Conversation on Dress
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 Dress” is reprinted here in its entirety.
Note to Readers
Contemporary readers may find language in The Smart Set Conversations to be objectionable.
Conversation on Dress
Scene: The swimming-pool at the Biltmore.
Time: Ash Wednesday.
Nathan
I note that you still wear B. V. D.’s. Isn’t it a bit — well, say rather somewhat — ?
Mencken
Maybe sagacious is the word you seek.
Nathan
It is precisely the word I do not seek. What I get at is that a man of your years and dignity should clothe himself in a more seemly manner. I overlook your overcoats — or, rather, your overcoat. It symbolizes, perhaps, your defective relish for public applause. But a man’s underwear symbolizes his view of himself. It constitutes an intimate and secret self-estimate. What he puts next to his epidermis reveals his private notion of his just deserts. Well, I am under no illusion that you regard yourself with anything approaching injustice. Therefore, I —
Mencken
Spare me your metaphysics! I wear B. V. D.’s for a plain reason. They are admirable, and they are cheap. Could you imagine garments more intelligently designed? Think of the old-style lingerie that we wore as boys — the thick, knitted undershirts, the long-legged sub-pantaloons. Did you ever hear of such a shirt that was comfortable, or of such a pantaloon that did not bunch at the ankles? Yet mankind suffered those abominations for years. Then, characteristically, American genius came to the rescue; it is constantly making the world more comfortable. It devised the B. V. D. — and at once wearing underclothes became a luxury. One never hears them discussed any more; they are as silent and efficient as a perfect head-waiter. In the old days every American man talked about his interior swathings. “Have you put on your heavy woolens yet?” And so on. Now every intelligent American wears B. V. D.’s, and the subject has lost all point and interest.
Nathan
But you miss my contention. I don’t object to the design of your inside wrappings. What astounds me is that a man so sniffish should wear such materials. If your chemise is not cambric, then it must be muslin, or calico, or something of the sort. And if you paid more than a dollar for it, then I license you to hold my head under water for ten minutes. Have you no respect for your person?
Mencken
Well, what should I wear, if not cotton? Wool? It scratches. Linen? It is clammy. Silk? It is bawdy. I don’t like the feel of silk on my hide. It is far too caressing and luxurious. My work in the world is essentially serious. I am a sort of liaison-officer between the American intelligentsia and civilization. Could I do this work reposing on an oriental couch, smoking opium, and with a couple of loose girls dancing before me? Could I do it emersed in a tub of pêche Melba? Could I do it while the Boston Symphony Orchestra played “Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald?” Naturally not. By the same token, I couldn’t do it bundled up in silks and satins like one of Ziggy’s poor working girls. The arts demand renunciation, simplicity, a touch of asceticism. The artist must know how to suffer.
Nathan
With all due regard for your feelings, mush! I can grant your whole case and still refute you. Wear a hair-shirt if you want to! Have your B. V. D.’s made of burlap. How does all this account for the hat you wear? Or for your habitual overcoat? Or for your 50-cent neckties? Beholding you loping along Fifth Avenue of an afternoon, one is reminded of a Goldberg cartoon dramatized by Harry Kemp, with music by Erik Satie. It is my contention that such a hat as yours offers a subtle offense to all that is highest and finest in our Christian civilization.
Mencken
Nonsense. You exaggerate rhetorically. The hat is a genuine Knox and cost me a pretty penny. I have it cleaned once a year, and a new band put on. It is a dignified and seemly hat, and quite suitable to my station in life. As for the public effect, I am not interested in it. I suffer enough trying to instruct and elevate the public. It would be going too far to ask me to rejoice it æsthetically also. The hat is satisfactory to me and, I hope, to God. Let that suffice.
Nathan
Yet you allude to yourself as an artist.
Mencken
Exactly. But as an artist in ideas, not in haberdashery. I am not interested in clothes for the same reason that I am not interested in the postal regulations governing fourth-class matter, or the music of Vincent D’Indy, or the question of whether General Ulysses S. Grant went to heaven or to hell. Such matters do not appertain to my avocation, nor to my vices. I am not an actor, and so I don’t work with my necktie. I am neither an Episcopal rector nor a stock-broker, and so it makes no difference whether my shoes are shined or not.
Nathan
Neither do you work with your front tooth. Yet, you employ a dentist to half sole and heel it annually, and if some woman threw a beer seidel at you and knocked it out you’d yell for the police.
Mencken
Naturally. I eat with my teeth, and eating is not only necessary to me, but a pleasure to me. In fact, it is probably my principal vice. No other vice has ever done me any harm, but I am even now in the hands of the faculty for eating too much. A genuinely tender and well turned Wiener schnitzel fascinates me almost as much as a Methodist deacon is fascinated by the gluteus maximus of a chorus girl. I’d gladly leave a hanging, or a performance of Beethoven’s fourth — not his fifth or eighth! — or even a quiet chat with some cute one in the falling dusk for such a dinner as dear old Halévy used to serve in the last days of sound white wine. If, as you say, I dress like Jim Morgan in “Ten Nights in a Barroom,” and look sartorially like a bad case of uticaria, then it is simply because clothes do not interest me. I do not aspire to be a Beau Brummel, any more than I aspire to be a vestryman of St. Bartholomew’s. Fancy clothes or no fancy clothes, I am pretty enough. If I dressed up it would cause me trouble. I fear the Life Force.
Nathan
That you are a beautiful creature I do not gainsay. In all the zoos of the world there is not a rhinoceros more lovely. Nevertheless you must go clothed; you can’t walk the earth in the altogether; it would be worse than Bolshevism. Well, being forced by law to garment yourself, why not do it with some good grace? That hat looks like an Allentown, Pa., cuspidor. It affects me like a woman without eyebrows. I don’t argue that you should waste hours choosing neckties. All I contend is that you should not carry your disdain of sightly habiliments to the point of phrenitis.
Mencken
I return to my primary position. I am a trafficker in concepts and conjectures, not a dancing-master. I wouldn’t write any better if my pantaloons were better creased. I don’t criticize the world and its ideas with my shirt.
Nathan
But the world inevitably criticizes you and your shirt. You and your shirt would make a very tasty frontispiece for Sinclair Lewis’ “Main Street,” or George Ade’s “Fables in Slang.”
Mencken
And what of you? Does your greater application to the psychology of regalia get you anything? Say some fool gal is fetched by that new greenish suit of yours, and by that corn-flower boutonnière. What is the result? It costs you $15 or $20 to buy her a dinner, you both get a bad stomach-ache, and the next morning you come down to the office grumbling because she confided to you — during the five dollar dessert — that she was in love with a footballer at De Pauw University.
Nathan
As they put it in New Jersey, there is something into what you say. But what, in turn, does your indifference to costumerie get you? The only difference between us, so far as I can see, is that one look at you gives the gal stomachache without any dinner.
Mencken
What is that to me? My work in the world, as I have hinted, is not concerned with what gives people aches in the stomach, but with what gives them aches in the medulla oblongata. My concern is with epistemology, not with intestinal fermentation.
Nathan
Again you emit nonsense. What you say is simply the old “art for art’s sake” buncombe in rather more disarming terms. Assuming that you are an artist, as you somewhat obstreperously maintain, then your duty as an artist is obviously to your art. But in addition there is your duty as a citizen. I contend that it is part of that duty to dress yourself in a respectable and tasteful manner, that there may be no unnecessary public scandal.
Mencken
My reply is that I already do so. Do you forget that E. W. Howe once pronounced me the best-dressed man in New York? Howe, true enough, has his defects as a critic of the fine arts. But in this department he was well within his jurisdiction, for he judged me as an American citizen. He himself is the archetype of the American citizen, and so I valued and still value his encomium. I question that you yourself have any right or capacity to estimate such things. You are no more American than absinthe, free speech or the sonata form. In the legend that you were born in Fort Wayne, Ind., I take no stock. That is, not permanently. Now and then, of course, I half believe it. When you bought that green necktie with orange spots I was pretty well convinced. But mainly I doubt it. More, everybody else doubts it. Whenever there is a war, the home-loving Vigilantes will accuse you of belonging to the enemy nation, whatever it is. But as for me, no one ever questions my patriotism: it is well known that all I suffer by living among Elks, Moose, Knights of Pythias, Odd Fellows and Maccabees is offered freely upon the altar of my country. Besides, there is the imprimatur of Howe, the most American of all Americans. He anoints me and hands me the cup. An apostolic succession. You can’t gainsay it. Howe thought you were a Jap. He had been reading the California papers.
Nathan
Fair words, but I still mark your hat “Exhibit A” and hand it to the foreman of the jury.
Mencken
Whose name, I daresay, is Emil Krausmeyer. He will recognize the spatters of beer, and give me a hoch. As a patriot, I prefer the verdict of Howe.
Nathan
This Howe admires your façade because it is of the species au fait in his native Potato Hill. You are both neanderthal men sartorially. Sprinkle some baking soda on your hair, roll your r’s, and I wouldn’t be able to tell you from him. . . . You circle the point of argument. A civilized man’s duty is to look like a civilized man, not like the window of a second-hand clothing store in the Jugo-Slovak quarter. When an eyesore like yourself moves down a street, he constitutes an affront to cosmic beauty. I sometimes think that you are in league with a syndicate of oculists.
Mencken
And thou? When a circus parade like yourself moves down the boulevard he constitutes an offense against everything but the high cost of living.
Nathan
You have little discernment; you are clothes-blind. I do not dress ostentatiously. On the contrary, my decorations are very piano. To a rube like you, any man whose collar is not three inches too large for him and whose cuffs are properly buttoned is a fop, and fit for the soft drinks. Anything beyond two ash-carts and an ice-wagon looks like a circus parade to a man in Pottstown.
Mencken
I repeat: my outward aspect is of no importance to me. I take no more interest in clothes than I take in bee-culture.
Nathan
Well, look at that fellow at the far end of the pool: a beer-keg with a face! Picture him walking down the street in toto! Go farther. Picture nine-tenths of the men and women you know walking down the street in the same state! Clothes keep a nation from laughing itself to death. You speak of the Life Force. The Life Force, four times out of five, is clothes, and little else. Shaw, who popularized the term in “Man and Superman,” knew it, but was too timid to say so in so many words. Therefore, like Barrie, who is similarly a coward when it comes to stating openly and clearly anything that isn’t already a platitude, he resorted to his customary stratagem of concealing it in the stage directions, where only “safe” persons might encounter it. He was afraid to trust himself with the idea before the mob. Turn to page 15 of the text of the play and to his description of Ann Whitefield, his Life Force instrument. He says: “Instead of making herself an eyesore, like her mother, she has devised a mourning costume of black and violet silk.” Shaw’s subsequent qualifications are only further evidences of his eternal timidity in the face of an idea that is not already generally accepted.
Mencken
I follow you only half way. In fact, you follow yourself only half way. You say the Life Force is clothes, and little else, and then you proceed to prove it by showing that some woman character in a Shaw play dresses herself up in order to vamp some anonymous idiot — an idiot who, when he appears before the actual audience, is seen to be an actor! My reply is that I have nothing to do with such piggery. Having no desire whatsoever to be retired to the stock-farm, I see no reason why I should engaud myself like an opera manager. My clothes cover my person. They are of sound material. Their colours are inconspicuous. All beyond that would be supererogation. Let us now leap into the pool and disport ourselves.
Nathan
One moment, and I am done. Clothes give biology its touch of poetry. Without clothes, human beings of any refinement would die of disgust. Clothes are the mirages which cause humanity to stagger upward and onward with a smile on its lips and hope in its heart. Where is life the happiest, the gayest? In the great capitals — Paris, London, New York — where men and women pay the most attention to their personal appearance. And where, on the contrary, is it the most sordid and dispiriting? In the yap towns and peasant centres where no one gives a damn what he or she looks like. Consider your own case honestly. Don’t you feel something’s wrong when you haven’t shaved, or when your collar is soiled, or when there is a soup spot on your coat? It’s not a matter of comfort, as you will doubtless presently maintain — a soiled collar is just as comfortable as a clean collar, and a spotted coat is just as comfortable as a spotless one — it’s a matter of looks. Admit it, and let’s dive in
Mencken
I admit nothing, save that, as your liver ossifies, you become an utter ijjit. What a notion, indeed — that in the little Methodist hells of the back country no one gives a damn what he or she looks like! Is it possible for the human mind to conceive a more thumping piece of tosh? The plain truth is, of course, that it is precisely in the hinterland that all questions of clothes are most important. In Paris, before the war — perhaps the most civilized town then visible in the world — a man could wear practically any imaginable clothes on the street, and go unnoticed. I myself, when ill with a fever there, once promenaded the Avenue de l’Opera wearing one black shoe and one yellow one, and with an American flag wrapped around my plug hat. Not a soul challenged me. But in such a place as Memphis, Tenn., the cops would have jailed me, and in the average small town in Iowa the peasants would have burned me as a witch. Interest in clothes does not run as civilization runs; it runs inversely as civilization runs. It is not in Paris, or Rome, or Munich, or the West End of London that people notice such things; it is in Paducah, Ky., Snow Hill, Md., and the Bronx. You are so horribly the cockney that you simply don’t know anything about what goes on west of Union Hill, N. J. If you walked into the average grass town of Maryland wearing that fur overcoat of yours, with that ring on your finger, and with your smoke-coloured walking-suit, the mouzhiks would fall upon you and give you a severe beating.
Nathan
I take it, of course, that your own draperies do not affront them?
Mencken
They do not venture to have an opinion about my clothes. I was born and raised in those parts, and know how to keep the peasants in their places. But if I went into your native Fort Wayne, Ind., wearing my Russian fur hat or my ribbon of the Ordre de la Chasteté, third class, I’d fully expect to be taken to the watch-house by the town constable. If he let me remain at large; it would simply be because he mistook me for a circus press-agent or a New York dramatic critic. Or maybe a collector for the Armenians
Nathan
All this is hollow and without sense. You prove that civilized garments would cause popular uprisings in Maryland or Indiana, and you then argue therefrom that a civilized man should not wear them. This is what you are fond of terming pish-posh. I array myself in a quiet manner, but do not disdain the elegances appropriate to the season, my surroundings and my station in life.
Mencken
I refuse to let you say anything so destructive to your dignity. Say that you were that fur coat because you like, now and then, a gaudy touch — because you frankly enjoy dressing up a bit — and I’ll overlook your weakness. I have worse myself. Why do I part my hair in the middle — a fashion that went out thirty years ago? So far as I know, only two other men in the civilized world still do it: Frank Harris and Fürst von Bülow. Well, why do I do it? Simply because it is a petty vanity. I confess it freely, and invite all critics of it to go to hell. But when you say that wearing a fur overcoat in New York is appropriate to your station in life, then I protest against the libel. Last night, on my way to the theater with you, I encountered exactly seven other men in such coats. One was a one-night-stand tragedian, one was a writer of popular songs, one was a curb-broker, one was a press-agent, one was a viola player in the Philharmonic Orchestra, one was the music critic of the Daily Underwear News, and the other I didn’t know. I don’t mention the chauffeurs.
Nathan
Let your point go into the minutes. But your whole logical method is fatal to your case. I saw only three hats like yours between the Beaux Arts and the Century Theater. One was on the head of a pickpocket who had just been taken in flagrante delicto by the cops, one was worn by a blind man at Broadway and 47th street, and one was lying in the gutter at 51st street. I should be delighted to have your interpretation of these facts.
Mencken
I do not attempt to interpret them. They have, in fact, no significance whatsoever. My hat means nothing; it is a mere blob. One either notices it or doesn’t notice it. But a fur overcoat challenges the attention. It is deliberately worn to challenge the attention. My point is that the attention thus evoked is humiliating to a man of your dignity. The worst anyone could conceivably suspect me of being, looking at my hat, is an apartment house janitor or a professor at Columbia University. But looking at your coat, an otherwise quite intelligent person might reasonably mistake you for, say, a vaudeville headliner, the conductor of a German Liedertafel, or a member of the Union League Club. I leave the case to posterity.
Nathan
Well, then, if you are so disdainful of mere investiture, why not simply dress your soul, and let your carcass go bald? I offer to stand on the steps of the Public Library — near the left lion — and watch you pass. You will learn soon enough the politico-socio-economic importance of clothes. There are five gendarmes at Fifth avenue and 42nd street. I offer ten to one that even the fattest of them reaches you and lands his club upon your coco before you escape down the sewer.
Mencken
I begin to despair of you. Now you try to argue that clothes are important by showing that policemen think they are important. What next? A policeman is a man who is fined $2 if he reports for work without his shoes shined. Ergo, he believes that having his shoes shined is more important than —
Nathan
But what of Ibsen? He had his shoes shined twice a day.
Mencken
Ibsen? Now you introduce Ibsen! God help us all! Tell the coroner that I leave my sapphires to Eleanor. Give Marie my —
(He dives.)
Nathan
Your hat?
(He dives.)
Notes
“Conversation On Dress” originally appeared in The Smart Set: Volume 65, Number 1 (May 1921), pp. 97-102. Authored jointly by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, it was signed under the byline “Set Down by Major Owen Hatteras.”
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