Mencken: A Study of His Thought, by Charles A. Fecher
Nolte, William H.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Mencken: A Study of His Thought, by Charles A. Fecher" Leonard concluded an article on gossip in writing with the suggestion that people in the media, like Capote, profit from a self-serving class system: "They talk and write about themselves and each...
...and records...and records...
...Reading Mencken certainly won't make you a better American—indeed, it may well make you a much worse one—but it will make you a better human since his values are honesty, decency, and, above all else, courage to oppose what Francis Bacon called the gods of the marketplace...
...Please add applicable taxes...
...The first draft of the Declaration expounded an equally eccentric theory...
...If he never answers his question about truth, Fecher does finally conclude that Mencken's thought was "seldom original and never profound," a judgment that is both true and false—and in large part beside the point...
...To be sure, he looks at the Sage from every angle, both as man and as writer, but he never looks beneath the surface of his personality or his thought...
...but in France he used it thirty-eight times in nine weeks...
...The true inheritors of Mencken's mantle, we are told in all seriousness, are probably "to be found in the new race of ego- and self-developers, fans of pop psychological manuals that teach people how to despise everybody except Number One...
...And no one saw more clearly than he that the vast majority of his fellows had little if any interest in either idea...
...But, Wills points out, in each case "mulatto" is a technical term for the classification of soil colors—one of a set of eight which Jefferson used on all his travels—and if it appears more frequently in the Holland journal than in, say, the French, that is because the soils of the two countries are different...
...If Mencken was anti-Negro, for example, then why would he have published so many black authors in the American Mercury...
...In their reviews of this book, which they quickly shunt aside to make room for corn28 The American Spectator August/September 1978 In the sixties it was Barry Goldwater and The Conscience of a Conservative...
...it is simply impossible to separate what he said from how he said it—as Fecher admits in his chapter on "The Style" when he says that "in the final analysis it cannot be described—it has to be experienced...
...At any point in time, Jefferson decided, half the people over age twenty-one (the age of legal majority) could expect to be dead "in 18...
...Wills perhaps has most fun with careless psychohistorians...
...he simply records...
...In his review in the Atlantic, Benjamin DeMott comes riding to the rescue of America, democracy, and the demos (strangely, he says nothing about Mom and Apple Pie...
...rather he was a profound artist in the same way that Swift and Voltaire and Mark Twain were profound...
...In the Declaration, this came out: "We have reminded [our British brethren] of the circumstances of our emigration & settlement here...that in constituting indeed our several forms of government, we had adopted one common king...
...To find out, one may as well ask the nearest lamp post...
...myopic critics always think the present more dense and difficult than the past...
...After reading this long and laborious labor of love, I know nothing that I didn't know before...
...The Declaration—originally a propaganda piece whose drafting the powerhouses of the Second Continental Congress ceded to a young Virginia stand-in for Peyton Randolph, while they pursued more urgent matters—has since become a totem, potent and meaningless...
...and those gods change very little from one generation to the next...
...The very title is misleading since Fecher does not give us a study of Mencken's thought, nor, for that matter, does he place him in any kind of historical context, nor does he show us what constituted Mencken's greatness or caused his renown or notoriety, nor does he even show us accurately what Mencken thought...
...The racist charge has been made before and then been refuted, and it will be made again, only to be refuted again...
...It should be compulsory reading for every member of the government, especially the Congress" —Clare Booth Luce SIXTH PRINTING 100,000 COPIES IN PRINT Climbing best-seller charts across the country IM MMII NNW...
...And where did Fecher get this...
...Check or money order enclosed...
...Certainly the charge is absurd—unless by the term "racist" one means to include everyone who ever distinguished between one race or nationality and another, which is to say everyone who is reasonably sentient or cognizant of the visible world...
...We have nothing to fear from the elitists or from the mockers of Homo sapiens...
...Kingsbury Smith, National Editoc Hearst Newspapers "Mr...
...Since the "defenders of decency" fifty years ago attacked Mencken for undermining morals and flouting custom, it is a bit ironic to see him linked today with his former foes...
...Wills has harder work attacking some older notions: that Jefferson was either an idealist (vague/visionary—pick one), or a disciple of Locke...
...There are only new recipes for the boiling of old bones...
...The author of the Declaration, Wills maintains, was a scientific man who framed his document with a scientist's precision...
...Original...
...Kilpatrick, Washington Star Syndicate "Two groups who should find Bill Simon's book particularly relevant: Americans who pay taxes and Americans who vote' —Andrew Tobias, Esquire "Simon provides a wealth of data about the functioning of our economy, and shows beyond all reasonable doubt that the domestic problems we hear complained of nowadays are chiefly the result of government intervention...
...Simon's book is an important one...we hope it will be read by a wide audience...
...Richer, certainly...
...Wills' examinations of 18th-century thought and feeling have been painstaking, even painful (he has studied the paintings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze), and he catches less meticulous scholars in embarrassing postures...
...That Britain's rule was oppressive and unjust, and that the colonies had therefore the right to throw it off, were commonplaces of the revolutionary party...
...Everything, indeed, is wrong with it...
...I said earlier that there were inaccuracies in this account...
...If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right...
...And also more decadent (in the Spenglerian sense) and much more powerful...
...As Solomon told us three thousand years ago, there is nothing new under the sun...
...to clinch the point, Wills quotes the Marquis de Chastellux, visiting the same spot, with the same reactions...
...09 I I I I I I I I I I I ments on its subject, two or three critics have described Mencken as rather an anachronism, a leftover ghost from an earlier and more innocent age...
...Fawn Brodie, counting eight uses of the word Richard Brookhiser is associate editor of National Review...
...Fecher's portrait is two-dimensional at best and hence will mislead those who know Mencken only as a "literary figure" of the past...
...I also heard an account of Wills' first meeting with William F. Buckley, Jr...
...years at the nearest integral number....Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years...
...Without one, the other was impossible...
...He is no longer even worth the energy of reaction...
...DeMott also discovered damning evidence of racism and indifference to the great masses of men—those whom Mencken referred to as "the vast herd of human blanks," "the lower orders," "the booboisie," etc...
...After reading the article some would no doubt insist that he did so because he was anti-white, which would in turn provide additional proof that Mencken was right when he said that there lurked in our midst a goodly number of idiots...
...As, LNMI MEM MIN =I IM• McGRAW-HILL BOOK COMPANY y Dept...
...There are a few other such howlers in the book, but let them go...
...Stanton Evans, National Review "There is in Simon's book no jargon, no murky economic theorizing...
...Huxley, Darwin, Adam Smith, Aristotle, or whomever), he was nonetheless an "original"—in a class by himself...
...In his introduction, Fecher remarks Mencken's immense impact on his time and, indirectly, on the present: "It is...the William H. Nolte is professor of English literature at the University of South Carolina and author of Rock and Hawk: Robinson Jeffers and the Romantic Agony (forthcoming from University of Georgia Press...
...MUM IMM ONO...
...Try it on Mencken and you will almost invariably get a false impression since the style was so much the man as to be substantive...
...At some point in their talk, Buckley asked Wills whether he was a conservative...
...I'm a Distributist," Wills replied, "is that conservative...
...The strange boy of literature is a crashing bore, trading on name only...
...Does that mean he was entertaining incestuous anticipations of the arrival of his red-haired daughter...
...James.l...
...Nor should we forget that Mencken defended minority views (many of them abhorrent to his person) as well as minorities long before the espousal of civil liberty became a means of self-aggrandizement...
...He writes of freedom...
...Besides, paraphrase sacrifices the connotative meaning of language...
...With a little less psycho, and a little more history, Erikson might have realized that all these elements were conventions of 18th-century descriptions of the "sublime...
...He has chosen to whoop it up with his own not very smart set...
...But I would hesitate to argue that wealth, decadence, and power are in themselves virtues...
...The number twenty, however, was not lightly chosen...
...Buckley considered—"Hugh Kenner tells me it's not" —but hired him anyway...
...The past Wills inhabits in this book is the 18th-century world of the Declaration of Independence...
...Wills, 23, was on the threshold of a ten-year association with National Review...
...Only intermittently did I get a glimpse of the Mencken I have been reading, and reading about, for nearly thirty years...
...As for the remark about Dante, Mencken was not above saying such things, particularly to so humorless a soul as Angoff, who must have been a constant delight to him...
...10020 Please send me copy(ies) of A Time For Truth @ $12.50 Name Address City State Zip Rev...
...while anti-Communists put the myth of America's special mission, of which the Declaration has become the seminal symbol, to even more heinous uses—"napalm and saturation bombing...or a Chile putsch...
...In a high sweat of moral indignation, DeMott credits Mencken with being the forefather of "Robert Ringer and the gospel of Enlightened Selfishness...
...while his chief intellectual creditor was not Locke, but the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Smith, and Francis Hutcheson...
...A little research would have revealed that Mencken admired the novelist very much, as the letters in the New York Public Library (which were used for an article on Mencken and Faulkner that appeared in the January 1972 issue of American Literature) and Joseph Blotner's enormous biography of Faulkner readily prove...
...Yawn...
...there was no more sense in him, he complained, than in 'the wop boob, Dante,' and he had not the slightest concept of sentence structure and paragraphing...
...In documenting Jefferson's scientism, Wills exposes a number of foibles which latter-day Jeffersonians have preferred to hush up...
...Even those hostile to Mr...
...Though an obvious admirer of Mencken, Fecher is probably too good an Americanto have served his subject well...
...Indeed, Americans were not "colonists" at all, but "emigrants...
...Jefferson's famous comment on Shay's insurrection—"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion"—strikes most modern admirersas a fine burst of anarchist sentiment...
...thesis of this book that Mencken's influence was all to the good—that the things he attacked deserved to be attacked, and that America is a cleaner, saner, more healthy place today because he attacked and disposed of them...
...Our ancestors," he declared in 1774, "before their emigration to America...possessed a right, which nature has given to all men...
...Jefferson had deduced it from an analysis of French actuarial tables...
...If, after reading Mencken, you can believe that you would be well advised to visit your favorite physician and have him ask you a few simple questions: You may be farther gone than even your wife (or husband, as the case may be) thinks...
...He neither criticizes nor explains...
...As for his profundity, or lack of it, he was in no way a profound thinker, not in the sense, anyway, that a Kant or a Hegel was profound...
...From Charles Angoff, the Prince of Liars...
...Now—for that expanding audience, it's William E. Simon andATIME FOR TRUTH "His hard-hitting book is the best popular statement of conservative principles since Goldwater...
...One may as well try to discover "truth" in vital force, or in a storm that blows down the houses on the seashore, or in a bell that wakes us in the morning...
...But I have difficulty in believing that America is saner and more healthy than it was before...
...In his surface inspection of the various aspects of Mencken's thought, Fecher contents himself in the main with paraphrase, which, though useful and even necessary to a point, becomes tedious, causing the reader to grumble and shuffle his feet...
...One example should suffice...
...Like most satirists, he was deeply concerned with the commonweal, and he fought all his life to protect what he called"the two greatest intellectual possessions of modern man"—to wit, "the idea of personal freedom and the idea of the limitation of government...
...BOOK REVIEW Mencken: A Study of His Thought Charles A. Fecher / Knopf / $15.00 William H. Nolte This will never do...
...He makes you taste it...and then cherish the heady flavor" —William Murchison, Dallas Morning News "A Time for Truth promises to be one of the year most controversial political books...
...Louis Post-Dispatch "Even people who loathe 'the dismal science' (economics) will find it fascinating...
...years 8. months, or say 19...
...If anything, Jefferson's rounding of nineteen to twenty was uncharacteristically loose...
...They define themselves as celebrities of the new society, and we believe that they are because we believe that celebrities are people who are talked about on television programs and written about in newspapers and magazines and books...
...Jefferson's fellow delegates were not persuaded, however, and in the final version the argument was cut—a bit of editorial license which Jefferson never forgave, and which he tried to emend by mailing copies of the first draft to his friends...
...In the chapter on "The Critic," certainly the weakest in the book, Fecher writes that Mencken "could not understand Faulkner...
...Liberals, Wills argues, construe the preamble—"the pursuit of happiness"—as mandate for big government...
...Erik Erikson gets equally low marks...
...Whatever one thinks of Wills' purpose, one must admire his performance of the task...
...Try it on any poem worth reading and see what you get...
...In all his work, whether in his American language studies, his book criticism, his writings on politics and government, his Days books, his studies of religion (Treatise on the Gods was his favorite of his books) and ethics (Treatise on Right and Wrong), the essays on women and the little volume In Defense of Women (a marvelous antidote to the tosh currently being spewed forth on that lovely and enigmatic subject), and the daily journalism—in all that stupendous body of work there is instruction for the sober searcher and entertainment for the heavy laden...
...Above all, an artist...
...Since he knows Angoff to be a liar, a man who wouldn't tell the truth under torture, why didn't he take the trouble to find out what Mencken thought of Faulkner...
...He made us see andfeel and know things that we had not seen, felt, or known before he came along...
...In Dimensions of a New Identity, Erikson huffs and puffs over a description of the Natural Bridge in Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia: "note, if you please...the juxtaposition of height and downfall, of sublime emotions—and the violent pain in the head...
...On the Holland tour, he used the word red only seven times in seven weeks...
...It is so readable and passionately truthful...
...I first heard some of the ideas that found their way into Inventing America in the course of a Jefferson seminar Wills taught my freshman year at Yale...
...Having survived his enemies, Mencken just might survive his friends...
...While there is no doubt that Mencken was an elitist (another dirty word in the lexicon of uplifters and snufflers before the Bar of Human Equality), he constantly went out of his way to help others and was a model of generosity and kindness in his private life...
...But there is no way of knowing what he said to Angoff...
...BOOK REVIEW Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence Garry Wills / Doubleday / $10.00 Richard Brookhiser Garry Wills has probably always been most comfortable in the past...
...mulatto" in a twenty-five-page description of a tour through Holland, concludes that Jefferson was already in emotional travail over his quadroon slave, Sally Hemmings...
...Simon and his ardent support of capitalism will find the book unusually informative" —Christopher Elias, Journal of Commerce A selection of The Conservative Book Club READER'S DIGEST PRESS $12.50 "...this is an unusually prestigious contribution to the literature of conservative political thought....What sets lit' apart is its tough frankness, its fierce impatience with the canons of polite controversy:'—Joseph Losos, St...
...If Mencken's ideas were not original, if they were borrowed from other writers (Nietzsche, T.H...
...One critic (in the Nation) even went so far as to discover in Mencken's severe code of honor and decency the residue of Victorianism...
...More specifically, why would he have asked George Schuyler for "an article showing how whites look to an intelligent Negro" and then published "Our White Folks" as the leading article in the December 1927 issue of the Mercury...
...Wills explains the emigration theory with the help of his second point—that 30 The American Spectator August/ September 1978...
...Jefferson added a further refinement: that the colonies had put themselves under British rule in the first place...
...Leonard concluded an article on gossip in writing with the suggestion that people in the media, like Capote, profit from a self-serving class system: "They talk and write about themselves and each other on their television programs and in their newspapers and magazines and books...
...Fecher also makes a few comments about trying to discover whether Mencken's ideas were true or not, a hopeless task which, needless to say, he never seriously attempts to perform...
...He tells us a lot about Mencken, but he shows us next to nothing...
...the real enemies of mankind are those who constantly express an abstract The American Spectator August/ September 1978 29 love for humanity, but have little affection for Tom, Dick, and Harry...
...Which is why, for approximately the lastdecade, Capote has become such a winner and sinner...
...Truman Capote...
...of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies....Settlement having been thus effected in the wilds of America, the emigrants thought proper to adopt that system of laws, under which they had hitherto lived...
...Inventing America seeks to recover the Declaration's original meaning, and to disarm the intellectual imperialists who have annexed it...
...new ways of looking at the truths, which are unchanging, and the many falsehoods, which we all adore and which we abandon only when they become sources of public embarrassment...
...No one, I daresay, would argue with the first part of that assessment though it leaves out of account an immense amount of his work: the language studies, much of the literary criticism and daily journalism, the Days books, etc...
...PL, 35th Floor Is n 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y...
Vol. 11 • August 1978 • No. 9
