My Life as Author and Editor

...Much happier are the pictures of, and gossip about, Zoe Akins, Anita Loos, Ruth Suckow, and Julia Peterkin...

...In brief, I am a damned fool...

...It would be nigh impossible to overestimate the influence on literary Americans of that volume's long article "Puritanism as a Literary Force...

...Mencken' s final words on Dreiser should surprise no one who knows much about either man: "He was essentially a German peasant, oafish, dour and distrustful of all mankind, and he remained one to the end of the chapter...

...They met for breakfast at the Algonquin Hotel in the stifling August heat: Poor Dorothy, who turned out to be on the plump side, with a distressing appearance of overtight lacing, sweated like a colored bishop in fly-time...

...L. Mencken saw six important books to press: the three Days volumes, the two Supplements to The American Language, and A New Dictionary of Quotations...

...But nowhere in this record is there any evidence of malice...

...In addition, I do a 6,000 word book article a month, write over half of Repetition Generale, and most of the "Conversations...

...Mencken fondly recalls both of them, remarking the great dissimilarity in their work as well as in their persons...

...he constantly refers to his bimonthly visits to the New York office, and to the wide assortment of people he entertained (or was entertained by) during the four-day stays...

...After describing her looks at about age 25, when Mencken met her, he adds the following: That she was faithful to Dreiser while they lived together I doubt very seriously, for his efforts as a lover, though herdic, were hardly enough to content a woman who had been accustomed to the services of a large and assiduous band of men...

...Near the end of this delightful and dumbfounding record, Mencken remarks that though the year 1921 was a busy one for him he accomplished little that was of any lasting significance...

...In fact, in only one instance was Mencken ever unforgiving, and that concerned the critic Stuart Pratt Sherman, who viciously attacked both Mencken and Dreiser during World War I. With the war ended and rabid patriotism no longer a hallmark of any kind, Sherman did everything he could to befriend Mencken, even enlisting the aid of various third parties, Carl Van Doren, for one, to help bring them together...

...By then she had also, as Mencken put it, taken to fornication, and had passed through the hands and beds of a good many other men...

...She was the true daughter of her Methodist pa—a tinpot messiah with an inflamed egoism that was wholly unameliorated by humor...

...and doing casual stuff for the Nation, the Post, and the Century...

...T he most painful of all the portraits in My Life is the one of Sinclair Lewis...

...Although she had shown talent as a writer, a painter, and a musician, she had settled on the stage as a career by the time she and Dreiser set up housekeeping together...

...He gives something not far removed from a coroner's report on Fitzgerald's death and then burial in Rockville, Maryland, beside the graves of some of his Key relatives, even naming the man who conducted the funeral service...

...His behavior finally resulted in Mencken's barring him from the house...

...By far his most important book of literary criticism, A Book of Prefaces, appeared in 1917...

...His trouble, he correctly concludes, was that he had too many jobs...

...Also appearing before he left the Smart Set were the first three of the Prejudices volumes...

...Mencken would never deny that the gods had treated him kindly...

...Our five days in the house had given us a full measure of her peculiar pestiferousness...

...But what sets My Life apart from other memoirs of the period is its vast gallery of portraits, most of them of the people Mencken met while he and George Jean Nathan were coediting the Smart Set...

...As always, Mencken describes the characters in graphic detail...

...Incidentally, considering his reputation as a curmudgeon, one may be surprised by the good humor to be found in this remembrance of things past...

...Although one had to pity Dorothy for having to live with someone like Lewis, who was usually drunk by noon and disputatious thereafter, she was by no means blameless herself...

...Just as sad is the picture he draws of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who lived in and around Baltimore in the early thirties...

...At the end of a visit Mencken and his wife Sara and Philip and Lily Goodman paid Lewis and Dorothy at their Vermont home in 1931, all agreed that he was more deserving of sympathy than she...

...The other memoir, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, 1906-41, is forthcoming from the Johns Hopkins University Press...

...Many of those who enliven the pages of My Life have been pretty much forgotten, save to the literary historians, but were nonetheless important in their day...

...those he simply avoided...

...Although he had, by about 1920, tired of the Smart Set—including its title, the paper on which it was printed, and the great emphasis it traditionally placed on fiction and poetry for its contentMencken seldom gets far from that forum...

...Her cheeks, meanwhile, became sloughs of whitish, sticky mud...

...After Zelda was placed in an asylum in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1933, Fitz (as Mencken called him) and Scotty moved back to Baltimore, where he was in and out of the hospital because of his drinking...

...It's not so much his pro-and-con analysis or his final resolve (though opposed in principle to adultery, since it involved a breach of faith, he finally had to admit that he had no right to inflict his prejudices on the whole human race) but rather the details he employs that make it a minor work of art...

...He certainly saw more of Nathan during those years, but then Nathan was never in need of aid, whereas Dreiser was always in trouble of some sort—and never hesitated to impose upon Mencken's good nature when trouble arose...

...I often think of this poor girl's unhappy youth with an insane mother and a dipsomaniac father, and of her baleful heritage...

...What most astonished Mencken was how Dreiser could have "four or five intrigues going on at once," and still find time for a heavy stint of daily writing...

...And to that he added: "I had a considerable fondness for him, mainly, I suppose, because of my awareness of his intense unhappiness, and I certainly greatly admired him as an artist, at least when he was at his best...

...As he put it: "Sara was fond of him and so was I, but we simply could not endure him...

...Mencken politely answered Sherman's letters, but, I am glad to report, he refused to meet him...

...If I had to name my favorite of the Dreiser women I should, without hesitation, name Kirah Markham, a leading actress of the Chicago Little Theatre when Dreiser met her in 1913...

...And now, two years later, we have in print the first of the volumes, My Life as Author and Editor, superbly edited by Jonathan Yardley...

...Not long after reaching this point (in the narrative), Mencken suffered his stroke...

...He then remarks that "Little Scotty," then a student at Vassar College, came down for the ceremony...

...Mencken devotes more space to his relations with Dreiser than with anyone else...

...He trusted nobody, and was always suspicious of good will—save only when it was pretended by palpable frauds...

...But then Mencken seemed to be incapable of performing only two or three jobs at once...

...N either in the Days books nor in The Diary, which created.such a silly furor when it appeared in 1989, do we see Mencken as sharply as we do here...

...In the main, however, these pages reveal a man whose recollections are cause for celebration above all else...

...In a delightful little set piece (on pages 134-37), Mencken describes the bout of soul-searching he endured following a conversation with Dreiser's wife, Sarah, about her husband's moral weakness...

...Still, the great service he performed for the National Letters preceded the founding of the Mercury...

...If this latter surmise is true, then there was poetic justice in her infidelity, for Dreiser, on his part, had had a delirious affair with the second Mrs...

...He also composed, or was at work on, two memoirs that, in accordance with the terms of his will, were "not to be open to anyone, under any circumstances whatever, until either January 1, 1980, or thirty-five years after the death of the author, whichever may be the later...

...Thus, the heavy wooden boxes containing the manuscripts remained sealed until January 29, 1991...

...Fitzgerald lamented that he had to sell his best stories, the ones he really sweated over, to Mencken for a paltry three hundred dollars or so, while the ones he knocked out in a day and a night brought two thousand dollars and up from the slicks...

...Some people he disliked, of course...

...Mencken published ten of Fitzgerald's stories...

...Much of that trouble, of course, had to do with Dreiser's women—that is, with the numerous affairs he had, either simultaneously or seriatim...

...Also, I am working upon Prejudices III, and editing a MS...

...for Dreiser...

...In a sentence I've seen quoted several times, Mencken summarizes his feelings: "All the while Iknew Sinclair Lewis he was either a drunkard or a teetotaler, so my relations with him never became what could be called intimate, for I am ill at ease with any man who is either...

...Here he recalls his first meeting with Dorothy Thompson, who three months before had become Lewis's second wife...

...Mencken is usually credited with having discovered the last two writers...

...I am, in fact, reasonably sure that she carried on an affair with an elderly Jewish painter and engraver named Henry Wolf, and I have reason to believe that she also had a fling with Paul Armstrong, to whom she applied (at my introduction) for a part in one of his plays...

...Harsh as he is on Lewis's outrageous behavior, Mencken is even harsher on the three women (two wives and a mistress) who took from him what they could and then went on their way...

...She appeared to suffer severely, and I was glad when the meal was over, and she could escape upstairs to renovate herself...

...Among those appearing in the magazine between 1916 and 1923 (I take the list from a study of Mencken's literary criticism that I wrote many years ago) were Dreiser, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, George Branch Cabe11, Ruth Suckow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Lee Masters, Eugene O'Neill, Joseph Wood 'Crutch, Howard Mumford Jones, Lewis Mumford, Maxwell Anderson, Anita Loos, John Hall Wheelock, Ben Hecht, Dorothy Parker, Waldo Frank, Thomas Beer, Ju.lia Peterkin, and John Peale Bishop...

...It was during that period, as Yardley notes, that Mencken "towered over the American scene as has no other literary or journalistic figure before or since...

...Mencken remarks that, during the years he knew Dreiser, he saw almost as much of his women as he did of him: "Nor did I see all of them, by any means, for he was fundamentally a very secretive fellow, and not infrequently he tried to keep me in the dark about this or that affair...

...Soon or late, Mencken got to know most of the writers whose work appeared in the Smart Set—that is to say, most of the important writers of the teens and twenties...

...Two such writers were Thyra Samter Winslow and Lilith Benda, who between them contributed dozens of novellas and short stories to the Smart Set...

...Thus, we learn little about the American Mercury, certainly the most important magazine published in America during the years of Mencken's editorship (1924-33...

...At which point he enters into the record a brief excerpt from a letter he wrote to Fielding H. Garrison on February 23, 1921: I am rewriting The American Language (8 hours a day), helping to edit the Smart Set and the Black Mask, advising the editors of two other magazines, doing an article a week for the Sun, sitting in at least one long Sun conference a week...

...Armstrong, Rella Abell, whom he met in Rome early in 1912...