Mencken:The American Iconoclast by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

Author:Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2005-11-01T04:30:00+00:00

IT WAS NOT ONLY VIRGINIA who suspected that in many ways Sara took charge of Mencken’s life. For all of Mencken’s protests against reform, many of his old friends resented the manner in which they thought Sara was trying to change her husband. In some ways her influence was for the good. She helped him see the merit in Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and caused him to view the work of other Southern authors. She may have prodded him to publish several stories by William Faulkner in the American Mercury. Her friendship with Ellen Glasgow altered his opinion of Barren Ground. This novel, which he had described in 1925 as “being somehow weak in its legs,” he now placed among her best books.

On the other hand, James Cain believed that it may have been due to Sara that her husband broke off with some of his closest friends. His version was somewhat at variance with the view of Sara as soft and feminine. “She had a catty gift, she could see through people magnificently,” he recalled. “Sara must always be regarded as the real whisperer into his ear. Of course, she really didn’t whisper, she was very slam bang in her estimates of people, very given to salty expressions which must have caught his ear, as a lot of them began creeping into his own copy. And of course there was just enough truth in her cracks and enough indication of reality with enough proof to warrant the attention he paid them. She wasn’t unkind, but perhaps she was malicious.” Ruth Goodman also recognized that “beneath her soft manner there lay some malice, much intelligence, and a certain ferocity.”4

Sara could not abide particular members of the Saturday Night Club. “It is easy to understand how so completely feminine, not to say delicate, a person like Sara would find it difficult to adjust herself to great hulking males like Raymond Pearl, or that deliberate vulgarian Heine Buchholz,” observed Hamilton Owens, in whom Sara confided after her marriage. She felt Hamilton understood her better than most of the hearty, rather rough acquaintances who surrounded her husband. Owens recalled that on one occasion he met her for lunch and she bluntly announced, “I want to get rid of some of Henry’s friends.” He asked her which one in particular. She was boiling. She said, “Raymond Pearl, in particular. He is, to me, an insufferable human being.”

When it came to separating Mencken from Pearl, James Cain noted, “Sara began having an ascendance over him that seems most remarkable considering how headstrong he was.” Except for Paul Patterson, Raymond Pearl was the most intimate of Mencken’s Baltimore associates. Six foot three with a shock of black hair, Pearl cut an imposing and charismatic figure. Wherever he went, he infected his associates with his own indomitable zeal.

Raymond Pearl was chief statistician at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, and professor of biology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Characterizing himself

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