MENCKEN'S TARGET
McCann, William
Mencken's Target Letters of H. L. Mencken, selected, and annotated by Guy J. Forgue. With a personal note by Hamilton Owen. Knopf. 506 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by William McCann For forty years H. L....
...In this fine volume, editor Guy J. Forgue has selected from 15,000 Mencken letters now held in public libraries and private collections the best of "the literary letters, along with a number of others that best express his personality and give the most vivid anil lifelike picture of the man and his literary activities...
...Otr all known subjects, ranging from aviation to xylophone playing, 1 have fixed and invariable ideas...
...In August, 1943, he wrote, to Harry Elmer Barnes, "The Progressive brethren sent me copies of the magazine, and I have been going through them with great pleasure...
...But Mencken was, perhaps primarily, a literary man, who for many years turned out, with astonishing gusto, an unbroken flood of newspaper columns, essays, and books...
...Here are his letters to Theodore Dreiser, Ellcry Sedgwick, Joseph Hergesheimer, [ames Joyce, Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, James T. Farrell, Ezra Pound, and numerous other authors of the past half-century...
...He was a great letter writer...
...Many of us got letters from Mencken," said Sherwood Anderson...
...There is no doubt that he took wicked delight in watching the political scene and in blistering the follies and knavery of politicians...
...For Smart Set (December, 1921) he penned his own epitaph: "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl...
...And he was essentially a friendly and humane person...
...The newspapers have simply abrogated their proper function...
...Swinburne was a heavy and very hoggish drinker, and had a great liking for waitresses," Mencken wrote...
...In my twenties t was gay, and also in my thirties, but since the age of forty I have been full of a sense of human sorrow...
...The sense has frequently taken the virulence of an actual bellyache...
...But these fine fellows are razor blades bravely trying to do the work of an ax...
...Mencken sometimes insisted he was more of a politician than a literary critic...
...These letters are luminous with the literary and journalistic glow of the period from 1910 to 1940...
...Reviewed by William McCann For forty years H. L. Mencken blasted away with his seven-shot, beer-cooled typewriter at blockheads, blatherskites, and bogus bananas in American literature and politics...
...Mencken on Mencken: "The plain truth is that I am not a fair man, and don't want to hear both sides...
...It is impossible to read these letters, it seems to me, and come to any other conclusion...
...In aiming, the old boy occasionally mistook a real wart on his nose for an imaginary mountebank in a bush, but it was a pity when his guns were stilled, first by illness in 1948 and finally by death in 1956, when he was 75...
...As I say, all my work hangs together...
...Today, we combat the foggy nonsense, the vicious cunning, the educated folly that threatens to engulf us all with a John Crosby, or a Milton Mayer, a Walter Lippmann, or a Murray Kempton...
...At that time he must have been in correspondence with all the young writers in the country . . . We got the letters and the letters made us proud...
...Crafty fakers and pious frauds of all sorts reappeared, crawling warily out of their shelters...
...For all his perversity, nihilistic rages, hoaxes, and myopic iconoclasms, Mencken did indeed strike many a blow for "common decency...
...Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx . . . There is no more poetry in the whole published works of Maxwell Bodenheim than you will find in an average college yell...
...This is not to claim that Mencken, superbly armed as he was, could now fend off the enveloping swarms of literate lunatics, but he would have gone down in a blaze of crackling gunfire and would have toppled a ten-acre field of phonies and self-righteous flutter-tuts...
...Without question, they are coming nearer to telling the truth than any other group of American editors...
...Whether it appears to be burlesque, or serious criticism, or mere casual controversy, it is always directed against one thing: unwarranted pretension . . . For a while the show is simply farce, but inevitably every man feels an irresistible impulse to rush out and crack a head—in other words, to do something for common decency...
...They have not changed since I was four or five years old...
Vol. 26 • February 1962 • No. 2
