Do You Remember?: The Whimsical Letters of H. L. Mencken and Philip Goodman

by Jack Sanders

In 1918, while Henry Louis Mencken was editing The Smart Set in New York and working on The American Language in his native Baltimore, his best friend, Philip Goodman, a New York advertising man, bon vivant, and fledgling publisher, wrote a letter “reminiscing” about their old German-American neighborhood in the 1880s and 1890s. He invented characters and events and wrote with irony and affection for those better times. Mencken rose instantly to the challenge and wrote a letter in similar vein. For three years the correspondents tried to out-do each other in telling tall stories. Sanders has reconstructed and annotated this correspondence.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published December 2, 1975

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mencken could be wry, bombastic and acidly funny, but not many people have accused him of whimsy, even in his fairly mellow autobiographies. These letters, though, are drenched in whimsy, and still manage to be hilarious.

HLM and his old pal Goodman, a New York publisher and theatrical producer, traded reminisences (all fictional) about the German culture of late-19th and early-20th-century Maryland and Pennsylvania, where they'd grown up. One of them would start a story: "Gustav Borschersing, of the family owning the lime kilns, died yesterday. He was taken off by the Leberkrankheit,* the curse of the whole family. ... I hear that he leaves $200,000, and that he divides it equally between his second wife, geb. Schultz, and his daughter by his first marriage, Eva Schneidereith. They hate each other, and will lock horns over their rival displays of mourning." The other would reply with further details or protests that he'd gotten it all wrong, and so on back and forth, creating a vast selection of family histories, friendships, feuds and scandals. Not many of them are brilliant on their own, but the cumulative effect is delirious. They had a plan at one point to turn the stories into a book, but I can't imagine it being funnier than the letters themselves.

Goodman was Jewish, and a lot of his stories reflect his upbringing. Mencken clearly knew that world and played along, with sprinklings of Hebrew and Yiddish. At one point, Goodman invites him to a bris: "If you can get here by Saturday evening I want you to join me in attending a banquet to be tendered to Mohel Leventhal in honor of his having completed fifty years of professional life. Congregation B'Nai Jeshurun will be there in a body to present him with a gold lancet on which will be inscribed the figure 13,452, being the number of babies he has unerringly attended." The festivities would include a public circumcision, plus "dancing later in the evening." At another point, Mencken thanks him for a (seemingly real) Rosh Hashana card. They eventually fell out over the rise of Hitler, with Mencken insisting the Fuhrer was simply a buffoon in the style of the American politicians he'd spent his career mocking. Sanders, who edited the letters (and preeningly calls himself "a humanist, libertarian, skeptic, and curmudgeon"), defends Mencken a little too strenuously, noting that he surrounded himself personally and professionally with Jews, but doesn't address his huge moral and political blind spots and failure to recognize where the world was clearly headed in the 1930s.

But that was more than a decade after these letters were written. They don't, as far as I remember, appear in The New Mencken Letters, an invaluable and extremely funny behemoth of a book, so if you're a Mencken fan, this is prime stuff.

* "liver disease," aka cirrhosis

[Gregory Koster · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gather round. What I’m about to tell you must remain ‘top secret.’ Revealing this information will expose you to savage ridicule, and the ruin of your reputation as a clever member of the intelligentsia.
Ready? DO YOU REMEMBER? THE WHIMSICAL LETTERS OF H.L. MENCKEN AND PHILIP GOODMAN is the dullest bloody book outside the Internal Revenue Code. Even the Code has a serious purpose, that keep people reading it. This book, co-authored by Mencken, one of the funniest writers of the twentieth century, is loaded with jokes requiring a professional translator’s knowledge of German, and a dissertation level of knowledge of what late nineteenth century life was like for German immigrants in a big American city. The result is an epileptic corpse of a book, jerking about randomly after long periods of inertia worthy of a rotting log, alarming the reader who is supposed to laugh, but has no idea why. The closest parallel is attending an opera sung in Italian, with the attendee not knowing Italian, or the history of the opera projectile being fired at the attendee. The book’s editor, Jack Sanders makes a valiant effort to remedy this defect by copious footnotes. The footnotes are excellent, but as with jokes that have to be explained, the comic effect is nil. Sanders had a difficult job with this book. The letters of both men were frequently undated. More, Goodman had his secretary take the letters and extract the “Do You Remember?” sections in a fresh typescript. She did so---but didn’t date any of the extracts. So Sanders had to piece together a storyline from the internal evidence of the surviving letters. All this effort should have told him that the project was worth doing, but he plowed on, doubtless encouraged by Mencken’s own belief that he and Goodman were going to turn these letters into a book some day. It was a serious derangement of Mencken’s editorial judgment. Perhaps a privately printed book, to be given to members of Mencken’s Saturday Night Club, men who would have the knowledge of German and German immigrant life. But not for the public. This book was brought to life by Mencken’s other books, animated only by the literary electricity that runs through so much of Mencken’s writing.