{"id":27521,"date":"2014-08-25T09:45:31","date_gmt":"2014-08-25T13:45:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27521"},"modified":"2020-08-07T13:17:18","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T17:17:18","slug":"terry-teachout-on-h-l-menckens-days-trilogy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/08\/25\/terry-teachout-on-h-l-menckens-days-trilogy\/","title":{"rendered":"Terry Teachout on H.L. Mencken&#8217;s <em>Days Trilogy<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>To clarify, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/aboutlastnight\/2014\/08\/bursts-of-complete-felicity.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Terry Teachout<\/a> is talking about a new omnibus edition of H.L. Mencken&#8217;s <em>Happy Days<\/em>, <em>Newspaper Days<\/em>, and <em>Heathen Days<\/em> (which I&#8217;ll certainly be adding to my various bookstore wish lists):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It happened that I hadn\u2019t looked at any of the <em>Days<\/em> books since <em>The Skeptic<\/em>, my Mencken biography, was published in 2002. Nor had I looked at <em>The Skeptic<\/em> since I last wrote about Mencken. That was four years ago, in a <em>New Criterion<\/em> essay about the Library of America\u2019s two-volume collection of his <em>Prejudices<\/em> essays in which I suggested that<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Mencken might possibly be a young person\u2019s writer, one who excites the unfinished mind but has less to offer those who have seen more of life. Certainly those who look to literature for a portrait of the human animal that is rich in chiaroscuro will not find it in the <strong>Prejudices<\/strong> \u2026 If a great essayist is one who succeeds in getting his personality onto the page, then H.L. Mencken qualifies in spades. The problem is that his personality grows more predictable with closer acquaintance, just as the tricks of his prose style grow more familiar. Like most journalists, he is best consumed not in the bulk of a twelve-hundred-page boxed set but in small and carefully chosen doses.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Hence it was a very pleasant surprise to return to the <em>Days<\/em> books after a long absence and find my original judgment on them to be confirmed anew. I described <em>Happy Days<\/em> as \u201cone of [Mencken]\u2019s most completely realized achievements \u2026 a masterpiece of pure style\u201d in <em>The Skeptic<\/em>, and went on to say that <em>Newspaper Days<\/em> was \u201cat least as good \u2026 It, too, is a not-so-minor masterpiece of affectionate reminiscence, one that in a better-regulated world would be recognized as a modern classic.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To clarify, Terry Teachout is talking about a new omnibus edition of H.L. Mencken&#8217;s Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days (which I&#8217;ll certainly be adding to my various bookstore wish lists): It happened that I hadn\u2019t looked at any of the Days books since The Skeptic, my Mencken biography, was published in 2002. Nor [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,28],"tags":[1077,86,591],"class_list":["post-27521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","tag-autobiography","tag-criticism","tag-hlmencken"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-79T","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27521"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59414,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27521\/revisions\/59414"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}