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"A Riot of Obscene Wit"

PAUL E. COHEN

'I/" If ^HF", other day Huneker came into my oflace with the ms.
of his novel," wrote H. L. jMencken in 1919 about Painted
Veils, the holograph manuscript of which is now in the
Solton and Julia Engel Collection. "The thing turned out to be
superb—the best thing he has ever done. But absolutely unprint¬
able. It is not merely ordinarily improper; it is a riot of obscene
wit." The novel was the work of James Gibbons Huneker, the
well-known journalist and critic who at age sixty-two had written
his first full-length work of fiction. "The old boy has put into it
every illicit epigram that he has thought of in 40 years," iMcncken
went on, "and some of them are almost perfect. I yelled over it."

Huneker had actually submitted the novel to him hoping it
might be serialized in Smart Set, the sophisticated literary journal
Mencken edited with George Jean Nathan. However, AJencken
exhibited an essentially prudish nature when he found the work
too full of "lascivious frills and thrills" for his journal and turned
it down with the predicition that the "pornographic novel will
never be published." This was 1919, after all, the very year James
Branch Cabell's Jurgen was barred from book'shops by the New
York Society for the Supression of Vice, the same organization
which had previously banned Theodore Dreiser's The Genius. "If
we printed [Painted Veils]," Mencken joked, "we'd get at least
40 years."

The publishing problem Huneker had created ^\-as probably
driven home to him after he read Jurgen which he "marvelled over
—at the notion of it being obscene." Painted Veils is not a bawdy
book; it has no coarse or vulgar language and no graphic accounts
of carnal pleasures. Nevertheless, it is still possible to understand
Mencken's refusal to serialize the book. The characters in the
novel make love with frequency—and in a variety of complex

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