Life — May 3, 1928 — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

With Apologies to ‘ NS RARY The Literary Katzenjammer ART OF THE NIGHT, by George Jean Nathan. $2.50; $10. 134, x 6%. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Amone the more illuminating manifestations of that imbecilic ratiocination peculiar to the mens Americana is the belief, prevalent in some quarters of our fair land, that Mr. George Jean Nathan is a writer of importance. For preposterous rubbish this is comparable only with the more august im- becility which rates Calvin Coolidge as a great man, Offen- bach as a great composer, Texas Guinan as an accomplished diseuse, the Hon. Ben Lindsey (J.) as an authority on biology, or salted almonds as great Vorspeise. That Nathan is energetic can not be denied. That he is privy to the sonorous hocus-pocus of critical jargon is a fact patent to any one who has had the time and stomach to delve into the Jahrbuch issued each spring under his name by the obliging House of Knopf. Each contains current forms of prayer to O'Neill, Ziegfeld, O’Casey and other gods, together with expurgatoriana for the year’s demons. An amusing performance admittedly for the Landsturm in art and acceptable as echte Danziger Goldwasser to those who consider the theatre a decent gathering place for civi- lized men rather than a literary stale-jakes. The fallacy of Nathan’s a priori point: that the theatre is an art, is, of course, not taken seriously by Nathan himself, and thus one may regard him as somewhat above the level of a Til Eulenspiegel. But that these collections of obiter dicta contain any more lasting contribution to the world’s thought than is offered in the highfalutin rumble-bumble of Otto H. Kahn or the pish-posh incidental to the performance of the marriage service in the Church of England is an admission I am not prepared to make. There is a current and quite preposterous impression that Nathan’s hold on the intellectual booberie is a sensual one. He is supposed to titillate their nerve-centers, causing them to jump. More palpable tosh than this has not formed a part of the public superstition since the Sermon on the Mount. As a matter of fact, Nathan’s appeal is spiritual. Assuming the manner of a cynical fellow, he looks sourly and with a bilious eye on the idols in the temple, but, even as he looks, he beats time to the chant of the priests and eventually, overcome with the religious razzle-dazzle, breaks into a profuse sweat, raises his arms to the heavens and per- forms a slow, reverent hoochie-koochie, followed by hun- dreds of zany converts. To say that Nathan is a purveyor of sensory stimuli be- cause he writes of beer-guzzling and hip-shaking is as much rubbish as to say that Aimée Semple McPherson is a pur- veyor of spiritual balm because she haggles with God, that a Shubert chorus man is a disciple of Karl Marx because he affects a red necktie or that Calvin Coolidge is a statesman because he wears a frock coat. If Nathan is an iconoclast, then Henry Ford makes automobiles and Otto H. Kahn has a dress-suit. Since we find, then, that, in so far as Nathan is a force at all he is a spiritual force, he must stand back-to-back with his brother ballyhoo boys in the vineyards of the Lord and The American MERCURY be measured. And, in competition with Rabbi Stephen § Wise and Bishop Manning, Mr. Nathan can not hope ever rise above the rank of drum-major’s assistant. I confidently predict that in a hundred years he will be remembered solely for his cravats. LINICAL NOTES ] BY GEORGE JEAN NATHAN The New Moses.—Every now and again the critical boys, many of them still in their emotional didies themselves, get to cutting up over some new baby they have found sucking at a bulrush down by the river's bank. Here, they cry, is some one who is going to make Voltaire look like an empty seidel of Léwenbriiu, Daumier like a small Emmenthaler kase, Brahms like an old Fedora hat and John Singer Sargent like the wet end of a Bock panetela. Such a phenomenon seems to be Professor Henry L. Mencken, who, my trusted Egyptian body-servant and spy tells me, is now being bailed as the New Hot Dickety. Aside from the local critics, who allow themselves to be hornswoggled with a regularity and amiability which coald bring them in money if properly applied, Le Mencken seems to have a following made up of such giant intellects as believe that Cabell is better than Rachmaninoff, Sinclair Lewis better than Stravinsky, Dreiser better than Mestrovi¢, O'Neill better than Tunney, Dreiser better than O'Neill, Lewis better than Dreiser, Cabell better than Lewis, O'Neill better than Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis_better than James Branch Cabell. I have also reason to believe that, under cross-examination, they would confess to a sneaking suspicion that (1) all hack-drivers are Swedenborgians; (2) when a man asks 1 woman to marry him, she always thinks he is fooling and accepts him; (3) that if you cut the pages of a book with your finger it makes the book look as if the pages had beea cut with some one’s finger, and (4) that all hack-drivers are Swedenborgians. From such intellectual brothels, then, are the Mencker witnesses assembled. The State rests. Etude in E Minor.—It is occasionally my duty, as Liaison Officer for the Watch and Ward Society, to look into the state of the res publice with special reference to sauce rémoulade. I have been especially interested, therefore, in the pronunciamento of several of my critical colleagues ia New York that the best sauce rémoulade is to be found st the Colony Restaurant. This I take to be piffle and recoa- mend to my brothers in the bond that they look into the sauce rémoulade in the oyster-bar at Prunier’s in Paris, at the Restaurant Horscher in Berlin, at Schéner's in Vienna, at Hetlig’s Café in Budapest, at the Hotel zu Fisenhut in Rothenburg, at Louie's in Prague, and at the Central House in Bellows Falls, Vt. Reprise.—It is my private opinion that Florenz Ziegfeld should receive the portfolio of Secretary of State withost further shilly-shallying. As a picker of cuties, Kellogg bss shown himself a dud. comicbooks.com