Page 39 - American Conservative September/October 2015

the deadly matter-of-factness which sex hygiene and the new science of eugenics impose? How can a woman continue to believe in the honor, courage, and loving tenderness of a man after she has learned, perhaps by affidavit, that his hemo- globin count is 117%, that he is free from sugar and albumen, that his blood pressure is 112/79 and that his Wassermann reaction is negative? ... What is neither hidden nor forbidden is seldom very charming.
Mencken was not sure whether books on sex had corrupted American youth, as the censorious postal inspector Anthony Comstock worried. But he was cer- tain that frankness had transformed American novels. The old stories “glossed over” the “Facts of Life.” But af- ter the revelations about sex from the realm of scientific education, the old-time novelists’ sales declined and a new crop of authors who told “it all” had become best- sellers. “The most virtuous lady novelists,” Mencken noted, “write things that would have made a bartender blush to death two decades ago.”
He thought that men were far less interested than women in knowing or talking about the subject. Ex- cept for a “few earnest men whose mental processes ... are essentially womanish,” men think “they know all about it that is worth knowing.” In point of fact, sex for men was simply “an afterthought and a rec- reation.” Here the older Mencken was speaking from his perspective as a man with a declining libido rather than from his experience as a cub reporter 20 years earlier. For him, work was more important than the praise and rewards of women, and Mencken believed this was true for all genuine men:
Men work because they want to eat, because they want to feel secure, because they long to shine among their fellows, and for no other reason. A man may crave his wife’s approbation, or some other woman’s approbation, of his social graces, of his taste, of his generosity and courage, of his general dignity in the world, but long before he ever gives thought to such things and long after he has forgotten them he craves the approbation of his fellow men. Above all, he craves the ap- probation of his fellow craftsmen—the men who understand exactly what he is trying to do, and are expertly competent to judge his doing of it.
Mencken did not mean to discount the enjoy- ment husbands received from their wives’ respect and admiration. But most intelligent men discovered that a wife’s esteem did not “run in direct ratio to his
intrinsic worth, that the qualities and acts that please her are not always the qualities and acts that are most satisfactory to the censor within him.” And at bottom, Mencken confessed, sex belonged “to comedy and the cool of the evening and not to the sober business that goes on in the heat of the day.” That sentiment might explain Mencken’s description of marital bliss:
passion, at least in its more adventurous and melodramatic aspects, is too exciting and alarm- ing for so indolent a man, and I am too egoistic to have much desire to be mothered. What, then, remains for me? Let me try to describe it to you.
It is the close of a busy and vexatious day—say half past five or six o’clock of a winter afternoon. I have had a cocktail or two, and am stretched out on a divan in front of a fire, smoking. At the edge of the divan, close enough for me to reach her with my hand, sits a woman not too young, but still good-looking and well-dressed—above all, a woman with a soft, low-pitched, agreeable voice. As I snooze she talks—of anything, every- thing, all the things that women talk of: books, music, the play, men, other women. No politics. No business. No religion. No metaphysics. Noth- ing challenging and vexatious—but remember, she is intelligent; what she says is clearly ex- pressed, and often picturesquely. I observe the fine sheen of her hair, the pretty cut of her frock, the glint of her white teeth, the arch of her eye- brow, the graceful curve of her arm. I listen to the exquisite murmur of her voice. Gradually I fall asleep—but only for an instant. At once, observ- ing it, she raises her voice ever so little, and I am awake. Then to sleep again—slowly and charm- ingly down that slippery hill of dreams. And then awake again, and then asleep again, and so on.
I ask you seriously: could anything be more unutterably beautiful?
In print Mencken was indefatigably the iconoclast. At home, whether with his mother or his wife, he was entirely domesticated in ways remarkably Christian. That double-sidedness may not turn Mencken into a conservative. But owing to a recognition of nature’s limits and society’s restrains on human folly, Mencken saw through the hollow claim that more freedom led to better societies. Whether he possessed an adequate philosophical or theological foundation for his judg- ments, Mencken’s brand of skepticism about human flourishing is one that traditionalists might well con- sider if they want to avoid the easy optimism that has afflicted both the moral censors and libertines.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 39