Marion Elizabeth Rodgers on the new, expanded edition of H. L. Mencken’s autobiographical trilogy

The latest Library of America volume, H. L. Mencken: The Days Trilogy, Expanded Edition, containing Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days, goes on sale in bookstores everywhere this week. It also includes Days Revisited—over 200 pages of material that Mencken stipulated could not be published until twenty-five years after his death.

We recently interviewed Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, who edited the volume. Rodgers is the author of Mencken: The American Iconoclast, and she previously edited the Library of America edition of Mencken’s Prejudices.

Where does the Days trilogy fit in H. L. Mencken’s life and work?

From 1930 to 1935, when Mencken was married to the writer Sara Haardt, they lived at 704 Cathedral Street in the Mount Vernon district of downtown Baltimore. As happy as he was during these years, Mencken very much missed his old home at 1524 Hollins Street in West Baltimore, which he said was “as much a part of me as my two hands.” In the spring of 1936, after Sara’s death, Mencken moved back to his old home and began systematically exploring the house and neighborhood. He started writing a series of autobiographical essays about his childhood and early youth. Two pieces about colorful neighborhood characters were published in The New Yorker in 1936 and 1937, but he didn’t really get going on the book until 1939. Even then his progress was not always steady or smooth, since he was also traveling, working on his column, covering the presidential conventions, and writing “The Sunpapers of Baltimore,” “The Charlatanry of the Learned,” “A New Dictionary of Quotations,” and the fourth edition of The American Language. He also fell ill. But Blanche Knopf kept at Mencken with such steady encouragement that Mencken remarked to her, "I really should call it ‘Blanche’s Days.’”

Why do you think Mencken claimed Newspaper Days was his favorite book?

Mencken was writing Newspaper Days at a time when he was disillusioned with the state of journalism, and especially with his own newspaper (The Baltimore Sun and Evening Sun). Always an advocate of limited federal government, Mencken opposed FDR’s restrictions on the press, so much so that he resigned from writing for the Sunpapers on January 16, 1941. Escaping into the past—his salad days as a young newspaperman, when, as he put it, the human race could spend “weeks, months and even years without being badgered, bilked or alarmed”—was such a joy that he wrote Newspaper Days at a rate of 3,000 words a day, an all-time high for him. When it was finished, he worried that it would only be of interest to newspapermen; on the contrary, it is probably the volume that has the most resonance for modern readers.

What does this book from American journalism’s heyday tell us about newspapers and the media today?

Time and curiosity seem to be less on tap today—the tyranny of the instantaneous deadlines of social media, blogs, and websites is steadily encroaching upon thorough, quality work. As a young reporter, Mencken made it a point to study books on things he did not know much about; he interviewed his subjects, applying shoe leather to pavement as necessary. On the other hand, newspaper editors today would never tolerate an uncommunicative reporter or keep in their employment one who invented stories. Yet both of these were common enough in the early 1900s, during Mencken’s first years as a reporter. As Mencken wrote, “In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office . . . today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire.” Part of this was a lack of technology—there were only two telephones in the office, “and no one ever used them if it could be avoided.” Also few papers had correspondents in the field, and wireless and ocean cables were undependable.

So after the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, hoping to revive the circulation of his newspaper with some exciting war news, Mencken simply fabricated details of the battle. Mencken never gives any indication that he recognizes how outrageous his exercise in manufactured news had been; he recounts it with self-congratulation and humor here in Newspaper Days. He gloated that he had “guessed precisely right in every particular of the slightest importance.” (Yet in 1906, when asked about his views of journalistic responsibility, he stated “exaggeration and deliberate falsification will have to die.”)

What’s the story behind the Days Revisited material—when was it written, when did it come to light, what’s its significance? How does it change our view of Mencken?

The Days books proved to be so popular they revived Mencken’s reputation. They also struck a chord among men and women who had shared similar childhoods, who after the publication of Happy Days began sending Mencken letters with their thoughts and impressions. This correspondence triggered more memories, and, as was his wont, Mencken started keeping a careful record. His “Notes, Additions and Corrections” were written mainly between 1943 and 1946, with perhaps a few entries after that up to 1948. Because he was writing about people who were still alive, he sealed these papers under time lock, not to be opened until twenty-five years after his death, which turned out to be in 1981. As he put it, “the passage of time would release all confidences and the grave close over all tender feelings.”

Several biographers, including myself, had access to these typescripts, but they are published for the first time in The Library of America edition. They are important not only because any new writings from Mencken, and these are wonderful and characteristic, are a gift to American letters, but also because they provide context, a window onto race relations, for example, as well as cultural beliefs and other aspects of Mencken’s time and place. What I find so interesting is that from this heritage and this particular family, Mencken became a journalist and started breaking barriers from an early age.

Why did you decide to include photographs?

As a boy, Mencken was an amateur photographer before he became keenly interested in writing. The photos here are those that were taken by him as a boy, and again later, during 1939–1940 when he was revisiting the locations for the Days books. He loved Baltimore so much he wanted to keep a record of the buildings and places he had described. These photographs are wonderful period images of a Baltimore that once was—and, in a very few instances, still remains.

What’s your favorite passage or moment in Days Revisited?

The writing here is typical, classic Mencken, full of caustic observations and witty asides, displaying the ease of a highly skilled writer. There are many passages to choose from. I like this one: “The worst burden that a competent and ambitious young man can carry is a stupid wife. When . . . she is also egotistical and bossy, his case is almost hopeless.” Or this one, about the suicide of a young girl: if she had lived, Mencken wrote, “she’d be a grandmother, with her conscience long since worn to a stump and her old age lighted by sentimental memories of her first love affair.” Or his disappointment in the new residents who have moved into his neighborhood and have destroyed the park (Union Square) in front of his house: “I have sat at my office-window and watched their little children digging great holes in the lawns: the poor brats had never heard of lawns and regarded every spot of grassland as a mere field. The depredations of these yahoos inspired a saying in Baltimore: ‘There are now only 45 states in the Union. West Virginia and South Carolina have moved to Maryland, and Maryland has gone to Hell.’”

What’s your sense of how this new edition—and Mencken’s writing in general—will be received?

When the original Days trilogy was published (1940, 1941, 1943), it became such a sensation that the Armed Forces published a pocket edition that was a GI favorite. One copy actually went into Normandy after D-Day, was read by many soldiers and traveled through thirty cities in England, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany, before it was donated to the Mencken Collection at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. Mencken is enjoying another resurgence of popularity today, especially among millennials. They are studying him in classrooms, quoting him, and are keenly interested in his take on all kinds of subjects, like the Scopes Trial. Baltimore students show a tremendous amount of curiosity in his old house at 1524 Hollins Street.

Why is this so?

According to a study by the Pew Research Center (March 2014), this generation identifies itself as “independent libertarians” rather than conservatives or liberals; Mencken’s libertarian point of view strikes a chord. There is even a twitter account—@HLMenckenBot—with nearly 10,000 followers. The pendulum is swinging back toward Mencken!

Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie: America’s pure product and the gift of a young virgin

Guest blog post by Anne Trubek, critic, blogger, and author of A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses

If you read the critical literature, Theodore Dreiser is one giant American cliché. He is boorish, and dull, and a poor stylist (“rhetorical bungling” is how Sandy Petrey put it); he is self-made, and crude. Dreiser has “the awkwardness, the chaos, the heaviness which we associate with reality,” Lionel Trilling said. Critics who champion him do so because “dullness and stupidity must naturally suggest a virtuous democracy.” (Trilling again). You get to imagining Dreiser as some American golem, made from native mud.

His best novel, Sister Carrie, comes a respectable thirty-third on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best. When Sinclair Lewis accepted his Nobel Prize in 1930, he said that Dreiser, “marching alone, usually unappreciated, often hated, [had] cleared the trail from Victorian and Howellsian timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life. Without his pioneering, I doubt if any of us could, unless we liked to be sent to jail, seek to express life and beauty and terror.” Even when championed, he is our pure product.

And you have to admit Sister Carrie has it all. It is about the rise of a fallen woman, and Carrie’s upward quest takes us through low-wage factory jobs, life as the mistress of a traveling salesman, accomplice to theft, life in New York as a chorus girl, strikes, strikebreakers, celebrity and suicide. The novel’s troubled publishing history illustrates how provocative it was for its time. Women who lose their virtue were to be punished or killed. For Dreiser’s publisher, Doubleday, Page & Co., and by extension the American reading public, it was all too much, too much America and bad faith.

The first person to read the novel at Doubleday was Frank Norris, another young realist, who had just published his first novel, McTeague. Norris enthusiastically recommended Sister Carrie for publication. After a senior editor read and liked the book as well, Walter Page sent Dreiser an encouraging note—“we are very much pleased with your novel”—and invited him to a meeting. Dreiser left with the understanding that his novel would be published that fall, in 1900, although no contract was signed. A few weeks later, Frank Doubleday, the senior partner, returned from a European trip and shortly thereafter the firm’s interest began to lag. One story has Doubleday shocked by Sister Carrie’s seamy depiction of urban life. Another holds that Doubleday’s wife strongly objected to the book.

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers on H. L. Mencken and the Harlem Renaissance

Guest blog post by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, author of Mencken: The American Iconoclast and editor of the LOA volumes H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series.

For H. L. Mencken, newspaperman, literary and social critic, editor of the Smart Set and the American Mercury, race was a recurrent and vital theme. As early as 1910, Mencken declared that a discussion of the relation between the races was the most important issue in American life. In his newspaper columns from 1911 to 1913, Mencken expressed his concern about the public health problems of Baltimore’s black population with opinions often more progressive than many of the local reformers. In articles and private letters during the turbulent years of World War I and afterwards, he shared his distress as segregation and lynching increased, African-American publications were suppressed, and black dissidents came under surveillance.

It was during these uncertain times that Mencken became friends with James Weldon Johnson, then writing for New York Age. Johnson wanted to meet the Smart Set editor, saying, “Mencken had made a sharper impression on my mind than any American then writing.” Johnson felt that Mencken’s essays, “The National Letters” and “The Sahara of the Bozart,” had not gone far enough. Taking his cue, Mencken later revised “The Sahara of the Bozart,” and went further, maintaining that the hope for Southern literature and culture lay in the hands of black writers. (These later versions are reprinted in the LOA’s edition of Prejudices). In his columns in the New York Evening Mail, Mencken began exploring the possibility of the Great Negro Novel.

As Charles Scruggs has demonstrated in The Sage in Harlem: H. L. Mencken and the Black Writers of the 1920s, both essays were important clarion calls to black intellectuals. W.E.B. Du Bois joined Johnson in quoting Mencken in the pages of The Crisis, The Messenger, New York Age, and elsewhere. “The Sahara of the Bozart” inspired Walter White to write The Fire in the Flint and it was Mencken who persuaded Alfred A. Knopf to publish White’s book. Behind the scenes, Mencken often championed the work of black authors, and many publicly acknowledged their debt. For young Richard Wright, reading the essays in Mencken’s Prejudices inspired him to become a writer.

John A. Farrell on the testy ties between Clarence Darrow, H. L. Mencken, and Edgar Lee Masters

Guest blog post by John A. Farrell, author of Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

When H. L. Mencken helped convince Clarence Darrow to go to Dayton, Tennessee, and defend biology teacher John Scopes in the 1925 Monkey Trial, the great newspaperman stumbled upon one of Americaʼs most virulent personal feuds.

Mencken was a friend to Darrow. And Mencken was a friend, as well, of Edgar Lee Masters, the poet-lawyer who had achieved great fame for publishing the Spoon River Anthology of poems.

But Darrow and Masters were no friends of each other.

“Iʼll make that son of a bitch the most detestable figure in American history,” Masters had vowed, a few years earlier.

It was not always so. In the early years of the twentieth century, Masters and Darrow had been law partners in Chicago.They were much alike: literary men, defenders of individual liberty, with Jeffersonian political beliefs and a taste for sex and money. “I have never been able to see anything wrong in erotic indulgence,” Masters would recall. “On that subject I was as emancipated as an animal.”

“Sex,” Darrow told a mistress, was “the only feeling in the world that can make you forget for a little while.”

Then came their falling out. Masters became persuaded that Darrow had cheated him of $9,000 of the firmʼs profits. He chewed on the grievance and then, in 1916, at the height of his Spoon River fame, threw the first punch, describing Darrow in a published poem as “A giant as we hoped, in truth a dwarf;/ A barrel of slop that shines on Letheʼs wharf.”

Darrow fumed, but decided that revenge, indeed, was best served cold. He said nothing to Masters, and continued to pose as his former partnerʼs friend— praising his poetry and sending him young female admirers. And when the poetʼs marriage disintegrated (due in part to what Masters dismissed as his “lighthearted adulteries”), Darrow offered to counsel the couple, and settle things amiably.

“Of course you know me well enough to know that I would never . . . try to make you any trouble,” Darrow said.

To his subsequent regret, Masters agreed. Darrow had “waited for a chance to revenge himself” and then “approached me extending his hand with an ingratiating smile,” a rueful Masters would recall. Too late, he discovered that his wife was “in the hands of Darrow, avaricious and sordid.” In the divorce, Masters lost his house, his country home, his children, and his fortune.

When Darrow announced that he would go to Dayton, to clash with prosecutor William Jennings Bryan and defend Scopes for teaching evolution in a public school biology class there, Masters dashed off a letter to Mencken:

You will find that Darrow is not the man to fight Bryan. I have seen Darrow perform. . . . He must have the stage set, a complaisant judge or a fixed jury to be bold and even there his forte is a speech, such as it is. He fails in cross examination due to his lack of concentration, patience, sequences of plan, pugnacity and will. I have seen Darrow quit cold more than once where he could see that it meant labor to fight, and where the publicity was doubtful, or adverse. In a word, he lacks character.

Mencken didnʼt disagree, but in his reply to Masters, he suggested that Darrowʼs flaws were irrelevant. “The way to handle it is to convert it into a headlong assault upon Bryan,” he wrote.

That Darrow did, in his famous showdown with Bryan, a three-time Democratic presidential nominee and former Secretary of State, later immortalized in the play and film Inherit the Wind.

The showdown was “inconceivably dramatic: two ancient warlocks brought jaw to jaw at last,” Mencken wrote. “It was superb to see Darrow throw out his webs, lay his foundations, prepare his baits. His virtuosity never failed. In the end Bryan staggered to the block and took that last appalling clout. It was delivered calmly, deliberately, beautifully. Bryan was killed as plainly as if he had been felled with an axe. He rolled into the sawdust a comic obscenity.”

Even Masters was impressed. “At last Darrow has his hour,” he wrote a friend. “He is a grey-eyed infidel, and all his life he has been talking this stuff; now he can empty his mind of it on a good occasion.”

Mencken continued in his somewhat awkward role as friend to the two feuding lawyers. He found himself in the middle, again, when Darrow chaired a special review board, appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to evaluate the National Recovery Administration, a key element in the New Deal.

Darrow had endorsed FDR, and the White House staff thought he was a safe choice. Masters strove to warn them.

His old antagonist had spent a lifetime “winding serpent-like where there was food, and winding safely away when there was danger,” Masters wrote the White House. “Money and publicity have been his life objects and to get them he has sacrificed parties and friends and principles all along."

“I do not refer to Darrowʼs malodorous career, to his indictment for jury bribing in California, nor to his dubious reputation as a lawyer in Chicago, but rather to his insidious and subtle faculty of playing fast and loose with labor and capital,” said Masters. If FDR allowed Darrow “inside the breastworks,” he was sure to turn and “fang” the president.

Mencken tried to reassure Masters. The White House knew what it was doing, he wrote. Darrow was just an old pussycat, entranced by the “catnip” of the press.

But Masters knew his man. The reports released by Darrowʼs review board in 1934 scored the NRA for favoring big industry over small business and consumers. FDR swiftly, and unceremoniously, cut Darrow loose.

“I hear from Washington that Darrow is wandering around in a fog, scarcely knowing where he is at or what he is doing,” Mencken wrote to Masters. “His report will take its place among the comic documents of all time. When it came in the Brain Trust boys threw back their ears and howled with delight.”

That was the White House spin. But Congress listened to the Darrow board, and so perhaps did the Supreme Court. In the spring of 1935, a year after Darrowʼs report, the court ruled unanimously that the NRA represented an unconstitutional excess of federal power.

Darrowʼs death, in 1938, failed to placate Masters.

“They will try to get a bust of him and make him an heir of fame, but what he did in life, his dishonesty and his treachery and his selfish grabbing and living will seep up from the grass of any pedestal and fill the circumambient air with feculence,” Masters told a friend.

Mencken was more generous. He hailed the “Gladiator of the Law” in the Baltimore Evening Sun. “In his private life and philosophy he was singularly gentle and even sentimental, but when he enlisted for a cause he was a terror,” Mencken wrote. “It was to his credit that he was most often a terror to quacks and dolts, hypocrites and scoundrels.”

Also of interest:

• James Weldon Johnson hires Clarence Darrow for the landmark 1925 Sweet murder trial, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• H. L. Mencken and Sara Haardt tie the knot, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• H. L. Mencken on “The Nature of Liberty,” a previous Story of the Week

Related LOA works: H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series (boxed set); American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, volume one: Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker (includes twenty-four poems from Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology)

Looking back: The most popular Story of the Week selections and Reader’s Almanac posts

The beginning of the year prompts moments of reflection. Looking back on 2010 The Library of America has been heartened by the warm reception readers gave to two of the year’s initiatives. In January LOA launched Story of the Week to a base of thirty thousand subscribers. That number is now approaching seventy thousand and increasing every week.

The swelling numbers may account for the most popular stories occurring in the past five months. What else connects them? We’ll leave that to you, although watching thousands of readers vault a lesser-known gem like "The Little Room" to the #2 spot makes us think "a good yarn” is as good a guess as any.

1. “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” Mark Twain – week of November 22
2. “The Little Room,” Madeline Yale Wynne – October 18
3. “The Train,” Flannery O’Connor – October 4
4. “I’ll Be Waiting,” Raymond Chandler – December 6
5. “The Nature of Liberty,” H. L. Mencken  – September 6

In July LOA launched the Reader’s Almanac with daily posts seeking the “enduring” in American literature. The most popular posts often surprised us by spiking traffic five to seven times the average volume. Finding a pattern among them is a bit of a puzzle. Who knew so many readers would find sales data so interesting? Or a decades-old video of ethnographic research? Or an anonymous rejection letter?

1. The Best-Selling Titles in The Library of America’s First Three Decades – January 3, 2011
2. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan: Desolation Angels led to “Desolation Row” – October 21, 2010
3. Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita first published in the U.S. 52 years ago – August 18, 2010
4. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and How to Sell a Banned Book – September 29, 2010
5. Zora Neale Hurston: Video of her ethnographic work in Florida in 1928 – July 26, 2010

We know that no one would get a greater kick over his appearance on both lists than Mark Twain, this year’s most beguiling best-selling author, but he probably would have expected no less.

H. L. Mencken, Adlai Stevenson on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Seven score and seven years ago today Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. In The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now numerous writers uncover new meanings in Lincoln's spare 271 words. Here are two contrasting examples:

H. L. Mencken was determined to separate meaning from the myth:

The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and most famous oration in American history. . . Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in the whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous.

But let us not forget that it is oratory, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of everyday! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—“that government of the people, by the people, for the people,” should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into the battle an absolutely free people; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and vote of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that vote was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely any freedom at all. Am I the first American to note the fundamental nonsensicality of the Gettysburg address? If so, I plead my aesthetic joy in it in amelioration of the sacrilege.

Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, at a ceremony marking the 88th anniversary of the address, discerns Lincoln's awareness of the world-historical moment:

Lincoln saw the war in its global dimensions. . . As Lincoln saw it, the Confederate states had rejected two fundamental precepts of democracy. First, in refusing to accept him as their President and making his election their justification for withdrawing from the Union, they had violated the first rule of democratic government, the obligation of a minority to abide by the result of an election. . . 

Second, in making slavery the foundation stone of their new government, the Confederacy was renouncing the doctrine of the equal rights of man in favor of the creed of the master race, an idea that Lincoln abhorred. . . . 

When we realize that Lincoln saw the dissolution of the Union as a threat to democratic aspirations throughout the world, his words at Gettysburg become more meaningful. Chancellorsville, Antietam, Chickamauga and Gettysburg were deciding more than the fate of these United States. Americans were dying for the new, revolutionary idea of the free man, even as they had died at Bunker Hill and Yorktown. They were dying to save the hopes of all people everywhere.

Of related interest:

• Joshua Zeitz of American Heritage on “The Radicalism of the Gettysburg Address”
• Listen to the Gettysburg Address read by Sam Waterston, Ken Burns, and others
• The Gettysburg Address exhibit at The Library of Congress

Related LOA works: The Lincoln Bicentennial Collection (3-book boxed set); H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series (2-book boxed set)

Eugene O’Neill and George Jean Nathan: transforming American theater together

It seems uncanny that the careers of a critic and a playwright could have been as inextricably entwined as were those of George Jean Nathan and Eugene O'Neill (whose birthday is today, October 16). As co-editor and drama critic of The Smart Set, Nathan was seeking to publish the new voices of post-World War I America. Their paths crossed in May 1917 when O’Neill submitted three of his “fo’c’sle” plays to H. L. Mencken, Nathan’s co-editor:

I have never seen anything of this kind in The Smart Set and I have small hope of it being the type of material you desire. But I do hope, and hope it strongly, that you will read them. I want these plays, which to me are real, to pass through your acid test because I know your acid is “good medicine.”

Mencken read them, wrote O’Neill he liked them, and forwarded them to Nathan, who decided to publish all three: The Long Voyage Home (October 1917), Ile (May 1918), and The Moon of the Caribees (August 1918). “That was my first ray of recognition,” O’Neill later said.

O’Neill and Nathan didn’t actually meet until May 1919, as O’Neill would recollect:

I can’t for the life of me recall much about my first meeting with Nathan. It was with John D. Williams at some restaurant, I believe, and I was three-fourths “blotto.” . . . The second meeting was at the Royalton at his apartment, and I still have a letter written by Nathan a few days later in which he speaks of being gratified at discovering that I was as proficient at drinking cocktails as at concocting dramas.

For the next three decades they met, talked, and continually corresponded: O’Neill sending Nathan scripts and Nathan responding with detailed critiques, which O’Neill claimed to value but rarely followed. In 1920 Nathan was instrumental in bringing O’Neill’s full-length play Beyond the Horizon to the attention of Broadway producer Williams. In a “thank you” letter O’Neill calls Nathan the play’s “godfather.” Beyond the Horizon would win O’Neill his first Pulitzer Prize. Nathan’s support for O’Neill’s first and only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, in 1933 led him to dedicate the play to Nathan.

O’Neill fell out of favor in the 1940s as years passed without him producing a new play. When he returned in 1946 with The Iceman Cometh, the reception was cool, except for Nathan. His 1947 review begins:

The Iceman Cometh . . . makes most of the plays of other American playwrights produced during the more than twelve-year period of O’Neill’s absence look comparatively like so much damp tissue paper. . . It is, in short, one of the best of its author’s works and one that again firmly secures his position not only as the first of American dramatists but, with Shaw and O’Casey, one of the three really distinguished among the world’s living.

The Iceman Cometh would be the last new work of O’Neill’s produced in his lifetime.

Of related interest:

• Read more about the legendary ten-year literary partnership between H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan in a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Rebecca Hill recently blogged about her visit to O’Neill’s Tao House, which is also featured in American Writers at Home
• The Electronic Eugene O’Neill archive is a trove of information about O’Neill’s works
• Raymond Owen recently blogged about George Jean Nathan and the movies

Related LOA works: Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays; The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner (includes Nathan’s complete review of The Iceman Cometh)

H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan: A Legendary Ten-Year Literary Partnership

Today many Baltimore residents will be celebrating Mencken Day, in honor of the 130th birthday of one of their most famous residents—as they do each year on the Saturday before September 12, the date of his birth in the city he lived in until his death. In commemoration of the festivities, it seems only fit to recall the friendship that launched his career.

George Jean Nathan first met H. L. Mencken when they were interviewed together in the New York offices of The Smart Set in May 1908. Mencken was twenty-eight, Nathan, twenty-six. Thomas Quinn Curtiss describes the scene in The Smart Set: George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken:

When Nathan arrived in [Norman] Boyer’s office he found the managing editor chatting with a cherub-faced, snub-nosed young man whose golden hair was parted in the middle and slapped down like a butcher’s on Sunday morning. The stranger’s clothes—a stiff, starched collar, gaudy strawberry tie, checkered suit, and yellow shoes—typified a provincial dandy or race-track tout.

On seeing Nathan the man leapt to his feet and thrust out his hand. “I’m H. L. Mencken of Baltimore,” he exclaimed, his bright, blue eyes sparkling. “I’m the biggest damned fool in Christendom and I don’t want any boastful reply that you claim the honor.”

By the fall of that year Mencken would be The Smart Set’s literary critic and Nathan its drama critic. So began one of the great literary partnerships of the twentieth century. The Smart Set had a limited budget—it paid just one cent a word—and so specialized in discovering new writers. Mencken and Nathan quickly proved such popular and prolific contributors that when new owners took over the magazine in 1914 they offered the editor position to Nathan. He agreed, “but only if Mencken comes with me.” Nathan became the senior partner, Mencken his co-editor. Together they relaunched The Smart Set, promising “to give its readers a moderately intelligent and awfully good time.”

Each issue featured some twenty short stories, ten poems, four articles, a novelette, and a play. If Mencken and Nathan couldn’t sign enough stories in time for publication they included anonymous contributions of their own under pen names. Edmund Wilson would later describe what The Smart Set meant to him as a youth:

In the spring of 1912, just before graduating from prep school, I somehow happened to pick up a copy of The Smart Set, a trashy-looking monthly, and was astonished to find audacious and extremely amusing critical articles by men named Mencken and Nathan, of whom I had never heard. I continued to read The Smart Set through college, at first with a slight feeling of guilt, for it was making fun of everything respectable in current American drama and literature.

From 1914 to 1923 Mencken and Nathan would use the magazine to publish the newest voices in American literature: Willa Cather, W.E.B. Du Bois, F. Scott Fitzgerald (Nathan paid him thirty dollars for his first published story), Dashiell Hammett, Sinclair Lewis, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Ezra Pound, and many more.

Mencken and Nathan developed a clear division of labor: Nathan did all the office editorial work, copyediting, and the layout of the magazine. Mencken’s job was to “keep on the lookout for good stuff.” As Marion Elizabeth Rodgers describes their working relationship in Mencken: The American Iconoclast:

Each Monday and Friday for nine years, Nathan carefully tied brown paper packets containing Smart Set manuscripts and sent them to Mencken in Baltimore. If Mencken found one he liked, he marked it “Yes” and returned it to Nathan. If Nathan liked it too, it was set in type at once, and the author’s check went out at the end of the week. If Mencken dissented, the manuscript was returned. The procedure also worked in reverse order, Mencken to Nathan. No time was wasted on discussion of manuscripts although brief written comments sometimes were included. The “No” of either was final. “The plan was so simple and so practicable that we often wondered that no other editors had ever thought of it,” commented Mencken.

It was a partnership that shouldn’t have worked. As Rodgers points out, “No two men could possibly have been more unlike in style and thought. ‘Nathan detests philosophical questions,’ Mencken said. ‘He sees life purely as an idiotic spectacle. I delight in such questions, though I reject all solutions. Nathan aims at a very complex style. I aim at the greatest possible lucidity.’”

What they shared was a passion for discovering, nurturing, and publishing the work of new American writers, for enjoying humor, and for attacking sacred cows. They also complemented each other: Mencken refused to move to New York; Nathan was very much the Manhattan man about town. Joseph L. Mankiewicz based the character of the acid-tongued ladies’ man and theater critic Addison DeWitt in All about Eve on Nathan. By the 1920s they had become such intimidating arbiters of taste that a popular ditty “Mencken, Nathan and God” satirized their stature.

“Nathan and I never took the magazine seriously,” Mencken later wrote—and it was their irreverent attitude that would prove their undoing. Having lampooned President Warren G. Harding during his presidency, they saw no reason to stop after his death in August 1923. When the printer brought their satiric parody of Harding’s funeral procession to the attention of the magazine’s conservative publisher, he exploded and declared the magazine for sale.

But Nathan and Mencken had been eager to start a magazine of their own. In 1924 they joined with young publisher Alfred Knopf to revolutionize magazine publishing with the launch of The American Mercury. Unlike The Smart Set, which was printed on cheap grade paper, the new magazine was handsome and in a larger format with no illustrations; the paper was imported Scotch featherweight, the binding sewn so that it opened flat like a book. And it didn’t just include stories, poems, and reviews: there were extended profiles of world figures, an entire section on “Arts and Sciences” with essays on medicine, architecture, and language. Although priced higher than its competitors at fifty cents, the first printing of ten thousand copies quickly sold out. By the end of the year the circulation was over 42,000; it peaked at 84,000 in 1928.

Authors flocked to the new magazine and liked what they found. James Branch Cabell explains why: “[Mencken] gives immediate attention to your manuscript, pays spot cash, encloses a return stamped envelope with the proofs and gives you second serial rights without asking.” Many of the innovations introduced by The American Mercury—extended profiles, aphorisms in the margins, and “Americana,” amusing items gleaned from newspapers and magazines across the country—soon became staples of magazine publishing.

Unfortunately, shortly after the magazine’s launch the clear division of labor Mencken and Nathan had cultivated started to unravel. Mencken wanted more social and political coverage; Nathan an equal balance of literature and the arts. More to the point, Nathan no longer cared to handle the editorial office chores. “The Smart Set was fun,” he complained. “The Mercury was a job.” Nathan resigned as co-editor but continued to contribute, come to the office, and retain his stock and seat on the board of directors. This infuriated Mencken such that he took Nathan’s name off the building’s lobby directory and had his desk moved out among the stenographers.

Yet, like a latter-day Bartleby, Nathan continued to come to work. Nathan’s behavior mystified friends and colleagues. Alfred Knopf speculated that Nathan needed Mencken more than Mencken needed Nathan. “After all,” Knopf wrote, “ the theater and H.L.M. were, I think, the two great experiences of his life.” Knopf would eventually buy out Nathan’s share in the magazine for $25,000. The stock market crash a few years later wiped out the value of the remaining stock and, Knopf later acknowledged, Nathan “was the only one to get any cash out of the magazine.”

Mencken continued as editor on The American Mercury until 1933 and Nathan continued to contribute articles until 1930. Despite their differences the friendship continued until 1932 when Mencken read the manuscript of Nathan’s memoirs. He found the chapter on him “full of malice” and errors. Even though Nathan apologized and excised all the offensive material from the published book, Mencken was adamant: “I am through with him.”

Read the Library of America interview with Marion Elizabeth Rodgers about H. L. Mencken (PDF)

Read “The Nature of Liberty” by H. L. Mencken (Story of the Week)

Read “Baiting the Umpire” by George Jean Nathan (Story of the Week)

Listen to a rare interview with H. L. Mencken (YouTube, in four parts)

Related LOA works: H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series (includes Mencken’s essay “George Jean Nathan”); The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner (includes three essays by George Jean Nathan: “The Audience Emotion,” “On Vaudeville,” “Eugene O’Neill”)

H. L. Mencken and Sara Haardt: “America’s foremost bachelor” tied the knot eighty years ago today

How ironic that H. L. Mencken should first meet Sara Haardt in 1923 at Baltimore’s Goucher College when he delivered a lecture on “How to Get a Husband.” Haardt was then a 24-year-old English professor at the women’s college, the youngest on the faculty, and Mencken eighteen years her senior. “Call me a liar if you will,” Mencken would write to a friend the day after the lecture, “but last night I lectured at Goucher College and discerned no less than 27 appetitizing [sic] cuties in the audience. It greatly astonished me; I always thought education ruined the complexion.” Mencken doesn’t mention that during a dinner party following the lecture he discovered that Haardt was an aspiring writer and asked her to send him some of her short stories. Haardt confessed that she had been submitting stories to The Smart Set, the magazine Mencken edited, since she had been “big enough to lift a stamp.”

So began the love affair of Mencken’s life. The world knew Mencken as a confirmed and outspoken bachelor. “Bachelors know more about women than married men,” he famously wrote. “If they didn’t, they’d be married too.” And on another occasion: “If I ever marry, it will be on sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself.” But Mencken’s quips didn’t anticipate the tenacity and charm of the young writer from Montgomery, Alabama. As Marion Elizabeth Rodgers recounts in Mencken: The American Iconoclast, shortly after their first meeting Haardt confided to a faculty friend, “I’m going to marry that man!” Rodgers provides a striking portrait of Haardt:

A contemporary wrote that from across a crowded room Sara looked “alarmingly beautiful: oval face full of magnolia blossom texture, fine features framed in dark curls, luminous almond-shaped eyes, full sensuous mouth”; a graceful figure with a soft cheesecake-y form that James Cain admired, and “well dressed in a quiet, tasteful way.” As for her voice, it was low like that of her childhood friend Tallulah Bankhead, gently Southern, as another put it, “without a trace of cawn pone.” Sometimes Sarah’s voice could verge on a growl when she said what she thought of people . . . “she had plenty of wit,” according to Cain, “of a smoldering, ironical kind,” accompanied by a throaty laugh.

Their courtship would last seven years, much of it conducted through letters. The seven hundred letters they exchanged during their twelve years together are collected in Mencken & Sara: A Life in Letters, edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers. The first letter occurred shortly after their first meeting in May, 1923, the last a few days before Haardt’s early death of tuberculosis on May 31, 1935. While we might characterize their correspondence as “love letters,” what they reveal is their growing discovery of each other’s intelligence, wit and culture, or as Rodgers puts it, “In this almond-eyed, delicate woman, Mencken was to find a soulmate.”

The actual marriage ceremony was brief. Mencken considered weddings “barbaric rites.” They moved the wedding date up a week from September 3 to August 27 to avoid the press, and only ten guests and one photographer joined them at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church for the event. It wasn’t until their train reached Halifax and their honeymoon began that the couple relaxed. “It is a grand experience to be able to look a hotel detective in the eye,” wrote Mencken to his close friend George Jean Nathan.

In her brief life Sara Haardt would write forty short stories and two short novels. Her death would interrupt her work on her most ambitious project, The Plantation, a “novel she hoped would provide,” in Rodgers’s words, “a greater understanding of the traditional Southern order and its effect upon those confined within it.” Mencken had edited and published several of her stories and he wrote the introduction to a collection of seventeen of her stories, Southern Album, he published after her death.

Mencken’s diary reveals just how much his wife’s last days and death affected him. There is barely a mention of her in 1935—only one entry for the entire year after May 31—and just a handful in 1936. It is not until the fifth anniversary of her death, on May 31, 1940, that Mencken addresses in detail his wife’s illness and death, his feelings for her, and what their life together meant to him. What follows is but a short excerpt from that entry in The Diary of H. L. Mencken, edited by Charles A. Fecher:

Sarah is dead five years today—a longer time than the time of our marriage, which lasted four years and nine months. It is amazing what a deep mark she left upon my life—and yet, after all, it is not amazing at all, for a happy marriage throws out numerous and powerful tentacles. They may loosen with years and habit, but when a marriage ends at the height of its success they endure. It is a literal fact that I still think of Sarah every day of my life, and almost every hour of the day. . . . Marriage is largely talk, and I still recall clearly the long palavers we used to have. . . . We had plenty to talk of. I talked out my projects to her, and she talked out hers with me. I don’t think we ever bored each other. I know that, for my part, the last days of that gabbling were as stimulating as the first. . . . I have never known a more rational woman, nor another half so charming. . . Thinking of her, I can well understand the great human yearning that makes for a belief in immortality, but I do not believe in it, and neither did she. . . I’ll have her in mind until thought and memory adjourn, but that is all. Whether or not it is better so I do not know, but there is the fact as I see it. We were happy together, but all beautiful things must end.

Read the exclusive LOA interview with Marion Elizabeth Rodgers about H. L. Mencken.
Related LOA works: H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series

How tripping over a box of love letters turned Marion Elizabeth Rodgers into H. L. Mencken’s biographer

In September, The Library of America is publishing in two volumes H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series, the six books of pungent prose Mencken published between 1919 and 1927 under the rubric Prejudices. The LOA edition is edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, author of the acclaimed biography, Mencken: The American Iconoclast, The Life and Times of the Bad Boy of Baltimore, which Charles Fecher, editor of The Diary of H. L. Mencken, hailed as “a definitive biography.”

In an exclusive interview (PDF) for today's Library of America e-Newsletter, Rodgers talks about the dazzling range of subjects found in Prejudices, the complex and mercurial writer behind them, and the accident that brought her and Mencken together:

My real introduction to Mencken was shortly before my graduation from Goucher College, in 1981, while I was researching the papers of Southern writer and alumna Sara Haardt, whom Mencken had married, thereby shattering his reputation as “America’s Foremost Bachelor.” I was putting away one of her scrapbooks in the vault of the library when I literally tripped over a box of love letters between her and Mencken. Taped to the top of the collection was a stern command, written by Mencken, that it was not to be opened until that very year. To say that my life changed at that moment would be an understatement. Suddenly, a door was swung open into Mencken’s life through the tender route of romantic correspondence. In those days my dream was to go to graduate school and write (yet another!) dull thesis on T. S. Eliot. Instead, I focused my degree on the Mencken/Haardt collection, promptly received a book contract, and became hooked. During the two decades since 1981, Mencken has pulled me through many adventures, both professional and personal, that included my editing several volumes of his work and culminated in my biography.

Haardt is still largely remembered for her relationship with Mencken (who was eighteen years her senior), but she was an author and critic in her own right, writing over fifty stories during her short life. After her marriage to Mencken in 1930, Haardt published her only novel, The Making of a Lady (1931); her story "Absolutely Perfect" was nominated for the O. Henry Prize in 1933. She died of meningitis in 1935, and the following year Mencken published a selection of her stories as Southern Album.

Related LOA works: H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series; American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes (includes Mencken on hot dogs and the “Home of the Crab”)

H. L. Mencken and the history of bathtubs: “Harmless fun in war days”

In “A Neglected Anniversary” (New York Evening Mail, December 28, 1917), H. L. Mencken took just 1,800 words to perpetrate a hoax on his wartime readers that continued to be cited as fact as late as 2008 (in a Kia television ad). Even The Washington Post fell for it less than a decade ago. Frank Lee MeiDere recounts the history of “The Great Bathtub Hoax of H. L. Mencken,” whose famous prank begins:

On December 20 there flitted past us, absolutely without public notice, one of the most important profane anniversaries in American history, to wit, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the introduction of the bathtub into These States. Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer. Not a newspaper called attention to the day.

Related LOA works: H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series