Conversation on Anatomy and Physiology
Conversation on Anatomy and Physiology
By H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan (as set down by Major Owen Hatteras) in The Smart Set
Mencken and Nathan in Conversation
On the eve of the First World War, two iconoclastic young journalists were offered the co-editorship of a magazine that was clearly in trouble at the time. The magazine was the Smart Set, a monthly with literary ambitions and editorial offices in New York. The young iconoclasts were H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, two writers possessing no small ambition of their own but with little else in common save for their mutual contempt for mediocrity and pretentiousness, literary or otherwise. During their nine years as co-editors, from 1914 until 1923, Mencken and Nathan transformed the Smart Set into a must-read among the intelligentsia of the early jazz era, established themselves as two of America’s foremost critics, and became bona-fide celebrities in American popular culture. Indeed, “Mencken and Nathan” were at times as popular collectively as they were separately.
Among their many writings in the Smart Set are a jointly authored series of “Conversations,” written dialogues between Mencken and Nathan that depict their personal interactions in various circumstances and locales, chronicling a series of events perhaps both real and imagined. These “Conversations,” usually recorded by their pseudonymous alter ego Major Owen Hatteras, offer a plausible if somewhat exaggerated representation of the idiosyncratic relationship between H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan as authors, editors, and friends. Their “Conversation on Anatomy and Physiology” is reprinted here in its entirety.
Note to Readers
Contemporary readers may find language in The Smart Set Conversations to be objectionable.
Conversation on Anatomy and Physiology
Scene: The Smart Set office in 45th Street.
Time: An autumn morning.
Nathan
There is that damned pain in my chest again. Do you think it signifies anything?
Mencken
Where is it?
Nathan
(Indicating the region of the left supraspinatus muscle.) Here.
Mencken
That isn’t your chest: that’s your shoulder.
Nathan
Well, what is the difference what it is? A pain is a pain.
Mencken
You probably strained yourself pulling a tight cork, or getting on your undershirt.
(A pause. Both resume work. Then:)
Nathan
You don’t think there could be any congestion?
Mencken
Where?
Nathan
Well, say in the lungs.
Mencken
What is the evidence?
Nathan
The pain —
Mencken
It isn’t in your lungs; it’s in your shoulder.
Nathan
I’ve had a touch of cold since Monday.
Mencken
Is it any wonder? It’s a marvel to me that you are alive at all, considering the way you live.
Nathan
What is the matter with the way I live?
Mencken
Almost everything. In the first place, you never get any fresh air whatsoever. I venture to say that on your average day you don’t take in six honest lungs full — maybe not even four. Consider your routine. You get up at eight, leap to your bedroom window, pull it down all the way, and then go into a steamy bathroom. Then you go down into the rathskeller of the Royalton and eat your breakfast. Then you walk two blocks to the office, and sit here until lunch-time with the windows closed. And where do you go for lunch? To Delmonico’s, or Pierre’s, or across the street to the Lorraine, or back to the Royalton — at most, two blocks. Then, after drowsing in the office for another hour or two, you return to the Royalton, pull down the curtains, light one of those amber bordello lamps, and work all afternoon. Then to dinner at some great distance, maybe three blocks — say the Beaux Arts, or the Ritz, or the Crillon. If you go as far as Del Pezzo’s or the Hofbräuhaus you take a taxicab — with both windows closed. Then to some theater for two or three hours of pure carbon dioxide. Then to some cabinet particulier to drink the poisons of the boot-leggers. A fit life for a mammal? Never in the world! Rather a life for a Wanze, or an actor.
Nathan
I keep my bedroom window open.
Mencken
Yes, but what a window! If it’s more than thirty-six inches wide, then I give you a free license to throw me out of it. And where is your bed? In the far corner — as far away from the window as you can get it. And what a bed — all heavy comforters and satin spreads. It always reminds me of that painting in the Louvre — I think it is called “The Accouchement of Marie Antoinette.” You live like a high-class fille de joie. No wonder you have colds!
Nathan
(Ironically.) I suppose you advise a sleeping-porch — here in New York. Like yours in Baltimore.
Mencken
Of course not. A properly built sleeping-porch is one of the noblest comforts of civilization, and hence impossible in New York. There are no actual comforts in New York; there are only luxuries — and most of them are luxuries designed, not for healthy human beings, but for diabetic fat women.
Nathan
That sleeping-porch of yours fills me with snickers. I can see you sneaking in on cold nights, and —
Mencken
(Indignantly.) Never! I never come in. I actually have no bed in my house.
Nathan
Well, what is the sense in it? Why freeze?
Mencken
I don’t. I have heavy army blankets, and I wear flannel pajamas.
Nathan
Oh, my God! Spare me the flannel pajamas! You probably look like Marie Dressler. I suppose you also wear pulse-warmers!
Mencken
No — and no ear-muffs.
Nathan
Well, the flannel pajamas are enough. I have seen them, pink and lavender, in shop-windows. Suppose you should die in the night, and the coroner should bring his jury in to look at you!
Mencken
(Maliciously.) And you? Suppose you should die in the night — of one of your imaginary diseases? What would the coroner say when he came into that bedroom of yours — with that thick, green carpet, and all of those feather-pillows? I offer two to one that he’d take one look — and then ask to see the madame.
Nathan
And what of it? Where would a sane man prefer to die — in a comfortable private hotel, or in an open shed?
Mencken
But you miss the point. The point is that the sleeping-porch makes death more unlikely — staves it off — preserves the health.
Nathan
Slobbergobble! Then why doesn’t it preserve your health?
Mencken
It does. I am —
Nathan
Slobbergobble again! You are a chronic invalid, just as I am. For five years past I can’t remember a single day when you didn’t complain of some malaise or other. If you haven’t got something the matter with your nose or your eyes then you have a ringing in the ears, and if your ears are all right then you have hay-fever, and if it isn’t the hay-fever season then you have lumbago. Why, you have been on the operating table at least forty times in five years. Every time you go home to Baltimore you have some sort of operation performed. You must look like a Hamburg steak by this time. It’s a wonder to me that you have enough organs left to keep you going.
Mencken
I return your slobbergobble. I am forty years old, and sound in wind and limb. I have never had to have a capital operation. A few minor clippings and borings — that’s all. At twenty I was a weakling — ordered to give up all work, and go to the West Indies for my health. I came home much worse, but still on my legs. Meanwhile, the doctor who had advised me to clear out had come down with something or other himself, and presently I went to his funeral. Then I fell into the hands of better doctors — and here I am, fat, healthy and happy.
Nathan
So it was doctors who saved you? I thought it was your sleeping-porch.
Mencken
The two together.
Nathan
But why pay a doctor to advise you to sleep on a sleeping-porch? You could get precisely the same advice from a head-waiter, or a clergyman, or a garbage-hauler — and it wouldn’t cost you a cent.
Mencken
You talk nonsense. A sleeping-porch is no cure-all. In fact, it cures nothing. It is a mere precaution against disease — it increases a man’s disvulnerability. However hard I work down there in Baltimore, bending over my desk all day, manufacturing literature for an obtuse and abominable peasantry, I always get at least eight hours of fresh air during the twenty-four. That is above the average, even of men who are often outdoors. Give me those eight hours, and I can stand any amount of work during the day. My workroom in Baltimore is hermetically sealed, at least in winter. I try to shut out all disturbing sound. Down there the folks still keep dogs and have children, and both have to be beaten, and are thus noisy. I live, in fact, in a very fecund neighbourhood. I am probably the only man for blocks around without viable issue. Well, raising children is almost as noisy a business as running a nail-factory. They whoop and yell all day. Worse, the general disturbance, the wear and tear on the nerves, sets their parents to quarreling. This constant torture, in fact, is the chief cause of domestic brawls. Have you ever heard of a childless couple who fought each other? It is a common superstition that children tighten the bond between husband and wife, or, as the phrase has it, “hold them together.” No doubt you believe it yourself. But it is not true. Even old August Strindberg, an idiot, knew better. Whenever I hear that some young married woman whom I know is expecting, it makes me sad. On the one hand, it is terrible to think of bringing an innocent child into a world filled with Methodists, lawyers, agents provocateurs, press-agents, Congressmen, Socialists, Italians, unhappy married women, war veterans —
Nathan
Don’t forget long-winded talkers.
Mencken
And on the other hand, there is the ghastly thought that the young one will presently set its pa and ma to hating each other. I have seen it happen over and over again. During the pre-natal period, of course, there is no quarreling, save perhaps for one grand row when the news is broken. A man would feel like a brute to quarrel with his wife at such a time. All his moony sentimentality stands against it — and women always capitalize the fact. The husband’s one aim is to prove his chivalry, his native nobility. Many a shrewd woman, I daresay, has deliberately had a child in order to get a grand piano, or a set of furs, or a country place. In fact, I could give you names and dates. But once the poor infant is born, trouble begins. Its generation was a poem — something, say, comparable to a performance of “Tristan und Isolde.” But its rearing always turns out to be a vexatious and noisesome business — a match, say, for running an auction-house or driving a pair of mules.
Nathan
But what has all this got to do with you? Surely you are not expecting to become a father.
Mencken
God forbid! I’d die of mortification. What I was getting at is this: that eight hours of fresh air in the twenty-four are enough to let me do absolutely as I please during the other sixteen hours. I smoke half a box of cigars — and keep all of the smoke in the room. The air is something fearful. A visitor would faint in ten minutes. You would gag and wheeze like a man with asthma. I never have the same caller twice. Let a stranger come in and begin to talk about Maeterlinck, or Imagisme, or Paul Elmer More, and before he can really annoy me, he is strangling, and I have to haul him out. Yet I breathe that flying sediment, that volcanic effluvia, all day — and thrive on it. The answer is that I get enough fresh air at night to last me until the next night. Not only are my lungs full, but also all the other recesses of my body. Compressed air is stored away in my very legs. When I am in New York and have to sleep in a hotel room, I feel half suffocated.
Nathan
All this sounds like piffle to me. If you are so healthy, then why are you always complaining of being ill?
Mencken
You miss the point. I am not intrinsically healthy; I am merely artificially healthy. At the age of twenty I was theoretically ready for the embalmer; at the age of forty I am a first-rate insurance risk, have a low blood pressure, and am able to do all my work. I give the whole credit to sound medical advice. I know a great many medical men, and most of them are very good ones. I have simply put myself in their hands. The fact that I am alive today is a massive proof that modern medicine is shrewd, accurate and a success.
Nathan
I should say that it is rather merely a massive proof that modern medicine is not snobbish.
Mencken
Forgive my not laughing. I have a slight attack of tonsilitis.
Nathan
When, go on with your prattle. You are never happy unless you are talking; and I like to see you have a good time.
Mencken
Thanks. Now then, to go back to what I was saying. I know that what I have said is the truth. All talk to the contrary is simply so much moonshine — especially when it comes from medical men themselves, say in their hours of Katzenjammer. It is a common saying that there are only five drugs that are worth a damn; all the rest are dismissed as useless, and even as dangerous. Nothing could be more imbecile. There are at least fifty drugs that are worth a great deal more than a damn — and I include only actual drugs, not antitoxins, vaccines, or anything of that sort. But they must be administered intelligently, scientifically, carefully. The trouble with the average doctor is not that he uses too many drugs, but that he doesn’t use enough — that he doses all his patients with one or two of them. The layman usually falls into the same error. Think of the number of diseases that quinine is taken for — and yet quinine is useful in malaria only, and in nothing else. As for me, I seldom swallow a dose of medicine, and never without medical advice — never so much as a liver pill. If I feel ill for a day or two, I do absolutely nothing. Nine times out of ten recovery follows as soon as I have caught up with my lost sleep, or sweated out my overdose of alcohol, or got over having slept in a hotel.
Nathan
And what is the sum of all this jabber? That I, who sleep in a comfortable, warm bed in a comfortable, warm room, and haven’t a single doggoned theory pro or con, have actually been laid up only one week in the last twelve years — when I had the flu. And that you, who wear pink flannel pajamas, shiver yourself to sleep al fresco, and are kept busy living up to your innumerable hypotheses, are no better off than I am. Not so well off. The fresh-air thing is largely buncombe. The healthiest labourers, for example, are coal miners. And don’t tell me that they get plenty of fresh air at night, since they live in the open country. I’ve seen where they live. And how they live. So have you. Even if they slept with their one window open, which they don’t, they’d breathe in the day’s residuum of dirt, coal dust, smoke, bed clothing, and pieces of the Pittsburgh Dispatch.
Mencken
But don’t forget that they get a lot of exercise.
Nathan
I don’t. Nor do I forget that professional baseball players get a lot of exercise — to say nothing of a lot of fresh-air — and that a baseball player of fifty who isn’t a physical wreck is as rare as an uncooked lamb chop.
Mencken
They’re wrecks, not because of the exercise or the fresh air, but because of dissipation after hours.
Nathan
Rot! Dissipation is the eternal Patsy Bolivar. Everything is blamed on dissipation. Yet dissipation, I daresay, has little to do with health one way or another. Take ourselves, for instance. In the old drinking days, we’d sit up until three in the morning consuming one seidel after another and one Invincibilia Greco Splenderoso Superbo after another, all the while mellowly devising and planning books, plays, magazines, pamphlets, what not. And the next morning at nine we’d be at our desks in high shape working like the devil. We were well, happy, accomplishing things. Now we sit around until midnight sucking ginger ale, smoking an appropriately weak cigar or two, revamping stale ideals, getting nowhere, and — the next morning — come down full of marble dust, dispirited, sick.
Mencken
There, my friend, you fetch a torpedo! There is nothing so good for one as intelligent alcoholization. I am surely not what any sane man would call a booze-master. I drink all I want, and maybe ten per cent more, but I seldom want enough to shake me up. Now and then I like to get quietly stewed, but that is all. I often go four or five days without a single drink, as you know, but do not quite believe. Nevertheless, I firmly and honestly believe, as I hope to sit upon the right hand of Jehovah when I die, that a certain amount of alcohol is absolutely necessary to my welfare, and even to my existence. My ancestors have been alcoholics for thirty generations. I could no more do without the stuff than I could do without Linsensuppe, or vitamins, or oxygen. I get along all right for days and days, but finally there comes a moment when I must have a seidel of malt or bust.
Nathan
At last you are exuding sense. When you do it, I don’t mind listening to you, even though I can’t listen and correct the infernal spelling in this book review of yours at one and the same time. Go on, my dear professor. Da capo.
Mencken
You recall the immortal words of Paul, geb. Saul, in Timothy V, 23: “Noli adhuc aquam bibere, sed modico vino utere propter stomachum tuum et frequentes tuas infirmitates.” The dear fellow probably goes a bit too far. “Noli adhuc aquam bibere” is laying it on rather thick. As for me, I drink a great deal of water — perhaps ten quarts a day. It prevents diabetes, the great curse of the literati. My great-grandfather, Prof. Dr. Giuseppe da Mencken, never touched water after the age of twenty-one. He even had his coffee boiled in Pinot Chardonay [sic]. He died at thirty-eight.
Nathan
Nevertheless —
Mencken
But, as you say, Paul was right in his main contention. You and I are physical wrecks. All I have to do is to shut my eyes and I can feel the embalmer’s squirt-gun sticking into my flank. We suffer from “frequentes infirmitates.” Ergo, we need an occasional hooch for our stomachs’, but also for our livers’, kidneys’, spleens’, lungs’ and gizzards’.
Nathan
You mentioned malt liquor. Can it be that in Baltimore —
Mencken
Even so.
Nathan
But —
(They whisper.)
Is it possible?
Mencken
Last week I drank twenty-nine seidels — all free. Not a cent to pay. They are glad to make you happy.
Nathan
But tell me —
(They whisper.)
Mencken
As I say, gin is a different question. But the other day a friend of mine at the Johns Hopkins —
(They whisper.)
Nathan
But what of vermouth?
(They whisper.)
Mencken
You know, of course, that red wine ought to be at least a year old before —
(They whisper.)
Nathan
Let me take down his address.
Mencken
Give the name of Mr. Farley.
Nathan
But I thought —
(They whisper.)
Mencken
I wouldn’t touch such stuff for —
(They whisper.)
Nathan
Well, when I emptied the last bottle I —
(They keep on whispering.)
[Curtain]
Notes
“Conversation on Anatomy and Physiology” originally appeared in The Smart Set: Volume 63, Number 4 (December 1920), pp. 93-98, signed under the byline “Set Down by Major Owen Hatteras.”
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