The Great American Saloon Series
Weisberger, Siegfried
by Siegfried Weisberger The Great American Saloon Series When I think of H.L. Mencken and reminisce about beer sessions past, I cannot forget the setting for such occasions. Mencken loved the...
...Mencken believed in drinking beer with a clear head, being prepared for song when good fellows got together...
...Mencken liked to know what was happening in Iowa, where the Midwestern corn belt grew and nurtured the nation's largest supply of pigs feet...
...Many a man had to be rolled home to his mother or wife by a burly policeman to be sobered up, but not Mencken...
...Bock beer, served directly from the barrel, was most characteristically associated with the spring of the year, when all life starts anew, bringing with it a new flow of sap...
...He never failed to touch upon the wonders in this great American land...
...He claimed that the men who wrote the Bible were the greatest poets who have ever lived...
...Mencken liked to gather with friends in beer parlors where men alone guzzled...
...We spoke of the slaughterhouses in Chicago where men of Slovak heritage worked, and where everything but the squeal of the pig was used by the butchers...
...And he was not infrequently a visitor to my Bierstube in the Peabody Book Shop...
...he easily could have talked a dozen mountain preachers under the table if the session's topic hadbeen the Bible versus men...
...He favored such brews as Miinchener, WUrzburger, and Pilsener Urquell, served in quart-sized Seidels...
...He loved linguistic ridicule, lampoonism, and farce...
...According to Mencken, the best beer ever served in America was the Francishauer Bock Beer...
...he was not in favor of fraternities...
...I recall one evening he read to me an enconium he had written years before in the Baltimore Sun: "[I]n this modern land of milk and honey one dainty crowds another year in and year out...
...Mencken loved the atmosphere of a German Gasthaus...
...I remember that he took great delight in attempting to convince me, say, of the existence of flying saucers, or that he possessed extrasensory powers...
...When they disappear, we turn to the oyster, and between times we nourish our systems with the strawberry, the Anne Arundel Beer Sessions with Mencken watermelon, the cantaloupe, the diamond back terrapins, corn on the cob, tomatoes, Blue Mountain peaches, smelts, corncakes, turkey and canvas back ducks...
...Mencken was not a group man...
...Biting satire thrilled him most...
...And when the establishment closed, we made our way home, our heads still ringing with the stout tones of the evening's Trinkenlieder...
...On the table would be spread abundant quantities of head cheese, garden tomatoes, Bismarck herring, garlic salami, rye bread, chicken livers, and pigs feet...
...When the crabs of the Chesapeake have soft shells, we ensnare them, fry them and feast upon them...
...Mencken will live on, I believe, and his Prejudices have made the permanent press...
...he believed that man's greatest accomplishment thus far was the perfected art of brewing beer...
...He was not in favor of beer sippers, kids who grew up on lollipop bottles...
...Gents and ladies unaware of life in springtime, of bock beer, and of bockwurst remain fools, Mencken insisted, all of their lives...
...Mencken liked to trace the links from the Iowa corn to the Chicago butchers to his Baltimore ham sandwiches...
...and his poignant use of outrage has been inscribed in the archives of America...
...The purpose of the sessions was drinking beer...
...Francishauer Bock was the beer that won the trade of the intelligentsia: eight professors and ten doctors at one table guzzled the golden beverage in support of its reputation...
...After he had expressed his opinions for the evening, he would strike up a song that he termed as serious as a Bach cantata, reich mit Geist, as delightful as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, as solemn as "Missa Solemnis," and as enjoyable as the whispering pines in an ancient forest...
...though good conversation was important, its role was not primary...
...Drinking beer with-a "Beer Bruder" was a great joy for the noble journalist...
...Self-styled "institutions of higher learn-- ing," he contended, were merely breeding grounds for cheap politicians and the cause of mediocrity in society...
...Tall tankards brimmed with bocks, lagers, and pilseners...
...I remember many a hot night in Baltimore when he would vent his vehemence against Tennessee and the Bible Belt, the snake charmer cults and the diehards who sought to suppress Darwin's theory of evolution...
...But not all of Mencken's wit was caustic...
...He never tired of discoursing on such men of enterprise as the beer barons, the gin makers, the whisky distillers, and the noodle makers...
...Occasionally he would quip about patriotic activities, lodge membership, and piety, waggishly urging obedience to the law of the mighty and faithful observance to petty reputation...
...He was devoted to ham sandwiches, and he insisted that he should know the history and the ecological roots of their contents...
...As our sessions wandered geographically, Mencken spoke fondly of pretzel bakers, who developed an enormous industry from bending salty dough...
...His concept of the humor of America as manifest in written and spoken language has been equaled by none...
...His stand was that universities produced too many doctors of philosophy who were insurance agents...
...Their habits to him were undisciplined drinking and had no place in a respectable beer hall...
...When I recall our sessions, I can still hear a "Mencken roaring laughter...
...Yet when he had ended a hard day of work and he felt the spirit of laughter, he longed for a beer session...
...When their shells grow hard, we boil them and feast upon them...
...At ease in the company of "Beer Bruders," Mencken was at no loss for frankness...
...In the comfort of a cozy beer house, Mencken loved to banter tongue-in-cheek with his friends...
...28 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975...
...Maryland is always well fed...
...Above all, Mencken craved good malt liquor...
...Before credulous barkeeps, he pretended to believe that Swedenborg was the world's greatest religious philosopher...
...Mencken knew the Bible well and honored it as a book of beautiful poetry...
...University professors at large were also subject to Mencken's ire...
...His favorites in Baltimore were Ganzhorn's Restaurant, the elegant Rennert Hotel, and that preferred watering-hole for seafaring German merchants, the Fuchs Haile...
...He held his liquor well...
...Our conversations traced the production of our libations and viands from the soil to the table...
...Mencken never failed to praise his native Maryland's culinary claims...
Vol. 9 • October 1975 • No. 1
