Delighted and Charmed Beyond Belief--Mencken

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Delighted and Charmed Beyond Belief--Mencken

I got this video on a Facebook post by Jim Peron. He said he had a copy of the LP recording of this interview with H. L. Mencken, but found a copy on YouTube.

To my knowledge (but I hope I'm wrong), this the only recording of Mencken's voice in existence. And there is almost an hour of it.

I dug a little and found more information about this interview at Open Culture: Rare Recording of Controversialist, Journalist and American Literary & Social Critic, H.L. Mencken

According to Matthias Rascher at that site: "This interview above was conducted by Mencken’s colleague Donald Howe Kirkley of The Baltimore Sun in a small recording room at the Library of Congress in Washington on June 30, 1948." Also, you can get a link to the FBI file on Mencken there.

And if anyone wants a transcript of the interview, one is available from the Library of Congress: Interview with H. L. Mencken (Transcript).

Mencken helped Ayn Rand a lot in the early years. After listening--and I listened to the whole thing, delighted and charmed beyond belief as the title of this post says--I can understand why. It's amazing how most of his comments are applicable to today. Verbatim. I know I resonate with them.

Imagine coming across a recording of an hour-long chat of a long-dead member of your family--an ancestor you heard about all your life, but never met.

Suddenly he's alive. That's the feeling I got.

Way cool. And add cool to that.

Michael

[Reidy]

Thanks for the lead.

Mencken seems to have been the model for (I forget the name) Roark's first client.

I haven't listened yet. What little of his that I've come across has not worn well. He seems to be the original liberal snob, founder of a tradition that includes Galbraith, Obama, Krugman and Maddow. This is not to say that he was a liberal in the modern sense (a welfare / regulatory statist), but these are the people who adopted his tone.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Pete,

What I heard sounds like a died-in-the-wool libertarian. (Most of it, anyway.)

Michael

[Reidy]

Yes, he's a libertarian, but modern-day statists have taken up his supercilious tone; Mencken's booboisie are Obama's bitter clingers to god and guns.

[Francisco Ferrer]

Mencken, in addition to being a literary and political critic was also a social critic, a profession that now appears to be extinct in the American scene. So, yes, he was a snob--a well qualified one--who could deftly attack stupidity, gullibility, superstition, and, as we hear in the recording, "America's lust for the hideous." As for modern day Menckens, the only one who might have been able to scale his Olympian wit, Gore Vidal, is now dead.

[BaalChatzaf]

Yes, he's a libertarian, but modern-day statists have taken up his supercilious tone; Mencken's booboisie are Obama's bitter clingers to god and guns.

Bravo!

[BaalChatzaf]

Mencken was an intelligent, literate and sophisticated man but he suffered from an endemic condition of his time. He was a racist. He considered Negros to be inferior. To his credit, he detested violence against Negros, particularly lynching.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken#Racism_and_elitism

[Francisco Ferrer]

The Wikipedia article about Mencken quotes from works that he never meant for publication, yet at the same time does not mention his critical role in promoting the careers of black writers: "By being the first white editor to publish the work of black writers in a mainstream white magazine, he helped open the gates for the Harlem Literary Renaissance."