Word: reade
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...person who has never read a Wylie book, "Opus 21" is a good buy, though even then it might be better to dig back to some of his earlier, fresher polemics. The veteran Wylie fan had better stick to memories...
...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...
...going well, he is unbeatable. He writes about Judd gray, the co-murderer, with Ruth Snyder, in a famously atrocious crime of the Twenties, with really extraordinary perception. He has a piece called "The Critical Process" which is the most illuminating discussion of criticism I have ever read. And he writes about Beethoven's Third Symphony with such excitement that if you can read music, you will be impelled to hunt up a score of the "Eroica" and see for yourself what he is taking about. Nobody else for Bernard Shaw, has written of music with such vitality...
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...
Then he introduces a bunch of whores, an atomic scientist, and a lot of other people who will appeal to the folks who read the Saturday Evening Post (and might buy "Opus 21" if properly titillated), and pushes them briskly into conversation with the book's central character, name of Phillip Wylie. Character Wylie takes these chances to deliver Author Wylie's party line, with considerable display of gusto, and the general attitude of a prophet...