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Do You Remember?: The Whimsical Letters of H. L. Mencken and Philip Goodman
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
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May 19, 2021
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.
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.
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