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Mencken and Sara: a life in letters.


Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters, edited

by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers Elizabeth Rodgers is a recurring character in the fictional universe of the crime drama franchise Law & Order. She is played by Leslie Hendrix.

Rodgers is dedicated to her work and finds it frustrating when she is badgered by the police for results when she doesn't
 (McGraw-Hill, 551 pp., $22.95)

H. L. MENCKEN wrote love letters? The same H. L. Mencken who proposed a $1-a-day tax on all bachelors because, he claimed, it was worth that much to be free? Eighteen years Mencken's junior, Sara Haardt was a Goucher College Goucher College (gou`chər), at Towson, Md., formerly at Baltimore; inc. 1885, opened 1888 by Methodists as a college for women, coeducational since 1987.  graduate and a fledgling writer when the two met in 1923 during one of Mencken's periodic visits to the Baltimore women's college. Thus began a correspondence which survived their marriage in 1930 and continued to her early death (from tuberculosis tuberculosis (TB), contagious, wasting disease caused by any of several mycobacteria. The most common form of the disease is tuberculosis of the lungs (pulmonary consumption, or phthisis), but the intestines, bones and joints, the skin, and the genitourinary, ) in 1935. Marion Elizabeth Rodgers retrieved these letters from the Haardt collection, which Mencken had donated to Goucher in the fall of 1935. Only now are they being published. Would Mencken have approved? Probably not. He was a private man who preferred to keep his "comic mask' (Edmund Wilson's phrase) firmly in place. In the course of these letters the mask does slip. What is revealed, however, is not a hard-faced curmudgeon cur·mudg·eon  
n.
An ill-tempered person full of resentment and stubborn notions.



[Origin unknown.]


cur·mudg
, but a fuzzy-cheeked fifty-year-old, give or take a few years, who was very much in love for perhaps the first time. In her introduction to this thoroughly annotated correspondence (which includes many more letters from Mencken than from Sara, owing to owing to
prep.
Because of; on account of: I couldn't attend, owing to illness.

owing to prepdebido a, por causa de 
 her greater care in preserving his missives), Marion Rodgers concludes that the two were united in their love of Baltimore, their love-hate attitude toward the South, their penchant for looking on life as a human comedy, their mutual respect, and their "dim view' of marriage. To Mencken, however, marriage was always a possibility --so long as both parties subscribed to his version of a pre-nuptial agreement: "I hereby promise to do my damnedest damned·est  
adj.
Superlative of damned.

n.
All that is possible; the utmost: did my damnedest to deliver the term paper on time.
. And you are hereby notified that I expect you to be polite.' If their letters are any indication, this contract was in force well before their marriage, a marriage made in the only heaven the agnostic ag·nos·tic  
n.
1.
a. One who believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God.

b. One who is skeptical about the existence of God but does not profess true atheism.

2.
 Mr. Mencken ever claimed to know.
COPYRIGHT 1987 National Review, Inc.
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright 1987, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.

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Article Details
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Author:Chalberg, John C.
Publication:National Review
Article Type:Book Review
Date:Oct 9, 1987
Words:325
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