The Great American Saloon Series
Weisberger, Siegfried
"The Great American Saloon Series" Last year we auspicated this illustrious series not with the intent of publishing 3 string of autobiographical essays on >ophomoric debauches nor with the invent of competing with the likes of...
...Mozart was dumped into an unmarked grave in his native city, Vienna...
...and an older retired businessman was the bass fiddler...
...Mencken has been described as "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people," and clearly he was a powerful private citizen in America...
...A violinmaker opened a small shop on the first floor, which may have been a partial magnet for Mencken when he looked for a spot for his Saturday Night Club...
...Before the quartet started there was usually chatter among the musicians and the guests of the evening...
...Mencken, a newspaperman, was the pianist...
...As the years passed, the Club became institutionalized and expanded to embrace a small orchestra and a growing collection of listeners, but in its first years, it consisted only of these four men who shared the expression of musical composition with a small circle of comrades...
...He insisted on a language for its people and a press for its written expression...
...The "Beer Barrel Polka" mood was more spirited than some other melodies and it tinted the atmosphere with a moderate uproar, with speeding movements...
...Weisberg-r and were instructed in the art of digified beer drinking...
...What we intended was to do our )atriotic part in restoring the saloon to is former high estate, by celebrating hose grand palaces of bibulosity that lave endured and that, taken one with mother, suggest the timeless principles rf conviviality and intelligent discourse...
...The skeletal structure of the Saturday Night Club was a close group of four men for whom music was a cherished love, as opposed to an occupational expression...
...Mencken clearly was the mainstay of the Saturday Night Club...
...Such wisdom seems to have evapoited from the land, and so I asked the .venty-nine-year-old sage, who recently )ok up residence in Cambridge, to de3ribe one of the great drinking organizaons of Western civilization, the Saturay Night Club, a club that for nearly alf a century maintained the highest traitions of the bibulous art...
...Musical poets have sung and their lyrics have conveyed messages to dreamers and troubadours...
...and cued" his musicians to begin Haydn School Master for the first part of the concert...
...During the eighteenth century, Leipzig was prominent as a literary and musical center...
...The brutal hand of fate writes sad chapters to history...
...All gossip ceased when he shouted "Ruhe...
...RET H.L...
...With each musical expression, the Saturday Night Club saluted the will of a man who wanted to give justice to the spirit of music, and H. L. Mencken asserted that the spirit of music hailed ale...
...Each session began with a salute to the end of the week and ended with an emotional longing for another gathering...
...When the concert came to a close, the members and musicians seemed elated by the expression of musical masters as well as by Mencken's contagious endorsement of the spirit of the Saturday Night Club...
...It is my hope that Mr...
...Characteristically he is thought of in the context of newspaper reporting, editing the old American Mercury, writing his renowned American Language and his delightful autobiographical series, Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days, and other noteworthy volumes...
...however, when Mencken nodded to begin the musical sequence for the evening, silence fell as a curtain falls on the stage...
...The second-floor room where the Saturday Night Club gathered was unpretentious, with chairs, a piano, and ample room where the quartet of musicians was to play...
...When you drink eer, you must not sip but guzzle," was Ir...
...Mencken and the Mencken family were closely associated with these traditions of music and knowledge in Leipzig, and it seems likely that H.L...
...Perhaps this annual ritual was another manifestation of firm familial roots in Leipzig...
...Mencken was a historian, an editor, and a poet under the pseudonymn, Philander von der Linde...
...Weisberger's piece will serve as a blueprint to discriminating bartenders and their clients, and will help us maintain standards...
...Mencken insisted on a unique role for American tradition...
...however, in the spirit of his consistent emotional commitment to support those men he admired, Mencken endorsed solo performances from the viola, violin, and bass...
...Even less did we intend o publish a series of irregular reports on he various low-grade alcohol pits spoting the Republic and serving as asylums .or those human slugs whose mien is de)endent on guff like the Playboy philos)phy...
...For years he was a close associate f Mencken and other literary fig[res of yesteryear, but in 1954 he retired rom bookselling, warning that the coun-y was going to "the boobs," and what entient follower of the American scene ill rise up to gainsay him...
...In his retire-lent he has continued to collect and read ooks, to study America's preposterous recline, and to elucidate his judgments t innumerable beer drinking sessions in nd about the Baltimore area...
...Its traditions mbraced the ideals and principles which Vied the great saloons of the past and which still obtain in those that remain...
...these were the traditions that the Saturday Night Club strove to maintain...
...nonetheless he was a man of tradition, and he expressed his sense of tradition in his love of music...
...At the end of each musical session, beer was served ceremoniously to Mencken and the other three musicians in traditional steins with attached lids...
...Mencken was a firm, gentle man and his reverence for music was respected without challenge...
...The men shared among themselves what had transpired since the previous Saturday Night Club meeting...
...Mencken recognized the great brewmasters, and he underscored their value to the good of the future of man in the same fashion that he gave homage to the products of past musical artists...
...Yet Mencken came from a family with strong musical tradition, and music was a major part of his life...
...Each member enjoyed polka playing, although the pleasure of the bass fiddler seemed most conspicuous during a polka rally...
...Mencken made a pilgrimage to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to hear Bach's renowned B Minor Mass...
...In years past, the building had been a private home...
...I pray that this essay will inspire our readers to scour the nation for those great saloons that remain and to report them to our Americana editor, so that this journal can continue its great mission...
...Each spring H.L...
...Henry Louis Mencken was knocked down by a stroke which left him partially incapacitated and unable to write...
...The repertoire of the Saturday Night Club was diversified but the "Beer Barrel Polka" was a special favorite...
...Frequently Haydn was the warmup for the Waltz King, Johann Strauss, and as the Saturday Night Club played his waltzes, Mencken's head swayed from side to side, his foot tapped the floor, and his entire body dramatized his internal love for the musical masters...
...Alas, I must admit that after four in:tallments we seem to have exhausted Toth our supply of authorities in the field Ind our supply of subjects worthy of enhronement in this series...
...H.L...
...The Saturday Night Club met in a small second-floor room of a Baltimore building...
...Mencken hailed the idiosyncratic qualities of fine beer: Munich beer, a Kulmbacher beverage, a Wurzburger beer—the light and dark—each superb...
...a lawyer played the violin...
...Henry Louis Mencken was well equipped, as a distant member of this noted family, to bang his contemporary America and to shake its people to awaken, to think, and to reason with the development of a worthy civilization...
...The Saturday Night Club was Mencken's party...
...Mencken's literary and musical interests had roots in his distinguished Leipzig heritage...
...In order to emphasize the delicacy and special quality of "fine malt liquor," Mencken liked to talk about beer in German: ". . . EM helles and ein dunkles...
...Henry Louis Mencken was a second-generation American, but emotionally and philosophically he was an eighteenth century man, a man of the Enlightenment...
...James Grant in our March 1974 isue...
...His most beloved ancestor was such a man: Johann Burkhard Mencken, who died prematurely at fifty-eight in 1732, but who during his professionallife, was the Rector of the University of Leipzig, then one of the most distinguished centers of learning in Europe...
...All other guests drank beer from regular seidel glasses which were described, with jovial respect, as "flat heads...
...He is the founder of Pea^ody's Bookstore, the famed Baltimore ibrairie and beer stube analyzed by 4r...
...Last year we auspicated this illustrious series not with the intent of publishing 3 string of autobiographical essays on >ophomoric debauches nor with the invent of competing with the likes of Holilay magazine...
...For the bass fiddler played the "Beer Barrel Polka" with the nostalgic reflection that he had inherited his bass from his grandfather, who had brought it to America when he fled from his native Germany during the revolution of 1848...
...The players and their few listeners were thoughtful men who wanted to be active, in a small group, for the sake of spirits, 'for the good of music, for the zest of life, and to carry on a tradition that useful men had kept alive throughout the ages...
...MENCKEN'S Saturday Night Club evolved from its founders' core love of music...
...Each musician held his instrument masterfully as the skilled playing moved forward...
...Weisberger's first injunction, and our ducation has progressed from there...
...He said with anguish, "Had I lost both of my legs, I could have sat in a wheel chair and written . . . now I give a damn—and at the end of the journey there shall be no chanting...
...Johann Sebastian Bach had been organist, teacher, and composer at the Thomas Church there, and each year the city's numerous vocal and orchestral societies gave many concerts...
...he was the host, he was the conductor, he was the soloist, and he was the noble friend who eulogized musical masters or contemporary colleagues...
...a university professor held the viola chair...
...Mencken knew what he was talking about...
...When not in use, the steins stood with stately dignity, on a special shelf...
...Each musician knew his instrument thoroughly and each was skilled at interpreting the notes of classical masters...
...It was at ne of these civilized gatherings that Imes Grant and I first met Mr...
...Saturday night without music was not Mencken, and without music a weekend had no chance...
...Schubert was allowed to starve during the tender years of his manhood...
...It seemed that even the piano keyboard beamed as Mencken knowingly selected ivory or black notes with radiant pleasure...
...Thus I have )etitioned an essay from the man who aught me the crucial importance of sou-ages and pretzels for intelligent beer Irinking...
...Each performer bowed a perfect solo with a latent intent to please composer, conductor, comrade, and self...
...So, regardless of the newspaper, legal, or academic pressures of the preceding week, the tone of the Saturday Night Club was refreshed and officially toasted with fine steins of beer...
...It is a horrible eality for a young idealist like your ser'ant, and I will not accept it...
...When Beethoven realized his total deafness, he stood up, pointed his finger to the heavens, and shouted, "Wie es ist so soll es sein"—as it is, so shall it be...
...Siegfried Weisberger is no stranger o this series...
Vol. 8 • November 1974 • No. 2
