerson and Whitman were right too; maybe even Sandburg is right. What ails us all is a weakness for rash over-generalization, leading to shooting pains in the psyche and delusions of divine persecution. Observing the steady and precipitate descent of promising postulants in beautiful letters down the steep, greasy chutes of the Saturday Evening Post, the Metropolitan, the Cosmopolitan and the rest of the Hearst and Hearstoid magazines, we are too prone, ass-like, to throw up our hands and bawl that all is lost, including honor. But all the while a contrary movement is in progress, far less noted than it ought to be. Authors with their pockets full of best-seller money are bitten by high ambition, and strive heroically to scramble out of the literary Cloaca Maxima. Now and then one of them succeeds, bursting suddenly into the light of the good red sun with the foul liquors of the depths still streaming from him, like a prisoner loosed from some obscene dungeon. Is it so soon forgotten that Willa Cather used to be one of the editors of McClure’s? That Dreiser wrote editorials for the Delineator and was an editor of dime novels for Street & Smith? That Huneker worked for the Musical Courier? That Amy Lowell imitated George E. Woodberry and Felicia Hemans? That E. W. Howe was born a Methodist? That Sandburg was once a Chautauqua orator? That Cabell’s first stories were printed in Harper’s Magazine? . . . As I say, they occasionally break out, strange as it may seem. A few months ago I recorded the case of Zona Gale, emerging from her stew of glad books with “Miss Lulu Bett.” Now comes another fugitive, his face blanched by years in the hulks, but his eyes alight with high purpose. His name is Sinclair Lewis, and the work he offers is a novel called “Main Street” (Harcourt) . . .

This “Main Street” I commend to your polite attention. It is, in brief, good stuff. It presents characters that are genuinely human, and not only genuinely human but also authentically American; it carries them through a series of transactions that are all interesting and plausible; it exhibits those transactions thoughtfully and acutely, in the light of the social and cultural forces underlying them; it is well written, and full of a sharp sense of comedy, and rich in observation, and competently designed. Superficially, the story of a man and his wife in a small Minnesota town, it is actually the typical story of the American family—that is, of the family in its first stage, before husband and wife have become lost in father and mother. The average American wife, I daresay, does not come quite so close to downright revolt as Carol Kennicott, but that is the only exaggeration, and we may well overlook it. Otherwise, she and her Will are triumphs of the national normalcy—she with her vague stirrings, her unintelligible yearnings, her clumsy gropings, and he with his magnificent obtuseness, his childish belief in meaningless phrases, his intellectual deafness and near-sightedness, his pathetic inability to comprehend the turmoil that goes on within her. Here is the essential tragedy of American life, and if not the tragedy, then at least the sardonic farce; the disparate cultural development of male and female, the great strangeness that lies between husband and wife when they begin to function as members of society. The men, sweating at their sordid concerns, have given the women leisure, and out of that leisure the women have fashioned disquieting discontents. To Will Kennicott, as to most other normal American males, life remains simple; do your work, care for your family, buy your Liberty Bonds, root for your home team, help to build up your lodge, venerate the flag. But to Carol it is far more complex and challenging. She has become aware of forces that her husband is wholly unable to comprehend, and that she herself can comprehend only in a dim and muddled way. The ideas of the great world press upon her, confusing her and making her uneasy. She is flustered by strange heresies, by romantic personalities, by exotic images of beauty. To Kennicott she is flighty, illogical, ungrateful for the benefits that he and God have heaped upon her. To her he is dull, narrow, ignoble.

Mr. Lewis depicts the resultant struggle with great penetration. He is far too intelligent to take sides—to turn the thing into a mere harangue against one or the other. Above all, he is too intelligent to take the side of Carol, as nine novelists out of ten would have done. He sees clearly what is too often not seen—that her superior culture is, after all, chiefly bogus—that the oafish Kennicott, in more ways than one, is actually better than she is. Her war upon his Philistinism is carried on with essentially Philistine weapons. Her dream of converting a Minnesota prairie town into a sort of Long Island suburb, with overtones of Greenwich Village and the Harvard campus, is quite as absurd as his dream of converting it into a second Minneapolis, with overtones of Gary, Ind., and Paterson, N.J. When their conflict is made concrete and dramatic by the entrance of a tertium quid, the hollowness of her whole case is at once made apparent, for this tertium quid is a Swedish trousers-presser who becomes a moving-picture actor. It seems to me that the irony here is delicate and delicious. This, then, is the end-product of the Maeterlinck complex! Needless to say, Carol lacks the courage to decamp with her Scandinavian. Instead, she descends to sheer banality. That is, she departs for Washington, becomes a war-worker, and rubs noses with the suffragettes. In the end, it goes without saying, she returns to Gopher Prairie and the hearth-stone of her Will. The fellow is at least honest. He offers her no ignominious compromise. She comes back under the old rules, and is presently nursing a baby. Thus the true idealism of the Republic, the idealism of its Chambers of Commerce, its Knights of Pythias, its Rotary Clubs and its National Defense Leagues, for which Washington froze at Valley Forge and Our Boys died at Chateau Thierry—thus this genuine and unpolluted article conquers the phony idealism of Nietzsche, Edward W. Bok, Dunsany, George Bernard Shaw, Margaret Anderson, Mrs. Margaret Sanger, Percy Mackaye and the I.W.W.

But the mere story, after all, is nothing; the virtue of the book lies in its packed and brilliant detail. It is an attempt, not to solve the American cultural problem, but simply to depict with great care a group of typical Americans. This attempt is extraordinarily successful. The figures often remain in the flat; the author is quite unable to get that poignancy into them which Dreiser manages so superbly; one seldom sees into them very deeply or feels with them very keenly. But in their externals, at all events, they are done with uncommon skill. In particular, Mr. Lewis represents their speech vividly and accurately. It would be hard to find a false note in the dialogue, and it would be impossible to exceed the verisimilitude of the various extracts from the Gopher Prairie paper, or of the sermon by a Methodist dervish in the Gopher Prairie Wesleyan cathedral, or of a speech by a boomer at a banquet of the Chamber of Commerce. Here Mr. Lewis lays on with obvious malice, but always he keeps within the bounds of probability, always his realism holds up. It is, as I have said, good stuff. I have read no more genuinely amusing novel for a long while. The man who did it deserves a hearty welcome. His apprenticeship in the cellars of the tabernacle was not wasted. . . .

The other fiction that I have explored since our last meeting has not filled me with enthusiasm. I see nothing in “Hagar’s Hoard,” by George Kibbe Turner (Knopf), save a commonplace story very artificially told. “The Dark Mother,” by Waldo Frank (Liveright), quite flabbergasts me. I am interested in the ideas of Mr. Frank and eager to hear them, but here he swathes them in such endless yards of writing that I am unable to make them out. “The Enemies of Women,” by Blasco Ibáñez (Dutton), is simply one more interminable tale by the jitney Hugo. “The Blue Room,” by Cosmo Hamilton (Little Brown), is tosh. “The Gate of Ivory,” by Sydney L. Nyburg (Knopf), baffles me almost as completely as the Frank book; it is about people who interest me, but I can’t read it. “Satan’s Diary,” by Leonid Andreyev (Liveright), is a posthumous work that seems to have been written by a man already sick unto death. . . .

I come to “The Anthology of Another Town,” by E. W. Howe (Knopf), and far more intriguing stuff. This Howe constitutes a sort of standing joke upon American critics; the Brandeses and Taines of the country, despite the bold partisanship of the late Howells, still approach him in a gingerly manner. It is his yokelism, half assumed but half real enough, that makes them suspicious. Observing it with something akin to horror, they are blind to his unmistakable talents as a literary craftsman. The plain fact is that Howe is a very cunning fellow, who has a style and knows how to write. If you doubt it, take a look at the sketch called “Joe Allen” in the present book.

II

The Incomparable Bok

Dr. Hendrik Willem van Loon, in his acute and entertaining history, “The Fall of the Dutch Republic,” more than once describes (sometimes, alas, with a scarcely concealed sniff) the salient trait of his fellow Netherlanders. It is an abnormal capacity for respecting respectability. Their ideal, it appears, is not the dashing military gent, gallantly leaping for glory down red-hot lanes of fire, nor is it the lofty and ineffable artist, drunk with beauty. No, the man they most admire is the virtuous citizen and householder, sound in politics and theology, happily devoid of all orgiastic tendencies, and with money in the bank. In other words, the ideal of Holland is the ideal of Kansas, as set forth with great ingenuousness by E. W. Howe. One thinks of that identity on reading “The Americanization of Edward Bok,” an autobiographical monograph by the late editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal (Scribner). Edward was born in Holland and his parents did not bring him to America until he was already in breeches, but he had not been here a year before he was an absolutely typical American boy of the 70’s. Nay, he was more: he was the typical American boy of the Sunday-school books of the 70’s. By day he labored with inconceivable diligence at ten or twenty diverse jobs, striving with every ounce of energy in him to become a man, some day, like Morris K. Jesup. By night he cultivated the acquaintance of all the moral magnificoes of the time, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Henry Ward Beecher, laboring with what remained of his steam to penetrate to the secret of their high and singular excellence, that he, too, might some day shine as they shined, and be pointed out to good little boys on their way to the catechetical class and to bad little boys on their way to the gallows. Well, he got both wishes. At thirty he was sound in theology and politics, happily free from all orgiastic tendencies, and with money in the bank. At forty he was a millionaire and the foremost American soothsayer. At fifty he was a national institution.

It was anything but a dull boyhood, but I doubt that it was a very merry one. Bok was not only sorely beset by economic necessity; he was also held to a harsh and relentless industry by his peculiar enthusiasms. Now and then, of course, a bit of romance wormed into it; particularly toward the end of it. Once, for example, he got some hot tips from Jay Gould, and he and his Sunday-school teacher at Plymouth Church, a stock-broker outside the sacred house (this, to me, is a lovely touch!) played them in Wall Street, and made a good deal of money. But soon his conscience revolted against the character of Gould, who was certainly very far from the Christian usurer standard accepted at Plymouth, and so he gave up the chance of tips in order, to stay its gnawings. No other strayings are recounted. It is not recorded that young Edward ever played hookey, or that he ever tied a tin can to the tail of a cat, or that he ever blew a spitball at his school-teacher or at Henry Ward Beecher. Above all, there is no mention of a calf love. Deponent saith, in fact, that when he took charge of the Ladies’ Home Journal, at twenty-six, he was almost absolutely innocent of the ways and means of the fair. He had, it appeared, never hugged a sweet creature behind the door, or kissed her neck in the privacy of an 1889 four-wheeler. He did not know that the girls like to be kissed on the eyes better than they liked to be kissed on the nose; he was unaware of their curious theory, after two cocktails, that every man who speaks to them politely is making love to them; he was densely innocent of the most elemental secrets of their toilette. This sublime ignoramus now undertook to be father confessor to all the women of America. More, he made a gigantic success of the business. Why? How? He himself offers no answer, and I am far too diffident to attempt one. Maybe his very normality was what fetched them—his startling resemblance, as of a huge portrait in exaggerated colors, to their fathers, their brothers, their husbands, their pastors, their family doctors. His point of view was the standard point of view of the respectable American man. When he shocked them, it was pleasantly and harmlessly, in the immemorial fashion of the clumsy male. He never violated their fundamental pruderies. He never really surprised them.

Nevertheless; this plu-normal Mr. Bok failed in his supreme enterprise: he never became quite a 100% American, and in his book he plainly says so. The trouble was that he could never wholly cure himself of being a European. Even a Hollander, though nearer the American than any other, is still a European. In Bok’s case the taint showed itself in an irrepressible interest in things that had no place in the mind of a truly respectable man—chiefly in things artistic. When he looked at the houses in which his subscribers lived, their drab hideousness made him sick. When he went inside and contemplated the lambrequins, the gilded cat-tails, the Rogers groups, the wax fruit under glass domes, the emblazoned seashell from Asbury Park, the family Bible on the marble-topped center-table, the crayon enlargements of Uncle Richard and Aunt Sue, the square pianos, the Brussels carpets, the grained woodwork—when his eyes alighted upon such things, his soul revolted, and at once his moral enthusiasm incited him to attempt a reform. The result was the long series of Ladies’ Home Journal crusades against the hideousness of the national scene—in domestic architecture, in house furnishing, in dress, in town building, in advertising. Bok flung himself headlong into his cam­paigns, and practically every one of them succeeded. He was opposed furiously by all right-thinking American men, even by such extraordinary men as the late Stanford White. Nevertheless, he fought on, and in the long run he drew blood. He is almost alone responsible for the improvement in taste that has shown itself in America during the past thirty years. No other man or woman deserves a tenth of the credit that should go to him. He carried on his fight with the utmost diligence and intelligence, wearing down all opposition, proceeding triumphantly from success to success. If there were gratitude in the land, there would be a monument to him in every town in the Republic. He has been, aesthetically, probably the most useful citizen that ever breathed its muggy air.

But here I come upon an inconvenient moral, to the effect, to wit, that his chief human value lay in his failure to become wholly Americanized, that he was a man of mark in direct proportion as he was not a 100% American. This moral I refrain from plainly stating on patriotic grounds. . . . But read his book. It will make you snicker now and then, but it is, in the main, very instructive.

III

The Late Master-Mind

A truly devastating piece of criticism is to be found in “The Story of a Style,” by Dr. William Bayard Hale (Huebsch). The style is that of poor Woodrow, and Dr. Hale operates upon it with machetes, hand grenades and lengths of gas-pipe. He is one peculiarly equipped for the business, for he was at one time high in the literary and philosophical confidence of the late Messiah, and learned to imitate the gaudy jargon of the master with great skill—so perfectly, indeed, that he was delegated to write one of the Woodrovian books, to wit, “The New Freedom,” once a favorite text of New Republic Liberals, deserving Democrats, and the tender-minded public in general. But in the end he revolted against both the new Euphuism and its eminent pa, and now he tackles both with considerable ferocity, and, it must be added, vast effect. His analysis of the whole Wilsonian buncombe, in fact, is downright cruel; when he finishes with it, not even a Georgia postmaster or a Palmer agent provocateur could possibly believe in it. He shows its ideational hollowness, its ludicrous strutting and bombast, its heavy dependence upon greasy and meaningless words, its frequent descent to mere sound and fury, signifying nothing. In particular, he devotes himself to a merciless study of what, after all, must remain the fallen Moses’s chief contribution to both history and beautiful letters, viz., his biography of George Washington. I have often, in the past, called attention to the incredible imbecility of this work. It is an almost inexhaustible mine of bad writing, faulty generalizing, childish pussyfooting, ludicrous posturing, and naive stupidity. To find a match for it one must try to. imagine a biography of the Duke of Wellington by his barber. Well, Hale spreads it out on his operating table, sharpens his snickersnee upon his boot-leg, and proceeds to so harsh an anatomizing that it nearly makes me sympathize with the author. Not many of us—writers, and hence vain and artificial fellows—could undergo so relentless an examination without damage. But not many of us, I believe, would suffer quite so horribly as Woodrow. The book is a mass of puerile affectations, and as Hale unveils one after the other he performs a sound service for American scholarship and American letters.

I say that his book is cruel, but I must add that his laparotomies are carried on with every decorum—that he by no means rants and rages against his victim. On the contrary, he keeps his temper even when there is strong temptation to lose it, and his inquiry maintains itself upon the literary level as much as possible, without needless descents to political and personal matters. More than once, in fact, he says very kind things about Woodrow—a man probably quite as mellow and likable within as the next man, despite his strange incapacity for keeping his friends. The curiosities of his character I hope to investigate at length on some future occasion, probably in “Prejudices: Third Series.” At the moment, I can only give thanks to God that Hale has saved me the trouble of exposing the extreme badness of the Woodrovian style—a style until lately much praised by cornfed connoisseurs. Two or three years ago, at the height of his illustriousness, it was spoken of in whispers, as if there were something almost supernatural about its merits. I read articles, in those days, comparing it to the style of the Biblical prophets, and arguing that it vastly exceeded the manner of any living literatus. Looking backward, it is not difficult to see how that doctrine arose. Its chief sponsors, first and last, were not men who actually knew anything about the writing of English, but simply editorial writers on party newspapers, i.e., men who related themselves to literary artists in much the same way that Dr. Billy Sunday relates himself to the late Paul of Tarsus. What intrigued such gentlemen in the compositions of Dr. Wilson was the plain fact that he was their superior in their own special field —that he accomplished with a great deal more skill than they did themselves the great task of reducing all the difficulties of the hour to a few sonorous and unintelligible phrases, often with theological overtones—that he knew better than they did how to arrest and enchant the boobery with words that were simply words, and nothing else. The vulgar like and respect that sort of balderdash. A discourse packed with valid ideas, accurately expressed, is quite incomprehensible to them. What they want is the sough of vague and comforting words—words cast into phrases made familiar to them by the whooping of their customary political and ecclesiastical rabble-rousers, and by the highfalutin style of the newspapers that they read. Woodrow knew how to conjure up such words. He knew how to make them glow, and weep. He wasted no time upon the heads of his dupes, but aimed directly at their ears, diaphragms and hearts.

But reading his speeches in cold blood offers a curious experience. It is difficult to believe that even idiots ever succumbed to such transparent contradictions, to such gaudy processions of mere counter-words, to so vast and obvious a nonsensicality. Hale produces sentence after sentence that has no apparent meaning at all—stuff quite as bad as the worst bosh of the Hon. Gamaliel Harding. When Wilson got upon his legs in those days he seems to have gone into a sort of trance, with all the peculiar illusions and delusions that belong to a frenzied pedagogue. He heard words giving three cheers; he saw them race across a blackboard like Socialists pursued by the Polizei; he felt them rush up and kiss him. The result was the grand series of moral, political, sociological and theological maxims which now lodges, imperishably in the cultural heritage of the American people, along with Lincoln’s “government for the people, by the people,” etc., Perry’s “We have met the enemy, and they are ours,” and Vanderbilt’s “The public be damned.” The important thing is not that a popular orator should have uttered such grand and glittering phrases, but that they should have been gravely received, for many weary months, by a whole race of men, some of them intelligent. Here is a matter that deserves the sober inquiry of competent psychologists. The boobs took fire first, but after a while even college presidents—who certainly ought to be cynical men, if ladies of joy are cynical women—were sending up sparks, and for a long while anyone who laughed was in danger of the calaboose. Hale does not go into the question; he confines himself to the concrete procession of words. His book represents tedious and vexatious labor; it is, despite some obvious defects, very well managed; it opens the way for future works of the same sort. Imagine Harding on the Hale operating table!

IV

Psychoanalyzing the Uplift

André Tridon’s “Psychoanalysis and Behavior” (Knopf) is addressed to the lay reader who is eager to find out what all the current debate over psychoanalysis is about, and has been repelled by the opaque explanations of old Dr. Freud and by the scarcely more intelligible discourses of his disciples and opponents. The psychoanalysts, as a class, are shockingly bad writers; one often wonders why they do not psychoanalyze themselves, and so find out what secret and illicit desire is impeding the free flow of their parts of speech. Tridon, on the contrary, writes simply and clearly; even a Congressman or a Princeton professor should be able to understand him. He gives, in very small compass, admirably lucid explanations of the chief theories of Freud, Jung and Adler, and adds a chapter on the theory of Dr. Edward J. Kempf, an American. Kempf, it seems to me, brings something genuinely valuable to the pioneering of Freud and to the fine critical work of Jung and Adler. That something is a device for bringing down the new psychology from the clouds. The trouble with Freud is that he too often thinks of the psychological process as a purely metaphysical process, carried on in a sort of vacuum. Sometimes, indeed, one finds him talking like a medieval philosopher. Kempf brings him back to earth by whispering into his ear that a man has muscles as well as a brain, and liver and lights as well as a subconscious. Here the work of Loeb and Crile has helped, but Kempf by no means merely poll-parrots their ideas. What he has to say shows hard thinking and genuine originality. Tridon himself applies the psychoanalytical doctrine to a number of everyday problems, a business that ought to be undertaken on a far more extensive scale. His chapters on the psychology of war hysteria and of comstockery are acute and instructive. Years ago, when psychoanalysis was new, I publicly challenged a number of eminent moral gladiators to submit to psychoanalysis, offering to submit myself as a control. They all refused. I was and am a vile fellow and full of secret sins, but I knew very well that I was not a tenth as vile as those professional Christians. Tridon, in a few pages, shows how much of the comstockian lust is genuine desire to save the plain people from hell and how much is something quite different. A thorough exploration of the mind of one of the smutty old fellows who sit as directors of vice societies would entertain and edify the public. It is amazing that the hallucinations of such sexual invalids should be gravely regarded by courts and legislatures. Of the half dozen I challenged as described, two have since been taken in gross violations of decency, and one other is under suspicion. I chose them at random, having no evidence against any of them—and already 50 percent of them have borne out my surmises. The other half are still in hard service as tinpot messiahs—but there is only one of them with whom I would trust a 16-year-old girl.

Tridon attempts some theorizing of his own in his chapter on sleep, and, forgetting Kempf, wanders into unconvincing metaphysics. Sleep, he says, following Freud, makes up with its dreams for the sorrows and disappointments of the day. The man whose life “fulfills almost all his wishes” needs relatively little sleep. For example, Thomas A. Edison. Again, Napoleon I, who slept but four hours a night until he reached St. Helena, where and when he began to snooze like a night watchman. Old people, having resigned all their hopes, sleep less than younger folk. . . . The notion, as I hint, probably has holes in it. The amount of sleep that a man needs is regulated far more by physical factors than by mental factors. I mention the awful name of intestinal stenosis, and pass on. The subject deserves far more careful study than it has ever got. Crile has looked into it, but only casually.