Part 1

Transcriber’s Note Italic text displayed as: _italic_

PISTOLS FOR TWO

BY OWEN HATTERAS

[Illustration: Decoration]

NEW YORK MCMXVII

ALFRED · A · KNOPF

_Published, September, 1917_

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

PAGE

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN 5

H. L. MENCKEN 21

PISTOLS FOR TWO

I

Biography fails, like psychology, because it so often mistakes complexity for illumination. Its aim is to present a complete picture of a man; its effect is usually to make an impenetrable mystery of him. The cause of this, it seems to me, lies in the fact that the biographer always tries to explain him utterly, to account for him in every detail, to give an unbroken coherence to all his acts and ideas. The result is a wax dummy, as smooth as glass but as unalive as a dill pickle.

It is by no such process of exhaustion that we get our notions of the people we really know. We see them, not as complete images, but as processions of flashing points. Their personalities, so to speak, are not revealed brilliantly and in the altogether, but as shy things that peep out, now and then, from inscrutable swathings, giving us a hint, a suggestion, a moment of understanding. Does a man really know what is going on in his wife’s mind? Not if she _has_ a mind. What he knows is only that infinitesimal part which she reveals, sometimes deliberately and even truculently, but more often naïvely, surreptitiously, accidentally. He judges her as a human being, not by anything approaching entire knowledge of her, but by bold and scattered inferences. He sees her soul, in so far as he sees it at all, in the way she buttons her boots, in the way she intrigues for a kiss, in the way she snaps her eye at him when he has been naughty—interprets her ego in terms of her taste in ribbons, the scent of her hair, her quarrels with her sisters, her fashion of eating artichokes, her skill at home millinery, the débris on her dressing table, her preferences in the theater, her care of her teeth.

Thus, by slow degrees, he accumulates an image of her—an image changing incessantly, and never more than half sensed. After long years, perhaps, he begins to know her after a fashion. That is, he knows how many shredded wheat biscuits she likes for breakfast, how much of his business she understands, how long she can read a first-class novel without napping, what she thinks of woolen underwear, the New Irish Movement, the family doctor, soft-boiled eggs, and God....

I enter upon these considerations because I have been employed by a committee of _aluminados_, heeled well enough to pay my honorarium, to conjure up recognizable images of MM. George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, that their scattered partisans and the public generally may see them more clearly. The job has its difficulties, for save in their joint editorial concern with _The Smart Set_ magazine and their common antipathy to certain prevailing sophistries, they are no more alike than a hawk and a handsaw. But in one other thing, at least, they also coalesce, and that is in the paucity of news about them. Most other magazine editors are constantly in the papers—discoursing on the literary art, agitating for this or that, getting themselves interviewed. These twain, however, pursue a more _pianissimo_ course, and so not much is known about them, even inaccurately....

II

The job invites. One reads regularly what magazine editors think of their contributors, but who ever reads what magazine contributors—of whom I, Hatteras, am one—think of their editors? A vast and adventurous field here enrolls itself, believe me. I know, more or less intimately, most of the editors of the great American periodicals, and I am constantly amused by the inaccuracy of the prevailing notions about them—notions diligently fostered, in many cases, by their own more or less subtle chicane. Consider, for example, the dean of the order, M. George Harvey, of the _North American Review_. His portrait shows a thoughtful old gentleman reading a book, his forefinger pressed affectionately against his right frontal sinus. Recalling the high mental pressure of his daily concerns, one concludes at once that he is struggling through Talboys Wheeler’s epitome of the Maha-Bhārāta, or Locke’s “Conduct of the Understanding.” But I have it from the Colonel himself—a confidence quite spontaneous and apparently sincere—that at the precise moment the photographer squeezed the bird he was thinking—what? Simply this: how much prettier Mlle. Mary Pickford would be if her lower limbs were less richly developed laterally. The book was the _Photoplay Magazine_.

Again, there is M. Robert H. Davis, editor of the Munsey publications. The official views of M. Davis depict him as a man of the great outdoors, a stalker of the superior carnivora, a dead shot, a fisher of tarpons and sharks, a rover of the primeval forests. He is dressed up like a cover of _Field and Stream_, a doggish pipe in his mouth, his tropics formidably encircled by cartridges and fish worms. But what are the facts? The facts are that Davis does all his fishing in the Fulton Market, and that the bear-skin which in his pictures he is seen holding triumphantly at arm’s length actually graces his library floor and was bought at Revillon Frères. He is a God-fearing, mild-mannered, and respectable man, an admirer of Elihu Root, a Prohibitionist, a member of the Red Cross and the S. P. C. A. The only actual hunting he ever does is to hunt for someone to agree with him that M. Irvin Cobb is a greater man than Mark Twain or Dostoievsky. And when it comes to fishing, he has said all he has to say when he brings up a couple of sardellen out of the mayonnaise.

Yet again, there are such fellows as Doty, of the _Century_; Towne, of _McClure’s_; Bok, of the _Ladies’ Home Journal_; Siddall, of the _American_; and Fox, of the _Police Gazette_. Doty prints Edith Wharton and Rabindranath Tagore—and reads, by choice, H. C. Witwer and Selma Lagerlöf. Fox collects Chinese jades and Sheraton chairs, and is a member of the Lake Mohonk Conference. Siddall used to be a hoochie-coochie sideshow ballyhoo with Ringling’s Circus. Towne, throwing off the editorial mask of moral indignation, writes tender triolets in the privacy of his chambers. Bok, viewed popularly as a muff—the wags of the National Press Club once put him down as one of the ladies entertained by them—is a rough, wild creature, a huge, knobby Hollander, with a voice like an auctioneer’s. And Eastman of the _Masses_, the prophet of revolt, the savior of the oppressed—what of Eastman? Eastman, _au naturel_, gives no more damns for the oppressed than you or I. His aim in life, the last time I met him in society, was to find a chauffeur who was not a drunkard and had no flair for debauching the parlor-maids. On this theme he pumped up ten times the eloquence he has ever emitted over Unearned Increments and Wage Slaves.

III

In a similar way are the MM. George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken misviewed. And it is because I see here an opportunity to experiment with my private theory of biography that I enter with some enjoyment the enterprise, thus thrown on me, of exhibiting the facts. To this end, I herewith present a list of the things I happen to know about the two gentlemen in question, leaving whoever cares for the job to go through it and construct for himself a definite and symmetrical effigy. So:

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

He was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, February 14 and 15 (the stunning event occurred precisely at 12 midnight) 1882.

His boyhood ambition was to be an African explorer in a pith helmet, with plenty of room on the chest ribbon for medals that would be bestowed upon him by the beauteous Crown Princess of Luxembourg.

He was educated at Cornell University and the University of Bologna, in Italy.

He is a man of middle height, straight, slim, dark, with eyes like the middle of August, black hair which he brushes back _à la française_, and a rather sullen mouth.

He smokes from the moment his man turns off the matutinal showerbath until his man turns it on again at bedtime.

He rarely eats meat.

He lives in a bachelor apartment, nearly one-third of which is occupied by an ice-box containing refreshing beverages. On the walls of his apartment are the pictures of numerous toothsome creatures. He is at the present time occupied in writing a book describing his sentimental adventures among them.

He has published the following books: “Europe After 8:15,” in collaboration with Mencken and Mr. Willard Huntington Wright; “Another Book on the Theater,” “Bottoms Up,” and “Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents.”

He has written for almost every magazine in America, except _Good Housekeeping_ and _The Nation_.

He dresses like the late Ward McAllister and wears daily a boutonnière of blue corn flowers.

He dislikes women over twenty-one, actors, cold weather, mayonnaise dressing, people who are always happy, hard chairs, invitations to dinner, invitations to serve on committees in however worthy a cause, railroad trips, public restaurants, rye whisky, chicken, daylight, men who do not wear waistcoats, the sight of a woman eating, the sound of a woman singing, small napkins, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Tagore, Dickens, Bataille, fried oysters, German soubrettes, French John Masons, American John Masons, tradesmen, poets, married women who think of leaving their husbands, professional anarchists of all kinds, ventilation, professional music lovers, men who tell how much money they have made, men who affect sudden friendships and call him Georgie, women who affect sudden friendships and then call him Mr. Nathan, writing letters, receiving letters, talking over the telephone, and wearing a hat.

In religion he is a complete agnostic, and views all clergymen with a sardonic eye. He does not believe that the soul is immortal. What will happen after death he doesn’t know and has never inquired.

He is subject to neuralgia. He is a hypochondriac and likes to rehearse his symptoms. Nevertheless, a thorough physical examination has shown that he is quite sound. His Wassermann reaction is, and always has been, negative. He is eugenically fit.

He never reads the political news in the papers. He belongs to a college fraternity and several university societies.

The room in which he works is outfitted with shaded lamps and heavy hangings, and somewhat suggests a first-class bordello. He works with his coat on and shuts the windows and pulls down all the curtains. He writes with a pencil on sheets of yellow paper. He cannot use a typewriter.

He detests meeting people, even on business, and swears every time a caller is announced at _The Smart Set_ office. He never receives a woman caller save with his secretary in the room.

He wears an amethyst ring. In his waistcoat pocket he carries an elegant golden device for snapping off the heads of cigars. He has his shoes shined daily, even when it rains.

Like the late McKinley, he smokes but half of a cigar, depositing the rest in the nearest spitbox. Like Mark Twain, he enjoys the more indelicate varieties of humor. Like Beethoven, he uses neither morphine nor cocaine. Like Sitting Bull and General Joffre, he has never read the Constitution of the United States.

He bought Liberty Bonds. He can eat spinach only when it is chopped fine. He knows French, Latin, Italian, and German, but is ignorant of Greek. He plays the piano by ear.

In his taste in girls, he runs to the _demi-tasse_. I have never heard of him showing any interest in a woman more than five feet in height, or weighing more than 105 pounds.

An anarchist in criticism, he is in secret a very diligent student of Lessing, Schlegel, Hazlitt, and Brandes. His pet aversion, among critics, was the late William Winter.

He has no interest in any sport, save tennis and fencing, and never plays cards. He never accepts an invitation to dinner if he can avoid it by lying. He never goes to weddings, and knows few persons who marry.

As a critic, he has been barred from many theaters. A. L. Erlanger, in particular, is a manager who views him as a colleague of Mephisto.

He eats very little.

He drinks numerous cocktails (invariably the species known as “orange blossom,” to which he has added two drops of Grenadine), a rich Burgundy, and, now and then, a bit of brandy.

He once told me that he had no use for a woman who wasn’t sad at twilight.

He has two male companions—so many and no more: Mencken and John D. Williams, the theatrical producer. He is rarely seen with any other.

He was born, as the expression has it, with a gold spoon in his mouth. He has never had to work for a living.

He works daily from 10 A.M. until 5 P.M. He plays from 5:30 until 8:30. Evenings, he spends in the theater. After the theater, he has supper. He retires anywhere from 11 P.M. to 3 A.M.

He has made many trips abroad and has lived at different times in France, England, Germany, Italy, Austria, the Argentine, India, Japan and Algiers.

He fell in love at first sight in 1913 with a flower girl in the Luitpold Café in Munich, but the hussy was distant.

He would rather have Lord Dunsany in _The Smart Set_ once than William Dean Howells a hundred times.

He often writes sentences so involved that he confesses he himself doesn’t know what they mean.

He admires Max Beerbohm, Conrad, Dr. Llewellys Barker, Mozart, the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies and the songs in “Oh, Boy,” sardines, ravioli, Havelock Ellis chocolate cake, Molnar, Hauptmann, Royalton cigars, Anatole France, _Simplicissimus_, _E. W. Howe’s Monthly_, an eiderdown blanket and a hard pillow, a thick-toothed comb and stiff brush, Schnitzler, bitter almond soap, George Ade, Richard Strauss, Pilsner, Huneker, Florenz Ziegfeld, Edwin Lefèvre’s story “Without End,” the quartette in the Piccadilly in London, the Café Viel in Paris, the overcoat shop in the Stefansplatz in Vienna, the strawberries in the Palais de Danse in Berlin.

He believes, politically, in an autocracy of the elect, for the elect, and by the elect.... His father was a Democrat.

He has written one play, “The Eternal Mystery,” which was produced on the Continent in 1914 and in America in 1915. He has forbidden the production of the play henceforth in any American city save Chicago, in which city anyone who chooses may perform it without payment of royalties.

In 1904 he won the Amsler gold medal for proficiency with the foils. He studied fencing under Lieutenant Philip Brigandi, of the Italian cavalry, and Captain Albert Androux, the celebrated French master of foils.

Fifteen minutes in the sun gives his complexion the shade of mahogany; twenty minutes, the shade of Booker T. Washington.

He wears the lightest weight underwear through the coldest winter.

He owns thirty-eight overcoats of all sorts and descriptions. Overcoats are a fad with him. He has them from heavy Russian fur to the flimsiest homespun.... He owns one with an alpine hood attachment.

He belongs to several metropolitan clubs, but never enters them.

He has never been in jail. He has been arrested but once: at the age of twenty for beating up a street-car conductor.

He always has his jackets made with two breast pockets: one for his handkerchief, the other for his reading glasses. The latter are of the horn species.

His telephone operator, at his apartment, has a list of five persons to whom he will talk—so many and no more. He refuses to answer the telephone before five o’clock in the afternoon.

His favorite places of eating in New York are the Café des Beaux Arts, the Kloster Glocke, and the Japanese Garden in the Ritz.

He can down several hundred olives at a single sitting.

He knows more about the modern foreign theater than any other American.

He is a lineal descendant of Petöfi Sándor, the national poet of Hungary, and of Thomas Bourgchier, archbishop of Canterbury.

An examination of his blood, on July 1, 1917, showed: Hb., 111%; W. B. C., 8,175. A phthalein test showed: 1st hr., 50%, 2d hr., 20%; total, 70%. Blood pressure: 129/77. Gastric analysis: Free HCl, 11.5%; combined, 20%. No stasis. No lactic acid.

He entered the New York Public Library for the first time on March 7, 1917, being taken there by A. Toxen Worm, of Copenhagen.

He never accepts a dinner invitation until invited three separate times, and then usually sends his regrets at the last moment.

The living Americans who most interest him are Josephus Daniels and Frank A. Munsey.

The only poet that he admires is John McClure. He seldom reads poetry. He has never read “Paradise Lost.”

He never visits a house a second time in which he has encountered dogs, cats, children, automatic pianos, grace before or after meals, women authors, actors, _The New Republic_, or prints of the Mona Lisa.

He is not acquainted with a single clergyman, Congressman, general, or reformer. He has never met any of the Vice-Presidents of the United States.

He is free of adenoids.

His knee jerks are normal.

He has never been inside a church.

He has been writing dramatic criticism for thirteen successive years, and in that time has seen more than 3000 plays in America, 400 in England, and 1900 on the Continent. He has simultaneously syndicated critical articles to as many as forty-two newspapers, and has served as dramatic critic to seven metropolitan magazines.

In 1910, on a wager, he wrote sixteen magazine articles in a single month.

Among his short stories are “D. S. W.,” “Nothing to Declare,” “But I Love Her,” “The Soul Song,” “The Triple Expense,” etc.

Among his most widely quoted retorts is that made by him to the newspaper interviewer who asked him if it was true that a disgruntled theatrical manager named Gest had alluded to him as a “pinhead.” “That,” replied Nathan, “is on the face of it absurd. ‘Pinhead’ is a word of two syllables.”

He once observed that the reason the galleries of our theaters, as our theatrical managers lament, are no longer filled with newsboys is that all the newsboys are now theatrical managers.

He wrote the introduction to Eleanor Gates’ play, “The Poor Little Rich Girl.”

He is the first American critic to have written of the dramatists Molnar, Brighouse, and Bracco.

His mother’s family were the pioneer settlers of Fort Wayne, Indiana. His father’s family were figures in the continental world of letters. His father spoke eleven languages, including the Chinese.

He frequently spends an entire afternoon polishing up a sentence in one of his compositions. And he often stops writing for a couple of days, or as long as it takes him, to hit upon an appropriate adjective or phrase.

He never writes love letters, and seldom reads them.

He cannot operate a motor car, or cook anything, or wind a dynamo, or fix a clock, or guess the answer to a riddle, or milk a cow.

He regards camping out as the most terrible diversion ever invented by man.

He knows nothing of country life, and cannot tell a wheat field from a potato patch. He regards all deciduous trees as oaks, and all evergreens as cedars.

He has yet to drink his first glass of Hires’ Root Beer.

He regards Al Woods as the most competent commercial manager in the American theater.

His library contains every known book on the drama published in the English, French, German, and Italian languages.

He owns many of the original Dunsany manuscripts.

Accused by certain of his critics of a flippant attitude toward the drama, he in reality takes the drama very seriously. The theater, on the other hand, he regards four out of five times as a joke.

He concurs in the Walpole philosophy that life is a tragedy to him who feels and a comedy to him who thinks.

He is a good listener. His invariable practice with talkers is to let the latter talk themselves out and then, after a moment’s studious silence, to nod his head and say yes. He never argues, never disagrees, no matter how bizarre the conversationalist’s pronunciamentos.

The Paris journal, _Le Temps_, frequently translates his critical articles and quotes from them copiously.

He owns an autographed photograph of the Russian mystic, Rasputin, presented to him by the latter six years ago.

He dislikes all forms of publicity. He has an aversion to self-advertisement that amounts almost to a mania. He believes, with Mencken, that whom the gods would destroy, they first make popular.

He takes a companion with him to the theater only on rare occasions. He uses the extra seat sent him by the managers as a depository for his hat and overcoat.

He always has thirty or forty lead pencils beside him when he writes. The moment one becomes a trifle dull he picks up another. He cannot sharpen the pencils well enough to suit himself and has the job done by his secretary.

He hasn’t the slightest intention of ever getting married.

He believes that the motor trip from Watkins Glen to Elmira, in New York State, is the most beautiful in America.

Among the Presidents of the United States he admires most—and by long odds—the late Grover Cleveland.

He believes the dirtiest spot in the world to be the Azores.

He believes Shaw’s “Cæsar and Cleopatra” to be the best modern British play, Brieux’s “Les Hannetons” the best modern French play, and Dunsany’s “Gods of the Mountain” the best modern Irish play.

He gets squiffed about once in six weeks, usually in company with John Williams. He has a headache the next day.

He carries a tube of menthol in his pocket and sniffs at it forty times a day.

He has been writing his monthly article for _The Smart Set_ since 1909. He and Mencken became editors of the magazine in August, 1914.

He began his career as a man of letters by reporting for the New York _Herald_. He reads the _Times_ and _Globe_ daily.

Among his critical contemporaries in New York he has the highest respect for Louis Sherwin. Of American dramatists he most admires Avery Hopwood. Of American dramatic critics his vote is probably for Henry T. Parker, of the Boston _Transcript_.

In his own opinion, the best thing he has ever written is “The Eternal Mystery.”

He has never been to Washington, nor to California, nor to Boston.

He has never made a speech, nor delivered a lecture, nor sat on a committee. He has never subscribed to a charity fund.

He wears a No. 14½ collar and No. 7¼ hat. His favorite soup is _Crême de Sante_.

The only author he ever invites to his office is Harry Kemp. He detests Kemp’s poetry.

The temperature of his daily bath is 67 degrees.

A practitioner of preciosity in style, he nevertheless dictates business and social letters in a “would say” manner, and has his secretary sign them.

In 1900 he fought a duel with pistols outside of Florence, Italy, and was wounded in the left shoulder. He is still a trifle lame from the wound.

Returning to America in 1912 on the _Philadelphia_, during a rough passage he was the only passenger on the ship to appear in the dining saloon for four successive days. With three of the stewards, he passed the time by improvising a bowling alley in the saloon, utilizing mutton chops for the pins and oranges for the balls. The latter were automatically returned to the bowlers by the ship’s periodical pitch backward.

He has had the same barber for fourteen years. Curiously enough, the barber’s name is George J. Nath.