Subject:
Re: [NABOKV-L] CHW to MR re: American v. European
From:
Andrew Brown <as-brown@comcast.net> <mailto:as-brown@comcast.net>
Date:
Wed, 10 Jan 2007 13:19:40 -0500
To:
Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@listserv.ucsb.edu> <mailto:NABOKV-L@listserv.ucsb.edu>
Emily Dickinson was every bit as American as Mencken, whose boisterous
rhetoric was suited only to the time in which he had his greatest
success, the Twenties. Note how Mencken is mentioned disparagingly by
two characters in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
Even at that early stage, (Sun
came out, or was written, in about ‘26, I think) Mencken’s reputation
was something on a par with Jimmy Breslin of the ‘60s. Mencken couldn’t
have held his own for ten minutes in a mano a mano with William
Safire when Safire was in fighting trim.
I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that Mencken was
really a Rush Limbaugh endowed with brains and literacy.
Sandburg, too, is very much trapped in his time, like a cicada shell
stuck to a tree. No one reads him today except scholars who for some
reason have been forced to.
Americans who were true Americans and yet able to transcend the time
trap include Poe, Sam Clemens (I don’t use that goofy moniker he rigged
up for himself); please read Sam’s The Innocents Abroad.
It is a timelessly funny, fearfully insulting, recklessly honest look
at old Europe and the old (but smoldering) Middle East by a wised-up
provincial American.
Ambrose Bierce, clever and concise; Vincent Millay (she chose the
masculine version of her name) one of the greatest — maybe the greatest
— composer of sonnets in the 20th century; and, of course, F. Scott
Fitzgerald.
It’s only my opinion, but I think if one
wanted to examine the
American voice of the first half of the last century, one might choose
the lyrical optimism of early Fitzgerald, balanced with the deflating
humor of Ring Lardner, rather than the journalism of Mr. Mencken. As an
American reader, and a confessed provincial who has had the luck to do
some traveling in other lands, I would nominate the American prose or
verse stylists above as examples to compare with VN. But, as I say,
these are just suggestions.
Respectfully,
Andrew Brown