The Sailors Say Brainy, You're a Feynman; McCarthyissom; By Hook or by Brooks; The Mighty Quill, &c.
The Table of Contents alone from the second edition (arguably preferable to the two other editions from 1961 and 1970 bookending it) of one of my favorite essay collections, The Open Form: Essays for Our Time, edited by Alfred Kazin and my lunchtime companion for a time thanks to a c. 1990 thrift store or Friends of the Library sale, provides the latest entry in my nomination of 1965 as the annus mirabilis of postwar Anglo-American kultur both pop and high-journalist; my favorite entry might well be James Agee's celebrated essay for LIFE on the golden age of silent-movie comedy
:Adolescence: self-definition and conflict / Edgar Z. Friedenberg --The sealed treasure / Saul Bellow --America and art / Louis Kronenberger --The two cultures / C.P. Snow --The illusion of the two cultures / Loren Eiseley --Cape Cod / John Hay --Dialogues as recorded by Lucien Price / Alfred North Whitehead --The patience of Shakespeare / Frank Kermode --Why the novel matters / D.H. Lawrence --Walt Whitman: he had his nerve / Randall Jarrell --Huckleberry Finn / Lionel Trilling --Moby-Dick / Alfred Kazin --London / V.S. Pritchett --The old stone house / Edmund Wilson --A fresh appraisal of the Civil War / D.W. Brogan --The irony of Southern history / C. Vann Woodward --Dunkirk / Winston Churchill --The dictator / Alan Bullock --A young entomologist in old Russia / Vladimir Nabokov --91 Revere Street / Robert Lowell --Boston: the lost ideal / Elizabeth Hardwick --If a slicker meet a slicker / S.J. Perelman --Notes of a native son / James Baldwin --Goodbye to all that / Robert Graves --A hanging / George Orwell --Comedy's greatest era / James Agee --What I believe / E.M. Forster --Beyond nihilism / Michael Polanyi.
To celebrate its fiftieth anniversary across 2013, the NYRoB will reprint extracts from some of its signature essays, starting in its issue for January 10 with "Dejeuner sur l’Herbe", Mary McCarthy's review of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, which ran in its inaugural issue of February 1, 1963 -
and also in Encounter for April of that year. The money quote, as it were:
The libertarian position usually has as one of its axioms a love of Nature and the natural, that is, of the life-principle itself, commonly identified with sex. But there is little overt love of the life-principle in The Naked Lunch, and sex, while magnified—a common trait of homosexual literature—is a kind of mechanical mantrap baited with fresh meat. The sexual climax, the jet of sperm, accompanied by a whistling scream, is often a death spasm, and the “perfect” orgasm would seem to be the posthumous orgasm of the hanged man, shooting his jissom into pure space.
Crème dement, and Does Al Cyone Really Know What Time It Is?: From David Brooks, "The Sidney Awards I", the first half of the NYT Beltway Burke's annual two-column parade, named for the social philosopher Sidney Hook, of his favorite magazine whisker-twirlers for the year:
People used to die quickly, but now more do so slowly. There are more than five million Americans with dementia. By 2050, 15 million Americans will be demented at an annual cost somewhere north of $1 trillion.
- Al Cyone
- NY
... I have to say that when I read that "15 million Americans will be demented at an annual cost somewhere north of $1 trillion", I couldn't help but think of calculating the cost of "dementing" just one person.
From "Thus Spake Henry", a 2003 retrospect on H.L. Mencken by Russell Baker:
Of all [Baltimore's] human monuments ... the two most cherished have long been Babe Ruth and Henry Louis Mencken. Babe Ruth was one of those rare American men of the people—Al Capone was another—whose name resounded beyond the oceans. During World War II, Japanese soldiers seeking to demoralize American Marines shouted, "To hell with Babe Ruth!" Baltimore took pride in having begot him.
And yet its heart belonged to Mencken. This was probably because Mencken never left Baltimore. Babe Ruth went to New York and didn't come back. Deep down, he was a cosmopolitan, at home wherever the beer was good and the women compliant. He was from Baltimore but not of it. By contrast, Mencken went to New York too, but never let it turn his head. Mencken was a hometown booster as hard-core middle-class as any prairie Rotarian extolling the wonders of his native ground.
... As [Mencken's 2002 biographer Terry] Teachout suggests, the middle-class solidity of his personal character would have seemed bizarre to his legions of admirers in the century's early years. To a generation that came of age between 1900 and the stock market crash and fancied itself enlightened, he was the fool killer smiting the "imbecilities" of a dying past with the most gloriously devastating language ever sent to battle against ignorance. Yet if the fact was known at all, it was universally overlooked that an old-fashioned homebody lay purring behind all that ferocious prose.
... What is odd about [Mencken's] writing is its uniquely baroque quality in an age when American prose writers were moving toward plainness and understatement. Hemingway's and Fitzgerald's writings were filled with silences. A Mencken piece was filled with storm and clatter, with roars of outrage and insulting invective enriched with rare and astonishing five-dollar words, possibly with a few German jawbreakers thrown in. It was absolutely beyond imitating. Part of its strength, as Teachout notes, is that it was perfected in newsrooms ... Here, as in much else, Mencken is rushing political journalism toward art, and the effect is exhilarating.
In Black Boy, Richard Wright speaks of this feeling when first reading Mencken's prose in 1937:I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences.... He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club.... It frightened me. I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.... he ... roar[ed] with fury about the lynching of a black man on Maryland's Eastern Shore. In an Evening Sun column he accuses the people on the shore of staging "a public obscenity worthy of cannibals," and calls Salisbury, scene of the lynching, an "Alsatia of morons" and "low-grade political hacks who flourish in such swamps." Noting that the victim's toes were cut off, he writes,No doubt they now adorn the parlor mantel piece of some humble and public-spirited Salisbury home, between the engrossed seashell from Ocean City and the family Peruna bottle.
... Sara [Haardt, a southern writer and professor] was already very ill when she married [the fifty-year-old Mencken in 1930], terminally ill as soon became clear, and destined to die after only five years of marriage. Mencken's diary of the 1930s, so depressing in so many passages, contains a beautiful passage about his love for Sara, conveying with great power how shattered he had been by her death:
May 30, 1945Sara will be dead ten years tomorrow. It seems a long, long while, yet she still remains living to me, and seldom a waking hour passes that I do not think of her....I went out to Loudon Park Cemetery this morning to visit her grave—my first trip there since Christmas. I laid some white carnations over the place where her ashes are buried.... They were very charming, and they seemed to me to be somehow more fitting than anything formal. I go to the cemetery so seldom because I can't get rid of the feeling that it is a banality. I need no such reminder to make me remember her. I shall not forget her. My days with her made a beautiful episode in my life, perhaps the only one that deserves to be called romantic.... I think of her with tenderness and a kind of longing.... When I think of her, it is as she was in her days of rela-tive good health, when she was gay, and amusing, and infinitely charming.
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