Pistols for two — Themes and Context

Transcriber’s Note Italic text displayed as: _italic_

_Published, September, 1917_

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Biography fails, like psychology, because it so often mistakes complexity for illumination. Its aim is to present a complete picture of a man; its effect is usually to make an impenetrable mystery of him. The cause of this, it seems to me, lies in the fact that the biographer always tries to explain him utterly, to account for him in every detail, to give an unbroken coherence to all his acts and ideas. The result is a wax dummy, as smooth as glass but as unalive as a dill pickle.

It is by no such process of exhaustion that we get our notions of the people we really know. We see them, not as complete images, but as processions of flashing points. Their personalities, so to speak, are not revealed brilliantly and in the altogether, but as shy things that peep out, now and then, from inscrutable swathings, giving us a hint, a suggestion, a moment of understanding. Does a man really know what is going on in his wife’s mind? Not if she _has_ a mind. What he knows is only that infinitesimal part which she reveals, sometimes deliberately and even truculently, but more often naïvely, surreptitiously, accidentally. He judges her as a human being, not by anything approaching entire knowledge of her, but by bold and scattered inferences. He sees her soul, in so far as he sees it at all, in the way she buttons her boots, in the way she intrigues for a kiss, in the way she snaps her eye at him when he has been naughty—interprets her ego in terms of her taste in ribbons, the scent of her hair, her quarrels with her sisters, her fashion of eating artichokes, her skill at home millinery, the débris on her dressing table, her preferences in the theater, her care of her teeth.

Thus, by slow degrees, he accumulates an image of her—an image changing incessantly, and never more than half sensed. After long years, perhaps, he begins to know her after a fashion. That is, he knows how many shredded wheat biscuits she likes for breakfast, how much of his business she understands, how long she can read a first-class novel without napping, what she thinks of woolen underwear, the New Irish Movement, the family doctor, soft-boiled eggs, and God....

I enter upon these considerations because I have been employed by a committee of _aluminados_, heeled well enough to pay my honorarium, to conjure up recognizable images of MM. George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, that their scattered partisans and the public generally may see them more clearly. The job has its difficulties, for save in their joint editorial concern with _The Smart Set_ magazine and their common antipathy to certain prevailing sophistries, they are no more alike than a hawk and a handsaw. But in one other thing, at least, they also coalesce, and that is in the paucity of news about them. Most other magazine editors are constantly in the papers—discoursing on the literary art, agitating for this or that, getting themselves interviewed. These twain, however, pursue a more _pianissimo_ course, and so not much is known about them, even inaccurately....

The job invites. One reads regularly what magazine editors think of their contributors, but who ever reads what magazine contributors—of whom I, Hatteras, am one—think of their editors? A vast and adventurous field here enrolls itself, believe me. I know, more or less intimately, most of the editors of the great American periodicals, and I am constantly amused by the inaccuracy of the prevailing notions about them—notions diligently fostered, in many cases, by their own more or less subtle chicane. Consider, for example, the dean of the order, M. George Harvey, of the _North American Review_. His portrait shows a thoughtful old gentleman reading a book, his forefinger pressed affectionately against his right frontal sinus. Recalling the high mental pressure of his daily concerns, one concludes at once that he is struggling through Talboys Wheeler’s epitome of the Maha-Bhārāta, or Locke’s “Conduct of the Understanding.” But I have it from the Colonel himself—a confidence quite spontaneous and apparently sincere—that at the precise moment the photographer squeezed the bird he was thinking—what? Simply this: how much prettier Mlle. Mary Pickford would be if her lower limbs were less richly developed laterally. The book was the _Photoplay Magazine_.