Second Mencken Chrestomathy

by H. L. Mencken

  I daresay any second-hand bookseller will be able to find a copy of the book for you. There is some raciness in the detail of it. Perhaps, despite its public failure, it enjoys a measure of pizzicato esteem behind the door. The author, having achieved its colossal self-revelation, became intrigued by the notion that he was a literary man of sorts, and informed me that he was undertaking the story of the girl last-named—the spotted virgin. But he apparently never finished it. Such a writer, once he has told the one big story, is done for.

  A Texas Schoolma’am

  From the American Mercury, June, 1926, pp. 123–25.

  A review of MY FIRST THIRTY YEARS, by Gertrude Beasley; Paris, 1926

  This book, I suspect, comes out with a Paris imprint because no American publisher would risk printing it. I offer the very first paragraph as a specimen of its manner:

  Thirty years ago I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in an act of rape, being carried through the pre-natal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting forth only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into association with people whom I should never have chosen. Sometimes I wish that, as I lay in the womb, a pink soft embryo, I had somehow thought, breathed or moved and wrought destruction to the woman who bore me, and her eight miserable children who preceded me, and the four round-faced mediocrities who came after me, and her husband, a monstrously cruel, Christ-like, and handsome man with an animal’s appetite for begetting children.

  This is free speaking, surely, but only a Comstock, reading it, would mistake it for an attempt at pornography. There is, in fact, not the slightest sign of conscious naughtiness in the book; it is the profoundly serious and even indignant story of a none too intelligent woman, lifted out of the lowest levels of the Caucasian race by her own desperate efforts, and now moved to ease her fatigue by telling how she did it. She is far too earnest to sophisticate her narrative; there is absolutely nothing in it that suggests the artful grimacing of the other Americanos printed by the philanthropic Three Mountains Press. When, looking back over her harsh and feverish life, she recalls an episode in the mire, she describes it simply and baldly, and in the words that clothed it in her own mind when she lived through it. Some of these words are ancient monosyllables, and very shocking. But they somehow belong in the story. If they were taken out, it would become, to that extent, unreal. As it is, it is as overwhelmingly real as a tax-bill.

  La Beasley, it appears, came into the world on the Texas steppes, the ninth child of migratory and low-down parents. Her father was an unsuccessful farmer who practised blacksmithing on the side. During her first half dozen years the family moved three or four times. Always prosperity was beckoning in the next township, the next county. Children were born at every stop, and as the household increased it gradually disintegrated. Finally, the mother heaved the father out, took her brood to Abilene, and there set up a boarding-house. The sons quickly drifted away; one of the daughters became a lady of joy; the others struggled pathetically with piddling jobs. Gertrude was the flower of the flock. She worked her way through a preposterous “Christian college,” got a third-rate teacher’s certificate, and took a rural school. The country parents liked her; she kept their barbarous progeny in order, often by beating them. After a while she took other examinations, and was transferred to better schools. In the end, she went to Chicago, and there tackled pedagogy on a still higher level. For all I know, she may be teaching in that great city yet. She closes her record arbitrarily at the end of her thirtieth year. We see her, with money saved, setting off for Japan. Her mother has prospered and is fat and happy. Her excommunicated father is dead. Her brothers and sisters are scattered all over the Southwest.

  The book is full of sharp and tremendously effective character sketches, and the best of them all is that of Ma Beasley. How many of our novelists could beat it? I think of Dreiser and Anderson, and no other. The old woman is done unsparingly and almost appallingly. We are made privy to her profound and bellicose ignorance, her incurable frowsiness, her banal pride in her obscure and ignoble family, her relatives, her lascivious delight in witless and malicious scandal-mongering. But there is something heroic in her, too. Her struggle to cadge a living for her squirming litter takes on a quality that is almost dignity. She is shrewd, unscrupulous, full of oblique resource. Her battles with her husband, and particularly with him in his capacity of chronic father, often have gaudy drama in them. Consider her final and only effective device for birth control: a loaded shot-gun beside her bed! One longs to meet the old gal, and shake her red hand. She is obscene, but she is also curiously admirable.

  The book is a social document of the utmost interest. It presents the first genuinely realistic picture of the Southern poor white trash ever heard of. The author has emancipated herself from her native wallow, but she does not view it with superior sniffs. Instead, she frankly takes us back to it, and tells us all she knows about its fauna, simply and honestly. There is frequent indignation in her chronicle, but never any derision. Her story interests her immensely, and she is obviously convinced that it should be interesting to others. I think she is right.

  For Rotary and God

  From the American Mercury, Dec., 1930, pp. 509–10.

  A review of A BIOGRAPHY OF EVERETT WENTWORTH HILL, by Rex Harlow; Oklahoma City, 1930

  One thinks of Oklahoma as a wilderness swarming with oil men daffy on golf, gin and women, but in truth it has begun to hatch idealists, and even to nourish a literature. Of the latter the author of the present work is a talented ornament, and of the former its subject is a shining star. When I say that Mr. Hill has been president of Rotary International I have said enough to indicate his measure. It is an honor that could go only to a great dreamer—one inflamed and even tortured by a vision of human perfection, with peace reigning in the world, every radical behind the bars, and the Boy Scouts as ecumenical as the Universal Church—, but he must be a dreamer with a gift, also, for practical affairs. Mr. Hill is precisely such a man. He is, on the one hand, the Ice King of Oklahoma, with vast and growing interests, not only in a great chain of colytic ice-plants but also in a multitude of other humane industries, and he is, on the other hand, an impassioned and relentless laborer, in season and out of season, for the good of his fellow-men. It is instructive to read about such a character, for in his career there is inspiration for all of us.

  The rising town of Russell, Kansas, nurtured him, and he came into the world on “a cold, bleak day” in 1884. His father, John Harris Hill, affectionately known as Harry, was a man of substance, and what is more, a man of exemplary habits.

  Observing that both his father and mother were always careful of their persons, dress and home, [Everett] too learned to keep his clothes clean, his teeth brushed and his hair combed.… Following their example in financial matters as well, he saved his pennies, nickels and dimes, and the broad sweep of the rapidly increasing acres he saw his father acquire developed in him, small though he was, an intense desire to become a landowner himself.

  The chance came soon enough: as a boy still in knee-pants he bought a farm, and by the time he got to high-school he was already on his way to fortune. His career there was a brilliant one, and among other things he learned the subtle art of resisting temptation. Says Mr. Harlow:

  He and a classmate, a girl whom he admired very much, became engaged in a heated contest for first honors of their class. Toward the close of the term the girl, counting on his generosity and chivalry, came to him and frankly asked that he let down enough in his work that she could win. A scholarship in some college or university went as a prize to the winner, and as she was a poor girl winning meant that she could get a chance to attend college, while loss would ring a death-knell to her hope for a higher education. “Everett, it means everything to me to win—an education, a broader life, greater happiness,” she pleaded. “To you it means only the pleasure of being first in your class. You can go to college whether you win or lose
. Please help me by letting me win.”

  St. Anthony himself never faced a more dreadful temptation. Here was a chance to reach, at one stroke, a dizzy and singular eminence: in brief, to go down into the history of mankind as the first (and perhaps only) gentleman ever born on Kansan soil. But young Everett’s irresolution was only momentary. Almost at once his baser nature yielded to his higher. “There were certain principles that he must uphold in his life, regardless of how they affected other people.” So he stepped on the gas of his intellect and got the prize, and the wicked temptress thereupon disappears from the chronicle.

  His career at the Cascadilla prep-school at Ithaca need not detain us, nor his brilliant years at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce in Philadelphia. He is, to date, its most distinguished graduate, but his distinction does not rest upon his feats as an undergraduate, but upon his services to humanity in later years. From Wharton he proceeded to the post-graduate seminary of the Standard Oil Company, and was presently performing prodigies of salesmanship in Georgia, but his heart was in the Middle West, and after looking about a bit he decided to settle in Oklahoma and grow up with the country. How, with two young confederates, W. T. Leahy and John Bowman, he established the Western Ice and Cold Storage Company at Shawnee; how he met and conquered the wicked R. L. Witherspoon, manager of an ice-plant belonging to the Anheuser-Busch Brewery in the same town; how Leahy and Bowman gradually faded from the picture, and Hill reigned alone; and how, from Shawnee, he extended his operations from town to town, until now he is the undisputed Ice King of that whole rich empire—for this thrilling story you must turn to Mr. Harlow’s narrative. There, too, you will find the romantic story of his three marriages—one of which came to such wreck that “the newspapers of the world carried streamer headlines” about it, and he himself was impelled to “cancel all speaking engagements” and forced to “call upon all the philosophy at his command to keep from sinking into cynicism and losing faith in friendship.” And there, finally, you will find a detailed account of his services to Rotary, and hence to the Republic, to humanity, and to God.

  The book has savor. It is a pity that there are not more like it. We have too many biographies of politicians and literati, and too few of really great men.

  Flamingo in Blue Stockings

  From the Smart Set, Dec, 1920, pp. 142–44.

  A review of MARGARET FULLER, 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?

  The Incomparable Bok

  From the Smart Set, Jan., 1921, pp. 140–42.

  A review of THE AMERICANIZATION OF EDWARD BOK, 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.