BOOKS

Mencken -

brawler in

literary market place

N H. L. Mencken died
the other day a generation
of us mourned the man from
Baltimore. Men of my years,”
children of this century, will

“remember him nostalgically,

mainly because he hated many
of the things we hated, or which
he taught many of us to hate.
For he was a great hater.

He despised cant and ignor-
ance, and war. Asked how he
could best serve in the First
World War, he replied, char-
acteristically, “As a critic.”

He abhorred bad literature
and he went. down into the

.arena to fight for a better. He
‘gagged at the saccharine of Rob-

ert W. Chambers, Harold Bell
Wright and Gene Stratton Por-
ter when writers like Sinclair
Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Sher-
wood. Anderson were knocking
on the door. He fought as much
as any man in his day to get
them inside, and when this man
fought, he fought.

There are probably few fight-
ers in American letters, at least

‘in our time, who laid to ‘with
. the gusto of this son-of a Bal-
timore cigar-maker..He fought

in the literary market-place
like a street brawler, asking
for no mercy and he gave none.:

’ “A consérvative in politics -all
his days he did ‘not quail when

his taste and his intelligence
told him that William Z: Foster
“was the best writer on labor
“of his time. He said it publicly,

and it was not fashionable to
say it. _ ;

Something that he wrote might
well be an epitaph of his life
{though it -is not his whole
story): “All I know is,” he said,
“it is better to tell the truth
than to lie, better to be free
than a slave, better to have
-knowledge than to be ignorant.”
Say that about him and you
have the best of the man. But,
regrettably, that was not all he
was: 3 :

ts “ Bes tt
- It is commonly said that a
man who loves well must hate -
well. The quality of love was
not pre-eminent in this fierce

»

satirist. He was a complex man
in whom contradictory currents
swirled.

He did not love the common
man for he believed that most
of mankind, like the American
middle-class that he lampooned,
belonged generally to the specie
“boobus Americanus.” The fact

* is that the conditions of his life _

never led him to associate with
the folk of labor, and he: never
understood them.

Mencken came out of a mid-
dle-class Baltimore family of
German origin. Quiet, studious,
stand-offish, he stood at the
head of his high school class, a
lad of obvious talent. He did
not go to college, but instead,
he dived into the newspaper
game at 19. i

By 23 he was the city editor
of the Baltimore Herald. In
1906 he went to the Baltimore
Sun where he stayed a great
part of his life and where his
literary career began.

In the hours between dead-
lines he discovered George Ber-
nard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, and

other masters of the late 19th -

Century. ;
In his early twenties the “Boy
Editor” wielded his sharp lance
for writers like Theodore Drei-
ser who had incurred the fierce
wrath of the blue-nose critics

.of. the day. J

He defended Dreiser’s. right
to have written Sister Carrie
and he fought for the realist’s
place in American letters and
for the public’s right to read the
banned book. He waged that
fight all his years. In fact he
wrote the introduction to Dreis-
er’s American Tragedy publish-
ed in the middle twenties.

And Dreiser’s recollection of
Mencken is vivid, and affec-

. tionate:

’He- recalled Mencken. as a
“taut; ruddy, snub-nosed youth

. whose brisk gait and in-
gratiating smile proved to be

_at once enormously intriguing

and amusing. I had for some
reason not connected with his
basic mentality, you may be

Shevchenko concert this Sunday

+74

Ukrainian Canadians in the lower mainland will commorate the anniversary of the Bard of

the Ukraine, Taras Shevchenko, poet and artist,

with their annual Shevchenko concert, to be held at

Hastings Odean Theatre this Sunday, March 18.The painting shown above, Taras Shevchenko among

the Kazakhs, is the work of two Soviet artists,

sure, the sense of a small-town
roisterer or a college sophomore
of the crudest yet disturbing
charm and impishness who, for
some reason, strayed into the
field of letters.”

bes 503 it

Mencken came to full flower
(with an abundance of thorns)
in the twenties when the first
issue of the Mercury appeared,
January 1924.

The green-backed magazine

became a bible to the college
youth. It was irreverent to-
ward Philistine and Pharisee
alike (and also toward Laza-
rus); it lambasted the Budditts
of the time from hell to break-
fast; it flailed out, against the
literary and social shibboleths
of the time and did so with a
gusto and a flair that made it
a thing of delight for thousands
of the discontented young of
the middle-class. Many in the
land exulted in a publication
that would not sing hallelujahs
to the age of Harding, Coolidge

MPORTANT letters throw-

ing new light on the life of
Karl Marx and events of the
19th centry have been
made available. to Labor
“Monthly by an Italian pro-
fessor.

_ There are 26 letters — nine
written in German by Marx’s
wife and 17 in English (and
one in French) by his ‘eldest
daughter Jennie — and pub-
lication. of them will begin
in tha journal shortly. ;
‘'. The: March issue. of. Labor
Monthly..contains a note on
discovery of the letters as
well as excerpts from them
dealing with the years 1870
and 1871 referring to the
Paris Commune. Bikes
The note says that the let-

ters came by “good luck” in-
to the hands of the G. G.
Feltrinelli Library, Milan.
They were translated into
- Italian and edited with copi-
ous notes by Professor Giu-
seppe Del Bo. ee

Copies of all the original
letters have now been made

*

ae EREREROnIenenenennen

| New Marx letters published.

available to Labor Monthly.
One of the excerpts is from
a letter written by Jennie to

Dr. Ludwig Kugelmann, who
was an intimate friend and
correspondent of Marx. It is
dated April 18, 1871.

Jennie apologises for not
answering his letter earlier
and continues: “However, I
confess I have not had the
energy to write a letter—my
courage has failed me.

“I cannot bear to sit quiet-
ly by, while the bravest and
the best are being massacred ~
at-the command of that fero-
cious clown Thiers (reaction-
ary statesman who brutally
suppressed the Commune),
who notwithstanding his
hordes of trained cut-throats
would never conquer the,un-
disciplined citizens of Paris,
were it not for the helping
hand of his Prussian allies...

“Even the London press,
which true to its honorable
mission, has done its utmost
in calumniating the proletar-
ians of Paris, is now obliged
to admit that men have never
struggled more bravely or.

boldly for a principle.”

and Hoover. .

He went into the highlands
of Tennessee to defend young
Scopes’ right to teach Darwin
and his dispatches from the

- ringside were vitriol. But un-

fortunately he poured it over
the plain folk of Tennessee who
had never a chance to learn
otherwise. He made no dis-
tinction between victim and
master. Nonetheless, in his own
way, he fought for enlighten-
ment, and against ignorance.

He opened the pages of the,
Mercury to new writers, Negro
and white. The work of young
talented writers who loved the
tradition and folk-lore of their
regions could be found here,
near his scorching essays on the
passing scene.

Here we first encountered
writers like Meridel Le Seuer,
Eugene Gordon, here we found
Langston Hughes’ work and
here, Richard O. Boyer, then a
young reporter on the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch won a national
contest among newspapermen.

Many, chafing . under the
tight reins of the time, found
his essays as stimulating as
the bath-tub gin of Prohibition.
For many, like this writer, it
was a short run from the Mer-
cury to the New Masses.

Mencken fanned the flames
of discontent, but he had noth-
ing much more to offer than
the scorched earth of opposi-
tion. He knew how to thunder
his “Nay,” but there were many
in the land who sought the

: hn é hfe

So as the boom of the twen-
ties blew up and the breadlines
laced the nation into a strait-
jacket, a new and younger gen-
eration did not find the Sage
of Baltimore the Solomon that
its predecessors did. The Mer-
cury which in its heyday reach-
ed 90,000 reader dwindled to
30,000 and by 1933 Mencken
resigned from the publication.

; tt xt 50g :

But he had left his mark.

Few could forget his lusty.

style, his punch, his sardonic
gift and his joy in the fight.
All that was to the good.

Yet, though he excoriated
Babbitt and reviled the pro-
vincial, he remained himself, in
much of his political thought,

a Babbitt. He was himself a _

provincial, in the worst sense

MARCH 16, 1956 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAG

N. P. Volkova and Z. V. Volkovinska.

of the word as he meant it to
be. He lived all his life in the
same brick house down on Hol-
lins Street, in Baltimore, suf-
fering from a sort of claustro-
phobia.

He did not roam the earth
as you might have expected
his restless mind would have
demanded, did not go to seé
for himself the vast social up-
heavals and acquaint himself
with the turbulent ideas of the

’ new Europe, the new republic.

founded by workers and. peas-
ants, terms, to him, that were
synonymous with ignorance
and mental sloth.

Similiarly in domestic poli-.

_tics. _He stayed a conservative

all his life, and yet, the con-
tradictions of his nature were
such that he lambasted the im-
prisonment of radicals during
the Palmer Red Raids, saying
wryly that the jailers, were, if
anything, far worse than those
they jailed. The statute books,
he said, were full of laws that
were antiquated in the time of
Empress Maria
Hapsburg Austria.
Yet, in the early thirties, he
lambasted the New Deal, boast-
ed in his way, that he did not
trust democracy. All his life
he sought an intellectual elite.

No, he did not keep pace |

with history. Mentally, as well
as physically, he remained dow?
on Hollins Street. Struck by
paralysis in 1948, he died long .
before he Was dead. Despite
his exciting vigor, his lusty

‘crusading for honesty in. let-

ters, his sponsorship of many
writers of genius and honesty;
he was an American tragedy.
He had no world outlook:
Nietszche influenced him ovet-
much; Marx not at all. He had
no perspective for the future

except, possibly, to believe that

man’s stupidity and cupidity
would bring him to a mercif!
end. ;
And yet there is evidence, 2°
Howard Fast and others indi-
cate, that he may have begu? —
to reassess the life of his times:
But he was too ‘ld, too sick
too much the prisoner of
own eloquent prejudices. :
was perhaps undone by his oW? —
dictum: “I am an amused spec
tator of the world.”

JOSEPH NOE

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