Word: angoff
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...BITTER SPRING (730 pp.)-Charles Angoff-Thomas Yoseloff...
Hell hath no fury like an ex-disciple. Novelist and Editor Charles Angoff was sole editorial assistant to H. L. Mencken from 1925 to 1933. In recent years Russian-born, Harvard-educated Angoff has emerged as Mencken's chief literary assassin. Having fanged his ex-idol non-fictionally in H. L. Mencken: A Portrait from Memory, Angoff releases some fictional venom in The Bitter Spring. Mencken is portrayed as a loud-mouthed vulgarian and an intellectual fraud with but a single saving grace, his love of music...
Listening with every pore open to the gibes and chaffer of the two sophisticates is a green, young editorial hand, David Polonsky (obviously Angoff), a breathless and bewildered Boswell already a trifle disillusioned in his Johnson. Polonsky's trouble seems to be that he has come to the American World seeking a 20th century messiah and found only a man with a man's common frailties. Nonetheless, Mencken, as the villainous Brandt, commandeers The Bitter Spring and breathes into it the only life it has. While much of Brandt's talk is unfit for print, it alone...