H.L. Mencken

The Morning Union/December 6, 1925

I.

A chance remark in this place a few months ago, to the effect that the American novel, in late years, has gone far ahead of the current English novel in competence and interest, caused the loud alarum to be sounded in the Motherland, and ever since then I have been undergoing a process of waspish chiding in its great organs of literary opinion. One English novelist, Hugh Walpole, was so fevered that he composed a polemic against me for purely American consumption, and it has been printed lately in the Bookman. Another gladiator, Milton Waldman, of the London Mercury, had at me in a syndicated newspaper article. And there have been others.

Nevertheless, I stick to my doctrine, and even venture to elaborate it. The English novel is down with diabetes, and unless some cure for it is quickly found it will soon be in a state of collapse. All the elder English novelists whose works glorified the Edwardian era are either dead or far gone in senility: Hardy, Moore, Kipling, James. All the middle-aged novelists have obviously lost their grip: Wells, Bennett, Phillpotts, Galsworthy. And all the younger boys and gals seem to be simply marking time. In two years past I have read but two new English novels of any merit whatever: “Passage from India,” by E. M. Forster, and “God’s Stepchildren,” by Mrs. Sarah Millin. Is it only a coincidence that neither deals with the English scene—and that one of them, and the better one, is the work of a woman living in far away South Africa? 

I offer Wells’ “Christina Alberta’s Father” and Walpole’s “Portrait of a Man with Red Hair” to anyone who doubts that the English novel is sick. Here are two books by men whose position in England is of the highest. Wells is just under 60 and Walpole is in the early 40’s. Both should be producing their best work. And yet each comes out with a story so feeble and so dull that, if a beginner had written it, it would scarcely find a publisher, even in England. 

II.

The remarkable thing is that such dreadful rubbish is reviewed in all solemnity by American critics, and even gravely praised. Old habits, alas, die hard! There is still a great deal of abject colonialism among us, and it is nowhere more in evidence than in the field of literature. Where, indeed, does Anglomania flourish more humorlessly than in the American Academy of Arts and Letters? Every ancient in that home for literary incurabies has his eye on an Oxford D. C. L. What the younger literati have their eyes on I don’t know, but whatever it is it makes them sweat affably every time they see the word honor spelled h-o-n-o-u-r. 

The result is that English books are always reviewed with great friendliness in the United States, and usually get notices that are far beyond their deserts. When, by any chance, they actually show sound merit—which is not infrequently, save the field of the novel—they are lauded as masterpieces, and their authors are hailed as immortals. I point to the case of Lytton Strachey’s “Queen Victoria,” still well remembered. The book was unquestionably amusing, but was it really revolutionary? Was the author a genuine pathfinder? Only if the fact be conveniently forgotten that the American Gamaliel Bradford has been doing precisely the same thing for 15 years—and doing it extremely well. 

But “Queen Victoria” has least some merit—in fact, a lot of merit. Most of the English books that are so ecstatically greased and pomaded have little or none. There is not only praise for the third-rate work of such men as Wells and Walpole, who have done good things in the past; there also a fawning friendliness for such ninth-raters as Michael Arlen Machen and A S. M. Hutchinson, Arthur Machen and W. B. Maxwell, whose best is wholly worthless. If such incompetents were Americans the fact would be stated plainly. But, being Englishmen, they are anointed with goose grease and fanned with peacock feathers. 

III.

There is absolutely nothing of the sort in the other direction. The English reviewers are not only not amiable to American books, they are excessively savage with them. Not a few of them, indeed, appear to specialize in flogging the abominable Yankee. If they can find nothing else to say against an American cook they protest bitterly against its American locutions and American spelling, as if the English standard in such things were the only conceivably correct one. And if it is a novel, and they tire of deriding its style, they spit on their hands for a fresh start and deride its people.

In this matter I can speak with good grace, for my own books have been received with unusual politeness in England—possibly because, being somewhat critical of the Republic and its ideals, they offer good ammunition for anti-American tirades. Seven of them have been republished there, and an eighth is announced; none has been stated beyond its deserts. But certainly not many other American authors have been so fortunate. The majority, when they enter the Motherland, have to pull up their collars and duck their heads. The dead cats begin to fly the moment they are sighted.

I offer, in point, the case of James Branch Cabell. Certainly no sane person would allege that Cabell doesn’t know how to write. He is, in truth. one of the most accomplished stylists that the United States has ever produced. More, he is a clear-headed and highly civilized man; his ideas are easily apprehended, and they are pungent and amusing. Yet it is only few weeks since the London Times literary supplement, one of the most sober and influential organs of English literary opinion, was denouncing him roundly as dull and clumsy! Try to imagine it! Nor was this Cabell’s first seance on the block. Long ago, because of the professional jealousy of the late Maurice Hewlett, he came under the ban of one of London’s most powerful groups of literary logrollers, and ever since then he has been the victim of an ignorant, dishonest, and preposterous enmity. 

IV.

Nor is he alone. American books, and particularly American novels, always have hard sledding in England. Most of them, in truth, are never heard of at all. There is not a literary periodical in America that does not print an article on the new English books in every number, but if articles on American books are printed regularly anywhere in England I have yet to hear of it. It is, indeed, hard to find a bookshop in London that sells such books. Hugh Walpole, in one of the London weeklies, was lately bewailing the fact. And in the same article he found it necessary to print a roster of the principal living American novelists: many of them, obviously, had not been heard of before in England. 

Mr. Waldman, in the syndicate article that I have mentioned, brought up Sinclair Lewis’ “Martin Arrowsmith” against me. It has sold 20,000 copies in England, which he says, is the equal of “more than 50,000 in America.” Perhaps. But a sale of 50,000 for a successful English novel would be small in America—and precious few American novels have ever gone to 20,000 in England. Lewis’ “Main Street” was a failure there; it was not until “Babbitt” swept the world that he got any serious recognition. To this day it has never occurred to any Englishman that “Babbitt” is a work genuinely of the first rank—and vastly better than anything any Englishman has published for 10 years. 

The case of Miss Amy Lowells’ “Keats” is too recent—and too glaring. The book was denounced in England as if writing it had been a sort of crime. Every pedant in the land devoted himself to searching for the trivial in it. It was sneered as biography and belabored as criticism. The thing went to such lengths that many Englishmen got alarmed and rose to protest. When Miss Lowell, in the midst of the uproar, died, it was whispered that the onslaught had killed her, for she was notoriously eager for English notice—in fact, a thoroughgoing Anglomaniac of the best Boston mother. 

Her death, in point of fact, was due to other and purely physical causes. She had been for many years what the underwriters call a poor risk. But the fact remains that a book upon which she had spent the labor of years, and into which she had poured all her immense knowledge of Keats and all her skill as critic of poetry—that this book, because it was American, assaulted as ferociously in England if it had been downright illiterate.