My Life as Author and Editor by H.L. Mencken

Author:H.L. Mencken [Mencken, H. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80888-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

1. A history of the Baltimore Sunpapers by Gerald W. Johnson, Frank R. Kent, Hamilton Owens and Mencken, and published in 1937.

1. See Appendix I.

2. See Appendix II.

3. See Appendix III.

1. Speaker of the House of Representatives, 1911–19.

T WAS THROUGH John Williams that Nathan and I met Philip Goodman, who was to publish two books for each of us in 1918. This was some time in the latter half of 1917, and Goodman and I became friends almost immediately, and remained so until the shattering impact of Hitler made him turn Jewish on me, but he and Nathan were somewhat less sympathetic, and before the end of 1918 had quarreled. Nathan also had a distrust of Willard H. Wright, born of some forgotten disagreement over Europe After 8.15, and often warned me to be wary of him. There were, to be sure, certain traits in Wright that I did not like—for example, he was a monumental liar—but on most of the matters that interested me during the early war years his ideas and mine were substantially identical, so I got on with him well enough. I had been in friendly communication with him since 1909, and, as I have related, had got him the job of editor of the Smart Set. Two years before this, on the death of Percival Pollard, I had suggested to Charles Bohm, managing editor of Town Topics, that he be made Pollard’s successor as book reviewer, and after a little delay this was done. I also induced Norman Boyer to invite him to contribute to the “Pertinent and Impertinent” department in the Smart Set, signed Owen Hatteras: this was in 1912.

When he came to New York, early in 1913, to become editor of the magazine, he left his wife and daughter in Los Angeles and set up a somewhat bawdy bachelor apartment in 45th Street, a few doors west of Fifth Avenue. There he lived with various women and staged many parties, all of which I attended when I happened to be in New York. Wright, in those days, was an extremely amusing fellow and full of ambitious writing plans. He published What Nietzsche Taught in 1914, Modern Painting in 1915, The Man of Promise and Modern American Painters in 1916, and Misinforming a Nation and Informing a Nation in 1917. I could not follow him into his liking for what has since come to be known as Modernist painting, but his taste in music was orthodox and impeccable, and he read widely and to much profit.

After trying polygamy for a year or so he settled down with Claire Burke, and when Thayer fired him at the beginning of 1914, and he made a mess of an effort to follow Franklin P. Adams as columnist for the New York Evening Mail, he went abroad with her, and they lived in Paris until the outbreak of World War I drove them home. During the terminal stages of the row between Wright and Thayer both of them sought my counsel, and as a result I had an unpleasant time of it.

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