Second Mencken Chrestomathy (51 page)

After all, Munyon was probably right: there is yet hope. Perhaps Emerson and Whitman were right too; maybe even Sandburg is right. What ails us all is a weakness for rash over-generalization, leading to shooting pains in the psyche and delusions of divine persecution. Observing the steady and precipitate descent of promising postulants in beautiful letters down the steep, greasy chutes of the
Saturday Evening Post
, the
Metropolitan
, the
Cosmopolitan
and the rest of the Hearst and Hearstoid magazines, we are too prone, ass-like, to throw up our hands and bawl that all is lost, including honor. But all the while a contrary movement is in progress, far less noted than it ought to be. Authors with their pockets full of best-seller money are bitten by high ambition, and strive heroically to scramble out of the literary Cloaca Maxima. Now and then one of them succeeds, bursting suddenly into the light of the good red sun with the foul liquors of the depths still streaming from him, like a prisoner loosed from some obscene dungeon. Is it so soon forgotten that Willa Cather used to be one of the editors of
McClure’s
? That Dreiser wrote editorials for the
Delineator
and was an editor of dime novels for Street & Smith? That Huneker worked for the
Musical Courier
? That Amy Lowell imitated George E. Woodberry and Felicia Hemans? That E. W. Howe was born a Methodist? That Sandburg was once a Chautauqua orator? That Cabell’s first stories were printed in
Harper’s Magazine
?… As I say, they occasionally break out, strange as it may seem. A few
months ago I recorded the case of Zona Gale, emerging from her stew of glad books with “Miss Lulu Bett.” Now comes another fugitive, his face blanched by years in the hulks, but his eyes alight with high purpose. His name is Sinclair Lewis, and the work he offers is a novel called “Main Street.”

This “Main Street” I commend to your polite attention. It is, in brief, good stuff. It presents characters that are genuinely human, and not only genuinely human but also authentically American; it carries them through a series of transactions that are all interesting and plausible; it exhibits those transactions thoughtfully and acutely, in the light of the social and cultural forces underlying them; it is well written, and full of a sharp sense of comedy, and rich in observation, and competently designed. Superficially the story of a man and his wife in a small Minnesota town, it is actually the typical story of the American family—that is, of the family in its first stage, before husband and wife have become lost in father and mother. The average American wife, I daresay, does not come quite so close to downright revolt as Carol Kennicott, but that is the only exaggeration, and we may well overlook it. Otherwise, she and her Will are triumphs of the national normalcy—she with her vague stirrings, her unintelligible yearnings, her clumsy gropings, and he with his magnificent obtuseness, his childish belief in meaningless phrases, his intellectual deafness and nearsightedness, his pathetic inability to comprehend the turmoil that goes on within her. Here is the essential tragedy of American life, and if not the tragedy, then at least the sardonic farce; the disparate cultural development of male and female, the great strangeness that lies between husband and wife when they begin to function as members of society. The men, sweating at their sordid concerns, have given the women leisure, and out of that leisure the women have fashioned disquieting discontents. To Will Kennicott, as to most other normal American males, life remains simple; do your work, care for your family, buy your Liberty Bonds, root for your home team, help to build up your lodge, venerate the flag. But to Carol it is far more complex and challenging. She has become aware of forces that her husband is wholly unable to comprehend, and that she herself can comprehend only in a dim and muddled way. The ideas of the great world press upon her, confusing her
and making her uneasy. She is flustered by strange heresies, by romantic personalities, by exotic images of beauty. To Kennicott she is flighty, illogical, ungrateful for the benefits that he and God have heaped upon her. To her he is dull, narrow, ignoble.

Mr. Lewis depicts the resultant struggle with great penetration. He is far too intelligent to take sides—to turn the thing into a mere harangue against one or the other. Above all, he is too intelligent to take the side of Carol, as nine novelists out of ten would have done. He sees clearly what is too often not seen—that her superior culture is, after all, chiefly bogus—that the oafish Kennicott, in more ways than one, is actually better than she is. Her war upon his Philistinism is carried on with essentially Philistine weapons. Her dream of converting a Minnesota prairie town into a sort of Long Island suburb, with overtones of Greenwich Village and the Harvard campus, is quite as absurd as his dream of converting it into a second Minneapolis, with overtones of Gary, Ind., and Paterson, N.J. When their conflict is made concrete and dramatic by the entrance of a
tertium quid
, the hollowness of her whole case is at once made apparent, for this
tertium quid
is a Swedish trousers-presser who becomes a moving-picture actor. It seems to me that the irony here is delicate and delicious. Needless to say, Carol lacks the courage to decamp with her Scandinavian. Instead, she descends to sheer banality. That is, she departs for Washington, becomes a war-worker, and rubs noses with the suffragettes. In the end, it goes without saying, she returns to Gopher Prairie and the hearth-stone of her Will. The fellow is at least honest. He offers her no ignominious compromise. She comes back under the old rules, and is presently nursing a baby. Thus the true idealism of the Republic, the idealism of its Chambers of Commerce, its Knights of Pythias, its Rotary Clubs and its National Defense Leagues, for which Washington froze at Valley Forge and Our Boys died at Chateau Thierry—thus this genuine and unpolluted article conquers the phony idealism of Nietzsche, Edward W. Bok, Dunsany, George Bernard Shaw, Margaret Anderson, Mrs. Margaret Sanger, Percy Mackaye and the I.W.W.

But the mere story, after all, is nothing; the virtue of the book lies in its packed and brilliant detail. It is an attempt, not to solve the American cultural problem, but simply to depict with great
care a group of typical Americans. This attempt is extraordinarily successful. The figures often remain in the flat; the author is quite unable to get that poignancy into them which Dreiser manages so superbly; one seldom sees into them very deeply or feels with them very keenly. But in their externals, at all events, they are done with uncommon skill. In particular, Mr. Lewis represents their speech vividly and accurately. It would be hard to find a false note in the dialogue, and it would be impossible to exceed the verisimilitude of the various extracts from the Gopher Prairie paper, or of the sermon by a Methodist dervish in the Gopher Prairie Wesleyan cathedral, or of a speech boy by a boomer at a banquet of the Chamber of Commerce. Here Mr. Lewis lays on with obvious malice, but always he keeps within the bounds of probability, always his realism holds up. It is, as I have said, good stuff. I have read no more genuinely amusing novel for a long while. The man who did it deserves a hearty welcome. His apprenticeship in the cellars of the tabernacle was not wasted.

From the Baltimore Evening Sun, March 2, 1925

L
ITTLE DOES
the public reck how much of the news it devours every day is manufactured by entrepreneurs. Not infrequently I have detected as much as a whole page of it in the eminent
Sunpaper
, a journal more suspicious than most: it is far worse in others. One reads that the representative of a national organization is before Congress demanding this or that radical change in the laws; the plain fact is that the national organization consists of its representative—that the rest of the members are simply dolts who have put up the money for his salary and expenses in order to bathe themselves in the glare of his publicity. One hears that a million children in Abyssinia are starving, that a fund of $5,000,000 is being raised to succor them, that Baltimore’s quota is $216,000; the plain fact is that an accomplished drive manager has got a new job. One hears that “the women of the United States” are up in arms about this or that; the plain fact is that eight fat women, meeting in a hotel parlor, have decided to kick up some dust.

It is extraordinarily hard for newspapers to distinguish what is real from what is false in such movements. Those that are private enterprises are commonly run by very cunning fellows, male or female; they are always apparently backed by persons of the highest standing; the demands that they make, for money and support, are often based upon grounds that seem to be very virtuous. Their promoters do not simply beg for space; they make news—and news is news, whatever its origin. The eight fat women, meeting in their hotel parlor, find it easy to alarm the politicians, who are not only dreadful cowards but almost unbelievable asses. Something thus
gets afoot. Governors jump; legislators rush through new laws; judges respond to “public sentiment.” How is a newspaper to avoid reporting such stuff? Yet it is often as bogus, at bottom, as a theatrical press-agent’s report that a Follies girl has lost a $100,000 diamond necklace or is engaged to a professor in Harvard University.

I believe, however, that something might be done, at least against the bolder and more flagrant performers. What comes over the wires, perhaps, is beyond careful investigation, but every newspaper might at least keep watch in its own town; if all did so, the daily stream of blather would lessen by at least eighty per cent. I am in a mood of constructive criticism, and offer concrete suggestions to the two
Sunpapers.

These rules are not unreasonable. No honest organization, devoted sincerely to good works, could plausibly object to them. But they would fetch many organizations which now prey upon the sentimentality and credulity of the public, and they would put a great many professional uplifters out of business in the community. My scheme is rough, and perhaps defective. I present it as it stands, not only to the two
Sunpapers
but also to the Society of American Newspaper Editors, which now labors with nonsensical codes of ethics—jewelry and fur coats for a profession which is just
learning to wash behind the ears. Let learned counsel lay their heads together, and perfect the imperfect. The public deserves a rest from pious and highfalutin tosh. Until newspapers learn how to keep it out of their news columns, completely and permanently, they will fail to discharge one of their principal functions: the detection and exposure of frauds. Suppose a physician let a chiropractor and a Christian Scientist bark and catch in his waiting room?

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, April 12, 1937. The existing Constitution of Maryland was ratified on Sept. 18, 1867. It voices the resentment of the people of the State against military control during the Civil War, and some of its provisions are quite extraordinary. The Declaration of Rights, for example, provides that the rights to jury trial, to habeas corpus, and to free speech and free assembly shall prevail “in time of war as in time of peace,” and Article VI provides that “whenever the ends of government are perverted” the people may overthrow the existing government and set up a new one, and that “the doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.” Article XIV of the Constitution proper provides for calling a constitutional convention every twenty years after 1867. But there was no such convention in 1927 or 1947. In 1937 I proposed my new Constitution. Only a few of its provisions are given; the rest were less novel. It got some attention among judges and lawyers through the country, and I received some interesting commentaries on it, but in Maryland it went almost unnoticed and none of its innovations has been adopted since, or even discussed