Farewell, Philip Roth; Mencken on the language; how we got Sherlock, and more: newsletter, May 25, 2018

This newsletter was emailed to everyone on Jim’s email list (3,081) on May 25, 2018

Thanks to all who wrote or commented on Facebook about the dulcimer that I made and showed off in last week’s newsletter. I am going to start on another one before long.

Sadly, for the second week in a row, we have had to say farewell to a great and well-known American writer Philip Roth.  Last week it was Tom Wolfe. And speaking of writers, this week’s newsletter features a couple of greats: Henry Louis Mencken and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Have a great weekend. 

Important: Remember to open the images or click on one of the links so that my email service will record your engagement and you will stay active on the list. Thanks.

Mencken and the American Language

H.L. Mencken, writer and journalist, comes to mind when the American public or American culture needs criticism and a bit of biting satire. He knew how to do that and did it better during this 40-plus-year as a newspaper columnist and magazine editor than anyone else.

He did it so well that we forget that there was more to the man than his cigar-chomping, beer-drinking, fiery typewriter wit. Much more.

Mencken took a scholar’s and a collector’s interest in the English language, especially as it was used by Americans. He was fascinated by the language, beginning with the way Americans differed from the English. He began to take note of these differences early in his writing and editing career, and this notice morphed into a study of the language itself — the American language.

Mencken wrote several newspaper columns about his interest in the language and the items he had noticed in his wide reading and in his discussions with people in Baltimore — a hotbed of innovative language use.  In the second decade of the 20th century, Mencken decided it was time for someone to become a modern-day Noah Webster. That someone would be him.

The American Language was published in 1919 by Alfred A. Knopf, one of its earliest titles.

It sold well and received excellent reviews. It was revised three times during Mencken’s lifetime and has been revised since his death.

Unlike Mencken’s acerbic views of American politics and the collective ignorance of the American electorate, Mencken celebrated the American language and came to its defense when it was attacked, particularly by English critics. There’s an excerpt below the signature of this email.

The American Language is pure Mencken and a delight to read. While you can purchase a copy from Amazon, it is available free through Google’s Project Gutenberg.

How the Impressionists got their name

The Impressionists didn’t start out trying to be impressionists.

They began in France in the 1870s as a group of painters who did not like the way that the French cultural czars controlled what the public saw. The French academics dictated that paintings should take on a certain look and that they should be executed in a certain way. Paintings that did not follow these rules were excluded from many exhibitions.

Some of the Paris-based artists of the day had a different vision. They believed in broad, free brush strokes in the manner J.M.W. Turner and Eugene Delacroix, and they believed that getting out of the studio and painting where the subjects were could enhance their work. They were the urban sketchers of their day.

They also had the temerity to organize their own exhibitions. The first one was in April 1874. Once they showed their work, the critics took aim and fired away. One of those critics was Luis Leroy, a journalist, critic, and humorist of the day. He took the opportunity to make fun of the exhibition, seizing on the title of one of Claude Monet’s works, Impression, Sunrise.

He wrote a fictional dialogue between viewers of the paintings that include this:

Impression—I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it … and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.

His article was derisively titled The Exhibition of the Impressionists.

Derisive or not, the name stuck, and a century and a half later we know — and honor — this group of painters for their vision, creativity, and courage.

Be careful what you make fun of.

Philip Roth, 1933-2018

The death of Philip Roth on Tuesday (May 22) removes one of the great names from the living giants of American letters. In fact, many consider him to be the last of those giants, and they may well be right.

Obituaries in the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other publications have praised and analyzed his work. Some have included Roth’s great critics, speaking their minds about the inadequacies of his work.

Roth had three great interlocking themes in his work: the sexual drive of males (some males, not all); Jews and Jewishness in America; and American and Americanism. His fourth theme — or maybe it was just a device — was himself. He loved taking part in his own novels, playing with his and the reader’s imagination about whom he was really writing about.

Roth didn’t mind making his readers uncomfortable, and he ran into some of the consequences of that early in his career. In 1962, at a Yeshiva University symposium where he was a guest author, he was denounced repeatedly by questioners for a story he included in Goodbye, Columbus. The confrontation almost became physical when Roth tried to leave at the end of the program and was surrounded by shouting students.

The confrontation — fully described here: Roths visit to YU changed career — was a seminal event in Roth’s development of a writer and led him to view his own Jewishness more critically than he had ever done.

If you were (or are) disturbed by Roth’s work, you should read Matthew Rosza‘s article in Salon.com (On hating and loving Philip Roth: How I learned to appreciate the book that repulsed me | Salon.com). Rosza doesn’t particularly like Roth either but understands the value of his work.

Roth’s clear, precise prose and his honesty about himself, his work, and his view of the world made him one of the era’s great writers.

RIP, Philip Roth.

Giveaways

The Prolific Reader. Kill the Quarterback is listed there along with some other great mysteries. https://theprolificreader.com/mystery/

The Amazon gift card raffle that we included in the newsletter for the last couple of weeks has ended, but I haven’t been notified about the winners yet. When I have their names, I will publish them. We’ll likely be doing another raffle like this one next mon