Second Mencken Chrestomathy (54 page)

In order to avoid offending literary friends, I turn to music for an example. In 1865 Richard Wagner seemed about to settle down into the bovine lethargy of a court composer. King Ludwig of Bavaria had given him a pension and a house, he had mastered the trick of writing operas as no man had ever written them before, and it looked a safe bet that he would go on bringing out versions of “Lohengrin,” each more diluted than the last, to the end of his days. But then came the dreadful shock of his meeting with Cosima Liszt-Bülow, and at once a new Wagner was born. In manner and aspect Cosima was far nearer a police sergeant than a sweetie, and life with her must have been comparable to going through an earthquake every day, or fleeing endlessly from a posse of lynchers, but the effect upon Wagner was superb. He dropped all his old tricks and took on a set of new and immensely better ones, and in a little while he had finished the “Ring,” written “Die Meistersinger,” and sketched out “Parsifal.” In the ivory tower of King Ludwig he would have faded away into repetitious futility, but with Cosima chasing him around the stump he gathered in a host of novel, vivid and, indeed, nerve-shattering impressions, and when he got them into his music he was sure of immortality.

Wagner, of course, was a very tough fellow. Very few men could have survived Cosima as he did. Most of us, after a few months, would have dived headlong into Lake Starnberg. A brief term in jail is much safer. Jails are jammed with humanity on the half shell, and thus reek with supplies for the artist, but life in them is nevertheless reasonably safe and peaceful. I therefore applaud the wise choice of Mr. Thaddeus. He will write better stuff hereafter.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, April 23, 1920. This offer apparently attracted a great deal of attention in the ante-chambers and subcellars of literary endeavor. It was reprinted by all the magazines devoted to the instruction and encouragement of bad authors, and enjoyed the honor of notice in many other periodicals. The result was a landslide of
manuscripts. They came by express, by mail and by messenger. In all that mountain of writing I discovered but one printable effort, and the author of that one, far from being a neglected genius, was a man who had had a novel printed a year previous. This fact I somehow overlooked, but the publisher to whom I rushed with the manuscript had a better memory. He reminded me that I had praised the work extravagantly in the
Smart Set

The gabble about neglected masterpieces is merely gabble; there is not the slightest shadow of truth in it. I believe that every piece of passable writing produced in America, if only it be intelligently offered in a reasonably probable market, is absolutely certain to be printed, and, what is more, to be paid for at a fair rate. In ten years I have not heard of a single exception. Time after time, when news has come to me of some great work lately achieved by a school teacher in Iowa or a newspaper reporter in Alabama, I have sent for it, read it with eyes a-pop—and found it to be a fabric of piffle, time-worn in plan and childish in execution. And every other editor in the United States goes through the same experience constantly. Every one of them spends half his time hunting for the extraordinary novelty, the pearl of great price—and the other half damning himself for wasting time upon a piece of balderdash.

The delusion of the contrary is hard to kill, but it is a delusion nonetheless. It seems impossible to convince the unsuccessful aspirant that his manuscript is actually read, and yet read it is, and by readers who live in the hope, from day to day, that the morrow will bring them an epoch-making discovery, then at least something printable. No other business of a magazine office is pursued with such relentless assiduity; every member of the staff takes a hack at it. To carry it on costs a great deal of money, and the return per annum is commonly next to nothing, but nevertheless there is always hope, and upon that hope is grounded a diligence that is truly amazing. And among publishers of books it is almost matched. No publisher is ever so disillusioned that he can bring himself to send back a strange manuscript without at least a peek into it, and no publisher is ever so close to bankruptcy that he can resist the temptation to take one more chance.

Two or three years ago, exposing notions of this general tendency in a popular magazine, I defied the whole college of literati of the country to produce a single great work that was not already in print. In case any such neglected masterpiece appeared I agreed to make myself personally responsible for its instant publication on fair terms—as a book if fat enough and in some reputable magazine if too thin. The response was a vast avalanche of manuscripts, some of them written by hand, some of them tied with pink and blue ribbons, many of them suffocatingly perfumed. By slow stages, though it was in the midst of Summer, I got through them all. There was not, in the whole lot, a single piece of work that met the specifications of my offer. There was not, in fact, a single piece of manuscript that was printable at all. One and all, the neglected manuscripts that reached me were dull, flatulent, imitative and without merit.

Hope is hard to kill. I have had a lesson, but I have not learned it. Perhaps that one trial was not enough. Well then, I make another. That is to say, I renew my offer, and make its terms the most liberal conceivable to the human mind. Let any author in America who thinks that he has produced a masterpiece and is convinced that the publishers have entered into a conspiracy to prevent its publication—let any and every such author, male or female, white or black, native or alien, free or jailed, drunk or sober, virtuous or sinful, college-bred or self-taught, send me his or her manuscript before 6
P.M.
of September 1, 1920 and, if it turns out on inspection to be as stated, if it turns out to be an actual masterpiece or even a fair piece of everyday writing, then I hereby promise and engage to find a reputable publisher for it, to see that it is published promptly, and to get a reasonable royalty for it without commissions, grafts or deductions of any kind whatsoever. And if I fail, then I agree to eat it.

The strings to this offer are very few. First, I stipulate that the manuscript shall not be accompanied by a letter of recommendation from the author’s pastor, or from anyone else. Secondly, I stipulate that it reach me with the postage fully prepaid. Thirdly, I stipulate that it be accompanied by a self-addressed and fully stamped envelope for its return. Further than this I stipulate nothing. There are no entrance fees. I exact and shall look for no gratitude.
I desire no presents of bad cigars, jewelry, gold pens, neckties, homemade preserves or bound sets of O. Henry and Bulwer-Lytton. My sole reward will come from the riotous appreciation of the publishers to whom I pass on the masterpieces unearthed—if any. They will deluge me with Havanas, first editions of George Moore, plug hats, diamonds, cases of contraband wine. They will invite me to banquets. It will be hard for me to prevent them kissing me.

From the Chicago
Tribune
, Sept. 12, 1926

S
INCE
Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, published his celebrated letters to his morganatic son, in 1744, there has been no adequate book, in English, of advice to young men. I say adequate, and the adjective tells the whole story. There is not, of course, a college president or a boss Y.M.C.A. secretary, or an uplifting preacher in the United States who has not written such a book, but all of them are alike filled with bilge. They depict and advocate a life that no normal young man wants to live, or could live without ruin if he wanted to. They are full of Sunday-school platitudes and Boy Scout snuffling. If they were swallowed by the youth of today the Republic of tomorrow would be a nation of idiots.

I point to the obvious example of the volumes of so-called sex hygiene. If there is anything in them save pious balderdash then I have yet to encounter it—and in the pursuit of my dismal duties as a critic of letters and ideas I have read literally hundreds of them. All of them are devoted to promoting the absurd and immoral idea that the sexual instinct is somehow degrading and against God—that whenever a young man feels it welling within him it is time for him to send for a physician and perhaps even for a policeman. If he is moved to kiss his girl he is in grave peril. If he yields to the Devil and actually necks her he is already half-way to Hell.

What could be worse rubbish? The sole effect of it, assuming it to be believed, is to send the young reader into manhood full of preposterous fears and shames and to shut him off from one of the chief sources of human happiness. For life without sex might be
safer, but it would be unbearably dull. There would be very little hazard in it and even less joy. It is the sex instinct that makes women seem beautiful, which they are only once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an ant hill.

But it is not when they address young men as males, but when they address them as citizens that the current authors of such books achieve their worst nonsense. The absurd cult of service, invented by swindlers to conceal their knaveries, is hymned eloquently in all of them. The chief aim and purpose of civilized man in the world, it appears, is to do good. In other words, his chief duty is to harass and persecute his neighbors. If he shirks it, then he is a bad citizen, and will go to Hell along with the draft dodgers, tax evaders, atheists and bachelors.

It seems to me that this highly dubious doctrine is responsible for much of the uneasiness and unhappiness that are visible in the United States today, despite the growing wealth of the country. Accepting it gravely, the American people have converted themselves into a race of nuisances. It is no longer possible, making a new acquaintance, to put any reasonable trust in his common decency. If he is not a policeman in disguise he is very apt to be a propagandist without disguise, which is even worse. The country swarms with such bores, and the chief aim of the current instruction in the duties of the citizen seems to be to make more of them.

No argument, I take it, is needed to show that this is an evil tendency. The happiness of men in the world depends very largely upon their confidence in one another—in A’s belief that B is well disposed toward him and will do nothing intentionally to make him uncomfortable. But the whole purpose of the uplift is to make other people uncomfortable. It searches relentlessly for men who are having a pleasant time according to their lights and tries to put them in jail, or, still worse, to stir up their conscience. In other words, it tries to make them unhappy. It is an engine for the dissemination of the disagreeable. Seeking ostensibly to increase the number of good citizens, it only increases the number of bad ones.

But the young, it is argued, must be schooled in public spirit, else they will all become highwaymen, just as they must be
schooled in virtue, else they will all become debauchees. That argument, in various mellifluous forms, is constantly heard. It constitutes the fundamental postulate of such organizations as the Y.M.C.A. and the Boy Scouts. To question it becomes a sort of indecorum and is commonly represented as a questioning of public spirit and virtue themselves. Nevertheless, it remains nonsensical. There is not the slightest evidence that the normal young American, deprived of his books of civics, would take to the highroad, or that, deprived of his books of sex hygiene, he would set up practise as a roué.

The young come into the world, indeed, with a great deal of innate decency. It is their inheritance from the immemorial dead who fashioned and gave a direction to the delicate and complicated organism known as human society. That organism arose out of mutual good will, out of tolerance and charity, out of the civilizing tendency to live and let live. It emerged from the level of savagery by yielding to that tendency. The savage is preëminently his brother’s keeper. He knows precisely what his brother ought to do in every situation and is full of indignation when it is not done. But the civilized man has doubts, and life under civilization is thus more comfortable than it is in a Tennessee village or an African
kraal.

If the young are to be instructed at all, it seems to me that they ought to be instructed in the high human value of this toleration. They should be taught what they learn by experience in the school yard: that human beings differ enormously, one from the other, and that it is stupid and imprudent for A to try to change B. They should be taught that mutual confidence and good will are worth all the laws ever heard of, ghostly or secular, and that one man who minds his own business is more valuable to the world than 10,000 cocksure moralists. This teaching, I fear, is being neglected in the United States. We are hearing—and especially the young are hearing—far too much about brummagem Utopias and far too little about the actual workings of the confusing but not unpleasant world we live in.