Second Mencken Chrestomathy (29 page)

This disdain of offices that, after all, are necessary, and might as well be faced with some show of cheerfulness, takes on the character of a cult in the United States, and the stray woman who attends to them faithfully is laughed at as a drudge and a fool, just as she is apt to be dismissed as a “brood sow” if she favors her lord with viable issue. One result is the notorious villainousness of American cookery—a villainousness so painful to a cultured uvula that a French hack-driver, if his wife set its masterpieces before him, would brain her with his linoleum hat. To encounter a decent meal in an American home of the middle class, simple, sensibly chosen and competently cooked, becomes almost as startling as to meet a Y.M.C.A. secretary in a bordello, and a good deal rarer. Such a thing, in most of the large cities of the Republic, scarcely has any existence. If the average American husband wants a sound dinner he must go to a restaurant to get it, just as if he wants to refresh himself with the society of charming and well-behaved children, he has to go to an orphan asylum. Only the recent immigrant can take his ease and invite his soul within his own house.

From the
Smart Set
, April, 1922, pp. 47–49

As I grow older, old tastes and enthusiasms fade miserably into memories—yellowed leaves fluttering from the dying tree. An observation mellow with platitude, and yet every man, as he makes it for himself, must be filled with a Goethean melancholy, a kind
of dismayed wonder. Am I actually the same mammal who, in the year 1894, was a baseball fan, and knew all the players without a score-card? It seems incredible—some outrageous fable out of history, like that about Washington and the cherry tree. I can imagine nothing more dismal today than a baseball game, or, for that matter, any sort of sport. The taste for it, the capacity for rising to its challenge, is as extinct in me as, say, the desire for immortality. I have absolutely no yearning to exist as a wraith for all eternity, and by the same token I have absolutely no yearning to play golf. Not long ago, when too much work at the desk—chained to a stool and a spittoon like a bookkeeper—brought me to a professor of internal medicine, and he prescribed more exercise, I turned to laying bricks to avoid the unbearable boredom of golf, tennis, and all the rest of it. In laying bricks there is at least some obvious intelligibility. One
makes
something, and it is there to look at and mull over after it is done. What is there after one has played a round of golf?

When I was a boy, bricklayers always fascinated me. No other mechanics wore such a lordly and distinguished air. Even in those days they got a great deal more money than other workingmen, and showed it in their manner. At noon, when the carpenters and tinners sat down in their slops to devour stale sandwiches out of tin cans, the bricklayers took off their white overalls, went to the Dutchman’s at the corner, and there dined decently on
Linsensuppe
and
Sauerbraten
, with large horns of lager to flush their esophagi. Bricklayers were the only workmen who had recognized gangs of slaves to serve them, to wit, the hod-carriers. In those far-off times, in the city where I lived, all hod-carriers were colored men—usually great, shiny fellows with immense knots of muscles in their legs and arms. The Irish had already become lawyers, city detectives, saloonkeepers, gang bosses, and
Todsaufer
for breweries. These colored men, in Summer, liked to work with their chests bare. Swarming up the ladders in long files, each with his heavy hod on his shoulder, they made an exotic, Egyptian picture. One could fancy them descended in a direct line from the Nubians who carried the hod when Cheops built his pyramid. The bricklayers, forever cursing them fluently, but all the same palpably friendly to them, fitted into the fancy perfectly. The mason
is the one workman who has resisted all change. He does his work today as he did it in Babylon, with deft hand and sharp eye. Compared with him, all the other mechanics of our time are upstarts: put him alongside the plumber, the structural iron worker, or the electrician. Moreover, what he does endures. The carpenter? A blower of soap bubbles, a maker of millinery! But the brick walls of Babylon stand to this day.

Laying bricks in my garden wall (to the great disquiet of my neighbor’s dog) I learned a number of things worth knowing. One (discovered almost instantly) was this: that there is much more to a handicraft than the simple exercise of muscle. To lay bricks decently one must be careful, calculating, far-seeing, alert, a bit shrewd. Distances must be figured out very accurately, else there will presently appear a gap that no conceivable brick will fit. One deals in hard and immovable lines, precise distances, mathematical levels. A wall that leans, save when age has pushed it over, is a wall that must come down. There can be no easy compromises with the plumb-bob, no rough and ready evasions of the plan. A week or two of hard effort left me with a respect for bricklayers vastly transcending my old admiration. I knocked off a day and went out to watch a gang of them laying the front wall of a somewhat elaborate moving-picture theatre—a complex maze of arches, cornices, pilasters. I had, even by this time, some professional comprehension of their problems. I stood gaping in the hot sun as they solved them—quickly, ingeniously, perfectly. But that, after all, was an easy job. The hardest of all, I have been told, is to lay the wall of a sewer manhole. It is all curves—and they do not all run the same way. The men who tackle it do it wholly by the eye. It is as difficult, in its way, as playing Bach.

Another thing I learned was that it was quite as easy, and a good deal more pleasant, to lay bricks in a good design as it was to lay them in a bad design. Do bricklayers know it? Do they take any actual delight in their craft? I believe fully that the better ones do. An architect once told me that every effort he made to use bricks beautifully, no matter how vexatious the technical problems it involved, met a hearty response from them, and eager coöperation—that they delighted in matching the colors of the new tapestry bricks, and worked joyfully on a fine chimney. Unluckily, they seldom
get the chance. Nine-tenths of the work they do for a living is shoddy—the uninspiring laying of bad bricks in inept and feeble designs. What could be more tiresome than running up a high blank wall? Or than encasing a skyscraper in its thin and puerile skin of clay? The only brickwork that can imaginably satisfy an honest bricklayer is honest brickwork—brickwork that stands upon its own bottom, and is precisely what it pretends to be. The main arch of that movie-parlor occupied four or five bricklayers for several days. It was a genuine arch, not a fake concealing concrete, and their delight in it was obvious. All day long their foreman hovered over them, watching every brick as it went into place, and buzzing all over the scaffolding with his blue-print and his level. I saw him regarding it from across the street when it was done, and the false work had been taken away. There was no mean satisfaction in his face, and it was no mean feat that satisfied him.

From the Chicago
Tribune
, Oct. 10, 1926

The dream of the Socialists, if any survive, is now realized among us, and even exceeded: bricklayers and plasterers are getting better pay than college professors. I am certainly no Socialist myself, but somehow this consummation gives me agreeable sensations. Is it foul, preposterous, inequitable, and against God? If so, on what ground? I know, like most men of my trade and interests, something about college professors, but, rather unusually, I also know something about bricklayers. My belief is that the latter are far more useful than the former, and that, taking one with another, they are also far more amiable and amusing fellows.

The pedagogue, being excessively literate, has long poisoned the world with highfalutin tosh about his high dignity and consequence, and especially about his altruism. He is commonly regarded, even by those who ought to know better, as a hero who has made vast sacrifices for the good of the rising generation and the honor of learning. He is, in fact, seldom anything of the sort. He
is simply a lazybones who has taken to the birch in order to escape implements of a greater laboriousness. The rising generation is not his pet, but simply his oyster. And he has no more respect for learning, in his average incarnation, than a congressman has for statecraft or a Prohibition agent or lawyer for law.

The world’s stock of knowledge is seldom augmented by pedagogues; far more often they oppose its increase in a violent and implacable manner. Turn to physics or metaphysics, as you please. How many of the salient philosophers have been professors of philosophy? Probably not twenty per cent. And how much of the recent advance in the physical sciences is due to men professionally devoted to teaching them? So little that it is hard to detect it. During the last quarter of a century chemistry has been completely overhauled. The axioms that it was grounded on in 1900 are now all abandoned. But at least three-fourths of the chemistry teachers of America are still teaching the chemistry of 1900, as nine-tenths of the literature teachers are still teaching the literary principles and ideas of 1885.

The pedagogue, however, is not my theme; what I presume to argue is that the rewards that men get in this world, taking averages, run with their merit and value as members of society, and that those who are badly paid are usually paid very justly. The doctrine to the contrary is widespread, and upsetting it would probably be an impossibility, for it is supported vigorously by the thousands who are flattered by it. Nevertheless, it remains hollow and invalid, and a huge body of facts stands against it. Of late it was mouthed very affectingly by homilists at the bier of the deceased Valentino. It was, it appeared, a disgrace to humanity that Valentino got such vast rewards, and so many pious and laborious men such small ones. His daily income was fifty times that of a bishop, a hundred times that of a pedagogue, and perhaps a thousand times that of a poet. And what did he do to earn it? He postured absurdly in nonsensical movies. He filled hundreds of thousands of female morons with gaudy and often salacious dreams. He destroyed throughout America, and even throughout the world, the respect that should go to dull and industrious men, painfully earning livings for their families.

With all due respect, bosh! Valentino was actually one of the
most useful men who ever lived in the federal union, and deserved every cent he took in. Into the life of a sordid, unimaginative and machine-bound people he brought a breath of romance. Thousands of poor girls doomed to marry book-keepers, garage-keepers and Kiwanians got out of his pulchritude a precious and lasting thrill. He lifted their eyes above the carpet sweeper and the slop pail. He made them, for a brief space, gloriously, royally, and even a bit sinfully happy. What bishop has ever done more for them, or at a lower rate per capita? And what pedagogue? And what poet?

The world has always rewarded its romance makers richly, and with sound reason. They are extremely valuable men. They take away the sting of life, and make it expansive and charming. They make the forlorn brigades of God’s images forget the miseries that issue out of hard work, mounting debts, disintegrating kidneys, and the fear of Hell. And their value, socially, obviously runs in direct proportion to the number of people they can reach and tickle. A Greenwich Village advanced poet, writing unintelligible Freudian strophes, is worth only the $9 a week that he gets, for his work brings joy to very few people. But an Edgar A. Guest, though his compositions may gag the judicious, earns every dollar of his millions, for when he lifts up his customers he lifts them up at wholesale, and the belch of satisfaction that follows is stupendous.

Here I may seem to argue that the worse the artist the nobler the man. I actually argue nothing of the sort. I am speaking, not of imponderable rewards, but of rewards in cash. The genuine artist gets something that the Valentinos and Guests can never hope to get. It is the colossal inner glow that goes with difficult work competently done. Something else also comes to him: the respect and esteem of his peers. He gathers fame, and it tends to be lasting. He cherishes the rare and immensely satisfying certainty that he will be remembered after he has gone from these scenes—that he is definitely and permanently rescued from the depressing swarm of anonymous men. The Valentinos and Guests get no such reward. Guest is admired by Rotarians, and probably enjoys it, but he would enjoy it infinitely more if he were admired by men of taste. Poor Valentino was an even worse case. His customers, in the main, were idiots, and he was well aware of it. He would have willingly swapped all his money for an hour of the
fame of Beethoven, for he was intelligent enough to see the adulation that surrounded him for what it was. But he was also intelligent enough to see that the fame of Beethoven was hopelessly beyond his reach, and so he raked in such rewards as actually came his way. It seems to me that he deserved them. He deserved them quite as much as any pedagogue in this glorious land deserves his $1,500 a year.

My experience of this worst of possible worlds convinces me that very few men are ever paid less than they are worth. Many are paid more, especially in America, where a great deal more money rolls in every year than the people of the country can earn, but not many are paid less. The cases that pop up almost always turn out, on inspection, to be extremely dubious. Some time ago, for example, the medical journals were full of sad articles on the meager earnings of the ordinary run of doctors—the modest fellows who confine themselves to neighborhood practise, and spend their days looking at tongues, dosing colds, and digging shoe buttons out of babies’ ears and noses. But it was quickly apparent, as the discussion developed, that most of these worthies were getting, not less than they deserved, but a great deal more. The trouble with them was simply that they were incompetent at their trade. Most of them knew no more about modern medicine than so many chiropractors or ambulance drivers. Their practise constituted a swindle, and their customers, becoming aware of the fact, turned to specialists,
i.e.
, to men better equipped to do what they were paid to do. These same specialists were rolling in money, for in medicine, as in all other professions, even the most modest competence is relatively rare, and the man who has it is thus heavily rewarded.