Wed, 11 Jan 2012

8:31 PM - Ink-Stained Riches

Cool of dazzle jordan shoes for cheap,IN HIS ESSAY ON H. L. MENCKEN entitled Saving a Whale, journalist Murray Kempton points out that whales are the only mammals that the museums have never managed to stuff and mount in their authentic skins. To Kempton, Mencken is a very excellent whale who, almost 40 years after his death, nonetheless defies critical taxonomy. That is placing it politely-Mencken in death provokes as a lot vitriol as he did whilst living. He continues to be called a racist, a humanitarian, an archconservative and a great liberal, and also the thorny reality is, he was all those issues. Nobody understands what to create of a man who turned his diary into a manure pile of anti-Semitism simultaneously he was working diligently to obtain Jews out of Hitler's Germany.   Biographers have been struggling to take Mencken's measure because the 1920s. Fred Hobson's Mencken (650 pages. Random Home. $35) will be the newest and greatest try. Hobson is the initial of Mencken's biographers to use all of the posthumously published diaries, exactly where the Sage of Baltimore vented his most odious bigotries and exactly where he most obviously revealed the alienation and loneliness at the heart of his personality. Hobson doesn't attempt to resolve the contradictions in Mencken's personality. Instead, he wisely utilizes this new materials to portray Mencken as a man forever in conflict with himself, the carefree cutup coexisting with the control freak, the comic with the tragedian. Eventually-at least a decade prior to the 1948 stroke that robbed him with the ability to read or write-Mencken's darker angels took charge of his soul. In 1942, he wrote, I have spent all of my 62 many years here, but I nonetheless discover it not possible to fit myself in to the accepted patterns of American life and believed. After all these many years, I remain a foreigner.But as Hobson points out, the darkness was there all along, and the miracle is the fact that out of this almost paralyzing bleakness, Mencken was once in a position to spin exuberant, lacerating prose that is as funny because it is basically severe. At the peak of his powers, in the '20s and early '30s, he slaughtered each and every sacred cow in sight, from Prohibition to fundamentalism. But as difficult as he could be on hillbillies and Klansmen, be was even harder on professors: Of a thousand head of such dull drudges not 10, with their doctors' dissertations behind them, ever contribute so much as a flyspeck towards the sum of human knowledge. Coining phrases like the Bible belt and aphorisms like Democracy is the theory that the typical individuals know what they want, and deserve to get it great and hard, Mencken left his indecorous fingerprints all over American thought and speech.As a newspaper columnist, a magazine editor along with a book author, Mencken radically broadened the scope and raised the standards of American journalism. But most significant, he proved that an intellectual could thrive in the well-liked press. Reading Michael Wreszin's new biography of Dwight Macdonald, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition (590 pages. Fundamental. $30), one is struck from the believed that had there been no Mencken, there might well happen to be no Macdonald. Macdonald himself acknowledged the debt in his well-known attack on American mass culture, Against the American Grain. And the extremely shape of Macdonald's career owes everything to Mencken's example. A freewheeling critic of politics and culture, first in intellectual journals like Partisan Review, Politics and later in the New Yorker and Esquire, Macdonald (1906-1982) was the archfoe of middlebrow and lowbrow taste. In his legendary attacks around the third edition of Webster's New International Dictionary and the Revised Regular Version of the Bible, he argued that debasing the language debased the culture; he wonderfully echoed the Mencken design. To clinch the comparison, Macdonald is most like Mencken in the way he is memorable even when he is incorrect. Writing about Orson Welles's Mr. Arkadin and Touch of Evil, he accused the filmmaker of letting himself go, like an over-weight matron indulging in desserts, in melodramas which seem to have been whipped up completely for theatrical effect.Murray Kempton proves himself an even closer student of Mencken's technique in his latest collection of newspaper and magazine function, Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Occasions (570 pages. Times. $27.50). Like Mencken, the 76-year-old New York Newsday columnist is initial and last a newspaper man right down to the his shoes. Skeptical and well-worn soles of curious, he's equally at home writing about Dwight Eisenhower, the gangster Matthew Ianniello or the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and he condescends to no one. With Mencken he shares a reflexive sympathy for the underdog, a distaste for cant and an addiction to thickety prose. Praising the singer Bessie Smith, he says, We would still have no more utilized for her any title except the bare and stately 'Bessie' than we'd have spoken of Juno as Mrs. Jupiter. Goddesses do not have last names.But the sad reality is, Mencken's disciples are not Mencken. Flaws and all, he was inimitable. As Hobson says, He was our nay-saying Whitman, and ... he sounded his personal barbaric yawp more than the roofs with the timid and the fearful, the contented and also the smug. With his inexpensive cigars and his hick's haircut, and with his gaudy, orotund prose, he looks and sounds like an old-fashioned vaudevillian-W C. Fields pounding a typewriter. As good as it could be to stick this curmudgeonly, politically incorrect relic on a back shelf and forget about him, we require his rancor too much. Much better than anyone, he still instructs us on the value of the loyal opposition. At his greatest, he produced his readers believe and he kept them truthful. 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