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Alcohol in the Eighties

Painted Veils by James Huneker. Boni and Liveright

The Literary Review (New York Evening Post) October 30, 1920

Mr. Huneker has just bridged a large lacuna in American letters. In Painted Veils he has given us our own little version of that panting period at the end of the last century which went racing though all the big cities of the Occident. We can now sit back proud in the knowledge that America was as ferocious as the rest of them. If France had its absinthe and its curacao, and England and Germany ditto, we now know on the authority of Painted Veils that vigorous young Americans went about with an occasional Dora whose “body was like a white satin stove,” and conquered frequent violent “hookers.” In Painted Veils, the Eighteenth Amendment is flaunted egregiously. The book should have three stars on the label. It is 110 proof.

The novel opens with Esther’s coming to New York back in the ’80s with only a hundred dollars in her pocketbook. But Esther is a difficult problem for the reader. Here is a young girl, coming to New York, poor and an orphan, yet she is neither duped, nor beset by plotting scoundrels, nor overwhelmed by the splendor of the city. In fact, as soon as Esther arrives she begins a business-like exploitation of every one who tries to befriend her. She has a voice, she has come to have a career, and she sets out on this career the first day. Within a short time she has used New York for all that it seems to be worth to her at that time, and goes off to Europe. With her temporarily out of the way Mr. Huneker turns attention to Ulick, who is a dramatic critic well up on the arts, with a Parisian training, but living in New York at the advice of his friend, Remy de Gourmont.

Ulick had had one brief mix-up, incognito with Esther before meeting her in New York, and the memory of it still itches him. However, there is nothing to do but find consultation in other fidelities, a predicament which Ulick manages quite well. But Esther has been going steadily ahead with her conquests, and returns to New York toward the close of the book a famous Wagnerian singer. Along with her fame she has considerably increased the range of her vices. The outcome of it all is a discovery which is as disgusting as the author intended it to be; then various characters are buried, and the book is over.

Painted Veils is a remarkable essay in assimilation, as I suppose a novel by a critic should be. With marked Baudelairean morals, it also has bits after the St. James version, a generous application of the psychoanalytic nomenclature, passages in the manner of our newest fragmentary writers, a few sentences of the thriller type, and, most of all, frequent borrowings from James Huneker, the critic. Mona at times has the flavor of Schnitzler’s Anna in “Der Weg ins Freie.” There is Huysmans, both in the intermingling of dogma and plot, and in the predilection for riot. The characters often mediate in a series of quotations from the most select authors. The purpureus pannus of Esther nude before the mirror is a newly imagined re-rendering of the classic theme of painting. For pages on end the author will transfer his authority to some other author he has read and admired.

The outcome of it all, then, is a “literary” novel. The characters are alternately ideological and mulierose, they are intelligent, and above all, talky. A continuous attempt at valuations—by no means new, but still vital—runs through the volume, although they are usually stuck in the mouth or head of some character. The book is allowed to fluctuate as it wills—action, criticism, analysis, generality; surely, Mr. Huneker was trying to do what Ulick contemplated: “To write a story, not all empty incident, nor yet all barren analysis. Neither Henry James, nor Dumas.”

I do not know how long it takes to make a bomb. But Mr. Huneker testifies that Painted Veils was written in barely more than a month and a half. It was written, then, as speedily as it seems. It was hardly more than a racy conversation. The rough spots were never corrected, but, in compensation, the good spots are all the swifter. Mr. Huneker took his little fling, and a fling is never quite beyond reproach. Again, a fling is more likely to be an hilarious affair, where the smile crystallizes on your face every now and then, turns sickly, but soon regains its spontaneity.

This spontaneity is the most striking quality of the book. The index cards in the public libraries have a record like this after Mr. Huneker’s name: (1859-); yet here comes Mr. Huneker with a volume that is nothing if not young. It is hard to believe when you read Painted Veils that Mr. Huneker was once a contemporary of waxed flowers and antimacassars, family albums, and the sheaf of wheat, “over the fence is out,” and fathers that asked young men who called three times in succession whether their intentions were honorable.

Uplifts having gone out of fashion, James Huneker is one of our leading down-lifters. For a time, at least, Gallicism seems to be climbing toward ascendancy over Victorianism. And with a sympathy for Gallicism comes a parallel questioning of America. We are coming to accept it not only docilely, but almost with gratitude, when we learn that “Ulick, despite his fondness for minced pie and Philadelphia scrapple, could not endure the national cuisine.’ ‘We are barbarians compared with the French,’ he openly asserted, ‘who know how to eat, drink, and think.’” In all probability, one nation is as stupid as another, however. But for better or worse, we are on our way; Victorianism never dreamed of such a neat cacophony as “They sang, and their voices were heavy with wine, passion, and incipient catarrh.”

There is no break between the Huneker of the ethic-less criticisms and Huneker of Painted Veils. His treatment is completely unhampered, and will prove decidedly too unhampered for those who prefer calling a spade a teaspoon. And what with The Genius and Jurgen and Painted Veils, it seems that that super-Adam-and-Eva, that pre-Hebronian couple, Lingam and Yoni, have been gaining great vogue of late.