In the Public Domain: The American Clowns of Criticism

Saroyan published fewer works in 1929 than in 1928, but much like those rookie-year pieces, this an ambitious piece of writing that both does and doesn't fit in with his later production. Saroyan is taking on the critics, arguably the three most widely-known critics and editors in the US at the time, in a piece that does feel somewhat like a literary young buck trying to get the attention of the big names.

It doesn’t seem to have worked, but it also doesn’t seem to have done any damage.

The three critics, E. Haldeman-Julius, H.L. Mencken, and George Jean Nathan, are considered some of the most important cultural figures of the time, and their influence can even be felt today.

Haldeman-Julius is best remembered for his series of Little Blue Books and as an ardent atheist and socialist writer. H.L. Mencken has been called one of the most significant intellectuals of the first half of the 20^th century. His writing ranged from journalism (including widely-reprinted coverage of the Scopes Monkey Trial) to scholarly works like The American Language. George Jean Nathan was a towering figure in magazine writing, criticism, and editing.

George Jean Nathan and Mencken worked together often, first as the editors of The Smart Set, a leading literary magazine, and later co-founding The American Mercury. The Mercury had a tremendous influence on Saroyan –

“But when with George Jean Nathan (Mencken) founded The American Mercury, I studied the first issue in 1924 from cover to cover at the Public Library. Writing on an Underwood upright typewriter at 3204 El Monte Way, I began to send him essays, which came back in terrible silence in the self-addressed stamped envelope, each manuscript with a clipped-on Rejection Slip.”

Saroyan mentioned writing “The American Clowns of Criticism” as well in the same piece (republished in Brian Darwent’s Saroyan: Memoirs) –

“…I got mad and wrote an attack on Mencken, Nathan, Haldeman-Julius and God – but neither The Bookman, Scribner’s, The North American Review, Century, nor any of the other quality magazines wanted the thing.”

It may be that Saroyan forgot that Overland published the piece. It may also be that Saroyan didn’t consider Overland to be a ‘quality magazine’ though its heritage and connections to legends like Bret Harte and Mark Twain certainly would have appealed to Saroyan.  

There does not appear to be any sort of coverage of Saroyan’s article. Overland was widely-known nation-wide as the leading magazine for promoting California literary voices, but sales were largely in California and along the West Coast, and the three mentioned critics were all located on the East Coast, and largely focused on New York. The piece also doesn’t seem to have damaged Saroyan’s reputation with at least two of the subjects of the piece. H.L. Mencken and Saroyan met and discussed a great many things. By the late 1930s, George Jean Nathan had become Saroyan’s most ardent supporter, especially in the theatre, where he was instrumental in gaining Saroyan entry into the Broadway scene.

The American Clowns of Criticism

Among the so-called sophisticated Americans of today no one seems at all reluctant to laugh at God and his only begotten son Jesus of Nazareth, at Mrs. Coolidge or any other person or thing which was heretofore ordinarily respected. But we find none of these same people the least inclined to laugh at those few gentlemen who have done, and are doing, the most to make God and Coolidge seem wholly null and void.

It is strange our critics continually find so much to say against the Deities, the Presidents and the Ten Commandments. When one looks at these several things broadmindedly, one cannot help admitting they are quite a necessity and fairly justified.

Then it must be that our critics are writing for an audience. There are evidently people in America who imagine they are becoming beautifully civilized merely because they laugh at things Babbitt is supposed to be worshipping, but really isn’t. If we happened to be living in an age of darkness and the land was flooded with such a thing as mania fanatica then, naturally, it would be quite the thing for either Mencken, Nathan or Haldeman-Julius to thumb his nose at god and to play tricks on His Bible. But in this day of hectic happiness our extremely religious are enjoying themselves tolerably well. And hasn’t Mr. Sinclair Lewis shown us that even a Rev. Gantry enjoys the BEST in life? In view of this, nose thumbing seems somewhat uncalled for. These three gentlemen are then probably trying to please an audience. And it must be a most singularly uncivilized audience, composed mostly of the type of people who find it highly gratifying to assume they belong to the sophisticated minority and who suppose themselves not to be Babbitts. They are the ones who want to be among the few with sense enough to laugh at things like God and Coolidge and Virtue. It never occurs to them, apparently, that such laughter is neither wholesome nor pleasant. In fact, that it is not laughter at all, but is sneering and snickering, and a thing of no good to the soul.

The point is: It would be perfectly fine for these people to laugh at the Deity and the President were it not for the fact that in jeering one Diety they are worshipping another, which is very bad business.

And so we find that if a person of this type reads, for instance, that it is Mr. Mencken’s honest opinion that God is a charlatan and a foreigner, he immediately takes just that for granted, quits his God, and commences worshipping Mr. Mencken instead. This is an uncivilized thing for a person to do. It is a thing only intellectual Babbitts do. A person who doesn’t believe in a God certainly has no business worshipping a mere man. It is twice as intelligent for a person to worship himself than to worship another man. That is why Mencken, Nathan and Haldeman-Julius are only twice as intelligent as their humble worshippers.

For if it is a simple thing for Mr. Haldeman-Julius to criticize God, it ought to be a simpler thing for me to criticize Mr. Haldeman-Julius,

In the first place all three of these critics are unreasonably intolerant in almost everything they write, and more or less prejudiced as well. Mr. Mencken is known as the greatest American critic since Thomas Paine. That means very little. Henry Ford is known as the greatest Ford manufacturer since the beginning. Mr. G. J. Nathan is famous as the only theatrical critic in the history of the world who makes it a point to criticize everything that he happens to view. That, too, is nothing, and Mr. Nathan’s method is neither a secret nor a puzzle. It remains only for another to try to be as unreasonably critical as Mr. Nathan without losing his sense of humor. Then there is Mr. E. Haldeman-Julius who is also almost famous and quite up in the world, in that his name appears all over every little blue book printed. Moreover numerous people in America read publications of his which are allowed no name other than E. Haldeman-Julius weekly. E, Haldeman-Julius Monthly, E. Haldeman-Julius Quarterly, and so on. It would seem that the only thing left in the world that counts is E. Haldeman-Julius. He tells his good audience that his publications are out to kill bunk, sham, and baloney.

Taking each of these worthy gentlemen separately, first it will be Mr. Henry Louis Mencken who is undoubtedly a very clever gentleman and who will never be forgotten for founding and editing (and how?) one of the most civilized magazines the world has ever known. It would seem by the way, that the reason a great number of young fellows have nothing to say against Mr. Mencken is because they want to get their names on the pages of his Mercury and spend all their energy and time in that occupation, impossible as it is.

There can be no denying that, at first, there was a delightful charm in his hilariously impish maneuvers and his agreeable jargon. It must have been a rare pleasure for many of his nature, who lacked his ability and fearlessness, to watch him as he went through life making faces at everything most people were afraid to make faces at. But today that old charm of Mr. Mencken is dead, or at least fast dying. Let me explain.

It was either Mr. Mencken, himself, or his good friend, Mr. Nathan, who remarked in the pages of the Mercury that it would be quite idiotic for anyone to suppose George Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue, for example, could be enjoyed if it were played twice in one evening or twice in one week or even twice in one month. And yet Mr. Mencken does not notice that his rhapsody has been played so many times in the same manner and with so little variation that familiar listeners know both the tune and the technique by heart.

His habit of calling all things by their proper names (even if he must resort to German to remain within the bounds of propriety) and of making fun of the things his nature cannot help making fun of, is highly entertaining to most readers, until, of course, they find they have read too much of him. His Prejudices have been admirably named in order to protect anything written therein, but in the handling of his subjects he does not seem to remember that he is actually prejudiced; and he makes the mistake of taking himself very seriously, which is probably the only thing he does take seriously, His generalizations often annoy the reader who is not fond of unfounded statements, even if they do very often sound really clever.

When it became evident that Mr. Mencken was 100 per cent against everything and everybody except probably a few things such as George Jean Nathan, a large following delighted in his attitude of healthy boyishness and those who did not, or could not, imitate him in writing, imitated him in their private lives. This was just another case of one more God slowly but surely making his man in his own image.

A little later when it was observed that the same things were being said in the same old unnecessarily boisterous manner, a few readers began to yawn and drop him and turn to. say, Dr. Frank Crane, who is in exactly the same business as Mr. Mencken, only on a larger scale. For, whereas Mr. Mencken has ten readers, Dr. Crane has eleven. And Daniel DeFoe fourteen.

Mr. Mencken has become more or less mature and so when he writes of the younger generation he very often gets things twisted because he cannot very well write from personal experience, he having been a boy when the parents of the younger generation were yet unacquainted, let alone married. Although he writes considerable about youth he actually knows very little about the boys who are commencing to shave regularly every Tuesday and Saturday mornings, and the girls who are gradually getting plump.

He has, in a very recent editorial, mentioned that the young man of about twenty invariably seeks an ideal in some living person who is supposed to be honorable, only to discover that the person is nothing more nor less than a fraud. And he adds that the fact that a great person is a fraud bothers the young man and he is quite puzzled and upset over the truth. Nothing could be further from the fact. The young person who seeks an ideal very seldom turns to one now living, but goes instead to ideals of which he can be certain. He goes to names which have become established. That is, if he is looking for ideals at all, which is rather unlikely, Mr. Mencken is certainly suddenly oddly optimistic if he supposes modern youth is ambitious enough to seek such things as honorable, and half-decent ideals. I have observed that the young fellows think most of salesmanship and stocks and bonds and that ideals can be damned.

But let us imagine there: are young fellows with ambition to go out looking for ideals among the men of today. I doubt if any considerable number would search out ideals of much actual worth, and I am sure there are few who would take Clarence Darrow for a pattern. I do believe, however, that a lot of young fellows would like particularly to be in the boots of Paul Whiteman, A. P. Giannini, Charles Lindberg, Adolph Menjou, Eugene Tunney, or even Sophie Tucker.

Whatever Mr. Mencken writes he is careful that it entertains and it usually does, especially if one has not read too much of him. And there are always enough young people who are maturing each year to whom a morsel of Mencken is as a gift from heaven, when it happens to be the very first morsel. It is too bad that Mr. Mencken is intolerant for that is as much a sin as cruelty.

Now for Mr. Haldeman-Julius, the man who would like to be America‘s Voltaire, and who does not yet know that Voltaire has been very satisfactorily translated into English for all good Americans.

With due respect to this gentleman for acquainting, through his little blue books, very old men on how to live to be at least 100 years of age, and very young men on how to make love and at the same time avoid any of the unpleasantnesses which are directly or indirectly connected with that fine art, he, as well as each of his publications, is a bore. He not only says the same familiar things over and over again but he says them without the least touch of wit or humor. I do not recall ever having read a single line of his which struck me as clever or original or well ordered. Mr. Mencken is at least clever and jolly and playful but Haldeman-Julius is unutterably dull and unhappy. He does not know how to write. He believes complete sentences make good literature,

Among a lot of other things Mr. Haldeman-Julius is worried over Christianity. He seems unaware that he is living in the year of our Lord, 1929, and that he is in America and not somewhere else. He does not know that the religious and irreligious alike live happy

lives in this fair land. He has recently discovered that the Bible is a fairy tale and can’t resist telling everybody about it, and always with his name very badly scrawled beneath what he has written. He draws up massive papers as technical as a steam boiler report, about the various poetic yarns of which the Bible is full.

He thinks he is the only person who knows exactly what the Bible is and what it isn’t and what God is and what He isn’t. He does not understand that even high school students today are familiar with all that sort of thing, and that they are sufficiently civilized to tolerate both the Christian and his God, as well as the Turk and his God, and the Chinaman and his.

What can it matter, any way, if Christianity is so much bunk? Why should one bother oneself with reading lengthy biblical examinations which are far more uninteresting and much less literary than the very pages of the Bible, and even as dull and witless as the pages of such senseless publications as The King’s Business and The New Light?

And then, too, Mr. Haldeman-Julius seems to be of the opinion that the divine purpose in life is to tell other people what bunk is. Before the reader proceeds far he begins to question whether the bunk is not on the other side.

Because of this insane desire to expose bunk we find him working hard over the American business man. What does an intelligent person care how dishonestly American business men earn, or more correctly, acquire their vast fortunes? What does the normal man care that in spending six-bits for a bottle of patent medicine, he is adding to another scoundrels wealth?

It may be presumed that the purpose of an intelligent and more or less civilized publication is to print literature and to entertain people who, according to Binet and Simon are above the age of 12. We find, instead, that the purpose of a magazine which considers itself refined, is to show us, as if we cannot see for ourselves, which religion is best, that of belief or disbelief; which therapy the best, that of medicine or chiropractic; which literature the best, that of Joseph Conrad or Zane Grey. We find ourselves weary of platitudes excitedly written and feverously presented, as though red-hot with newness and originality.

It is a peculiar habit of Haldeman-Julius to write editorials all over the covers of his publications where the Listerine ads ought to be. In them he will tell you positively, that Jesus Christ was an imposter, or that Voltaire disliked noise and was forever seeking solitude. After you have read the thing you put it down with a perplexed, “I don’t | get the point.” But you suppose that, after all, there may be those who upon reading such an editorial will become so startled with the surprising news that they cut out the page and paste it on their bed room walls, and immediately commence worshipping Mr. Haldeman-Julius.

But in spite of all he remains a mere bunco man, who kids himself into thinking he is exposing bunk, for the benefit of mankind

This man is not only intolerant but dull which is a sin punishable only by eternal oblivion.

At last, but by no means least, we come to the clown of American criticism, Mr. George Jean Nathan, who if he is not always rational, but most always is, is always positively amusing, in much the same manner and degree as Mr. Mencken, but a thing of startling impossibility with the great Haldeman-Julius.

Mr. Nathan’s sense of humor is of the keen variety and he can make more people laugh than any one else writing today other than Ring Lardner, Robert Benchley, and Stephen Leacock. And even if his profession seems to be that of criticizing the American Theatre (which he does nothing else but) his Clinical Notes in the Mercury have always been criticism of the first order as well as sophisticated humor. Even though Mr. Nathan is also somewhat too intolerant to do most of his subjects justice, when he likes he can show a bit of tenderness and understanding and pity. And he never becomes so delirious over apparent things as to write lengthily of them and in a serious mood. He tells what he supposes to be the truth in all matters and he does not bother with what anyone else might think of what he has written. He says he is entitled to change his opinion of anything as often as he likes, because he is liable to error, and that is a thing most critics do not admit.

Mr. Nathan, like the other two gentlemen already mentioned, also takes only himself seriously. For has he not written in the preface to his New American Credo that “the philosophical treatise (that’s what he calls the Credo!) was received with appropriate seriousness, despite its surface air of jest.” The Credo, as anyone who has laid hands on it knows, is a mere collection of an intelligent man’s jokes. And Mr. Nathan is the first and only joke collector to call his jokes philosophy. It is a collection of the things most Americans are supposed to believe, for no reason at all, according to Mr. Nathan.

Let us take a look at the first thing an American is supposed to believe, according to Nathan, “1. That the elephant tusks, swamp moss and specimens of old arrow-heads periodically brought back by explorers from the African jungle are of great value in adding to the store of human knowledge.”

If that is the manner in which an American philosophical treatise commences, then we had better read Emanuel Swedenborg on the explanation of the Apocalypse.

In order to finish reading the book it is necessary to wade through only 1231 thats, all of which are equally irrelevant as the first.

Witness another: “374. That a guinea pig performs the act of adultery on an average of five hundred times a day.”

And another. “736. That when one asks a bell-boy in a hotel in Buda Pest to get one’s suit pressed, he reappears in a few minutes with a large blonde.”

And yet the author and the publisher of this book seem so pleased with it that on the last page appears: “A NOTE ON THE TYPE IN WHICH THIS BOOK IS SET. This book is composed on the Linotype in Bodoni, so-called after its designer, Giombattista Bodoni (1740-1813)” etc., etc.

And so here again is a fine critic who makes the mistake of taking his work and himself seriously which is also a sin punishable by eternal censure.

It is obvious then that these three gentlemen pursue the uncivilized method of exposing shams and idiocies by pointing them out directly instead of carefully and quietly reporting them in the manner of Anatole France. The latter has undoubtedly done more with his pleasant writings to murder superstition, ignorance, cruelty and intolerance than these three gentlemen combined. But that is saying nothing that might injure these gentlemen, for it will be considerable time before the world will see another Anatole France. Of course, this unrefined method of pointing out superstitions and idiocies is probably entertaining if written by a Mencken or a Nathan. It is however too harsh for the person who is ignorant and superstitious, to see it as the author does, and for that reason, the ignorant remains ignorant and the uncivilized remain uncivilized.

As before stated, there is certainly a lack of intelligent tolerance in these critics, which is regrettable, for what good is a critic who cannot see two sides to every question?

These men are much too prejudiced. So much so that they cannot give such persons and things as the following a half-way decent hearing, but continually dismiss them with gestures of disgust: Eddie Guest, Los Angeles, James Oliver Curwood, moving pictures, idiots, Billy Sunday, song and dance men, English literature, Democracy, Gertrude

Atherton, politicians, psychoanalysts, prohibition, Rotary, censors, love, William Randolph Hearst, and God.

But on the other hand they worship and endlessly praise anything they prefer. Thus Mr, Mencken bows his head humbly to medicine, Mr. Nathan to pretty legs and fair faces, and Mr. Haldeman-Julius to himself.

Today it is popularly believed that of these three critics Mr. Mencken is the greatest, with Mr. Nathan a close second. And in the vague and dim distance Mr. Haldeman-Julius is also noticed, but in no wise connected with the other two gentlemen, who are, if not actually, brothers, at least so by adoption and preference.

But they are an intolerant group of men and intolerance is a terrible sin, punishable, at least, with horse laughing and nose thumbing.

Is it any wonder then, when the supposedly sophisticated publications of the land are given to so much unnecessary breast beating on the one hand over trivialities and to an unending haw-haw of a horse laugh at ignorance on the other hand, that more and more people are burying themselves in the pages of such things as The Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Holy Bible? '