Lillie Fortenbaugh

[bronzeage]

goodness, you guys still at this here? *grins*


neither of you seem to be making much headway - like a tug-of-war with no rope

but it's still a spectator sport

I'm just glad I didn't make a nasty crack about the real Byron. No telling what that would have brought.

 

[butters]

I'm just glad I didn't make a nasty crack about the real Byron. No telling what that would have brought.

yes, best you leave Byron's crack out of this and remain behaving in a civilised fashion.

 

[bronzeage]

yes, best you leave Byron's crack out of this and remain behaving in a civilised fashion.

You are just trying to start something.

Shoes that match my belt are as civilized as I get.

 

[butters]

You are just trying to start something.

Shoes that match my belt are as civilized as I get.

I gave up rubbing two sticks together long ago. Now I have central heating - not quite the same thing as a real fire though

 

[bronzeage]

I gave up rubbing two sticks together long ago. Now I have central heating - not quite the same thing as a real fire though

I have central air conditioning. If I need heat, I just open a window.

 

[Sonny Limatina]

I'm just glad I didn't make a nasty crack about the real Byron. No telling what that would have brought.

Bronze, that dude's a pretentious, pseudointellectual fap. And you stepped on his game. He's a little fragile about such things...

 

[bronzeage]

Bronze, that dude's a pretentious, pseudointellectual fap. And you stepped on his game. He's a little fragile about such things...

How can you game with H. L. Mencken? At least Edgar Allen Poe could help with Goth girls, and he was from Baltimore, also.

I can't disagree with your observation. He did seem a little more brittle than I expected, but Mencken can bring that out in a person.

 

[trysail]

I'm a Brit, I also have never heard of him.

seriously. I've never heard of him. Is he a novelist?

He has been called America's George Bernard Shaw. That is an underestimate. During the teens and '20s it is impossible to underestimate his influence on American literature, taste and culture.

His prose style is inimitable and fabulous. As a daily journalist, critic, philologist, author and editor, it is estimated that he wrote 5,000 words a day for forty years. He introduced Nietszche to the English speaking world and wrote a scholarly tome, The American Language, that was a seminal work establishing American English as a separate and distinct form of English. He mentored and advised a large number of successful authors including, but not limited to, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Manchester.

In the first book of his semi-autobiographical trilogy, the 1940 memoir Happy Days he states that his childhood was "the maddest, damndest, gladdest existence ever known to mortal man." He describes his chance encounter of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn at age twelve as, "The most stupendous event of my life."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mencken

Works
George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905)
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1907)
The Artist: A Drama Without Words (1912)
A Book of Burlesques (1916)
A Little Book in C Major (1916)
The Creed of a Novelist (1916)
Pistols for Two (1917)
A Book of Prefaces (1917)
In Defense of Women (1917)
Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918)
The American Language (1919)
Prejudices (1919–27)
First Series (1919)
Second Series (1920)
Third Series (1922)
Fourth Series (1924)
Fifth Series (1926)
Sixth Series (1927)
Selected Prejudices (1927)
The Hills of Zion (1925)
Notes on Democracy (1926)
Libido for the Ugly (1927)
Menckeneana: A Schimpflexikon (ed) (1928)
On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (1920-1936)
Treatise on the Gods (1930)
Making a President (1932)
Treatise on Right and Wrong (1934)
Happy Days, 1880–1892 (1940)
Newspaper Days, 1899–1906 (1941)
Heathen Days, 1890–1936 (1943)
A Mencken Chrestomathy (1948)
Minority Report (1956)
The American Scene (Huntington Cairns, ed) (1965)
The Impossible H. L. Mencken: A Selection Of His Best Newspaper Stories (Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, ed) (1991)
My Life As Author and Editor (Jonathan Yardley, ed) (1992)
A Second Chrestomathy (1994)
A Religious Orgy in Tennessee A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial (2007)

 

[butters]

All that and yet he still managed to live next to the same woman for 50 odd years and never knew anything about her. That's kind of sad, imo.

I don't knock his writing at all. But with all his accomplishments he was still a flawed human being. As are we all. It is the human condition.

 

[trysail]

.....duplicate post

 

[trysail]

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1342/1476371991_058fac35d5.jpg​

"If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."

-H. L. Mencken
A Mencken Chrestomathy
New York, 1949 (Eleventh printing, 1981).


If you've never read Mencken and you want an introduction, Alistair Cooke's The Vintage Mencken is a great place to start. That will inevitably send you on to the fabulous semi-autobiographical trilogy, Happy Days, Newspaper Days and Heathen Days. A Mencken Chrestomathy is another excellent place to start. A further collection that provides a great introduction is A Choice Of Days ( a single volume compendium of the "Days" trilogy).

I am envious of anyone who hasn't yet read Mencken; you have a potentially life-altering treat in prospect.



_______________________________________


"In character creation its masterpiece is the advertising agent who, by devising some new and super-imbecilic boobtrap, puts his hook-and-eye factory 'on the map,' ruins all other factories, marries the daughter of his boss, and so ends as an eminent man...... It is the sort of thing that awakens a response only in men who are essentially unimaginative, timorous and degraded- in brief, in democrats, bagmen, yahoos. The man of reflective habit cannot conceivably take any passionate interest in the conflicts it deals with. He doesn't want to marry the daughter of the owner of the hook-and-eye factory; he would probably burn down the factory itself if it ever came into his hands. What interests this man is the far more poignant and significant conflict between a salient individual and the harsh and meaningless fiats of destiny, the unintelligible mandates and vagaries of god. His hero is not one who yields and wins, but one who resists and fails."

-H. L. Mencken
Prejudices, Second Series. "The National Letters"
New York, 1920


Ahhhh! Mencken!

_________________________________________________

"Has it been duly marked by historians that William Jennings Bryan's last secular act on this globe of sin was to catch flies? A curious detail, and not without its sardonic overtones. He was the most sedulous fly-catcher in American history, and in many ways the most successful. His quarry, of course, was not Musca domestica but Homo neandertalensis. For forty years he tracked it with coo and bellow, up and down the rustic backways of the Republic. Wherever the flambeaux of Chataqua smoked and guttered, and the bilge of idealism ran in the veins, and Baptist pastors dammed the brooks with the sanctified, and men gathered who were weary and heavy laden, and their wives who were full of Peruna and as fecund as the shad (Alosa sapidissima), there the indefatigable Jennings set up his traps and spread his bait. He knew every country town in the South and West, and he could crowd the most remote of them to suffocation by simply winding his horn. The city proletariat, transiently flustered by him in 1896, quickly penetrated his buncombe and would have no more of him; the cockney gallery jeered him at every Democratic national convention for twenty-five years. But out where the grass grows high, and the horned cattle dream away the lazy afternoons, and men still fear the powers and principalities of the air- out there between the corn-rows he held his old puissance to the end. There was no need of beaters to drive in his game. The news that he was coming was enough. For miles the flivver dust would choke the roads. And when he rose at the end of the day to discharge his Message there would be such breathless attention, such a rapt and enchanted ecstasy, such a sweet rustle of amens as the world had not known since Johann fell to Herod's axe.

There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village, beating off the flies and gnats, and that death found him there. The man felt at home in such simple and Christian scenes. He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland valleys of the Cumberland Range, his coat laid aside, his bare arms and hairy chest shining damply, his bald head sprinkled with dust- so accoutred and on display, he was obviously happy. He liked getting up early in the morning, to the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill. He liked the heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen. He liked country lawyers, country pastors, all country people. He liked country sounds and country smells.

I believe this liking was sincere- perhaps the only sincere thing in the man. His nose showed no uneasiness when a hillman in faded overalls and hickory shirt accosted him on the street, and besought him for light upon some mystery of Holy Writ. The simian gabble of the cross-roads was not gabble to him, but wisdom of an occult and superior sort. In the presence of city folks he was palpably uneasy. Their clothes, I suspect, annoyed him, and he was suspicious of their too delicate manners. He knew all the while that they were laughing at him- if not at his baroque theology, then at least at his alpaca pantaloons. But the yokels never laughed at him. To them he was not the huntsman but the prophet, and toward the end, as he gradually forsook mundane politics for more ghostly concerns, they began to elevate him in their hierarchy. When he died he was the peer of Abraham. His old enemy, [Woodrow] Wilson, aspiring to the same white and shining robe, came down with a thump. But Bryan made the grade. His place in Tennessee hagiography is secure. If the village barber saved any of his hair, then it is curing gall-stones down there today.

But what label will he bear in more urbane regions? One, I fear, of a far less flattering kind. Bryan lived too long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully literate men, even of the kind who write schoolbooks. There was a scattering of sweet words in his funeral notices, but it was no more than a response to conventional sentimentality. The best verdict the most romantic editorial could dredge up, save in the humorless South, was to the general effect that his imbecilities were excused by his earnestness- that under his clowning, as under that of the juggler of Notre Dame, there was the zeal of a steadfast soul. But this was apology, not praise; precisely the same thing might be said of Mary Baker G. Eddy. The truth is that even Bryan's sincerity will probably yield to what is called, in other fields, definitive criticism. Was he sincere when he opposed imperialism in the Phillipines, or when he fed it with deserving Democrats in Santo Domingo? Was he sincere when he tried to shove the Prohibitionists under the table, or when he seized their banner and began to lead them with loud whoops? Was he sincere when he bellowed against war, or when he dreamed of himself as a tin-soldier in uniform, with a grave reserved at Arlington among the generals? Was he sincere when he fawned over Champ Clark, or when he betrayed Clark? Was he sincere when he pleaded for tolerance in New York, or when he bawled for the faggot and stake in Tennessee?

This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home from the barnyard. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition- the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine..."

- H.L. Mencken
Prejudices, Fifth Series
New York, 1926


Have you ever read an obituary like that? Mencken, of course, was a once-in-a-millenium phenomenon. We won't see his like again anytime soon.



____________________________________________


"......Pearl argued that any man who entertained a lady for so little as two minutes was guilty of a gross offense, not only against her person but also against the peace and dignity of the human race..... [Brodel] had simply never heard that copulation could be prolonged at will- at all events, far beyond the limits he had set..... On the heels of this grotesque discussion Pearl announced the founding of an organization to be called the Society for More and Better Fucking in the Home."

-H. L. Mencken
The Diary of H.L. Mencken
New York, 1989


Membership applications are still accepted!

________________________________________________

"But, as I have noted, their innocence of literae humaniores was not necessarily a sign of stupidity, and from some of them, in fact, I learned the valuable lesson that sharp wits can lurk in unpolished skulls. I knew cops who were matches for the most learned and unscrupulous lawyers at the Baltimore bar, and others who made monkeys of the oldest and crabbedest judges on the bench, and were generally respected for it. Moreover, I knew cops who were really first-rate policemen, and loved their trade as tenderly as so many art artists or movie actors. They were badly paid, but they carried on their dismal work with unflagging diligence, and loved a long, hard chase almost as much as they loved a brisk clubbing. Their one salient failing, taking them as a class, was their belief that any person who had been arrested, even on mere suspicion, was unquestionably and ipso facto guilty. But that theory, though it occasionally colored their testimony in a garish manner, was grounded, after all, on nothing worse than professional pride and espirit de corps, and I am certainly not one to hoot at it, for my own belief in the mission of journalism has no better support than the same partiality, and all the logic I am aware of stands against it."

-H.L. Mencken
The Vintage Mencken (gathered by Alistair Cooke)
originally published in Mencken's 1942 Newspaper Days as "Reflections On Notable Cops"
New York, 1955


After his 1956 death and through the '60s, Mencken's opinions and philosophy (as well as his work) fell into some disrepute and neglect. Alistair Cooke played a critically important role in championing and successfully reviving widespread interest in Mencken's incomparable prose, wit, vocabulary, and genius.



______________________________________________

"Puritanism-
The haunting fear that somewhere, someone is happy."

-H.L. Mencken

_________________


In an essay comparing Theodore Roosevelt and Kaiser Wilhelm II,

"Both delighted in the armed pursuit of the lower fauna."
-H. L. Mencken

____________________



"Frederick the Great, asked why he gave commissions in the Prussian army only to Junker, replied simply, 'Because they will not lie and cannot be bought.' "

-H. L. Mencken

____________________



"A demagogue is one who knowingly tells untruths to those he believes to be morons."

-H.L. Mencken

____________________



"For every complex human problem, there is a well-known solution— one that is neat, simple and wrong."

-H. L. Mencken


_____________________

"The most sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages."

-H. L. Mencken (on the American people)

_____________

"Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking."

-H. L. Mencken

_____________

"If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x X y is less than y."

-H. L. Mencken

_____________

"The truth is something that is somehow discreditable to someone."

-H. L. Mencken

_____________

"All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else."

-H. L. Mencken

_____________

"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable."

-H. L. Mencken

_____________

"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."

-H. L. Mencken

_____________

"Of all the classes of men, I dislike the most those who make their livings by talking— actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on. All of them participate in the shallow false pretenses of the actor who is their archetype. It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause of the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric. His success is judged by the favor of his inferiors, or at all events of persons supposed to be his inferiors, and for that sort of thing I have no taste. If he is intelligent at all, which happens occasionally, he must be well aware that this favor is irrational and almost certainly transient. He is admired for his worst qualities, and he cannot count upon being admired for long. A good part of my time, in my earlier days, was spent listening to speeches of one sort or another, and to watching their makers glow under the ensuing clapper- clawing. I was always sorry for such men, for I soon observed that the applause of today was almost invariably followed by the indifference of tomorrow.''

-H. L. Mencken

_____________

 

[Byron In Exile]

He has been called America's George Bernard Shaw. That is an underestimate. During the teens and '20s it is impossible to underestimate his influence on American literature, taste and culture.

His prose style is inimitable and fabulous. As a daily journalist, critic, philologist, author and editor, it is estimated that he wrote 5,000 words a day for forty years. He introduced Nietszche to the English speaking world and wrote a scholarly tome, The American Language, that was a seminal work establishing American English as a separate and distinct form of English. He mentored and advised a large number of successful authors including, but not limited to, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Manchester.

In the first book of his semi-autobiographical trilogy, the 1940 memoir Happy Days he states that his childhood was "the maddest, damndest, gladdest existence ever known to mortal man." He describes his chance encounter of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn at age twelve as, "The most stupendous event of my life."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mencken

Works
George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905)
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1907)
The Artist: A Drama Without Words (1912)
A Book of Burlesques (1916)
A Little Book in C Major (1916)
The Creed of a Novelist (1916)
Pistols for Two (1917)
A Book of Prefaces (1917)
In Defense of Women (1917)
Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918)
The American Language (1919)
Prejudices (1919–27)
First Series (1919)
Second Series (1920)
Third Series (1922)
Fourth Series (1924)
Fifth Series (1926)
Sixth Series (1927)
Selected Prejudices (1927)
The Hills of Zion (1925)
Notes on Democracy (1926)
Libido for the Ugly (1927)
Menckeneana: A Schimpflexikon (ed) (1928)
On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (1920-1936)
Treatise on the Gods (1930)
Making a President (1932)
Treatise on Right and Wrong (1934)
Happy Days, 1880–1892 (1940)
Newspaper Days, 1899–1906 (1941)
Heathen Days, 1890–1936 (1943)
A Mencken Chrestomathy (1948)
Minority Report (1956)
The American Scene (Huntington Cairns, ed) (1965)
The Impossible H. L. Mencken: A Selection Of His Best Newspaper Stories (Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, ed) (1991)
My Life As Author and Editor (Jonathan Yardley, ed) (1992)
A Second Chrestomathy (1994)
A Religious Orgy in Tennessee A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial (2007)

That might well be, but "bronzeage" is clearly superior, since he is still alive, and has the "potential" to outdo Mencken.

We can only await the forthcoming prose.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

It appears form Mencken's diary entry that Lillie led a full and rich life. Her lifestyle was comfortable, but not extravagant. She was active in her church and other community organizations, kept abreast of current affairs and had a large circle of friends.

She remained active in her old age, leaving the house everyday to interact with many different people, to whom she was likely a cheerful figure who brightened their day.

The only dismal part of her life seems to be her cranky neighbor, who may have been a distant relative of Lt.

The lives of such poor simpletons always fascinate me. It is hard to imagine them being endurable. So far as I know, Lillie never did anything in all her years that was worth doing, or said anything worth hearing. Yet she showed a considerable complacency, and I have no doubt that she was well satisfied with herself. The conversations that went on between her and her brother and sister must have been marvellous indeed. I seldom did more than pass the time of day with her myself, and when I called at the door on learning of her death it was the first time I had crossed her threshold for years. The house, in so far as I could see it, turned out to be a museum of archaisms. There was even a crayon portrait of her father hanging over the parlor mantlepiece. The wallpaper and carpets, not to mention the furniture, looked to be at least fifty years old, and it was only too apparent that they were hideous even when young. Thus Lillie lived out her days. She got along somehow, without intelligence, information, or taste. She had no desire to learn anything, and in fact learned nothing. Her ideas at seventy were her ideas at fifteen. It is hard to think of a more placid life, and apparently she enjoyed it, but it is likewise hard to think of one more hollow. It was as insignificant, almost, as the life of her dog.

You know, a recent Litster, LF, recently reminded me of this, as do so many others when discussing a topic as she mentioned how the debate would be amusing only to a 19 y-o, and I really think she meant that it had been settled dogma with her since that age.

I think that's too true for too many of our self-styled deep thinkers here.

I will not exclude present company either...

WATCHING people is hardly richly interacting, just a cheap movie or a high school play.

 

[bronzeage]

That might well be, but "bronzeage" is clearly superior, since he is still alive, and has the "potential" to outdo Mencken.

We can only await the forthcoming prose.

I had no idea you were so fragile. In the future I will try to be more considerate of your feelings. With that in mind, try to cheer up.

 

[trysail]

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

-H. L. Mencken

 

[Hapless_Mouse]

In Defense of Women
by H. L. Mencken

Introduction

As a professional critic of life and letters, my principal business in the world is that of manufacturing platitudes for tomorrow, which is to say, ideas so novel that they will be instantly rejected as insane and outrageous by all right thinking men, and so apposite and sound that they will eventually conquer that instinctive opposition, and force themselves into the traditional wisdom of the race. I hope I need not confess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudes rescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday, with new labels stuck rakishly upon them. This borrowing and refurbishing of shop-worn goods, as a matter of fact, is the invariable habit of traders in ideas, at all times and everywhere. It is not, however, that all the conceivable human notions have been thought out; it is simply, to be quite honest, that the sort of men who volunteer to think out new ones seldom, if ever, have wind enough for a full day's work. The most they can ever accomplish in the way of genuine originality is an occasional brilliant spurt, and half a dozen such spurts, particularly if they come close together and show a certain co-ordination, are enough to make a practitioner celebrated, and even immortal. Nature, indeed, conspires against all such genuine originality, and I have no doubt that God is against it on His heavenly throne, as His vicars and partisans unquestionably are on this earth. The dead hand pushes all of us into intellectual cages; there is in all of us a strange tendency to yield and have done. Thus the impertinent colleague of Aristotle is doubly beset, first by a public opinion that regards his enterprise as subversive and in bad taste, and secondly by an inner weakness that limits his capacity for it, and especially his capacity to throw off the prejudices and superstitions of his race, culture anytime. The cell, said Haeckel, does not act, it reacts--and what is the instrument of reflection and speculation save a congeries of cells? At the moment of the contemporary metaphysician's loftiest flight, when he is most gratefully warmed by the feeling that he is far above all the ordinary airlanes and has absolutely novel concept by the tail, he is suddenly pulled up by the discovery that what is entertaining him is simply the ghost of some ancient idea that his school-master forced into him in 1887, or the mouldering corpse of a doctrine that was made official in his country during the late war, or a sort of fermentation-product, to mix the figure, of a banal heresy launched upon him recently by his wife. This is the penalty that the man of intellectual curiosity and vanity pays for his violation of the divine edict that what has been revealed from Sinai shall suffice for him, and for his resistance to the natural process which seeks to reduce him to the respectable level of a patriot and taxpayer.

I was, of course, privy to this difficulty when I planned the present work, and entered upon it with no expectation that I should be able to embellish it with, almost, more than a very small number of hitherto unutilized notions. Moreover, I faced the additional handicap of having an audience of extraordinary antipathy to ideas before me, for I wrote it in war-time, with all foreign markets cut off, and so my only possible customers were Americans. Of their unprecedented dislike for novelty in the domain of the intellect I have often discoursed in the past, and so there is no need to go into the matter again. All I need do here is to recall the fact that, in the United States, alone among the great nations of history, there is a right way to think and a wrong way to think in everything--not only in theology, or politics, or economics, but in the most trivial matters of everyday life. Thus, in the average American city the citizen who, in the face of an organized public clamour (usually managed by interested parties) for the erection of an equestrian statue of Susan B. Anthony, the apostle of woman suffrage, in front of the chief railway station, or the purchase of a dozen leopards for the municipal zoo, or the dispatch of an invitation to the Structural Iron Workers' Union to hold its next annual convention in the town Symphony Hall--the citizen who, for any logical reason, opposes such a proposal--on the ground, say, that Miss Anthony never mounted a horse in her life, or that a dozen leopards would be less useful than a gallows to hang the City Council, or that the Structural Iron Workers would spit all over the floor of Symphony Hall and knock down the busts of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms-- this citizen is commonly denounced as an anarchist and a public enemy. It is not only erroneous to think thus; it has come to be immoral. And many other planes, high and low. For an American to question any of the articles of fundamental faith cherished by the majority is for him to run grave risks of social disaster. The old English offense of "imagining the King's death" has been formally revived by the American courts, and hundreds of men and women are in jail for committing it, and it has been so enormously extended that, in some parts of the country at least, it now embraces such remote acts as believing that the negroes should have equality before the law, and speaking the language of countries recently at war with the Republic, and conveying to a private friend a formula for making synthetic gin. All such toyings with illicit ideas are construed as attentats against democracy, which, in a sense, perhaps they are. For democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even half-wits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must thus be to penalize the free play of ideas. In the United States this is not only its first concern, but also its last concern. No other enterprise, not even the trade in public offices and contracts, occupies the rulers of the land so steadily, or makes heavier demands upon their ingenuity and their patriotic passion.

Familiar with the risks flowing out of it--and having just had to change the plates of my "Book of Prefaces," a book of purely literary criticism, wholly without political purpose or significance, in order to get it through the mails, I determined to make this brochure upon the woman question extremely pianissimo in tone, and to avoid burdening it with any ideas of an unfamiliar, and hence illegal nature. So deciding, I presently added a bravura touch: the unquenchable vanity of the intellectual snob asserting itself over all prudence. That is to say, I laid down the rule that no idea should go into the book that was not already so obvious that it had been embodied in the proverbial philosophy, or folk-wisdom, of some civilized nation, including the Chinese. To this rule I remained faithful throughout. In its original form, as published in 1918, the book was actuary just such a pastiche of proverbs, many of them English, and hence familiar even to Congressmen, newspaper editors and other such illiterates. It was not always easy to hold to this program; over and over again I was tempted to insert notions that seemed to have escaped the peasants of Europe and Asia. But in the end, at some cost to the form of the work, I managed to get through it without compromise, and so it was put into type. There is no need to add that my ideational abstinence went unrecognized and unrewarded. In fact, not a single American reviewer noticed it, and most of them slated the book violently as a mass of heresies and contumacies, a deliberate attack upon all the known and revered truths about the woman question, a headlong assault upon the national decencies. In the South, where the suspicion of ideas goes to extraordinary lengths, even for the United States, some of the newspapers actually denounced the book as German propaganda, designed to break down American morale, and called upon the Department of Justice to proceed against me for the crime known to American law as "criminal anarchy," i.e., "imagining the King's death." Why the Comstocks did not forbid it the mails as lewd and lascivious I have never been able to determine. Certainly, they received many complaints about it. I myself, in fact, caused a number of these complaints to be lodged, in the hope that the resultant buffooneries would give me entertainment in those dull days of war, with all intellectual activities adjourned, and maybe promote the sale of the book. But the Comstocks were pursuing larger fish, and so left me to the righteous indignation of right-thinking reviewers, especially the suffragists. Their concern, after all, is not with books that are denounced; what they concentrate their moral passion on is the book that is praised.

The present edition is addressed to a wider audience, in more civilized countries, and so I have felt free to introduce a number of propositions, not to be found in popular proverbs, that had to be omitted from the original edition. But even so, the book by no means pretends to preach revolutionary doctrines, or even doctrines of any novelty. All I design by it is to set down in more or less plain form certain ideas that practically every civilized man and woman holds in petto, but that have been concealed hitherto by the vast mass of sentimentalities swathing the whole woman question. It is a question of capital importance to all human beings, and it deserves to be discussed honestly and frankly, but there is so much of social reticence, of religious superstition and of mere emotion intermingled with it that most of the enormous literature it has thrown off is hollow and useless. I point for example, to the literature of the subsidiary question of woman suffrage. It fills whole libraries, but nine tenths of it is merely rubbish, for it starts off from assumptions that are obviously untrue and it reaches conclusions that are at war with both logic and the facts. So with the question of sex specifically. I have read, literally, hundreds of volumes upon it, and uncountable numbers of pamphlets, handbills and inflammatory wall-cards, and yet it leaves the primary problem unsolved, which is to say, the problem as to what is to be done about the conflict between the celibacy enforced upon millions by civilization and the appetites implanted in all by God. In the main, it counsels yielding to celibacy, which is exactly as sensible as advising a dog to forget its fleas. Here, as in other fields, I do not presume to offer a remedy of my own. In truth, I am very suspicious of all remedies for the major ills of life, and believe that most of them are incurable. But I at least venture to discuss the matter realistically, and if what I have to say is not sagacious, it is at all events not evasive. This, I hope, is something. Maybe some later investigator will bring a better illumination to the subject.

It is the custom of The Free-Lance Series to print a paragraph or two about the author in each volume. I was born in Baltimore, September 12, 1880, and come of a learned family, though my immediate forebears were business men. The tradition of this ancient learning has been upon me since my earliest days, and I narrowly escaped becoming a doctor of philosophy. My father's death, in 1899, somehow dropped me into journalism, where I had a successful career, as such careers go. At the age of 25 I was the chief editor of a daily newspaper in Baltimore. During the same year I published my first book of criticism. Thereafter, for ten or twelve years, I moved steadily from practical journalism, with its dabbles in politics, economics and soon, toward purely aesthetic concerns, chiefly literature and music, but of late I have felt a strong pull in the other direction, and what interests me chiefly today is what may be called public psychology, i.e.., the nature of the ideas that the larger masses of men hold, and the processes whereby they reach them. If I do any serious writing hereafter, it will be in that field. In the United States I am commonly held suspect as a foreigner, and during the war I was variously denounced. Abroad, especially in England, I am sometimes put to the torture for my intolerable Americanism. The two views are less far apart than they seem to be. The fact is that I am superficially so American, in ways of speech and thought, that the foreigner is deceived, whereas the native, more familiar with the true signs, sees that under the surface there is incurable antagonism to most of the ideas that Americans hold to be sound. Thus If all between two stools--but it is more comfortable there on the floor than sitting up tightly. I am wholly devoid of public spirit or moral purpose. This is incomprehensible to many men, and they seek to remedy the defect by crediting me with purposes of their own. The only thing I respect is intellectual honesty, of which, of course, intellectual courage is a necessary part. A Socialist who goes to jail for his opinions seems to me a much finer man than the judge who sends him there, though I disagree with all the ideas of the Socialist and agree with some of those of the judge. But though he is fine, the Socialist is nevertheless foolish, for he suffers for what is untrue. If I knew what was true, I'd probably be willing to sweat and strive for it, and maybe even to die for it to the tune of bugle-blasts. But so far I have not found it.

H. L. Mencken"

 

[Sean]

I can't believe the Brits in this thread have never heard of him.

 

[butters]

I can't believe the Brits in this thread have never heard of him.

his is not the first name to crop up when discussing writers. especially if poetry's the talking point.

 

[Sean]

his is not the first name to crop up when discussing writers. especially if poetry's the talking point.

Neither is Thoreau, especially in the UK. Doesn't excuse the ignorance.

 

[butters]

Neither is Thoreau, especially in the UK. Doesn't excuse the ignorance.

ignorance is a state of mind that's blameless unless willful. we learn as we go.

 

[Sean]

ignorance is a state of mind that's blameless unless willful. we learn as we go.

You write fortune cookies?

 

[butters]

You write fortune cookies?

oh duh! 'course! you?

 

[Sean]

oh duh! 'course! you?

No. I find baseless platitudes somewhat banal. I'm a cynic like that.

 

[butters]

No. I find baseless platitudes somewhat banal. I'm a cynic like that.

that'd account for it then.

 

[Byron In Exile]

I can't believe the Brits in this thread have never heard of him.

Nor can I.