RECENTLY I’ve been thinking about someone whose name is attached to an organization I’m currently president of, H.L. Mencken (1880-1956). For years I’ve tried to understand why the Baltimore Sage has been branded, mostly recently in The Weekly Standard (see here and here) and in a voluminous biography by Terry Teachout, as anti-Semitic and anti-Black. The closest I could come to documenting these charges is that Mencken joked in his diary about the bad table manners of an obviously Jewish diner in a club that he frequented. He also said in a moment of levity that “an anti-Semite is someone who dislikes Jews more than is absolutely necessary.” This, as everybody who knew him was aware of, was a quip that Murray Rothbard was fond of repeating.

As for Mencken’s supposed revulsion for Blacks, I can’t find any evidence of it, although he may not have used “African-American,” or whatever is the now fashionable PC term in referring to the minority in question. We know that Mencken criticized segregation in his native city of Baltimore. He also never tired of attacking lower class White Southerners of the kind who wanted to keep Blacks segregated. Indeed if I were going after Mencken for his intolerance, I would have to notice his invectives against Southern Fundamentalists rather than his scattered, insignificant jokes about Jews and Blacks. That said, however, White Southerners don’t count as victims in their own eyes or in anyone else’s. In fact their politicians and journalists seem quite happy to view them as onetime racial victimizers, who were redeemed by civil rights legislation.

In any case, it seems to me that the recent attacks on Mencken have nothing to do with his prejudices. Liberals and neocons hate him for taking stands that don’t have much to do with the accusations made against him. One, Mencken opposed America’s entry into both World Wars, and during the First World War, he was expressly pro-German. (He was after all a German-American.) His predilection for the Central Powers in 1914 elicited a bitter tirade from Fred Siegel in (where else?) The Weekly Standard (January 30, 2006), a screed that charges the “horrid” Mencken with being a lifelong enemy of democracy and decency. Supposedly Mencken’s fondness for Nietzsche (about whom he produced a not very useful or scholarly biography) shows for all to see that he worshipped the “will to power” and saw this incarnated in the Teutonic enemy of Anglo-American democratic civilization. Someone who took such reprehensible positions in foreign affairs, we have to infer from Siegel’s remarks, must also have been against Jews, who represent all that is good and radiant in the West and (lest we forget) Israel.

“MANY WHITE FOLKS, even those with some White consciousness, still don’t get it about Arman’s teachings and their own existence,” said Homeless Jack.

“If they did understand more, they’d be stronger in their beliefs about their Whiteness and would live happier more fulfilled lives.

“Some Whites talk about race and racial differences but they start too far downstream to really understand our place in existence and why we must follow Arman’s teachings to survive, expand and evolve as White people. Arman says that his teachings are really Nature’s teachings and are written throughout all of existence for those who can read them, and that they were set in motion when existence began.

“I want to be clear about this, man. Arman is very humble about the teachings because he says they’re not really his teachings, and that he’s just the one who is trying to put them in words that can be easily understood. He says he isn’t even comfortable with them being given the collective name Armanism, as some have done, and he only reluctantly accepts that name until a more fitting one evolves.

“Arman teaches the proper bedrock foundations of existence that come right from the way existence works, man. And, when one truly understands, one can never have one’s faith shaken about why we must remain White people, and why we must do what we must do, and why we must separate from all other peoples, and why we must never miscegenate, and why we must raise our individual birth rate as high as our bodies will permit.

“And, as I already said, man, Arman teaches the way for us to live happy and fulfilled lives while being fully aware of who and what we are, while at the same time abandoning misguided personal efforts to deny our existence as White people. Arman says too many of us try to be less White lest we offend non-Whites, and that this is a serious error in our thinking. Arman says we should just be indifferent to other peoples who are not our people. We should not interfere in their destinies no matter what, so long as we are not affected. And we should concentrate on our own highest destiny — which is what Arman teaches. We must be for ourselves alone and for no others.

“Arman’s teachings give us the freedom to be truly, authentically, and unapologetically White, and to love ourselves as we were born, every minute of our lives — without unnecessarily bragging about it.

“Arman also says that our genetic code and our religion are one.

“Some White folks with a preliminary level of White consciousness will talk about hating other racial groups. Some also have overly idealized images in their minds about so-called ‘wonderful White culture and White civilized ways.’ These are often partly based on the belief that we Whites had various golden ages in the past.

“In addition, some of these beliefs are founded in the religious beliefs and mores from the desert religions as they have been modified over the centuries. Many of these things are just layered on like a thin veneer and are not only not essential to who and what we are, but some are holding us back from our own survival, expansion, and evolution. They limit us, man. Some make us dour sourpusses, afraid of life and afraid to have children and to be who and what we are. We should be full of joy and be ever-expansive, man, not full of hate and negativity.

“Arman says false beliefs must be stripped away so we can get to the essentials of what being authentically White really means if we are to consciously evolve in the best way for ourselves. We are alone, man. No other peoples are like us. We must not allow ourselves to be blended in with other types of humans. That is devolution. We are a later evolutionary branching of the human type, but false beliefs are putting us in danger of extinction as the genocide against us is now widespread and there is an ever-increasing danger of gene transfer from other types of humans to us.

“When asked to tell what he teaches in just a few words, Arman sometimes replies: ‘I teach the way existence works.’

“And, Arman has indicated that the essential parts of existence are the spinning, turning, spiraling forces of Nature. Without these forces there would be no existence. It is these forces that create, maintain and destroy everything. But, let’s not dwell on them, here, man, other than to acknowledge that Arman says they are behind everything and are within everything, and to realize that within organisms, the turning, spiraling forces are manifested most importantly as DNA.

“Arman says that those who truly follow his teachings are scientists, whether they know it or not and whether or not they have any science education. ‘Each person who follows this path, and truly understands it,’ says Arman, ‘is a physicist, naturalist, evolutionist, biologist, botanist, psychologist and a true scientist of every type and variety all wrapped up in the single person.’

“Arman says that true science is never in conflict with his teachings and his teachings are never in conflict with true science because they are one and the same, but that his teachings, which are based, in the first instance, on revelations and guidance he received, include a sense of awe and wonder as well as things not yet understood by science that can generally be called beliefs and faith.

“Is there a god in Arman’s teachings? Yes, but… Arman usually calls this the First Cause and says that it is unknowable because it is that which did the impossible by creating something out of absolute nothing. Any god that started with something already in existence — even if it is subatomic particles — cannot be, by definition, the First Cause, and only the First Cause can truly be called God. You will see from this that God as set forth by Arman is different from many other conceptions you may have heard about. And, this conception is such that one can believe in the teachings even if one does not believe in a god.

“Once waves and forces and subatomic particles were in existence, the trajectory was set for the automatic cosmic evolution that we see all around us in the universe. And, everything in existence is spinning, turning, and spiraling. Arman also says that if you don’t have a god in your religious scheme, then you are ignoring human psychology and the importance of having an ender of all arguments, among other things. So, you White folks who think you’re too rational to have a god may want to invent one, or better still, follow Arman’s lead on this.

“On Earth, the spinning, turning, spiraling forces have created the DNA molecule, and the DNA molecule, in turn, creates all life on Earth.

“We White humans are just one of millions of organisms that have all evolved from that first molecule of DNA that made the leap from so-called non-living minerals to living minerals. Ultimately, we are all minerals, man, but we so-called living organisms are minerals that can make more like ourselves and do various other things that we define as life.

“So, what is the difference between us and, say, a rock or a pile of dirt? It is the DNA molecule. It is the animating thing within us. The DNA molecule is sort of like a potter’s wheel and a potter all in one. It takes minerals and spins and shapes them into living organisms and it remains within them as the life force itself. It’s like a coiled spring, man. When we are born, the spring is tight, and as the years go by, it begins unwinding until it is without any more tensile strength, and then we return to the inert mineral state.

“But DNA is much more than just a potter’s wheel and a potter. Analogies and metaphors quickly break down when we try to describe what is almost impossible for us to describe. Ever since it came into existence, the DNA molecule has been trying to fill all of existence with itself. It does this by constantly making new forms of life, by modifying previous forms. How does it do this? it constantly tinkers with its own code and moves parts of the code around. It never stops tinkering. If there is water, it invents gills. If there is sky, it invents wings. If it is cold, it invents fur. If it is a dim area, it invents white skin. If it comes to an obstacle, it quickly adapts to try to overcome the obstacle. And all of these automatic changes in the DNA code found in every living organism are happening all the time so that every organism is given a chance to survive, to breed, to expand the genetic code it carries.

“If the changes in the organism make it a little quicker or a little stronger or a little smarter than similar organisms in its niche and if it follows Nature’s plan to reproduce to its maximum with more like itself, it may eventually replace the earlier models from which it sprang. This is evolution, man. It’s a constant and never ending competition to bring forth the best for every niche.

“Arman says we must live consciously and we must now will our own evolution.

“Now, here’s something else. Some organisms are trapped by having adaptations that are too specific. Think of koalas from Australia as just one example. They’ll die if they can’t eat one particular kind of leaf. That’s a specific adaptation. Contrast that with cockroaches which have many general adaptations so they can live almost anywhere on land and eat almost anything. And, they just keep producing more of their kind no matter what obstacles are thrown in their way. Cockroaches were around when there were dinosaurs. Who was the best at survival? The cockroach. Whose genetic code is still here and still expanding? The cockroach. Learn from this.

(© 2012 H. Millard)

* * *

“Millard is an original. His books aren’t like your typical fiction. If you don’t know where to put his books, try the same shelf with Kerouac, Kafka, Sartre and Nietzsche…”

Ourselves Alone & Homeless Jack’s Religion messages of ennui and meaning in post-American America by H. Millard In Ourselves Alone and Homeless Jack’s Religion, H. Millard, the hard-to-pigeonhole author of The Outsider and Roaming the Wastelands, has put together some of his category-bending commentaries on post-American America. The commentaries deal with politics, philosophy, free speech, genocide, religion and other topics; all in Millard’s edgy style. They lead up to Homeless Jack’s Religion, in which Homeless Jack lays out revelations he found in a dumpster on skid row. Click here to buy. ISBN: 0-595-32646-3

ROAMING THE WASTELANDS– (ISBN: 0-595-22811-9)H. Millard’s latest sacred cow toppling book, is now available at Amazon.com by clicking on this link or by calling 1-877-823-9235. “A fun—and sobering—thing to read” – Alamance Independent

THE OUTSIDER – (ISBN: 0-595-19424-9) H. Millard’s underground classic story of alienation is available at Amazon.com by clicking on the this link or by calling 1-877-823-9235.

AFTER POLITICS, JOURNALISM has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater. American exceptions to mediocrity’s leaden mean: From column A, there was Franklin D. Roosevelt. From column B, H.L. Mencken.

Although Henry Louis Mencken was a magazine editor (The Smart Set, The American Mercury), a literary critic, an expositor of Nietzsche, and a school of Samuel Johnson compiler of The American Language, he never ceased to be a journalist for the Sunpapers in his hometown of Baltimore, where he was born in 1880 and where he died in 1956. From 1906 to 1948, he was connected with the Baltimore Sun, as a columnist, feature writer, editor. He was the most influential journalist of his day; he was also the wittiest.

As a working journalist, Mencken took as his lifelong subject nothing less than Freedom’s land and Bravery’s home, the (not so very) United States, where flourished such gorgeous clowns as Calvin Coolidge; “The Great Croon of Croons,” Franklin D. Roosevelt; the not-so-great Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan; and many, many others. But if only God could have invented such a cast, it was Mencken who proved to be God’s most attentive and appreciative drama critic. It was Mencken who described the show. He reveled in absurdity; found no bonnet entirely bee-less. He loved the national bores for their own sweet sake.

As he contemplated the meager lives of our dull presidents, he wrote: “There comes a day of public ceremonial, and a chance to make a speech…. A million voters with IQs below 60 have their ears glued to the radio. It takes four days’ hard work to concoct a speech without a sensible word in it. Next a dam must be opened somewhere. Four dry Senators get drunk and make a painful scene. The Presidential automobile runs over a dog. It rains.”

American journalism’s golden (a kinder adjective than “yellow”) age coincided with Mencken’s career; that is, from century’s turn to mid-century’s television. During this period, there was still a public educational system and although Mencken often laughs at the boobs out there, the average person could probably get through a newspaper without numb lips. Today, half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.

For Mencken, the old-time journalist, or “newsie,” was a combination of François Villon and Shane. He was “wild-cattish.” He was free-lance, a knight for hire. In 1927, Mencken was already looking back nostalgically to the time when a journalist “used to make as much as a bartender or a police sergeant”; now “he makes as much as the average doctor or lawyer, and his wife, if he has one, maybe has social ambitions.” Today, of course, the “journalist” is often paid movie-star prices for movie-star appearances on television or along the lecture circuit, and he needs no wife to inspire him to a cozy lunch à deux with Nancy Reagan or Barbara Bush.

Mencken did acknowledge that, even then, some journalists liked to mingle with the wealthy and the powerful but, for him, there was always a greater fascination in those lower depths where dwell bartenders and police sergeants.

Mencken’s ideal popular paper for that vast public which “gets all its news by listening” (today one would change “listening” to “staring” – at television) would be “printed throughout, as First Readers are printed, in words of one syllable. It should avoid every idea beyond the understanding of a boy of ten” on the ground that “all ideas are beyond them. They can grasp only events.” But they will heed only those events that are presented as drama in “the form of combat, and it must be a very simple combat with one side clearly right and the other clearly wrong. They can no more imagine neutrality than they can imagine the fourth dimension.” Thus, Mencken anticipated not only the television news program but the television political campaign with its combative thirty-second spot commercials and sound-bites. Movies were already showing the way, and Mencken acknowledged the wisdom of the early movie magnates whose simpleminded screened agons had made them rich. Unfortunately, once rich, they pined for culture, against which Mencken sternly warns with his famous injunction: “No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

Today, Mencken’s boisterous style and deadpan hyperboles are very difficult even for “educated” Americans to deal with, and Sanskrit to the generality. Although every American has a sense of humor – it is his birthright and encoded somewhere in the Constitution – few Americans have ever been able to cope with wit or irony, and even the simplest jokes often cause unease, especially today, when every phrase must be examined for covert sexism, racism, ageism.

American character (which does and does not exist) fascinated Mencken, who observed, in 1918, that the universal image of Uncle Sam the money-grubber was mistaken. “The character that actually marks off the American is not money-hunger at all; it is what might be called, at the risk of misunderstanding, social aspiration.” For the American, money plays only a part in moving upward “to break down some barrier of caste, to secure the acceptance of his betters.” Unlike Europe, “no one has a station” (so far as he knows, of course: class is a national dirty secret) “unless he makes it for himself.” Of course Mencken lived in simpler times. For the American of 1918, “there is always something just behind him and tantalizing him, menacing him and causing him to sweat.”

Mencken quotes Wendell Phillips. “More than any other people, we Americans are afraid of one another.” Mencken acknowledges this truth, and he puts it down to the desire to conform, which means howling with the rest of the mindless pack as it careens from nowhere to nowhere in pursuit of such instant enemies of the week as Qaddafi, Noriega, Saddam, put in place by our packmeisters, successively, like that mechanical rabbit used to keep racing dogs on course. For this sense of collective security, the individual must sacrifice himself in order “to belong to something larger and safer than he is,” and he can “work off his steam within prudent limits. Beyond lie the national taboos. Beyond lie true independence and the heavy penalties that go therewith.”

A century earlier, that shrewd passerby Tocqueville also noted the force of the majority on the individual to conform. But Mencken was obliged to live a lifetime in such a society and so, unlike the French penologist, he could present data from inside the stammer: “The taboos that I have mentioned are extraordinarily harsh and numerous. They stand around nearly every subject that is genuinely important to man: they hedge in free opinion and experimentation on all sides. Consider, for example, the matter of religion. It is debated freely and furiously in almost every country in the world save the United States,” but here the critic is silenced. “The result is that all religions are equally safeguarded against criticism, and that all of them lose vitality. We protect the status quo, and so make steady war upon revision and improvement.”

In August 1925, Mencken meditated on how Europeans view Americans, and how they noted “our growing impatience with the free play of ideas, our increasing tendency to reduce all virtues to the single one of conformity, our relentless and all pervading standardization…. Europe doesn’t fear our military or economic prowess, rather it is Henry Ford that gives them the shivers…. By Americanization it means Fordization – and not only in industry but also in politics, art and even religion.” Nor is this simply the spontaneous power of public opinion; it is the deliberate power of the state brought into play. “No other nation of today is so rigorously policed. The lust to standardize and regulate extends to the most trivial minutia of private life.”

At the time that Mencken wrote this, alcohol had been prohibited by law to the American people, as well as almost every form of sex, disturbing reading matter, and so on. Mencken also adverted to the Scopes Trial of that year, whose verdict forbade the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in the schools of Christian Tennessee. This trial convinced thoughtful Europeans that Americanism was “a conspiracy of dull and unimaginative men, fortuitously made powerful, against all the ideas and ideals that seem sound to their betters,” leading the Europeans to suspect “that a nation cherishing such notions and feelings, and with the money and the men to enforce them, deserved to be watched very carefully.”

* * *

As a first-generation American, Mencken liked playing the vaudeville German, with a passion for beer, Brahms, German culture. “My grandfather made a mistake when he came to America, and I have always lived in the wrong country.” Like so many echt Americans, Mencken deeply resented the British. Not only did he share in the tribal dislike of Teuton for Anglo but he resented the ease with which the Brits manipulated American politics in their favor at the time of the two World Wars. During the First World War, Mencken’s pro-Germanism got him banned from the Sun. But despite Mencken’s somewhat stagy dislike of Brits, socialism, radicals, the “Anglo-maniacal” Woodrow Wilson, and the reformers Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, he tended to make very good patriotic sense of American politics.

Mencken notes that from the start of the republic, “setting aside religion, [politics] was literally the only concern of the people. All men of ability and ambition turned to it for self-expression.” This is wondrously wise and an echo of Pericles’ comment that the man who thinks politics not his business has no business. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, politics drew “the best literary talent into its service – Franklin, Jefferson and Lincoln may well stand as examples – it left the cultivation of belles lettres to women and second-rate men.” Now, of course, the second-raters have taken over politics. As for beautiful letters …

Mencken’s alarm at our system’s degradation was in no way based upon a starry-eyed notion of the revered but always circumvented Constitution. Although that long-ignored primer says that only Congress may declare war, President Bush has only recently confided to us that “we have fought 204 wars of which only five were declared,” so put that in your peace pipe and smoke it! Mencken would not have been startled. For him, “all government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.” This must have got a good chuckle from the Baltimore burgher over his breakfast of chipped beef and scrapple.

Mencken continues. Government “invades his liberty and collars his money in order to protect him, but in actuality, it always makes a stiff profit on the exchange. This profit represents the income of the professional politicians, nine-tenths of whom are professional rogues.” That was then. The rogues are smoother now and often endearing on television. They are also no longer paid for by such chicken feed as kickbacks on city contracts. Rather, they are the proud employees of the bankers and the military industrial procurers who have bought them their offices, both square and oval. But though we are worse off than in Mencken’s day, he was at least able to give one cheer for the Constitution, or at least for the idea of such a document, as a kind of stoplight: “So far you may go, but no further. No matter what excuse or provocation, you may not invade certain rights, or pass certain kinds of laws.”

Inevitably, Mencken’s journalism is filled with stories of how our enumerated rights are constantly being evaded or struck down because it is the reflexive tactic of the politicians “to invade the Constitution stealthily, and then wait to see what happens. If nothing happens they go on more boldly; if there is a protest they reply hotly that the Constitution is worn out and absurd, and that progress is impossible under the dead hand. This is the time to watch them especially.”

Mencken also notes that in the first decade of this century there was “a sudden change…. Holes began to be punched in the Bill of Rights, and new laws of strange and often fantastic shape began to slip through them. The hysteria of the late war completed the process. The espionage act enlarged the holes to great fissures. Citizens began to be pursued into their houses, arrested without warrants, and jailed without any form of trial. The ancient writ of habeas corpus was suspended: the Bill of Rights was boldly thrown overboard.”

Although the extent of the decadence of the democratic process at our end of the century was unknown if not unsuspected, to Mencken, he knew enough of history and its engine, entropy, to declare that “no government, of its own motion, will increase its own weakness, for that would mean to acquiesce in its own destruction … governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down…. Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.” As a self-styled “Presbyterian Tory” (with Manichean tendencies), Mencken regarded attempts at reform as doomed, while the thought of any Utopian system bettering things caused him deep distress because to create Utopia you would have to enslave more and more people in order to better – while worsening – their lot.

Curiously enough, of all those good and bad Americans who shuddered at the sudden sharp wind from the east known as communism, Mencken, as early as 1930, figured that there was no way that communism could ever set up shop within our alabaster cities much less take sickle to our fruited plains. Mencken’s reasoning is exquisitely sound: “That Americans, in the mass, have anything properly describable as keen wits is surely far from self-evident. On the contrary, it seems likely that, if anything, they lie below the civilized norm.” Incidentally, for several decades I have been trying to convince Europeans that Americans are not innately stupid but merely ignorant and that with a proper educational system, etcetera. But the more one reads Mencken, the more one eyes suspiciously the knuckles of his countrymen, looking to see callouses from too constant a contact with the greensward.

Mencken believes Americans to be more gullible than most people, dwelling as we do in “the home of freak economic schemes” (often, alas, contagious) and “the happy hunting ground of the most blatant and absurd sort of charlatans in politics.” From this intimate knowledge of the American “mind,” Mencken thinks that Americans, as lovers of “the bizarre and the irrational would embrace communism with joy, just as multitudes of them, in a previous age, embraced free silver. But, as everyone knows, they will have none of it.” Mencken concedes the attraction of Utopias to the foreign-born and educated Americans, but “two-thirds of the native-born Communists that I have encountered are so plainly mashuggah that it would be flattery to call them stupid.”

Mencken gives two reasons for the failure of communism/socialism to take root in the United States. The first is that Americans had long since been vaccinated by the likes of Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt against this sort of virus: In effect, the folks had been there before and they were aware of so “gross” a social and economic solution. Mencken’s second reason strikes me as not only true but inspired. Americans were more sensitive to “the concrete debacle in Russia” because “they probably felt themselves, in a subtle and unconscious way, to be nearer to the Russians than any Europeans. Russia was not like Europe, but it was strangely like America. In the same way the Russians were like Americans. They, too, were naturally religious and confiding; they, too, were below the civilized average in intelligence; and they, too, believed in democracy, and were trying to give it a trial.”

For Mencken, communist literature was “as childish as the literature of Christian Science,” while communism itself “will probably disappear altogether when the Russian experiment comes to a climax, and Bolshevism either converts itself into a sickly imitation of capitalism or blows up with a bang. The former issue seems more likely.” This is not bad for 1930.

As Mencken thought all government bad, it follows that he was a Jeffersonian who believed that the least we had of a bad thing the better. As “an incurable Tory in politics,” he was congenitally antiliberal, though “I always give heed to them politely, for they are at least free men.” Surprisingly, he has respectful words for Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, victims of federal persecution (it is not taught in our schools that once upon a time, at the behest of the Secretary of Labor, foreign-born Americans could be deported, without due process). Mencken finds the two radicals “extremely intelligent – [and] once their aberrant political ideals are set aside they are seen to be very sharp wits. They think clearly, unsentimentally and even a bit brilliantly. They write simple, glowing and excellent English.” Mencken confesses that he cannot understand how they can believe so childishly in the proletariat, but “the fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret. All of us, in our several ways, are illogical, irrational, almost insane.” Mencken’s tolerance for the bees aswarm in the bonnets of others was very great if the swarm be honest and its honey pure.

The state as hostile tropism is Mencken’s central philosophic notion as a journalist. Whether the state is used to deport or imprison people for their ideas or the color of their skin (as in the case of the Nisei) or simply to harass citizens who drink whisky, he was that malevolent state’s hard critic. He illuminates our marvelous Bill of Rights, no sooner promulgated than struck with the first of those sets of alien and sedition acts that continue, in one form or another, to this day. He is very funny about the Noble Experiment to prohibit alcohol (1913-33), which made the United States the world’s joke-nation, a title still unceded.

As for America’s once triumphant mass-production of the automobile, he notes that this achievement promptly became a pretext for the persecution of the citizenry by creating “a body of laws which fills two courtrooms to suffocation every day (in Baltimore), and keeps three judges leaping and tugging like fire-engine horses. The situation is made more intoxicating by the fact that nine-tenths of the criminals are persons who would not otherwise fall into their toils – that the traffic regulations tap whole new categories of victims…. The ideal of the Polizei, at all times and everywhere, is to get their hands upon every citizen at least once a day.” Today the tobacco smoker is at risk. Tomorrow, who knows who will fall victim to the state’s endless sense of fun.

* * *

Like all good writers, Mencken is a dramatist, at his best when he shows us the ship of state in motion on high seas while his character studies of the crew of this ship of fools still give delight, though every last one now lies full fathom five. Ding dong dell.

As a reporter, Mencken covered many political conventions from 1904 to 1948. As a Baltimore Sun columnist, he wrote about national politics whenever the spirit moved or, indeed, shoved him. In 1925 he was amused, as always, by the collapse yet again of the Liberals and their journals: “The Nation gradually abandons Liberalism for libertarianism. The New Republic hangs on, but is obviously not as vigorous and confident as it used to be.” Mencken delighted in “Dr. Coolidge,” Liberalism’s natural enemy. But then “a politician has no actual principles. He is in favor of whatever seems to him to be popular at the moment.” Even so, Coolidge “believes naturally in Law Enforcement – by lawful means if possible: if not, by any means at hand, lawful or lawless … he actually got his first considerable office … by posturing as a fascist of the most advanced type.” This was in 1919 when Governor Coolidge of Massachusetts broke the Boston police strike and became famous.

But Coolidge is only an engaging character actor in a drama whose star throughout is William Jennings Bryan (Democratic candidate for President 1896, 1900, 1908 – spokesman or -person for free silver and the common person – or man). Bryan had become famous and popular and dangerous to the status quo when he put together a huge coalition of poor farmers and poorer laborers and, in their interest, spoke against the rich and their gold standard. Bryan gave the country’s ownership its first big scare since the rebellion of Daniel Shays. Alas, Mencken was not at the convention in ’96, when with a single speech (“You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”) Bryan got the nomination at the age of thirty-six. As his friend and ally, my grandfather, used to say, “He never learned anything else ever again in his life.”

As much as Mencken despised Bryan, the demagogue, he is moderately touched by Bryan’s appearance at the 1904 convention “in his familiar alpaca coat and his old white string tie,” looking “weak and haggard” (he was suffering from pneumonia) until he started to speak and brought down the house, yet again. Four years later he would be the doomed nominee: four years after that, Wilson made him his Secretary of State, a post he resigned when he saw that the Administration was moving toward war, an act of principle that Mencken rather meanly does not credit in a man he calls “the magnificent job-seeker.”

At the end, Mencken was present in Dayton, Tennessee for the Scopes Trial, where the old man seemed “maleficent” to Mencken when he spoke for superstition and the literal interpretation of the Bible. Bryan and the Bible won the day, but Bryan himself was dead a few weeks later, killed, my grandmother always said, by an ungovernable passion for “chicken and rice and gravy.”

For Mencken, Bryan is the id – to use Freudian jargon – of American politics: the ignorant, religious, underclass leader whose fateful and dramatic climax came in the trial to determine whether or not we are descended from monkeys. Herbert Hoover is the ego; he also represents the British interest, forever trying to draw the great stupid republic into their wars and combinations. Calvin Coolidge is a near-fascist clown whose career is “as appalling and as fascinating as a two-headed boy.” Warren G. Harding is the master of a glorious near-English in which “the relations between word and meaning have long since escaped him.” Harding’s style “reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.” Mencken’s descriptions of these wondrous clowns are still a delight because, though the originals are long since erased from the collective “memory” of the United States of Amnesia, the types persist. “I am not,” Mencken observes demurely at one point, when blood is on the walls, “a constructive critic.”

For Mencken, “the best of [politicians] seem to be almost as bad as the worst. As private citizens they are often highly intelligent and realistic men, and admirable in every way.” But because of the superstitious mass, they are not allowed to make sense. “When they accomplish anything, it is usually by accident.” Even of his sometime hero, Al Smith, he deplored his speeches but then, “like all habitual orators, he plainly likes to make speeches, no matter how dull the subject or hot the hall.”

Mencken is quite aware that behind the diverting spectacle of our politics stands the ownership of the country, Business. He understands the general preference of the Business-boss for the Lawyer-employee in politics. Partly it is because “a lawyer practising his craft under Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence becomes a pedant almost inevitably. The system he follows is expressly designed to shut out common sense,” which is just as well because “Big Business in America, is almost wholly devoid of anything even poetically describable as public spirit. It is frankly on the make…. Big Business was in favor of Prohibition, believing that a sober workman would made a better slave than one with a few drinks in him. It was in favor of all the gross robberies and extortions that went on in the [First] war,” and profited by the curtailment of civil liberties and so on. Coolidge was their man; so was Herbert Hoover, “the perfect self-seeker…. His principles are so vague that even his intimates seem unable to put them into words…. He knows who his masters are, and he will serve them.”

Mencken is also aware that there is a small but constant resistance to the “masters,” but he gives the resistance little aid or comfort. Essentially, he is on the side of Business if not Businessmen because “business is the natural art of the American people.” He pities those with “believing minds” who would follow this or that demagogue, and he lived long enough to attend the 1948 convention of the Progressive Party, where Henry Wallace picked up the banner marked Nay; but Mencken was put off not so much by the poignant, plaintive “nay” as he was by the coloring of the letters, red.

Even so, the Tory Mencken understands the roots of radicalism. Although “it is assumed that men become radicals because they are naturally criminal, or because they have been bribed by Russian gold,” what actually moves them “is simply the conviction that the Government they suffer under is unbearably and incurably corrupt…. The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.” But Mencken himself is no radical because “I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time. But that is certainly not the common American view…. When they see an evil they try to remedy it – by peaceful means if possible, and if not, then by force.” Yet, paradoxically, Mencken can also write that “history … is the upward struggle of man, out of darkness and into light,” presumably a struggle with ooze alone.

Eventually, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would appear to be the answer to the radicals’ dream and Mencken regarded him, at the beginning, with a cold but not disapproving eye as FDR metamorphosed from a John the Baptist for Al Smith to the Christ himself, or the national super-ego. With some pleasure, Mencken described the Democratic convention that nominated FDR for Vice President, largely because he bore the name of a famous Republican President. Also, he was chosen to “perfume the ticket.” As “leader of the anti-Tammany Democrats in New York,” he could be counted on “to exorcise the Tammany split from the party.” Finally, “he is a civilized man and safely wet.”

When FDR’s turn came at Chicago in 1932, Mencken wrote, “I can recall no candidate of like importance who ever had so few fanatics whooping for him.” But Mencken allowed that FDR was good on radio, and he smiled a lot. By the 1940 convention, Mencken was hostile not only to the New Deal but to the approaching war. To Mencken, 1940 looked like a rerun of 1916, when Wilson had campaigned as “the man who kept us out of war.” Politics being nothing if not imitative of what has worked before, he glumly observed that “Roosevelt himself has promised categorically, on at least a dozen occasions, to keep out of the war, and with the most pious and eye-rolling solemnity” even though “his foreign policy … has been unbrokenly devious, dishonest and dishonorable. Claiming all the immunities of a neutral, he has misled the country into countless acts of war, and there is scarcely an article of international law that he has not violated.” But Roosevelt won the election. And the war came.

Roosevelt’s opponent in the election of 1940 was Wendell Willkie, an eloquent “barefoot boy,” as they called him, “from Wall Street,” with a Hoosier accent and considerable demagogic skills. Just before he was nominated, I shook his limp hand, and he glared at me with blind eyes in a white sweating face and croaked, “Ah’d be a lah-er if ah said ah diduhn wanna be Prez Nigh Stays.” The only occasion where I gazed as Mencken gazed upon the same political spectacle was the Republican convention at Philadelphia where Willkie was nominated. This was in June 1940 and I was guide to my blind grandfather, former Senator T. P. Gore. A Democrat, TPG was not about to miss any convention that might be fun. On a hot evening, we rode to the convention hall in a streetcar with former Vice President Charles G. Dawes, a bright, crickety little man, wearing a white straw hat. At the hall, the heat was dreadful. Young women gave out palmetto fans with “Fan for Van” written on them; thus, the great moose of Michigan, Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, majestically hurled himself into the ring. Senator Robert A. Taft was also a candidate. He was, even then, known as “Mr. Conservative.” Twelve years later, when he was denied the nomination in favor of D.D. Eisenhower, he let slip a terrible truth that no Republican can be nominated for President without the permission of the Chase Manhattan Bank.

We sat in the bleachers to stage left of the podium, where stood the former President, Herbert Hoover, face like a rosy marshmallow. Carefully, I described the scene for my blind grandfather; he had entered political history not only as the first senator from the new state of Oklahoma but as the orator who had started the longest demonstration ever recorded at any convention (for Bryan, at Denver, 1908). TPG was one of the few speakers that Mencken could endure, noting that in 1928, when he “rose to second the nomination of his old friend, Senator Reed, there was humor in his brief speech, and also a very impressive earnestness. He won the crowd instantly and got a great round of applause. No other rhetorician came near his mark.”

Hoover “stood before the mike like a schoolboy reciting a piece, and seldom varied his intonation or made a gesture.” Mencken brings it all alive to me a half-century later, though he finds Hoover paler than I did but then I had never seen the President before – or since. I was deeply impressed by Hoover’s rigid gravitas. But my grandfather, whose wit and politics were not unlike Mencken’s, after listening to the ovation for the ex-President, said, “Hoover’s the only man here who doesn’t know that he’s finished.”

As the galleries chanted, “We want Willkie,” I became addicted to the convention as then practiced and it is ironic that in 1968, thanks to some television “debates” with a right-wing publicist, I should have helped preside over the transformation of the party conventions from the comings-together of the nation’s tribes to a series of low-rated TV specials. No one can now say, with Mencken, “Me, I like [conventions] because they amuse me. I never get tired of the show … so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour.”

Currently, any use of the word “race” in the United States is considered an a priori proof of the user’s racism. Abstract nouns are now subject to close scrutiny to make sure that the noun’s deployer is not a racist or sexist or ageist or bigot. Meanwhile, any word or phrase that might cause distress must undergo erasure while euphemism (the E- – or is it U- or Eu- – word?) is the order of the day, as “body bag” suddenly becomes, in Pentagonese, “human remains pouch” since “pouch” is a resolutely cheery word, suggesting cute marsupials Down Under, while “bag” is a downer, as in “bag lady,” Munich, appeasement, Hitler. A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren’t they?

Mencken is a nice antidote. Politically, he is often right but seldom correct by today’s stern standards. In a cheery way, he dislikes most minorities and if he ever had a good word to say about the majority of his countrymen, I have yet to come across it. Recently, when his letters were published, it was discovered that He Did Not Like the Jews, and that he had said unpleasant things about them not only as individuals but In General, plainly the sign of a Hitler-Holocaust enthusiast. So shocked was everyone that even the New York Review of Books‘ unofficial de-anti-Semitiser, Garry Wills (he salvaged Dickens, barely), has yet to come to his aid with An Explanation. But in Mencken’s private correspondence, he also snarls at black Americans, Orientals, Britons, women, and WASPs, particularly the clay-eating Appalachians, whom he regarded as subhuman. But private irritability is of no consequence when compared to what really matters, public action.

Far from being an anti-Semite, Mencken was one of the first journalists to denounce the persecution of the Jews in Germany at a time when the New York Times, say, was notoriously reticent. On November 27, 1938, Mencken writes (Baltimore Sun), “It is to be hoped that the poor Jews now being robbed and mauled in Germany will not take too seriously the plans of various politicians to rescue them.” He then reviews the various schemes to “rescue” the Jews from the Nazis, who had not yet announced their own final solution.

To the British proposal that the Jews be admitted to British Guiana, Teutonophile Mencken thinks that the Ostjuden might hack it in British Guiana but not the German Jews, as “they constitute an undoubtedly superior group…. Try to imagine a German-Jewish lawyer or insurance man, or merchant, or schoolmaster [in] a place where the climate is that of a Turkish bath. Tanganyika he thought marginally better but still pretty bad, at least “as good as the worst parts of Mexico.” He then suggests that Canada could “absorb 100,000 or even 200,000 with ease, and they would be useful acquisitions, especially in the western prairie populations, which are dominated today by a low-grade of farmers, without any adequate counterbalance of a competent middle class.” Today Mencken could not write this because the Farmers Anti-Defamation League of Saskatchewan would be offended, and his column banned in Canada. “Australia, now almost as exclusive as Sing Sing, which it somewhat resembles in population, could use quite as many [Jews] as Canada and New Zealand.” The Australian Government would, today, file a protest; and Mencken’s column would be banned.

Then Mencken gets down to business: “The American plan for helping the refugees is less openly brutal than the British plan, but almost as insulting to them, and even more futile.” After many official and unofficial condemnations of Germany, including “the Hon. Mr. Roosevelt’s” declaration that “he could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a Twentieth Century civilization,” the President is still not willing to relax the immigration laws or do anything “that might cause him political inconvenience.” Mencken finds such “pecksniffery … gross and disgusting … and I hope that American Jews will not be fetched by it.” Mencken also notes how the “Aframerican press” found amazing Roosevelt’s solicitousness for German Jews, so unlike his complaisance to the ongoing crimes against black Americans.

Mencken concludes: “There is only one way to help the refugees, and that is to find places for them in a country in which they can really live. Why shouldn’t the United States take in a couple of hundred thousand of them, or even all of them?” He notes two popular objections. One, there is already a lot of unemployment in the United States, to which he responds that it is unlikely the Jewish immigrants will either loaf or be incompetent. Two, there is anti-Semitism of the sort then being fanned by the Ku Klux Klan but, as he observes, “not many Jews are likely to go to Mississippi or Arkansas.”

I am certain that those who wish to will be able to find anti-Semitism in Mencken’s proposal to admit all Jewish refugees. Certainly he generalizes about Jews. (How does he know that they don’t all want to go to Mississippi?) But then perhaps the whole message is code; certainly the remark about Jewish “efficiency” is a classic blood libel.

As of 1934, Mencken was moderately impressed by Eretz Israel and agreeably condescending to the Arabs, who “breed like flies but die in the same way.” Mencken was generally approving of the European Jewish settlers, though he predictably cast a cold eye on the collectivist farms and kibbutzim. Of one of them, he wrote, presciently, “It was founded in 1921, and is still in the first flush of its success. Will it last? Probably not. As soon as its present kindergarteners grow up they will begin to marry outside, and then there will be quarrels over shares, and it will no doubt go the way of Brook Farm, Amana and all the other predecessors.” Mencken thought that there was only a fifty-fifty chance of the Jewish plantation in Palestine enduring. “On the one hand (Ere[t]z Israel) is being planted intelligently and shows every sign of developing in a healthy manner. But on the other hand there are the Arabs – and across the Jordan there is a vast reservoir of them, all hungry, all full of enlightened self-interest. Let some catastrophe in world politics take the British cops away, and the Jews who now fatten on so many lovely farms will have to fight desperately for their property and their lives.” The catastrophe came right on schedule in the form of Hitler and of such professional Jewish terrorists as Begin and Shamir.

One of the few groups that Americans are fairly free to denounce, after the Arabs, are the Japanese. Mencken was most alert to “the yellow peril.” (I used quotes to forestall the usual letters accusing me of hating all Orientals along with Mencken, when neither did nor does.) In 1939, Mencken was thinking seriously about Japan. As there is no public memory in the United States, let me remind the reader that since the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905, the United States had been preparing for a war with Japan in order to establish who would be numero uno not only in the Pacific but in Asia.

By 1939, Japan was busy conquering China, having acquired Korea and Manchuria, and the Nipponese imperial eye was set on the Southeast Asian oil fields, at that time in the hands of two local Asiatic powers, the British and the Dutch.

As a “racist,” Mencken blithely generalized about race, a real no-no in today’s world, where each and every one of the five billion people on our common crowded planet is a treasured and unique creation, sharing nothing at all with anyone else except, maybe, the Big Fella in the Sky. But generalize he did, something no longer allowed in freedom’s land. Mencken wrote: “The Japanese, judged by Western eyes, are an extremely homely people, and no doubt the fact has a good deal to do with their general unpopularity.” Mencken thought that they look both “sinister and ludicrous,” not an encouraging or likable combination. “They look, talking one with another, like Boy Scouts with buck teeth, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles…. I have never met a Caucasian who professed any affection for the Japs, though there are not a few white fans for the scenery,” etc. Already guilty of Racist Generalizing, Mencken proceeded, sickeningly, to grade all Japanese: “They are a people of very considerable talents, and will have to be reckoned with in the future history of the human race. They have long since got past the stage of sitting respectfully at the feet of the West…. In all the fields of human endeavor save theology, politics and swine justice they are showing the way to their ofay mentors. They have made important and durable contributions to knowledge in each and every one of the exact sciences, and they have taken such a lead in trade and industry that the only way left to beat them is to murder them.” But even this solution, particularly favored by England, won’t be easy because they have “a considerable knack for war.”

As “nearly all white men dislike the Japs and like the Chinese,” Mencken tried to give an accurate impression of our soon-to-be great adversary and, as I gaze out over the Hollywood Hills toward Japanese Universal Pictures, our eventual conquerors. But accuracy in reporting on Pacific matters is always difficult because the American press have always given us a view of the Japanese that “is seldom accurate and not always honest,” to say the least. As of 1939, China and Chiang Kai-shek were, as always, on the brink of victory; but, somehow, Japan always won and, as Mencken remarked, “The Japs, in truth, had as sound a mandate to clean up China as the United States have had to clean up Cuba.” Or Mexico, Nicaragua, Salvador, Panama, Grenada, not to mention Korea, Cambodia, Iran, and Iraq.

Three years later, the Japs, heavily provoked, sank the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and the great race war was on, with Round One (with guns) going to the white race (1945) and Round Two (with computers) going to the yellow race (1990). Mencken was particularly good – that is, prophetic – on American skullduggeries south of the border, where he often visited and duly noted our eerie inability to do anything honest or even intelligent, whether in Cuba or Haiti or in dealing with Nicaragua’s Sandino.

Like Puck, Mencken found most mortals fools. He showed us odd glimpses of the vacuous Duke of Windsor and his Baltimore lady as well as of Rudolph Valentino, whom he once entertained in what must have been an unusually alcoholic session for a young Italian. Mencken commiserated with the assault by the press on the lad’s manhood and he shed a public tear at the beauty’s demise not long after.

In literary matters, Mencken was a shield to the meat and potatoes of naturalism-realism, a sounder diet than one of, shall we say, frozen fish? He was a champion of Dreiser; a foe of censorship. He was good on Conrad but at sea with James and insensitive to Wharton. He knew cooking and provided a sound recipe for “shore soup,” the crab-based glory of the eastern shore of Maryland. He was passionate about music. Disliked jazz but admired “Aframerican” musicians. Interested in architecture, he was appalled by the ugliness of American cities except for San Francisco, where “there is nothing European about the way life is lived; the color is all Asiatic” because it is so happily cut off from “the rest of the dun and dour Republic.” He described the average person’s way of life in New York as that of a “sardine in a can,” while “the grass in the so-called parks looks like embalmed sauerkraut.” He hated chiropractors. He was amazed, as an editor, to find that graduates of West Point wrote the best English. He took a bitter pride in “the love of ugliness [that] is apparently inherent in the American people. They cherish and venerate the unspeakable.”

Matthew Arnold wrote that a “style is the saying in the best way what you have to say. The what you have to say depends on your age.” Mencken certainly said what he had to say about the age that he had been assigned to. When asked why, if he could find nothing to “revere” in the United States, he lived there, he replied, “Why do men go to zoos?”

Religion as generally practiced by the Americans of his day, he saw as a Great Wall of China designed to keep civilization out while barbarism might flourish within the gates. He himself was a resolute breacher of the Great Wall, and to the extent that some civilization has got through, he is one of the few Americans that we can thank. Plainly, so clear and hard a writer would not be allowed in the mainstream press of today, and those who think that they would like him back would be the first to censor and censure him.

As for Mencken himself, he wrote his own epitaph in 1921 for The Smart Set: “If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.” I realize that he has, viciously, used the G-word and, even worse, the long-since-banned H-word. But there he is. And there we are, lucky we.

(1991)

Co-written by Bayard Johnson (author of “Damned Right”), “Clouds” takes the reader on a journey into the intriguing and little-understood belief system and world view shared by many American Indians and other indigenous people around the world.

The American Indian way of living has almost nothing in common with the patriarchal philosophies and religions of Europe and Asia, and this book helps explain the violent clash of cultures that continues to erupt between indigenous and industrial societies whenever they come into contact anywhere in the world.

Few Lakota are still living who heard the true account of their people’s beliefs directly from Elders who were born free, whose earliest memories pre-dated the fencing of the Plains and the imprisonment of the Lakota people and culture. Russell Means is one of these.

As a young leader of the American Indian Movement, which helped resuscitate Indian nations throughout the hemisphere, Russell had the privilege of learning traditional Lakota ways and knowledge from Elders who were steeped in these ancient teachings. It is now Russell’s turn to pass on this timeless and timely wisdom to a world starved for balance and truth.

Look for “If You’ve Forgotten The Names Of The Clouds, You’ve Lost Your Way: An Introduction to American Indian Thought and Philosophy” on Amazon, Barnes&Noble.com, and wherever ebooks are sold.

For your Kindle edition go to this link:

http://www.amazon.com/Youve-Forgotten-Names-Clouds-ebook/dp/B007V91ENK/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1337714994&sr=1-1

For your Nook edition go to this link:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/if-youve-forgotten-the-names-of-the-clouds-youve-lost-your-way-russell-means/1110184604?ean=9781620952979

AS MAYOR Pam Powers approached the downtown exit she wondered again if the Sign Man lived in the two acres of woods that the off ramp curved around. As she inched along in the morning rush hour traffic she also wondered how many people in cars behind her and in front of her were thinking the same thing.

After she yielded to the right and was creeping into the dark, cool underpass she thought maybe when the weather was bad the Sign Man slept up there under the overpass. To Pam, this interchange was like the Sign Man’s home because almost every morning he would be at the off ramp, and almost every afternoon he would be at the on ramp.

She laughed at herself when she realized she was a little excited as she looked forward to seeing him. His signs were always close to the street and easy to see, but he was usually about twenty feet away, back by the fence that encircled another wooded area just after the underpass. His signs were Magic Marker on cardboard nailed to a board that was bolted upright in a five gallon plastic bucket. There was a chunk of concrete in the bottom of the bucket to keep the wind from blowing it over. She powered down the passenger window as she waited in line. The cars ahead of her would flash their brake lights and money would fly out the passenger windows into and all around the bucket.

Today his sign read CONTEMPLATING ETERNAL THEMES.

Finally her turn came. She threw a handful of change out the window, and looked over at him. He was sitting on the ground, leaning back against the fence with his boots flat and his forearms on his knees. His head was tilted back as he faced the sky, as if he were… contemplating eternal themes.

He had on his usual jeans, flannel shirt, and straw hat with green plastic in the front part of the visor. The sun, shining through the visor, created a soft band of green across the upper half of his face, and lit up the red and blond highlights in his beard and hair. She guessed he was about her age, thirty something, and not bad looking. His eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, but after she threw the money she gave a little wave, and he gave a little wave back. She was smiling as she drove downtown.

All day in offices in the city, people looked for an opportunity to use it:

“What is Mr. Jones doing?”

“I don’t know, but it looks as if he’s contemplating eternal themes.”

“Are you busy?”

“No, I was just contemplating eternal themes.”

In just a few weeks the Sign Man had become a local celebrity of sorts. His first sign had read, THIS IS MY JOB!

In the days that followed he brightened everyone’s mornings with:

HOMELESS BY CHOICE … BUDDY CAN YOU SPARE A C-NOTE? … MIDGET RODEO … SWANKING AROUND THE OFFICE.

Soon a tipping point was reached with a sign that read HOMELESS ROADKILL. That day the Sign Man sprawled beside the road and lay there all day looking for all the world like… homeless roadkill. The most popular morning radio program informed everyone about the sign, and took calls from listeners who were fans of the homeless celebrity. The Sign Man was building a following, so of course one rush hour morning a city cop stopped beside the sign (DON’T GLUMP…), turned his flashing lights on, got out of the squad car, and started toward the Sign Man. He got about halfway when cars started slamming on brakes and bumping into one another. The cop turned around as the cars began their rear-end cascade, and when he looked back the Sign Man had slipped through the fence and disappeared into the woods.

Mayor Pam Powers liked the Sign Man from the first time she saw him; she thought he added a little local color to downtown. When she heard about the cop incident she called the Chief of Police and they had a private talk resulting in an understanding that the Sign Man would not be bothered again. The Sign Man had no way of knowing that the Mayor had stood up for him, but a few days later he put up a sign saying MAYOR PAM IS A HOTTIE. That weekend she tried a new, more flattering hair style. No one had ever called her a hottie. Yes, she liked the Sign Man.

One morning the sign was USED JEWELRY DROP OFF. This sign brought the usual looks and money, however that afternoon with the same sign, but beside the on ramp, was a different story. Women in their cars waiting in line could be seen removing earrings, ankle bracelets and assorted body jewelry. Gold chains draped the rim of the bucket; silver trinkets littered the ground around the bucket. People laughed at the loot and at themselves as the Sign Man sat by the fence reading a newspaper.

On Friday afternoon the sign was PARTY TIME, garnering horn tooting and hand waving. Monday morning brought YOU LOOK NICE TODAY. Later in the week saw THE 8 BALL SAYS, then PORTABLE GRAFFITI and FEARLESS OF ILLOGIC.

One morning commuters were told NEED MAGIC MARKERS. That afternoon the bucket was filled with pilfered magic markers of every color imaginable. The next morning workers were treated to a huge, multi-colored mural that looked like something Peter Max would do. Around the words THANK YOU were wingfooted messengers, rainbows, shooting stars; it was beautiful. Late that afternoon a silver-haired man in a new Lexus stopped, lowered his window, leaned over, and yelled, “I’ll give you twenty bucks for the sign.”

The Sign Man yelled back, “I’ll take a hundred.”

The art lover laughed, got out of his car, and walked around to the sign. He looked at the picture more closely, then pulled a roll of bills from his pocket and counted out five twenties. He held the money up and the Sign Man pointed to the bucket. The buyer laughed, shook his head, dropped the bills into the bucket, and carefully pulled the sign from the board.

One especially hot day the sign read SUNHAMMERED. That night on the local television news program the weather man used the word ‘sunhammered’ in the weather report. People who didn’t have to were taking the downtown exit so they could say they had seen the sign, and the man.

They were never disappointed: SLOW DOWN INSIDE … DISENTHRALLED … PLAY THRU IT … YOU CAN CHANGE THE WORLD … CLAWING MY WAY TO THE BOTTOM. One night the local television news feature “On The Scene” opened with a shot of the sign (CREATE A NO WAKE ZONE) with a female reporter standing beside it. She was all smiles as she explained, “We came down here to interview the Sign Man but it seems he would rather let his signs speak for him.” This was followed by a short video clip of the Sign Man looking over his shoulder at the camera as he slipped through the fence and disappeared into the woods. The reporter kindly voiced over with, “Maybe the story here is the messages – not the messenger.”

This was followed by a clip of signs that had been seen over the last several days: DONATE: YOU’LL FEEL BETTER … IN THE FULL GRIP OF… DON’T GET TETCHY… HIGHER ORDER ABERRATION… ARE YOU UNDERACCESSORIZED? … TREASUREABLY BAD …BUMPER STICKER PHILOSOPHY. His reluctance to be interviewed endeared him even more to many of the viewers.

The next morning the sign read, OHNE MICH, which is German for “leave me out.” Soon after that the Sign Man did something he had never done before. He posted a political message: NO $ FOR ISRAEL. The reaction of his fans ran from encouragement to disappointment; from thumbs up to middle finger up. There was elation, but also shock, confusion, and anger. It was all anyone wanted to talk about on talk radio.

The next morning there was no sign. But there was yellow crime scene tape, squad cars, and policemen everywhere. By noon everyone had heard: The Sign Man had been found at first light hanging by his neck from the overpass with his hands tied behind his back, beaten and bloody.

Mayor Pam took the afternoon off and went home. That night she called her father, Senator Powers, and told him the story.

Senator Powers was about to retire from public service after a long and distinguished career. He was one of the most popular and admired men in the country. A few days after talking to Pam, he stood in the Senate and delivered an iconoclastic speech. He started by saying, “Gentlemen, a few days ago a man was killed in my home town because he publicly stated that America should stop giving aid to Israel. Osama Bin Laden once publicly stated that the World Trade Center was destroyed because America supports Israel. Other terrorists around the world have stated that they hate America because we support Israel. Gentlemen, it doesn’t have to be this way…

“If America used the billions of dollars it now squanders to arm the world to instead implement a foreign policy based on benevolence rather than violence we could eventually bring peace to the world. America has the resources to go into any country that requested aid, and inventory what that country really needs; clean water, hospitals, roads, schools, whatever, and then just give it to them. No strings attached. No hypocritical demands that they become democracies, when half the countries in the UN are not democracies. No bullying about what kind of weapons they can or can not have, when Israel has more weapons of mass destruction than anyone except us. Unless we change the way we spend our ‘foreign aid,’ we shouldn’t be doing it at all.”

The members of the Senate were mesmerized when near the end of his speech he said, “The only way to accomplish a change of this magnitude is to first pass meaningful campaign reform legislation, with real teeth in it; reform that will make it impossible and illegal for any foreign lobby or multinational to buy or influence our legislators. We can do it, and when we do we will be on our way back to a government that truly represents the people, and not just the people with the most money. And we’ll put an end to innocent people being killed in America for expressing their opinion.”

As the audience rose to loudly applaud and cheer Senator Powers, the few Jewish senators, their underlings, and those known to be owned by the Jewish lobby, stood up and walked out.

On the one-year anniversary of the Sign Man’s death there was a ceremony at the underpass. The Sign Man’s identity had not been discovered, nor had the identity of whoever had killed him. The Department of Transportation had moved the fence back, and the City Parks Department had created a rugged little park where the Sign Man used to station himself. The right lane was blocked off for parking and the media were there.

Hundreds of downtown workers walked to the site at noon and listened as Mayor Pam said a few heartfelt words about the Sign Man, then introduced her father. Ex-Senator Powers was being courted by his party and the public to run for President since his moratorium on foreign aid had passed, but he didn’t mention that. He just said a few words about the power of the individual before unveiling the life-size bronze statue of the Sign Man.

The unveiling was met with applause and tears. On a slab of concrete two feet high and eight feet square, purposely left rough and unfinished, sat, literally, an exact replica of the now world famous Sign Man. The artist had created a backdrop with a curtain-like section of fence behind the statue, and had installed an old antique-looking street light off to one side. The Sign Man sat appearing to lean back against the fence with a rolled-up newspaper in one hand, his head tilted back as if looking heavenward. A crescent of green plexiglass had been worked into the brim of his hat, and a cool green band of light covered the top half of his face. The replica of his bucket was by the street, but instead of a cardboard sign there was now a brass plaque that read YOU CAN CHANGE THE WORLD.

Every morning people still stop, toss money at the bucket, and throw a little wave to the Sign Man.

Selected Writings of Pauline Kael; Library of America, 2011
Pauline Kael: Alone in the Dark; Brian Kellow, Viking Adult, 2011

by Ron Capshaw

FOR CONSERVATIVES, PAULINE KAEL IS notorious for her much-quoted comment about her astonishment that Nixon won the 1972 election since “everyone I know voted for McGovern.”

Despite this prime example of the liberal whose worldview is confined to a Martha’s Vineyard soiree, she was not usually so blinkered. Unlike the Left of the early 70s who were lionizing American Stalinists, Kael denounced them as joyless agitprop merchants whose politically correct comedies sank the screwball genre. Of their Hollywood descendants such as Robert Redford and Warren Beatty, Kael characterized them as creatively imprisoned by their limousine liberalism.

Her ability to alienate both sides is all the more remarkable when one considers that these offenses occurred during the “Silent Majority” and New Left era. Writers have compared Kael to such legendary film critics as James Agee and Otis Ferguson; Owen Gliebman has even called her “the Elvis or the Beatles of film criticism.” [6] But the figure she has the most in common with is George Orwell. Both warred against ideological fashion. Both approached their topics empirically and not with any preconceived theories. Both were willing to find value in pulp (Orwell in Boy’s Weeklies, Kael in Keaton’s Batman). Both were uncomfortable with immorality; Orwell would famously describe Salvador Dali’s autobiography as a “book that stinks.” Kael’s condemnation of The Exorcist in the filmmaker’s willingness to exploit a 13-year-old actress coupled with the script’s instructions for the priests to abuse her mirrored the sentiments of conservative Christians at the time. Her negative review of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange could have been written by Orwell himself:

“At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don’t have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact de-sensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you’re offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don’t believe in censorship the use of the only counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there’s anything conceivably damaging in these films–the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don’t use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much for us–that only squares and people who believe in censorship are concerned with brutality.”

Kael never even attempted to be hip. She was old-fashioned enough to appreciate the charm of Cary Grant and to lament that Richard Lester’s gritty and wised-up version of The Three Musketeers didn’t even attempt heroism. Her ideology, described by herself as a McGovern liberal, didn’t prevent her from locating the appeal of such anti-Warren-Court vigilante films as Walking Tall in fears for her own safety in Miranda America.

It is this combination of refusing to be one with the herd and her relentless honesty that makes Selected Writings, containing reviews of such dated films as Billy Jack and The Poseidon Adventure, timeless.

Nothing in her background could have indicated such iconoclasm. In Brian Kellow’s excellent biography, we see her as a Berkeley dropout during the heyday of American Communism, 1936. From there, she migrated to Greenwich Village New York before returning to that most bohemian of cities, San Francisco. She was hired on the spot by City Lights when an editor heard her discussing film and asked her to review Chaplin’s Limelight. The result could not have been predicted. Kael did not draw on her Berkeley experiences in approaching Chaplin, the darling of leftist intellectuals. Limelight, entitled in her review “Slimelight” was simply a sickeningly sentimental film, not an expression of the superstructure. This recoil from crowd-pleasing pablum continued throughout the sixties. The Sound of Music was “a sugarcoated lie that people seemed to want to eat.”

Even her writing process defied the tune-out-drop-out zeitgeist. Kellow shows a workaholic fueled by coffee and liquor, an anti-elitist who attended movies not on nights set aside exclusively for the critics but with crowds. Despite working at the stately New Yorker she was irreverent to the point of self-destructiveness; she could be depended upon at glittering parties to insult whoever was the publisher’s pet celebrity of the moment.

As a critic, Kael’s determination to be one against the herd sometime led her into denouncing films that have since become classics and championing those that haven’t aged well. It is almost like a reflex, a form of mindless rebellion when she raved about Straw Dogs, The Warriors and Man of La Mancha (with a singing Sophia Loren) while roasting It’s A Wonderful Life and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Still in today’s climate of culture wars, where every reviewer has to be a pundit, she is refreshing. It is hard to imagine her praising Michael Moore; one can imagine her saying his film-making resembled one of those religious documentaries celebrating a preaching to the faithful. She may have even ended her review, as she frequently did, with an insult: Moore is simply incapable of patting himself on the back because the fruits of capitalism have made him fat.

by Martin Wright Sampson, Professor of English Literature, Cornell University

I REMEMBER that as a small boy I used to wonder what there would be left to discover when the waste places on my maps were dotted with names, when from pole to pole we should be familiar with this round world of ours. The thought that we had not yet explored everything appealed to my sense of adventure, when lifting my head out of the enchanting pages of Jules Verne, I could see myself, larger and sterner than life, crossing vast deserts, penetrating mysterious jungles, scaling impending cliffs, and winning the fair daughter of an incredible king. I was boyishly glad that there were unexplored tracts in Africa and Australia and about the frozen limits of the poles – they were old Earth’s pledges to her little son that glory and loveliness had not passed away. The vacant stretches were not vacant, for in them romance lay hid.

The childish notion of romance quietly fades, and in its place there comes the true romance. I did not need to grow all the way to manhood to learn that if the wastes of the world gave fewer and fewer opportunities for discovery, yet there was before me the known world, more mysterious in what it had done than any wild expanse of land that had no history. The thought of the past made magical the present. Europe – word of potent charm that sent visions racing through my brain – was ready to be revealed to me. What if it had been known through old centuries? to me it would be new. What if mankind were older still? to me it was unspeakably new.

After all, it was the child’s notion still, but real now and lasting. For what was, and what is, romance to me but the possibility of discovering new things? A dreaming boy might look for them in the fantastic, in the remote, but a man shall find them in the things long since found out, and in his own heart. Romance does not pass, for man is a poet. Steeped in reverie, or thrilling with power, he yearns for the things that are waiting to be discovered by him. I care not if this dream be of a Jacob’s ladder from heaven, or of a rail-road from Cairo to the Cape, the dream is the romance of life, and we cling to it by an instinct surer than reason. Certain men who could look within and without themselves and write, have written a myriad of visions whose name is poetry, and in behalf of this I speak.

What is poetry? The question appears quickly with no quick and cogent answer accompanying it. In the way of the spirit we can reach a common meaning; in the way of the letter, probably not. For poetry has as yet eluded definition. Those marks that commonly seem to distinguish it fail as touchstones when we make the final test. Poetry lies not solely in the use of metre – is not the English translation of Job a poem? not in continuous felicity of style is not Wordsworth a poet? not in a great theme nor in a deep conception – is not some of the most beautiful poetry as irresponsible as a flower? Such qualities are, to be sure, oftenest present in poetry, but they do not separately ensure the name of poetry to the writings in which they appear. Poems succeed by virtue of something other than the outward and visible sign, and each of us preserves in his heart his criterion, the inward and spiritual grace. That which indefinably touches us is poetry to us, though to others it be doggerel or rant. That which others proclaim great or beautiful is not poetry to us if it does not wind its way into our souls. In the main, because we are like one another, we agree; and when we agree that the thing which has spoken to us is poetry, then truly it is poetry – for who else shall judge? The poet writes for the world to read, and when the world is deeply touched and again and again reaffirms its judgment, it has given in its practical way an answer to our question. The answer is not a definition: we may define it if we can.

Now that which is at the bottom of all our attempted definitions of poetry is a sense of something personal and precious. And because of its very intimacy, this personal and precious something is both variable and constant. It may change, as mood shifts into mood; but it persists, as our identity persists. As this poetical nature of ours varies, we feel the futility of defining it; while it remains, we know that to question its power is vain. It is an elusive and lasting part of us, which we can neither master nor escape from, to which we are not slave and from which we desire no release.

This deep-seated element is one of which we have no cause to be ashamed. We do not talk of it in the market-place, but we are inwardly proud of it and must preserve it at all hazards. For although it is lasting, it is not everlasting, and sometimes may linger hidden and hardly subject to our call. If this tender and almost sacred element is not kept safe, something of the sweetness goes out of our waking hours, and our dreams are only the disordered fantasies of sleep.

I am speaking seriously when I say it is at our high peril that we allow to become dormant this poetic sensibility. Our natures are none so rich that we can afford to let go even a little of their wealth. I say this seriously, and yet, I hope, temperately; for I am by no means ready to urge that the poetical in us is our very best part. It yields, if it can so be separated, to the religious, to the heroic, to the contrite in us; and spells beauty more than it does serene steadfastness of purpose. But saying that says the worst thing that can be said against it. If it may seem at times to be nothing more than beauty, it is always, assuredly, nothing less. Life would be poor without it.

Poetry, then, to which this profound element in us responds, might seem to need no support or defense. But we all know that poetry is not, on the whole, very widely read; that when highly thought of, it is often respected rather than made to enter fully into daily life; and that it is often completely misunderstood.

One misunderstanding, which may stand for them all, is that poetry is essentially opposed to common sense, an affair of dreamers, a weak and rather maudlin thing. Now poetry is, to be sure, an affair of dreamers; but all dreamers are not maudlin; and dreams are chiefly of two classes, the silly and the true, and poetry at bottom deals with the true. Instead of being the opposite of common sense, poetry is therefore the superlative of common sense. The misconception of poetry as a rather effeminate thing may have arisen in several ways: for instance, many poems deal with things that at a given time may be uninteresting to mature men and women, and impatience leads to sweeping judgment. Thus all poetry suffers in their minds from the casual inadequacy of specific examples.

Indifference is probably a more serious obstacle than misconception, indifference of those who really apprehend poetry and who have at one time been genuinely fond of it. The habit of reading poetry has not been kept up; and one cannot long remain susceptible to any art if the appreciation of it is not habitual. The failure to keep on reading is partly due to an ignorance of the scope of poetry. We read certain kinds of verse in school and suppose them to be entirely representative of poetry, when indeed they are not. And we read certain kinds of poetry somewhat ignorantly in youth, and trusting our youthful judgment never recur to them again. “Paradise Lost” has often been sacrificed to immaturity.

The best way of remaining open to the appeal of poetry is to study it seriously. One who has mastered the fundamental laws of a process is unlikely to lose whatever enjoyment the result can give him. Out of continuous, thoughtful reading comes understanding. Out of understanding comes a renovation of heart and soul.

Perhaps we are assuming too easily that the thesis is established: that poetry has a peculiarly great value to us. Let us consider some of the things that poetry may do for a reader. Poetry makes external nature more delightful to us. The violet, the rose, the song-birds, clouds and streams and mountains, mean more to us because poets have spoken of them. I do not mean that the poets may have seen more in nature than other men see. Some men see more than the poets. It is not merely what the poet sees, but what he says, that makes his comment on nature inspiring. To the daffodil Shakespeare and Wordsworth add a charm: their words are as much a part of the flower as if they were petals. I cannot look at daffodils without seeing more than their yellow. They tell me Shakespeare’s words anew:

“Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty.”

They sing again to me Wordsworth’s imperishable song,

“And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”

A brook under the trees makes me hear Coleridge as well as the brook’s noise.

“A noise like of a hidden brook,
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.”

Nature is richer to me because a poet has said the right word for all time. Poetry is full of these fleeting secrets fastened into steadfast words. Shakespeare and Shelley, Keats and Browning, have added to the music of the lark, the nightingale, the thrush, true words that the unknowing birds carelessly sing to all who love poetry.

But what poetry does for external nature, that, in far greater degree, it does for human nature. It reveals the human spirit, that means more than flowers or mountains, even when these arise before us through words of consummate tenderness or majesty. And human nature must mean more to us still, when we have heard poetry’s word about it. I do not know in how many ways, in how many accents, this word may be spoken, but I do know that the message is so large that even the message of nature seems small beside it. In his own way the poet tells us of life; and I, his reader, come away liking life better, feeling that its joys and sorrows have been made lucid to me.

If a poet make individual men stand before us, his characters enter into the close circle of our acquaintance. Our horizon widens as we hear their stories, receive their confidences, love, struggle, and suffer with them. We step from out the cramping present into some spacious hail where Hamlet or Launcelot awaits our coming and for a brief space is ours in spite of all the world. The moving figures do not take the place of life, but they reveal endless possibilities of life. It is hard to imagine a mood in which there shall be no personage from the high realm of poetry ready to speak to me if I am willing to listen. Thus I escape my hereditary and social limitations and add to my experience, experience I never shall have; and it may be with a stouter heart I can face the conflicts that must be mine, if I have held my breath when heroes flung their challenge, and have stared all eyes when they struggled with doubts or passions or dragons and came out with the glory of victory on their brows.

And even more than such figures of heroic and kindly men, drawn by the poet’s fancy, I value the revelation of that unassailable reality, the soul of the poet himself, who tells with penetrating candor his yearnings, temptations, failures, and triumphs; who speaks because he cannot keep silent; who speaks beautifully because his thought finds no expression in the repulsive and ugly; who speaks nobly be-cause his nature is noble; who speaks in poetry because by the grace of God a poet he was born.

Such revelations hearten and strengthen a man. They make him know his own heart better, they give him a better own heart to know. He who has shared with sympathy the recounted experience of another man is thereby the more fitted to share in the actual lives of his fellows, and knowing mankind better is thereby more human.

I know that it needs not poetry thus to delight and deepen and broaden a man. Life itself may give a man abiding knowledge of life. To life, poetry is essentially secondary: no verses can take the place of living. But in a deeper sense poetry is a part of life: a poem is a personal fact to writer and reader, every whit as much as pleasure and pain. A fancied adventure is not a real adventure, but a poem’s effect is intensely real. One would ten thousand times rather do something heroic than read or write of heroism, but is it utterly vain to read of heroism? Will a man’s thoughts grow noble the more surely if you take away from him the noble pages of literature? Of a certainty such reading is real experience.

The practical advantage of letting poetry enter into one’s life is easily possible to show. Over and over again one is thrown on his own resources and meets emergencies in which his character is crucially tested. He must make decisions, he must act; and all that there is to prompt and back him is what he is at the moment of need. What he is determines what he shall be. At his best he can do things only to the limit of what that best may be. Now if there has entered into his life, as a valid part of it, the vision, the insight, that poetry may give, there will be a lift in his nature that will add something to what used to be his best: and because of his assimilation of the spirit of poetry; because the happy words, the shining phrases, the glowing passion, of poetry have many a time cleared up a dull hour and become part of his habit; because day by day his brain will have been fitted with better thoughts and feelings than he could have created for himself – the man will have behind him an inspired and strengthened character to guide his choosing mind, his eager hand. To live with beauty is not only to give oneself a joy, it is to have the power of beauty at one’s call. A man’s life would be in a deep and manly way purified and sweetened if each day he could gain a little of the inspiration that poets fuse into their verse and have it share his visions for that day. The wise poet was right who advised us, daily to see a beautiful picture, daily to read a beautiful poem. He was right, he was practical.

Continually to be a sharer in the wholesome gifts of art, of the most accessible and broadest of the arts, literature, to partake freely of the bounty of our sage and generous brethren, the poets of our race, this is to cherish well the immortal part of us, this is to preserve the soul from the stupefying commonplace, this is to use wisely the talents the Master has lent us.



Early life

Cain was born into an Irish Catholic family in Annapolis, Maryland. The son of a prominent educator and an opera singer, he had inherited his love for music from his mother, but his high hopes of starting a career as a singer himself were thwarted when she told him that his voice was not good enough. After graduating from Washington College where his father, James W. Cain served as president, in 1910, Cain began working as a journalist for the Baltimore Sun.

Cain was drafted into the United States Army and spent the final year of World War I in France writing for an Army magazine.

Career

Back in the States, he continued working as a journalist writing editorials for the New York World and articles for The American Mercury. He briefly served as the managing editor of the New Yorker, but later turned to screenplays and finally to fiction.

Although Cain spent many years in Hollywood working on screenplays, his name only appears on the credits of three films: Algiers, Stand Up and Fight, and Gypsy Wildcat.

Cain’s first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, was published in 1934. Two years later the serialized Double Indemnity [which was also made into a classic film, with screenplay collaboration by the great Raymond Chandler — Ed.] was published.

Cain made use of his love of music and of the opera in particular in at least three of his novels: Serenade (about an American opera singer who loses his voice and who, after spending part of his life south of the border, re-enters the States illegally with a Mexican prostitute in tow); Mildred Pierce (in which, as part of the subplot, the only daughter of a successful businesswoman trains as an opera singer); and Career in C Major, a short semi-comic novel about the unhappy husband of an aspiring opera singer who unexpectedly discovers that he has a better voice than she does (Cain’s fourth wife, Florence Macbeth, was a retired opera singer).

American Authors’ Authority

In July 1946, Cain wrote an article for Screen Writer magazine in which he proposed the creation of an American Authors’ Authority to hold writers’ copyrights and represent the writers in contract negotiations and court disputes. This idea was dubbed the “Cain plan” in the media. The plan was denounced as Communist by some writers, who formed the American Writers Association to oppose it. Although Cain worked vigorously to promoted the Authority, it did not gain widespread support and the idea died.

Personal life

Cain was married to Mary Clough in 1919. The marriage ended in divorce and he promptly married Elina Sjösted Tyszecka. Although Cain never had any children of his own, he was close to Elina’s two children from a prior marriage. In 1944 Cain married film actress Aileen Pringle, but the marriage was a tempestuous union and dissolved in a bitter divorce two years later. Cain married for the fourth time to Florence Macbeth, an opera singer. Their marriage lasted until her death in 1966.

Cain continued writing up to his death at the age of 85. However, the many novels he published from the late 1940s onward never rivaled his earlier successes.

Quotation

“I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort.”

(from the preface to Double Indemnity)

Read the full article on Poe Forward

by Ann Hendon

ACCORDING TO Reading Local, there’s a new literary reading series in Baltimore that honors the spirit of H.L. Mencken and The American Mercury. They say:

The second installment of the New Mercury Reading Series was held at Jordan Faye Contemporary Gallery, featuring Charles Cohen, Steve Luxenberg, and Melissa Hale. Their mission statement is a re-envisioning of H. L. Mencken and George Nathan’s goals for The American Mercury, founded in 1924 and revived recently online as a compendium of vintage articles and new. The New Mercury Reading Series is a venture after my own heart, as they plan to “feature mostly writers with a Baltimore connection of some kind, even if they are no longer living here,” according to organizer (and author of Roots of Steel, which I discussed here) Deborah Rudacille. Their goal is to showcase authors of all types of non-fiction: memoir, journalism, essays, reporting, criticism: anyone “who fits under the big tent of real-life storytelling.”

Check out this 1923 announcement in Time for the initial publication of The American Mercury.

More than ever, the spirit of intelligence, free thinking, creativity, and reason that Mencken exemplified is needed today, and we hope that this reading series — and our own efforts, for that matter — are up to the standard set by our founder.