Mencken's Letters
Nolte, William H.
SPECIAL BOOK REVIEW: MENCKEN'S LETTERS oncerning his correspondence, H. L. Mencken had a simple rule: letters were to be answered within 24 hours of receiving them. Whether he always followed that...
...If I had another life to live I think I'd attempt a long study of him, trying to account for him...
...The Navigator" is no exception...
...In a long interview (not mentioned by Dowell in his edition) that Hood gave a reporter from the Washington Post about her relations with Mencken, published June 24, 1973, there is a curious, even comic, error which still puzzles me...
...He was then busy at work on Treatise on the Gods, his own favorite of his many books...
...It seemed to me that they needed editing...
...Incidentally, the entire letter appears again in Louis Cheslock's collection H. L. Mencken on Music, and has been reprinted in part numerous times...
...Either the reporter had gone to sleep at the switch, or else Hood, then in her 87th year, had somehow come to believe that she really married Mencken...
...In fact, the war had been over a year before Mencken dropped the "mister" from his salutation...
...Eudora Welty's advance praise for Mencken and Sara, unlike the usual puffs that publishers solicit for the adornment of book jackets, needs no qualification: "Mencken's letters to Sara reflect his working life on an almost daily basis—but they are of particular value in showing us an unfamiliar side of the man himself...
...Leonard Hirshberg, a Baltimore physician...
...I have no difficulty in believing the testimony of her acquaintances that Sara was intelligent, witty, charming, and quite good looking...
...If the Church is Satan's kingdom, how can darkness give birth to such light...
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...And he writes of those who have migrated to the West, and who have continued migrating from place to place, seeking to make the land over in the image of their expectations...
...With the recent publication of the Dreiser-Mencken Letters, issued in two volumes admirably edited by Thomas P. Riggio, we at last have the most complete record of their correspondence we will likely ever have...
...His merest belch was as lovely as the song of the sirens...
...We had a drink or two, and then you and he started off for the South...
...In his first letter to Helen Dreiser, who had been one of Dreiser's many mistresses for twenty-five years before their marriage the year before his death (Dreiser had refused to divorce his first wife, Jug, in order to avoid paying alimony), Mencken wrote that Dreiser's death had left him "feeling as if my whole world had blown up...
...Henceforth, we may expect to see separate editions of letters addressed to single correspondents...
...That Mencken and Dreiser differed so radically both in temperament and intellect only adds to the interest one takes in their correspondence...
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...A closer reading of the piece proved beyond doubt that the reporter was at fault—as was his editor on the Post for allowing such palpable nonsense to be printed...
...I naturally expected some communication from him, but none came in...
...The crystal is "mineral glass'•=it is virtually scratch-proof...
...By the time An American Tragedy appeared, the battle over realism and the freedom of letters, which Mencken had waged throughout his first dozen years on The Smart Set, had been successfully concluded—so successfully in fact that the genteel critics (mostly located in the universities) had not only been routed from the field but many of them had changed sides and were now supporting Dreiser and others whom they formerly had scorned...
...But I cannot believe that Mencken's influence on Sara "may have helped her pave the way for the Southern literary renaissance...
...The Zimmerman Letter Barbara...
...I left the clod after only one month and ten days...
...Amonth before their first meeting, Hood apparently asked Mencken, believe it or not, about the status of his purity, to which he answered: "I am amazed that you should raise any doubts about my chastity...
...Elsewhere she identifies Gerald W. Johnson as "Gerald White Johnson" and then, incredibly enough, tells us that "White was to join Mencken on the Baltimore Evening Sun," etc...
...The fact is that neither of those writers expressed such an attitude toward the South...
...Moreover, she obviously adored him...
...Behrman admits that he was so in awe of Mencken that when Harold Ross, the editor of the New Yorker, invited him one day in the early thirties to have dinner with him and Mencken at the restaurant 21, he accepted but with some trepidation: "I was young enough to be a hero worshipper...
...Nor do I know what to make of the statement that such writers as Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner "expressed a sympathetic attitude to the South that for Mencken would have been inconceivable...
...He also wrote her three other letters, but they never saw each other again...
...Disagreements they certainly had throughout their long friendship, and none was sharper than the one occasioned by Mencken's review of An American Tragedy in the March 1926 number of The American Mercury.(Riggio includes all of Mencken's reviews and articles on Dreiser in an appendix—some 40,000 words of criticism that reveals, as no one else's has, the great strengths and the no less great weaknesses of the novelist's opera...
...Incidentally, in several letters to other correspondents, particularly those he didn't know very well, Mencken apologized for enjoying the quadrennial shows...
...We were friends before ever you were a critic of mine, if I recall...
...his bibliographer, the late Betty Adler, offers convincing evidence that the latter figure is the more reliable...
...As Tom Wolfe noted with some hyperbole but not enough to matter much, during that period American literature commuted from 1524 Hollins Street, Baltimore—certainly the most famous private address in the nation...
...Imagine...
...Most importantly, the NYPL houses copies of the letters that Mencken dictated to Mrs...
...I thereupon rushed out to the place, dragged you out of it and brought you in to warm up...
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...How I wish Casey, North, and Poindexter had waited to read it...
...When Hitler invaded Russia, Dreiser just as suddenly began crying for American intervention—even though that meant helping the English, who were, he believed, the instigators of the war in the first place...
...besides, Mencken was never one to snitch on a friend...
...But it is now too late...
...To which she answered that his nomination would effectually invalidate the amendment, thus leaving him no choice in the matter...
...To be sure, Hood was deadly serious in her effort to snare the Sage, but he was no less intent on keeping her at arm's length...
...FT he first collection of Mencken's 1 letters appeared as long ago as 1961, just five years after his death—a rather remarkable fact in that the letters of most of our important writers are published, if at all, only after their literary remains have been mostly exhausted, usually twenty or so years following their demise...
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...and has "interrupt" and lap" modes...
...If only I'd tried him out first, I'd never have married him.')" On first reading this years ago I did a double take, to put it mildly...
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...IRVING HOWE 'Jacoby's brilliant analysis of our diminished intellectual life is, in itself, a hopeful sign...
...It is a major contribution to our understanding of a much neglected, much misunderstood subject...
...Long before Mencken's departure to bliss eternal (he was always convinced that he was ticketed the other way, but then he often erred in his predictions), his letters were showcased for their vibrancy and charm, humor and common sense—in brief, for the manner in which he conveyed his likes and dislikes...
...he also was promoting the candidacy of another friend, Governor Albert C. Ritchie of Maryland...
...In fact, the letters seldom ascend to any topic of more serious nature...
...Here as elsewhere—particularly in the delightful essay "The Life of an Artist" he wrote for the New Yorker a couple of years later—Mencken is overly kind in what he chooses to remember about his old sidekick...
...The book merits attention...
...But then he had been similarly attracted to a dozen other women before...
...It would be out of place in such a recollection to include any of the darker truths...
...The NEW OXFORD REVIEW, a monthly magazine, supports the Pope, and the teaching of the Church across the boards — whether the issue be the divinity of Christ, abortion, nuclear weapons, birth control, or social justice — and without getting antiecumenical about it...
...I found it absorbing, exciting, and was literally unable to put it down...
...Sara was a twenty-fiveyear-old instructor at Goucher College, Mencken was evidently infatuated, and HEALTH CARE IN AMERICA The Political Economy of Hospitals and Health Insurance Edited by H.E...
...At least one of the photographs reproduced here makes undeniable the last of -those attributes...
...He sweated beauty as naturally as a Christian sweats hate...
...Mencken had been muchmore caustic in his reviews of various earlier books—particularly those of The "Genius" (1915) and Hey Rub-aDub-Dub (1920)—but back then Dreiser merely squirmed, expressed his annoyance, and continued in his plodding way...
...Moreover, various of the many books on Mencken, particularly those by William Manchester, Sara Mayfield, Carl Bode, and Charles Fecher, tell us a great deal about Sara Haardt...
...It is true though that he never cared much for Wolfe, at least not enough to publish anything Wolfe sent him...
...Bums and loafers...
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...By thus limiting his choices, he was able to stay within the confines of one volume...
...in World War I. Though Mencken doubtless knew Hood, he probably had never heard of Gretchen until the fall of 1926, when she wrote the New York World a letter recommending Mencken for President 92 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 "Why not Mencken for President...
...He is one of the greatest Americans of his time, and yet you gag when he tries to neck you...
...He was also ghostwriting articles on the feeding and care of children for Dr...
...It came in handy...
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...But either the Church is the voice of Jesus Christ on earth, supernaturally and infallibly guaranteed by Almighty God 'to reveal His will, or it is not...
...If Mencken exaggerates the influence of Dreiser upon him he does so out of kindness to Helen, whose years with Dreiser were hardly happy ones...
...Now, many people know next to nothing about Mencken, but those who know something surely know that he married...
...This book is so real, you can smell the smoke...
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...One can understand her not knowing who...
...Professor Dowell's editing of the letters is in every way admirable, as is his introduction...
...Dreiser wrote that they at once dismissed the original purpose of the conference and proceeded to expatiate on "the more general phases and ridiculosities of life, with the result that an understanding based on a mutual liking was established, andfrom then on I counted him among those whom I most prized—temperamentally as well as intellectually And to this day, despite various disagreements, that mood has never varied...
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...Such gross wickedness had better not be mentioned...
...Though they shared a number of views and interests, one cannot help feeling the physical distance separating them, a distance which prevented that shared experience upon which true congeniality is based...
...let's lower them so we can feel good about ourselves and avoid guilt...
...he had to accept the call to lead the nation back into the fold of civilization...
...Sixteen years later, Carl Bode edited another fat selection (the two books contain more than 1100 pages) designed to reveal the breadth of Mencken's encyclopedic interests and again the personality—that perfectly integrated personality which, as Hamilton Owens once noted, he seemed to have possessed almost from the beginning...
...If I should- now discover that I belong to a church consisting of a loose federation of flocks and bishops, my first reaction would be that I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I had become a Methodist or Episcopalian — no offense intended...
...The idea has been gathering momentum in my mind for months...
...There was a curiously inarticulate side to him, and it often showed up when he was most moved...
...The first such collection, Letters from Baltimore (1982), contains the 200 letters Mencken wrote to British author P. E. Cleator between 1936 and 1948, the year he suffered his permanently disabling stroke...
...If you prefer, mail check or card authorization and expiration...
...The most fascinating of the letters, not surprisingly, are those in which Mencken comments on the passing scene, on events and people that directly concerned him—the Scopes Monkey Trial, the various political conventions, the enormous gallery of people he encountered in his travels or who called on him at Hollins Street...
...I remember how I resented his leaving you sit in the cold car up the street, and how I resented likewise his aloof indifference to my mother's illness...
...Does driving a wedge between sex and procreation enhance or trivialize our sexuality...
...Even those people, and there must have been hundreds if not thousands of them, who wrote to express their outrage over something he had written received cards from him, bearing the printed words "You're probably right...
...A powerful story, told with a breakneck pace...
...Like so many other of the best writers of his generation, Behrman got his start in the literary world when Mencken accepted one of his stories for publication—though not for The Smart Set, to which he later contributed numerous short stories and one-act plays...
...Certainly I must hold out until 1932...
...It was a long while afterward before I ever felt close to 'him again...
...Whether he always followed that rule I cannot say, but I remain skeptical...
...when she revealed that she had "been married way back in 1914, but left the clod I'd wed, after only one month and ten days together, never to see him again...
...We put him into a cab and Ross and I walked down 52nd...
...As with all such recollections, one must suspect the authenticity of the direct quotations, but one accepts the substance nonetheless: I studied Mencken...
...Documents from the Soviet press illustrate the unexpected consequences of glasnost — including the potential emergence of a new political party...
...For example, she mistakenly identifies Mencken's reference to "an old fellow named Stewart, a newspaper reporter of 40 years practice" as a reference to Stuart Pratt Sherman, thus confusing first name with last name and not even noticing the different spellings...
...And one of the oldest and most im- portant of these friends—and one of the most disagreeable—was Theodore Dreiser...
...Well, I had a letter from Henry Mencken today.' You said it casually, but in your heart, you felt that it was like being knighted by a king...
...After the Hitler-Stalin pact, he praised the Nazis and went about the country preaching pacifism...
...His political views were not just stupid, which one might forgive, but dishonest as well...
...Between 1932 and 1950, rather a slack period when his secretary, Mrs...
...Just how many letters Mencken wrote during the fifty years when putting words on paper was almost as normal an activity as breathing, no one will ever know...
...After her death in 1935 Mencken told Owens that he "had two more years of happiness than I had any right to expect...
...Recently the NEW- OXFORD REVIEW held a symposium in its pages on "Arnericanist" dissent, or "American Exceptionalism" — the prevalent notion' that the American Church should make itself an exception to Vatican teaching and assimilate itself to American practices, especially in the areas of Church governance and sexual morality...
...You gals are all too sniffish...
...Ross was full of admiration for Mencken...
...My mother died the next day...
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...The hyperbole, the brevity of syntax, the great delight in the vulgate, the delirious note of irreverence—all are there and seem natural and spontaneous even in their unexpectedness...
...He admitted they were obscene, but he still found them irresistible...
...The fellow was scarcely human...
...During the course of the evening Mencken told Ross a wild story, made up on the instant, by way of soothing Ross's anger over the bibulous habits of his stable of writers—and of deftly pulling the editor's leg in the process...
...Sara, however clever and,ambitious, was a semi-invalid during much of her mature life...
...The private voice comes from deep reservoirs of tenderness, rugged patience, silent endurance...
...If I had sacrificed it I might have been a star in the movies by now...
...She does, however, tell us a great deal about Sara that is new, at least to me, though her assessments of Sara's fiction don't really help much...
...In any case, he responded with a polite note to Hood that he found it impossible to accept the nomination since he would be unable to "make oath to support the Eighteenth Amendment...
...Do you think I'd complain...
...Though these letters are certainly worth having in print, and Cleator has done an excellent job of editing them, of clarifying all the references Mencken makes in his answers to Cleator's queries and in his responses to the war-time horrors (both of Cleator's parents were killed in an air raid), they will be of little interest to the general reader...
...they slipped in when we weren't looking...
...Nor did his correspondence decrease in volume during the years when he edited The American Mercury, the first issue of which appeared in January 1924...
...For those who may have forgotten, Senator "Cotton Tom" Heflin of Alabama was one of the virulent anti-Catholics who bolted the party after the nomination of Al Smith, whom Mencken stronglysupported in the election...
...Estimates vary from a mere 100,000 to around a quarter of a million...
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...After more talk about The Smart Set, the chief aim of which, as Mencken said, was "to discover new writing talent and to aerate Puritanic tradition," and much more talk about music, Mencken's first love, Ross expressed to Mencken his amazement that the Sage found time to answer personally every letter he received...
...Concerning those articles Mencken called on Dreiser a few months later in New York...
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...By no means...
...But one will look in vain for that artist in the letters...
...It shocks me first to hear that he forgets himself, and secondly that a poor working girl should be blind to the great honor he does her...
...Then for a bronze casket, and a salute of 21 guns...
...Wouldn't it be better to go down into history as the only Virgin President ever heard of...
...Reading Dreiser's clumsy letters, with all the misspelled words, the fractured syntax, the elephantine attempts at humor, I couldn't help recalling Mencken's devastating critique of the Dreiserian manner in the long essay in A Book of Prefaces (1917...
...A universal is a universal...
...The Pope, as you may know, has landed 5000 Jesuits at Galveston, and they are now hiding in the swamps...
...At the conclusion of the tale—about a visiting Englishman who insisted that his American host take him to see a hanging, too long and involved to relate here—Behrman's eyes met Mencken's: "Without winking, he winked at me...
...When they emerge every Christian man in the place will fall upon them...
...With that assessment few people today would argue...
...Moreover, these are letters of the elderly Mencken, lacking the spark that ignites the missives of his early and middle years...
...He had written of himself that he was "naturally monkish," but there was certainly nothing monkish in his appearance...
...After all, he was frequently away from Baltimore for days, and even weeks, at a time, which meant that he must have often had hundreds of letters awaiting his return...
...How many women have been necked by two candidates for the sacred office...
...Give this thought your prayers...
...The day after Wolfe's death in Baltimore in 1938, Mencken wrote the novelist James Stevens that his contacts with Wolfe had been "rather brief and casual...
...The stopwatch/chronograph reads to 1/100 secs...
...Box 1104 Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 Guenter Lewy takes up the question of left-wing extremists in the U.S...
...90 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 vaunted sympathy for the lower orders and the downtrodden was largely bogus, an exercise in self-aggrandizement...
...Even thinking of it is foreign to my nature...
...He writes The American Language and still finds the time to answer every God-damn letter...
...And then he adds: "To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies—the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said—there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident...
...A week later, evidently in answer to another attempt to enlist his fealty, he wrote: "I still think you are unappreciative of Nick...
...If any one sentence in Mencken's long review best renders his assessment it is this one: " 'An American Tragedy,' as a work of art, is a colossal botch, but as a human document it is searching and full of a solemn dignity, and at times it rises to the level of genuine tragedy...
...It is that no ordinarily attractive and intelligent woman has ever made a serious and undivided attempt to marry him...
...If I must be nominated in 1932 by such vermin I'll be almost tempted to decline...
...THEODORE DRAPER "Every policymaker and politician should be forced to defend himself against the arguments marshalled so powerfully in this important book...
...He's so God-damn industrious," he growled...
...Rosalind Lohrfinck, kept a stenographic record of his correspondence, his daily average dropped to an even dozen—for a total of about 80,000...
...It made up for Smart Set deficits...
...What eventually became something like a collaboration between the two most influential, in their separate and very different ways, dissidents in our literature begins in 1907 with Dreiser, then editor of the Delineator, inquiring if Mencken might be interested in providing him with a popular edition of Schopenhauer's works—a request that Mencken apparently declined...
...But they are generals looking for an army, and they will be shocked at how few of the laity will follow them...
...It might make me suffer spiritually, but I'd think of the honor...
...From the portrait Mencken draws, one might conclude that Dreiser's major flaw was no more than the credulity that enabled others to take advantage of him...
...Still, he always insisted that deep down in that welter of words there lived a true artist who would long outlive his day...
...But his ostensible admiration for the- Soviet system didn't prevent him from acting like a true capitalist, as evidenced by his incorporating himself in order to avoid paying income taxes...
...Others who write for us include L. Brent Bozell, Thomas Molnar, Christopher Derrick, John Lukacs, Juli Loesch, and Russell Kirk...
...The proof of- this is in the full churches and seminaries where the orthodox faith -is taught, and the empty ones where the trendies and Neo-Mods have taken over...
...A year before their marriage in 1930, which was delayed because of her health, Sara's doctor informed Mencken that she had three years at the most to live...
...No goods...
...Hence the question: Why Sara...
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...Still, as one who has spent several years snuffling about through Menckeniana, I am willing to believe that on one occasion he really did (as he told Alfred Knopf, his publisher) write 125 epistles between matins and taps...
...Also, he had the unassuming air of a great man...
...Owens says that, though most of Mencken's friends discounted, the likelihood of marriage because of his numerous dicta on the joys of bachelorhood, there still remained Mencken's famous comment on "The Bachelor": "The reason the average bachelor of thirty-five remains a bachelor is really very simple...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 87 Durant, who for a symposium he was conducting had asked Mencken among others to explain what meaning life had for him...
...To which Mencken simply replied: "I have the habit of answering letters," as if that, Behrman adds, made it effortless and not in the least time-consuming...
...Tuchman recounts how President Wilson instructed Secretary of State Robert L. Lansing to "leak" to Hood the text of the telegram concerning the German plot to align Japan and Mexico against the U.S...
...There he wonders if Dreiser ever got anything "properly describable as pleasure" from his dogged accumulation of mere words...
...As, for example, in this free-floating critique: "In [Haardt) a new type of story situation, rather than plot, dominates, and the artistry lies in capturing the multiplicity of actual experience...
...In that piece, incidentally, he remarks that though he liked Dreiser very much and "greatly enjoyed hearing him discourse in his ponderous, indignant way, suggesting both the sermons of a Lutheran pastor and the complaints of a stegosaurus with a broken leg," Dreiser's remarks sometimes set his teeth on edge, "for I was a born earthworm and he had an itch for such transcendental arcana as spiritualism, crystal gazing, numerology, and the Freudian rumble-bumble, then a scandalous novelty in the world...
...It is hard to say, as F. 0. Matthiessen wrote, which of the two men was farther from his proper work: Mencken as the author of an article on "When Baby Has Diphtheria," or Dreiser as the one who solicited the article...
...If the Church is not what she claims to be, then it is the most idolatrous, blasphemous, and arrogant thing in the world...
...And now here, in one of the explanatory notes she wrote for the letters, she recalls a conversation she had with Mencken about the status of her virginity (the things people talked about in those wicked times...
...Sheldon Vanauken: Some of the American Exceptionalists may go into schism...
...A month later he recalls the bitterly cold night Dreiser and Helen stopped off in Baltimore on their way South: "It was, to be precise, on December 12, 1925, for my mother was desperately ill in hospital and died the next day...
...This is an absorbing and very rewarding book...
...In two instances (concerning Sherwood Anderson and Dorothy Thompson), he was caught red-handed, and the damning evidence was loudly proclaimed in the newspapers...
...For the next eight years the two men neither corresponded nor saw each other...
...It could not come at a more opportune moment...
...But such quibbles do not really diminish Rodgers's- achievement, which is certainly considerable...
...She wrote under the handicap of continuous weakness and even pain...
...And then, immediately following, the attempt to understand and hence forgive: "But I should have known him better...
...Amore expansive, and humorous, tale concerning Mencken's mind-boggling industry may be found in S. N. Behrman's introduction to Carl Dolmetsch's history and anthology of The Smart Set...
...Dreiser parked your car on a hill about a block from my house, and we had been sitting at the fire for some time before I learned that you were in it...
...Already well known in newspaper circles as both editor and journalist, Mencken had by then published George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905) and was at work on the more substantial The Philosophy of Nietzsche (1908...
...Whether that policy derived from politesse or from some impish desire to have the last word is anyone's guess...
...His discussion of the politics of water distribution and land development, and his critiques of the western population explosion, the "Sagebrush Rebellion," and the federal government's role in land conservation should be read by every American...
...Schuster regretted that he lacked the space for "another characteristic Mencken letter"—one in which he paid homage to his musical gods...
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...It is r EAM YANKEE war Harold Coyle "Coyle's unusual skill as a novelist brings to life the reality of combat as very few writers are able to do...
...Even his Wallace Stegner The American West as Living Space "What do you do about aridity," asks Wallace Stegner, "if you are a nation inured to plenty and impatient of restrictions and led by pillars of fire and cloud...
...May he flourish...
...I am strictly orthodox in that department, and abhor the heresies of Greenwich Village...
...For example, in his compilation of The World's Great Letters (1940), M. Lincoln Schuster included the letter (written in 1933) Mencken sent Will DREISER-MENCKEN LETTERS: THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THEODORE DREISER AND H. L. MENCKEN, 1907-1945 Edited by Thomas P. Riggio/University of Pennsylvania Press/$69.95 (2 vol...
...The quick, urgent pages light up with his praise and encouragement, his teasing and nonsense...
...Down to around 1930, by which time the magazine had fallen from its position as our leading journal of ideas, a decline brought on in large part by the Depression, he frequently wrote as many as thirty letters a day...
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...But, then, where did all those saints come from...
...I have some doubts about it...
...For the additional information provided by Rodgers we can be thankful, though some of what she says and the way she says it must cause the judicious to grieve...
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...16:18 —this and the no less mysterious historical fidelity of the Catholic Church to this commission, through decay and renewal, for some 2,000 years...
...In this bright little volume, entitled 7ch Kuss Die Hand": The Letters of H. L. Mencken to Gretchen Hood, Peter W. Dowell includes slightly more than half of those missives, having wisely chosen to exclude "those letters which largely recapitulate others that appear herein, simply confirm engagements mentioned elsewhere, or are otherwise incidental...
...We even published good things in it...
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...Moreover, he was (like Hemingway) insanely jealous of other writers, especially Sinclair Lewis...
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...Oh," said Mencken, "we published that sub rosa...
...foreign policy...
...I hate to think of those sacred precincts given over to carnal recreations...
...God did not say, "Thou shalt not commit adultery except in America...
...Honest answers tell us that it is Catholic teaching, not current American mores, that genuinely liberates...
...In his account of that first meeting (given to Isaac Goldberg in 1925), Dreiser described his caller as a "taut, ruddy, blue-eyed, snub-nosed youth'!-- how typically Dreiserian the description!—whose appearance was that of "a small town roisterer or a college sophomore of the crudest and yet most disturbing charm and impishness, who, for some reason, had strayed into the field of letters...
...My wife was a great admirer of his books, but my own view of them was rather less enthusiastic...
...ROBERT A.M...
...Before leaving for Houston to cover the Democratic Convention in June 1928, he was in a prophetic mood: "I look for bloodshed at Houston...
...a novel of World War Ill EAM YANKEE Harold Coyle $17.95 TOM CLANCY, author of Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising AT BOOKSTORES EVERYWHERE From PRESIDIO PRESS 31 Pamaron Way, Novato, CA 94947 Phone (415) 883-1373 88 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 only natural that the best letters of Mencken's last years were those addressed to old friends...
...Nor do I doubt her talent as a fiction writer, having recently read some of her stories...
...One of the great attractions of the Church for me- was its unity-amid-diversity, a mystery indeed but clearly not unrelated to Christ's commission 'to Peter in Matt...
...Looking like "a spoiled and petted and possibly over-financed brewer's or wholesale grocer's son who was out for a lark," Mencken promptly ensconced himself in a large and impressive chair placed there to deflate the ego of the overly confident, and from that unintended vantage point beamed on Dreiser "with the confidence of a smirking fox about to devour a chicken...
...I saw that inside he was bubbling with delight that Ross had swallowed his story whole...
...Five years later she wrote Mencken a letter of condolence (included in this volume) on the death of Sara, and he answered...
...After remarking that he had attended a funeral and had to attend another the next day, he adds: "What I object to is the obscene way in which the undertakers look at me and rub their hands...
...Frech III Spring 1988, c. 415 pages cloth 534.95, paper 513.95 WHEN GOVERNMENT FAILS The Privatization Revolution By Randall Fitzgerald Spring 1988, c. 325 pages cloth 524.95 CRISIS AND LEVIATHAN Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government By Robert Higgs 1987, 416 pages cloth 524.95 TAXATION AND THE DEFICIT ECONOMY Fiscal Policy and Capital Formation in the United States Edited by Dwight R. Lee 1986, 554 pages cloth 534.95, paper 514.95 Available at bookstores or from PACIFIC RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY 177 Post Street, San Francisco, CA 94108 (415) 989-0833 Enclose check with order (add 51.75 shipping/handling...
...Stegner writes passionately about the West he loves, a fragile and often inhospitable land, a land marked first and foremost by aridity...
...We got the letters," he wrote "and the letters made us proud...
...His numerous secretarial aides, mostly women, received little or no pay for the Herculean labor of editing and correcting his manuscripts...
...and proposes ways to monitor them...
...Mail to: NEW OXFORD REVIEW Room 152 1069 Kains Ave...
...The new, exclusive ratcheted safety bezel prevents you from staying underwater longer than you had planned...
...Make check payable to NEW OXFORD REVIEW...
...I consoled Ross by reminding him that Mencken was German and thorough by inheritance...
...Even more noteworthy, they are letters written to a man whom Mencken never met, World War II having come between them, so to speak...
...Whereas two-thirds of the letters in the Forgue collection were written before that date, the same amount in Bode's The New Mencken Letters was written after...
...government to effect real change in China...
...Although these letters to Hood never indicate any stronger emotion than that of hearty friendship, she professed to having suffered the worst shock of her life when she learned in the summer of 1930 that Mencken was to marry Sara Haardt...
...Archbishop Roger Mahony: It is crucial to keep in mind that the Church is not a debating club or society of explorers...
...I could never, of course, follow him into his enthusiasms for such things as spiritualism, Communism and the balderdash of Charles Fort [an eccentric mystic whose diatribes against modern science Dreiser had championed and tried to get publishers to print], but that never made any difference between us, for some of my ideas were just as obnoxious to him...
...Indeed, she admitted that she "never got over it...
...In his brief, pungent notes, Mencken touches on all his favorite topics, from food and drink to the music he had heard or played with the Saturday Night Club, and from politics to religion...
...After insulting most of his Russian hosts, he returned home to write bitter indictments of the capitalistic system and praise the Russian experiment to the skies...
...During those years when he was coeditor of The Smart Set, from 1914 to 1923, Mencken was in touch with virtually every writer of any importance in the country...
...Hence, he restricted his selection to what he considered "the best of Mencken's literary letters, along with a number of others that best express his personality and give the most vivid and lifelike picture of the man and his literary activities...
...GORE VIDAL "Absorbing:—CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, New York Times $18.95 BASIC 10 East 53rd St., New York, NY 10022 BOOKS Call toll-free (800) 638-3030 HI future of tile l'lc.tcril 11fialhc Bo II S UTOPIAS The Rise and Fall of Suburbia ROBERT FISH NI .% N 771c} Last Intellectuals A M E R I AN ,N T H E A E CrE o _ Rti›.r-41: PAR, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 93...
...If Forgue had the first choice in the selection, Bode was the first to mine the enormous cache of letters in the...
...She returned to Washington in 1923 during the final illness of her father, Edwin Hood, who had for forty years in that city been a prominent journalist and a friend to Presidents, Secretaries of State, and other such notables...
...But the fact remains that Dreiser was a self-centered cad, almost the match in bounderism of Hemingway...
...And then one volume usually suffices...
...Also, the post-War critics, following in Mencken's wake, could be depended on to give Dreiser's behemoth of a novel a sympathetic reading...
...RONALD STEEL, University of Southern California $20.95 Bourgeois Utopias The Rise and Fall of Suburbia ROBERT FISHMAN "Fascinating . . . . A sprightly analysis of the European and American origins to today's American suburbs and suburban-density cities...
...Basic Ideas Beyond American Hegemony The Future of the Western Alliance DAVID P. CALLED A Twentieth Century Fund Book "A masterly critique of U.S...
...Five days later, in answer to Helen's letter saying she didn't remember the visit in December 1925, Mencken repeats his recollection, understandably etched for good in his memory: I remember that December day very clearly...
...Berkeley, CA 94706 PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 89 en described the novel, Dreiser's first in ten years, as a "shapeless and forbidding monster—a heaping cartload of raw materials for a novel, with rubbish of all sorts intermixed—a vast, sloppy, chaotic thing of 385,000 words—at least 250,000 of them unnecessary," Dreiser readily wrote off his old defender as not only wrong-headed but clearly dispensable—as, in a way, he was...
...A native of Washington, D.C., Hood began her career as an opera singer...
...Lohrfinck—that is, most of the letters that he wrote after 1932...
...Nor did he see anything untoward about plagiarizing a fellow writer...
...It should last at least 18 months before -you need replace it...
...the "Stewart" was (it is unlikely that anyone today could identify all the references), but she certainly should have known that Sherman was not a newspaperman (he was a professor of English at the University of Illinois for most of his short career) and, furthermore, that he died in his middle forties...
...The most exhilarating writer in America, the wielder of a blunderbuss with the deftness of a fencer, was, in person, quiet, reserved, attentive, courteous...
...This irked me considerably, and we were on cool terms for some years afterward...
...For that matter, at times Rodgers's editing needs editing...
...As for Mencken's thinking their attitude "inconceivable," one must remember that he admired Faulkner's stories and published some of them in the Mercury...
...Though Mencken frequently refers to their plans for marriage, which was to take place once he occupied the White House, he invariably does so in such jesting manner that Hood should never have been in doubt about his sincerity...
...But most American .Catholics are sympathetic with the moral revolution: if the ideals are too high for our liking, well, then...
...As timely as the Iran-Contra case and a pleasure to read...
...sus of the Correspondence of H L. Mencken, published by the Enoch Pratt Free Library in 1969, Miss Adler identified more than 5,000 correspondents along with the eighty or so libraries that house the letters that have survived...
...Which is as it should be...
...A t the beginning of her long—rather too long, it seems to me—introduction to Mencken and Sara, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers gives two reasons for publishing the correspondence, though to do so might seem an intrusion on Mencken's and Sara's strong sense of privacy...
...A few days later, he described the Republican Clown Show in Kansas City as "the usual dull obscenity—roars all day and yells all night...
...I met him several times in New York, but that was all...
...You are to wear no veil...
...No one can fail to learn from it and be perturbed by it...
...We had met only too seldom in late years, but there was a time when he was my captain in a war that will never end, and we had a swell time together...
...A, 3508 Market Street, Suite 350, by the Foreign Policy Philadelphia, PA 19104 (or call 215-382-0685...
...You have 30-day return and one year warranty...
...f less importance than his letters to Sara, to be sure, but nonetheless eminently enjoyable, are Mencken's letters to the late Gretchen Hood...
...I'd rather die in the United States," he noted, "than live here...
...As W. A. Swanberg's biography (dedicated, by the way, to the memory of Mencken, "who knew Dreiser at his ' best and worst, and fought for the best") clearly reveals, Dreiser rarely told the truth or acted honorably in his dealings with friends, publishers, agents, or anyone else for that matter...
...James G. Hanink: Does separating sex from commitment help teen-agers grow up...
...We import these outstanding watches directly in large quantities and are able to offer them for just $49.95...
...In editing that first large collection, entitled Letters of H. L. Mencken, Guy Forgue had to deal with an abundance of riches...
...Owens went on to say that several women of their joint acquaintance insisted Sara was making such an attempt, but he thought that only a partial explanation and certainly not the main one: "More likely there was something of a paternal or protective instinct involved...
...MENCKEN AND SARA: A LIFE IN LETTERS Edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers/McGraw-Hill/$22.95 "ICH KUSS DIE HAND": THE LETTERS OF H. L. MENCKEN TO GRETCHEN HOOD Edited by Peter W. Dowell/University of Alabama Press/$19.95 William H. Nolte IIIIIU 11111111' ,11111110111' ilf 1111111 111111111111 1,6 111111111111111 '1...
...Something impelled me to tell him that when I was a Senior at Harvard I had gotten my first acceptance of a short story from him, not for The Smart Set but for a publication called La Vie Parisienne...
...W.E.B...
...Research Institute This offer for individuals only...
...And,—if any humble leman may speak up—may remain so—despite variouswell—choose your insults...
...Dreiser did not begin keeping Mencken's letters until more than a year later, and then he didn't save them all...
...There is a subtle yet insistent alarm and a switchI able hourly time signal...
...Then you must either adapt to it or try to engineer it out of existence...
...Suppose Aimee McPherson were to tackle me...
...He might have been Chancellor of a German University or the Mayor of Hamburg...
...As here, for example: "But would connubial bliss be wise...
...Thus began a correspondence that lasted three and a half years, during which Mencken wrote nearly 250 letters, postcards, and telegrams to Hood...
...Now, in the postscript to his letter of February 8, he sputtered: "Who reads you...
...There is only one genuine Navigator" Watch...
...RICHARD E. NEUSTADT, Harvard University "While I strongly disagree with its conclusions, this book is a valuable dissection of an important issue...
...Dreiser renewed the exchange of letters in 1934, and the two men continued on more or less amicable terms until Dreiser's death in 1945, at which time Mencken began a correspondence with his widow...
...It was impossible for him not to feel concern- for one so pretty, so amiable, so patient...
...You may deny it for a while...
...Such errors indicate that she is not very conversant with the materials at hand...
...But then other important critics had called the novel a masterpiece—as a beginning point for their panegyrics...
...UPS/insurance: $5.95 for one Navigator' Watch, $6.95 for three...
...Eventually, however, we came together again, and in his later years we were very friendly...
...And if the Church is the kingdom of light, why would anyone but a dimwit want to dim it...
...ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSICI $19.95 The Last Intellectuals American Culture in the Age of Academe RUSSELL JACOBY "An important subject handled in an intelligent and provocative way...
...But what joy can there be in rolling up sentences that have no more life and beauty in them, intrinsically, than so many election bulletins...
...HERBERT J. GANS, Columbia University "A valuable book—a concise, synoptic overview of the social history of the suburb...
...for silvertone...
...For example, when he went to Russia in 1927, innocently expecting to be greeted by Stalin, he realized at once that his Russian guides showed him only what they felt he should see, and his diary contains one long lament over the inefficient and stupid system of government in the USSR...
...In all money matters, he lied instinctively...
...or 24-hr...
...No other man had a greater influence upon my youth...
...About half way through the interview, one encounters this parenthetical marvel: "(Years later she described her brief marriage to Mencken...
...If you're tired of all the doubt and dissent in the Church, and are looking- for an intelligent antidote, subscribe to the NEW OXFORD REVIEW...
...Walker Percy: I am a- convert of 40 years standing...
...Here are excerpts from some of the comments we printed: Peter Kreeft: On questions of essential--dog-ma and moral principles,: there can be no such thing as "American exceptionalism," or Tasmanian exceptionalism, or any exceptionalism...
...I think it is unlikely that any more general collections will be forthcoming...
...In her Man of Letters: A CenWilliam H Nolte is C. Wallace Martin Professor of English at the University of South Carolina...
...One can only wonder what Hood wrote to occasion this response: "Your references to living in sin shock me...
...First, "few people know that Mencken married," and second, "fewer still know anything about his wife...
...The most amazing thing about Mencken was his great catholicity of interests, the fact that he found so much in the world that delighted him—and that he had such a gift for translating that delight for the rest of us...
...Probably the best known of all the many stories told about the epistolary Mencken and the effect his letters had on the recipients is the one recounted by Sherwood Anderson in his memoirs...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 91 thus readily accepted the role of mentor, constantly encouraging and advising his determined protegee in her literary efforts...
...Hence, when MenckA Time to Choose: CATHOLICISM or DISSENT...
...I expect Tom Heflin to be nominated...
...It would be impossible to paraphrase the finale without doing it injury: At ten o'clock Mencken got up to go as he said he had work to do...
...Think of erudition in the White House coupled with fearless ability...
...Her letter was probably occasioned by one from Mencken that had appeared in the World supporting Senator James Reed of Missouri for the Democratic nomination...
...When she (apparently) complained to Mencken that Nicholas Longworth, Speaker of the House (when Hood brought the two men together they got on famously, as did Mencken with Alice Roosevelt Longworth), had made a pass at her on the way home from a dinner at which Mencken and Longworth had evidently outdone themselves at putting away the alcoholic refreshments, she did not receive the sympathy she expected: "I am amazed by what you say of our eminent friend...
...From the time of their first meeting in 1923, when...
...Beware of similar looking imitations...
...as a girl she had been advised by Madame Schumann-Heink to study abroad, which she did before beginning her professional life in London...
...Still, Schuster went on to quote from that letter, written to Isaac Goldberg and published in Goldberg's biography of Mencken in 1925: "Of Schubert I hesitate to speak...
...Of all the theories concerning this (perhaps inexplicable) matter, the most convincing is that offered by Hamilton Owens in his Personal Note to Letters of H. L. Mencken...
Vol. 20 • December 1987 • No. 12
