高级英语（第二册） Lesson7 The Libido for the Ugly (H. L. Mencken)
1 On a Winter day some years ago, coming out of Pittsburgh on one of the
expresses of the Pennsylvania Railroad, I rolled eastward for an hour through the coal
and steel towns of Westmoreland county. It was familiar ground; boy and man, I had
been through it often before. But somehow I had never quite sensed its appalling
desolation. Here was the very heart of industrial America, the center of its most
lucrative and characteristic activity, the boast and pride of the richest and grandest
nation ever seen on earth--and here was a scene so dreadfully hideous , so intolerably
bleak and forlorn that it reduced the whole aspiration of man to a macabre and
depressing joke. Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond
imagination--and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have
disgraced a race of alley cats.
2 I am not speaking of mere filth. One expects steel towns to be dirty. What I
allude to is the unbroken and agonizing ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness,
of every house in sight. From East Liberty to Greensburg, a distance of twenty-five
miles, there was not one in sight from the train that did not insult and lacerate the eye.
Some were so bad, and they were among the most pretentious --churches, stores,
warehouses, and the like--that they were down-right startling; one blinked before
them as one blinks before a man with his face shot away. A few linger in memory,
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高级英语（第二册） Lesson7 The Libido for the Ugly (H. L. Mencken)
horrible even there: a crazy little church just west of Jeannette, set like a
dormer-window on the side of a bare leprous hill; the headquarters of the Veterans of
Foreign Wars at another forlorn town, a steel stadium like a huge rattrap somewhere
further down the line. But most of all I recall the general effect--of hideousness
without a break. There was not a single decent house within eyerange from the
Pittsburgh to the Greensburg yards. There was not one that was not misshapen, and
there was not one that was not shabby.
3 The country itself is not uncomely, despite the grime of the endless mills. It is,
in form, a narrow river valley, with deep gullies running up into the hills. It is thickly
settled, but not: noticeably overcrowded. There is still plenty of room for building, even
in the larger towns, and there are very few solid blocks. Nearly every house, big and
little, has space on all four sides. Obviously, if there were architects of any
professional sense or dignity in the region, they would have perfected a chalet to hug
the hillsides--a chalet with a high-pitched roof, to throw off the heavy Winter snows,
but still essentially a low and clinging building, wider than it was tall. But what have
they done? They have taken as their model a brick set on end. This they have
converted into a thing of dingy clapboards with a narrow, low-pitched roof. And the
whole they have set upon thin, preposterous brick piers . By the hundreds and
thousands these abominable houses cover the bare hillsides, like gravestones in some
gigantic and decaying cemetery. On their deep sides they are three, four and even five
stories high; on their low sides they bury themselves swinishly in the mud. Not a fifth of
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高级英语（第二册） Lesson7 The Libido for the Ugly (H. L. Mencken)
them are perpendicular . They lean this way and that, hanging on to their bases
precariously . And one and all they are streaked in grime, with dead and eczematous
patches of paint peeping through the streaks.
4 Now and then there is a house of brick. But what brick! When it is new it is the
color of a fried egg. When it has taken on the patina of the mills it is the color of an egg
long past all hope or caring. Was it necessary to adopt that shocking color? No more
than it was necessary to set all of the houses on end. Red brick, even in a steel town,
ages with some dignity. Let it become downright black, and it is still sightly , especially
if its trimmings are of white stone, with soot in the depths and the high spots washed
by the rain. But in Westmoreland they prefer that uremic yellow, and so they have the
most loathsome towns and villages ever seen by mortal eye.
5 I award this championship only after laborious research and incessant prayer. I
have seen, I believe, all of the most unlovely towns of the world; they are all to be
found in the United States. I have seen the mill towns of decomposing New England
and the desert towns of Utah, Arizona and Texas. I am familiar with the back streets of
Newark, Brooklyn and Chicago, and have made scientific explorations to Camden, N.
J. and Newport News, Va. Safe in a Pullman , I have whirled through the g1oomy,
Godforsaken villages of Iowa and Kansas, and the malarious tidewater hamlets of
Georgia. I have been to Bridgeport, Conn., and to Los Angeles. But nowhere on this
earth, at home or abroad, have I seen anything to compare to the villages that huddle
aloha the line of the Pennsylvania from the Pittsburgh yards to Greensburg. They are
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高级英语（第二册） Lesson7 The Libido for the Ugly (H. L. Mencken)
incomparable in color, and they are incomparable in design. It is as if some titanic and
aberrant genius , uncompromisingly inimical to man, had devoted all the ingenuity of
Hell to the making of them. They show grotesqueries of ugliness that, in
retrospect ,become almost diabolical .One cannot imagine mere human beings
concocting such dreadful things, and one can scarcely imagine human beings bearing
life in them.
6 Are they so frightful because the valley is full of foreigners--dull, insensate
brutes, with no love of beauty in them? Then why didn't these foreigners set up similar
abominations in the countries that they came from? You will, in fact, find nothing of
the sort in Europe--save perhaps in the more putrid parts of England. There is
scarcely an ugly village on the whole Continent. The peasants, however poor,
somehow manage to make themselves graceful and charming habitations, even in
Spain. But in the American village and small town the pull is always toward ugliness,
and in that Westmoreland valley it has been yielded to with an eagerness bordering
upon passion. It is incredible that mere ignorance should have achieved such
masterpieces of horror.
7 On certain levels of the American race, indeed, there seems to be a positive
libido for the ugly, as on other and less Christian levels there is a libido for the beautiful.
It is impossible to put down the wallpaper that defaces the average American home of
the lower middle class to mere inadvertence , or to the obscene humor of the
manufacturers. Such ghastly designs, it must be obvious, give a genuine delight to a
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高级英语（第二册） Lesson7 The Libido for the Ugly (H. L. Mencken)
certain type of mind. They meet, in some unfathomable way, its obscure and
unintelligible demands. The taste for them is as enigmatical and yet as common as
the taste for dogmatic theology and the poetry of Edgar A Guest.
8 Thus I suspect (though confessedly without knowing) that the vast majority of
the honest folk of Westmoreland county, and especially the 100% Americans among
them, actually admire the houses they live in, and are proud of them. For the same
money they could get vastly better ones, but they prefer what they have got. Certainly
there was no pressure upon the Veterans of Foreign Wars to choose the dreadful
edifice that bears their banner, for there are plenty of vacant buildings along the
trackside, and some of them are appreciably better. They might, in- deed, have built
a better one of their own. But they chose that clapboarded horror with their eyes open,
and having chosen it, they let it mellow into its present shocking depravity. They like it
as it is: beside it, the Parthenon would no doubt offend them. In precisely the same
way the authors of the rat-trap stadium that I have mentioned made a deliberate
choice: After painfully designing and erecting it, they made it perfect in their own sight
by putting a completely impossible penthouse painted a staring yellow, on top of it.
The effect is that of a fat woman with a black eye. It is that of a Presbyterian grinning.
But they like it.
9 Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of
ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the
United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates
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