Word: menckenisms
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Though Edgar Kemler's title would imply that his new book is a biography of H. L. Mencken, it is more accurately described in a notation on the dust jacket: "An Informal History of the Man and His Era." A genuine biography of the 'Sage of Baltimore' would be a good idea (and a part of one can be found in Mencken's autobiographical books: "Happy Days," "Newspaper Days," and "Heathen Days") but what Mr. Kemler was written is only a chronicle of the era in which his protagonist made his biggest splash in the backwaters of American culture...
...reporting is purely external, being drawn mostly from Mencken's hundreds of bound volumes of press-clippings and his published writings. I, as one, would like to know why a man so intelligent and civilized as Mencken would aggressively support the Germans in the early part of both World Wars; would call Bernard Shaw, his model for iconoclasm, "a great windbag full of platitudes"; would accept the starvation-deaths during the Depression as "salutary." All of these things reveal a side of Mencken's character which could certainly bear exploring, and are certainly more interesting than such revelations as "between...
...Mencken's life-long devotion to hurling billingsgate at the 'Puritan boobs' won him many a loyal follower, particularly among the intellectually self-sciousness of America . . . realizing the grossness of its manners and its mind, and been dismally primitive. To Edmund Wilson, Mencken was, "the civilized consciousness of America . . . realzing the grossness of its manners and its mind, crying out in horror and chagrin . . ." His battles with the censors, one of which caused him to invade Boston and which also caused Felix Caragianes, the Square newsdealer, to be arrested for selling Mencken's "Mercury," are no less admirable today than...
...where Diamond Jim Brady went for bearnaise sauce, Enrico Caruso for pigs' knuckles and John Philip Sousa for imported frankfurters, was sold by Proprietor Victor Eckstein (an heir of Founder August Luchow) for about $500,000. Although the restaurant will carry on under new management, Oldtimer H. L. Mencken mourned: "It's the end of civilization...
...Mencken has been a prodigious workman with a fine regard for the craft of writing. Even the "professors" he loved to pummel had to cheer his massive, scholarly and readable American Language as the best thing of its kind. At another extreme, his autobiographical books (Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days) are among the most engaging of any in U.S. writing. During the past decade his writings and utterances have tended toward peevish and irresponsible flailings of men and politics. But he has seldom hit below the belt and has never used the stab in the back. Whatever his justifications...