Word: menckenism
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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...
...Cello. Magazine circles were little better. The New Republic was run by "kept idealists," and the Nation was staffed "by men and women who were suffering the change of life." Mencken's high jinks masked low insight, according to Angoff, and Mencken never fully understood even the writers he championed, e.g., Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis. He thought Henry James "was an idiot, and a Boston idiot to boot, than which there is nothing lower in the world, eh?" F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was "poor stuff." Said Mencken of Hemingway...
Music could mellow the caustic Mencken strain. He once moved Angoff by saying, "Schubert knew God, he knew that God, too, was afraid, that God, too, trembled and was in doubt and got angry and regretted and yearned in vain, like you and me and all of us." Though he spouted misogynisms, Mencken was deeply in love with his wife, Sara Haardt, who lived only five years after their 1930 marriage. When she was dying he told a friend, "Women are always waiting . . . women are always waiting for-birth, for kisses, for love, for growing-up, for smiles, for death...
Exit Babbitt. Mencken brought no such intuitive wisdom to economics or international affairs. He tried to laugh off the Depression as an invention of "charity racketeers," and he ignored Hitler as passing nonsense. Soon he and the Mercury were on the skids, and from 1933 until his 1948 stroke, he busied himself mainly with reminiscence (Newspaper Days) and scholarship (supplements to The American Language). Author Angoff skirts his lasting impact. Mencken, who detested democracy, ironically democratized U.S. life and art. He made Babbitt-land so culture-conscious that Babbitt disappeared. He lampooned frauds in high places so lustily that...