GEORGE JEAN NATHAN
He was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, February 14 and 15 (the stunning event occurred precisely at 12 midnight) 1882.
His boyhood ambition was to be an African explorer in a pith helmet, with plenty of room on the chest ribbon for medals that would be bestowed upon him by the beauteous Crown Princess of Luxembourg.
He was educated at Cornell University and the University of Bologna, in Italy.
He is a man of middle height, straight, slim, dark, with eyes like the middle of August, black hair which he brushes back à la française, and a rather sullen mouth.
He smokes from the moment his man turns off the matutinal showerbath until his man turns it on again at bedtime.
He rarely eats meat.
He lives in a bachelor apartment, nearly one-third of which is occupied by an ice-box containing refreshing beverages. On the walls of his apartment are the pictures of numerous toothsome creatures. He is at the present time occupied in writing a book describing his sentimental adventures among them.
He has published the following books: “Europe After 8:15,” in collaboration with Mencken and Mr. Willard Huntington Wright; “Another Book on the Theater,” “Bottoms Up,” and “Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents.”
He has written for almost every magazine in America, except Good Housekeeping and The Nation.
He dresses like the late Ward McAllister and wears daily a boutonnière of blue corn flowers.
He dislikes women over twenty-one, actors, cold weather, mayonnaise dressing, people who are always happy, hard chairs, invitations to dinner, invitations to serve on committees in however worthy a cause, railroad trips, public restaurants, rye whisky, chicken, daylight, men who do not wear waistcoats, the sight of a woman eating, the sound of a woman singing, small napkins, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Tagore, Dickens, Bataille, fried oysters, German soubrettes, French John Masons, American John Masons, tradesmen, poets, married women who think of leaving their husbands, professional anarchists of all kinds, ventilation, professional music lovers, men who tell how much money they have made, men who affect sudden friendships and call him Georgie, women who affect sudden friendships and then call him Mr. Nathan, writing letters, receiving letters, talking over the telephone, and wearing a hat.
In religion he is a complete agnostic, and views all clergymen with a sardonic eye. He does not believe that the soul is immortal. What will happen after death he doesn’t know and has never inquired.
He is subject to neuralgia. He is a hypochondriac and likes to rehearse his symptoms. Nevertheless, a thorough physical examination has shown that he is quite sound. His Wassermann reaction is, and always has been, negative. He is eugenically fit.
He never reads the political news in the papers. He belongs to a college fraternity and several university societies.
The room in which he works is outfitted with shaded lamps and heavy hangings, and somewhat suggests a first-class bordello. He works with his coat on and shuts the windows and pulls down all the curtains. He writes with a pencil on sheets of yellow paper. He cannot use a typewriter.
He detests meeting people, even on business, and swears every time a caller is announced at The Smart Set office. He never receives a woman caller save with his secretary in the room.
He wears an amethyst ring. In his waistcoat pocket he carries an elegant golden device for snapping off the heads of cigars. He has his shoes shined daily, even when it rains.
Like the late McKinley, he smokes but half of a cigar, depositing the rest in the nearest spitbox. Like Mark Twain, he enjoys the more indelicate varieties of humor. Like Beethoven, he uses neither morphine nor cocaine. Like Sitting Bull and General Joffre, he has never read the Constitution of the United States.
He bought Liberty Bonds. He can eat spinach only when it is chopped fine. He knows French, Latin, Italian, and German, but is ignorant of Greek. He plays the piano by ear.
In his taste in girls, he runs to the demi-tasse. I have never heard of him showing any interest in a woman more than five feet in height, or weighing more than 105 pounds.
An anarchist in criticism, he is in secret a very diligent student of Lessing, Schlegel, Hazlitt, and Brandes. His pet aversion, among critics, was the late William Winter.
He has no interest in any sport, save tennis and fencing, and never plays cards. He never accepts an invitation to dinner if he can avoid it by lying. He never goes to weddings, and knows few persons who marry.
As a critic, he has been barred from many theaters. A. L. Erlanger, in particular, is a manager who views him as a colleague of Mephisto.
He eats very little.
He drinks numerous cocktails (invariably the species known as “orange blossom,” to which he has added two drops of Grenadine), a rich Burgundy, and, now and then, a bit of brandy.
He once told me that he had no use for a woman who wasn’t sad at twilight.
He has two male companions—so many and no more: Mencken and John D. Williams, the theatrical producer. He is rarely seen with any other.
He was born, as the expression has it, with a gold spoon in his mouth. He has never had to work for a living.
He works daily from 10 A.M. until 5 P.M. He plays from 5:30 until 8:30. Evenings, he spends in the theater. After the theater, he has supper. He retires anywhere from 11 P.M. to 3 A.M.
He has made many trips abroad and has lived at different times in France, England, Germany, Italy, Austria, the Argentine, India, Japan and Algiers.
He fell in love at first sight in 1913 with a flower girl in the Luitpold Café in Munich, but the hussy was distant.
He would rather have Lord Dunsany in The Smart Set once than William Dean Howells a hundred times.
He often writes sentences so involved that he confesses he himself doesn’t know what they mean.
He admires Max Beerbohm, Conrad, Dr. Llewellys Barker, Mozart, the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies and the songs in “Oh, Boy,” sardines, ravioli, Havelock Ellis chocolate cake, Molnar, Hauptmann, Royalton cigars, Anatole France, Simplicissimus, E. W. Howe’s Monthly, an eiderdown blanket and a hard pillow, a thick-toothed comb and stiff brush, Schnitzler, bitter almond soap, George Ade, Richard Strauss, Pilsner, Huneker, Florenz Ziegfeld, Edwin Lefèvre’s story “Without End,” the quartette in the Piccadilly in London, the Café Viel in Paris, the overcoat shop in the Stefansplatz in Vienna, the strawberries in the Palais de Danse in Berlin.
He believes, politically, in an autocracy of the elect, for the elect, and by the elect.... His father was a Democrat.
He has written one play, “The Eternal Mystery,” which was produced on the Continent in 1914 and in America in 1915. He has forbidden the production of the play henceforth in any American city save Chicago, in which city anyone who chooses may perform it without payment of royalties.
In 1904 he won the Amsler gold medal for proficiency with the foils. He studied fencing under Lieutenant Philip Brigandi, of the Italian cavalry, and Captain Albert Androux, the celebrated French master of foils.
Fifteen minutes in the sun gives his complexion the shade of mahogany; twenty minutes, the shade of Booker T. Washington.
He wears the lightest weight underwear through the coldest winter.
He owns thirty-eight overcoats of all sorts and descriptions. Overcoats are a fad with him. He has them from heavy Russian fur to the flimsiest homespun.... He owns one with an alpine hood attachment.
He belongs to several metropolitan clubs, but never enters them.
He has never been in jail. He has been arrested but once: at the age of twenty for beating up a street-car conductor.
He always has his jackets made with two breast pockets: one for his handkerchief, the other for his reading glasses. The latter are of the horn species.
His telephone operator, at his apartment, has a list of five persons to whom he will talk—so many and no more. He refuses to answer the telephone before five o’clock in the afternoon.
His favorite places of eating in New York are the Café des Beaux Arts, the Kloster Glocke, and the Japanese Garden in the Ritz.
He can down several hundred olives at a single sitting.
He knows more about the modern foreign theater than any other American.
He is a lineal descendant of Petöfi Sándor, the national poet of Hungary, and of Thomas Bourgchier, archbishop of Canterbury.
An examination of his blood, on July 1, 1917, showed: Hb., 111%; W. B. C., 8,175. A phthalein test showed: 1st hr., 50%, 2d hr., 20%; total, 70%. Blood pressure: 129/77. Gastric analysis: Free HCl, 11.5%; combined, 20%. No stasis. No lactic acid.
He entered the New York Public Library for the first time on March 7, 1917, being taken there by A. Toxen Worm, of Copenhagen.
He never accepts a dinner invitation until invited three separate times, and then usually sends his regrets at the last moment.
The living Americans who most interest him are Josephus Daniels and Frank A. Munsey.
The only poet that he admires is John McClure. He seldom reads poetry. He has never read “Paradise Lost.”
He never visits a house a second time in which he has encountered dogs, cats, children, automatic pianos, grace before or after meals, women authors, actors, The New Republic, or prints of the Mona Lisa.
He is not acquainted with a single clergyman, Congressman, general, or reformer. He has never met any of the Vice-Presidents of the United States.
He is free of adenoids.
His knee jerks are normal.
He has never been inside a church.
He has been writing dramatic criticism for thirteen successive years, and in that time has seen more than 3000 plays in America, 400 in England, and 1900 on the Continent. He has simultaneously syndicated critical articles to as many as forty-two newspapers, and has served as dramatic critic to seven metropolitan magazines.
In 1910, on a wager, he wrote sixteen magazine articles in a single month.
Among his short stories are “D. S. W.,” “Nothing to Declare,” “But I Love Her,” “The Soul Song,” “The Triple Expense,” etc.
Among his most widely quoted retorts is that made by him to the newspaper interviewer who asked him if it was true that a disgruntled theatrical manager named Gest had alluded to him as a “pinhead.” “That,” replied Nathan, “is on the face of it absurd. ‘Pinhead’ is a word of two syllables.”
He once observed that the reason the galleries of our theaters, as our theatrical managers lament, are no longer filled with newsboys is that all the newsboys are now theatrical managers.
He wrote the introduction to Eleanor Gates’ play, “The Poor Little Rich Girl.”
He is the first American critic to have written of the dramatists Molnar, Brighouse, and Bracco.
His mother’s family were the pioneer settlers of Fort Wayne, Indiana. His father’s family were figures in the continental world of letters. His father spoke eleven languages, including the Chinese.
He frequently spends an entire afternoon polishing up a sentence in one of his compositions. And he often stops writing for a couple of days, or as long as it takes him, to hit upon an appropriate adjective or phrase.
He never writes love letters, and seldom reads them.
He cannot operate a motor car, or cook anything, or wind a dynamo, or fix a clock, or guess the answer to a riddle, or milk a cow.
He regards camping out as the most terrible diversion ever invented by man.
He knows nothing of country life, and cannot tell a wheat field from a potato patch. He regards all deciduous trees as oaks, and all evergreens as cedars.
He has yet to drink his first glass of Hires’ Root Beer.
He regards Al Woods as the most competent commercial manager in the American theater.
His library contains every known book on the drama published in the English, French, German, and Italian languages.
He owns many of the original Dunsany manuscripts.
Accused by certain of his critics of a flippant attitude toward the drama, he in reality takes the drama very seriously. The theater, on the other hand, he regards four out of five times as a joke.
He concurs in the Walpole philosophy that life is a tragedy to him who feels and a comedy to him who thinks.
He is a good listener. His invariable practice with talkers is to let the latter talk themselves out and then, after a moment’s studious silence, to nod his head and say yes. He never argues, never disagrees, no matter how bizarre the conversationalist’s pronunciamentos.
The Paris journal, Le Temps, frequently translates his critical articles and quotes from them copiously.
He owns an autographed photograph of the Russian mystic, Rasputin, presented to him by the latter six years ago.
He dislikes all forms of publicity. He has an aversion to self-advertisement that amounts almost to a mania. He believes, with Mencken, that whom the gods would destroy, they first make popular.
He takes a companion with him to the theater only on rare occasions. He uses the extra seat sent him by the managers as a depository for his hat and overcoat.
He always has thirty or forty lead pencils beside him when he writes. The moment one becomes a trifle dull he picks up another. He cannot sharpen the pencils well enough to suit himself and has the job done by his secretary.
He hasn’t the slightest intention of ever getting married.
He believes that the motor trip from Watkins Glen to Elmira, in New York State, is the most beautiful in America.
Among the Presidents of the United States he admires most—and by long odds—the late Grover Cleveland.
He believes the dirtiest spot in the world to be the Azores.
He believes Shaw’s “Cæsar and Cleopatra” to be the best modern British play, Brieux’s “Les Hannetons” the best modern French play, and Dunsany’s “Gods of the Mountain” the best modern Irish play.
He gets squiffed about once in six weeks, usually in company with John Williams. He has a headache the next day.
He carries a tube of menthol in his pocket and sniffs at it forty times a day.
He has been writing his monthly article for The Smart Set since 1909. He and Mencken became editors of the magazine in August, 1914.
He began his career as a man of letters by reporting for the New York Herald. He reads the Times and Globe daily.
Among his critical contemporaries in New York he has the highest respect for Louis Sherwin. Of American dramatists he most admires Avery Hopwood. Of American dramatic critics his vote is probably for Henry T. Parker, of the Boston Transcript.
In his own opinion, the best thing he has ever written is “The Eternal Mystery.”
He has never been to Washington, nor to California, nor to Boston.
He has never made a speech, nor delivered a lecture, nor sat on a committee. He has never subscribed to a charity fund.
He wears a No. 14½ collar and No. 7¼ hat. His favorite soup is Crême de Sante.
The only author he ever invites to his office is Harry Kemp. He detests Kemp’s poetry.
The temperature of his daily bath is 67 degrees.
A practitioner of preciosity in style, he nevertheless dictates business and social letters in a “would say” manner, and has his secretary sign them.
In 1900 he fought a duel with pistols outside of Florence, Italy, and was wounded in the left shoulder. He is still a trifle lame from the wound.
Returning to America in 1912 on the Philadelphia, during a rough passage he was the only passenger on the ship to appear in the dining saloon for four successive days. With three of the stewards, he passed the time by improvising a bowling alley in the saloon, utilizing mutton chops for the pins and oranges for the balls. The latter were automatically returned to the bowlers by the ship’s periodical pitch backward.
He has had the same barber for fourteen years. Curiously enough, the barber’s name is George J. Nath.
His valet’s name is Osuka F. Takami. The latter has a penchant for polishing Nathan’s patent leather boots with the sofa pillows.
He has seen only one vaudeville show in the last eight years.
He believes that Herma Prach is the prettiest girl on the Viennese stage and Gladys Gaynor the prettiest on the London stage. He has never seen a pretty girl on either the Berlin or Paris stage.
His headquarters in London is the Savoy; in Berlin, the Adlon; in Vienna, the Grand; in Paris, the Astra.
He has never eaten a pickled eel, calf’s brains, chicken livers, or tongue.
He has never been in a Childs’ restaurant or in Rector’s.
He is of a nervous temperament and the slightest sound during the night wakes him up.
He looks seven years younger than he is.
He has been shot at three times in America, but never hit.
He likes chop suey, spaghetti, French pastry, horseradish sauce, Welsh rarebits, oysters à la Dumas, raw tomatoes, stuffed baked potatoes, green peppers, broiled lobster, halibut, mushrooms cooked with caraway seeds, and chipped beef.
His favorite American city is Philadelphia. His favorite French, Barbizon. His favorite German, Munich. His favorite English, Leeds.
He covered murder trials in various parts of the country for the New York Herald during the years of his preparation for dramatic criticism.
He wears tan pongee silk shirts in summer.
The New Yorkers he admires most are W. R. Hearst, Arthur Hopkins, and M. Alevy, the eminent maître d’hôtel of the Café des Beaux Arts.
He is the only American dramatic critic who has never succumbed to the Augustus Thomas, Granville Barker or Belasco rumble-bumble.
He is entirely ignorant of mathematics, geology, botany, and physics. Like Mencken, however, he is a good speller, and is privy to the intricacies of punctuation.
The name of the girl who manicures his nails is Miss Priscilla Brown. She is an orphan.
The claret he commonly serves to his guests costs eighty-five cents a gallon, in quarts. He buys the labels separately.
His favorite hospitals are the Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, and Galen Hall, in Atlantic City. Whenever he is ill he goes to one or the other.
Since 1901 he has loved seventeen different girls, and still remembers the names of all of them, and their preferences in literature, food, and wines. Of the seventeen, fourteen are happily married, one has been married and divorced, and the rest have gone West.
He owns three watches, seventeen scarf-pins, and nineteen pairs of shoes.
His skull is sub-brachycephalic, with a cephalic index of 83.1. His cranial capacity, by the system of Deniker, is 1756 cc. His nose is mesorhinian, and his nasal index is 46.2. The ratio between the length of his radius and that of his humerus is as 73 is to 100.
By the Binet-Simon test his general intelligence is that of a man of 117 years.
His voice is a baritone, with a range of one octave and two tones.
He never answers questions put to him in letters.
A friend presented him several years ago with a set of O. Henry, which, try as he will, he can’t get rid of.
He would rather eat a salt-sprinkled raw tomato still hot from the sun than a dinner from the hand of a French chef.
He has everything he wears made to his order, save his belts and his socks. He never buys even a hat that is ready-made.
He has written under the pseudonyms of George Narét, Rupert Cross, and William Drayham.
He has been denounced in the New York newspapers, during his career as dramatic critic, by three playwrights, five theatrical managers, eight actresses, twenty-two actors, and almost everyone connected with vaudeville.
He likes garlic, but refrains from eating it.
He has read Max Beerbohm’s “Happy Hypocrite” thirteen times.
Like Mencken, he is subject to periodic attacks of melancholia.
He has visited every American resort north of Old Point Comfort—and thinks them all pretty bad.
He believes the Ritz, in Philadelphia, to be the best hotel in America.
He believes the Hudson Theater, in New York, to be the most comfortable theater in America.
Several years ago, seeking isolation in which to finish a piece of work, he decided to shut his eyes, run his finger down a New York Central time-table, and go to the place opposite the name of which his finger would come to a halt. His finger stopped opposite an exotic something named New Paltz.... The first person he saw when he got off at the New Paltz station was the man he had roomed with in his junior year at college.
He has said that “cleverness” consists merely in saying the wrong thing at the right time.
He owns three suits of evening clothes.
He wears pongee pajamas.
His one-act play, “The Eternal Mystery,” which was suppressed in New York and Detroit, created more discussion than any one-act play produced in America in the last dozen years.
He is kind to dogs, babies, and negroes. He has never given a street beggar a cent.
Among his closest friends in Europe are Ballington Booth, Jack Johnson, and M. Philippe Cartier, in charge of the malt department on the Orient Express.
His most ingenious piece of dramatic criticism was his criticism of the writings of Augustus Thomas, in which he proved that Thomas’ plays would be better if they were played backward.
His hair grows so quickly that he has to get a hair-cut every ten days.
His father’s first name was Charles; his middle name, Narét.
He likes hot weather, the hotter the better.
He believes the island of Bermuda to be the most beautiful spot on earth. He would like to live there—if he couldn’t live in Munich.
He once wrote an article on The Department of the Interior for Munsey’s Magazine. He gave the proceeds, by way of atonement, to the First Baptist Church of Asbury Park.
He knew Evelyn Nesbit when she was a baby.
He believes that twelve per cent of all reformers and uplifters are asses, and that the rest are thieves.
He wears low, Byronic collars and rather gaudy neckties.
In philosophy he is a skeptical idealist, believing that the truth is an illusion and that man is a botch. He has read the works of Kant, Fichte, and Locke, but can’t remember what was in them. He regards Schopenhauer, on the woman question, as a sentimentalist whistling in the dark.
His knowledge of economics is extensive, and he once wrote a pamphlet against David Ricardo. It has been translated into French, German, and Bohemian.
He has never written any poetry in English, but published a slim volume of Petrarchan sonnets in Italian during his student days in Bologna. The only copy of this book known to exist is in the library of Balliol College, Oxford. The author’s own copy was lost in the burning of the Hôtel de France at Lausanne, in the winter of 1903.
He is an excellent Latinist and has translated Albius Tibullus.
His favorite opera is Gluck’s “Iphigénie in Tauris.” He once traveled from Nice to Dresden to hear it. His chief abomination in the opera house is “The Jewels of the Madonna.”
While on the staff of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett offered him the post of London correspondent. The emolument proposed, however, made Nathan laugh.
He owns three top hats, fourteen walking sticks, and two Russian wolf-hounds.
He writes with a Mikado No. 1 lead-pencil.
He is on good terms with but two members of his family.
He reads, on the average, one hundred and fifty foreign plays every year.
He has read every book on the drama published in America, England, France, and Germany since 1899.
He uses Calox tooth powder, Colgate’s shaving soap, a double strength witch hazel, a Gillette razor, and Kitchell’s Horse Liniment. He has never taken quinine, Peruna, Piso’s Cough Syrup, Sanatogen, asperin, morphine, opium, or castor oil—but he has taken everything else.
He believes Mencken eats too much.
He has been inoculated against typhoid.
He once, as a boy, ran a railroad locomotive from Cleveland, Ohio, to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, killing only two cows.
He gets a cinder in his eye on an average of twice a day.
He can drink anything but sweet cordials.
With his meals, he uses Cross and Blackwell’s chow-chow.
In his undergraduate days he was an editor of all the Cornell University papers.
He wrote articles on the theater for the old Harper’s Weekly for four years.
He knows three jockeys, eight bartenders, one murderer, two sea captains, three policemen, one letter carrier, and one politician.
He is a warm friend of Detective William J. Burns.
He likes buttermilk.
Christmas costs him, on the average, about a thousand dollars.
For the last two years he has received weekly anonymous letters from some woman in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who signs herself with the initials “L. G.”
He is writing the introduction to Arthur Hopkins’ new book on the drama.
He has not ridden a horse since May 22, 1908.
In October, 1912, he and his broker were wrecked off Barnegat in the latter’s yacht, Margo I, and were rescued via a breeches buoy by the Barnegat life-saving crew.
He never reads popular novels.
Mr. Winthrop Ames has invited him to write a satirical review for his Little Theater in New York and Nathan is planning to do the thing during 1918.
He eats two raw eggs a day to put on weight.
When the victim of a bad cold and unable to smoke, he chews soft licorice candy while writing.
He believes that George Bickel is the funniest comedian on the American stage, that Arnold Daly is the best actor, that Margaret Illington is the best actress.
He has never written a thing that, upon rereading after its appearance in print, didn’t seem to him to be chock full of flaws.
He is lucky at games of chance, though he seldom plays. In 1912 he won $2,000 in the Havana lottery.
He owns six belts, one of them presented to him by Gabriele D’Annunzio and made of wolf hide.
He is in favor of universal military service, imperialism, and birth-control, but is opposed to woman suffrage, the direct primary, and prohibition.
His usual pulse is 71 a minute. After drinking it rises to 85.
He keeps no books of account, and does not know his exact income. As a means of defense against sudden calamity he keeps $3000 in gold in a safe deposit vault.
His favorite name for girls is Helen.
If he could rechristen himself, he would choose the given name of John.
He pronounces his middle name, not in the French manner, but to rhyme with bean.
He is a third cousin of Signor Enrico Nathan, the late Socialist mayor of Rome. His uncle, Dr. Émile Nathan van der Linde, privat docent in anthropology at Leyden, was killed by savages in Borneo in 1889, while a member of the Oesterling exploring expedition.
He has never visited the battlefield at Gettysburg.