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...
...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...
...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...
...And also, Mencken's influence extended beyond the American shore...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The idea of a book of Mencken letters was first conceived by Dr...
...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...
...Trilling affirms the beleaguered tradition of the liberal anti-Stalinist (there was "an active consistency in having been opposed to both Communism and McCarthyism...
...He disregarded their politics and their views on any subject other than the one they wrote about...
...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...
...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...
...But more than slightly ridiculous, Trilling is slightly menacing to the common run of intellectual...
...If he thought the writing was good, he published it...
...He made it a rule to answer letters whenever possible on the day they were received...
...Mencken's use of hyperbole was one of the principal characteristics of his humor...
...He summarized the effect of Mencken's writing by declaring that "the man increases your will to live...
...Liberationists daily expose new frontiers of oppression, and she insists on the primacy of manners, and quotes D.H...
...Mencken and Walter Lippmann had little if anything in common...
...Mencken himself was an interesting man and he had correspondence with many of the most interesting men of the time...
...He was neither a good political analyst or prognosticator...
...His letters were short and direct...
...Because Communist regimes violate basic liberal tenets...
...Carl Bode, the editor of The New Mencken Letters, estimates that Mencken must have written a hundred thousand of them...
...Mencken's role was that of a liberator and it was Most felt in American literature...
...He was an individualist committed to free thinking, not only for himself but for others...
...He helped more writers than any other editor in the history of American writing...
...At one time, Mencken was a Voice in American life and letters...
...The Australian Language by Sidney J. Baker (published in Sydney in 1945) did for Australian speech what Mencken did for ours...
...Farrell's latest book, his fiftieth, is The Dunne Family...
...Why...
...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...
...And there are humorous letters—especially to his friend Philip Goodman...
...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...
...Generally speaking, there was a lack of personal spite or rancor in Mencken...
...Little, Brown had no choice but to attempt this suppression, since the response to Hellman is unanswerable...
...But Forgue confined himself to literary letters...
...During the twenties, for instance, he started to pay less attention to literature and more to politics and the general American scene...
...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...
...When President Roosevelt first came into office, Mencken looked on him with favor but he quickly changed his mind...
...I more or less agreed with him...
...She calls Joe McCarthy the "greatest gift the U.S...
...On the whole, Mencken kept all that was private in his life to himself...
...Miss Hellman has founded her moral authority on a highly self-serving version of her appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee...
...This is because she is unremittingly aware of the nexus between intellect and power—social, political, cultural...
...The New Mencken Letters is ably edited by Professor Carl Bode of the University of Maryland...
...Carlyle was right," Mencken said to me once...
...He looked upon Franklin D. Roosevelt and the members of his "Brain Trust" as quacks...
...Mencken referred to the editors and those around this magazine as "the kept idealists of the New Republic...
...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...
...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...
...After his pathfinding The American Language was published, the number of letters dealing with linguistics increased...
...Mencken is gone but it will be one hell of a long time before he is forgotten...
...Mencken's hurt over her death was not apparent to me until after I read these 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...
...Both are good and should be read...
...Thus, he defended the rights of free speech of the socialists Eugene V. Debs and Scott Nearing...
...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...
...Miss Hellman was merely being protected by a publisher of especial "loyalty," we were meant to believe...
...And worse, as heroine Lillian Hellman is picking the latest bouquet from off the cultural-political stage, Mrs...
...Nevertheless, Walter Lippmann not only recognized the power of Mencken but even paid tribute to it...
...This was manifested in the careers and writings of many writers whose works and ideas did not follow his ideas...
...These intellectuals' fondest hopes for a Soviet socialist utopia were 36 The American Spectator November 1977...
...He began working on a collection of the writings of Thomas Jefferson...
...He wrote of "Roosevelt Minor" with greater scorn than he ever did of Harding, Coolidge, or Hoover...
...One measure of his liberating role is that his influence washelpful to many who came to think differently from him...
...Lawrence: "Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom...
...But there is no point in comparing these two books...
...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...
...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...
...James T. Farrell have had a pervasive influence in this country, are strung through his writings...
...Mencken had an almost voracious appetite for books and ideas, but he could think for himself...
...There are also letters to his women friends and ex-friends...
...As I mentioned earlier, little was given to reveal his personal feelings, his sadnesses...
...In these, he does not reveal intimate feelings or emotions...
...Trilling was among the targets of the guilt-bullets fired in playwright Hellman's memoir of the 1950s, Scoundrel Time...
...In 1926, he wrote that Mencken was "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people...
...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...
...Julian Boyd of the Library of Princeton University...
...Both in the Smart Set and the American Mercury, Mencken published new and younger writers...
...As for Lillian Hellman, the (old) news is broadcast that the reigning Empress Wears No Clothes...
...BOOK REVIEW The New Mencken Letters Edited by Carl Bode / The Dial Press / $19.50 The good that H.L...
...In The New Mencken Letters there are samples of his correspondence with most of the major writers of his time...
...Mencken looked upon politics as the biggest circus in a world of circuses...
...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...
...Generally, he regarded life as a circus, redeemed only by those who belonged to a "civilized minority...
...Mencken reached the height of his popularity in the twenties when he founded the American Mercury...
...And lest we forget, it was Mencken who wrote that one should not underestimate the stupidity of the American boob...
...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...
...He said this to me after his wife Sara Haardt had died...
...I was told it contained a hysterical personal attack on me," the McCarthy victim told the New York Times...
...Nevertheless, he did not lacksympathy for those who were troubled—including many whom he did not know...
...One final word...
...From his correspondence, we learn that he hailed and thought highly of the writings of Henry Miller...
...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...
...deviationist views on the Alger Hiss case (Lionel believed Whittaker Chambers' testimony, calling him "a man of honor...
...His defense of Dreiser is a dramatic example of this...
...Not all anti-Communists are liberals, but in my mind no one can call himself a liberal who is not an anti-Communist...
...I did not realize then that her death had strongly motivated this statement...
...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...
...He defended the rights of those with whom he disagreed and admired the sincerity of intellectually courageous men whose ideas he dismissed as hogwash...
...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...
...In Mencken's letters, the boob and "booboisie" (a word he coined) come in for a share of ridicule...
...His political analyses and predictions were often off the mark...
...When he and George Jean Nathan edited the Smart Set, they published James Joyce...
...could have given the Soviet Union (and it looks like a gift of permanent value...
...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...
...Carl Bode has had the advantage of greater access to Mencken's papers...
...Mencken was a prodigious letter writer...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...His letters reflect the course of his life and his changing interests...
...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...
...His writing was vigorous and carried more conviction than a sober analysis of many of his ideas would suggest...
...The only solution to the problems of living out a lifetime is work...
...The shout is a rattling of chains, always was...
...Mencken's influence was wielded more by the strength of his writing than by the power of his ideas...
...His own background was middle class and Puritan and, as Edmund Wilson pointed out, Mencken was not free of Puritanism...
...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...
...I began this review by writing of Mencken's influence...
Vol. 11 • November 1977 • No. 1
