Second Mencken Chrestomathy (68 page)

From the
Smart Set
, Dec, 1920, pp. 142–44.
A review of M
ARGARET
F
ULLER
, by Katharine Anthony; New York, 1920

Here, for the first time, is an attempt at a comprehensive and intelligent study of one of the strangest fish that ever disported in our pond of letters. The more one thinks of Margaret, indeed, the more fabulous she seems. On the one hand a bluestocking of the bluestockings, she was on the other hand a sombre and melodramatic adventuress, full of dark conspiracies and illicit longings. Imagine Agnes Repplier and the Theda Bara of the films rolled into one, with overtones of Margot Asquith and Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, and you have a rough image of her. Such diverse men as Hawthorne, Emerson, Horace Greeley, Channing, Carlyle and Mazzini were all more or less mashed on her, and mistook the fluttering of their hearts for intellectual homage. Tall, imperious, romantic, over-sexed, she queened it over the literati of two continents for twenty years, but it was not until she was nearly forty that she managed to bag a concrete husband, and even then she had to be satisfied with an out-at-elbows Italian nobleman, little more than half her age. This scarecrow enjoyed the curious honor of being seduced by the woman who had palsied Hawthorne by the mere flash of her eye. He reciprocated by marrying her, thus making
her a
marquesa
and her imminent offspring legitimate. A few years later they died together in a shipwreck within a few miles of New York. Margaret had a chance to save herself, but preferred to die. The Dorcas Clubs were all busy with the scandal; she knew what was ahead of her in the land of the free. Thus she passed from the scene like Conrad’s Lord Jim, “inscrutable at heart, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.”

Emerson undertook a biography of her, aided by Channing and James Freeman Clarke, and Mazzini and Robert Browning promised to contribute to it, but never actually did so. There are other studies by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Julia Ward Howe and Andrew Macphail, all bad. Miss Anthony undertakes to clear away the accumulated rubbish of speculation, and to get at the probable facts about this most mysterious of learned ladies. What she finds, as might be expected, is an elaborate outfit of Freudian suppressions. Margaret’s history, in brief, was the history of a war between vigorous passions and equally vigorous Puritan inhibitions. Starting out, like every other sentimental girl, with an exaggerated affection for her own father, she went down the years craving love and romance, and never, until she nabbed the poor wop, gaining either. Men were flustered by her, but two things always scared them off: one being her amazing homeliness and the other her great reputation for learning. They admired this learning, but it made them wary. Thus Margaret was forced to work off her emotions in literature, politics and other such great affairs. It was not until she found the young Italian, a man too ignorant to know that she was learned, that she had her woman’s chance. She seized it so eagerly that all of her New England prejudices vanished instanter, and with them her common sense. It was a ridiculous affair, but also somehow pathetic. Marrying Ossoli was an imbecility almost indistinguishable from that of marrying a chauffeur. He was a handsome fellow and of noble blood, and he apparently admired his wife vastly, but it is safe to guess that he bored her dreadfully; and that she saw disaster ahead and more fuel for the gossips. Margaret was wise to die at forty. At fifty she would have been a wreck.

Miss Anthony’s book is well planned and entertainingly written. When her story is done she shuts down; there is none of the empty word-spinning so common in literary biography. It would be
interesting to see her tackle Poe and Hawthorne in the same way—two very mysterious fellows, hitherto left as dim by their biographers as Lincoln has been by his. She evades, however, the chief problem: how did so gaudy a flamingo come to be hatched in drab New England? The Fullers seem to have been Puritans of the utmost respectability, over-educated and wholly lacking in imagination. Perhaps there was a concealed scandal in an earlier generation. A thin vein of scarlet runs down many an American family tree.…

Another defect: I think she over-estimates Margaret’s stature as a writer. The fact is that the men who chiefly admired her were unconscious predecessors of Ossoli—preliminary studies for her shocking masterpiece. Bemused by the woman, they thought that they were intrigued by the sage. Her books are very dull stuff, indeed. She wrote, to the end, like a talented high-school girl. Poe himself was never more highfalutin. The fact that she recognized the genius of Goethe and the shallowness of Longfellow is surely no proof of genius. Would one call a man a competent critic of music on the simple ground that he venerated Bach and sniffed at Massenet?

From the
Smart Set
, Jan., 1921, pp. 140–42.
A review of T
HE
A
MERICANIZATION OF
E
DWARD
B
OK
, by Edward Bok; New York, 1920

Dr. Henrik 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.
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 ’70s. Nay, he was more: he was the typical American boy of the Sunday-school books of the ’70s. By day he labored with inconceivable diligence at ten or twenty diverse jobs. 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 institute.

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 seashells from Asbury Park, the family Bible on the marble-topped center-table, the crayon enlargement 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 buildings, 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.…

From the Baltimore
Sun
, July 2, 1939

Dr. Francis E. Townsend, the originator, organizer and sole proprietor of the $200-a-month old-age pension movement bearing his name, was 72 years old last January 13. Few men in American history, or indeed in any history, have leaped from obscurity to celebrity so late in life. Up to the time he was seized by the one and only idea to his credit on the scrolls of time, and the bush burst into flame under his nose, he was a family doctor in a poor way of practice, and his fame, such as it was, was circumferenced by a few streets. For more than thirty years he had been looking at the tongues of what he himself describes as “the indigent”—first in the little town of Belle Fourche, S.D. (population, 2,000), and then in Long Beach, the waterfront annex of Los Angeles.

How he hit upon the notion that made him known from coast to coast, and got him a following of a million or more cocksure
and howling disciples, with another million or two hanging about the side-lines and brought him to such puissance that more than 100 head of Congressmen, Democrats and Republicans alike, now take his orders and eat from his hand—how this miracle was set in train will probably never be known. The doctor himself says that he was inspired by seeing a couple of poor people, in the depths of the depression, searching garbage cans for scraps of food, but that, of course, is only half the story, and not the more important half. Many other persons of tender heart had been shocked by the same spectacle, and not a few of them had resolved mightily that something had to be done about it. But. Dr. Townsend was the only one who hatched a simple, completely preposterous and hence irresistibly convincing scheme. It had three parts, all of them easily comprehensible to the meanest understanding. The first consists in paying every American more than 60 years old a pension of $200 cash a month. The second consisted in requiring every recipient to spend every cent of it before the month’s end. And the third consisted in raising the money by laying a sales tax of two per cent, upon each and every transaction involving the exchange of money, of whatever shape or sort.

That all this was original with the doctor is, of course, hard to believe. Parts of it, in fact, had been adumbrated by other wizards, and long before the depression. But the chances are at least even that he had never heard of these other wizards, even at second hand, and the fact remains indisputable that he was the first to put the various elements together, and the first to sign on customers for the whole. He began in a small way in the purlieus of Los Angeles, but in a strangely little while he was roving all of California, and before a year had come and gone his anything but clarion voice was being heard as far east as Ohio, as far south as Florida, and as far north as Maine.