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Updated: June 4, 2025
My last protest was the feeblest of all: "I can't spend a year or a month or a week poring over the scores of these fellows; I can't go to concerts to hear their music. I might as well go to work in a coal mine." "I'll do it for you!" triumphantly checkmated General Mencken. "I'll read the scores and you shall write the book!"
"An excellent idea!" cried Major Mencken, enthusiastically, "Write one chapter and then repeat it verbatim throughout the book, changing only the name of the principal character. Then clap on a preface, explaining your reason for this procedure."
Dreiser does break with it morally, spiritually, aesthetically. Let the dotards, he says, bury their dead. Mr. Mencken wishes to drive us out of Colonialism. He says that Longfellow has had his day, and that it is time to stop imitating Addison, time to be ashamed of aping Stevenson, Kipling, or John Masefield. He is right.
The true older generation, of which one seldom hears in current criticism except in terms of abuse, remains to be discovered, and we herewith announce its personnel, so that the next time the youthful writer excoriates it in the abstract all may know just whom he means. Among the older generation in American literature are H. L. Mencken and Mrs.
Therefore our immunity. Since they need no grey matter, they have none. And unable to understand us, they ignore us. And if we grow too insistent, as has Mencken, they put an end to the business by embracing us and pulling our fangs by disgusting us with their stupidity.
Syncopation is Devil's Ally." Discovered! One reads the morning paper and feels a return of hope. The High Priests are aroused. They have disembowelled an ally. There is hope then of a bloody fray. Another Edition and they will be on our own heads, swinging their snickersnees. Mencken will be arrested and burned in public. Anderson will be strung up by the heels and his estates confiscated.
He makes a whimsical plea for a modern revival of the Court of Love and in "Morality in Fiction" he derides that Puritanism in American letters whose dark scourge H. L. Mencken still pursues with a cat-o'-nine-tails and a hand grenade. He gives us a fanciful set of rules for a novelist which, happily, he has ignored in his own fictions.
The Authoritative Work on American Music The Authoritative Work on American Music H. L. Mencken pointed out to me recently, in his most earnest and persuasive manner, that it was my duty to write a book about the American composers, exposing their futile pretensions and describing their flaccid opera, stave by stave.
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