Word: angoff
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...MENCKEN: A PORTRAIT FROM MEMORY (240 pp.)-Charles Angoff-Thomas Yoseloff...
...Angoff, do you mean to tell me that they didn't teach you the fine points of wines and whiskeys at Harvard?' " 'No, I'm afraid they didn't,' I would say, prepared for what was to come, for we went through this ritual numberless times...
...Then, Professor Angoff, you have something to learn. By the time you get around to getting your second upper plate of teeth, the way I am now, you will learn that people who don't like to drink can't write . . . Never trust a man who doesn't feel better when he's tanked up . . . But,' he spat in the spittoon, and his face became serious ... 'I have no use for anybody who neglects his work for drink ing or for women. Work comes first. All the time. Drinking, like lovemaking...
Hickest of the Hick. During the day, as Author Charles Angoff makes clear in a book that is really a nonstop conversation piece, Mencken's vice was word-intoxication. Profane, scatological and childishly bigoted, Mencken uttered a good many words that probably belonged in the spit toon, but they lodged vividly in the memory of Russian-born, Harvard-educated Charles Angoff. Critic, Novelist and Edi tor Angoff has a legitimate claim to know Mencken well-from 1925 to 1933 he was Mencken's sole editorial associate on the Mercury. But this will only partly help the reader...
Beyond sauerkraut and Blutwurst and good German beer, Angoff suggests, Mencken thrived on prejudices. His private league of nations included the American "boobeoisie," the "bloody English," the "stinking frogs," the "dirty wops" and the "Irish monkeys." New Hampshire and Vermont were "the varicose veins of New England," and New York was "a sewer, a cesspool, a garbage can . . . the hickest of all hick towns." Of U.S. Presidents, there was "no viler oaf" than Woodrow Wilson. "You know what I think of Hoover. Turn him upside down, and he looks the same." As for the Roosevelts, Teddy "had the manners...