DEBUNKER OF THE TWENTIES
Putnam, Samuel
WRITERS and WRITING THE NEW LEADER LITERARY SECTION Debunker of the Twenties A MENCKEN CHRE STOMATHY. Edited and Annotated by the Author. By H. L. Mencken. Alfred A. Knopf. 627 pp....
...The laughprovoking Menckenian jibes are never baseless but, if one accepts the first premises, are seen to rest upon , a foundation of uncommon common sense and a closely reasoned life view...
...To the Stalinists the Polish Jews were enemies because they were tainted with socialism and what would now be described as "cosmopolitanism»J' The supreme courage of the Jews seems to me to be that any of them remained in Poland at all...
...He is in a way a super-journalistic Nietzsche transplanted to America and animated by the comic rather than the tragic spirit...
...And by the time he launched the American Mercury—after the comparatively unlamcnted demise of the Smart Set, which had begun tP pall on editors and readers alike—it seemed that he himself might be settling down into a more serious and organized view of the national follies...
...There he has touched on the secret point of all...
...In America, as in Europe, the years following World War I were filled with bitter disillusionment and despair, marked by widespread social, political and esthetic revolts...
...One is profoundly moved by the valiance of the doomed Warsaw Jews, but — unless one suffers from the unfortunate misconception that courage is an "aryan" attribute — this is not the significant aspect of the book...
...Goldstein effectively demonstrates that this was the case with the Polish Jews...
...After asserting that "all (governments) alike are enemies to decent men," and speaking of the way in which the "suckers" are taken in by the demagogues, our author remarks: "What I can't make ouf is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them (the suckers), and is pained and debauched when they are made a show of...
...Unfortunately history demonstrates that there is no necessary relationship between the courage of an individual or group and the justice of the cause for which he struggles...
...He is the author of "Paris Was .Our Mistress...
...have felt compelled to do for him, and as it is, thjjfr^Wu probably go through the 'Ttt&Pjill over again and exhume practically every line he ever wrote, whether or not his ectoplasm would approve...
...I now see that such a description is inaccurate...
...But we have the author's assurance that the present volume contains the best out of his early period...
...It should be required reading for persons concerned with maintaining human dignity and integrity in the amoral chaos of our time...
...But the note of pathos is not lacking, though buried and concealed beneath the glitter of style...
...That, surely, is honest enough...
...Reviewed by JOHN P. ROCHE THE STARS BEAR WITNESS is a powerful book...
...The Mencken who has here chosen to rescue himself from seeming oblivion Is really performing a work of supererogation (he ought to love that word...
...He thought little of the free verse modernists but declared Whitman to be the greatest singer we havcyhad...
...Memoirs of a Lost and Found Generation...
...On the other hand, The Stars Bear Witness brought home to me—a nonJew—the situation of the Jews in Eastern Europe as no other book has succeeded in doing...
...I do not believe in democracy," we are told at the end of the preface, "but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind...
...Every person has the right not to be a hero, and who can blame the remnant of Polish Jewry for abandoning the fight in Poland...
...Apparently only the committed fare really brave...
...ON THE OTHER HAND, .he lent strong encouragement to a socially sincere critic of the American scene like Sinclair Lewis and to such truly American poets as Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay...
...Undoubtedly, he hari much to rln with the rise of a school of superficial "debunkers," in American history and other provinces, who have left a lasting and a harmful mark upon those Americans, who aspire to be intellectuals—these writers are in no small degree responsible for the contemporary fellow-traveler who sees everything wrong with his own country while the Soviet Union is always right...
...T» Samuel Putnam Is a former contributor to the American Mercury...
...Even as GOP cohorts were crying "back to normalcy," the better part of a writing generation was shaking the dust of America off its feet and fleeing for spiritual refuge to Paris's Left Bank...
...5.00...
...Once again we are back in "the era of wonderful nonsense," of prohibition and bathtub gin, flappers and -bobbed hair, flagpole-sitters and Billy Sunday evangelists, Gamaliel Harding and Teapot Dome, William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial— with Henry L., like some sardonic puppet master, seated high above the spectacle and enjoying the performance in a way no one else ever did...
...But does this, after all, represent the sum of the Mencken influence, or can it be that, seduced bv his inimitable style and misled by his pose of complete ironic detachment, we have failed to sec the real Mencken behind the chortles and guffaws...
...Not an extremely heretical or revolutionary statement, since it is cherished by some 20,000,000 persons who voted for Dewey in the last election...
...It is the latter Mencken who is delightfully and tastefully self embalmed in these pages which, whatever else may be said about them, are never dull reading...
...In a deeper sense, Goldstein has written a poignant study of int^r-group relations in No man's Land...
...I was about to add: a forgotten era...
...Not, 1 should add, in Zionism as Jewish nationalism, but in Zionism as escape from an intolerable situation...
...Viking Press...
...stay home and try toAlaugh to death the "hinterland," the "Bible belt" and the Botarians as Mencken and Nathan were seemingly bent on doing . The rebel forces were thus split into hostile factions, with the idlers at the Caf6 du Dome looking down their noses at the Menckenites, who in turn guffawed at the "esthetes...
...Studies of concentration camp communities, e.g., David Rousset's The Other Kingdom, Christopher Burney's The Dungeon Democracy, have revealed that, far from solidifying under pressure, inmates of terror camps cut each other's throats on the slightest pretext...
...The human mind and body can only take so much punishment...
...1 * * * ' COMPOSED OF EXTRACTS from his books that are out pf print and from articles that appeared in such publications as the Smart Set, the .American Mercury, and the Baltimore Evening Sun, along with a few previously unpublished notes, the Chrestomathy brings a whiff of faroff yesterdays...
...Beading again these pieces, many of which I first came upon a quarter of a century ago, 1 have tried to go behind that style and discover the man—a task made easier by the author's frank opening statement and by the grouping of his excerpts under such headings as Religion, Morals, Government, Democracy, Economics, Literature and Literati, Science, Music, the Lesser Arts, and Women...
...Reviewed by SAMUEL PUTNAM IT WOULD HARDLY BE AN EXAGGERATION to say that H. L. Mencken is the narffe* rto't of a man but of an era...
...In one of Hitchcock's horror films there is a sequence in which a man suddenly discovers that every man in a roomful of people is his enemy...
...And he is dead or forgotten only in the sense that he is no longer the idol of the perennial and incurable sophomore in and out of college who once went about quoting the Sage of Baltimore to justify his own asininities...
...To the Poles the Jews were enemies because they were Jews...
...Particularly was this true of the anti-Zionist Bund, which fought for the recognition of the Jewish community in Polish society, rather than for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine...
...In the nature of things, it could not have been otherwise...
...but that would be to overlook the fact that there are two distinct though by no means incompatible Menckens...
...Goldstein, though a spokesman for the Bund, has convinced me for the first time of the validity of Zionism...
...for even had his Chrestomathi/ gone uncompiled, both the literary and the social historian...
...The Stars Bear Witness is, in short, a study in moral courage...
...3.50...
...Look at the doings on Capitol Hill right now with respect to last fall's campaign promises and the expressed will of the people, and you will see what he means...
...Only those who had firm commitments to their ideals—Zionism, socialism or religion —succeeded in maintaining their integrity...
...One is the scholarly ^author of The American Language, whose fame and standing as a philologist are constantly increasing...
...It is a traumatic experience which can be read as a chronicle of Jewish heroism, but such an interpretation misses the real meaning...
...By Bernard Goldstein...
...It is beautifully written—a feat for which I suspect the translator, Leonard Shatzkin, should be given considerable credit...
...The essence of that view is a belief in the supreme worth of the superior individual as against the herd...
...Was he at last trying to make some sense out of the gigantic ami sublime nonsense he beheld about him'' It is significant that Mencken founded no school, started no literary uend outside that of the short-lived debunkers, had no imitators or disciples worth noticing by subsequent generations...
...ONE OF THE PROFOUNDLY SAD aspects of The Stars Bear Witness is the lack of unity in the Jewish community itself which Goldstein describes...
...The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone—one -which barely escapes being no government at all...
...I have said something about a note of pathos...
...L M John P. Roche is Instructor hi Political Science...
...304 pp...
...THE CHIEF IMPRESSION I derive is of a greater, more solid substance than many of us (I blush to confess it) had thought was there...
...The same thing happened in Warsaw...
...To the Nazis the Jews were enemies because they were "Bolsheviks," Jews, and Poles...
...Mencken's bark is sometimes worse than his bite...
...The other is tlje Great Iconoclast, the slayer of "yokels," "pundits," and the "booboisie," who attained the peak of his influence at the .turn of the 1920's and dominated theft gaudy decade to the time they started jumping out of windows in Wall Street...
...Haverford College, and a specialist in comparative government and political thought...
...Those appeared to be the alternatives: catch the next boat for Europe...
...In France, Dadaists and Surrealists were holding forth much as the Existentialists are today...
...JKpyjd...
...German Jews snubbed Polish Jew*s, Czech Jews despised German Jews, and some even descended so low as to work for the" Gestapo in the hope of saving their skins...
...How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat...
...Bravery of the Idealist THE STARS BEAR WITNESS...
...Heroism has become a cheap commodity...
...This, however, is far from being the whole picture...
...Turn then to the section on Government: "All govrenment in its essence is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one perruanent object is to oppress him and cripple him...
...Twenty-five years ago Mencken impressed' me as being an "aristocratic anarchist...
Vol. 32 • August 1949 • No. 33
