For a prospective article I have been conducting research on
Dashiell Hammett (in particular his mystery book reviews for
The Saturday Review of Literature and his "Crime Wave"
columns in the New York Evening Post). Because Hammett first
wrote for _The Smart Set_ and then _Black Mask_, I
necessarily wandered across the trail of George Jean
Nathan.
In his "The Theatre" column for the _American Mercury_ (which
he and Mencken also co-founded and co-edited) of November
1929, Nathan had some commentary regarding the mystery,
particularly mystery plays dominating the New York season
that year but also the mystery story.
He boiled his critique down to five "Analytical Meditations"
that I shall summarize due to length:
1. Of all forms of entertainment, the mystery play or story
most greatly flatters the cerebral vanity of persons without
minds, in that it challenges the superficial brain cells with
a showy substitute for ratiocination.
2. The late war [WWI] produced killing on such an enormous
scale that, by virtue of its very magnitude, that killing
became in turn incomprehensible and neuter...Killing on the
grand scale became an impersonal thing and such is human
nature that it lost personal interest. And, as the murder of
a single citizen is always closer to the interest of the
people in a town than the killing of thousands of men on some
far battlefield, the public's emotions craved a reduction of
murder, a narrowing down of murder to a point of personal
interest and personal sympathy...The public, not seeing or
knowing personally the tens of thousands of men killed in
battle, could not feel half the personal concern in their
murder that it can feel in the murder of an actor it lays
eyes on or even in the murder of a character that a novelist
has made intimately real to it.
3. The mystery play has much the same quality as a baseball
game, a horse race or any other such popular competitive
sport. Its excitement for the spectator lies in betting upon
and determining the name of the ultimate winner. Everything
is intensely directed toward the finish, the solution, the
award...The other play other than the mystery play is not so
greatly concerned with its outcome as with its intermediate
by-play. It appeals to the relative minority who go to a
horse race more because they love horses than because they
admire jockeyship.
4. The mystery play, the world over, presently occupies the
fancy of the generation of audiences that has grown up since
the outbreak of the late war [again, WWI] and that, while it
has out-grown childhood, is still not completely adult.
Before the war these audiences, then at the sapling age,
found delight in an endless succession of stage magicians,
illusionists, prestidigitators and quick-change artists...The
next theatrical rung after the magician, mind-reader and
general goldfish-bowl hocus-pocus artist is the mystery
play....
5. The public relishes the mystery play because it
substitutes out-and-out plot for more or less shadowy and
involved theme. The theme play develops out of itself slowly:
what it is driving at is made only gradually to sink into the
consciousness of an audience. But the mystery play states its
intrinsic nature plainly soon after the curtain goes up, thus
relieving the audience of metaphysical speculation and
permitting it lazily and comfortably to enjoy its mental
shortcomings in cross-word puzzle details.
Due to the length of this post, I will avoid adding my own
comments on Nathan's writings. I do have a view but will
refrain from expressing it at this time.
Bill Harker
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