President Harding’s Favorite Book

PRESIDENT-ELECT HARDING was, and is, a newspaper man. Thank God for that. He knows life as it is, and as it appears to be in the press. The man who knows how to read our newspapers has won half of the battle. And newspaper men are generous and excellent judges of men.

Harding smokes cigarettes. This puts him in a different class. Look out for the man who warns you against cigarettes. Who tells you (on offering him your case) with a superior smile: “Thanks, I don’t use them.”

Sometimes I will sing a song of hate against those black cigars of the sedate and of the respectable. I loathe the cigar of the habitual smoker, so justly characterized by Schopenhauer as a stimulant of thought for people who do not think. Not one smoker of cigarettes ever arrives at that low level of enjoyment.

To smoke a cigar is not much more than a hobby. The cigarette is a passion, a vice.

The cigarette is intoxicating. If one inhales the aromatic smoke, draws it deep into one’s lungs, into blood and nerves, one feels that this narcotic wonder-poison liberates the soul from a profane pressure, and one’s spirit is lured to lighter and brighter regions. Intoxication is the sweet magic of the cigarette, and, therefore, the cigarette is inseparable from all extravagant enjoyments. The cigarette is in the gambling den. It can be found always where they drink champagne. It is a part of frivolity, of sin, of the poetry of enjoyment. Its aromatic fragrance, the tender rings that vanish swiftly into grotesque figures.... The cigarette is the perfume of the boudoir.

The cigarette smoker never looks for a stronger brand, as the consumer of cigars, who methodically tans his tongue with his weed. The cigarette smoker increases his daily ration, and finally smokes between the courses of his meal, between his kisses.... In the green room of theatre and concert room, you can see him hungrily reaching for his silver case, the gift of his beloved. He awakens in the night and lights his cigarette, and what peace and joy after each long draught of the sweet redeeming bewilderment. That’s quite different from that brown, ill-smelling butt, chewed from one corner of the mouth to the other, lighted again and again, until it has happily dissolved itself into ashes. A bedroom filled with smoke: a long story of enlightenment to the one who knows. The cigarette fits in our nervous times. A nervous pleasure for a nervous people. We smoke cigarettes because we are nervous. We are nervous because we smoke cigarettes.

How beautiful they look, golden, tender threads enclosed in fragile rice paper, like a lovely woman’s beautiful hair, fragrant and tempting. Compare them with the most beautiful box of cigars. Those black, strong-smelling cigars, carcasses of leaves transformed into mummies. Think of the men who smoke them, and tell me isn’t there some similarity?

In some Sunday paper, I read that Mr. Harding’s favorite book was written by Edgar Saltus. You rack your brains? You don’t remember Saltus? Twenty years ago, he was hailed as the coming American novelist. At least twenty books of his appeared in short succession. Today he is known almost exclusively to the booklover. First (often the only) editions of some of his books are in demand and sell at fancy prices, while others can be found at the book bargain counters of Liggett’s Drug Stores at twenty-five cents a copy. His Magdalene appeared at the time of Oscar Wilde’s visit to America. Both men met here, in London and Paris. Critics contend that Wilde received from this book his inspiration for Salome. There are pages and pages of great similarity in both books. Saltus’ Magdalene is a fine contribution to the world’s literature of Magdalenes. In all his books there is a touch of the French eighties, and a resonance with the English nineties. If Saltus had not been a scholar, he would be another George Moore. Only a connoisseur can take a fancy to Saltus, a man who has a fine sense for literature and for life.

I love to think of the newspaper man with literary inclinations smoking his cigarette, while reading one of Saltus’ books, in his study in the White House.

1920