Part 2
His valet’s name is Osuka F. Takami. The latter has a penchant for polishing Nathan’s patent leather boots with the sofa pillows.
He has seen only one vaudeville show in the last eight years.
He believes that Herma Prach is the prettiest girl on the Viennese stage and Gladys Gaynor the prettiest on the London stage. He has never seen a pretty girl on either the Berlin or Paris stage.
His headquarters in London is the Savoy; in Berlin, the Adlon; in Vienna, the Grand; in Paris, the Astra.
He has never eaten a pickled eel, calf’s brains, chicken livers, or tongue.
He has never been in a Childs’ restaurant or in Rector’s.
He is of a nervous temperament and the slightest sound during the night wakes him up.
He looks seven years younger than he is.
He has been shot at three times in America, but never hit.
He likes chop suey, spaghetti, French pastry, horseradish sauce, Welsh rarebits, oysters _à la Dumas_, raw tomatoes, stuffed baked potatoes, green peppers, broiled lobster, halibut, mushrooms cooked with caraway seeds, and chipped beef.
His favorite American city is Philadelphia. His favorite French, Barbizon. His favorite German, Munich. His favorite English, Leeds.
He covered murder trials in various parts of the country for the New York _Herald_ during the years of his preparation for dramatic criticism.
He wears tan pongee silk shirts in summer.
The New Yorkers he admires most are W. R. Hearst, Arthur Hopkins, and M. Alevy, the eminent _maître d’hôtel_ of the Café des Beaux Arts.
He is the only American dramatic critic who has never succumbed to the Augustus Thomas, Granville Barker or Belasco rumble-bumble.
He is entirely ignorant of mathematics, geology, botany, and physics. Like Mencken, however, he is a good speller, and is privy to the intricacies of punctuation.
The name of the girl who manicures his nails is Miss Priscilla Brown. She is an orphan.
The claret he commonly serves to his guests costs eighty-five cents a gallon, in quarts. He buys the labels separately.
His favorite hospitals are the Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, and Galen Hall, in Atlantic City. Whenever he is ill he goes to one or the other.
Since 1901 he has loved seventeen different girls, and still remembers the names of all of them, and their preferences in literature, food, and wines. Of the seventeen, fourteen are happily married, one has been married and divorced, and the rest have gone West.
He owns three watches, seventeen scarf-pins, and nineteen pairs of shoes.
His skull is sub-brachycephalic, with a cephalic index of 83.1. His cranial capacity, by the system of Deniker, is 1756 cc. His nose is mesorhinian, and his nasal index is 46.2. The ratio between the length of his radius and that of his humerus is as 73 is to 100.
By the Binet-Simon test his general intelligence is that of a man of 117 years.
His voice is a baritone, with a range of one octave and two tones.
He never answers questions put to him in letters.
A friend presented him several years ago with a set of O. Henry, which, try as he will, he can’t get rid of.
He would rather eat a salt-sprinkled raw tomato still hot from the sun than a dinner from the hand of a French chef.
He has everything he wears made to his order, save his belts and his socks. He never buys even a hat that is ready-made.
He has written under the pseudonyms of George Narét, Rupert Cross, and William Drayham.
He has been denounced in the New York newspapers, during his career as dramatic critic, by three playwrights, five theatrical managers, eight actresses, twenty-two actors, and almost everyone connected with vaudeville.
He likes garlic, but refrains from eating it.
He has read Max Beerbohm’s “Happy Hypocrite” thirteen times.
Like Mencken, he is subject to periodic attacks of melancholia.
He has visited every American resort north of Old Point Comfort—and thinks them all pretty bad.
He believes the Ritz, in Philadelphia, to be the best hotel in America.
He believes the Hudson Theater, in New York, to be the most comfortable theater in America.
Several years ago, seeking isolation in which to finish a piece of work, he decided to shut his eyes, run his finger down a New York Central time-table, and go to the place opposite the name of which his finger would come to a halt. His finger stopped opposite an exotic something named New Paltz.... The first person he saw when he got off at the New Paltz station was the man he had roomed with in his junior year at college.
He has said that “cleverness” consists merely in saying the wrong thing at the right time.
He owns three suits of evening clothes.
He wears pongee pajamas.
His one-act play, “The Eternal Mystery,” which was suppressed in New York and Detroit, created more discussion than any one-act play produced in America in the last dozen years.
He is kind to dogs, babies, and negroes. He has never given a street beggar a cent.
Among his closest friends in Europe are Ballington Booth, Jack Johnson, and M. Philippe Cartier, in charge of the malt department on the Orient Express.
His most ingenious piece of dramatic criticism was his criticism of the writings of Augustus Thomas, in which he proved that Thomas’ plays would be better if they were played backward.
His hair grows so quickly that he has to get a hair-cut every ten days.
His father’s first name was Charles; his middle name, Narét.
He likes hot weather, the hotter the better.
He believes the island of Bermuda to be the most beautiful spot on earth. He would like to live there—if he couldn’t live in Munich.
He once wrote an article on The Department of the Interior for _Munsey’s Magazine_. He gave the proceeds, by way of atonement, to the First Baptist Church of Asbury Park.
He knew Evelyn Nesbit when she was a baby.
He believes that twelve per cent of all reformers and uplifters are asses, and that the rest are thieves.
He wears low, Byronic collars and rather gaudy neckties.
In philosophy he is a skeptical idealist, believing that the truth is an illusion and that man is a botch. He has read the works of Kant, Fichte, and Locke, but can’t remember what was in them. He regards Schopenhauer, on the woman question, as a sentimentalist whistling in the dark.
His knowledge of economics is extensive, and he once wrote a pamphlet against David Ricardo. It has been translated into French, German, and Bohemian.
He has never written any poetry in English, but published a slim volume of Petrarchan sonnets in Italian during his student days in Bologna. The only copy of this book known to exist is in the library of Balliol College, Oxford. The author’s own copy was lost in the burning of the Hôtel de France at Lausanne, in the winter of 1903.
He is an excellent Latinist and has translated Albius Tibullus.
His favorite opera is Gluck’s “Iphigénie in Tauris.” He once traveled from Nice to Dresden to hear it. His chief abomination in the opera house is “The Jewels of the Madonna.”
While on the staff of the New York _Herald_, James Gordon Bennett offered him the post of London correspondent. The emolument proposed, however, made Nathan laugh.
He owns three top hats, fourteen walking sticks, and two Russian wolf-hounds.
He writes with a Mikado No. 1 lead-pencil.
He is on good terms with but two members of his family.
He reads, on the average, one hundred and fifty foreign plays every year.
He has read every book on the drama published in America, England, France, and Germany since 1899.
He uses Calox tooth powder, Colgate’s shaving soap, a double strength witch hazel, a Gillette razor, and Kitchell’s Horse Liniment. He has never taken quinine, Peruna, Piso’s Cough Syrup, Sanatogen, asperin, morphine, opium, or castor oil—but he has taken everything else.
He believes Mencken eats too much.
He has been inoculated against typhoid.
He once, as a boy, ran a railroad locomotive from Cleveland, Ohio, to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, killing only two cows.
He gets a cinder in his eye on an average of twice a day.
He can drink anything but sweet cordials.
With his meals, he uses Cross and Blackwell’s chow-chow.
In his undergraduate days he was an editor of all the Cornell University papers.
He wrote articles on the theater for the old _Harper’s Weekly_ for four years.
He knows three jockeys, eight bartenders, one murderer, two sea captains, three policemen, one letter carrier, and one politician.
He is a warm friend of Detective William J. Burns.
He likes buttermilk.
Christmas costs him, on the average, about a thousand dollars.
For the last two years he has received weekly anonymous letters from some woman in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who signs herself with the initials “L. G.”
He is writing the introduction to Arthur Hopkins’ new book on the drama.
He has not ridden a horse since May 22, 1908.
In October, 1912, he and his broker were wrecked off Barnegat in the latter’s yacht, _Margo I_, and were rescued via a breeches buoy by the Barnegat life-saving crew.
He never reads popular novels.
Mr. Winthrop Ames has invited him to write a satirical review for his Little Theater in New York and Nathan is planning to do the thing during 1918.
He eats two raw eggs a day to put on weight.
When the victim of a bad cold and unable to smoke, he chews soft licorice candy while writing.
He believes that George Bickel is the funniest comedian on the American stage, that Arnold Daly is the best actor, that Margaret Illington is the best actress.
He has never written a thing that, upon rereading after its appearance in print, didn’t seem to him to be chock full of flaws.
He is lucky at games of chance, though he seldom plays. In 1912 he won $2,000 in the Havana lottery.
He owns six belts, one of them presented to him by Gabriele D’Annunzio and made of wolf hide.
He is in favor of universal military service, imperialism, and birth-control, but is opposed to woman suffrage, the direct primary, and prohibition.
His usual pulse is 71 a minute. After drinking it rises to 85.
He keeps no books of account, and does not know his exact income. As a means of defense against sudden calamity he keeps $3000 in gold in a safe deposit vault.
His favorite name for girls is Helen.
If he could rechristen himself, he would choose the given name of John.
He pronounces his middle name, not in the French manner, but to rhyme with bean.
He is a third cousin of Signor Enrico Nathan, the late Socialist mayor of Rome. His uncle, Dr. Émile Nathan van der Linde, _privat docent_ in anthropology at Leyden, was killed by savages in Borneo in 1889, while a member of the Oesterling exploring expedition.
He has never visited the battlefield at Gettysburg.
H. L. MENCKEN
He was born at Baltimore on Sunday, September 12, 1880, and was baptized in the Church of England.
He was educated at the Baltimore Polytechnic, and is theoretically competent to run a steam engine or a dynamo, but actually is quite incapable of doing either.
Down to the age of fifteen it was his ambition to be a chemist, and to this day he is full of fantastic chemical information and fond of unloading it. At the age of fourteen he invented a means of toning photographic silver prints with platinum.
The family business was tobacco, and he was drafted for it on leaving school. He became a journeyman cigar-maker, and can make excellent cigars to this day. But when chemistry and business died out, literature set in, and he took to journalism.
At the age of twenty-three he was city editor and at twenty-five managing editor of the Baltimore _Herald_, now defunct—the youngest managing editor of a big city daily in the United States.
He printed a book of poems at twenty-two—now a rare _bibelot_. He was “discovered,” as the saying is, by Ellery Sedgwick, now editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_, but then running _Leslie’s Monthly_. He and Sedgwick have remained on friendly terms to this day, but he sometimes writes for the _Atlantic_.
In 1900, having read Lafcadio Hearn’s “Two Years in the French West Indies,” he shipped on a banana boat for the Spanish Main, and has returned to the West Indies three times since.
He is five feet, eight and a half inches in height, and weighs about 185 pounds. In 1915 he bulged up to 197 pounds. Then he took the Vance Thompson cure and reduced to 175, rebounding later.
The things he dislikes most are Methodists, college professors, newspaper editorials (of which, in his time, he has written more than 10,000), Broadway restaurants, reformers, actors, children, magazine fiction, dining out, the New Freedom, prohibition, sex hygiene, _The Nation_, soft drinks, women under thirty, the nonconformist conscience, Socialism, good business men, the moral theory of the world, and the sort of patriotism that makes a noise.
Among the men he admires are Joseph Conrad, W. R. Hearst, E. W. Howe, Richard Strauss, Anatole France, and Erich Ludendorff—this last because he is a great general and has never uttered a single word of patriotic or pietistic cant. He likes Dreiser, but does not admire him.
His taste in female beauty runs to a slim hussy, not too young, with dark eyes and a relish for wit. He abhors sentimentality in women, holding that it is a masculine weakness, and unbecoming the fair. He seldom falls in love, and then only momentarily.
He wears buttoned shoes because he cannot tie shoe laces. Neither can he tie a dress tie; if there is no one to tie it for him he has to miss the party. In general, he is almost wholly devoid of manual dexterity, though he can play the piano well enough to entertain himself, and is a good sight reader.
The only art that ever stirs him is music. He views literature objectively, almost anatomically. He is anæsthetic to painting. His favorite composers are Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Brahms, and Richard Strauss. He detests Tschaikowsky and Rossini, and likes Wagner better out of the opera house than in it. In his youth he wrote waltzes. He abominates song and piano recitals and oratorios. He has a pretty extensive knowledge of musical technique, and knows a sound sonata from a bad one. When he improvises it is usually in F major. He has a poor ear and cannot tune a fiddle.
He drinks all the known alcoholic beverages, but prefers Pilsner to any other; a few seidels make him very talkative. In the absence of Pilsner, he drinks Michelob. He seldom drinks at meals and often goes three or four days without a drink. In wine, he likes whatever is red and cheap. He detests champagne, Scotch and rye whisky, and gin, though he drinks them all to be polite. He has a good head, and is not soused more than once a year, usually at Christmas.
He has good eyes and a gentle mouth, but his nose is upset, his ears stick out too much, and he is shapeless and stoop-shouldered. One could not imagine him in the moving pictures. He has strong and white, but irregular teeth.
He wears a No. 7½ hat. He is bow-legged. He is a fast walker. He used to snore when asleep, but had his nasal septum straightened by surgery, and does so no longer.
He takes no interest whatever in any sport. He played baseball as a boy, but hasn’t seen a game for ten years, and never looks at the baseball news in the papers. He cannot play tennis or golf, and has never tried. He knows nothing of cards. He never bets on elections or horse-races. He never takes any exercise save walking.
He rejects the whole of Christianity, including especially its ethics, and does not believe that the soul is immortal. His moral code is from the Chinese and has but one item: keep your engagements. He pays all bills immediately, never steals what he can buy, and is never late for an appointment. He has missed but one train in his life.
He believes in war so long as it is not for a moral cause. He advocates universal military training on the ground that it causes wars.
His table manners are based upon provincial French principles, with modifications suggested by the Cossacks of the Don.
When at home he arises at eight sharp every morning, and is at his desk at nine.
He likes to go motoring at night, and often sets out alone at midnight.
He takes a half hour’s nap every afternoon. He can sleep anywhere and at almost any time.
He has eleven uncles and aunts and eighteen cousins, and has never quarreled with any of them.
He has been inoculated against typhoid and hay fevers.
He is a prompt correspondent, and answers every letter the day it is received.
He keeps his watch on an old-fashioned clothes-press in his workroom, and winds it every time he looks at it.
He detests windy days. As between heat and cold, he prefers heat.
He never preserves love letters, and never writes them.
His tonsils have been cut out. His Wassermann reaction is and always has been negative. He has a low blood pressure. His heart and kidneys are normal.
His favorite hotel is the Bayrischer Hof at Munich. After that he ranks them in the following order: the Adlon, Berlin; the Palace, Madrid; the Paladst, Copenhagen; the Statler, Buffalo; the Edouard VII, Paris.
He says the best place to eat in the whole world is at the basement lunch counter of the Rennert Hotel, Baltimore. The best things to order there are oyster potpie, boiled turkey with oyster sauce, Virginia ham and spinach, and boiled tongue.
He owns ten suits of clothes, and wears them seriatim. All of them are of summer weight. He never wears heavy clothes.
He never wears patent leather shoes, even with dress clothes. He wears horn spectacles for reading, but never otherwise.
Between 1899 and 1906 he wrote and published thirty-five short stories. Since 1906 he has written none.
For five years he contributed a daily article to the Baltimore _Evening Sun_. His total writings for newspapers run to nearly 10,000,000 words. He has reported three national conventions and nine executions.
His one-act play, “The Artist,” has been translated into German, Dano-Norwegian, Italian, and Russian.
He has twice voted for Roosevelt, not by conviction, but because he believes Roosevelt gives a better show than any other performer in the ring. In politics he is a strict federalist.
He advocates woman suffrage on the ground that, if women voted, democracy would be reduced to an absurdity the sooner.
He is very polite to women, particularly if he dislikes them, which is usually.
He owns the original manuscript of “Sister Carrie,” presented to him by Dreiser.
He is a nephew of the late Right Rev. Frederick Bainville Mencken, bishop of Akkad _in partibus infidelium_. This uncle was disinherited by his grandfather as a result of a family dispute over transubstantiation.
His pet literary abominations are “alright” (as one word) and the use of “near” as an adjective. He will never speak of or to an author who uses either.
His favorite eating places in New York are Rogers’, the Kloster Glocke, the Lafayette, and the Café del Pezzo.
The cities he likes best are Munich, Chicago, Baltimore, and London. He dislikes Paris, Rome, Berlin, and New York—the last-named so much that, whenever he has any work to do, he goes to Baltimore to do it.
He was an intimate friend of the late Paul Armstrong for many years and never quarreled with him.
In his own opinion, the best thing he has ever written is “Death: a Discussion” in his “Book of Burlesques.”
He wears B. V. D.’s all the year round, and actually takes a cold bath every day.
He never has his nails manicured, but trims them with a jacknife.
Every Saturday night he spends the time between 8 and 10 playing music, and the time between 10 and 12 drinking Michelob. He plays second piano.
He has received three proposals of marriage, but has never succumbed. He has never seduced a working girl. He has no issue.
He works in his shirt-sleeves and sleeps in striped pajamas.
He wears Manhattan garters, No. 15½ Belmont collars, and very long-tailed overcoats. His plug hat, which he wears but two or three times a year, has a flat brim, like that of a French comedian.
He is smooth-faced and shaves every morning with a Gillette safety razor. Once, while in Paris, he grew a yellow moustache and goatee. They lasted, however, but two weeks.
He has lived in one house in Baltimore for 34 years. In it he has 3000 books.
He owns the largest collection of Ibseniana in the world, including autographs, first editions, and other rarities. Part of it is in Baltimore, part in Copenhagen, part in Munich, and part in Geneva.
He reads German and Norwegian fluently, French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin less fluently, and makes shift to sweat through the following: Russian, Greek, Dutch, Rumanian, Serbian, Czech, Sanskrit, Assyrian, Hungarian, and Swedish.
His favorite American poet is Lizette Woodworth Reese. He and she have lived in the same city for years, but they have never met.
His total receipts in royalties on his books, in fifteen years, have been $172.50.
His personal funds are invested in bonds of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Midvale Steel Company, and the Danish, Chilean, and Swiss governments.
During his newspaper career he was American correspondent of the Hongkong _Press_, the Kobe _Chronicle_, and the Colombo (Ceylon) _Observer_.
One of his fads is theology. He understands its technical terminology, and is sometimes consulted on difficult points by both Catholic and Protestant clergy.
Down to July 7, 1913, he employed suspenders to hold up his trousers. Being then convinced by Nathan that such appliances had a socialistic smack, he abandoned them for a belt.
He reads an average of ten books a week, in addition to those he goes through for reviewing purposes. The subjects he affects are theology, biology, economics, and modern history.
He has never read George Eliot, or Jane Austen, or Bulwer-Lytton. He has never been able to read Dostoievsky, or Turgeniev, or Balzac. His favorite writers, as a youth, were Thackeray, Huxley, and Kipling. He seldom reads newspapers. The only magazines he ever looks at are the _Smart Set_, _Ed Howe’s Monthly_, the _Country Gentleman_, the _Masses_, the _Seven Arts_, and the _Ladies’ Home Journal_.
He has a wide acquaintance among medical men and knows a good deal about modern medical problems. His advice is often sought by persons seeking treatment; he gives it copiously.
He knows mathematics up to plane geometry and trigonometry. He knows philosophy, chemistry, and history, but is ignorant of physics and grammar. He can draw with some skill, and was once a good mechanical draftsman. He is an excellent speller and knows how to punctuate.
In philosophy he is a strict mechanist of the Loeb-Haeckel school. In psychology he leans toward Adler. He questions pragmatism, but admits its workableness. He is an advocate of absolute free speech in all things—and exhibits the utmost intolerance in combatting those who oppose it.
He believes and argues that sex is a vastly less potent influence in life than the Puritans and psychanalysts maintain. He advocates the establishment of lay monasteries for men who care for neither God nor women.