Strangely, Lawrence, you and I, embarked on a similar task, have come to a
similar place. I, too, am rooting around in dusty, old books (well, maybe
yours weren't dusty), trying to clear space and weight and history. And I,
too, have landed on H. L. Mencken's Prejudices, although my volume is an old
(1958) Vintage paperback selected down from the original six volumes by James
T. Farrell. I haven't actually dipped into it, but I did read the back cover
this morning, wherein (whereon?) I came upon the following: "We are never
without buncombe in the world..." I'm familiar with the word 'bunkum,' but
had never seen it spelled that way. Wikipedia provided a charming context and
history of the word. I will put the book back on the shelf.
Ursula,
dusting and weeding the
206 feet of books
just in her living room.
On Aug 16, 2016, at 3:26 PM, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
My son who is taking responsibility for moving me to Idaho next April has
been on me about getting rid of books. He hates moving boxes of books, and
in truth I have had a great number that in all honesty I'll either never read
again or never read in the first place. In addition I have copies of the New
York Review of Books almost all the way back to the beginning. I've also
been saving copies of the London Review of Books for several years. So for
the better part of a week I've been going through old copies of the NYROB the
LROB and as it turns out getting rid of few copies but finding a great number
of books that may be just the thing to read on Sandpoint's cold winter nights
or days when we're snowed in. Just this morning I ordered the two volume
(1,200 page) Library of America edition of Prejudices by H. L. Mencken.
Mencken for any one two young to have read him, lived from September 12, 1880
to January 29, 1956.
The reviewer (from the 11-11-10 issue of the NYROB), Russell Baker, at one
point touches on something (at least that is what it seems to me) we
discussed not so long ago about thinking (or not thinking) in words. "He had
always written, he said, simply to find out what he was thinking.
Those who assumed that he had 'some deep-lying reformatory purpose' were
wrong: 'My one purpose in writing I have explained over and over again: it
is simply to provide a kind of katharsis for my own thoughts. They worry me
until they are set forth in words. This may be a kind of insanity, but at
all events it is free of moral purpose. I am never much interested in the
effects of what I write."
Russell like most in the aforementioned discussion) finds it "hard to believe
that the young Mencken who seemed capable of doing anything he wanted to, and
exulted in the fun and mischief of it, wrote that carefully phrased and
painstakingly self-edited prose merely to discover what he had in mind."
I on the other hand find no difficulty in Mencken's process. While he
doesn't admit to 'thinking in words,' his process is very like my own process
for writing poetry. I don't have a full-blown poem in mind, just the inkling
of one and need to begin writing both to get the worrying (which is as good a
description as any) resolved and to write the poem itself, if there is one.
Now as to the editing, I don't see why that troubles Russell. The writing
isn't there complete in Mencken's mind. He has to think in words (I believe)
as he writes and some revision may (will) be in order before he's done. In
my own case I "usually" go back over a poem and think about the individual
words. In a recent poem "The In and the Out of it" Mike Geary discovered a
word that didn't ring true. I read his objection late at night and admitted
the word made no sense to me, but the next morning it did. It did describe
what I wanted to write but it wasn't the best word for the job, and it wasn't
just the word. I rephrased the area of the poem a bit. Something like that
would have gone on with Mencken's writing and wouldn't have all contradicted
what he wrote about his worrying.
Not to leave this note on that issue, and though the original volumes sold in
2010 for $35, one can buy them used for much less than that on Amazon, here
is Russell's inkling of what to expect in Prejudices: "Of the presidents who
held office int he early 1900s, only Theodore Roosevelt seems to have puzzled
him. He obviously viewed Harding and Coolidge as small-bore political hacks
not worth full-force assaults. Woodrow Wilson, however, was special. Wilson
he simply hated.
"'Wilson: the self-bamboozled Presbyterian, the right-thinker, the great
moral statesman, the perfect model of a Christian cad,' he called him. To
Mencken, Wilson was a cold and treacherous moralizer, a sponsor of laws under
which people were imprisoned for dissenting against American participation in
World War I. Wilson had won reelection in 1916 with a boast that he had kept
the country out of war and, once the election was won, expeditiously took it
into the war in alliance with England and France. Mencken, a grandson of
German immigrants, detested England and detested Wilson for taking the
country into the war on England's side. Why the United states was in the
war on any side is not entirely clear even now; indeed, historians often have
trouble explaining what the war itself was about.
"Mencken's interest in Theodore Roosevelt may have been rooted in aspects of
the Roosevelt character that suggested a minor-league Kaiser. The America of
Roosevelt's dreams 'was always a sort of swollen Prussia, truculent without
regimented within.' Even his manner betrayed a touch of Kaiser-envy 'There
was always the clank of the saber in his discourse; he could not discuss the
tamest matter without swaggering in the best dragoon fashion,' Mencken wrote.
"He cited several other characteristics that Roosevelt and the Kaiser had in
common: 'both dreamed of gigantic navies,' believed in keeping potential
enemies intimidated by heavy armament, and constantly preached the citizen's
duty to the state but soft-pedaled the state's duty to the citizen." [One
wonders what Mencken would have thought of John F. Kennedy's 1961 speech
which included "ask not what you country can do for you, ask what you can do
for your country."]
"'Both delighted in the armed pursuit of the lower fauna. Both heavily
patronized the fine arts. Both were intimates of God and announced His
desires with authority.' The Kaiser was probably the milder and more modest
of the two, Mencken said. In his training for exalted position he had
cultivated 'a certain ingratiating suavity,' and so could be 'extremely
polite to an opponent,' whereas Roosevelt, Mencken wrote, 'was never polite.'
'One always thinks of him as a glorified longshoreman engaged eternally in
cleaning out bar-rooms -- and not too proud to gouge when the inspiration
came to him, or to bite in the clinches, or to oppose the relatively fragile
brass knuckles of the code with chair-legs, bung-starters, cuspidors,
demijohns, and ice picks.'"
Lawrence
