Part 3
When he is at home he lunches at noon and dines at six. He never eats between meals. He never takes a drink before dinner save when on holiday.
He most often begins his letters to men with the salutation “My dear Mon Chair.” To women, “My dear Mon Chairy.”
A March ago, he attempted to give up smoking and sought to alleviate his longing for the weed by sucking slippery elm. He was again pulling at a stogie the following month.
He has probably done more for talented young writers who have tried in vain to get a hearing with publishers than any other American critic. Of all those whom he has helped to obtain an hospitable ear, only one has ever so much as thanked him.
He forgives anything in a friend—theft, perjury, or stupidity—anything save hypocrisy. But he has no use for loyalty in others. “Loyalty,” he says, “is the virtue of a dog.”
He pokes fun at modern musical comedy, particularly the music thereof. Yet he has never heard “Sari” or “The Purple Road,” or the best of the last dozen scores of Victor Herbert.
He believes, with Nathan, that the three best stories printed in _The Smart Set_ under their joint editorial direction have been “The Exiles’ Club,” by Dunsany; “Ashes to Ashes,” by James Gardner Sanderson; and “The End of Ilsa Menteith,” by Lilith Benda. He believes, like Nathan, that the most charming sentimental story printed in _The Smart Set_ has been Lee Pape’s “Little Girl.” He believes, with Nathan, that the best epigram has been that sent in by an anonymous contributor: “When love dies there is no funeral. The corpse remains in the house.”
He met Nathan for the first time in the chateau of the Comtesse Hélène de Firelle in the valley of the Loire, on August 10, 1906. Three days later they left together for a trip to Munich, to drink the waters.
One of his best pieces of humor is a pun on “_non compos mentis_.” I cannot print it.
A healthy man, he yet complains hourly of imaginary ailments.
He has never seen Coney Island.
When in his cups, he imagines himself a proficient bass singer.
In the last three years he has been to the theater but once. On this occasion he accompanied Nathan to a piece called “Common Clay.” He remained twenty minutes.
He uses handkerchiefs two feet wide.
He always fights with Nathan for the bar or dinner check. His records of victories is eight per cent.
Like Nathan, he dislikes to talk about business affairs or to listen to anyone talk about business affairs. Both he and Nathan leave their finances entirely in the hands of their competent partner, E. F. Warner.
He and Nathan plan some day to collaborate on a satirical farce with scenes laid in a Turkish harem.
In conversation he is given to an immoderate employment of the word “bemuse.”
He believes the following to be his best epigram: “An anti-vivisectionist is one who gags at a guinea pig and swallows a baby.” To the contrary, I believe his best to be: “The charm of a man is measured by the charm of the women who think that he is a scoundrel.”
He wrote dramatic criticisms in Baltimore for four years. At the end of that period, unable longer to bear the idiocies of the local theaters, he inserted a $200 half-page advertisement in each of the Baltimore newspapers to the effect that he would cause the arrest of the next manager who sent him tickets.
He loves cocoanut pie.
He smokes cigarettes only on rare occasions. He is not used to them and, on such occasions, holds the cigarette gingerly, as if it were going to bite him.
Present at a mixed conversation, he frequently dozes off to sleep.
When in New York, every night before retiring he eats a dozen large clams.
He never drinks beer save in seidels.
He has been to the Horse Show but once. On this occasion he remained three minutes.
He does not dance.
In Paris, in 1913, he hailed Nathan on the latter’s way to Southampton with this wireless: “Get off Cherbourg and come direct Paris. Have discovered place where they have good beer.”
He is unable to sit at table upon finishing dinner. With the arrival of the finger-bowl he is off for a walk.
He is, at bottom, a sentimentalist. True, he has no use for such things as babies, love stories (however good), or the Champs Élysées in the springtime (once while walking up the boulevard with Nathan he deplored the absence on it of a first-class drugstore), yet he succumbs moistly to Julia Sanderson singing, “They Wouldn’t Believe Me,” to a cemetery in the early green of May, to the lachrymose waltz from “Eva,” which he plays upon the piano in a melancholious _pianissimo_, and to any poem about a dog (however bad).
His trousers are never creased. His clothes are always of a navy blue shade. He never wears a waistcoat. He buys the best cravats that can be obtained for fifty cents.
He loves liqueurs, preferably _crême de cacao_. They always make him feel badly the next morning.
He has written the following books: “A Book of Prefaces,” “A Little Book in C Major,” “A Book of Burlesques,” “The Battle of the Wilhelmstrasse,” “The Artist,” “The Gist of Nietzsche,” “The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche,” “Europe after 8:15” (in collaboration with Nathan and Wright), “Men _vs._ the Man” (in collaboration with R. R. La Monte), and “George Bernard Shaw: His Plays.” The latter was the first book on Shaw ever published.
He eats and enjoys all varieties of human food. There is no dish that he doesn’t eat. He has eaten snails, frogs, eels, octopus, catfish, goat meat, and Norwegian cheese. He thinks that the best roasts are the English, the best table wines the Spanish, the best pastry the Danish, the best soups the German, and the best cooking the French.
He has visited the following countries: England, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Germany, Austria, Russia, Spain, France, Switzerland, and Cuba. He has never been in Canada or Mexico, and has never been further West than St. Louis.
He has been under rifle and shell fire in this war, on the eastern front, and was glad to get under cover. He has been in France, Germany, and Russia during the war. He was nowhere mistaken for a spy, and was always treated courteously. He says that 99 per cent of the authors of war books are liars.
His family is well-to-do, and he has never been dead broke.
He has never seen a moving picture show.
He is opposed to vice crusades, holding that the average prostitute is decenter than the average reformer. He ascribes the crusading spirit, following Freud, to a suppressed and pathological sexuality.
He wears (and owns) no jewelry whatever, not even a scarfpin, but he sports a formidable Swiss watch, with a split second hand and a bell that strikes the quarter hours. He never wears gloves save in intensely cold weather.
He owns and drives a 1916 Studebaker car, and never has it washed.
Once, on receiving an amorous _billet doux_ from a fair admirer, he sent it back to the writer with a _Smart Set_ rejection slip.
He frequently carries on a perfectly innocent conversation with Nathan in a low stage whisper, thus lending to his most trivial remarks a secret and sinister import.
He introduced the new widespread use of “jitney” as an adjective. He also coined the words “smuthound” and “snouter,” both designating a “malignant moralist”—another of his invention.
While playing the piano, he keeps the loud pedal glued to the floor from _couvert_ to _coda_.
He and Nathan, in all the years of their friendship, have quarreled but once. This was in the late summer of 1916, when Mencken was suffering from a violent attack of hay fever and insisted upon going to bed one night at eleven o’clock, thus leaving the disgusted Nathan to kill time as best he could until midnight, at that period his hour for retiring.
He never wears rubbers, carries an umbrella, or wears a mackintosh. He likes to walk in the rain and get wet.
He alludes to all actors as “cabots.” For the plural of “genius” he uses “genii.”
He travels with a suitcase large enough to transport a circus.
At the age of twenty-nine he was invited to join the Elks.... The judge, a friend of his, reduced the charge from “assault with intent to kill” to “assault and battery.”
He has never had typhoid fever, smallpox, cholera, scarlet fever, arthritis, appendicitis, or delirium tremens. He has never had a headache. He can digest anything.
He has been involved, in his time, in eight lawsuits, and has won them all, chiefly by perjury.
His first name is Henry; his middle name, Louis. He never spells them out, signing himself always simply H. L.
He drinks a brand of cheap claret which he lays in in shipments of ten cases.
He has presented the steward of the Florestan Club, of Baltimore, with a bronze medal for reviving Maryland hoe cake.
A life-long opponent of Puritanism in all its forms, he is on good personal terms with many Puritan reformers, and always reads the tracts they send to him.
He has been arrested four times, once in Paris, once in Copenhagen, and twice in America. He was acquitted each time, though guilty.
He complains ceaselessly over what it costs him to live. Yet he is a liberal fellow and keeps Nathan supplied with cigars. The cigars, however, are not to Nathan’s taste.
He is an omnivorous borrower of matches.
He washes his hands twenty-four times a day.
He writes directly upon the typewriter, never longhand. He signs all his letters with the episcopal “Yours in Xt.”
For the last four years he and Nathan have been planning a motor trip through Virginia. They will never make it, both agree emphatically.
His favorite dish is anything _à la Créole_.
He once brought from abroad, as a gift to his negro cook, three dozen strings of Venetian beads. She is a strict Baptist and declined to wear them.
His favorite novel is “Huckleberry Finn”; his favorite name for a woman, Maggie.
He often goes without breakfast, and never eats more than an apple and a slice of dry bread.
He and Nathan have their secretaries in _The Smart Set_ offices keep a list of forty-two bad writers. Opposite the name of each of the forty-two is the fine one must pay the other if the name is uttered by either.
He slicks his hair down like the actor who plays the heroic lieutenant in the military dramas.
He likes to ride down Fifth Avenue in a victoria.
He owns a plaid shirt. He wears it.
He has worn the same straw hat for five years. He cleans it every spring with a tooth-brush dipped in bicarbonate of soda and Pebeco tooth paste. Each spring he buys a new tooth-brush.
He writes in a bare room. There is no carpet or rug on the floor. The only pictures on the wall are portraits of his great-great-grandfather, Ibsen, Conrad, Marcella Allonby, Mark Twain, and Johannes Brahms.
He sleeps on a sleeping porch adjoining his office. He uses, as a blanket, a Persian shawl presented to him by the late Lafcadio Hearn.
He has read 9872 bad novels during his active life as a literary critic.
He is an artist of no mean ability. His portrait of Nathan, reproduced in the Chicago _Daily News_ in May, 1917, attracted wide attention and, among other things, brought him requests for sittings from Hamlin Garland, William Lyon Phelps, and Robert B. Mantell.
He clips the ends off his cigars with his side teeth.
He has written under the pseudonyms of William R. Fink, William Drayham, John F. Brownell, Harriet Morgan, W. L. D. Bell, Gladys Jefferson, and Baroness Julie Desplaines.
He sees nothing beautiful about the Hudson from Riverside Drive, but believes St. Thomas’s to be one of the most beautiful churches in the world.
He collects odd pieces of furniture, Japanese wood carvings, and bad plaster of paris casts.
He knows two actors, George Fawcett and Frank Craven.
He was taught how to swim by John Adams Thayer.
He is the author of a farce that has played on Broadway for one hundred nights. To this authorship, no one save Nathan, James Huneker, A. H. Woods, and myself have been privy.
His high-water marks in the matter of malt bibbing are as follows: Pschorrbräu, Munich, 8 _masses_ in two hours and seven minutes; Appenrodt’s, Paris, 9 _seidels_ in one hour and a quarter; Lüchow’s, New York, 13 _seidels_ and one glass in one hour, twenty-one minutes and twelve seconds. Timers: Pschorrbräu, Arthur Abbott, H. B. M. vice-consul; Appenrodt’s, Pierre Disdebaux, of Marseilles, France; Lüchow’s, Theodore Dreiser, of Warsaw, Indiana, U. S. A.
He was a regular reader of the _Boston Transcript_, the New York _Times_, and the _Youth’s Companion_, up to the age of ten.
He believes W. L. George to be the best of the younger English novelists.
His signature runs up hill.
He has been cured of hay-fever and is at present writing a pamphlet extolling the discoverers of the cure.
He admires the kind of Munich “art” that is sold in the Fifth Avenue shops at $4.35 the picture.
He likes to look in shop windows. He has never ridden in a Ferris Wheel.
He laments the fact that he gets no exercise and contemplates fixing up a carpenter shop in the basement of his house in Baltimore, so that he may saw and chop his arms back into muscular shape.
He numbers the paragraphs of his letters and never writes more than six paragraphs.
The English critics hailed his Nietzsche book as the best thing of its sort that had come out of America.
He has never read Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” or “Pericles, Prince of Tyre.”
He believes that all fat women are sentimental and says that the publisher who will edit a magazine for this clientèle will make a fortune. Inasmuch as magazine fiction heroines are at present always slim, elf-like creatures, he contends that the sentimental fat girl never gets a fair chance to enjoy herself, and that, accordingly, a magazine with no heroine weighing less than one hundred and ninety pounds would in one year put Cyrus K. Curtis in the pauper class.
Like Nathan, he believes that the theory that it is difficult to make money is poppycock. If one is willing to give the public what it wants, anyone—argue these two—can get rich very quickly. To prove their contention, they outlined plans for several cheap magazines three years ago, which, upon being put into circulation, proved immediate and overwhelming successes. Mencken and Nathan, at the end of six months, sold their joint interest for $100,000. They argue that the thing is as simple as rolling off a log, and that any person who is interested in this sort of thing may become a Street-and-Smith or Munsey overnight.
At the age of nineteen, he invented a slot machine for the vending of patent medicines on excursion boats.
He has read “Huckleberry Finn” twenty-seven times. He reads the book once a year, regularly.
He has never seen Mrs. Castle, Mary Garden, Ann Pennington, Maurice and Walton, Mary Pickford, or Secretary Lansing.
He has shaken hands with Billy Sunday.
Wherever he goes he carries a Corona typewriter. He paid $50 cash for it, but nevertheless he has given the manufacturers an eloquent testimonial. He writes on cheap newspaper copy-paper.
He is fond of candy.
He is an ardent defender of organized charity, arguing that it helps progress by making charity difficult and obnoxious.
He is often mistaken for a misogynist. He is actually a strict monogamist. He believes that all men are naturally monogamists, and that polygamy is due to vanity.
He began to edit the plays of Ibsen in 1910, but abandoned the enterprise after he had issued “A Doll’s House” and “Little Eyolf.”
He is a bitter opponent of Christian Science, and has written all sorts of things, from epigrams to long articles, against it.
The La Mencken cigar, once popular throughout the South, was not named after him, but after his father.
He is a good sailor, and has been seasick but once—on a 1000-ton British tramp in a West Indian hurricane.
In blood he is chiefly Saxon, Danish, Bavarian, and Irish—no Anglo-Saxon, no Prussian, no Latin. The portraits of his Saxon forefathers show strong Slavic traces. He is the present head of the family. A Mencken, in the seventeenth century, founded the first scientific review in Europe. Another was privy councilor to Frederick the Great. Another was rector of the University of Leipzig. Yet another was chief justice of the supreme court there. A Mlle. Mencken was the mother of Bismarck.
The Menckenii were converted to Christianity in 1569, but returned to paganism during the Napoleonic wars, in which twelve of them were killed and sixty-three wounded.
The present Mencken is an amateur of military science, and has written a brochure, privately printed, on the Battle of Tannenberg.
He writes very slowly and laboriously, save when writing for newspapers. Then he is highly facile, and can turn out a two-column article in three hours. He has never learned to dictate.
He used to have a mole on the back of his neck, but had it removed in the summer of 1913.
He is not afraid of the dark, or of spiders, or of snakes, or of cats. He likes dogs better than any other animals, and regards them as more respectable than men.
If he could choose another given name it would be Francis.
He owns two hundred acres of land near Innsbruck, in the Tyrol, and will build a bungalow on it after the war.
He is a violent anti-Socialist, as “Men _vs._ the Man” shows, but he reads all the new Socialist books.
In American history the men he most admires are Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Cleveland. He has a low opinion of Lincoln, Jackson, and Bryan.
He is handy with horses, and can drive four-in-hand.
He detests cut flowers, carpets, the sea-shore, hotels, zoological gardens, the subway, the Y. M. C. A., literary women, witch hazel, talcum powder, limp leather bookbindings, aerated waters, bottled beer, low collars, public libraries, and phonographs.
He is a Cockney, and prefers the city to the country.
He never wears tan shoes.
He can swallow castor oil without disgust and without needing a chaser, but he never does so.
Next to Pilsner and Burgundy (or, in wartime, Michelob) his favorite drink is city water direct from the tap—no ice.
He chews cigars.
He is a very fast reader and can get through a two hundred-page book in an hour.
IV
So much for my observations and investigations of the two gentlemen, MM. Nathan and Mencken. I have told you, not everything that is known about them, nor even all that I know myself, but enough, I hope, to enable you to conjure up colorable images of them. As I have said, it is by such small and often grotesque lights that character is genuinely illuminated—not by the steady and distorting glare of orthodox biography. It remains for me to tell you how they do their joint work—work which rests upon the apparently perilous basis of an absolute equality of authority, for each owns exactly the same amount of stock in _The Smart Set_ Company that the other owns, and each is editor equally with the other, and both derive from the property exactly the same revenue, to a cent.
Their system is very simple and admirably workable. When either, by any internal or external process, generates an idea for the conduct of the magazine, he lays it before the other in all its details. This is always done in writing; never orally. If the other approves the idea he writes upon the brief the words “Nihil obstat,” and it is forthwith executed. If, on the contrary, he disapproves, he indorses it with the word “Veto” and it is returned. The same idea may be revived by its author thirty days later, but not before. If thrice vetoed it is forever banned. The office records for the past three years yield the following:
Plans Proposed Approved Vetoed By Nathan 18 13 5 By Mencken 12 8 4
In the handling of manuscripts they pursue a somewhat analogous system. Mencken never reads manuscripts while in New York; all such work he does in Baltimore. As the offerings of authors are received in the office they are scrutinized by Nathan’s secretary, and the following classes are weeded out and immediately returned:
Mss. written in pencil or with green, purple, or red typewriter ribbons.
Mss. fastened together with ribbons or pins.
Mss. radiating any scent or other odor.
Mss. of plays which begin with soliloquies into a telephone.
Mss. bearing the recommendations of the editors of other magazines.
Mss. accompanied by letters of more than one hundred words.
Mss. accompanied by circulars advertising books written by their authors or by other printed matter.
Mss. of poetry by poets whose names do not appear upon a list in the possession of the secretary.
Once this preliminary clearing out is accomplished, the manuscripts that remain are shipped to Mencken, and he reads them within twenty four hours. Those that he rejects are returned to their authors. Those that he approves are returned to Nathan, with the Dano-Norwegian word “bifald,” signifying assent, written across the first page of each. They are then read by Nathan, and if he agrees they are purchased and paid for at once. If he disagrees they are returned without further process. Once a manuscript is bought it goes to Mencken a second time, and he reads it again. If he finds that it needs revision in detail, it is turned over to his private secretary and valet, an intelligent Maryland colored man named William F. Beauchamp, a graduate of Harvard. After it has passed through Beauchamp’s hands it is set up in type. In case Mencken deems it necessary to reject a manuscript by an author who must be treated politely, he sends it back with a note putting the blame on Nathan. In case Nathan, in like circumstances, votes no, he blames it upon Mencken. This, of course, is lying, but in the long run it amounts to the truth. The two never discuss manuscripts; they simply vote. They never buy anything from personal friends. They have a strict agreement, in fact, that each will automatically veto anything sent in by an author with whom he is on good terms. This agreement is never violated. Nathan, for example, has a brother who, under a _nom de plume_, is a frequent contributor to the leading magazines, but is barred from _The Smart Set_ by the relationship. In the same way Mencken was, until recently, the intimate friend and confidant of an eminent woman novelist, but her work has never appeared in _The Smart Set_.
When Mencken is in New York, he and Nathan meet at _The Smart Set_ office every day, including Sunday, at 10 A.M., and spend two hours discussing the minor business of the magazine. At noon they proceed to Delmonico’s and have luncheon, returning at 3 P.M. They finish all business by 4:30, when they leave the office. They often dine together and spend the evening together, but they never discuss office matters at such times. They never invite authors to luncheon or dinner and never accept invitations from them. They never attend literary parties or visit studios. They are not acquainted with any of the literary lions of New York, saving only Dreiser and Huneker.