Second Mencken Chrestomathy

by H. L. Mencken

  This scant and casual notice of Dr. Jefferson’s book scarcely does justice to one of the most interesting of recent volumes. The common notion that a bartender is an ignorant man is here set at rest forever. The author reveals himself not only as a gentleman of sound information but also as one of cultured habits of reflection. His book is written in excellent English from cover to cover, and the arrangement of its materials certifies to his possession of a trained and orderly mind. It is sincerely to be hoped that he will not allow it to be his last essay in the philosophy of his ancient (and perhaps now dying) art. Bartending has suffered greatly from the ignorant and cynical attitude of mind of the general public. When the average man thinks of barrooms, his mind quickly turns to memories of some of his own worst stupidities and follies, and so he comes unconsciously to the notion that the man on the other side of the bar is an ass also. Nothing can be more grotesquely unjust and untrue. The typical American bartender in this year of grace 1916 is a man of education, intelligence and refinement. He must be able to meet all classes and conditions of men in a dignified and self-respecting manner; he must understand human vanity; he must keep himself steadfast in the midst of manifold temptations. Obviously, such a man can be no slouch. The boob, the osseocaput, the fat- or bonehead may get along very well in the pulpit, in business or at the bar, but it is quite impossible for him to survive behind the bar.

  Night Club

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Sept. 3, 1934

  I hadn’t been in one for three or four years, but save in the wine-list there was no visible change. The same side-show murals on the walls, and the same cacochromatic play of lights. The same sad youths laboring the same jazz. The same middle-aged couples bumping and grunting over the dance floor like dying hogs in a miasmatic pen. The same interludes of dismal professional entertainment, with the same decayed vaudevillians. The same crooners, male and female, bawling maudlin jingles into the same mikes. The same shuffling and forgetful waiters. The same commonplace food. The same poky service.

  The wine-list showed some cuts in price. Highballs had come down from the 75 cents of Prohibition days to half a dollar, and some of the simpler kinds of cocktails were but 40 cents. There were champagnes as low as $5 a quart, and still wines at $2.25, $2, and even, in a few cases, $1.75. But the transcripts of the labels (often misspelled) were empty of temptation: they all seemed to be third-rate trade-goods. Every beer listed was, to my unhappy personal knowledge, bad. Of the good beers now on the market there was no mention. It was a task to make up one’s mind what to drink. I chose an almost anonymous white wine, and regretted it heartily.

  What the mark-up is in such places I don’t know, but it can’t be much less than 100 per cent. For the overhead is heavy, and the flow of business is not swift. While the clients are performing the lethargic obscenity that they call dancing they are not drinking, and most of them seem to dance every number. I observed one crème de menthe frappé that lasted, by my watch, more than an hour, and one bottle of indeterminate red wine that sufficed for four people all evening. There was nowhere in the place, so far as I could see, any high-pressure boozing, and certainly no one was tight, save maybe my waiter—an habitual heel-drainer, or I am no criminologist. The dancers, with few exceptions, looked very silly, but they were all sober. No carcasses of the stewed, whether male or female, hung along the bar.

  Why do people go to such places? It is hard to make out. To lose themselves in the color and gayety? I could discern no more gayety than is usual in a Bible class, and the standard color scheme is far more exhilarating to bulls than to human beings. To be soothed and carried away by the music? There is no music, but only an idiotic beating of tom-toms, with occasionally a few measures of a banal tune. To seek grace and exercise in the dance? There is no grace in such stupid wriggling, and no exercise in doing it over a few square yards of floor. To dally with amour? But surely the place for amour is not under 5,000 candle-power of red, yellow, green and blue lights, with strangers ricocheting from the cabooses of the high contracting parties, and catapulting them hither and yon.

  The music interested me most, for one often hears, even from good musicians, that jazz is not to be sniffed at—that there is really something in it. But what, precisely? I can find nothing in what is currently offered. Its melodies all run to a pattern, and that pattern is crude and childish. Its rhythms are almost as bad; what is amusing in them is as old as Johann Sebastian Bach, and what is new is simply an elephantine hop, skip and jump. Nor is there anything charming in jazz harmony, once it has been heard a couple of times. The discords, three times out of four, seems to be due to ignorance far more than to craft, and the modulations, in the main, are simply those of a church organist far gone in liquor. As for the instrumentation, it appears to be based frankly on the theory that unpleasant sounds are somehow more pleasant, at least to certain ears, than pleasant ones. That theory is sound, and it has many corollaries: indeed, the love of ugliness is quite as widespread, and hence quite as human, as the love of beauty. But it still remains a scientific fact that a thin and obvious tune played badly on an imperfect reed instrument, is hideous, and no metaphysics, however artful, can ever reduce that fact to fancy. And it is likewise a fact that a single fiddle, if it be pitted against three or four saxophones, a trumpet, a bull-fiddle and a battery of drums, gives a very bad account of itself, and can make little more actual music than a pig under a fence.

  My guess is that jazz remains popular, not because of any virtue (even to anthropoid ears) in its melodies, harmonies and instrumentation, nor even to any novelty in its rhythm, but simply to its monotonous beat. No matter what syncopations may be attempted in the upper parts, the drums and bull-fiddle bang along like metronomes, and that is the thing that apparently soothes and delights the customers. It is music reduced to its baldest elementals, and hence music that they can follow. It might be made just as well by a machine, and some day, I suppose, the experiment of so making it will be tried.

  That there are artistic possibilities in it may be granted, for on rare occasions some unusually competent composer develops and reveals them. But they are certainly not apparent in the sorry trash that loads the radio every night. It is simply undifferentiated musical protoplasm, dying of its own effluvia. There is no more ingenuity in it than you will find in the design of a series of fence-posts. One tune is so much like another that it is hard to tell them apart, and the cheap harmonies that support the first also support all the rest. Every squeal of the clarinets is an old and familiar squeal, and there is seldom any effort to break the monotony by introducing new instruments, or by working out new ways of using the old ones. The muted trumpet is still offered gravely as something novel and saucy.

  The dancing that goes with this noise is, if anything, even worse. It is the complete negation of graceful and charming motion. In its primeval form I used to watch it in the Negro dives of Hawk street thirty-five years ago. There would be a dance-floor packed to the walls, and on it the colored brethren and their ladies, policed by Round Sergeant Charles M. Cole and his storm troopers, would stamp and wriggle, each sticking to a space of a few square feet. In those days the proud Aryan pursued the waltz and two-step, and ballroom dancing had sweeping linear patterns, and went to tripping and amusing tunes. But now the patterns are gone, and dancing everywhere degenerates to what it was in Hawk street—a puerile writhing on a narrow spot.

  It is a feeble and silly art at best, and so its decay need not be lamented. It comes naturally to the young, whose excess of energy demands violent motion, but when it is practised by the mature it can never escape a kind of biological impropriety, verging upon the indecent. The real damage that the new mode has done is to music, the cleanest and noblest of all the arts. There is in the repertory a vast amount of dance music, and in it are some of the loveliest tunes ever written. But now they are forgotten as if they had never been, and people heave and pant to rubbish fit only for tin whistles.

  That we owe the change t
o Prohibition is certainly arguable. By putting all social intercourse in America on an alcoholic basis, it forced people to dance when they were not quite themselves, and in consequence they had to avoid the complications of the waltz and its congeners, and to seek safety in more primitive measures. The simple beat of the tomtom was the safest of all, so it came in. Simultaneously, ears and brains were dulled, and it became painful to follow the complicated and exciting tunes of Johann Strauss, so the crude banalities of jazz were substituted. Thus we have music purged of everything that makes it music, and dancing reduced to a duck-like wabbling, requiring hardly more skill than spitting at a mark.

  This is not my hypothesis: I have heard it from authorities worth attending to. They seem to agree that the gradual deboozification of the country, following upon Repeal, will eventually restore decent music to the ballroom and with it a more seemly kind of dancing. As I have noted, the people that I saw in that night club the other evening all seemed to be soberer than was common in Anti-Saloon League days. I should add that most of them looked a bit sad, and that many even looked a bit shamefaced. They had little applause for the music, and were plainly not having anything properly describable as a high old time. In the main, they were old enough to have the pattern of the waltz packed in their knapsacks. What if the professor had choked his horrible saxophones and burst into “Wiener Blut”? My guess is that a wave of genuine joy would have rolled over that dismal hall.

  The Peaceable Kingdom

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Aug. 28, 1931

  The professional wets continue in the folly of representing and libeling the saloon. It is not only a folly; it is also a thumping hypocrisy, for all of them know very well that the saloon was never as bad as the drys painted it. There were, of course, saloons of a low character, but they were never as low in character as the neighborhoods in which they flourished. Every saloon was measurably cleaner, more cheerful and more orderly than the street in which it stood. Not uncommonly it was a school of manners for the whole vicinity. The bombast and ill-nature that marks family life among the proletariat was strictly forbidden. A visitor who spoke to the bartender or to another visitor in the tones he was free to use to his wife had his skull nicked with a bung-starter, and learned a salutary lesson in decorum. A saloon free-lunch was always composed of better food than could be had at home by those who consumed it. The art on saloon walls, though it may have been of the fleshly school, was better than the art on the walls of American parlors. The most humble man, if he had a nickel to put upon the bar, was free to stand before it for an hour and listen to the discourse of his betters. If no great dignitary ever came in, then at least the police sergeant came in, and what he had to say after a few beers was always instructive and sometimes astonishing. Moreover, the brewery’s collector, or Todsäufer, dropped in regularly—if not daily, then certainly once a week. He was a man of wide information and polished manners, and not infrequently he was a member of the City Council. His talk echoed the thoughts and projects, the hopes and despairs, of the great world. His Shriner’s button was of solid gold, and the claws, teeth and wishbones of elks, moose, lions, tigers and eagles upon his watch-chain were set in the same noble metal. Many a Baltimorean, now a rich banker or manufacturer, owes his start in life to the friendly interest of a Todsäufer, met in a saloon.

  The Home of the Crab

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, June 13, 1927

  That Baltimore is a center of gastronomical debauchery is a delusion still cherished by thousands of Americans who have never been there. It is remarkable how long such notions last. This one, I daresay, was true at some time in the past, but certainly it has not been true since the great fire of 1904. That catastrophe left indelible scars upon the town. It not only changed it physically, and for the worse; it also dethroned the old ruling caste of easy-going, good-living gentry, and turned loose a mob of go-getters, most of them not natives. Baltimore used to run to shady, red-bricked streets, gorgeous victuals and sound liquors; its white marble front steps were almost as famous as its soft crabs, its oysters, its terrapin and its seven-year-old rye. But now it runs to long rows of hideous homes in all the horrible shades of yellow, with front porches fit for railway terminals—and with them have come boulevards and stadiums, and with the boulevards and stadiums, soda water and hot dogs. I remember myself when there were at least twoscore first-rate eating houses in the city: now there are not half a dozen. Two of the best are run by Italians, or at all events, on the Italian plan. The food they offer is, in many ways, the most appetizing in town, but it is Italian, not Baltimorean. When a visitor of civilized tastes honors the town with his presence he doesn’t want to eat Italian dishes; he wants to try the Maryland dishes he has heard of all his life—the chicken à la Maryland, the planked shad, the Maryland beaten biscuit, the steamed hard crabs, the jowl and sprouts, the soft crabs and so on. Where is he to get them? Maybe, by accident, in some lunchroom. The rest of the eating-houses of the town, ignoring all such local delicacies, serve only the dull, uninspired victuals that are now the standard everywhere in America, from Boston to Los Angeles. Year by year their cuisine comes closer and closer to that of the Pennsylvania Railroad dining-car.

  This decay, of course, is not peculiar to Baltimore. It is to be observed all over the United States, and the local causes, when they are discernible at all, are perhaps less potent than the increasing standardization and devitalization that now mark all American life. The American people have become the dullest and least happy race in Christendom. When they seek amusement it is in huge herds, like wild animals. There was a time when even the poorest man, in such a place as Baltimore, at least ate decent food. It was cheap and his wife knew how to cook it, and took pride in the fact. But now the movie parlor engulfs her every afternoon, and what he eats comes mainly out of cans. His midday lunch was once her handiwork, and he washed it down with honest beer. Now he devours hot dogs.

  Hot Dogs

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 4, 1929

  The hot dog, as the phrase runs, seems to have come to stay. Even the gastroenterologists have given up damning it, as they have given up damning synthetic gin. I am informed by reliable spies that at their convention in Atlantic City last May they consumed huge quantities of both, and with no apparent damages to their pylorus. In such matters popular instinct is often ahead of scientific knowledge, as the history of liver eating shows so beautifully. It may be that, on some near tomorrow, the hot dog will turn out to be a prophylactic against some malady that now slays its thousands. That this will be the case with respect to gin I am willing to prophesy formally. Meanwhile, hot dog stands multiply, and millions of young Americans grow up who will cherish the same veneration for them that we, their elders, were taught to give to the saloon.

  My own tastes in eating run in another direction, and so it is very rarely that I consume a hot dog. But I believe that I’d fall in line if the artists who confect and vend it only showed a bit more professional daring. What I mean may be best explained by referring to the parallel case of the sandwich. When I was a boy there were only three kinds of sandwiches in common use—the ham, the chicken and the Swiss cheese. Others, to be sure, existed, but it was only as oddities. Even the club sandwich was a rarity, and in most eating-houses it was unobtainable. The great majority of people stuck to the ham and the Swiss cheese, with the chicken for feast days and the anniversaries of historic battles. Then came the invasion of the delicatessen business by Jews, and a complete reform of the sandwich. The Jewish mind was too restless and enterprising to be content with the old repertoire. It reached out for the novel, the dramatic, the unprecedented, as it does in all the arts. First it combined the ham sandwich and the cheese sandwich—and converted America to the combination instanter. Then it added lettuce, and after that, mayonnaise—both borrowed from the club sandwich. Then it boldly struck out into the highest fields of fancy, and presently the lowly sandwich had been completely transformed and exalted. It became, as t
he announcements said, “a meal in itself.” It took on complicated and astonishing forms. It drew on the whole market for materials. And it leaped in price from a nickel to a dime, to a quarter, to fifty cents, even to a dollar. I have seen sandwiches, indeed, marked as much as a dollar and a half.

  The rise in price, far from hurting business, helped it vastly. The delicatessen business, once monopolized by gloomy Germans who barely made livings at it, became, in the hands of the Jewish reformers, one of the great American industries, and began to throw off millionaires. Today it is on a sound and high-toned basis, with a national association, a high-pressure executive secretary, a trade journal, and a staff of lobbyists in Washington. There are sandwich shops in New York which offer the nobility and gentry a choice of no less than 100 different sandwiches, all of them alluring and some of them downright masterpieces. And even on the lowly level of the drug-store sandwich counter the sandwich has taken on a new variety and a new dignity. No one eats plain ham and cole-slaw to set it off. At its best it is hidden between turkey, Camembert and sprigs of endive, with anchovies and Russian dressing to dress it.

  What I have to suggest is that the hot dog entrepreneurs borrow a leaf from the book of the sandwich men. Let them throw off the chains of the frankfurter, for a generation or more their only stay, and go seeking novelty in the vast and brilliant domain of the German sausage. They will be astonished and enchanted, I believe, by what they find there, and their clients will be astonished and enchanted even more. For there are more different sausages in Germany than there are breakfast foods in America, and if there is a bad one among them then I have never heard of it. They run in size from little fellows so small and pale and fragile that it seems a crime to eat them to vast and formidable pieces that look like shells for heavy artillery. And they run in flavor from the most delicate to the most raucous, and in texture from that of feathers caught in a cobweb to that of linoleum, and in shape from straight cylinders to lovely kinks and curlycues. In place of the single hot dog of today there should be a variety as great as that which has come to prevail among sandwiches. There should be dogs for all appetites, all tastes, all occasions. They should come in rolls of every imaginable kind and accompanied by every sort of relish from Worcestershire sauce to chutney. The common frankfurter, with its tough roll and its smear of mustard, should be abandoned as crude and hopeless, as the old-time ham sandwich has been abandoned. The hot dog should be elevated to the level of an art form.