Word: menckenisms
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What the Mercury will be like under its new editor not even Publisher Knopf- who said only that the magazine would be conducted along "the same general lines" -knew last week. Grave, workmanlike, austere where Mencken was clownish, inspired, blatant. Editor Hazlitt started his career on the Wall Street Journal, was a financial writer for the New York Evening Post and then the Mail before he became literary editor of the Sun in 1925. He resigned in 1929 to join The Nation. Last month he published The Anatomy of Criticism. Essayist William Hazlitt was his great-great-great uncle...
Henry Louis Mencken, having been divorced from the finances of the American Mercury last-year, now announces his resignation from its editorship. No one will blame him for his unwillingness to be the last seaman on board a vessel which is patently enreefed, but many will be sorry that the Mercury has come to be such a vessel. Its function, basting the prosperous and needling the Rotarian, is outlived in time when Rotarians are impecunious and craven and the imbecilities of their heyday clotured by depression. The protuberances which the Mercury swatted have largely sunk back into the primeval slime...
...Cornhill Magazine had its day, and the Yellow Book, and the Little Review; with tear in eye one will soon add the American Mercury to the list of extinguished balls of fire. The October issue contains only two contributions from Mr. Mencken; rumor bath it that he has withdrawn from its financial camorra, and the assumption is that a man's purse liea nearest his heart. Yet without even a Mencken editorial the magazine manages to decline gracefully. To the college student an article by one E. H. Orr on "The Impossibility of Education" is the piece do resistance...
...delicacy of the issue is Mr. Mencken's thin contribution. By a series of magnificent obiter dicta he manages to make reviews of works by Messer Herbert Agar and Will Durant pinch-hit for his missing editorials. The first of these reveals in a few well-chosen words the editor's reaction to N. R. A. and all that; the second says a few words on the Slav Utopia (Mencken's phrase for Red Russia) which should be prescribed reading to every member of the Harvard Socialist-Liberal-Club-Students'-League Knights-of-the-White-Kamelia organization. Further than this...
...master of one environment, and within his peculiar limitations a deep and a sincere artist. Much nonsense, of course, has been talked about the bitter smile under the painted grin he wore, and many of the critical faculty could never restrain a condescending note when they spoke, in Mr. Mencken's phrase, of the golden heart that beat beneath the motley. So long as our illuminate gently pat the heads of direct, self possessed, and mature artists and curl their lips at homespun, so long must we be judged in the world as a literary cocktail compounded of six parts...