THE VINTAGE MENCKEN - AN INTRODUCTION TO H. L. MENCKEN BY Attstair
Cootp This book was put together in a period which, in spite of the
anxious humility forced on us by the atom and hydrogen bombs, has
much in common with the 1920 1 that Mencken came to immortalize and
to deflate. Since his day there are slicker types of demagogues in
politics and new schools of necromancy in advertising, show
business, industry, psychiatry, and public rela tions, to go no
further. Following their antics in these later days as a newspaper
reporter, I have often thought that Mencken should be living and
writing at this hour So this volume is meant incidentally to recall
to die tamed radicals who cut their intellectual teeth on him what
manner of man he was but mainly to introduce to a generation that
never read him a writer who more and more strikes me as the master
craftsman of daily journalism in the twentieth century. He has
written nothing since his stroke in 1948, and it is surely no se
cret that he ceased to be a missionary force long before ALISTAIB
COOKE then. To be precise, it was the Roosevelt era that brought
him to the mat. At first glance, the New Deal might appear to offer
just the sort of target he loved a big popular idol, an idealist in
the Wilsonian tradition who was yet undis mayed by the shifts and
audacities necessary to get his own way moreover, a liberal with
the further stigma of having gone back on a patrician upbringing
for the peoples sake. But as a matter of record the New Deal was
Menckens Waterloo, and Roosevelt his Wellington. To jeer at
democratic government when it paid off in filet mignon and a car in
every garage was one thing. To pipe the same tune in the unfunny
daysof I2-000,000 unemployed was another. Menckens thunder issued
from an immaterial mind, but also from a full stomach. In the
thirties it impressed only those who feared die hungrier chorus of
die breadlines. It was al ways plain that Mencken had a clear eye
for the reali ties that conceived the Roosevelt period. He saw that
the way ahead for America lay between no such simple choices as he
had laid down between the aristocrat the first-rate man speaking
his mind and the boo boisie that had no mind to speak. But this
thesis was his specialty, and in a vulgar time it had made him fa
mous. He naturally came to hate the man and the shift of history
that made it an anachronism. The decline of his prestige was very
swift, and he was honest enough to recognize it. In the middle 1930
5 he all but aban doned the preoccupation of his palmy days, his
self chosen trade as a critic of ideas. He turned to his old hobby
of the American language, rewrote once again the original volume
and, to clinch his reputation if it was ever in doubt as the
classical authority on the English of the United States, put out in
the next ten years two magnificent Supplements to the parent work.
As he moved into his sixties he amused himself by put ting on paper
a few recollections of his childhood in Baltimore. These fugitive
magazine pieces blossomed ri An Introduction to H. L. Mencken into
a three-volume autobiography, completed by the end of 1943. After
the war he concerned himself almost wholly with his notes on the
language, but he roused himself in 1948 to cover the presidential
nominating conventions. In the fall of that year he came down with
a cerebral thrombosis...
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