Barbs and Blasts
McCann, William
Barbs and Blasts The American Scene, a reader, by H. L. Mencken. Edited by Huntington Cairns. Knopf. 542 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by William McCann "TI/Tr. Mencken has no heart," Pro-fessor Stuart...
...It is like an electric current...
...Nobody even advises him...
...So are the excellent essays o'n Theodore Dreiser, Thorstein Veblen, James Fenimore Cooper, Ambrose Bierce, and James Gibbon Hun-eker...
...Nobody owns him...
...He did so deliberately and with enormous gusto...
...But neither was he a lover of plutocracy and dictatorship...
...A hearty slating always does me good," he said, "particularly if it is well written...
...I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency...
...The blasts were delightful...
...From 1905 to 1945, Mencken irradiated American life and letters with the splendid glow of his high-octane prose...
...Included too are "The Sahara of the Bozart," "In Memoriam: W.J.B.," and excerpts from The American Language...
...In The American Scene, Huntington Cairns has put together, with an admirable introduction, several dozen of Mencken's best pieces...
...He once wrote, "It is a little inaccurate to say that I hate everything...
...An inveterate foe of unwarranted pretension, Mencken often indulged in what Irving Babbitt rather admiringly described as "superior intellectual vaudeville...
...Add to these a swatch of letters, some autobiographical bits, and numerous assorted oddments, and you have a casserole for a connoisseur...
...Joseph Conrad said he found Mencken's "vigor . . . astonishing...
...All the way through your book," Dreiser wrote his friend, "I am compelled to note how unlike Henry Wadsworth Longfellow you are...
...Nobody bosses him...
...And James T. Farrell probably is not the only man around these days who wishes Mencken were here to battle the current crop of clods, frauds, and literate barbarians...
...Mencken, alas, was no lover of democracy...
...The amiable emptiness and handshaking hokum of politicians, the pretentious posturings of the literati, the sodden inanities of professors, the elaborate idiocies of publicists—none was safe from this lethal flame thrower...
...H. L. Mencken could take criticism as well as dish it out...
...Editor Cairns aptly describes Mencken's criticism as "the recoil of an extraordinarily well-stocked mind of acute discernment, tempered by an unmatched humor and quickened by an urge to do execution upon the counterfeit...
...On Being an American" is here, of course, and "The National Letters...
...He was, to borrow Horace Gregory's phrase, an "aristocratic libertarian...
...Mencken has no heart," Pro-fessor Stuart Sherman fumed, "and if he ever had a palate he has lost it in protracted orgies of literary strong drink . . . His appetite craves a fierce stimulation, a flamboyance and glitter of cheeses, the sophisticated and appalling ripeness of wild duck nine days old...
...Right or wrong, he has stood on his own bottom, firmly and resolutely, since the day he was first heard of in politics, battling for his ideas in good weather and bad, facing great odds gladly, going against his followers as well as with his followers, taking his own line always and sticking to it with superb courage and resolution...
...a sense of enormous hidden power . . . Who could quarrel with such generosity, such vibrating sympathy, and with a mind so intensely alive...
...A humorist by instinct and an ingenious craftsman, he blasted away merrily at all varieties of pomposity and bogus respectability...
...There is no ring in his nose...
...I think you may agree, after reading this engaging book, that Conrad did not hear more music than the band played...
...I shall vote for him unhesitatingly, and for a plain reason: he is the best man in the running, as a man...
...Hear him, for instance, on the 1924 Presidential race: "There remains, then, the Wisconsin Red [Robert M. LaFollette, Sr.], with his pockets stuffed with Soviet gold...
...He so much relished the fulminations of hostile editorial writers ("a dilated brain impregnated with ego, indigo, and gangrene") and of academicians like Stuart Sherman that he compiled an amusing book of the vituperation they lavished on him...
Vol. 29 • July 1965 • No. 7
