Second Mencken Chrestomathy (67 page)

Naturally enough, the blow almost kills the poor boy—he is still, in fact, scarcely out of his nonage—and the problems that grow out of the confession engage him for the better part of the next two years. Always he approaches them and wrestles with them morally; always his search is for the way that the copy-book maxims approve, not for the way that self-preservation demands. Even when a brilliant chance for revenge presents itself, and he is forced to embrace it by the sheer magnetic pull of it, he does so hesitatingly,
doubtingly, ashamedly. His whole attitude to this affair, indeed, is that of an Early Christian Father. He hates himself for gathering buds while he may; he hates the woman with a double hatred for strewing them so temptingly in his path. And in the end, like the moral and upright fellow that he is, he sells out the temptress for cash in hand, and salves his conscience by handing over the money to an orphan asylum!

So in episode after episode. The praying brother of yesterday is the roisterer of today; is the snuffling penitent and pledge-taker of tomorrow. Finally, he is pulled both ways at once and suffers the greatest of all his tortures. Again, of course, a woman is at the center of it. He has no delusions about her virtue—she admits herself, in fact, that it is extinct—but all the same he falls head over heels in love with her, and is filled with an inordinate yearning to marry her and settle down with her. Why not, indeed? She is pretty and a nice girl; she seems to reciprocate his affection; she is naturally eager for the obliterating gold band; she will undoubtedly make him an excellent wife. But he has forgotten his conscience—and it rises up in revenge and floors him. What! Marry a girl with such a Past! Take a fancy woman to his bosom! Jealousy quickly comes to the aid of conscience. Will he be able to forget? Contemplating the damsel in the years to come at breakfast, at dinner, across the domestic hearth, in the cold, blue dawn, will he ever rid his mind of those abhorrent images, those phantasms of men?

Here, at the very end, we come to the most engrossing chapter in this extraordinary book. The duellist of sex, thrust through the gizzard at last, goes off to a lonely hunting camp to wrestle with his intolerable problem. He describes his vacillations faithfully, elaborately, cruelly. On the one side he sets his honest yearning, his desire to have done with light loves, the girl herself. On the other hand he ranges his moral qualms, his sneaking distrusts, the sinister shadows of those nameless ones, his morganatic brothers-in-law. The struggle within his soul is gigantic. He suffers as Prometheus suffered on the rock; his very vitals are devoured; he emerges battered and exhausted. He decides, in the end, that he will marry the girl. She has wasted the shining dowry of her sex; she comes to him spotted and at second-hand; snickers will appear in the polyphony of the wedding music—but he will marry her nevertheless. It will be a marriage unblessed by Holy Writ; it will
be a flying in the face of Moses; luck and the archangels will be against it—but he will marry her all the same, Moses or no Moses. And so, with his face made bright by first genuine revolt against the archaic, barbaric morality that has dragged him down, and his heart pulsing to his first display of authentic, unpolluted charity, generosity and nobility, he takes his departure from us.

I daresay any second-hand bookseller will be able to find a copy of the book for you. There is some raciness in the detail of it. Perhaps, despite its public failure, it enjoys a measure of
pizzicato
esteem behind the door. The author, having achieved its colossal self-revelation, became intrigued by the notion that he was a literary man of sorts, and informed me that he was undertaking the story of the girl last-named—the spotted virgin. But he apparently never finished it. Such a writer, once he has told the one big story, is done for.

From the
American Mercury
, June, 1926, pp. 123–25.
A review of M
Y
F
IRST
T
HIRTY
Y
EARS
, by Gertrude Beasley; Paris, 1926

This book, I suspect, comes out with a Paris imprint because no American publisher would risk printing it. I offer the very first paragraph as a specimen of its manner:

This is free speaking, surely, but only a Comstock, reading it, would mistake it for an attempt at pornography. There is, in fact, not the slightest sign of conscious naughtiness in the book; it is the profoundly serious and even indignant story of a none too intelligent woman, lifted out of the lowest levels of the Caucasian race by her own desperate efforts, and now moved to ease her fatigue by telling how she did it. She is far too earnest to sophisticate her narrative; there is absolutely nothing in it that suggests the artful grimacing of the other Americanos printed by the philanthropic Three Mountains Press. When, looking back over her harsh and feverish life, she recalls an episode in the mire, she describes it simply and baldly, and in the words that clothed it in her own mind when she lived through it. Some of these words are ancient monosyllables, and very shocking. But they somehow belong in the story. If they were taken out, it would become, to that extent, unreal. As it is, it is as overwhelmingly real as a tax-bill.

La Beasley, it appears, came into the world on the Texas steppes, the ninth child of migratory and low-down parents. Her father was an unsuccessful farmer who practised blacksmithing on the side. During her first half dozen years the family moved three or four times. Always prosperity was beckoning in the next township, the next county. Children were born at every stop, and as the household increased it gradually disintegrated. Finally, the mother heaved the father out, took her brood to Abilene, and there set up a boarding-house. The sons quickly drifted away; one of the daughters became a lady of joy; the others struggled pathetically with piddling jobs. Gertrude was the flower of the flock. She worked her way through a preposterous “Christian college,” got a third-rate teacher’s certificate, and took a rural school. The country parents liked her; she kept their barbarous progeny in order, often by beating them. After a while she took other examinations, and was transferred to better schools. In the end, she went to Chicago, and there tackled pedagogy on a still higher level. For all I know, she may be teaching in that great city yet. She closes her record arbitrarily at the end of her thirtieth year. We see her, with money
saved, setting off for Japan. Her mother has prospered and is fat and happy. Her excommunicated father is dead. Her brothers and sisters are scattered all over the Southwest.

The book is full of sharp and tremendously effective character sketches, and the best of them all is that of Ma Beasley. How many of our novelists could beat it? I think of Dreiser and Anderson, and no other. The old woman is done unsparingly and almost appallingly. We are made privy to her profound and bellicose ignorance, her incurable frowsiness, her banal pride in her obscure and ignoble family, her relatives, her lascivious delight in witless and malicious scandal-mongering. But there is something heroic in her, too. Her struggle to cadge a living for her squirming litter takes on a quality that is almost dignity. She is shrewd, unscrupulous, full of oblique resource. Her battles with her husband, and particularly with him in his capacity of chronic father, often have gaudy drama in them. Consider her final and only effective device for birth control: a loaded shot-gun beside her bed! One longs to meet the old gal, and shake her red hand. She is obscene, but she is also curiously admirable.

The book is a social document of the utmost interest. It presents the first genuinely realistic picture of the Southern poor white trash ever heard of. The author has emancipated herself from her native wallow, but she does not view it with superior sniffs. Instead, she frankly takes us back to it, and tells us all she knows about its fauna, simply and honestly. There is frequent indignation in her chronicle, but never any derision. Her story interests her immensely, and she is obviously convinced that it should be interesting to others. I think she is right.

From the
American Mercury
, Dec., 1930, pp. 509–10.
A review of A B
IOGRAPHY OF
E
VERETT
W
ENTWORTH
H
ILL
, by Rex Harlow; Oklahoma City, 1930

One thinks of Oklahoma as a wilderness swarming with oil men daffy on golf, gin and women, but in truth it has begun to hatch idealists, and even to nourish a literature. Of the latter the author
of the present work is a talented ornament, and of the former its subject is a shining star. When I say that Mr. Hill has been president of Rotary International I have said enough to indicate his measure. It is an honor that could go only to a great dreamer—one inflamed and even tortured by a vision of human perfection, with peace reigning in the world, every radical behind the bars, and the Boy Scouts as ecumenical as the Universal Church—, but he must be a dreamer with a gift, also, for practical affairs. Mr. Hill is precisely such a man. He is, on the one hand, the Ice King of Oklahoma, with vast and growing interests, not only in a great chain of colytic ice-plants but also in a multitude of other humane industries, and he is, on the other hand, an impassioned and relentless laborer, in season and out of season, for the good of his fellow-men. It is instructive to read about such a character, for in his career there is inspiration for all of us.

The rising town of Russell, Kansas, nurtured him, and he came into the world on “a cold, bleak day” in 1884. His father, John Harris Hill, affectionately known as Harry, was a man of substance, and what is more, a man of exemplary habits.

The chance came soon enough: as a boy still in knee-pants he bought a farm, and by the time he got to high-school he was already on his way to fortune. His career there was a brilliant one, and among other things he learned the subtle art of resisting temptation. Says Mr. Harlow:

St. Anthony himself never faced a more dreadful temptation. Here was a chance to reach, at one stroke, a dizzy and singular eminence: in brief, to go down into the history of mankind as the first (and perhaps only) gentleman ever born on Kansan soil. But young Everett’s irresolution was only momentary. Almost at once his baser nature yielded to his higher. “There were certain principles that he must uphold in his life, regardless of how they affected other people.” So he stepped on the gas of his intellect and got the prize, and the wicked temptress thereupon disappears from the chronicle.

His career at the Cascadilla prep-school at Ithaca need not detain us, nor his brilliant years at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce in Philadelphia. He is, to date, its most distinguished graduate, but his distinction does not rest upon his feats as an undergraduate, but upon his services to humanity in later years. From Wharton he proceeded to the post-graduate seminary of the Standard Oil Company, and was presently performing prodigies of salesmanship in Georgia, but his heart was in the Middle West, and after looking about a bit he decided to settle in Oklahoma and grow up with the country. How, with two young confederates, W. T. Leahy and John Bowman, he established the Western Ice and Cold Storage Company at Shawnee; how he met and conquered the wicked R. L. Witherspoon, manager of an ice-plant belonging to the Anheuser-Busch Brewery in the same town; how Leahy and Bowman gradually faded from the picture, and Hill reigned alone; and how, from Shawnee, he extended his operations from town to town, until now he is the undisputed Ice King of that whole rich empire—for this thrilling story you must turn to
Mr. Harlow’s narrative. There, too, you will find the romantic story of his three marriages—one of which came to such wreck that “the newspapers of the world carried streamer headlines” about it, and he himself was impelled to “cancel all speaking engagements” and forced to “call upon all the philosophy at his command to keep from sinking into cynicism and losing faith in friendship.” And there, finally, you will find a detailed account of his services to Rotary, and hence to the Republic, to humanity, and to God.

The book has savor. It is a pity that there are not more like it. We have too many biographies of politicians and literati, and too few of really great men.