Second Mencken Chrestomathy (66 page)

I believe that a chain of hot dog stands offering the novelties I suggest would pay dividends in Baltimore from the first day, and that it would soon extend from end to end of the United States. The butchers and bakers would quickly arise to the chance it offered, and in six months the American repertoire of sausages would overtake and leap ahead of the German, and more new rolls would be invented than you may now find in France. In such matters American ingenuity may be trusted completely. It is infinitely
resourceful, venturesome and audacious. I myself am acquainted with sausage-makers in this town who, if the demand arose, would produce sausages of hexagonal or octagonal section, sausages with springs or music boxes in them, sausages flavored with malt and hops, sausages dyed any color in the spectrum, sausages loaded with insulin, ergosterol, anti-tetanus vaccine or green chartreuse.

Nor is there any reason to believe that the bakers would lag behind. For years their ancient art has been degenerating in America, and today the bread that they ordinarily offer is almost uneatable. But when the reformers of the sandwich went to them for aid they responded instantly with both wheat and rye breads of the highest merit. Such breads, to be sure, are not used in the manufacture of drug-store sandwiches, but they are to be found in every delicatessen store and in all of the more respectable sandwich shops. The same bakeries that produce them could produce an immense variety of first-rate rolls, once a demand for them was heard.

I believe in my scheme so thoroughly that I throw it overboard freely, eager only to make life in the United States more endurable.
Soli Deo gloria!
What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table. I have wandered about for weeks without encountering a single decent meal. With precious few exceptions, the hotels of America all cook alike—and what they offer is hard to distinguish from what is offered on railway dining-cars.

From M
INORITY
R
EPORT
, 1956, pp. 102–03.
First printed in the
Smart Set
, Feb., 1920, p. 47

One of the fellows I can’t understand is the man with violent likes and dislikes in his drams—the man who dotes on highballs but can’t abide malt liquor, or who drinks white wine but not red
or who holds that Scotch whiskey benefits his kidneys whereas rye whiskey corrodes his liver. As for me, I am prepared to admit some merit in every alcoholic beverage ever devised by the incomparable brain of man, and drink them all when the occasions are suitable—wine with meat, the hard liquors when my so-called soul languishes, beer to let me down gently of an evening. In other words, I am omnibibulous, or, more simply, ombibulous.

From P
REJUDICES
: F
IRST
S
ERIES
, 1919, pp. 224–35. First printed in the
Smart Set
, June, 1915, pp. 290–93. After the book herein discussed came out I heard nothing more from the author until 1935, when he wrote to me from Wisconsin and then from Chicago. It appeared that he had married, had nine children, and was out of work, and that the whole family was trying to live on a dole of $17.28 a week. He said that he had written another book—not the one mentioned herein—, but I never heard any more about it

O
NE DAY
long ago I received a letter from a man somewhere beyond the Wabash announcing that he had lately completed a very powerful novel and hinting that my critical judgment upon it would give him great comfort. Such notifications, at that time, reached me far too often to be agreeable, and so I sent him a form-response telling him that I was ill with pleurisy, had just been forbidden by my oculist to use my eyes, and was about to become a father. The aim of this form-response was to shunt all that sort of trade off to other reviewers, but for once it failed. That is to say, the unknown kept on writing to me, and finally offered to pay me an honorarium for my labor. This offer was so unusual that it quite demoralized me, and before I could recover I had received, cashed and dissipated a modest check, and was confronted by an accusing manuscript, perhaps four inches thick, but growing thicker every time I glanced at it.

One night, tortured by conscience and by the inquiries and reminders arriving from the author by every post, I took up the sheets and settled down for a depressing hour or two of it.… No, I did
not
read all night. No, it was
not
a masterpiece. No, it has
not
made the stranger famous. Let me tell the story quite honestly. I am, in fact, far too rapid a reader to waste a whole night on a novel; I had got through this one by midnight and was sound asleep at my usual time. And it was by no means a masterpiece; on the contrary, it was inchoate, clumsy, and, in part, artificial, insincere and preposterous. And to this day the author remains unknown.… But underneath all the amateurish writing, the striving for effects that failed to come off, the absurd literary self-consciousness, the recurrent falsity and banality—underneath all these stigmata of a neophyte’s book there was yet a capital story, unusual in content, naïve in manner and enormously engrossing. What is more, the faults that it showed in execution were, most of them, not ineradicable. On page after page, as I read on, I saw chances to improve it—to get rid of its intermittent bathos, to hasten its action, to eliminate its spells of fine writing, to purge it of its imitations of all the bad novels ever written—in brief, to tighten it, organize it, and, as the painters say, tease it up.

The result was that I spent the next morning writing the author a long letter of advice. It went to him with the manuscript, and for weeks I heard nothing from him. Then the manuscript returned, and I read it again. This time I had a genuine surprise. Not only had the unknown followed my suggestions with much intelligence; in addition, once set up on the right track, he had devised a great many improvements of his own. In its new form, in fact, the thing was a very competent and even dexterous piece of writing, and after re-reading it from the first word to the last with even keener interest than before, I sent it to Mitchell Kennerley, then an active publisher in New York, and asked him to look through it. Kennerley made an offer for it at once, and eight or nine months later it was published with his imprint. The author chose to conceal himself behind the
nom de plume
of Robert Steele; I myself gave the book the title of “One Man.” It came from the press—and straightway died the death. The only favorable review it received was mine. No one gabbled about it. No one, so far as I could make out, even read it. The sale was small from the start, and quickly stopped altogether. To this day the fact fills me with wonder. To this day I marvel that so dramatic, so penetrating and so curiously moving a story should have failed so overwhelmingly.…

For I have never been able to convince myself that I was wrong about it. On the contrary, I am more certain than ever that I was right—that it was and is one of the most honest and absorbing human documents ever printed in America. I have called it, following the author, a novel. It is, in fact, nothing of the sort; it is autobiography. More, it is autobiography unadorned and shameless, autobiography almost unbelievably cruel and betraying, autobiography that is as devoid of artistic sophistication as an operation for gall-stones. This so-called Steele was simply too stupid, too ingenuous, too moral to lie. He was the very reverse of an artist; he was a born and incurable Puritan—and in his alleged novel he drew the most faithful and merciless picture of an American Puritan that has ever got upon paper. There was never the slightest effort at amelioration; he never evaded the ghastly horror of it; he never tried to palm off himself as a good fellow, a hero. Instead, he simply took his stand in the center of the platform, where all the spotlights met, and there calmly stripped off his raiment of reticence—first his long-tailed coat, then his boiled shirt, then his shoes and socks, and finally his very B.V.D.s. The closing scene showed the authentic
Mensch-an-sich
, the eternal blue-nose in the nude, with every wart and pimple glittering and every warped bone and flabby muscle telling its abhorrent tale. There stood the Puritan stripped of every artifice and concealment.

Searching my memory, I can drag up no recollection of another such self-opener of secret chambers and skeletonic closets. Set beside this pious babbler, the late Giovanni Jacopo Casanova de Seingalt shrinks to the puny proportions of a mere barroom boaster, a smoking-car Don Juan, an Eighteenth Century movie actor or whiskey drummer. So, too, Benvenuto Cellini: a fellow vastly entertaining, true enough, but after all, not so much a psychological historian as a liar, a yellow journalist. One always feels, in reading Benvenuto, that the man who is telling the story is quite distinct from the man about whom it is being told. The fellow, indeed, was too noble an artist to do a mere portrait with fidelity; he could not resist the temptation to repair a cauliflower ear here, to paint out a tell-tale scar there, to shine up the eyes a bit, to straighten the legs down below. But this Steele—or whatever his name was—never stepped out of himself. He never described the gaudy one he would
like
to have been, but always the commonplace,
the weak, the emotional, the ignorant, the third-rate Christian male he actually was. He deplored himself, he distrusted himself, he plainly wished heartily that he was not himself, but he never made the slightest attempt to disguise and bedizen himself. Such as he was, cheap, mawkish, unaesthetic, conscience-stricken, he depicted himself with fierce and unrelenting honesty.

Superficially, the man that he set before us seemed to be a felonious fellow, for he confessed frankly to a long series of youthful larcenies, to a somewhat banal adventure in forgery (leading to a term in jail), to sundry petty deceits and breaches of trust, and to an almost endless chain of exploits in amour, most of them sordid and unrelieved by anything approaching romance. But the inner truth about him, of course, was that he was really a moralist of the moralists—that his one fundamental and all-embracing virtue was what he himself regarded as his viciousness—that he was never genuinely human and likable save in those moments which led swiftly to his most florid self-accusing. In brief, the history was that of a good young man, the child of God-fearing parents, and its moral, if it had one, was that a strictly moral upbringing injects poisons into the system that even the most steadfast morality cannot resist. One saw an apparently sound and normal youngster converted into a sneak and rogue by the intolerable pressure of his father’s abominable Puritanism. And once a rogue, one saw him make himself into a scoundrel by the very force of his horror of his roguery. Every step downward was helped from above. It was not until he resigned himself frankly to the fact of his incurable degradation, and so ceased to struggle against it, that he ever stepped out of it.

The external facts of the chronicle were simple enough. The son of a school-teacher turned petty lawyer and politician, the hero depicts himself as brought up under such barbaric rigors that he has already become a fluent and ingenious liar, in sheer self-protection, at the age of five or six. From lying he proceeds quite naturally to stealing: he lifts a few dollars from a neighbor, and then rifles a tin bank, and then takes to filching all sorts of small articles from the storekeepers of the vicinage. His harsh, stupid, Christian father, getting wind of these peccadilloes, has at him in the manner of a mad bull, beating him, screaming at him, half killing him. The boy, for all the indecent cruelty of it, is convinced
of the justice of it. He sees himself as one lost; he accepts the fact that he is a disgrace to his family; in the end, he embraces the parental theory that there is something strange and sinister in his soul, that he couldn’t be good if he tried. Finally, filled with some vague notion of taking his abhorrent self out of sight, he runs away from home. Brought back in the character of a felon, he runs away again. Soon he is a felon in fact, and his father allows him to go to prison.

The prison term gives the youngster a chance to think things out for himself, without the constant intrusion of his father’s Presbyterian notions of right and wrong. The result is a measurably saner philosophy than that he absorbed at home, but there is still enough left of the old moral obsession to cripple him in all his thinking, and especially in his thinking about himself. His attitude toward women, for example, is constantly conditioned by puritanical misgivings and superstitions. He can never view them innocently, joyously, unmorally, as a young fellow of twenty or twenty-one should, but is always oppressed by Sunday-schoolish notions of his duty to them, and to society in general. On the one hand, he is appalled by his ready yielding to those hussies who have at him unofficially, and on the other hand he is filled with the idea that it would be immoral for him, an ex-convict, to go to the altar with a virgin. The result of these doubts is that he gives a good deal more earnest thought to the woman question than is good for him. The second result is that he proves an easy victim to the discarded mistress of his employer. This worthy working girl craftily snares him and marries him—and then breaks down on their wedding night, unwomaned, so to speak, by the pathetic innocence of the ass, and confesses to a choice roll of her past doings, ending with the news that she is suffering from what crusaders of the day called a social disease.