The New Mencken Letters, edited by Carl Bode
Farrell, James T.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - The New Mencken Letters Edited by Carl Bode / The Dial Press / $19.50 The good that H.L. Mencken did was not interred with his bones. At one time, Mencken was a Voice in American life...
...When he and George Jean Nathan edited the Smart Set, they published James Joyce...
...He laughed at the foibles, the preposterousness, and the absurdity of Homo sapiens as though he were enjoying the sight of clowns in a circus...
...Hellman had accused her and her late husband, literary critic Lionel Trilling, of John Fox, a recent graduate of Princeton, is currently studying at Oxford...
...And also, Mencken's influence extended beyond the American shore...
...Here, I might refer to one of Mencken's most quoted remarks—that a Chinaman could defeat the incumbent presidential candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1936...
...He said this to me after his wife Sara Haardt had died...
...Mencken referred to the editors and those around this magazine as "the kept idealists of the New Republic...
...Mencken's hurt over her death was not apparent to me until after I read these letters...
...His letters were short and direct...
...Mencken had an almost voracious appetite for books and ideas, but he could think for himself...
...Trilling interrupts the proceedings with the news that one of Miss Hellman's dearest friends, her reputation, has died of massive historical inaccuracy...
...BOOK REVIEW We Must March My Darlings Diana Trilling / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / $10.00 John Fox To the average intellectual's gaze, Diana Trilling cuts a slightly ridiculous figure...
...He looked upon Franklin D. Roosevelt and the members of his "Brain Trust" as quacks...
...Mencken and Walter Lippmann had little if anything in common...
...Generally, he regarded life as a circus, redeemed only by those who belonged to a "civilized minority...
...One measure of his liberating role is that his influence washelpful to many who came to think differently from him...
...Writing among and about "the people .1 know best, the academic and literary intellectuals of New York," Trilling in her social criticism seldom violates a simple hard-won principle: Thought is in a real sense action—ideas have consequences, and their authors bear crucial moral responsibility for them...
...Because Communist regimes violate basic liberal tenets...
...Mencken was a prodigious letter writer...
...This was manifested in the careers and writings of many writers whose works and ideas did not follow his ideas...
...He disregarded their politics and their views on any subject other than the one they wrote about...
...Mencken reached the height of his popularity in the twenties when he founded the American Mercury...
...These intellectuals' fondest hopes for a Soviet socialist utopia were 36 The American Spectator November 1977...
...For the new wave of moral bookkeepers like Garry Wills (who goes after the Cold War with a historical meat-axe in his introduction to Scoundrel Time), it must be disconcerting, once you have roundly condemned "red-baiters" and laid the blame for a self-righteous Cold War at Harry Truman's door, to have Diana Trilling dig up an old column of yours from the National Review, in which you remarked that "Russia has grown like an evil fungus, because of the pale atmosphere of cowardice everywhere," and in which you praise Chiang Kai-shek's regime as a "desperate romance of courage...the stuff of epic...
...During the twenties, for instance, he started to pay less attention to literature and more to politics and the general American scene...
...Pressed for some elaboration of the book's horrors, its Little, Brown editor Roger Donald replied in measured tones, "I know what the hell's in the goddam manuscript...
...His political analyses and predictions were often off the mark...
...Not all anti-Communists are liberals, but in my mind no one can call himself a liberal who is not an anti-Communist...
...The attempted censorship of this book likewise points up divisions that have plagued the Left since Joseph Stalin's rise to power, and shows a new generation why many controversies of the thirties and fifties continue to enjoy robust life...
...Mencken himself was an interesting man and he had correspondence with many of the most interesting men of the time...
...If he thought the writing was good, he published it...
...His writing was vigorous and carried more conviction than a sober analysis of many of his ideas would suggest...
...Nevertheless, he did not lacksympathy for those who were troubled—including many whom he did not know...
...He was neither a good political analyst or prognosticator...
...I began this review by writing of Mencken's influence...
...Little, Brown had no choice but to attempt this suppression, since the response to Hellman is unanswerable...
...From his correspondence, we learn that he hailed and thought highly of the writings of Henry Miller...
...His own background was middle class and Puritan and, as Edmund Wilson pointed out, Mencken was not free of Puritanism...
...The idea of a book of Mencken letters was first conceived by Dr...
...There are also letters to his women friends and ex-friends...
...Mencken's influence was wielded more by the strength of his writing than by the power of his ideas...
...Carlyle was right," Mencken said to me once...
...He began working on a collection of the writings of Thomas Jefferson...
...Carl Bode has had the advantage of greater access to Mencken's papers...
...The New Mencken Letters is ably edited by Professor Carl Bode of the University of Maryland...
...The scandal involyed in the publication of We Must March My Darlings illustrates the rewards that now accrue to one who too carefully connects political idea with political responsibility...
...He made it a rule to answer letters whenever possible on the day they were received...
...But few commentators have noted the force of such rigorous argument, or the ironic flaw in the revisionist posture: that it is a part of chic conscience to lionize a woman who waves a thirty-year-old blacklist in one hand while she colludes in the censorship of "hysterical" books with the other (her left...
...Why...
...He wrote of "Roosevelt Minor" with greater scorn than he ever did of Harding, Coolidge, or Hoover...
...The only solution to the problems of living out a lifetime is work...
...After his pathfinding The American Language was published, the number of letters dealing with linguistics increased...
...The enlightened classes are busy denuding CIA fronts, and she goes about saying, for attribution: "I am, was, and always shall be an anti-Communist...
...I more or less agreed with him...
...James T. Farrell have had a pervasive influence in this country, are strung through his writings...
...She calls Joe McCarthy the "greatest gift the U.S...
...One final word...
...The reader is certain to gain a fuller sense of what the man Mencken was like, and of the role he played in American literature...
...At one time, Mencken was a Voice in American life and letters...
...In 1962 Guy J. Forgue, a Frenchman, edited a selection of Mencken letters from some 15,000 of them which he was able to read from various sources...
...Julian Boyd of the Library of Princeton University...
...This is because she is unremittingly aware of the nexus between intellect and power—social, political, cultural...
...In these, he does not reveal intimate feelings or emotions...
...And lest we forget, it was Mencken who wrote that one should not underestimate the stupidity of the American boob...
...Trilling cites a discomforting fact which has been negligible to so much of the Left for so long: The Soviet Union has for political reasons murdered more of its citizens than did Hitler's Germany...
...Miss Hellman has founded her moral authority on a highly self-serving version of her appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee...
...On October 22, 1935, in a letter to Bishop James Cannon, Jr., to whom he was strongly opposed in matters of censorship but with whom he maintained cordial personal relations, Mencken wrote: "If the country actually turns against him [Roosevelt], it will be possible to beat him with a Chinaman...
...Mencken had little respect for Lippmann, who had been a principal contributor to the New Republic during the early days after its founding in 1914...
...The twenties was a decade in which writers such as Mencken and Sinclair Lewis strongly influenced the thinking of many Americans, especially those whom Mencken frequently called "the civilized minority...
...The Australian Language by Sidney J. Baker (published in Sydney in 1945) did for Australian speech what Mencken did for ours...
...deviationist views on the Alger Hiss case (Lionel believed Whittaker Chambers' testimony, calling him "a man of honor...
...He summarized the effect of Mencken's writing by declaring that "the man increases your will to live...
...He was an individualist committed to free thinking, not only for himself but for others...
...BOOK REVIEW The New Mencken Letters Edited by Carl Bode / The Dial Press / $19.50 The good that H.L...
...Nevertheless, Walter Lippmann not only recognized the power of Mencken but even paid tribute to it...
...Mencken's use of hyperbole was one of the principal characteristics of his humor...
...The shout is a rattling of chains, always was...
...He defended the rights of those with whom he disagreed and admired the sincerity of intellectually courageous men whose ideas he dismissed as hogwash...
...Hellman wondered how the evidently respectable Trillings could maintain views of black anti-Communism in this age of light, and she let it be known that such views and such people had, willy-nilly, brought us two of history's greatest evils, Vietnam and Richard Nixon...
...And worse, as heroine Lillian Hellman is picking the latest bouquet from off the cultural-political stage, Mrs...
...There is more about the costs of various commodities, hotel bills, and the like than there is about how he felt—except when he gave expression to many of his admitted prejudices...
...But more than slightly ridiculous, Trilling is slightly menacing to the common run of intellectual...
...Mencken is gone but it will be one hell of a long time before he is forgotten...
...Yet he became a powerful critic of the parochial Victorian Puritanism which had spread its moral pall over so much of nineteenth-century American thinking and writing—and carried over into the twentieth century...
...He was anti-democratic and the ideas of Social Darwinism, which Contrary to a report in the Chicago Tribune, _lames T. Farrell is alive and well in New York City...
...Mencken looked upon politics as the biggest circus in a world of circuses...
...To understand the political situation of the last forty years, one must appreciate the one-time "intense Communist partisanship among our ostensibly most conscientious and educated classes...
...When President Roosevelt first came into office, Mencken looked on him with favor but he quickly changed his mind...
...The Trilling reply to this standard revisionist wisdom met with censorship at Little, Brown (also Hellman's publisher), as per instructions to delete four passages critical of Hellman...
...In 1926, he wrote that Mencken was "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people...
...But Forgue confined himself to literary letters...
...At times the use of hyperbole in his political comments, both in his published writings and in his letters, seems to have led him to make far-fetched predictions that terrible things would happen, which did not come to pass...
...Thus, he defended the rights of free speech of the socialists Eugene V. Debs and Scott Nearing...
...Liberationists daily expose new frontiers of oppression, and she insists on the primacy of manners, and quotes D.H...
...Trilling shows her facts on the Hiss case to be wrong, and suggests that a past spent as apologist for Stalin may compromise one's new career as moral prosecutor of other people's political pasts...
...As for Lillian Hellman, the (old) news is broadcast that the reigning Empress Wears No Clothes...
...Miss Hellman was merely being protected by a publisher of especial "loyalty," we were meant to believe...
...In The New Mencken Letters there are samples of his correspondence with most of the major writers of his time...
...On the whole, Mencken kept all that was private in his life to himself...
...Both in the Smart Set and the American Mercury, Mencken published new and younger writers...
...At the same time, he had friendly correspondence and relations with Judge Felix Frankfurter, who was responsible for the appointment of some of the most intelligent of the so-called Brain Trusters...
...Lawrence: "Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom...
...It is impossible for anyone of liberal commitment, and particularly in the name of liberalism, to tolerate any system of government, whatever its professed goals, which deprives its people of the elementary freedom of self-government, speech, travel, cultural expression, and—more—which implements this authoritarianism by mass murder and mass enslavement of dissidents...
...He helped more writers than any other editor in the history of American writing...
...could have given the Soviet Union (and it looks like a gift of permanent value...
...Carl Bode, the editor of The New Mencken Letters, estimates that Mencken must have written a hundred thousand of them...
...His defense of Dreiser is a dramatic example of this...
...Generally speaking, there was a lack of personal spite or rancor in Mencken...
...As I mentioned earlier, little was given to reveal his personal feelings, his sadnesses...
...Mencken attacked the liberal tendencies in this country before World War I. He had formed his own views under the influence of Darwin, the Yale scholar William Graham Sumner, and Friedrich Nietzsche...
...Trilling affirms the beleaguered tradition of the liberal anti-Stalinist (there was "an active consistency in having been opposed to both Communism and McCarthyism...
...But there is no point in comparing these two books...
...Both are good and should be read...
...I did not realize then that her death had strongly motivated this statement...
...In Mencken's letters, the boob and "booboisie" (a word he coined) come in for a share of ridicule...
...Farrell's latest book, his fiftieth, is The Dunne Family...
...Boyd collected something like 8,000 Mencken letters but before he completed his project, The American Spectator November 1977 35 his interest shifted to—in his phrase—"another great writer...
...The offending essay, "Liberal Anti-Communism Revisited" (which appears uncut courtesy of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), is importantly a defense of left-wing anti-Communism, which Trilling considers an essential part of contemporary liberalism...
...Trilling was among the targets of the guilt-bullets fired in playwright Hellman's memoir of the 1950s, Scoundrel Time...
...Mencken's role was that of a liberator and it was Most felt in American literature...
...I was told it contained a hysterical personal attack on me," the McCarthy victim told the New York Times...
...And there are humorous letters—especially to his friend Philip Goodman...
...His letters reflect the course of his life and his changing interests...
Vol. 11 • November 1977 • No. 1
