Word: menckenism
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...MENCKEN CHRESTOMATHY (627 pp.) -H. L. Mencken-Knopf...
...nearly half a century many a U.S. citizen has devoutly wished that Henry Louis Mencken would shut up. In all that time, he has been hushed only twice. From 1917 to 1919, the blocky bad man of U.S. letters refused to write under wartime censorship. Then, last November, a severe stroke (cerebral hemorrhage) left the 68-year-old gadfly partially paralyzed and stilled his buzzing. But not entirely. Even as he was brought to a halt, his latest book was in the printer's hands. It will remind old readers and explain to many...
...Victorian belles stabbing a masher with hatpins. Intellectuals, Easterners and British writers, many of whom have lived happily in its sunshine for decades, snarl at its lack of culture, its brashness, its frenzied architecture. Aldous Huxley called it the "city of Dreadful Joy [where] conversation is unknown." H. L. Mencken handed down a one-word verdict: "Moronia...
...cannot read very far into this big generous selection without relishing that it is a cardinal sin to take Mencken very seriously. Mencken does not take himself seriously, and he is always dismayed when his readers overdo the business. "One horse laugh," he says, "is worth ten thousand syllogisms," and he proceeds to provide many move horse-laughs than examples of neat, careful, judicious, and thorough thinking. I repeat that this is a matter of doctrine, not of accident. Speaking of great critics, he says that "they could make the thing charming, and that is always a million times more...
More than anything else, it is this vitality that makes Mencken always worth reading. He considers himself an eminently civilized man, and perhaps he is, but in the process of becoming one, through an education self-administered chiefly in Baltimore's public library, he did not at the same time become refined. He gives free reign to his impulses and to his notions; he does not bother to qualify, to mitigate, to water-down. Consequently he writes with a vigor which approaches what those of us with more refined sensibilities might call bombast, but which is preferable a hundred times...