Blasts and Bravos
Geltman, Max
"Blasts and Bravos" Over in a corner of old Greenwich Village in New York City, Paul Shyre is holding forth as H. L. Mencken at the tiny Cherry Lane Theatre in an adaptation of some of the Baltimore Sage's most...
...A Tory in politics (though this recreation of the Master is perhaps niggardly on this point), he deplored the low caliber of men chosen for the highest offices in the Republic...
...Richard Cobden, Political Writings, (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1973), 2 vols., 770 pp...
...He was, in the best sense of the term, a political animal...
...But he had faith in man—so long as he stayed out of Hollywood, the national suburb which he called "the great reductio ad absurdum of civilization...
...Men like Mencken always die too soon...
...To set his friends' minds at rest he sentoff the following telegram to Philip Goodman: "was baptized by Aimee last Tuesday night you can have no idea of the peace it has brought my soul I can now eat five bismarck herrings without the slightest acidoses...
...Over in a corner of old Greenwich Village in New York City, Paul Shyre is holding forth as H. L. Mencken at the tiny Cherry Lane Theatre in an adaptation of some of the Baltimore Sage's most ebullient epigrams and aphorisms which he has aptly titled Blasts and Bravos...
...These things, quoted out of context, make one chuckle, as indeed they were intended to do...
...Mencken was not (in my judgment) as sound in his musical appreciations as he has been made out to be...
...These quotations from Shyre's production and lots more can be found in Sara Mayfield's The Constant Circle, a book I heartily recommend...
...Once in Hollywood he let himself be converted by Aimee Semple McPherson...
...Also he detested "democracy" in the ignoble sense which sees in absolute egalitarianism an improvement on the human spectacle...
...Yet he liked Silent Cal, reserving his undiluted contempt for William Jennings Bryan, who denied to the heavens that he was a mammal, as the Sage told his musical colleagues at the Saturday Night Club...
...Nero fiddled but Coolidge snored...
...Mencken was an unabashed agnostic, but not quite an atheist...
...In fact, he despised all "uplift," political and religious, most of all that kind of uplift practiced by the YMCA that combines muscle-building with soul-soaring...
...The audiences—happily the youngest of audiences—are chuckling with unalloyed mirth, a kind of joy that hasn't been heard in the land since the untimely departure of the founder of the original Saturday Night Club...
...Best of all, one smiles inwardly not merely at the high humor of the man, but at his reverential love of life and manners (or lack of them) as expressed by the most canting of his pet hates—the American politician...
...Not that Mencken hated politics...
...Of course you won't hear all this at the Cherry Lane, but if you come to the "Big Apple" (Mencken would surely have had something pithy to say about that...
...He observed of Coolidge, "Speaking or silent he says absolutely nothing...
...Going into politics," he once said, "is as fatal to a gentleman as going into a bordello is to a virgin...
...It was his notion that there were only two kinds of music: "German and bad...
...There's nothing to be said against him, but then there's nothing to be said for him—except that he slept more soundly than any other President...
...The orthodox may say that Henry lacked the gift of faith...
...A bit much, this, but quintessentially Menckenian...
...When the Seventh Day Adventists predicted the end of the world, he took the precaution of removing the works of Voltaire from his shelves and the portrait of Darwin from his studio wall...
...Beethoven stood on top of the Mencken musical pantheon, and of Schubert he said, "Schubert sweated beauty as naturally as a Christian sweats hate...
...Here in fireman-red suspenders, with a bottle of good cheap wine on one table, and a stein full of Michelob (he didn't always guzzle Wurzburger) on his writing desk, MenckenShyre talks casually, wittily, stalking among his bookshelves in house slippers, culling bits and pieces from his Schimpf lexicon (barbs cast in his direction by the High Booboisie) and from newspaper clips, very much in the spirit of this Alternative's "Current Wisdom...
...don't forget to visit the little theatre on thecorner of Commerce and Morton Streets for a civilized and bracing evening with and about H. L. Mencken—a national institution lost to us these despairing days when we need him most...
...Introduction by Naomi Churgin Miller...
...But now—for a while at least—he comes to life in his study (exquisitely recreated by Eldon Elder) at 1524 Hollins Street, Baltimore...
Vol. 8 • March 1975 • No. 6
