Vintage Mencken

Galligan, Edward L.

Vintage Mencken A CHOICE OF DAYS byH. L. Mencken Edited by Edward L. Galligan Alfred A. Knopf. 337 pp. $12.95. ON MENCKEN Edited by John Dorsey Alfred A. Knopf. 313 pp. $15. To observe the...

...Mencken took more joy in writing about politics than in any other writing he did...
...William H. Nolte on Mencken as a literary critic, and Carl Bode on Mencken as a letter writer...
...Nobody bosses him...
...Two of the most memorable pieces are "A Girl from Red Lion, P.A...
...He died January 29, 1956, and intellectual charlatanry has been less imperiled in America ever since...
...On all known subjects, ranging from aviation to xylophone playing, I have fixed and invariable ideas...
...Right or wrong, he has stood on his own bottom, firmly and resolutely, since the day he was first heard of in politics, battling for his ideas in good weather and bad, facing great odds gladly, going against his followers as well as with his followers, taking his own line and sticking to it with superb courage and resolution...
...A humorist by instinct and a consummate wordsmith, Mencken fired away continually and happily with his beer-cooled typewriter at all varieties of pomposity and pretension...
...I shall vote for him unhesitatingly, and for a plain reason...
...and "Romantic Intermezzo," a hilarious description of the 1920 Democratic National Convention...
...Alistair Cooke writes on The American Language...
...White as a rival contender for the honor...
...An aristocratic libertarian, Mencken had little respect for democracy...
...Embellished as they are with Mencken's delightful extravagances and fictitious rickrack, these chapters provide a flavorful account of his life from his Baltimore boyhood to the mid-1930s...
...In surveying the 1924 campaign (Calvin Coolidge versus John W. Davis), he wrote: "There remains, then, the Wisconsin Red [Robert M. LaFollette Sr.] with his pockets stuffed with Soviet gold...
...Even those who dislike Mencken for his elitist views and hold in low esteem his scholarly achievements in the study of the American language usually agree on one thing: his mastery of English prose...
...But he had even less respect for plutocracy and dictatorship...
...There is no ring in his nose...
...Bode appends a number of letters never before published...
...His choice of Presidential candidates was not always predictable...
...The flexibility, clarity, and force of his writing are nowhere more in evidence than in A Choice of Days...
...A convention was for Mencken a simmering casserole," Malcolm Moos observes, "and he savored all the ingredients...
...Joseph Wood Krutch thought Mencken's was the best prose written in America during the Twentieth Century...
...he is the best man in the running, as a man...
...This may not be the case, but offhand I can think of only E.B...
...Wit warmed and animated his writing and gave it the gusto that was one of its chief virtues...
...Alfred A. Knopf contributes an interesting personal memoir ("I never knew his like and expect never to see it again...
...In On Mencken, editor John Dorsey brings together eight new essays by eight old hands who are well known for their interest in Mencken and their contributions to Menckeniana...
...William McCann (William McCann is a free-lance writer and critic...
...Nor was Mencken himself for that matter, despite his cocksure pose and bluster: "The plain truth is that I am not a fair man, and don't want to hear both sides...
...To observe the centenary of H.L...
...Huntington Cairns writes on Mencken's Baltimore, and Charles A. Fecher on his "thought...
...he would not have been surprised at all when 60 per cent of the voters in the 1972 Presidential election chose Richard M. Nixon after watching him for years...
...These updated appraisals differ not greatly from those of Mencken's perceptive contemporaries—men like Walter Lippmann, Edmund Wilson, and James T. Farrell, who surely were not blind to his faults...
...He is a foe of democracy," said his old friend and colleague George Jean Nathan, "and politely sees every person, however asinine, who comes to call...
...Malcolm Moos on Mencken and politics...
...Mencken's birth (September 12,1880), Edward L. Galligan had the admirable idea of bringing together in one volume twenty chapters from Mencken's three fine autobiographical volumes— Happy Days (1940), Newspaper Days (1941), and Heathen Days (1943...
...From the eight essays we get glimpses of Mencken as a genial, beer-drinking, piano-thumper as well as a brilliant, fallible, and enormously complicated writer, who thought of himself as a "critic of ideas...
...Nobody even advises him...
...Nobody owns him...

Vol. 45 • June 1981 • No. 6


 
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