BOOKS
Landers, Robert K. & Aaron, Daniel & Corwin, Phillip & Taylor, Mark
Mencke#. A Study of His _9 Thought CHARLES A. FECHBR Knopf, $15 [391 pp.] DANIEL AARON This new study of Mencken is being hailed by some of his old friends and ,critics as'the most...
...Please send check with The man from +South Dakota, how- order, adding 75r postage, to: ever, was a rather different sort from Stevenson, No one would ever carica...
...Dept...
...After the Cuban missile crisis," Martin quotes George Ball as saying, "Adlai was only going through the motions...
...CW U.S...
...consciously, is seeking God, George McGovern remembers that, Searching for God draws parallals between the monastic life and the his wife and children asleep, he was tire of the ordinary Christian...
...Ir was Hicksville...
...He has also revealed him (sometimes inadvertently) in such a way as to qualify strongly his own claims for Mencken's universality...
...Adla| Stevemson and the World JOHN BAR'I~OW MARTIN Doubleday, $15 [946 pp.] Gr~sroots GEOPcGE McGOVERN Random House, $12.50 [307 pp.] ROBERT K. LANDERN Inauguration Day, 1961...
...He pays particular attention to the writers and thinkers who shaped his opinions---opinions arrived at early in his career and adhered r with remarkable consistency for the rest of his life...
...But at the same time he often extenuates Mencken's lapses and searches for the degree of truth in his exaggerations...
...but he didn't do so...
...Granted that Mencken was not always right or reasonable, still, Fecher argues, "the things he attacked deserved to be attacked," and whatever his faults, his immense influence on his times "puts him among the giants in our cultural history...
...Stevenson seems to have thought Kennedy coldblooded, even heartless," Martin writes...
...Mencken's biographers, Fecher thinks, have" succeeded cotlectively if not singly in presenting his "tremendous personality" but have done less well in "synthesizing and weighing the 13 October 1978:666 body of his ideas...
...He talked about cuity, familial estrangement and loss of faith...
...O P ~f~[~['t attack...
...And, in fact, Kennedy and his cohorts did bumble us, not, to be sure, into nuclear war (although in the Cuban missile crisis, they came close), but into Vietnam, a bumble about which Stevenson himself, alas, as Martin judges, "probably was ambivalent...
...His role had become ritualistic...
...ture McGovern as a wishy-washy MOREHOUSE-BARLOW Hamlet...
...A Study of His _9 Thought CHARLES A. FECHBR Knopf, $15 [391 pp.] DANIEL AARON This new study of Mencken is being hailed by some of his old friends and ,critics as'the most trustworthy interpretation of the Master yet .to appear--" so far and a~vay the best work of any kind I have read on Henry," writes Alfred A. Knopf in his warm and amusing foreword, "as to leave the competition nowhere...
...Fevher flatly declares: "There was not a single notable writer of the twenties and thirties who was unwilling to acknowledge his indebtedness, either direotly or indirectly, to H.L...
...He riage Encounter groups and Dia]-A-Priest...
...Chicago...
...His life had passed him by...
...He sketches Mencken's Baltimore background, family influences, the formative experiences of the aggressive and self-confidem cub journalist...
...add tax...
...After .the ceremony," John Bartlow Martin wrRes, Stevenson "alone, of all the Cabinet, had no limousine to pick him up...
...I found it unattractive and ter- An insightful compilation o| weekly articles ribly sad . . . . Adtai was a terribly written hy Fr...
...He thought Kennedy too sure of himself...
...James and Howells and Paul Elmer More were better literary critics than either Mencken or his disciple allows...
...He believed, as he put it, "that a good phrase is better than a Great Truth...
...And who is Fecher to say that Mencken's three pieces on James Huneker are more interesting now than all of Huneker's wrKing, or (more preposterously) that "The whole collected works of Thorstein Veblen are probably of less importance--and certainly less readable-than the great essay 'Professor Veblen and the Cow.'" There were areas of American literature and thought that Fecher was less often in such enthusiastic agreement with the Baltimore Sage...
...involvement in Vietnam...
...Afoot he started out to make his way in the biting wind up Pennsylvania Avenue .to the reviewing stand ~t the White House...
...Adlai Stevenson and the others who were to be in the Cabinet sat on the platform and watched as the torch was passed to, the new generation willing to pay any price and bear any burden...
...He concedes that Mencken can be harsh and strident, that he may have gone too far in his diatribes against democracy, that his dismissal of Nazism was "the least creditable aspect of his long career," that he could be "cruelb, unfair," that he neither liked nor underCommonweal: 667 stood the work of writers "who emerged out of the first world war," that he was not a "reliable" critic of poetry or the theater, that he could be snobbish, cold, and callous "toward the average human being...
...Spr/ng~e/d (Me) to go...
...The celebrator of Conrad, D~iser, Beethoven, and Pilsner er relishes the squalid brochures of untebanks and the vulgarities of hoi pol!oi...
...Stevenson's career altered course...
...Stevenson, to his (as it now seems) credit, did not really feel at home on the "pragmatic," "tough," "decisive" New Frontier...
...yet ~t times, his admiration for those masters seems to distort, if only a +little, .his view of their servant...
...Readers knowledgeable in Menckeniana, especially those familiar with Guy Forgue's superb book, are likely to find such praise excessive, yet it is not hard to see why Menckenites should welcome Father's intellectual portrait of HLM...
...He "quite literally changed the course of American literature" and possessed the largest vocabulary "one may safely venture, of any writer in the English language...
...What links the myriad facets of Mencken's "r are less his axiomatic beliefs (materialism, natural inequality, the second-rateness of American culture, the perniciousness of "Puritanism" etc...
...These objections notwithstanding, Fecher's book is an excellent introduction to the ebulUent iconoclast who peers out at the reader from a series of evocative photographs and is heard in hundreds of expressive passages...
...Deals with proh]ems of drug abuse, alcoholism, promishad no place to go...
...In hot, however, there was a Leader ~. News $6.00 place for Stevenson: the leadership Order direct lrom the publisher of the then growing opposition to the EXPOSITION PRESS...
...The Nietzschean influence can be seen in his political theory, in his vendetta against what he calls "Puritanism" and the Genteel Tradition, and in his prose style...
...He blamed the 'Irish Mafia' of Kennedy's staff...
...Temperamentally," McGee- 78 Danbury Road ern notes, "I am not a very good Wilton, Connecticut 06897 temporizer...
...humiliations to which he was subjeered, which makes this great man Based on the belief that every seem to have ,been, near the end, so human being, consciously or unsadty lost...
...Mar~in, in this second volume (no less excellent and only slightly less engrossing than the first one) of his definitive biography of Stevenson, takes his subject from defeat in 1952 to death in 1965...
...At bottom, as Fecher rightly says, Mencken was an artist, but he also sees him as a figure of Goethean dimensions...
...John Kennedy had drawn, directly or indirectly, some part of his public self from Stevenson's, but the relationship between the young President and his Ambassador to the United Nations was, as Martin puts it, "uncomfortable and sometimes almost painful...
...He neglects, as an instance, to note that Robert Kennedy, from whose account of the Cuban missile crisis Mar+tin is not otherwise reluctant to quote, wrote of an offer made by Premier Khrushchev during that crisis, that it "was not unreasonable and did not amount to a loss .to :the United States or to our NATO allies...
...He is less trustworthy in his comments on American bistory and cuRure and seems quite content to accept uncritically many of Mencken's judgments about America's literary past and the situation of the arts in the United States when Mencken .began to challenge the cultural custodians...
...As painting the living room of their apartment near Dakota Wesleyan Univer- monks search for God in the aussity (where has was teaching history), terity of the monastery, so, too, when he heard Stevenson deliver his do laypeople as they go about their everyday work in their ' post-mklnigbt acceptance speech at the 1952 Democratic convention in everyday world...
...The professorabaiter defends the code of the natural ,aristocrat, execrates farmers, Methodists, politicians, and prohibitionists...
...Fecher has elected to subsume the Menckenian welter into broad elastic categories: the philosopher, the political theorist, the critic, the philologian, and the stylist...
...leaving the UN but he had no place "'Strikes directly to the roots o| today's human frailties and difflcu[ties...
...History had passed him newspaper, hasec[ on his experience with ]Vlarby...
...It pleased him to note that the crowds on the sidewalk gave only perfunctory applause to Kennedy and the dignitaries who drove by in the parade but when they recognized Stevenson on foot among them they cheered...
...For the most part, Martin succeeds...
...Washington not part of it . . . . He was going through the motions, making speeches, yet w~th a feeling in his heart that it didn,t make any difference to the GERALD D world if he fell over and had a heart COVERDALE...
...When, on that cold day in January, 1961, the torch was passed, but not to him...
...And in the process of transforming his hero into a universal man, he magnifies his achievements and is tempted into making questionable assertions about the extent and depth of his "impact...
...Fecher may have padliated some of Mencken's grosser prejudices, but he has done justice to his rectitude and professionalism--and above all to his astonisl~ing intellectual voracity and verbal energy...
...as Martin moves him across the ensuing years, the author honorably tries to remain impartial as between the ambassador and his successive presidential masters...
...paperbound) $4.95...
...He autobiography, Grassroots, is inter- is aware that one person's approach to his religious life may esting, although it would be more so had 'Robert Sam Anson not provided not work for another, but--in the a fuller and better written account spirit of Saint Benedict----Cardinal of them in his 1972 biography, Hume reminds us that there is a McGovern...
...From then on he knew he was not going to have an impact on foreign policy--which was what was most important to him...
...way for all of us...
...Had Martin paused to question President Kennedy's refusal to accept this clear and "not unreasonable" offer to remove the Soviet missiles in Cuba in exchange for removal of the U.S...
...in N.Y...
...Fecher has made a good case for Mencken as a powerful cultural force, a writer of extraordinary inventiveness, a humorist comparable to Mark Twain...
...Mencken, according to Fecher, "raised criticism to the level of a fine art...
...This is not to say that Fecher is uncritical...
...Even his professed admirers tend .to fault his criticism, to regard him primarily as a brilliant bad boy and entertainer, and to miss or misinterpret a corrective to ~his simplistic view...
...He was not ambivalent about Vietnam: he assailed our Plecme callow four to six "policy of moral debacle and political w@| |Or chclnqo O~ defeat" there as early as September, address and enclose label 1963, Right /rom the start, as his i Commonweal: 669...
...Nor can the anti-~lemocrat be detached ~rom the theologian, literary critic, or humorist...
...McGovern's ac- problems that can beset the incount of his pre-1972 years, in his "dividual in his search for God...
...N.Y+ llS01 (516) 822-5700 a place he was urged by a few to Prepaid plus 75r P&H per copy...
...Coverdale for a local c[iocesan unhappy man...
...than his prevailing tone, language, style...
...take...
...Since Mencken's "thought" .pretty welt boils down to a relatively few and not espe-" cia$1y complex basic ideas, the caCegories tend to overlap...
...He thought Kennedy's deIJ October 1978~ 668 cisive approach to problems led him to such disasters as the Bay of Pigs and said that one of these decisive and impulsive young men could bumble us i~o nuclear war...
...That was it," he recalls: He Cardinal Hume gives a realistic, put down his paint brush and entered compassionate analysis of the Democratic politics...
...It is this failure (which perhaps he would have rectified, had he lived), and not so SEARCHING FOR GOD much his estrangement from power Cardinal George Basil Hume, in Washington or the various shabby O.S.B...
...The problem of organizhag the enormous mass of Mencken's published and unpublished writings, literally hundreds of thousands of words, would daunt the most intrepid investigator: And given his omnivorous reading, his delight in both the esoteric and the common, any attempt to reduce his prodigal output into some coherent design seems hardly worth the effort...
...He , knows Mencken's work thoroughly and writes about it with authority...
...It is a conscientious, well-informed, and honest rendering by a self-described "Mencken buff" whose devotion to his subject all but overwhelms his effort to be dispassionate...
...missiles in Turkey, he would have strengthened the impression that Stevenson, in earlier suggesting, to much criticism and little avail, a similar swap, had been not just courageous, but wise...
Vol. 105 • October 1978 • No. 20
