George Jean Nathan: Mencken's Gunnery Mate
Nolte, William H.
William H. Nolte George Jean Nathan: Mencken's Gunnery Mate Though he has not been awarded a niche in the pantheon of Great American Writers, George Jean Nathan certainly deserves a place in the...
...Indeed, I was astonished in going through Nathan's books to note the pervasive influence of Mencken on all aspects of Nathan's thought...
...When the New York Critics' Circle Award for best play of the year was givento Miller for All My Sons, Nathan reminded his reader that the same season had seen the first production of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh and then, using those two plays for evidence, delivered a withering little lecture on the difference between timeliness and timelessness...
...The leftists and Mencken were in agreement on only one thing: that capitalism and democracy must be essentially at odds with one another...
...If you've heard a politician speak lately this should ring a bell: "All that is necessary to raise imbecility into what the mob regards as profundity is to lift it off the floor and put it on a platform...
...Well, I hope he made it...
...Nor should we forget that Shaw subsequently shook Ibsen off his feet in turn by heaving himself into the latter's domain and at the very outset staggering audiences far and wide with, for the first time from a stage, a facile parroting of doctrines culled from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Marx...
...While such a view helped him keep an open mind concerning art, keep an objective distance between the viewer and the thing being viewed, it also prevented him from ever taking the theatre too seriously...
...I care not who writes the laws of a country so long as I may listen to its songs...
...Nathan is least interesting when discoursing on his favorite subject —that is, himself...
...To this he added a final peradventure: -The theatre...
...certainly Nathan never claimed to know...
...It would be an oversimplification, though not an untruth, to say that Mencken rejected Roosevelt's New Deal (he once compared FDR's concept of govern*Behrman concludes his little essay with a wildly funny story (much too long to recount here) about his first meeting with Mencken...
...In his delightful "Introductory Reminiscence" in The Smart Set: A History and Anthology (1966), the late S.N...
...He could never resist stretching an analogy until it snapped in his hand, and in the reader's face, as here: "It is possible a man may love only one woman in his life...
...From there he moves to the view that altruism is itself a form of hedonism, that it is, indeed, "the highest flowering of selfishThe Alternative: An American Spectator August/ September 1976 9 ness...
...10 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1976...
...I give only one of the possible answers, and perhaps not the most important one, but one that tickles my midriff: to wit, his enemies too often made the fatal mistake of quoting him...
...He referred to the Sage of Baltimore as "Soc8 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/ September 1976 rates in easy wedlock with Rabelais, a one-man Academe swimming sturdily in Pilsener...
...Rather, indeed, a corroboration...
...It was one thing, however, to mock a Harding...
...Its emotions are ten times as powerful as those of reality, its ideas are twenty times as idiotic as those of real men, its lights and colors and sounds are forty times as blinding and deafening as those of nature, its people are grotesque burlesques of every one we know...
...I by no means intend to imply that mere quotability is the sole criterion for bestowal of the laurel...
...Here's one from Nietzsche's-waste basket: "Beware the sexlessness of those who talk most of sex...
...Not only is the Baltimore Sage still very much with us, he is the most widely quoted of all our literati— and by a country mile...
...during that heady period he echoed the Nietzschean call for a transvaluation of values...
...Perhaps it was "a secret romanticism—a lingering residuum of a boyish delight in pasteboard and spangles, gaudy colors and soothing sounds, preposterous heroes and appetizing wenches...
...Two years later he was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church...
...Emerson...
...In the penumbra of such a reputation, Nathan "played an irreverent obbligato...
...I never enter one anyway, save only to delight in some particularly beautiful stained-glass window, or in some fine specimen of architecture, or in the whiskers of the Twelve Apostles...
...Try reciting his name to the average Harvard graduate and see what response you get...
...So, for that matter, is it equally possible that a man get through life with only one pair of trousers...
...Harold Ross, who evidently idolized the Sage, had invited Behrman in the early thirties to have dinner with him and Mencken at 21...
...And not only survive, but actually thrive...
...I say strangely since one would expect a writer whose talent was critical in nature to have organized his thoughts in some kind of progressive manner, to have begun with a thesis, then supported it in a hierarchical fashion that led inevitably, logically to a conclusion that at least came within waving distance of where he began...
...Mencken was doubtless correct in his belief that "The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe—that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud...
...Moreover, he seemed to have been born without illusions, which made him, in the eyes of those who are constantly moving from one certitude to the next, something of a monster...
...Not content with that sweeping generalization, he adds that he doubts if "there ever has lived an intelligent man whose end in life was not the.achievement of a large and selfish pleasure...
...Behrman wrote that Mencken's reputation, as early as 1915, was "massive, overwhelming and tantalizing...
...When not writing about the drama, Nathan churned out thousands of words on such favorite subjects as women, marriage, sex, doctors, vacations, his more famous friends, everything in fact that in any way occupied his time or attention...
...If all the Armenians were to be killed tomorrow and if half of Russia were to starve to death the day after, it would not matter to me in the least...
...The two brothers were doubtless shaken by the first calls, but their anxiety turned to mirth in 1955 when they learned of Nathan's decision to marry...
...One might with equal logic therefore argue for the abolition of all forms of punishment in that none so far devised has succeeded in deterring persons from committing theft, perjury, arson, assault, bigamy, holdups, rape, or anything else...
...And at five o'clock, my day's work done, I shook and drank a half dozen excellent aperitifs...
...In a devastating piece on Sartre's No Exit, much admired by those who had never seen all his shopworn borrowings in print before, Nathan first identified the source of the plagiarisms and then offered this closing reminder: "That such and similar worn ideas should be regarded as noteworthy mental achievements is, nevertheless, not surprising...
...One should add that there has never been an iconoclast who has escaped public opprobrium...
...I suspect that La Rochefoucauld taught him much about the making of aphorisms, as I know Nietzsche did...
...I thought him (and still do) a great man...
...It enabled him to see the shallowness of ideological drama and "message" plays of playwrights like Clifford Odets, Robert Sherwood, Maxwell Anderson, T.S...
...Mencken was something else again...
...Behrman described Nathan as an incredibly handsome man: "Posters of him sprouted all over town as if he were a matinee idol appearing in a Broadway show...
...On that day during the world war when the most critical battle was being fought, I sat in my still, sunlit, cozy library composing a chapter on aesthetics for a new book on the drama...
...My favorite, though, is one that he shares with some anonymous wag: "In the words of a friend of mine, I drink to make other people interesting...
...All of his writing, he once wrote, whether it took the form of burlesque, serious criticism, or mere casual controversy, sought "to expose a false pretense, to blow up a wobbly axiom, to uncover a sham virtue...
...When asked why he thus renounced his agnosticism for the Church of Rome, he is reported to have answered, ever the pleasure-seeker, "Because I want to go to Heaven...
...Even at their most familiar and obvious they are tablets from the mount in comparison with much of what passes for mentality in the drama of Broadway...
...There were other interests, of course—primarily, his abiding and, to me at least, baffling love for the theatre, or more precisely for drama, since, as Nathan pointed out, much of what comes under the heading of "the theatre" has little to do with plays or drama...
...Mencken always drew a crowd, of course, and many of its members did not like what they heard, which is understandable enough since he purposely antagonized entire groups of complacent and self-assured Americans...
...Eliot, Arthur Miller, and other assorted special pleaders...
...With such a description (some would call it an indictment) of the drama, and of the nightflies attracted to it, Nathan offered no complaint...
...One church is as good as another to me...
...Those "work" well enough, but this one draws a blank: " ...such is the baffling drollery of human nature that a man's wife ever seems to him a virgin...
...When he took his aisle seat in a theatre he carried with him one of the most finely-tuned crap-detectors of his time...
...If that anointment makes a few of the Pure of Heart and the Earnest Strivers grumble and cry foul, then so much the better...
...Writing was as much a part of his daily existence as breathing...
...But the credo also reveals, unwittingly, a man firing blank cartridges at a target that doesn't exist...
...ment to "a milch cow with 125,000,000 teats") because its economic theory was founded on deficit spending in perpetuity...
...Far from setting himself apart by his admitted egotism, Nathan has simply confessed that he is like most other people, but without the moral fustian that some employ to hide their tracks as they move from one attained (or unattained) goal to the next...
...In the teens and twenties he was violently attacked as being un-American (a charge to which he readily pleaded guilty), but in those decades his assailants were defending the status quo against his ribald mockery of the insularity and cheapness of what he called American snivelization...
...I seriously doubt that many in our literate minority remember him at all...
...Where the leftists defended democracy for its egalitarian tendencies, Mencken, as a Federalist in spirit, opposed it for leading, particularly in hard times, to a tyranny of the majority...
...Ironically, his revilers in the thirties attacked him as an apologist for the capitalist system which they sought to overthrow...
...This one requires a double-take: "God is just...
...Those critics intent on burying him, and there still are many such, would be well advised to employ paraphrase in their denunciations but to avoid at all costs direct quotation...
...quite another to gouge a Roosevelt...
...More to the point of his fall from grace, Mencken opposed FDR (after voting for him in 1932) as strongly as he had opposed Woodrow Wilson...
...A final note: if Mencken was so severely chastised and pummelled, so shot at from both the Left and the Right, if he was such anathema to all right-thinking men, then how did he, survive...
...But more likely it was simply a sense of humor, a delight in spectacle that was "infinitely surprising, amusing, buffoonish, vulgar, obscene...
...It was he, not Nathan, whom the New York Times editorial writer called "the most powerful private citizen in America...
...In The Autobiography of an Attitude (1928), he informs us that the older he becomes the more he is "persuaded that hedonism is the only sound and practical doctrine of faith for the intelligent man...
...I have little doubt that Nathan's narcissism helps explain that enduring interest...
...I sometimes wonder who occupies second place...
...by my Maker, I want to pay this small tribute to dear Nathan, wherever he may now reside...
...I daresay that most people who remember him at all remember him as the gunnery mate of Henry Mencken, who has long since been anointed, warts and all, and seated at the table with such indecorous savants as Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire, and Mark Twain...
...I can live every bit as happily under a king, or even a Kaiser, as under a President...
...Reading various of his books recently I was struck by his preoccupation with himself, with his apparent need to flaunt his rather hollow-sounding hedonism in the reader's face...
...But nowhere did he express his hedonism better than in the foreword to The World in Falseface (1923): "The great problems of the world —social, political, economic and theological—do not concern me in the slightest...
...Nathan suffered no such decline in reputation during his lifetime...
...He considered all art as being artificial life, which was itself artificial...
...But, I think, he accurately assessed Nathan's stature when he said: "I knew Nathan and took him in my stride...
...Back to Platonism: the artifice of an artifice of the Real, whatever the Real might be...
...Mark Twain...
...From the day they met, probably in May of 1909, and began their twenty-year editorial partnership, first on The Smart Set and then on The American Mercury, Mencken was the dominant figure in the relationship, both in his influence on Nathan and his visibility on the national scene...
...The true believers laughed with him as he debunked the three clowns who reigned between the two Saviors...
...Although he was, so far as I can make out, just as honest and courageous as Mencken, and just as fond of thumbing his nose at pomposity and affectation, he really cared no more about political matters, or social justice, or manners and morals, or the national interest, or what delusions thepeople cherished, than did the average alley cat...
...Fetch a copy of the book and have a look...
...Here is diversion for a cynic...
...That evening Mencken told Ross a tale, by way of pulling his leg, that makes me laugh every time I think of it...
...A Sartre, of course, is no remotest, faintest Ibsen or Shaw, but he seems to be onto the trick of rubbing one platitude against another and producing what the credulous see as brilliant sparks...
...What Nathan says here needed saying —even though it, too, is a parroting of what Mencken had written about Shaw and Ibsen some forty years before...
...I can admire what Nathan wittingly reveals here—that he knows what he wants from life and has no illusions about his essential selfishness...
...He has reserved most of the prettiest legs for homely women...
...After a starvation diet, even a slightly senescent pork chop seems pretty wonderful...
...Before my favorite quack informs me that I have been thus blessed William H. Nolte is Chairman of the Department of English at the University of South Carolina...
...Or this: "Marriage is based on the theory that when a man discovers a particular brand of beer exactly to his taste he should at once throw up his job and go to work in the brewery...
...What concerns me alone is myself, and the interests of a few close friends...
...Of Eliot's message in The Cocktail Party, which was widely hailed as a masterpiece, he wrote, "Eliot's religious philosophy, insofar as one can penetrate its opium smoke, here suggests that of a sophomore Methodist boning up for examinations in Catholicism, and his sexual philosophy is no less that of a man whose dalliance with women seems to have been confined to hand-holding in an ivory tower...
...One writer, for example, sneered at him for still holding to the outlandish belief that Adam Smith said anything remotely applicable to modern economics...
...The few super-literates who do remember him are by now bent and gnarled by the spinning years and hence enjoying the skimpy usufructs of a life well (or badly) spent—such rewards, for example, as hardening of the arteries, senile dementia, transient ischemic attacks, visceral prolapse, the blind staggers, and a wonderful wondering as to what the hell it's all about...
...If all of us are hedonists, I see no reason for either bragging or complaining about the fact...
...If Nathan's stock never rose so high, neither did it sink so low as Mencken's did in the Great Depression when it became a favorite pastime among the proletarians, Marxists, and New Dealers to attack him as one of the false gods of the marketplace...
...For all I care the rest of the world may go to hell at today's sunset...
...On at least two or three occasions in the middle fifties, Nathan called Henry and his brother August, who still resided at the old 1524 Hollins Street address, to inform them that he was nearing the end and to wish them a fond farewell...
...We should not forget that Ibsen shook the claptrap reasoning of the English-speaking stage off its feet with ideas which, while strange to the theatre, were not materially above the intellectual level of a popular novelist...
...only after he was gone did the light dim, and our collective memory fade...
...One that I wish I had thought of: "The argument most often advanced for the abolition of capital punishment is that it has not successfully deterred and doesn't deter persons from committing murder...
...A good deal, I believe, can be said for such a view...
...Unfortunately he was not content with that one avowal of self-interest...
...Henry James...
...William H. Nolte George Jean Nathan: Mencken's Gunnery Mate Though he has not been awarded a niche in the pantheon of Great American Writers, George Jean Nathan certainly deserves a place in the annex of that sacred hall...
...After overcoming an early tendency toward prolixity, and at times turgidity, he became an adept craftsman in the making of sentences that glitter and sting...
...His parents, incidentally, were part Jewish, but his mother had been a practicing Catholic...
...what he liked he wrote about over and over, and often in almost the same words...
...In an essay on Nathan, in Prejudices: First Series, Mencken wondered what could keep so intelligent a man returning night after night to the theatre, "breathing bad air nightly, gaping at prancing imbeciles, sitting cheek by jowl with cads...
...Bluntly and candidly, he viewed life as an aesthetic experience devoid of moral meaning—in fact, lacking any meaning whatsoever, save that which humans impose upon it...
...Needless to say, particularly since various others have pointed it out, Nathan was extremely repetitious...
...He complained of Odets' inviting us "to believe that neuroticism and talent are one and indistinguishable...
...Remove the rather exotic flowers from that tapestry of prose and you will see right through it and into the front parlor of most dwellings, high or low...
...I simply pointto the obvious fact that Mencken is still being read and attended to, and not just gathering dust on the shelf...
...In the end his selfishness turned to Glory...
...While on the subject of posthumous fame, I should remark the somewhat different courses the reputations of Mencken and Nathan took over the years...
...Why would readers, properly forewarned, keep going back to his articles and books...
...I take almost as much delight from their discomfort as I do from seeing Mencken get his just deserts...
...Thoreau...
...Much of Mencken's ill repute, as well certainly as his popularity, may be attributed to his having possessed to an extraordinary degree the two qualities that most of us take for granted but few possess—honesty and courage...
...Again and again in his books and articles he insisted that he was interested only in "the surface of life: life's music and colour, its charm and ease, its humour and its loveliness...
...is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated...
...He is author of H.L...
...He was amusing enough but after all, when you come right down to it, he was only a drama critic who had been abroad...
...Mencken: Literary Critic...
...It's hard to say...
...Strangely enough, he nevermastered the essay form...
Vol. 9 • August 1976 • No. 10
