Time Machine: H.L. Mencken's 1925 Review of 'The Great Gatsby' | Hacker News Reader

Time Machine: H.L. Mencken's 1925 Review of 'The Great Gatsby'

chicagotribune.com

76 pointssamclemens38 comments

A fine piece of writing: "The thing that chiefly interests the basic Fitzgerald is still the florid show of modern American life — and especially the devil's dance that goes on at the top. He is unconcerned about the sweatings and sufferings of the nether herd; what engrosses him is the high carnival of those who have too much money to spend, and too much time for the spending of it. Their idiotic pursuit of sensation, their almost incredible stupidity and triviality, their glittering swinishness — these are the things that go into his notebook."

Also see Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences"[1], reviewing some of the works of James Fenimore Cooper (of "The Last of the Mohicans" fame).

A sample:

  In his little box of stage properties he kept six or eight cunning
  devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive
  and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he
  was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one
  was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of the
  moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out
  barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another
  stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was
  his broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his
  effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any
  book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all
  the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a
  Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four
  dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a
  hundred handier things to step on, but that wouldn’t satisfy
  Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if
  he can’t do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leather Stocking
  Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.

[1] - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3172/3172-h/3172-h.htm

Mencken describes Fitzgerald's increasing skill as a writer as a rare thing.

I would argue that among really good writers, it's not rare at all. The usual course is for an author to keep learning for years, figure out what works well for them, and perhaps lose a little ground towards the end of their lives due to failing health or lack of care.

Similarly, good technologists build a workshop full of techniques that experience has given them, do their highest quality work in middle to late middle age, and then retreat from active building to teach, critique or advise.

>The usual course is for an author to keep learning for years, figure out what works well for them, and perhaps lose a little ground towards the end of their lives due to failing health or lack of care.

I haven't found that to be true, at least amongst successful authors. Certainly not enough to call it 'the usual course.' Most authors who I have seen be successful in early life don't write their best works in middle or late age.

I think one of the problems which may make it appear that this is the case, whether or not it actually is, is that once an author has achieved some success, they are granted increasing deference by editors and publishers; this may lead to the quality of their finished work declining even while their writing skill increases.

That's true, but we see the same phenomenon in a lot of fields where that isn't as true — such as bands' later albums — so it seems likely to me that there's something deeper at work a lot of the time.

I suspect it's some combination of that and:

- They had a reserve of good ideas and used them up faster than they could generate new ones

- Their initial efforts had a lot of time to "cook" in their heads, while the later ones were forced out (similar to what you propose, only it's their internal editor that's slacking off)

- They lose their enthusiasm for the profession, but they don't want to give up the success and identity they've built in the field

There may be other fields where that isn't as true, but bands albums aren't one of them; bands relations with labels and producers, etc., have much the same as authors with publishers and editors. Basically, once their name is going to make the sale on its own, other people in the production chain are less likely to say no.

OTOH, I think that quality of work (judged, as it always is, by subjective appeal to some critic or set of critics) with constant skill has considerable variation in most artistic endeavors, and what makes a name is usually not the kind of work that most people can turn in day in and day out. Saying that skill goes down after someone becomes famous is, I think, a lot like saying people's skill at the lottery tends to go down after they hit the jackpot.

> - They had a reserve of good ideas and used them up faster than they could generate new ones

I think the quality and complexity of the ideas also matters, perhaps more even than quantity. Some of my favorite 'creators' who become better over time tend to focus on essentially the same thing over and over again (more than others, it seems). But their later works are richer and better and developments from earlier works.

>Mencken describes Fitzgerald's increasing skill as a writer as a rare thing.

It's not rare among really good writers, Mencken is saying a really good writer is what is rare.

With "a really good writer" being defined not as one who produces one good book.

Mencken's chosen qualifiers are right there in the text:

"I make much of this improvement because it is of an order not witnessed in American writers; and seldom, indeed, in those who start off with popular success."

Emphasis mine. American writers and the one-hit wonders of the literary world tend to get worse rather than better, he's saying. The first is probably a justifiable statement at the time—decent-to-good American literature was rare (though not entirely absent) in the English corpus before the moderns (many of whom preferred to live in Europe, anyway).

How often do really good writers come along? It's interesting to hear what contemporaries thought of Gatsby because, 90 years later, we know that it is an Important Book. On the other hand, how many people will read Stephen King or Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey in the year 2100, even though these were commercial blockbusters in our time?

Stephen King is so prolific that I imagine some of his works will have real staying power. Even if he's merely a "good" author, odds are that at least one of his works will be far better than his own average.

My vote is for the first dark tower book. That one above all others I've read remains fun to think about.

Even if you just consider the film classics based on his books (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Shining), he'll have staying power as people will find his books through the films.

Then there's the cultural impact he's had. Stranger Things was basically a Stephen King novel and even directly name-dropped him.

"The trouble with H.L. Mencken is that he believes he is H.L. Mencken. There is no cure for a delusion of that magnitude."

... is a quote I distinctly remember reading many years ago, and which I cannot find a single reference to anywhere on the internet. Guess I'm just crazy?

If that's the extent of your craziness, you're doing pretty well:

http://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/internet/2016/12/mo...

It's probably a real but non-famous quote that just didn't happen to be recorded on an extant website. That's the sort of thing that's easy to lose to time.

I'd be curious to know how this was transcribed: it has "Totentons" evidently for "Totentanz". I seem to reread the book every n years, and often as not change my mind from the previous reading.

> it has "Totentons" evidently for "Totentanz".

Same goes for "fidelis ad urnum", which should read "urnam".

And probably gaudy in "gandy villas and bawdy house parties".

I imagine if not originally dictated, his draft was hand written and submitted directly for typesetting.

While possibly Mencken's errors, a linotype operator botching a slug or an editor misreading a partially open 'a' wouldn't be the severe error it is today in the age of autocorrect and instantaneous type production.

When you post a comment, there's just a screen between you and all of the internet and its information. Mencken might have had weeks or months and a dozen people's hands between his review and its printing. Not to mention reprintings, revisions, and the eventual OCR close to a century later.

I don't think I'd describe Gatsby as a 'glorified anecdote'. It's fairly tightly plotted, as much as any hollywood blockbuster. But the writing does far outshine the story. It's absolutely beautiful, if perhaps a bit mawkish.

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It's surprising how much Gatsby has in common with Dandy characters like Dorian Gray. Never noticed until Mencken's review.

Two books I loved when I read them in my early to mid twenties. I fell in love with their main characters and the decadence.

If you've not read his piece on Chiropractic, it is worth it. https://www.chirobase.org/12Hx/mencken.html

Most of that piece is contemptuous rhetoric, like "the simple sentimentality of a somewhat sclerotic fat woman" from the OP but without the more interesting analysis. It takes the worth of doctors of his time for granted, mentioning tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy: at least the former was much overprescribed then, I don't know about the latter. A chiropractor won't offer to remove any organs you're not sure of the use of. (I've never seen one myself.)

I do like older manipulative writing for being more obvious to us, because we're not quite the target anymore. A kind of vaccine.

The recent Family Guy spoof nailed its weaknesses pretty well, I thought.

++spoiler alert++

> To find a parallel for the grossness and debauchery that now reign in New York one must go back to the Constantinople of Basil I.

H.L., honey, you have no idea...

Between Mencken's day and today, there was a book titled Hollywood Babylon, with the expectable content.

We're probably into solid Paleolithic territory by now ...

Regardless of the subject matter and opinions expressed, I think any reviewer who decides to give away all of the plot details within the first few sentences of a review should not be given much (if any) merit.

That's an interesting perspective. I guess there's a philosophical question: what is the point of reviews? If it is to help determine whether to read or see something, then I guess I agree with you that this sort of thing largely defeats the purpose. But if it is instead to have a sort of "conversation" with the reviewer about their thoughts on something you've already read or seen, then this sort of recap is less problematic.

I think I use reviews for both purposes. Using movies as an example, I'll check rottentomatoes before-the-fact to see whether there is at least a vague consensus that the movie I'm about to pay to see isn't going to be a total waste of my time. But then after I've seen it, I'll sometimes also go read what a smaller set of reviewers who I enjoy had to say about it, and compare and contrast their thoughts with my own. Both things have value to me, but in very different ways.

It's unfortunate that there aren't separate widely-used terms for recommendation style reviews and critical breakdown style reviews, because it makes it hard to find the latter when I want it. For an example, Jamahl Epsicokhan has written reviews of all the episodes of Star Trek on his site Jammer's Reviews. They break down both the plot and give criticism of the entire work, including parts that would be spoilers. Sometimes you can find these kind of articles under the term "rewatch" though.

I could tell you exactly what you'll see when you go to Big Sur, but that still would not spoil your trip should you drive down there yourself.

You cannot spoil The Great Gatsby just by recalling the major plot points. Indeed, the novel's beauty is actually in between the parties and deaths of it's characters.

I beg to differ, as the deaths of its characters have far more impact on first consumption, and that colors the work. If the narrator began the story by announcing which characters would be deceased by its conclusion, then it would be a different story entirely.

The last three paragraphs are interesting if you think of Trump as a descendant of Gatsby's NY.

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