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Lillie Fortenbaugh

Ishmael said:
Mencken can be succinct.

"All government, of course, is against liberty." - H. L. Mencken

Ishmael
Click to expand...

True, but I still say Twain got there first.....


"There is no distinctly American criminal class - except Congress"

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself"
 
VaticanAssassin said:
True, but I still say Twain got there first.....


"There is no distinctly American criminal class - except Congress"

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself"
Click to expand...

Ahh, but Swift preceded Clemens. But I suppose we could roll this all the way back to Aristophanes or perhaps Anastasi.

But I agree on Clemens for the most part. Might want to do some reading of Will Rogers.

"About all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation." - Will Rogers

Ishmael
 
Byron In Exile said:
H.L. Mencken's Diary

Baltimore, April 30, 1945

Old Lillie Fortenbaugh, our next-door neighbor for nearly fifty years, died last Thursday afternoon, April 26, and was buried today. As incredible as it may seem, I did not learn of her death until Saturday, forty-eight hours afterward. The news then reached me from my sister Gertrude, who called up from the country, and reported that she had encountered the death notice in the Sun. August was laid up with bronchitis on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and I was indoors Thursday evening and all day Saturday until after Gertie's call. I was in and out of the house on Friday, but, as usual, used the back gate, and thus did not notice the flowers on the Fortenbaugh push-button.

Lillie must have been close to seventy. She was a complete moron and led a life of utter vacuity. August went to the funeral this afternoon and came back reporting that the officiating clergyman spoke of her church work, and that her brother Charlie, also enormously stupid, mentioned her "civic work" (his own phrase), but all this was probably only funeral politeness. Lillie, in fact, spent most of her time by day roving about the shopping district, looking in windows and pricing things that she didn't buy. When she grew tired she took a seat in a department store rest-room, and there watched the flow of shoppers. Toward the end of the afternoon she went to a movie. Her evenings were devoted to the radio. We could hear it faintly through our wall, but it was not disturbing. To the best of my recollection she rarely turned on music, and never any good music. Her preference seemed to be for speeches, and for the yowling of so-called news commentators.

In her earlier years Lillie banged the piano every evening, and had a good many visitors, but of late strange voices have come through the wall only seldom. There were servants in the house in those days, including a low-comedy colored butler, but of late most of the housework has apparently been done by Lillie's younger half-sister, Ethel. Ethel was married years ago and had a son, but soon her husband left her, taking the son along, and of late she has been at home most of the time, with occasional ventures into practical nursing. When her husband sued her for divorce, his main allegation was that she was sub-normal mentally. I was summoned by the family to deny this, and did so as in duty bound, but the judge was not deceived, for he had her before him. When I returned to Hollins street in 1936 I had a clash with Lillie about the barking of her dog. Her reply to my complaint was to accuse me of shooting at it! The dog barked less after that, but of late it has been resuming its old uproar, and only last week I planned to complain to the police. Now, I suppose, it will disappear.

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.
Click to expand...



His knowledge and appreciation of Mencken, alone, was enough to mark him as unusual and extraordinary.



​
 
seems to me a man's 'greatness' ought not be measured by how much his opinions and tastes meet your own, but in how much he might still be thought well of by those whose opinions are contrary to his own.
 



It's FINALLY happened (thank god; it's long overdue).

If you have never read H. L. Mencken's semi-autobiographical "Days" trilogy, you're lucky and I envy you— you've got a treat in store.

Library of America books are lovely. They're beautifully crafted, small enough to be held comfortably in one hand and printed on acid-free paper.

Mencken was the best prose writer of the 20th century. These stories are laced with intelligence, erudition and rollicking humor. There are stories that left me convulsed in laughter when I first encountered them many decades ago.


Table of Contents:
Code: 
Happy Days 1880–1892
Preface
I.Introduction to the Universe
II.The Caves of Learning
III.Recollections of Academic Orgies
IV.The Baltimore of the Eighties
V.Rural Delights
VI.The Head of the House
VII.Memorials of Gormandizing
VIII.The Training of a Gangster
IX.Cops and Their Ways
X.Larval Stage of a Bookworm
XI.First Steps in Divinity
XII.The Ruin of an Artist
XIII.In the Footsteps of Gutenberg
XIV.From the Records of an Athlete
XV.The Capital of the Republic
XVI.Recreations of a Reactionary
XVII.Brief Gust of Glory
XVIII.The Career of a Philosopher
XIX.Innocence in a Wicked World
XX.Strange Scenes and Far Places 


Newspaper Days 1899–1906
Preface
I.Allegro Con Brio
II.Drill for a Rookie
III.Sergeant’s Stripes
IV.Approach to Lovely Letters
V.Fruits of Diligence
VI.The Gospel of Service
VII.Scent of the Theatre
VIII.Command
IX.Three Managing Editors
X.Slaves of Beauty
XI.The Days of the Giants
XII.The Judicial Arm
XIII.Recollections of Notable Cops
XIV.A Genial Restauranteur
XV.A Girl from Red Lion, P.A.
XVI.Scions of the Bogus Nobility
XVII.Aliens, but Not Yet Enemies
XVIII.The Synthesis of News
XIX.Fire Alarm
XX.Sold Down the River


Heathen Days 1890–1936
Preface
I.Downfall of a Revolutionary [1890]
II.Memoirs of the Stable [1891]
III.Adventures of a Y.M.C.A. Lad [1894]
IV.The Educational Process [1896]
V.Finale to the Rogue’s March [1900]
VI.Notes on Palaeozoic Publicists [1902]
VII.The Tone Art [1903]
VIII.A Master of Gladiators [1907]
IX.A Dip into Statecraft [1912]
X.Court of Honor [1913]
XI.A Roman Holiday [1914]
XII.Winter Voyage [1916]
XIII.Gore in the Caribbees [1917]
XIV.Romantic Intermezzo [1920]
XV.Old Home Day [1922]
XVI.The Noble Experiment [1924]
XVII.Inquisition [1925]
XVIII.Vanishing Act [1934]
XIX.Pilgrimage [1934]
XX.Beaters of Breasts [1936]


Days Revisited: Mencken’s Unpublished Commentary
Preface
Notes on Happy Days
Notes on Newspaper Days
Notes on Heathen Days

Chronology
Note on the Texts
Note on the Illustrations
Notes
Index
 - See more at: http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=407&section=toc#sthash.EWzk6fFI.dpuf


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How nice to see this thread with its many delightful Mencken quotations reemerge.


Byron's intelligence and his knowledge and appreciation of Mencken were a couple of the multiple reasons I generally enjoyed his posts.



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"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




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H. L. Mencken As A Boy? Oh Boy !

by Danny Heitman
(Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Advocate newspaper in Louisiana, has been reading Mencken since high school. In 2004, he delivered the H. L. Mencken Memorial Lecture in Baltimore)

Humanities November/December 2014 | Volume 35, Number 6
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/novemberdecember/feature/h-l-mencken-boy-oh-boy


https://www.neh.gov/files/imagecache/neh_large/humanities/articles/2014_1112_webimages_28_mencken.jpg
(What a pleasant surprise— I had not previously seen this photograph of Mencken and his brothers)​



... But the Days books, as good as they are, don’t create a clear sense of Mencken’s contribution to American literature and culture. Readers unfamiliar with Mencken might best enjoy reading Days alongside Rodgers’s 662-page Mencken: The American Iconoclast, published in 2005. Rodgers’s study (supported by an NEH grant) is one of five major biographies of Mencken, who died in 1956. Writers keep trying to capture Mencken’s life on the page, one gathers, because they believe that no one will ever get to the bottom of him. He had, after all, not one life but many, gaining national fame as a reporter, groundbreaking political and social commentator, arts critic, amateur philologist, magazine editor, and memoirist. Mencken also wrote thousands of letters, and his far-flung correspondence, which reached everyone from Theodore Dreiser to Edgar Lee Masters to James M. Cain, is an accomplishment in itself.

In An Infuriating American, a slender new book about Mencken’s career, author Hal Crowther almost audibly sighs from the page at the thought of capturing what made Mencken great. “Mencken is almost too big to approach with any confidence,” Crowther confesses. “Setting yourself to write about him, you feel like an old farmer with his old mule, at sunrise of a long, hot day, looking out over fifty acres that ought to be plowed before sundown. Give me strength, Lord, and where do I begin?”

***​

He invented the term Bible Belt to describe the culturally conservative South, a region he also mocked as “the Sahara of the Bozart.” He dismissed democracy as a farce, concluding that its essential fallacy rested in relying on a majority of morons. Here’s how Mencken famously put it: “No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

Mencken’s unflinching columns and essays electrified the country. “What amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it,” Richard Wright recalled. In the 1920s, young people disillusioned by the aftermath of World War I found resonance in Mencken’s words, said Hamilton Owens, a journalistic protégé. “His was the point of view they wanted. His harsh realism, his complete scorn for the prevailing patriotic hypocrisies, his ‘destructiveness’ and above all his uproarious gusto at swinging his ax on the idols gave them that sense of direction which they had lacked.”

Mencken’s tone, though, leaned toward bemusement, not bitterness. “I do not believe in democracy,” he conceded, “but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.”

...What Crowther wrote of Mencken’s broader literary legacy could well apply to the Days books: “A journey into Mencken country is nothing like a walking tour of the Lake District, or of the chateaus along the Loire. For everything we encounter that’s inspirational or charming, there’s something appalling or incomprehensible. Pretty country, no. But it’s never dull, and no one ever returned complaining that it was a waste of time.”


more...

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It was a delight to stumble upon Mr. Heitman's essay on the occasion of the publication of The Library of America edition of the "Days" trilogy (Happy Days, Newspaper Days and Heathen Days).

Humanities is the magazine of the National Endowment for Humanities.

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https://public.oed.com/wp-content/uploads/Final-fascicle-400-wide.jpg


1928: Year Of The Dictionary

by Peter Gilliver




‘This year, whatever else it may be, is the Year of the Dictionary.’ So wrote Charles Onions in the Times of 19 April 1928, in an article celebrating the completion of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The final section or ‘fascicle’ of the Dictionary, covering words from Wise to Wyzen—and with the names of Charles Onions and William Craigie, the two surviving Editors, on its title page—was published on that day, bringing to a triumphant conclusion the labour of thousands of people over nearly three-quarters of a century. The English language now had a dictionary unmatched in its comprehensiveness and wealth of detail: ‘the supreme authority, without a rival or the prospect of a rival’, as it was described a few years later—a description which still holds today...

...The main event in Oxford was a special exhibition of dictionaries at the Bodleian Library: rather more muted than the ‘military exercises, boxing matches between the dons, orations in Latin, Greek, English, and the Oxford dialect […] and a series of medieval drinking bouts’ that had been predicted by the American humourist H. L. Mencken...


https://public.oed.com/1928-year-of-the-dictionary/


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"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."
- H. L. Mencken​




​
 


Good Old Days

by Terry Teachout


Mencken’s Days books are no longer widely read, but those who know his work more than casually are in universal agreement that they rank among his greatest literary achievements...

...the point of The Days Trilogy: Expanded Edition is, it should be needless to say, the books themselves. If you already know them, they’re as good as you remember, and if you don’t, you’re in for the most resplendently satisfying of treats. Mencken never wrote anything better, or more likely to last.

Why, then, are the Days books largely unknown save to specialists? One obvious reason is that Mencken, being the most politically incorrect of writers, is not taught in the academy, meaning that you have to find out about him on your own...

...Contrary to popular belief, Mencken was not a conservative, or even a full-blooded libertarian: He fits no known ideological pigeonhole. But in one respect he was perfectly described by Michael Oakeshott, who probably never read a word of his but nonetheless hit the bull’s-eye when he observed that conservatives have “a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be.” H. L. Mencken was among the most furious of complainers when it came to matters cultural and political, but in his daily life he had an enviable capacity for enjoying things as they are. The fancy word for this capacity is “gusto,” and Mencken had it in spades: He liked a good chat, a good meal, a good glass of beer, and a good night’s sleep, and he understood that in such simple pleasures lies much, perhaps most of the point of life. It is that gusto which irradiates the Days books, and anyone who can read them without feeling a reciprocal echo of his joie de vivre is a blue-nosed prig...


more...

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Wow. Just wow.


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by Gore Vidal
(introduction to Marion Elizabeth Rodger's The Impossible Mencken):



"... A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?

Mencken is a nice antidote. Politically, he is often right but seldom correct by today's stern standards. In a cheery way, he dislikes most minorities and if he ever had a good word to say about the majority of his countrymen, I have yet to come across it. Recently, when his letters were published, it was discovered that He Did Not Like the Jews, and that he had said unpleasant things about them not only as individuals but In General, plainly the sign of a Hitler-Holocaust enthusiast. So shocked was everyone that even the New York Review of Books' unofficial de-anti-Semitiser, Garry Wills (he salvaged Dickens, barely), has yet to come to his aid with An Explanation. But in Mencken's private correspondence, he also snarls at black Americans, Orientals, Britons, women, and WASPs, particularly the clay-eating Appalachians, whom he regarded as subhuman. But private irritability is of no consequence when compared to what really matters, public action...

***​

... Matthew Arnold wrote that a "style is the saying in the best way what you have to say. The what you have to say depends on your age." Mencken certainly said what he had to say about the age that he had been assigned to. When asked why, if he could find nothing to "revere" in the United States, he lived there, he replied, "Why do men go to zoos?"

Religion as generally practiced by the Americans of his day, he saw as a Great Wall of China designed to keep civilization out while barbarism might flourish within the gates. He himself was a resolute breacher of the Great Wall, and to the extent that some civilization has got through, he is one of the few Americans that we can thank. Plainly, so clear and hard a writer would not be allowed in the mainstream press of today, and those who think that they would like him back would be the first to censor and censure him.

As for Mencken himself, he wrote his own epitaph in 1921 for The Smart Set: "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." I realize that he has, viciously, used the G-word and, even worse, the long-since-banned H-word. But there he is. And there we are, lucky we."




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


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