SOURCE: "A Riot of Obscene Wit," in Columbia Library Columns, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, May, 1982, pp. 19-28.

"The other day Huneker came into my office with the ms. of his novel," wrote H. L. Mencken in 1919 about Pointed 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 unprintable. 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," Mencken 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, Mencken 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 prediction that the "pornographic novel will never be published." This was 1919, after all, the very year James Branch Cabell's Jurgen was barred from bookshops by the New York Society for the Suppression 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 was 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 combinations—and epigrammatic comments about sex dominate in such a way that it is possible to lose sight of other elements of the narrative. Huneker considered the work "frankly erotic" and boasted to Mencken: "There are enough happenings to amuse the choicest company at a bordel."

The racy story was set in New York City during the late nineteenth century among the musicians, artists, decadents and dilettantes Huneker had known two or three decades earlier. From all accounts, there could have been no better spokesman for this fin de siéle group than Huneker himself who was described by the poet Benjamin De Casseres as "the incarnation of the cultured bohemianism of the glamorous days when the city was young, irresponsible, Dionysian." He had taken the city by storm in the late 1880s, according to Alfred Kazin, "driving a dozen horses and tumbling over between them. He had more energy, knew more people, retailed more gossip, wrote more books, drank more beer, and disseminated more information on the artistic personality than almost any other journalist of his time." Kazin could have added that Huneker had probably had more love affairs than most of his contemporaries as well.

Trained as a musician, first in Philadelphia and later in Paris, Huneker's success in journalism came as a result of his failure to become a piano virtuoso. He turned to writing original and witty articles on music in which he popularized many modern European composers including Richard Strauss. Later he wrote lively essays on drama, art and literature which showed the influence of such authors as Joris Karl Huysmans, Remy de Gourmont, and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. These are the writers Huneker had admired in Paris and all of them appear briefly as characters in his roman á clef.

Huneker's career as journalist writing for a number of New York dailies is chronicled in Steeplejack (1918), an autobiography completed shortly before he began Painted Veils. "I would fain be a pianist, a composer of music," the frustrated author forlornly divulged in these memoirs. "I am neither. Nor a poet. Nor a novelist, actor, playwright. I have written many things from architecture to zoology without grasping their inner substance. I am Jack of the Seven Arts, master of none." Throughout his life, Huneker had proudly called himself a "man-of-letters," a phrase once employed to describe the kind of roving literary journalism he practiced. As academics and specialists started taking over much of this literary writing, "men-of-letters" began to lose their influence and the phrase itself became pejorative. As Huneker approached sixty, he seemed aware of the changing literary climate which was making his profession obsolete; apparently this realization strengthened his conviction that his own career had been a dismal failure.

He was especially depressed that summer of 1919 when he started his novel. In addition to being disillusioned, he was in dire financial and physical straits, having just returned from the hospital where he had been operated on for the removal of a cyst from his bladder. Furthermore, and perhaps more devastating for the rakish writer, he was now impotent, a condition he had complained to his doctor about as early as 1911. By 1919, he admitted that he had altogether given up what he liked to call "horizontal refreshment": "Fornication is forgotten—and thank the lord." It was in these trying circumstances that Huneker sat down to write the most lurid book of his time—and he wrote it at breakneck speed.

"III as I was from bladder trouble—5 months on the water wagon now—I composed and wrote a novel—100,000 words," he told De Casseres. "I wrote it in 7 weeks, less 2 days—wrote it with the tears in my eyes from age; and in revenge" Huneker hoped that his female readers would find the work especially erotic—if not thoroughly arousing. Had Huneker become an "exhibitionist in print?" Was he seeking alternative techniques to stimulate women now that he was "non compos penis," as Mencken playfully described the unfortunate condition? Perhaps by writing Painted Veils Huneker was simply working out his sexual inadequacies or gratifying some of his needs.

In the novel, Huneker retold the story he had written in his autobiography—but from a different perspective. He claimed that he left out of his memoirs accounts of his love life because "I didn't wish the publishers to go to jail." But in Printed Veils all of the "suppressed complexes" come to the surface: "I've traced a parallel route frankly dealing with sex; also with the development of a young man deracinated because born in Paris and suffering." That character is Ulrick Invern, "a writer, incidentally a critic" who lives ambivalently on the fringes of the artistic world of New York City. He is trapped between the advice of Remy de Gourmont, who encouraged him in Paris to return to America, and Edgar Saltus, who told him he should have remained in Paris. "Apart from his studies nothing interested [Ulrick] like sex," and much of the novel is about his essentially unfulfilling—though nonetheless intriguing—relationships with three fetching women whom Huneker characterized as "hot and hollow."

Easter Brandes, a narcissistic singer, has the strongest hold on Ulrick, and she is caught early in the book admiring her naked reflection in a mirror: "she bowed low to her image, kicked her right leg on high, turned her comely back, peeped over her shoulder, mockingly stuck out her tongue as she regarded with awe—almost—the delicately modelled buttocks." Ulrick also has a love affair with Mona Milton, a concupiscent woman who "wished that her soul could be like a jungle at night, filled with the cries of monstrous sins." Finally, the young protagonist passes some of his time with Dora, a classy prostitute who is a "treasure-trove for an erotic man."

The central incident of the narrative occurs at a Holy Roller revival in Zaneburg, New Hampshire, where Ulrick and Easter meet for the first time. A Negro preacher named Brother Rainbow presided over this religious gathering which degenerated into an orgy. During the frenzy, the lights go out, and Ulrick and Easter each have sex. Ulrick presumes that his partner had been Easter and as a result he pursues her throughout the book with a stronger passion than he can ever muster for the other women he meets. At the end of the novel, however, he learns the truth about the incident: "In the darkness we all got mixed up," Easter informs him. She had been raped by Brother Rainbow while Ulrick's companion had been the preacher's white assistant, Roarin' Nell.

"The story itself is largely true," Huneker told the incredulous John Quinn, a famous lawyer and collector who called the novel "Painted Whores." "I know—and knew—[Easter]. She is a composite of—well, I'll tell you some day. Mona is in town today: and the little slut, Dora, still lives and ceased fornication." H. L. Mencken thought he knew the names of two women who may have provided the inspiration for Easter, and he wrote about them to Dr. Fielding Hudson Garrison, a mutual friend and well-known medical historian: "I suspect that Huneker's heroine is chiefly Sibyl Sanderson, with touches of Olive Fremstad. Before the collapse of his glands he was in the intimate confidence of both of them." Mencken was more or less correct, though Mary Garden, Sibyl Sanderson's protegee, was probably a stronger influence than Sanderson's herself. All three were glamorous opera singers whose love affairs sometimes attracted as much attention as their singing. Olive Fremstad, who also provided Willa Cather with the model for the heroine of her Song of the Lark, is the only one of the three with whom Huneker was ever linked romantically.

Huneker likened his heroine to the mythological Istar, a Babylonian goddess of sex and war, and patterned the novel on an obscure poem by Epopee d'Izdubar, "Istar's Descent into Hdes," from which he quotes the passage entitled "Painted Veils." There Istar travels through seven gates on her way through hell. At each one, she is stripped of an article of clothing until "At the seventh gate, the warder … took off the last veil that covers her body." The seven arts which Huneker practiced are represented by the seven veils which symbolically drape the seven sins to which he so often gleefully yielded. The gates of the poem also provided Huneker with the structure for his work which is divided into seven chapters called "gates."

As the characters progress through these gates, hypocrisy is stripped from them and at the end their true natures are revealed. "Hypocrisy is, as you say, necessary to screen certain unpleasant realities," Ulrick's friend Mel informs him. "It is a pia fraus; painted veils. Painted lies." Easter is an innocent, small-town singer at the first gate of the novel; by the time she reaches the sixth gate she is a dazzling opera star who has become "Istar, the Great Singing Whore of Modern Babylon." She is completely immoral, has taken up lesbianism, and has seduced Dora, the prostitute. Ulrick's best friend, a priest, has also fallen victim to her; instead of being corrupted by a religious man—as she was by Brother Rainbow—she has become a seducer of the cloth.

Easter's activities have a debilitating effect on Ulrick though his troubles seem more complex than simple dissatisfaction with her. Ulrick never appears satisfied—or even very successful—in his relationships with women. "He had ardently longed for this meeting," Ulrick thought during an embrace with Mona, "and now he was acting like a cowardly eunuch." As her passions increased, he "resisted her tumultuous onset blushing like a virgin." He behaved no better with Dora when he "turned his head away as she repeatedly kissed him." Even with Easter: "he kissed her on the mouth, but the champagne odour was repugnant." Ulrick's unhappiness and dissatisfaction are closely linked to his sexuality, and he may have been suffering a form of impotence not unlike his creator's. "All is lacking, if sex is lacking," Ulrick had disclosed to Easter, "or if the moisture of the right man is lacking." The revelation that it was Roarin' Nell, not Easter, with whom he had coupled at the Holy Roller meeting horrified Ulrick, and he subsequently drank himself to death in Paris.

"As to my novel… it will shock you," Huneker wrote to William Crary Brownell, the urbane literary adviser to Scribner's, in a letter discussing the possibility of publishing the book with that firm. Charles Scribner had once told Huneker that he would tolerate anything Huneker chose to print, but obviously Scribner never expected a book "inscribed in all gratitude to the charming morganatic ladies, les belles impures, who make pleasanter this vale of tears for virile men. What shall it profit a woman if she saves her soul but loseth love?" The novel, in fact, was such a departure from his other work, which consisted largely of critical essays and studies of Chopin and Liszt, that Huneker had had the foresight to send the manuscript to other publishers, not only to Mencken but also to Alfred Knopf and Horace Liveright.

Scribners did like the book, however, or at least Huneker hyperbolically reported that they had told him "not in this generation have they read fiction so original, brilliant, human, or so well composed and written!" And they offered to publish it, but only in an expurgated edition "for a purer public" than Huneker wanted to reach on the first go-round. "As to the bowdlerization, nothing is decided upon," Huneker told T. R. Smith, Boni and Liveright's editorial assistant. "The story can stand on its merits without the humorous elements; of obscenity, vulgarity or indecency, there is not a trace; only extreme frankness and the sex side dealt with as if by a medical expert. Might I say gynecologist."

Boni and Liveright accepted the book complete with the "omphalic trimmings." As Dreiser's publisher, this firm had already had experience with controversial books, but even they would not issue the book in a trade edition. Huneker nevertheless entered into negotiations with Horace Liveright with high expectations of success, and a signed, private printing was scheduled for October 1920 ("if the police, prompted by the Society for the prevention of cruelty to imbeciles, don't intervene"). "I should like you to see the publisher's contract," he appealed to John Quinn. "I need money and I'm going to get it." In a letter to Horace Liveright about that contract, Huneker tried to anticipate contingencies which might arise: "And please mention English edition; and my rights to translations, dramatic and movie rights. I'll interpolate this claim if it is not included. As to probable date of payments; $1000 when the book appears, balance of $800 as soon as possible. I'll sign 1200 sheets; I wish there were 1500."

There were no translations, no expurgated editions, no movies, no plays, not even any lawsuits. But that first printing, offered only by subscription, quickly sold out in a ten-dollar edition printed expressly for, according to Mencken, "the admittedly damned." Issuing it this way entailed few risks, and an expensive, small printing had the additional virtue of appealing to collectors of pornography. While Mencken would not fall into that category, he was nevertheless one of the recipients. Pasted into his copy, now in the H. L. Mencken Room of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, is a card which reads: "To my old friend, the Attila of American criticism, and the salt of the earth generally, this book of senile scabrous morality is inscribed with the regards of James Huneker." Huneker also sent Mencken another card stating that the title should be changed to Painted Tails; he instructed Mencken to affix this to his copy as well, but apparently it was lost.

Had the book been more thoughtfully written—or perhaps only more slowly written—and skilfully developed, it might have won a less tentative place for itself in the annals of American literature. Huneker seemed well aware of the work's limitations when he wrote "No book, no matter what the length of its incubation, can be art, that is actually written in 7 weeks, less 2 days." Nevertheless, Harry Levin called Painted Veils the book which "ushered in the twenties," and the novel has been praised by others including Oscar Cargill who declared it an "apologia pro vita sua—one of the most remarkable ever written."

Pointed Veils has also enjoyed short periods of popularity. In 1928, six years after Huneker's death, Horace Liveright successfully reissued it and in 1953 an Avon paperback edition is said to have had the astonishing sale of 200,000 copies. However, it did not have the succes de scandale Huneker might have anticipated after Mrs. N. P. Dawson used a superlative to describe it in the New York Globe: "There are disgusting scenes in Pointed Veils that 'outstrip' anything that has ever been put in print before" (December 24, 1920). Nor did it gain the importance Columbia professor Vernon Loggins predicted in 1937 in I Hear America, In a discussion of three writers—Huneker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Carl Van Vechten—Loggins wrote: "But of all the books of sophistication published in America during the twenties the one which now seems most likely to last is James Gibbons Huneker's Painted Veils."