Word: menckenisms
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...MENCKEN ON MUSIC (222 pp.)-A selection by Louis Cheslock-Knopf...
LETTERS OF H. L. MENCKEN (506 pp.)-Selected and annotated by Guy J. Forgue-Knopf...
...whisky tenor is unmistakable. To the late H. L. Mencken, iconoclastic polemic was the choicer part of criticism. His aim was to high-browbeat "the populace" with a club: to fight American Gothic, Mencken became the great American Goth. All of this, and more, is made pleasantly apparent in two excellent Mencken samplers, in which he plays at two of his favorite roles-music critic and man-of-letters...
Awed Wobbler. His interest in music started early (piano) and continued through the rest of Mencken's life; once a week he played with the Saturday Night Club, a group of Baltimore amateurs and professionals who met to drink beer and wobble through everything from Funiculi, Funiculo to the Brahms Second Symphony. Mencken's writings on music, which appeared in his newspaper columns and in the two magazines he edited (Smart Set and American Mercury), show neither the musical erudition of Britain's Ernest Newman nor the impeccable taste of that other musical iconoclast, George Bernard Shaw...
Revealing List. Mencken strikes the same strident tone in the 400 letters culled by Editor Forgue from his massive correspondence of 15,000. "Of my inventions," he once wrote, "I am vainest of Bible Belt, booboisie, smuthound and Boobus americanus." The list is revealing. It bears the date and the outdatedness of the '20s, along with such storied fossils as bathtub gin, the Black Bottom and the Stutz Bearcat. The fate of a successful iconoclast is to be buried with the icons he smashed...