H.L. Mencken

Mencken--Sahara of the Bozart

HLM had choice words on the 'red states,' of the kind never heard from our present right ideologues.

http://writing2.richmond.edu/jessid/eng423/restricted/mencken.pdf

The Sahara of the Bozart {Beaux-arts}
{{Originally printed, in shorter form, in the New York Evening Mail, Nov. 13,1917}}


Alas, for the South! Her books have grown fewer-
She never was much given to literature.

In the lamented J. Gordon Coogler, author of these elegiac
lines, there was the insight of a true poet. He was the last bard
of Dixie, at least in the legitimate line. Down there a poet is
now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a
metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a
vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal
reaches of the now mythical ether. Nearly the whole of Europe
could be lost in that stupendous region of worn-out farms,
shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could throw in
France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British
Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the “prog-
ress” it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually,
culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in
Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south
of the Potomac; there are probably single square miles in Amer-
ica. If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by
a tidal wave tomorrow, the effect upon the civilized minority of
men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood
on the Yang-tse-kiang. It would be impossible in all history to
match so complete a drying-up of a civilization.

I say a civilization because that is what, in the old days, the
South had, despite the Baptist and Methodist barbarism that
reigns down there now. More, it was a civilization of manifold
excellences-perhaps the best that the Western Hemisphere had
ever seen-undoubtedly the best that These States have ever seen.
Down to the middle of the last century, and even beyond, the
main hatchery of ideas on this side of the water was across the
Potomac bridges. The New England shopkeepers and theologians
never really developed a civilization; all they ever developed was a
government. They were, at their best, tawdry and tacky fellows,
oafish in manner and devoid of imagination; one searches the
books in vain for mention of a salient Yankee gentleman; as well
look for a Welsh gentleman.

But in the South there were men of
delicate fancy, urbane instinct and aristocratic manner-in brief,
superior men-in brief, gentry. To politics, their chief diversion,
they brought active and original minds. It was there that nearly
all the political theories we still cherish and suffer under came to
birth. It was there that the crude dogmatism of New England was
refined and humanized. It was there, above all, that some atten-
tion was given to the art of living-that life got beyond and above
the state of a mere infliction and became an exhilarating experi-
ence. A certain notable spaciousness was in the ancient Southern
scheme of things. The Ur-Confederate had leisure. He liked to toy
with ideas. He was hospitable and tolerant. He had the vague
thing that we call culture.


But consider the condition of his late empire today. The pic-
ture gives one the creeps. It is as if the Civil War stamped out
every last bearer of the torch, and left only a mob of peasants
on the field. One thinks of Asia Minor, resigned to Armenians,
Greeks and wild swine, of Poland abandoned to the Poles. In all

that gargantuan paradise of the fourth-rate there is not a single
picture gallery worth going into, or a single orchestra capable of
playing the nine symphonies of Beethoven, or a single opera-house,
or a single theater devoted to decent plays, or a single public
monument that is worth looking at, or a single workshop devoted
to the making of beautiful things. Once you have counted James
Branch Cabell (a lingering survivor of the ancien regime:
a scarlet dragon-fly imbedded in opaque amber) you will not find
a single Southern prose writer who can actually write.

And once
you have-but when you come to critics, musical composers,
painters, sculptors, architects and the like, you will have to give
it up, for there is not even a bad one between the Potomac mud-
flats and the Gulf. Nor a historian. Nor a philosopher. Nor a
theologian. Nor a scientist. In all these fields the South is an awe-
inspiring blank-a brother to Portugal, Serbia and Albania.
Consider, for example, the present estate and dignity of Vir-
ginia-in the great days indubitably the premier American state,
the mother of Presidents and statesmen, the home of the first
American university worthy of the name, the arbiter elegantiarum
of the Western World.

Well, observe Virginia today. It is years
since a first-rate man, save only Cabell, has come out of it; it is
years since an idea has come out of it. The old aristocracy went
down the red gullet of war; the poor white trash are now in the
saddle. Politics in Virginia are cheap, ignorant, parochial, idiotic;
there is scarcely a man in office above the rank of a professional
job-seeker; the political doctrine that prevails is made up of hand-
me-downs from the bumpkinry of the Middle West-Bryanism,
Prohibition, all that sort of filthy claptrap; the administration of
the law is turned over to professors of Puritanism and espionage;
a Washington or a Jefferson, dumped there by some act of God,
would be denounced as a scoundrel and jailed overnight.
Elegance, esprit, culture?

Virginia has no art, no literature, no
philosophy, no mind or aspiration of her own. Her education has
sunk to the Baptist seminary level; not a single contribution to
human knowledge has come out of her colleges in twenty-five
years; she spends less than half upon her common schools, per
capita than any Northern state spends. In brief, an intellectual
Gobi or Lapland. Urbanity, politesse, chivalry? Go to! It was in
Virginia that they invented the device of searching for contraband
whiskey in women’s underwear.
. . .
There remains, at the top, a
ghost of the old aristocracy, a bit wistful and infinitely charming.
But it has lost all its old leadership to fabulous monsters from the
lower depths; it is submerged in an industrial plutocracy that is
ignorant and ignominious. The mind of the state, as it is revealed
to the nation, is pathetically naive and inconsequential. It no
longer reacts with energy and elasticity to great problems. It has
fallen to the bombastic trivialities of the camp-meeting and the
stump. One could no more imagine a Lee or a Washington in the
Virginia of today than one could imagine a Huxley in Nicaragua.
[...]

===

Entering upon such themes, of course, one must resign one’s
self to a vast misunderstanding and abuse. The South has not only
lost its old capacity for producing ideas; it has also taken on the
worst intolerance of ignorance and stupidity. Its prevailing mental
attitude for several dec ades past has been that of its own hedge
ecclesiastics. All who dissent from its orthodox doctrines are
scoundrels. All who presume to discuss its ways realistically are
damned.

I have had, in my day, several experiences in point. Once,
after I had published an article on some phase of the eternal race
question, 2 a leading Southern newspaper replied by printing a
column of denunciation of my father, then dead nearly twenty
years-a philippic placarding him as an ignorant foreigner of
dubious origin, inhabiting "the Baltimore ghetto” and speaking a
dialect recalling that of Weber & Fields --two thousand words of
incandescent nonsense, utterly false and beside the point, but
exactly meeting the latter-day Southern notion of effective controversy.


Another time, I published a short discourse on lynching,
arguing that the sport was popular in ‘the South because the backward culture of the region denied the populace more seemly recreations.

Among such recreations I mentioned those afforded by
brass bands, symphony orchestras, boxing matches, amateur
athletic contests, horse races, and so on. In reply another great
Southern journal denounced me as a man “of wineshop temperament,
brass-jewelry tastes and pornographic predilections.”

In other words, brass bands, in the South, are classed with brass
jewelry, and both are snares of the devil! To advocate setting up
symphony orchestras is pornography! . . . Alas, when the touchy
Southerner attempts a greater urbanity, the result is often even
worse, Some time ago a colleague of mine printed an article deploring
the arrested cultural development of Georgia. In reply he
received a number of protests from patriotic Georgians, and all of
them solemnly listed the glories of the state. I indulge in a few
specimens :




Who has not heard of Asa G. Candler, whose name is
synonymous with Coca-Cola, a Georgia product?
The first Sunday school in the world was opened in Savannah.
Who does not recall with pleasure the writings of . . . Frank
L. Stanton, Georgia’s brilliant poet?
Georgia was the first state to organize a Boys’ Corn Club in
the South-Newton county, 1904.

The first to suggest a common United Daughters of the
Confederacy badge was Mrs. Raynes, of Georgia.
The first to suggest a state historian of the United Daughters
of the Confederacy was Mrs. C. Helen Plane (Macon convention,
1896).
The first to suggest putting to music Heber’s “From Greenland’s
Icy Mountains” was Mrs. F. R. Goulding, of Savannah.


And so on, and so on. These proud boasts came, remember,
not from obscure private persons, but from "leading Georgians"
-in one case, the state historian. Curious sidelights upon the ex-
Confederate mind! Another comes from a stray copy of a Negro
paper. It describes an ordinance passed by the city council of
Douglas, Ga., forbidding any trousers presser, on penalty of forfeiting
a $500 bond, to engage in “pressing for both white and
colored.” This in a town, says the Negro paper, where practically
all of the white inhabitants have "their food prepared by colored
hands,” "their babies cared for by colored hands,” and “the clothes
which they wear right next to their skins washed in houses where
Negroes live”-houses in which the said clothes “remain for as
long as a week at a time.” But if you marvel at the absurdity, keep
it dark! A casual word, and the united press of the South will be
upon your trail, denouncing you bitterly as a scoundrelly
damnyankee, a Bolshevik Jew.


Obviously, it is impossible for intelligence to flourish in such
an atmosphere. Free inquiry is blocked by the idiotic certainties
of ignorant men. The arts, save in the lower reaches of the gospel
hymn, the phonograph and the political harangue, are all held in
suspicion. The tone of public opinion is set by an upstart class but
lately emerged from industrial slavery into commercial enterprise
-the class of “bustling” business men, of “live wires,” of commercial
club luminaries, of “drive” managers, of forward-lookers
and right-thinkers--in brief, of third-rate Southerners inoculated
with all the worst traits of the Yankee sharper. One observes the
curious effects of an old tradition of truculence upon a population
now merely pushful and impudent, of an old tradition of chivalry
upon a population now quite without imagination. The old repose
is gone. The old romanticism is gone.

The philistinism of the new
type of town-boomer Southerner is not only indifferent to the ideals
of the Old South; it is positively antagonistic to them. That
philistinism regards human life, not as an agreeable adventure,
but as a mere trial of rectitude and efficiency. It is overwhelmingly
utilitarian and moral. It is inconceivably hollow and obnoxious.
What remains of the ancient tradition is simply a certain charming
civility in private intercourse--often broken down, alas, by the
hot rages of Puritanism, but still generally visible. The Southerner,
at his worst, is never quite the surly cad that the Yankee is. His
sensitiveness may betray him into occasional bad manners, but in
the main he is a pleasant fellow-hospitable, polite, good-humored,
even jovial. . . . But a bit absurd. . . . A bit pathetic.

Pure said:

It might be noted that he was free of jingoism and patriotic emissions, like the current breed of neocons, randists, and survivalists.

On Being an American
from Prejudices, Third Series (1922)
by H.L. Mencken

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Thank you, Pure. That was quite great.

PURE

Mencken blamed the situation in the South on the Civil War. The war killed off the aristocracy and handed the South over to the store clerks and preachers. If the South had won it would have become like Austria or Italy. The slaves would have been sold to Central America once mechanized cotton farming came along, though a few enclaves would remain..like New Orleans. Farm boys from the Midwest woulda saved their money to visit New Orleans to sample its Quadroon and Octaroon Delights. Americans from all over would have crossed the Potomac and Ohio to have a drink and breathe free for a few days.

If you think I could resist a thread titled H. L. Mencken, you don't know me. Henry Louis Mencken was the twentieth century's most gifted and accomplished prose writer— bar none. We won't see his like again anytime soon. Due to the fact that he wrote an estimated 5,000 words a day for forty years, forming a complete collection of his works is an ill-advised undertaking. I wish I'd known that before I began collecting his works.

Ever read an obituary like this one?

"Has it been duly marked by historians that William Jennings Bryan's last secular act on this globe of sin was to catch flies? A curious detail, and not without its sardonic overtones. He was the most sedulous fly-catcher in American history, and in many ways the most successful. His quarry, of course, was not Musca domestica but Homo neandertalensis. For forty years he tracked it with coo and bellow, up and down the rustic backways of the Republic. Wherever the flambeaux of Chataqua smoked and guttered, and the bilge of idealism ran in the veins, and Baptist pastors dammed the brooks with the sanctified, and men gathered who were weary and heavy laden, and their wives who were full of Peruna and as fecund as the shad (Alosa sapidissima), there the indefatigable Jennings set up his traps and spread his bait. He knew every country town in the South and West, and he could crowd the most remote of them to suffocation by simply winding his horn. The city proletariat, transiently flustered by him in 1896, quickly penetrated his buncombe and would have no more of him; the cockney gallery jeered him at every Democratic national convention for twenty-five years. But out where the grass grows high, and the horned cattle dream away the lazy afternoons, and men still fear the powers and principalities of the air- out there between the corn-rows he held his old puissance to the end. There was no need of beaters to drive in his game. The news that he was coming was enough. For miles the flivver dust would choke the roads. And when he rose at the end of the day to discharge his Message there would be such breathless attention, such a rapt and enchanted ecstasy, such a sweet rustle of amens as the world had not known since Johann fell to Herod's axe.

There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village, beating off the flies and gnats, and that death found him there. The man felt at home in such simple and Christian scenes. He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland valleys of the Cumberland Range, his coat laid aside, his bare arms and hairy chest shining damply, his bald head sprinkled with dust- so accoutred and on display, he was obviously happy. He liked getting up early in the morning, to the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill. He liked the heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen. He liked country lawyers, country pastors, all country people. He liked country sounds and country smells.

I believe this liking was sincere- perhaps the only sincere thing in the man. His nose showed no uneasiness when a hillman in faded overalls and hickory shirt accosted him on the street, and besought him for light upon some mystery of Holy Writ. The simian gabble of the cross-roads was not gabble to him, but wisdom of an occult and superior sort. In the presence of city folks he was palpably uneasy. Their clothes, I suspect, annoyed him, and he was suspicious of their too delicate manners. He knew all the while that they were laughing at him- if not at his baroque theology, then at least at his alpaca pantaloons. But the yokels never laughed at him. To them he was not the huntsman but the prophet, and toward the end, as he gradually forsook mundane politics for more ghostly concerns, they began to elevate him in their hierarchy. When he died he was the peer of Abraham. His old enemy, [Woodrow] Wilson, aspiring to the same white and shining robe, came down with a thump. But Bryan made the grade. His place in Tennessee hagiography is secure. If the village barber saved any of his hair, then it is curing gall-stones down there today.

But what label will he bear in more urbane regions? One, I fear, of a far less flattering kind. Bryan lived too long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully literate men, even of the kind who write schoolbooks. There was a scattering of sweet words in his funeral notices, but it was no more than a response to conventional sentimentality. The best verdict the most romantic editorial could dredge up, save in the humorless South, was to the general effect that his imbecilities were excused by his earnestness- that under his clowning, as under that of the juggler of Notre Dame, there was the zeal of a steadfast soul. But this was apology, not praise; precisely the same thing might be said of Mary Baker G. Eddy. The truth is that even Bryan's sincerity will probably yield to what is called, in other fields, definitive criticism. Was he sincere when he opposed imperialism in the Phillipines, or when he fed it with deserving Democrats in Santo Domingo? Was he sincere when he tried to shove the Prohibitionists under the table, or when he seized their banner and began to lead them with loud whoops? Was he sincere when he bellowed against war, or when he dreamed of himself as a tin-soldier in uniform, with a grave reserved at Arlington among the generals? Was he sincere when he fawned over Champ Clark, or when he betrayed Clark? Was he sincere when he pleaded for tolerance in New York, or when he bawled for the faggot and stake in Tennessee?

This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home from the barnyard. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition- the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine..."

- H.L. Mencken
Prejudices, Fifth Series
New York, 1926.


The Calamity of Appomattox
By H.L. Mencken

"No American historian, so far as I know, has ever tried to work out the probable consequences if Grant instead of Lee had been on the hot spot at Appomattox. How long would the victorious Confederacy have endured? Could it have surmounted the difficulties inherent in the doctrine of States’ Rights, so often inconvenient and even paralyzing to it during the war? Could it have remedied its plain economic deficiencies, and become a self-sustaining nation? How would it have protected itself against such war heroes as Beauregard and Longstreet, Joe Wheeler and Nathan D. Forrest? And what would have been its relations to the United States, socially, economically, spiritually and politically?

I am inclined, on all these counts, to be optimistic. The chief evils in the Federal victory lay in the fact, from which we still suffer abominably, that it was a victory of what we now call Babbitts over what used to be called gentlemen. I am not arguing here, of course, that the whole Confederate army was composed of gentlemen; on the contrary, it was chiefly made up, like the Federal army, of innocent and unwashed peasants, and not a few of them got into its corps of officers. But the impulse behind it, as everyone knows, was essentially aristocratic, and that aristocratic impulse would have fashioned the Confederacy if the fortunes of war had run the other way. Whatever the defects of the new commonwealth below the Potomac, it would have at least been a commonwealth founded upon a concept of human inequality, and with a superior minority at the helm. It might not have produced any more Washingtons, Madisons, Jeffersons, Calhouns and Randolphs of Roanoke, but it would certainly not have yielded itself to the Heflins, Caraways, Bilbos and Tillmans.

The rise of such bounders was a natural and inevitable consequence of the military disaster. That disaster left the Southern gentry deflated and almost helpless. Thousands of the best young men among them had been killed, and thousands of those who survived came North. They commonly did well in the North, and were good citizens. My own native town of Baltimore was greatly enriched by their immigration, both culturally and materially; if it is less corrupt today than most other large American cities, then the credit belongs largely to Virginians, many of whom arrived with no baggage save good manners and empty bellies. Back home they were sorely missed. First the carpetbaggers ravaged the land, and then it fell into the hands of the native white trash, already so poor that war and Reconstruction could not make them any poorer. When things began to improve they seized whatever was seizable, and their heirs and assigns, now poor no longer, hold it to this day. A raw plutocracy owns and operates the New South, with no challenge save from a proletariat, white and black, that is still three-fourths peasant, and hence too stupid to be dangerous. The aristocracy is almost extinct, at least as a force in government. It may survive in backwaters and on puerile levels, but of the men who run the South today, and represent it at Washington, not 5%, by any Southern standard, are gentlemen.

If the war had gone with the Confederates no such vermin would be in the saddle, nor would there be any sign below the Potomac of their chief contributions to American Kultur—Ku Kluxry, political ecclesiasticism, nigger-baiting, and the more homicidal variety of wowserism. Such things might have arisen in America, but they would not have arisen in the South. The old aristocracy, however degenerate it might have become, would have at least retained sufficient decency to see to that. New Orleans, today, would still be a highly charming and civilized (if perhaps somewhat zymotic) city, with a touch of Paris and another of Port Said. Charleston, which even now sprouts lady authors, would also sprout political philosophers. The University of Virginia would be what Jefferson intended it to be, and no shouting Methodist would haunt its campus. Richmond would be, not the dull suburb of nothing that it is now, but a beautiful and consoling second-rate capital, comparable to Budapest, Brussels, Stockholm or The Hague. And all of us, with the Middle West pumping its revolting silo juices into the East and West alike, would be making frequent leaps over the Potomac, to drink the sound red wine there and breathe the free air.

My guess is that the two Republics would be getting on pretty amicably. Perhaps they’d have come to terms as early as 1898, and fought the Spanish-American War together. In 1917 the confiding North might have gone out to save the world for democracy, but the South, vaccinated against both Wall Street and the Liberal whim-wham, would have kept aloof—and maybe rolled up a couple of billions of profit from the holy crusade. It would probably be far richer today, independent, than it is with the clutch of the Yankee mortgage-shark still on its collar. It would be getting and using his money just the same, but his toll would be less. As things stand, he not only exploits the South economically; he also pollutes and debases it spiritually. It suffers damnably from low wages, but it suffers even more from the Chamber of Commerce metaphysic.

No doubt the Confederates, victorious, would have abolished slavery by the middle of the 80s. They were headed that way before the war, and the more sagacious of them were all in favor of it. But they were in favor of it on sound economic grounds, and not on the brummagem moral grounds which persuaded the North. The difference here is immense. In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished. The triumph of sin in 1865 would have stimulated and helped to civilize both sides.

Today the way out looks painful and hazardous. Civilization in the United States survives only in the big cities, and many of them—notably Boston and Philadelphia—seem to be sliding down to the cow country level. No doubt this standardization will go on until a few of the more resolute towns, headed by New York, take to open revolt, and try to break out of the Union. Already, indeed, it is talked of. But it will be hard to accomplish, for the tradition that the Union is indissoluble is now firmly established. If it had been broken in 1865, life would be far pleasanter today for every American of any noticeable decency. There are, to be sure, advantages in Union for everyone, but it must be manifest that they are greatest for the worst kinds of people. All the benefit that a New Yorker gets out of Kansas is no more than what he might get out of Saskatchewan, the Argentine pampas, or Siberia. But New York to a Kansan is not only a place where he may get drunk, look at dirty shows and buy bogus antiques; it is also a place where he may enforce his dunghill ideas upon his betters."

Published in The American Mercury, Sept., 1930, (The Vintage Mencken, Gathered by Alistair Cooke, Vintage Books, 1955, pp.197-201)


You ought to consider joining The Mencken Society:
http://www.mencken.org/

jbj handed the South over to the store clerks and preachers.

just so we're clear about the likes of present Southern luminaries, such as Huckabee, Sandford, Jindal, Corker.

i also note, jbj, that mencken's piece is free of attempts to blame, "explain," shift responsibility, etc.; as a southerner himself, he was bold enough NOT to offer excuses.

PURE

I'm what you'd call Southern aristocracy. I can spot a yahoo store clerk at 100 paces. Theyre always casing people and homes. The aristocrat invites you home for a barbecue. Lynching was virtually unknow before the war. If you had a problem with someone you slapped them and offered a gunfight at their earliest convenience.

Store clerks and preachers and Crackers are all one and the same to me.

TRYSAIL

Mencken is the man but his letters, diary, and autobiography are boring.

Byron In Exile said:

The Roy Orbison one?

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Might be him, no idea. You started the song, might as well finish it off with the next couple of lines.

trysail said:

To each, his own— of course— however, as a native Bawlamoron and one with innumerable connections to Mencken and his circle, the release and publication of his diary in 1986 ( thirty years after his death ) and the further release of additional papers in 1996 ( forty years post mortem ) were fascinating to me.

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I own most of the books Mencken wrote and several about him, and I still find the memoirs, letters, autobiography to be dull reading. What he intended for publication is very entertaining.

trysail said:

This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home from the barnyard. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition- the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine...

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Oh, Lord. This should be on WJB's tombstone.

JAMESBJOHNSON said:

TRYSAIL

Mencken is the man but his letters, diary, and autobiography are boring.

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His diary is great. My first two posts in this thread are from his diary. This is something he never intended to be published, but only to be made available, 25 years after his death, to scholars and researchers.

But the Pratt Library won their case... bottom line: if you don't want it published, don't write it.

The diary wasnt written for an audience, thats my point.

JAMESBJOHNSON said:

The diary wasnt written for an audience, thats my point.

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I agree with that... and, it's a bit tedious at times, when it's about health complaints and so on, but it's still fascinating to see his life from his perspective, as opposed to what he presented for publication.

Baltimore, April 30, 1945

Old Lillie Fortenbaugh, our next-door neighbor for nearly fifty years, died last Thursday afternoon, April 26, and was buried today. As incredible as it may seem, I did not learn of her death until Saturday, forty-eight hours afterward. The news then reached me from my sister Gertrude, who called up from the country, and reported that she had encountered the death notice in the Sun. August was laid up with bronchitis on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and I was indoors Thursday evening and all day Saturday until after Gertie's call. I was in and out of the house on Friday, but, as usual, used the back gate, and thus did not notice the flowers on the Fortenbaugh push-button.

Lillie must have been close to seventy. She was a complete moron and led a life of utter vacuity. August went to the funeral this afternoon and came back reporting that the officiating clergyman spoke of her church work, and that her brother Charlie, also enormously stupid, mentioned her "civic work" (his own phrase), but all this was probably only funeral politeness. Lillie, in fact, spent most of her time by day roving about the shopping district, looking in windows and pricing things that she didn't buy. When she grew tired she took a seat in a department store rest-room, and there watched the flow of shoppers. Toward the end of the afternoon she went to a movie. Her evenings were devoted to the radio. We could hear it faintly through our wall, but it was not disturbing. To the best of my recollection she rarely turned on music, and never any good music. Her preference seemed to be for speeches, and for the yowling of so-called news commentators.

In her earlier years Lillie banged the piano every evening, and had a good many visitors, but of late strange voices have come through the wall only seldom. There were servants in the house in those days, including a low-comedy colored butler, but of late most of the housework has apparently been done by Lillie's younger half-sister, Ethel. Ethel was married years ago and had a son, but soon her husband left her, taking the son along, and of late she has been at home most of the time, with occasional ventures into practical nursing. When her husband sued her for divorce, his main allegation was that she was sub-normal mentally. I was summoned by the family to deny this, and did so as in duty bound, but the judge was not deceived, for he had her before him. When I returned to Hollins street in 1936 I had a clash with Lillie about the barking of her dog. Her reply to my complaint was to accuse me of shooting at it! The dog barked less after that, but of late it has been resuming its old uproar, and only last week I planned to complain to the police. Now, I suppose, it will disappear.

The lives of such poor simpletons always fascinate me. It is hard to imagine them being endurable. So far as I know, Lillie never did anything in all her years that was worth doing, or said anything worth hearing. Yet she showed a considerable complacency, and I have no doubt that she was well satisfied with herself. The conversations that went on between her and her brother and sister must have been marvellous indeed. I seldom did more than pass the time of day with her myself, and when I called at the door on learning of her death it was the first time I had crossed her threshold for years. The house, in so far as I could see it, turned out to be a museum of archaisms. There was even a crayon portrait of her father hanging over the parlor mantlepiece. The wallpaper and carpets, not to mention the furniture, looked to be at least fifty years old, and it was only too apparent that they were hideous even when young. Thus Lillie lived out her days. She got along somehow, without intelligence, information, or taste. She had no desire to learn anything, and in fact learned nothing. Her ideas at seventy were her ideas at fifteen. It is hard to think of a more placid life, and apparently she enjoyed it, but it is likewise hard to think of one more hollow. It was as insignificant, almost, as the life of her dog.

Byron In Exile said:

I agree with that... and, it's a bit tedious at times, when it's about health complaints and so on, but it's still fascinating to see his life from his perspective, as opposed to what he presented for publication.

Click to expand...

I'll give you 'interesting.' When he wrote about his life for publication the prose is hilarious. And I get the part about private writing being different from publication.

JAMESBJOHNSON said:

When he wrote about his life for publication the prose is hilarious. And I get the part about private writing being different from publication.

Click to expand...

Okay...

JAMESBJOHNSON said:

I'll give you 'interesting.'

Click to expand...

No, that won't do.

You need to give me "fascinating," now.

That is, if you understand Mencken's published writings...

Cut me some efffing slack

Mencken is THE MAN. His books fill my house and I read them like fundies read the Bible, but some of it is a cure for insomnia.

just in case,

you might have the impression that mencken was at his peak in trashing miss lillie,

check out his writings on music. excellent critical sense, and since he made me want to re listen, here are some links:


{Mencken on Music; available online and for download}
http://www.archive.org/stream/hlmenckenonmusic007217mbp

http://www.archive.org/stream/hlmenckenonmusic007217mbp/hlmenckenonmusic007217mbp_djvu.txt



{Schubert}

FRANZ SCHUBERT, at least in Anglo-Saxondom, has evaded
the indignity of too much popularity. Even his lovely "Sere-
nade/' perhaps the most moving love-song ever written, has
escaped being mauled at weddings in the manner of Men-
delssohn's march from "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
and Wagner's from "Lohengrin." It is familiar, but not
thread-bare; I have listened to it within the past week with
new delight in its noble and poignant melody, its rhythmic
and harmonic ingenuity, its indescribable Schubertian fla-
vor. Nor is there anything stale about nine-tenths of his
piano music, or the songs. The former is played very little
far, far too little. The latter are yowled in all the music
studios of the world, but the populace remains unaware of
them, and so they manage to hold their dignity and charm.
'The Erl King" and "Who is Sylvia?" have become f amiliar
on the air, but surely not many of the remaining six hun-
dred.

Schubert, indeed, was far too fine an artist to write for
the mob. When he tried to do it in the theater he failed
miserably, and more than once he even failed in the con-
cert-hall. There is the case, for example, of "Heidenroslein",
to Goethe's words. Goethe wrote them in 1773 and
J. F. Reichardt set them in 1793. In 1815, a year after
Reichardt's death, Schubert made a new setting. Was it
better that is, considering the homely words? No; it was

harder to sing, but not better. Twleve years later the text
was reset again by Heinrich Werner, a composer so obscure
that even Grove's Dictionary is silent about him, but a man,
obviously, with all the gift for simple, transparent melody
of a Friedrich Silcher. When "Heidenroslein" is sung today
it is to Werner's melody, not Schubert's.

Great stretches of Schubert's music, indeed, remain al-
most unknown, even to musicians. Perhaps a hundred of
his songs are heard regularly in the concert-hall; the rest
get upon programmes only rarely. Of his chamber music
little is heard at all, not even the two superb piano trios,
the octet, and the quintet with the two 'cellos.


Of his symphonies the orchestras play the Unfinished incessantly but never too often! and the huge C Major now and then, but the Tragic only once in a blue moon. Yet the Tragic remains one of Schubert's masterworks, and in its slow movement, at least, it rises to the full height of the Un- finished. There are not six such slow movements in the whole range of music. It has an eloquence that has never been surpassed, not even by Beethoven, but there is no rhetoric in it, no heroics, no exhibitionism. It begins quietly and simply and it passes out in a whisper, but its beauty remains overwhelming. I defy anyone with ears to listen to it without being moved profoundly, as by the spectacle of great grief.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTNahoQSiGQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gVxie3Uqdw&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NLoyYSD0CA&feature=related

===

{Beethoven}
The older I grow, the more I am convinced that the most portentous phenomenon in the whole history of music was Beethoven 37 the first public performance of the Eroica on April 7, 1805. The manufacturers of programme notes have swathed that gigantic work in so many layers of btoal legend and specula- tion that its intrinsic merits have been almost forgotten. Was it dedicated to Napoleon I? If s<v^s the dedication sincere or ironical? Who cares that is, who with ears? It might have been dedicated, just as well, to Louis XIV, Paracelsus or Pontius Pilate. What makes it worth discuss- ing, today and forever, is the fact that on its very first page Beethoven threw his hat into the ring and laid his claim to immortality. Bang! and he is off. No compromise! No easy bridge from the past! The second symphony is already miles behind.

A new order of music has been born. The very manner of it is full of challenge. There is no sneaking into the foul business by way of a mellifluous and disarming introduction; no preparatory hemming and hawing to cajole the audience and enable the conductor to find his place in the score. Nay! Out of silence comes the angry crash of the tonic triad, and then at once, with no pause, the first statement of the first subject grim, domineering, harsh, raucous, and yet curiously lovely with its astound- ing collision with that electrical C sharp. The carnage has begun early; we are only in the seventh measure. In the thirteenth and fourteenth comes the incomparable roll down the simple scale of E flat and what follows is all that has ever been said, perhaps all that ever will be said, about music-making in the grand manner. What was afterward done, even by Beethoven, was done in the light of that perfect example. Every line of modern music that is honestly [38 H. L. Mencken ON Music] music bears some sort of relation to that epoch-making first movement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0aZrVsEmA8

Mencken on Conrad, excerpts

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19355/19355-8.txt {book of prefaces}

But is the Conrad I here describe simply a new variety of moralist, differing from the general only in the drift of the doctrine he preaches? Surely not. He is no more a moralist than an atheist is a theologian. His attitude toward all moral systems and axioms is that of a skeptic who rejects them unanimously, even including, and perhaps especially including, those to which, in moments of æsthetic detachment, he seems to give a formal and resigned sort of assent. It is this constant falling back upon "I do not know," this incessant conversion of the easy logic of romance into the harsh and dismaying logic of fact, that explains his failure to succeed as a popular novelist, despite his skill at evoking emotion, his towering artistic passion, his power to tell a thumping tale. He is talked of, he brings forth a mass of punditic criticism, he becomes in a sense the fashion; but it would be absurd to say that he has made the same profound impression upon the great class of normal novel-readers that Arnold Bennett once made, or H. G. Wells, or William de Morgan in his brief day, or even such cheap-jacks as Anthony Hope Hawkins and William J. Locke. His show fascinates, but his philosophy, in the last analysis, is unbearable.

[[ ...]]

His heroes are moved by avarice, by ambition, by rebellion, by fear, by that "obscure inner necessity" which passes for nobility or the sense of duty--never by that puerile passion which is the mainspring of all masculine acts and aspirations in popular novels and on the stage. If they yield to amour at all, it is only at the urging of some more powerful and characteristic impulse, _e.g._, a fantastic notion of chivalry, as in the case of Heyst, or the thirst for dominion, as in the case of Kurtz. The one exception is offered by Razumov--and Razumov is Conrad's picture of a flabby fool, of a sentimentalist destroyed by his sentimentality. Dreiser has shown much the same process in Witla and Cowperwood, but he is less free from the conventional obsession than Conrad; he takes a love affair far more naïvely, and hence far more seriously.

I used to wonder why Conrad never tackled a straight-out story of adultery under Christianity, the standard matter of all our more pretentious fiction and drama. I was curious to see what his ethical agnosticism would make of it. The conclusion I came to at first was that his failure marked the limitations of his courage--in brief, that he hesitated to go against the orthodox axioms and assumptions in the department where they were most powerfully maintained. But it seems to me now that his abstinence has not been the fruit of timidity, but of disdain. He has shied at the hypothesis, not at its implications. His whole work, in truth, is a destructive criticism of the prevailing notion that such a story is momentous and worth telling. The current gyneolatry is as far outside his scheme of things as the current program of rewards and punishments, sins and virtues, causes and effects. He not only sees clearly that the destiny and soul of man are not moulded by petty jousts of sex, as the prophets of romantic love would have us believe; he is so impatient of the fallacy that he puts it as far behind him as possible, and sets his conflicts amid scenes that it cannot penetrate, save as a palpable absurdity.

Love, in his stories, is either a feeble phosphorescence or a gigantic grotesquerie. In "Heart of Darkness," perhaps, we get his typical view of it. Over all the frenzy and horror of the tale itself floats the irony of the trusting heart back in Brussels. Here we have his measure of the master sentimentality of them all.... § 4 As for Conrad the literary craftsman, opposing him for the moment to Conrad the showman of the human comedy, the quality that all who write about him seem chiefly to mark in him is his scorn of conventional form, his tendency to approach his story from two directions at once, his frequent involvement in apparently inextricable snarls of narrative, sub-narrative and sub-sub-narrative. "Lord Jim," for example, starts out in the third person, presently swings into an exhaustive psychological discussion by the mythical Marlow, then goes into a brisk narrative at second (and sometimes at third) hand, and finally comes to a halt upon an unresolved dissonance, a half-heard chord of the ninth: "And that's the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic." "Falk" is also a story within a story; this time the narrator is "one who had not spoken before, a man over fifty."

In "Amy Foster" romance is filtered through the prosaic soul of a country doctor; it is almost as if a statistician told the tale of Horatius at the bridge. In "Under Western Eyes" the obfuscation is achieved by "a teacher of languages," endlessly lamenting his lack of the "high gifts of imagination and expression." In "Youth" and "Heart of Darkness" the chronicler and speculator is the shadowy Marlow, a "cloak to goe inbisabell" for Conrad himself. In "Chance" there are two separate stories, imperfectly welded together. Elsewhere there are hesitations, goings back, interpolations, interludes in the Socratic manner. And almost always there is heaviness in the getting under weigh. In "Heart of Darkness" we are on the twentieth page before we see the mouth of the great river, and in "Falk" we are on the twenty-fourth before we get a glimpse of Falk. "Chance" is nearly half done before the drift of the action is clearly apparent. In "Almayer's Folly" we are thrown into the middle of a story, and do not discover its beginning until we come to "An Outcast of the Islands," a later book. As in structure, so in detail. Conrad pauses to explain, to speculate, to look about. Whole chapters concern themselves with detailed discussions of motives, with exchanges of views, with generalizations abandoned as soon as they are made.

Even the author's own story, "A Personal Record" (in the English edition, "Some Reminiscences") starts near the end, and then goes back, halting tortuously, to the beginning. In the eyes of orthodox criticism, of course, this is a grave fault. The Kipling-Wells style of swift, shouldering, button-holing writing has accustomed readers and critics alike to a straight course and a rapid tempo. Moreover, it has accustomed them to a forthright certainty and directness of statement; they expect an author to account for his characters at once, and on grounds instantly comprehensible. This omniscience is a part of the prodigality of moral theory that I have been discussing. An author who knows just what is the matter with the world may be quite reasonably expected to know just what is the matter with his hero. Neither sort of assurance, I need not say, is to be found in Conrad. He is an inquirer, not a law-giver; an experimentalist, not a doctor. One constantly derives from his stories the notion that he is as much puzzled by his characters as the reader is--that he, too, is feeling his way among shadowy evidences. The discoveries that we make, about Lord Jim, about Nostromo or about Kurtz, come as fortuitously and as unexpectedly as the discoveries we make about the real figures of our world.

The picture is built up bit by bit; it is never flashed suddenly and completely as by best-seller calciums; it remains a bit dim at the end. But in that very dimness, so tantalizing and yet so revealing, lies two-thirds of Conrad's art, or his craft, or his trick, or whatever you choose to call it. What he shows us is blurred at the edges, but so is life itself blurred at the edges. We see least clearly precisely what is nearest to us, and is hence most real to us. A man may profess to understand the President of the United States, but he seldom alleges, even to himself, that he understands his own wife. In the character and in its reactions, in the act and in the motive: always that tremulousness, that groping, that confession of final bewilderment. "He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart...." And the cloud enshrouds the inner man as well as the outer, the secret springs of his being as well as the overt events of his life. "His meanest creatures," says Arthur Symons, "have in them a touch of honour, of honesty, or of heroism; his heroes have always some error, weakness, or mistake, some sin or crime, to redeem."

What is Lord Jim, scoundrel and poltroon or gallant knight? What is Captain MacWhirr, hero or simply ass? What is Falk, beast or idealist? One leaves "Heart of Darkness" in that palpitating confusion which is shot through with intense curiosity. Kurtz is at once the most abominable of rogues and the most fantastic of dreamers. It is impossible to differentiate between his vision and his crimes, though all that we look upon as order in the universe stands between them. [[..]]

"My purpose," said Ibsen, "is not to answer questions; it is to ask them." The spectator must bring something with him beyond the mere faculty of attention. If, coming to Conrad, he cannot, he is at the wrong door. § 5 Conrad's predilection for barbarous scenes and the more bald and shocking sort of drama has an obviously autobiographical basis. His own road ran into strange places in the days of his youth. He moved among men who were menaced by all the terrestrial cruelties, and by the almost unchecked rivalry and rapacity of their fellow men, without any appreciable barriers, whether of law, of convention or of sentimentality, to shield them. The struggle for existence, as he saw it, was well nigh as purely physical among human beings as among the carnivora of the jungle.

Some of his stories, and among them his very best, are plainly little more than transcripts of his own experience. He himself is the enchanted boy of "Youth"; he is the ship-master of "Heart of Darkness"; he hovers in the background of all the island books and is visibly present in most of the tales of the sea. And what he got out of that early experience was more than a mere body of reminiscence; it was a scheme of valuations. He came to his writing years with a sailor's disdain for the trifling hazards and emprises of market places and drawing rooms, and it shows itself whenever he sets pen to paper. A conflict, it would seem, can make no impression upon him save it be colossal. When his men combat, not nature, but other men, they carry over into the business the gigantic method of sailors battling with a tempest. "The Secret Agent" and "Under Western Eyes" fill the dull back streets of London and Geneva with pursuits, homicides and dynamitings. "Nostromo" is a long record of treacheries, butcheries and carnalities. "A Point of Honor" is coloured by the senseless, insatiable ferocity of Gobineau's "Renaissance." "Victory" ends with a massacre of all the chief personages, a veritable catastrophe of blood.

Whenever he turns from the starker lusts to the pale passions of man under civilization, Conrad fails. "The Return" is a thoroughly infirm piece of writing--a second rate magazine story. One concludes at once that the author himself does not believe in it. "The Inheritors" is worse; it becomes, after the first few pages, a flaccid artificiality, a bore. It is impossible to imagine the chief characters of the Conrad gallery in such scenes. Think of Captain MacWhirr reacting to social tradition, Lord Jim immersed in the class war, Lena Hermann seduced by the fashions, Almayer a candidate for office! As well think of Huckleberry Finn at Harvard, or Tom Jones practising law. These things do not interest Conrad, chiefly, I suppose, because he does not understand them. His concern, one may say, is with the gross anatomy of passion, not with its histology. He seeks to depict emotion, not in its ultimate attenuation, but in its fundamental innocence and fury. Inevitably, his materials are those of what we call melodrama; he is at one, in the bare substance of his tales, with the manufacturers of the baldest shockers.

But with a difference!--a difference, to wit, of approach and comprehension, a difference abysmal and revolutionary. He lifts melodrama to the dignity of an important business, and makes it a means to an end that the mere shock-monger never dreams of. In itself, remember, all this up-roar and blood-letting is not incredible, nor even improbable. The world, for all the pressure of order, is still full of savage and stupendous conflicts, of murders and debaucheries, of crimes indescribable and adventures almost unimaginable. One cannot reasonably ask a novelist to deny them or to gloss over them; all one may demand of him is that, if he make artistic use of them, he render them understandable--that he logically account for them, that he give them plausibility by showing their genesis in intelligible motives and colourable events. The objection to the conventional melodramatist is that he fails to do this. It is not that his efforts are too florid, but that his causes are too puny. For all his exuberance of fancy, he seldom shows us a downright impossible event; what he does constantly show us is an inadequate and hence unconvincing motive. In a cheap theatre we see a bad actor, imperfectly disguised as a viscount, bind a shrieking young woman to the railroad tracks, with an express train approaching. Why does he do it? The melodramatist offers a double-headed reason, the first part being that the viscount is an amalgam of Satan and Don Juan and the second being that the young woman prefers death to dishonour. Both parts are absurd.

Our eyes show us at once that the fellow is far more the floorwalker, the head barber, the Knight of Pythias than either the Satan or the Don Juan, and our experience of life tells us that young women in yellow wigs do not actually rate their virginity so dearly. But women are undoubtedly done to death in this way--not every day, perhaps, but now and then. Men bind them, trains run over them, the newspapers discuss the crime, the pursuit of the felon, the ensuing jousting of the jurisconsults. Why, then? The true answer, when it is forthcoming at all, is always much more complex than the melodramatist's answer. It may be so enormously complex, indeed, as to transcend all the normal laws of cause and effect. It may be an answer made up largely, or even wholly, of the fantastic, the astounding, the unearthly reasons of lunacy. That is the chief, if not the only difference between melodrama and reality. The events of the two may be, and often are identical. It is only in their underlying network of causes that they are dissimilar and incommensurate.

Here, in brief, you have the point of essential distinction between the stories of Conrad, a supreme artist in fiction, and the trashy confections of the literary artisans--_e.g._, Sienkiewicz, Dumas, Lew Wallace, and their kind. Conrad's materials, at bottom, are almost identical with those of the artisans. He, too, has his chariot races, his castaways, his carnivals of blood in the arena. He, too, takes us through shipwrecks, revolutions, assassinations, gaudy heroisms, abominable treacheries. But always he illuminates the nude and amazing event with shafts of light which reveal not only the last detail of its workings, but also the complex of origins and inducements behind it. Always, he throws about it a probability which, in the end, becomes almost inevitability. His "Nostromo," for example, in its externals, is a mere tale of South American turmoil; its materials are those of "Soldiers of Fortune." But what a difference in method, in point of approach, in inner content! Davis was content to show the overt act, scarcely accounting for it at all, and then only in terms of conventional romance.

Conrad penetrates to the motive concealed in it, the psychological spring and basis of it, the whole fabric of weakness, habit and aberration underlying it. The one achieved an agreeable romance, and an agreeable romance only. The other achieves an extraordinarily brilliant and incisive study of the Latin-American temperament--a full length exposure of the perverse passions and incomprehensible ideals which provoke presumably sane men to pursue one another like wolves, and of the reactions of that incessant pursuit upon the men themselves, and upon their primary ideas, and upon the institutions under which they live. I do not say that Conrad is always exhaustive in his explanations, or that he is accurate. In the first case I know that he often is not, in the second case I do not know whether he is or he isn't. But I do say that, within the scope of his vision, he is wholly convincing; that the men and women he sets into his scene show ineluctably vivid and persuasive personality; that the theories he brings forward to account for their acts are intelligible; that the effects of those acts, upon actors and immediate spectators alike, are such as might be reasonably expected to issue; that the final impression is one of searching and indubitable veracity.

One leaves "Nostromo" with a memory as intense and lucid as that of a real experience. The thing is not mere photography. It is interpretative painting at its highest. In all his stories you will find this same concern with the inextricable movement of phenomena and noumena between event and event, this same curiosity as to first causes and ultimate effects. Sometimes, as in "The Point of Honor" and "The End of the Tether," he attempts to work out the obscure genesis, in some chance emotion or experience, of an extraordinary series of transactions. At other times, as in "Typhoon," "Youth," "Falk" and "The Shadow Line," his endeavour is to determine the effect of some gigantic and fortuitous event upon the mind and soul of a given man. At yet other times, as in "Almayer's Folly," "Lord Jim" and "Under Western Eyes," it is his aim to show how cause and effect are intricately commingled, so that it is difficult to separate motive from consequence, and consequence from motive.

But always it is the process of mind rather than the actual act that interests him. Always he is trying to penetrate the actor's mask and interpret the actor's frenzy. It is this concern with the profounder aspects of human nature, this bold grappling with the deeper and more recondite problems of his art, that gives him consideration as a first-rate artist. He differs from the common novelists of his time as a Beethoven differs from a Mendelssohn. Some of them are quite his equals in technical skill, and a few of them, notably Bennett and Wells, often show an actual superiority, but when it comes to that graver business which underlies all mere virtuosity, he is unmistakably the superior of the whole corps of them. This superiority is only the more vividly revealed by the shop-worn shoddiness of most of his materials. He takes whatever is nearest to hand, out of his own rich experience or out of the common store of romance. He seems to disdain the petty advantages which go with the invention of novel plots, extravagant characters and unprecedented snarls of circumstance.

All the classical doings of anarchists are to be found in "The Secret Agent"; one has heard them copiously credited, of late, to so-called Reds. "Youth," as a story, is no more than an orthodox sea story, and W. Clark Russell contrived better ones. In "Chance" we have a stern father at his immemorial tricks. In "Victory" there are villains worthy of Jack B. Yeats' melodramas of the Spanish Main. In "Nostromo" we encounter the whole stock company of Richard Harding Davis and O. Henry. And in "Under Western Eyes" the protagonist is one who finds his love among the women of his enemies--a situation at the heart of all the military melodramas ever written. But what Conrad makes of that ancient and fly-blown stuff, that rubbish from the lumber room of the imagination! Consider, for example, "Under Western Eyes," by no means the best of his stories. The plot is that of "Shenandoah" and "Held by the Enemy"--but how brilliantly it is endowed with a new significance, how penetratingly its remotest currents are followed out, how magnificently it is made to fit into that colossal panorama of Holy Russia! It is always this background, this complex of obscure and baffling influences, this drama under the drama, that Conrad spends his skill upon, and not the obvious commerce of the actual stage. It is not the special effect that he seeks, but the general effect. It is not so much man the individual that interests him, as the shadowy accumulation of traditions, instincts and blind chances which shapes the individual's destiny.

Here, true enough, we have a full-length portrait of Razumov, glowing with life. But here, far more importantly, we also have an amazingly meticulous and illuminating study of the Russian character, with all its confused mingling of Western realism and Oriental fogginess, its crazy tendency to go shooting off into the spaces of an incomprehensible metaphysic, its general transcendence of all that we Celts and Saxons and Latins hold to be true of human motive and human act. Russia is a world apart: that is the sum and substance of the tale. In the island stories we have the same elaborate projection of the East, of its fantastic barbarism, of brooding Asia. And in the sea stories we have, perhaps for the first time in English fiction, a vast and adequate picture of the sea, the symbol at once of man's eternal striving and of his eternal impotence. Here, at last, the colossus has found its interpreter. There is in "Typhoon" and "The Nigger of the Narcissus," and, above all, in "The Mirror of the Sea," a poetic evocation of the sea's stupendous majesty that is unparalleled outside the ancient sagas.

Conrad describes it with a degree of graphic skill that is superb and incomparable. He challenges at once the pictorial vigour of Hugo and the aesthetic sensitiveness of Lafcadio Hearn, and surpasses them both. And beyond this mere dazzling visualization, he gets into his pictures an overwhelming sense of that vast drama of which they are no more than the flat, lifeless representation--of that inexorable and uncompassionate struggle which is life itself. The sea to him is a living thing, an omnipotent and unfathomable thing, almost a god. He sees it as the Eternal Enemy, deceitful in its caresses, sudden in its rages, relentless in its enmities, and forever a mystery. § 6 Conrad's first novel, "Almayer's Folly," was printed in 1895. He tells us in "A Personal Record" that it took him seven years to write it--seven years of pertinacious effort, of trial and error, of learning how to write. He was, at this time thirty-eight years old. Seventeen years before, landing in England to fit himself for the British merchant service, he had made his first acquaintance with the English language. The interval had been spent almost continuously at sea--in the Eastern islands, along the China coast, on the Congo and in the South Atlantic. That he hesitated between French and English is a story often told, but he himself is authority for the statement that it is more symbolical than true. Flaubert, in those days, was his idol, as we know, but the speech of his daily business won, and English literature reaped the greatest of all its usufructs from English sea power.

To this day there are marks of his origins in his style. His periods, more than once, have an inept and foreign smack. In fishing for the right phrase one sometimes feels that he finds a French phrase, or even a Polish phrase, and that it loses something by being done into English. The credit for discovering "Almayer's Folly," as the publishers say, belongs to Edward Garnett, then a reader for T. Fisher Unwin. The book was brought out modestly and seems to have received little attention. The first edition, it would appear, ran to no more than a thousand copies; at all events, specimens of it are now very hard to find, and collectors pay high prices for them. When "An Outcast of the Islands" followed, a year later, a few alert readers began to take notice of the author, and one of them was Sir (then Mr.) Hugh Clifford, a former Governor of the Federated Malay States and himself the author of several excellent books upon the Malay. Clifford gave Conrad encouragement privately and talked him up in literary circles, but the majority of English critics remained unaware of him.

After an interval of two years, during which he struggled between his desire to write and the temptation to return to the sea, he published "The Nigger of the Narcissus."[7] It made a fair success of esteem, but still there was no recognition of the author's true stature. Then followed "Tales of Unrest" and "Lord Jim," and after them the feeblest of all the Conrad books, "The Inheritors," written in collaboration with Ford Madox Hueffer. It is easy to see in this collaboration, and no less in the character of the book, an indication of irresolution, and perhaps even of downright loss of hope. But success, in fact, was just around the corner. In 1902 came "Youth," and straightway Conrad was the lion of literary London. The chorus of approval that greeted it was almost a roar; all sorts of critics and reviewers, from H. G. Wells to W. L. Courtney, and from John Galsworthy to W. Robertson Nicoll, took a hand. Writing home to the _New York Times_, W. L. Alden reported that he had "not heard one dissenting voice in regard to the book," but that the praise it received "was unanimous," and that the newspapers and literary weeklies rivalled one another "in their efforts to express their admiration for it." This benign whooping, however, failed to awaken the enthusiasm of the mass of novel-readers and brought but meagre orders from the circulating libraries. "Typhoon" came upon the heels of "Youth," but still the sales of the Conrad books continued small and the author remained in very uncomfortable circumstances.

Even after four or five years he was still so poor that he was glad to accept a modest pension from the British Civil List. This official recognition of his genius, when it came at last, seems to have impressed the public, characteristically enough, far more than his books themselves had done, and the foundations were thus laid for that wider recognition of his genius which now prevails. But getting him on his legs was slow work, and such friends as Hueffer, Clifford and Galsworthy had to do a lot of arduous log-rolling. Even after the splash made by "Youth" his publishing arrangements seem to have remained somewhat insecure. His first eleven books show six different imprints; it was not until his twelfth that he settled down to a publisher. His American editions tell an even stranger story. The first six of them were brought out by six different publishers; the first eight by no less than seven. But today he has a regular American publisher at last, and in England a complete edition of his works is in progress.

Thanks to the indefatigable efforts of that American publisher (who labours for Gene Stratton-Porter and Gerald Stanley Lee in the same manner) Conrad has been forced upon the public notice in the United States, and it is the fashion among all who pretend to aesthetic consciousness to read him, or, at all events, to talk about him. His books have been brought together in a uniform edition for the newly intellectual, bound in blue leather, like the "complete library sets" of Kipling, O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant and Paul de Kock. The more literary newspapers print his praises; he is hymned by professorial critics as a prophet of virtue; his genius is certificated by such diverse authorities as Hildegarde Hawthorne and Louis Joseph Vance; I myself lately sat on a Conrad Committee, along with Booth Tarkington, David Belasco, Irvin Cobb, Walter Pritchard Eaton and Hamlin Garland--surely an astounding posse of _literati_! Moreover, Conrad himself shows a disposition to reach out for a wider audience. His "Victory," first published in _Munsey's Magazine_, revealed obvious efforts to be intelligible to the general. A few more turns of the screw and it might have gone into the _Saturday Evening Post_, between serials by Harris Dickson and Rex Beach.

Meanwhile, in the shadow of this painfully growing celebrity as a novelist, Conrad takes on consideration as a bibelot, and the dealers in first editions probably make more profit out of some of his books than ever he has made himself. His manuscripts are cornered, I believe, by an eminent collector of literary curiosities in New York, who seems to have a contract with the novelist to take them as fast as they are produced--perhaps the only arrangement of the sort in literary history. His first editions begin to bring higher premiums than those of any other living author. Considering the fact that the oldest of them is less than twenty-five years old, they probably set new records for the trade. Even the latest in date are eagerly sought, and it is not uncommon to see an English edition of a Conrad book sold at an advance in New York within a month of its publication.[8] As I hint, however, there is not much reason to believe that this somewhat extravagant fashion is based upon any genuine liking, or any very widespread understanding. The truth is that, for all the adept tub-thumping of publishers, Conrad's sales still fall a good deal behind those of even the most modest of best-seller manufacturers, and that the respect with which his successive volumes are received is accompanied by enthusiasm in a relatively narrow circle only.

A clan of Conrad fanatics exists, and surrounding it there is a body of readers who read him because it is the intellectual thing to do, and who talk of him because talking of him is expected. But beyond that he seems to make little impression. When "Victory" was printed in _Munsey's Magazine_ it was a failure; no other single novel, indeed, contributed more toward the abandonment of the policy of printing a complete novel in each issue. The other popular magazines show but small inclination for Conrad manuscripts. Some time ago his account of a visit to Poland in war-time was offered on the American market by an English author's agent. At the start a price of $2,500 was put upon it, but after vainly inviting buyers for a couple of months it was finally disposed of to a literary newspaper which seldom spends so much as $2,500, I daresay, for a whole month's supply of copy.[[..]]


The Conrad philosophy is harsh, unyielding, repellent. The Conrad heroes are nearly all boors and ruffians. Their very love-making has something sinister and abhorrent in it; one cannot imagine them in the moving pictures, played by tailored beauties with long eye-lashes. More, I venture that the censors would object to them, even disguised as floor-walkers. Surely that would be a besotted board which would pass the irregular amours of Lord Jim, the domestic brawls of Almayer, the revolting devil's mass of Kurtz, Falk's disgusting feeding in the Southern Ocean, or the butchery on Heyst's island. Stevenson's "Treasure Island" has been put upon the stage, but "An Outcast of the Islands" would be as impossible there as "Barry Lyndon" or "La Terre." The world fails to breed actors for such rôles, or stage managers to penetrate such travails of the spirit, or audiences for the revelation thereof. With the Conrad cult, so discreetly nurtured out of a Barabbasian silo, there arises a considerable Conrad literature, most of it quite valueless.

Huneker's essay, in "Ivory, Apes and Peacocks,"[9] gets little beyond the obvious; William Lyon Phelps, in "The Advance of the English Novel," achieves only a meagre judgment;[10] Frederic Taber Cooper tries to estimate such things as "The Secret Agent" and "Under Western Eyes" in terms of the Harvard enlightenment;[11] John Galsworthy wastes himself upon futile comparisons;[12] even Sir Hugh Clifford, for all his quick insight, makes irrelevant objections to Conrad's principles of Malay psychology.[13] Who cares? Conrad is his own God, and creates his own Malay! The best of the existing studies of Conrad, despite certain sentimentalities arising out of youth and schooling, is in the book of Wilson Follett, before mentioned. The worst is in the official biography by Richard Curle,[14] for which Conrad himself obtained a publisher and upon which his _imprimatur_ may be thus assumed to lie. If it does, then its absurdities are nothing new, for we all know what a botch Ibsen made of accounting for himself. But, even so, the assumption stretches the probabilities more than once.

Surely it is hard to think of Conrad putting "Lord Jim" below "Chance" and "The Secret Agent" on the ground that it "raises a fierce moral issue." Nothing, indeed, could be worse nonsense--save it be an American critic's doctrine that "Conrad denounces pessimism." "Lord Jim" no more raises a moral issue than "The Titan." It is, if anything, a devastating exposure of a moral issue. Its villain is almost heroic; its hero, judged by his peers, is a scoundrel.... Hugh Walpole, himself a competent novelist, does far better in his little volume, "Joseph Conrad."[15] In its brief space he is unable to examine all of the books in detail, but he at least manages to get through a careful study of Conrad's method, and his professional skill and interest make it valuable. § 7 There is a notion that judgments of living artists are impossible. They are bound to be corrupted, we are told, by prejudice, false perspective, mob emotion, error.

The question whether this or that man is great or small is one which only posterity can answer. A silly begging of the question, for doesn't posterity also make mistakes? Shakespeare's ghost has seen two or three posterities, beautifully at odds. Even today, it must notice a difference in flitting from London to Berlin. The shade of Milton has been tricked in the same way. So, also, has Johann Sebastian Bach's. It needed a Mendelssohn to rescue it from Coventry--and now Mendelssohn himself, once so shining a light, is condemned to the shadows in his turn. We are not dead yet; we are here, and it is now. Therefore, let us at least venture, guess, opine. My own conviction, sweeping all those reaches of living fiction that I know, is that Conrad's figure stands out from the field like the Alps from the Piedmont plain. He not only has no masters in the novel; he has scarcely a colourable peer. Perhaps Thomas Hardy and Anatole France--old men both, their work behind them.

But who else? James is dead. Meredith is dead. So is George Moore, though he lingers on. So are all the Russians of the first rank; Andrieff, Gorki and their like are light cavalry. In Sudermann, Germany has a writer of short stories of very high calibre, but where is the German novelist to match Conrad? Clara Viebig? Thomas Mann? Gustav Frenssen? Arthur Schnitzler? Surely not! As for the Italians, they are either absurd tear-squeezers or more absurd harlequins. As for the Spaniards and the Scandinavians, they would pass for geniuses only in Suburbia. In America, setting aside an odd volume here and there, one can discern only Dreiser--and of Dreiser's limitations I shall discourse anon.

There remains England. England has the best second-raters in the world; nowhere else is the general level of novel writing so high; nowhere else is there a corps of journeyman novelists comparable to Wells, Bennett, Benson, Walpole, Beresford, George, Galsworthy, Hichens, De Morgan, Miss Sinclair, Hewlett and company. They have a prodigious facility; they know how to write; even the least of them is, at all events, a more competent artisan than, say, Dickens, or Bulwer-Lytton, or Sienkiewicz, or Zola. But the literary _grande passion_ is simply not in them. They get nowhere with their suave and interminable volumes. Their view of the world and its wonders is narrow and superficial. They are, at bottom, no more than clever mechanicians. As Galsworthy has said, Conrad lifts himself immeasurably above them all. One might well call him, if the term had not been cheapened into cant, a cosmic artist. His mind works upon a colossal scale; he conjures up the general out of the particular. What he sees and describes in his books is not merely this man's aspiration or that woman's destiny, but the overwhelming sweep and devastation of universal forces, the great central drama that is at the heart of all other dramas, the tragic struggles of the soul of man under the gross stupidity and obscene joking of the gods. "In the novels of Conrad," says Galsworthy, "nature is first, man is second." But not a mute, a docile second!

He may think, as Walpole argues, that "life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of men," but he does not think that they are too weak and poor in spirit to challenge it. It is the challenging that engrosses him, and enchants him, and raises up the magic of his wonder. It is as futile, in the end, as Hamlet's or Faust's--but still a gallant and a gorgeous adventure, a game uproariously worth the playing, an enterprise "inscrutable ... and excessively romantic."... If you want to get his measure, read "Youth" or "Falk" or "Heart of Darkness," and then try to read the best of Kipling. I think you will come to some understanding, by that simple experiment, of the difference between an adroit artisan's bag of tricks and the lofty sincerity and passion of a first-rate artist.

What, no one posted In Defense of Women?

The conclusion sounds about right.

There is no book on woman by a man that is not a stupendous compendium of posturings and imbecilities.

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JAMESBJOHNSON said:

Cut me some efffing slack

Mencken is THE MAN. His books fill my house and I read them like fundies read the Bible, but some of it is a cure for insomnia.

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Okay...