Books: Nonsenseorship
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G. G. Putnam >> Nonsenseorship
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In those days human sympathy was wider. F. M. W. seemed in many
respects a matter-of-fact man, but it was he who chanced upon the 59th
street Circle just before dawn and paused to call the attention of all
bystanders to the statue of Columbus.
"Look at him," he said. "Christopher Columbus! He discovered America
and then they sent him back to Spain in chains."
He wept, and we realized for the first time that under a rough
exterior there beat a heart of gold.
LITERATURE AND THE BASTINADO
[Illustration: Ben Hecht chopping away at the ever-forgiving and
all-condoning Bugaboo of Puritanism.]
BEN HECHT
Surveying the trend of modern literature one must, unless one's mental
processes be complicated with opaque prejudices, wonder at the
provoking laxity of the national censorship. I write from the
viewpoint of an aggrieved iconoclast.
It becomes yearly more obvious that the duly elected, commissioned and
delegated high priests of the nation's morale are growing blind to the
dangers which assail them. If not, then how does it come that such
enemies of the public weal as H. L. Mencken, Floyd Dell, Sherwood
Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Dos Passos, Mr. Cabell, Mr. Rascoe, Mr.
Sandburg, Mr. Sinclair Lewis are not in jail? How does it come
Professor Frinck of Cornell is not in jail? Bodenheim, Margaret
Anderson, Mr. John Weaver are not in jail.
Were I the President of the United States sworn to uphold the dignity
of its psychopathic repressions, pledged on a stack of Bibles to
promote the relentless pursuit and annihilation of other people's
happiness, I would have begun my reign by clapping H. L. Mencken into
irons forthwith. Mr. Cabell, I would have sent to Russia. Sherwood
Anderson I would have boiled in oil.
But what is the situation? Observe these gentlemen and their kin
enjoying not only their bodily liberty but allowed to prosper on the
royalties derived from the sale of incendiary volumes designed to
destroy the principles upon which the integrity of the commonwealth
depends. The spectacle is one aggravating to an iconoclast. There is
no affront as distressing as the tolerance of one's enemies.
Mr. H. L. Mencken is, perhaps, the outstanding victim of this
depravity of indifference which more and more characterizes the enemy.
Mr. Mencken, hurling himself for ten years against the Bugaboo of
Puritanism--a fearless and wonderfully caparisoned Knight of Alarums,
Prince of Darkness, Evangel of Chaos--Mr. Mencken pauses for a moment
out of breath casting about slyly for fresher and deadlier weapons and
lo! the Bugaboo with a gentle smile reaches out and embraces him and
plants the kiss of love on both his cheeks, strokes his hair
wistfully, and invites him to sit on the front porch. Alas, poor
Mencken! It is the fate that awaits us all. Zarathustra in the
market-place feeding ground glass to the populace is gathered to the
bosom of the City Fathers and gleefully enrolled as a member of the
Guild.
This is no idle rhetoric. Dissent in the Republic has come upon hard
ways. Ten years ago the name of Mencken would have stood against the
world. Today no college freshman, no lowly professor, no charity
worker, or local alderman too puritanical to do him homage.
Whereupon the argument is that an era of enlightenment has set in,
that this same Mencken and his contemporary throat-cutters have
vanquished the Bugaboo, and that, as a result, a spirit of high
intellectual life prevails through the land. The proletaire have risen
and are thumbing their nose at the gods. Brander Matthews has sent in
a five years' subscription to the Little Review. The Comstocks
overcome with the vision of their ghastly complexes are appealing to
Sigmund Freud for advice and relief. But the argument is superficial.
"Victory!" cry the iconoclasts grinding their teeth at the absence of
a foe.
But it is a victory that rankles in the soul. The foe is not
vanquished but, seemingly, bored to death has fallen asleep. It is, in
any event, a phenomenon. Many generalizations offer themselves as
solace.
The first paradox of this phenomenon is that Puritanism, beaten to a
pulp by an ever-increasing herd of first, second, third, and fourth
rate iconoclasts, has triumphed completely in the legislatures of the
country. With every new volume exposing the gruesome mainsprings of
the national virtue, further taboos and restrictions crowd themselves
into the statute books.
In a sense it would seem as if the _bete populaire_, becoming
increasingly drunk with the consciousness of its own power, is
elatedly preoccupied in cutting off its own nose, tying itself up into
knots, and kicking itself in the rear, proclaiming simultaneously and
in triumphant tones, "Observe how powerful I am. I can pass laws
making ipecac a compulsory diet."
Whereupon the laws are passed and the noble masses with heroic
grimaces fall to devouring ipecac, to the confusion of all free-born
stomachs. In fact this species of ballot flagellatism, this diverting
pastime of hitting itself on the head with a stuffed club has
gradually elevated the body politic to the enviable position occupied
by the all-powerful king of Fernando Po. This mysterious being lives
in the lowest depths of the crater of Riabba. His power is in direct
ratio to the taboos which hem him in. Convinced that bathing is a
crime against his dignity, that sunlight is incompatible with his
royal lineage; convinced that his prestige is dependent upon a weekly
three days' fast and a cautious observation of the taboos against all
variants of social intercourse--piously convinced of these astounding
things, the all-powerful monarch of Fernando Po sits year in and year
out motionless on his throne in the lowest depths of the crater of
Riabba, awed by himself and overcome with the contemplation of his
all-powerfulness. We have here, I trust, an illuminating analogy.
The Republic, like this King of Fernando Po, imposes daily upon itself
new taboos, new rituals. Yet there is the phenomenon of its tolerance
toward the idol breakers. From the lowest depths of the crater of
Riabba in which he sits enthroned the monarch of the Laongos condemns
to death with a twitch of his brows all who seek to question the
sanctity of the taboos. But this other occupant of the crater of
Riabba-our Republic-raises gentle eyes to the idol wreckers, to the
taboo destroyers. An occasional, "tut tut" escapes him. And nothing
more.
Whereupon the argument is that our monarch of the pit is an impotent
fellow. Again, a superficial deduction. For behold the censorships
with which he belabors himself.
Censorship, almost extinct in the restriction of the national
literature, thrives in every other field. Censorships abound. Food,
drink, movies, politics, baseball, diversion, dress--all these are
under the jurisdiction of a continually aroused censorship. The
pulpits and editorial pages emit sonorous hymns of taboo. Every
caption writer is an Isaiah, every welfare worker fancies himself the
handwriting on the wall. Unchallenged by the vote of the masses or by
any outward evidence of mass dissent, the platitudes pile up, the
nation is filled from morning to morning with stentorian clamor.
Puritanism in a frenetic finale approaches a climax.
But, and we tiptoe towards the crux of this phenomenon, the Bacchanal
of Presbyterianism is an artificial climax. Unlike the day of the
later Caesars, the populace does not abandon itself in imitation of
its Neros and Caligulas. Instead, we have the spectacle of a populace
apathetic toward the spirit of its time.
The Puritan debauch is the logical culmination of the anti-Paganism
and backworldism launched two hundred centuries back. The Christian
ethic, to the bewildered chagrin of its advocates, has triumphed. Not
a triumph this time that offers itself as a cloak for Jesuitism,
colonization, or empire juggling. But an unimpeachable triumph
entirely beyond the control of the most adroit of the choir-Machiavellis.
In other words the body politic finds itself betrayed by its own
platitudes. A moral frenzy animates its horizon. But it is a frenzy of
idea escaped control, an idea grown too huge and luminous to direct
any longer. The moral frenzy of the war was the moral frenzy of such
an idea--virtue become a Frankenstein. This virtue--the Golden Rule,
the Thou Shalt Nots, the thousand and one unassailable maxims, adages,
old saws invented chiefly for the protection of the weak and the
solace of the inferior--this virtue has taken itself out of the hands
of its hitherto adroit worshippers. A snowball rolling uphill toward
God and gathering furious dimensions, it has escaped the shrewd
janitors of orthodoxy who from age to age were able to keep it within
bounds.
Thus in the war, confronted with the platitude that the world must be
made safe for democracy and with the further platitude that democracy
and equality were the goals of Christianity and with a dozen similar
platitudes none of which had any authentic contact with the life of
the nation, thus confronted, the proletaire was forced to lift itself
up by its boot straps and rise to the defence of a Frankenstein
idealism of which it was the parent-victim. Disillusionment with the
causes of the war has, however, served no high purpose. The
Frankenstein God, the Frankenstein virtue is still enshrined in the
Heaven of the Copy Books. And we find the proletaire still
worshipping, albeit with the squirmings and grimacings, a horrible
idealization of itself.
The Thou Shalt Nots have escaped. They increase and multiply with a
life of their own. Logic is the most irresponsible of the manias which
operate in life. Logic demands that ideas be carried to their climax
and this demand, as inexorable as Mr. Newton's law, has made a
Frankenstein of the unsuspecting Galilean.
Hypnotized by the demands of logic, bewildered by the contemplation of
this code of backworldism which he himself seems somehow to have
created, the ballot maniac stands riveted at the polls and sacrifices
to his own image by hitting himself on the head with further virtuous
restrictions--a gesture necessary to prevent his own image from giving
him the lie. He must, in other words, prove himself as virtuous,
whenever public demonstration demands, as the Frankenstein platitudes
proclaim him to be.
The Puritanism of the nation, remorselessly upheld by its laws and its
public factotums is an extraneous and artificial pose into which the
blundering proletaire has tricked itself. There are innumerable
consequences. We have, firstly, the spectacle of the masses disporting
themselves slyly in the undertow of cynicism.
"Modesty," bellows Sir Frankenstein from pulpit and press, "is a
cardinal virtue." "Right O," echoes the feminine contingent and
promptly bobs its hair, shortens its skirts, and rolls down its socks.
"Abstinence, sobriety, are an economic and spiritual necessity,"
bellows Sir Frankenstein. Whereupon the male contingent votes the land
dry and gets drunk.
From the foregoing we may derive glimmers of truth concerning the
public tolerance of iconoclasts. "Main Street," a volume fathered by
Mencken, Freud, and the other Chaos-Bringers, leaps into prominence as
a best seller. It is devoured and acclaimed by the ballot maniac who
reads it, smacks his lips over its "truths" and sallies forth to vote
further canonizations of hypocrisy into the legal code. Even I, who
ten years ago prided myself upon being as indigestible a type of the
Incoherent Young as the land afforded, find myself for one month a
best seller [Footnote: "Erik Dorn," Mr. Hecht's first novel.--Ed.] on
my native heath. Woe the prophet who is with honor in his country! He
will flee in disgust in quest of hair shirts and a bastinado.
Thus, the citizens. With the left hand they greet the iconoclasts and
hand them royalties. With the right hand they pass further laws for
the iconoclasts to denounce. A phenomenon results. With the thought of
the masses becoming more and more neutral in the highty-tighty war
between Good and Evil, the laws created by these same masses grow more
and more rabid. But it must be borne in mind that although the masses,
carried away by flagellant impulses, assist in the creation of these
laws, in the main, they are laws, self-created platitudes which give
birth to new platitudes. Logic is the most pernicious of the Holy
Ghosts responsible for the conception of undesirable Gods.
I am prepared now to make further revelations. The foregoing, although
bristling with inconsistencies, seems to me, nevertheless, a ground
work. I will begin the apocalyptic finale with a resume of the
choir-leaders, the high priests, the Mahatmas of Sir Frankenstein.
Item one: It is obvious that the laws of the land being the ghastly
climaxes of artificial logic and not of human desires or biological
necessities, therefore the salaried apostles of these laws must
function similarly outside nature.
The high priests, it develops indeed upon investigation, diligently
lickspittling to Sir Frankenstein, have no following. The masses are
not going to Heaven in their wake. They, the high priests, are
magically out of touch with their worshippers. And from day to day
they grow further out of touch until they are to be seen high in the
clouds tending the fugitive altars that are soaring toward God on
their own power.
These high priests are the creatures elected, commissioned and
delegated by the proletaire to perpetuate its grandiose and impossible
image. And this they do. They are the custodians of the public morals,
meaning the protectors of the huge trick mirror out of which the
complexes, neurasthenias, and morbid fears of the public stare back at
it in the guise of Virtue, Honor, Decency, and Love. These custodians
are also, to leap into the denouement, the censors here under
discussion; censors not only tolerated but insisted upon by the people
to annoy and harass them and inspire them to further ballot
flagellations in order that they, the people, may be spared the
disaster of discovering themselves different from what two hundred
centuries of self-idealization have driven them into believing
themselves to be.
This, the high priests do. In every village, hamlet and farm they have
their say. They chastise. They make things fit for decent people to
see or wear or drink, and people flattered to death at the idea of
being considered decent submit piously to the distastement
infringements and taboos.
All-powerful are the censors. But despite this all-powerfulness they
labor under a wretched handicap. They are stupid. Stupidity is the
paradox to be found most often in all-powerful Gods. They are stupid,
the censors. And the Devil is clever. The Seven Arts which are the
Seven Incarnations of Dionysius, the Seven Masks of an unrepentant
Lucifer, elude them in the horrific struggle. Or at least partially
elude them. Occasionally a cloven hoof is spied and sliced to the
bone.
* * * * *
We return now with proud and tranquil ease to the beginning of this
tale, to the phenomenon of a tolerated literary iconoclasm in a land
alive with caterwaulings of virtue.
As hinted above not all the Arts escape, nor do any of them escape all
the time. Music, whose sly and terrible vices were for centuries
unperceived by the high priests, has been brought to earth in places.
"Jazz Incites to Sin. Syncopation is Devil's Ally." Discovered! One
reads the morning paper and feels a return of hope. The High Priests
are aroused. They have disembowelled an ally. There is hope then of a
bloody fray. Another Edition and they will be on our own heads,
swinging their snickersnees. Mencken will be arrested and burned in
public. Anderson will be strung up by the heels and his estates
confiscated. There will be war--red war, and we in the army of the
iconoclasts growling impotently at each other will face about and have
at them with hullaballo and manifesto and snickersnee in turn.
"Nude Painting Banned From Window. Nab Store Keeper." We read on. The
snickersnee swings towards the vitals of Hollywood. "Movie Magnate
Charges Work of Art Cut; Sues Censors. Seeks Redress in Courts."
Valhalla! They are closing in. Another forced march and they are upon
us.
Alas, our coffee cools as we wait impatiently for the alarms to sound.
We are intact. Mencken still lives. Anderson still lives. The tide of
battle sweeps us by, passes us up, and there's the end to it.
Again, our victory rankling, we cast about for reasons. Do not the
censors read our books? Yes, the censors read our books. And
scratching their necks pensively and immediately below their left
ears, the censors fall asleep. Our books were over their heads. Our
broadsides aimed for their vitals whizzed by their ears and lulled
them into slumber. A hideous victory is in our hands.
Voltaire blew God out of France for a century. But that was because
God was still an emotion in his day and not a Frankenstein of logic.
He blew up the high priests. But that was because the high priests
still had enough intelligence in that time to know what constituted an
epoch-shaking explosion.
Our enemies the censors, the hallelujah flingers, commissioned,
elected, delegated by the proletaire are not worthy our steel. Having
no longer any contact with the masses, they need no genius to
perpetuate themselves. The masses care not what they are so long as
they are. Figureheads for Frankenstein, they need only shriek
themselves blue and their will, will be done. Shrewdness,
intelligence, are qualities non-essential since virtue, no longer
feeding upon shrewdness and intelligence, fattens upon its own
monstrous logic.
The high priests are vital to the lie which man has created for
himself as a heaven and out of which his own image leers godlike back
at him. They are vital for nothing else.
Therefore our immunity. Since they need no grey matter, they have
none. And unable to understand us, they ignore us. And if we grow too
insistent, as has Mencken, they put an end to the business by
embracing us and pulling our fangs by disgusting us with their
stupidity.
Given free reign under the conditions herein outlined, the youth of
the land is abandoning itself to a safe and sane orgie of iconoclasm.
Satanic epigrams cloud the air of the very market-place. Poets, column
conductors, hack literary reviewers, hack romancers, lecturers,
realists, imagists, and all are gloatingly engaged in sacking the
Temple, in thumbing their nose at the taboos.
In fact so widespread is the unlicensed and unrebuked iconoclasm of
the day that a great disgust is being born in the hearts of the
pioneers. Every dog has his paradox, every hack his anti-Christ, they
bewail. And surveying the horizon despairingly they see no enemy
rushing upon them with the wind.
There are, of course, scattered here and there among the keepers of
the Seal, observant priests. They omit isolated groans. They launch
Quixotic sorties. But they retire and collapse without waiting combat.
To their denunciation of "degenerate, sinful and corrupting cesspools
of alleged art" (I quote from a review of some of my own work
appearing in an issue of the Springfield (Ill.) _Republican_),
there is no answering response. They are left abandoned, the Fiery
Cross burning down to their fingers and flickering out. They cannot be
glorified into an enemy.
On the whole I fear for the result. Ideas favor a bloody battle-ground
for birthplace. And here we stand, drawn up in battle array
discharging broadsides of "Winesburgs, Ohios," "Main Streets,"
"Cornhuskers" and the like; flying our colors valiantly--but there is
no battle. The enemy sleeps. Or the enemy wakes up and issues an
indifferent invitation that we stay to tea.
Comrade Dreiser may demur at all this and, peeling his vest, reveal us
wounds, honorable wounds acquired in honorable battle. And further, he
may regale us with tales of hair shirts and bastinadoes suffered by
him in the Republic. But alas, he is Telemachus, grey-bearded and full
of memories. And the youth of Athens, fallen upon softer ways, listen
with envious incredulity to such tall tales.
THE WOMAN'S PLACE
[Illustration: Ruth Hale as a XXth Century woman guarding the Home Brew.]
RUTH HALE
At last the women of this country are about to perform a great
service--not one of those courtesy services about which so much is so
volubly said and so little is done in repayment--but a good sturdy
performance, that will probably bring these magnificent men folks
right to their knees.
They are going to teach the unfortunates how to live under
prohibitions and taboos. Of course there has never been any
prodigality of freedom in this country--or any other--but what there
was belonged to the men. The women had to take to the home and stay
there. So the two sexes adjusted themselves to life with this
difference, that the women had to do all the outwitting and
circumventing, all the little smart twists and turns, all the cunning
scheming by which people snatch off what they want without appearing
to, whereas men got their much or little by prosily sticking their
hands out for it.
This developed, naturally, not only somewhat diverse temperaments, hut
also greatly diverse equipments. When men cannot get what they want
now by either asking or paying for it, they have no more resources.
Bless them, they must return into the home, where the secret has been
perfected for centuries on centuries of how to hoard a private stock
and how to find a bootlegger. Under the steadily growing
nonsenseorship regime, they are obliged to come and take lessons from
the lately despised group of creatures to whom nonsenseorship is a
well-thumbed story. If the world outside the home is to become as
circumscribed and paternalized as the world inside it, obviously all
the advantage lies with those who have been living under
nonsenseorship long enough to have learned to manage it.
Thus woman moves over from her dull post as keeper of the virtues to
the far more important and exciting post as keeper of the vices. It is
not an ideal power which she thus acquires. But then none of this is
about ideals. This is just a little practical 'study in what is going
to happen, and why. Taboos never yet have added a cubit to the stature
of the soul of humanity. They have nearly always been the chattering
children of fear and pure idiocy. They have always tried to throw the
race back on to all fours, and have left the nobility of standing
upright wholly out of account.
The taboos which have surrounded women time out of mind have been so
puerile and imbecile that one quite non-partisanly wonders why on
earth they have been allowed to continue. A second thought
demonstrates, of course, that fear has had the major part in it, and
that skill in cheating has gone so far as practically to nullify the
privations of the taboo.
But one must put by this hankering after nobility, and accept the
plain fact that fear is the dominant human motive. What the race would
do if fear were conquered, or at least faced sternly eye to eye, is
staggering to contemplate. Perhaps God looks upon that vision. It may
be that which gives Him patience. But man at best gives it one
terrified squint in a lifetime. All behavior must take fear into
account.
The man who lately brought back from the Amazon Basin news of a
fear-dispelling drug used there by a savage tribe, would have been
carried home from the steamer on the shoulders of his compatriots if
for one moment he had been believed. His drug may do all he claimed
for it, but a country which boasts a Volstead in full stride cannot
force itself to take him seriously. The only likely part of his story
was that the tribes who prepared the drug would put to instant death
any woman who happened either to learn how to prepare it or did
actually get some of it into her.
We recognize that part as familiar. We have made the same fight here
against the fearless woman as the savages made on the Amazon. The only
thing we were never smart enough to apply was the moral of the Kipling
story about the two greatest armies in the world: the men who believed
that they could not die till their time came, against those who wanted
to die as soon as possible. It was from one or the other of these two
kinds of fearlessness that women have trained themselves in wisdom.
This is the wisdom which moves them to secret laughter when they find
their brothers in the throes of Volstead and Krafts. And it is from
this wisdom that they will teach them all to be happy, though
prohibited.
It is an unfortunate fact that humanity will not behave itself. It
does not really warm to any of the current virtues. When the
Eighteenth Amendment says it must not drink hard liquors, its inner
heart's desire is to drink them, even beyond its normal, and usual
capacity. Prohibition is, it is true, one of the strikingly
superimposed virtues. It has nothing whatever to recommend it in man's
true feelings, and this is not true of many of the civilized traits,
though probably not any of them meets with entire approval. We do
think that before anything approaching a real art of living is
perfected among us, the present ethical system will be wholly
outmoded. Meanwhile, pressure brought to bear on the least welcome of
all virtues is merely going to make bad behavior worse. But that is
Volstead's business, not ours. Let him do battle with that octopus,
while we bring up reinforcements to his enemies. Women know all about
how to be bad and comfortable while the law goes on trying to make
them good and otherwise. Just look at a few of the things on which
they have cut their teeth.
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