'A Dull Night in a Buffalo Hotel'

When writing journalism, H.L. Mencken occasionally practiced what I think of as an informal form of Impressionism. He would organize isolated bits of description, usually snapshots of people, without explicit narration or formal structure. The effect, sometimes satirical, was panoramic, a small-scale version of what John Dos Passos would do in his U.S.A. trilogy. The risk, of course, would be artiness, a pretentious exercise in the merely clever. Mencken manages to avoid this failing in part because of his comedic sense combined with poignancy. In 2006 I wrote about it in connection with his “Suite Américane” (Prejudices, Third Series, 1922). 

He tried something similar with another suite, this one titled rather banally “People and Things” (Prejudices, Fourth Series, 1924). This excerpt is taken from the first of five sections, “The Capital of a Great Republic”:

 

“The chief correspondent of the Toomsboro, Ga., Banner in the Senate press-gallery.... The stenographer to the assistant chief entomologist of the Bureau of Animal Industry.... The third assistant chief computor in the office of the Naval Almanac.... The assistant Attorney-General in charge of the investigation of postal frauds in the South Central States.... The former wife of the former secretary to the former member of the Interstate Commerce Commission.... The brother to the wife of the chargé d’affaires of Czecho-Slovakia.... The bootlegger to the ranking Democratic member of the committee on the election of President, Vice-President and representatives in Congress....”

 

The effect is to make fun of bureaucracy, of course, but it also subverts the vanity of human wishes. They are often the sort of people nicely characterized by a psychiatrist in T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (1949):

 

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

 

The fifth section is more personal as suggested by the title, “The Shrine of Mnemosyne.” One suspects these are snapshots recovered from Mencken’s personal experience:

 

“The little town of Kirkwall, in the Orkney Islands, in a mid-Winter mist, flat and charming like a Japanese print.... San Francisco and the Golden Gate from the top of Twin Peaks.... Gibraltar on a Spring day, all in pastel shades, like the back-drop for a musical comedy.... My first view of the tropics, the palm-trees suddenly bulging out of the darkness of dawn, the tremendous stillness, the sweetly acid smell, the immeasurable strangeness.... The Trentino on a glorious morning, up from Verona to the Brenner Pass.... Central Germany from Bremen to Munich, all in one day, with the apple trees in bloom.... Copenhagen on a wild night, with the Polizei combing the town for the American who upset the piano.... Christiania in January, with the snow-clad statue of Ibsen looming through the gloom like a ghost in a cellar.... The beach at Tybee Island, with the faint, blood-curdling rattle of the land-crabs.... Jacksonville after the fire in 1902, with the hick militiamen firing their machine-guns all night.... The first inauguration of Woodrow, and the pretty suffragette who drank beer with me at the Raleigh.... A child playing in the yard of a God-forsaken town in the Wyoming desert.... Bryan’s farewell speech at the St. Louis Convention in 1904.... Hampton Court on Chestnut Sunday.... A New Year’s Eve party on a Danish ship, 500 miles off the coast of Greenland.... The little pile of stones on the beach of Watling’s Island, marking the place where Columbus landed.... The moon of the Caribbees, seen from a 1000-ton British tramp.... A dull night in a Buffalo hotel, reading the American Revised Version of the New Testament.... The day I received the proofs of my first book.... A good-bye on an Hoboken pier.... The Palace Hotel in Madrid.”

 

I find this unexpectedly poignant, as the randomness of memory often is, despite Mecnken’s shots at such familiar targets as President Woodrow Wilson and perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.