Serpent in Eden

...When he included the famous essay in his Chrestomathy (1949), Mencken noted that it "dates sadly, but I have let it stand as a sort of historical document...

...Soon his daughter-in-law can't stand to have him around and quaintly tells him, "I don't see your other children burning up the telephone wires to ask you to stay with them...

...Fifty years ago Mencken's name was generally coupled with that of General Sherman or with the Antichrist...

...They have a right to be present at the bargaining table when public employees are involved, to publish or broadcast material that jeopardizes a fair trial, to question presidents on a timetable of media choosing, always and in every way equating their rights with the public's "right to know...

...When the fifteen-year-old takes off her clothes in a motel room, Harry is moved to reminisce about his first love, Jessie, a real, honest-to-gosh friend of Isadora Duncan...

...They find her demented and deranged but still in love with the dance...

...If the heart of his research has to do with values, or rather the transvaluation of values, he does not himself evaluate—at least not to any extent...

...Hobson might have offered us some critical appraisal of these groups, but he apparently writes under the theory that one pays one's money and one takes one's choice...

...Surely the competence of the media is as important as its legal rights...

...Something to do with the revival indeed...

...But his cat will not use the john on the bus, so he gets out of the bus and stands by the side of the road looking mournful for a while...

...Death's easy to take, Tonto," he says...

...While various Southern authors—journalists, like Gerald Johnson, Nell Battle Lewis, Julian and Julia Harris, Grover Hall, and, somewhat later, W.J...

...When it appeared in the New York Evening Mail in 1917, "The Sahara of the Bozart" caused only a slight stir, but when refurbished and published three years later in book form (in Prejudices: Second Series), it caused an uproar throughout the South, the reverberations of which can still be felt from time to time...

...To this bit of homespun confusion he adds the note that "She suffered ter-ribly, Tonto, but she never complained...

...if they are against, how can we convince people of their bias...

...Organ music screams in the background...

...For example, a copy of Sahara, a little magazine of Georgia verse, recently crossed my desk...

...One of Harry's grandsons is there and he runs off with the hippie hitchhiker to the commune...

...Then he is picked up by a beautiful hooker on her way to Las Vegas, who obligingly pulls off the road and gives her services while the background music goes into "Love is a Many Splendored Thing...

...This latest effort by Paul Mazursky, director of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Blume In Love, is about an old man and his cat...

...Things can get worse as well as better...

...That Mencken exerted an enormous influence on the region, acting as a kind of midwife to the rebirth of belles-lettres, has long been apparent to literate Americans, but it waited for Hobson to provide us with chapter and verse of the tale...

...Indeed, by the middle twenties Mencken had become, as Emily Clark put it, a state of mind, a school of thought...

...and the famous UNC sociologist Howard Odum—agreed with Mencken's views and helped to propagate them, the Nashville group defended the status quo...

...Cash...

...Mencken was overly modest...

...He brings into sharp focus Mencken's numerous comments, both private (in his correspondence with writers) and public (in his newspaper and magazine articles), on what he considered wrong with the South and what he advocated as measures necessary to the correction of those wrongs...

...there are probably single square miles in America...

...If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave tomorrow, the effect upon the civilized minority of men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood on the Yang-tse-kiang...

...The story is episodic and as such reveals what is wrong with the movie: it simply tries to be too many things and succeeds at being each, so that it comes across as no consistent thing...

...When he gets thrown in jail for his peccadillo, he shares a cell with an elderly Indian (played by Chief Dan George) who has the only really funny moments in the show...

...I would be delighted to be mistaken, but see little merit in the argument that it is too early to evaluate the outcome...

...He exaggerated as much in his praise of the past as he did in his assault on the present—probably more so, in fact...

...However, he gives up after one try and decides to go out to visit his daughter in Chicago...

...One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether...

...Notice how poor people are never evicted from buildings so that schools or hospitals or parks can be built...

...He then added, "On the heels of the violent denunciations of the elder Southerners there soon came a favorable response from the more civilized youngsters, and there is reason to believe that my attack had something to do$00...

...When he arrives in Las Vegas, he absent-mindedly starts urinating against the wall of a casino...

...Harry and Tonto WHEN I HEAR the words "a warm and moving motion picture" I reach for my revolver, so it was with my revolver by my side that I ventured out into the fall twilight to see Harry and Tonto...

...I, for one, think that his numerous quotations from letters and articles written by the so-called Fugitives (who later called themselves Agrarians) convict them to a man of pursuing ignes fatui...

...It's not the simple truth that sets men free or even causes them to think, but rather the Truth appareled in shocking garments and blown up to epic size...

...Then the cat runs away and bus must leave without him, so he buys an old car and starts driving across the country, sans driver's license...

...A kid's got to have a life of his The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1974 21...

...It's the suffering that hurts...

...The amount of time he devoted to the Rebels—advising them, contributing to their journals, finding other contributors, helping them get books published, advertising them, as it were, in his articles—is frankly amazing...

...On the one hand, it is now impossible for us to believe, as Mencken believed at the time (he soon saw his error), that "Down to the middle of the last century, and even beyond, the main hatchery of ideas on this side of the water was across the Potomac bridges...

...As he walks around the neighborhood Harry gossips with the other elderly residents, gets mugged, watches television, and generally seems fairly content with his life...

...This loveable old Harry tells his daughter-in-law that she should go on a macrobiotic diet and lose a few pounds, he sets his cat loose to scratch his hostess, and he keeps the family up at night...

...There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac...

...These are some of the reasons why I believe the bottom line on Watergate will be negative...

...For sheer impact upon the whole region, the essay has no rival in all of American literature—and not by miles...

...today he is considered one of the New South's Founding Fathers...

...Nevertheless, Hobson has performed a great service in uncovering the wealth of material on Mencken and the South, and his book is a worthy contribution to the Mencken shelf...

...Probably morethan any other of his essays, "The Sahara of the Bozart" proves that the best destructive criticism performs a constructive service...

...Then it's on to Los Angeles, where he is picked up by his other son, Larry Hagman, in a Cadillac convertible...

...As they drive along he talks to her or the cat about his former wife and her death...

...The son is broke and on his way to insanity...

...With that bit of conviviality ringing in his ears, Harry sets out to find another place to live...

...Some edifice redolent of the stench of materialism andprofit is always the villain...

...A man with a weak heart would hardly boast about his great health merely because he barely survived a heart attack...

...Harry charitably offers him money but says he cannot stay with him...

...Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of worn-out farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could throw in France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles...

...and Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom defended Fundamentalism as a proper and deserving part of the Southern "tradition...

...While he continued his attack on Southern insularity and moralism, and more specifically on the churches of the region (he was fond of remarking that the Ku Klux Klan was "simply the secular arm of these churches"), he insisted that not until the young Southerners entered the fray could there be any hope for the region...

...I should point out that Hobson is much less interested in interpreting the material before him, which he has dug out of the various collections of Menckeniana, especially the lode of letters in the New York Public Library, than he is in simply uncovering it and then letting it speak for itself...

...The absence of political attention to the problem is understandable...

...Serpent in Eden is unnecessarily repetitious and too much given to citation (the slender volume contains some 900 footnotes...

...It is a terribly mixed-up mishmash, which I kept hoping would succeed, and which has its moments, but which basically falls plummeting to earth one too many times to pick itself up and go on punching...

...Other adventures befall them when they get to Chicago...

...His' constant companion is a miserable-looking orange cat named Tonto...

...Day after day, we are exposed to an endless series of claims relating to media rights...

...Though Mencken was certainly not the first writer to attack Southern lethargy and ignorance—one recalls, in particular, the demolition work of Mark Twain—no other writer, before or since, has had such pervasive influence on the region...

...He is a marvelous deadpan comic and more use should be made of him...

...And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the 'progress' it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert...

...Already the revolver is straining in its holster, begging to be used...

...He moves in with his son in the Bronx and proceeds to make a fantastic pest of himself...

...He picks up a homely fifteen-year-old hitchhiker who is heading out to a commune in Colorado...

...However, he must leave his building when it is torn down to make way for a garage...

...While the hippie watches, misty-eyed, Harry and Jessie waltz around the dayroom with its oblivious residents...

...Moreover, the thing was a bomb, not a rational analysis—neither in its inordinate praise of the Old South, nor in its denigration of the present, circa 1920...

...By the practice of Indian witchcraft he cures Harry of his bursitis...

...The media's own immunity from criticism in the media, and the political hazards of reform—which now more than ever will be interpreted as an attack upon free speech and an attempt to intimidate the media —leave us worse off than we have ever been in this area...

...He was too intent upon setting up a contrast between what was once a civilization and what was then a barbarism to bother with the niceties of judicious thought...

...When it comes to voting, we accept the notion that our ability to exercise legal rights effectively is important, but no such question seems to be raised concerning the media...

...It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity...

...And if that impact was more emotional than intellectual, that's only to be expected...

...Stribling, Thomas Wolfe, Julia Peterkin, and Frances Newman...

...Since he has given his car to the hitchhiker, Harry now hitchhikes himself...

...No doubt his aristocratic prejudicies contributed to his overestimation of antebellum society...

...First he is picked up by a health foods salesman who advises him to get plenty of Vitamin F and sells him a blender...

...Donald Davidson, for example, wrote glowing accounts of the "spiritual unity of the South...

...Harry (played by Art Carney) is an old teacher, long widowed, who lives in a condemned building on Morningside Heights, Manhattan...

...Unless both critics and supporters of the Administration do some hard thinking about the institutional implications of Watergate, its real costs are likely to far exceed the pessimistic conventional estimates offered thus far...

...In 1934 Tate wrote that Fundamentalism "fortunately still reigns...

...Retiev Serpent in Eden: H.L...

...And yet, after a massive institutional failure to inform us adequately, the media have added insult to injury by proclaiming that Watergate illustrates the vitality of the media...

...For example, the kind of truth—both undeniable and wildly outlandish—found in the opening paragraph: "Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician...

...Mencken and the South by Fred Hobson, Jr...

...As Hobson puts it, Mencken and South-baiting were synonymous terms...

...He refuses to let his cat• be handled by the bomb searchers at the airport, so he gets on a bus...

...So the hippie insists that they visit the poor old creature who now lives in a nursing home in Indiana...

...fiction writers like T.S...

...The latter does not extend, of course, to the right to know media sources, the authors ofnewspaper editorials, or the extent to which the pockets of media personnel have been lined by sources with a, vested interest in what is presented as news...

...You know how cute these old folks are...

...Following the Scopes Trial in 1925 this group, living in and around Nashville, went on the defensive against Mencken and the Menckenites —particularly the group centered around Chapel Hill (and the University of North Carolina), which was then as now one of the truly enlightened places in the South...

...Now here comes the real loveableness of the old gent...

...Harry's daughter, bitchily played by Ellen Burstyn, tells Harry that, well, shucks, she guesses she will always love him but she guesses they will always argue...

...Moreover, Mencken tended to confuse the Old South with the civilization of northern Virginia...

...0 William H. Nolte A Irrigating the Sahara IN HIS SERPENT IN EDEN, Fred Hobson has written the first full account of Mencken's relations with and influence upon that small army of Southern writers who came of age during the 1920s—the period when the South, intellectually speaking, began to wake from its long postbellum slumber...

...He is, in other words, much more the scholar than the critic...

...The Nixon Administration shared the common political preoccupation with the wrong issue—to wit, are the media for or against us...

...As editor of the Reviewer in Richmond, which she launched just as "The Sahara of the Bozart" made its appearance in 1920, Miss Clark was one of 20 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1974 many Southerners whom Mencken encouraged and helped...

...North Carolina $8.95 with the revival of Southern letters which followed in the middle 1920s...

...In raising this question, the Administration was not particularly concerned about our information needs but about its image in the media...

...How times do change...

...What gave the essay its shock power was simply his delight in uncovering sham virtues and impaling pretentious and cocksure men on his rhetorical hook...

...In an effort to solve this problem, it undertook an anti-media cam-paign which reinforced the neglect of media competence as a public policy problem...

...Notice how noble old people suffer terribly without complaining...

...Doesn't that remind you a lot of the old people you know...

...its editorial column paid tribute to the founder of the Bozart Press, begun in Atlanta in the late 1920s...