Word: menckenisms
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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HEATHEN DAYS 1890-1936 - H. L Mencken-Knopf...
Henry Louis Mencken admits that "the resurrection men" have had him in their "animal house"-his way of saying that he has been in the hospital. Illness has not prevented the Baltimore sage, who believes that beer is very close to the meaning of life, from drawing off a third foaming, savory volume of reminiscences.* As much as he loves beer Mencken loves "competence ... in any art or craft from adultery to zoology." This book is further testimony to his own competence as the nation's comical, warm-spirited, outstanding village atheist. He still stands ready to convulse, while...
...named Hoggie Unglebower, a juvenile gang leader in West Baltimore. Hoggie was no Lothario, "he was actually almost a Trappist in his glandular life," but he was a master at killing rats and murdering cats. Hoggie fell from his pedestal the awful day his glands began to function, and Mencken transferred his loyalty to an instructive Shetland pony called Frank...
Frank taught Mencken how to bite enemies in what Mencken calls the "caboose." Then Frank nearly blew up after trying to eat ten bushels of oats, and young Mencken joined the Y.M.C.A. There he learned to distrust "Christian endeavor in all its forms" and moved hastily on to Baltimore Polytechnic. The Polytechnic taught him 1) that philanthropy was "a purely imaginary quantity, like demi-virginity or one glass of beer," and 2) that the eager curiosity of growing boys was not to be satisfied by anatomy classes in which "all the abdomen south of the umbilicus was represented...
Here is a truly extraordinary book, a one-man five-ring verbal circus, a phantasmagoria of wit, satire, irony, invective, diatribe, rhetoric, and pulpit oratory. The style is variously compounded of elements from Sterne, Carlyle, Swift, H. L. Mencken, and the book of Jeremiah. Yet, appearing now at a time of national introspection and moral house-cleaning, it should be a valuable book, entirely aside from its qualities as pure entertainment. Wylie claims to have been breathing the same brand of fire for the last twenty or so years, predicting the future importance of bombing and the black-hearted intentions...