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From Autobiography, George Samuel Schuyler 1966
But closest of all to me was that distinguished Southerner, Henry L. Mencken of Baltimore, Maryland, sometime city editor of the Sun, also editor of The Smart Set and The American Mercury, and for long the dean of American letters. I corresponded with him from the time of my first article in the Mercury in December, 1927, until long after he was stricken with paralysis and could only correspond through his secretary. Many of his letters to me appear in Letters of H. L. Mencken, selected and annotated by Guy J. Forgue (A. A. Knopf, New York, 1961).
We first met at the office of The American Mercury, then located in Knopf�s office at 730 Fifth Avenue in New York. Miss Lustgarten, the secretary, was there, but Charles Angoff had not yet come from Harvard to join the staff. When I came in, Mencken, a roly-poly exuberant man of medium height, jumped up grinning and said, �Well, we meet at last!� By that time I had contributed about four articles to the magazine. I stayed for about half an hour and we had a lively chat, a pleasant beginning.
All the other times I saw him were in his home on Hollins Street, and always with his brother, August, present. Mencken boasted of his justly famous cellar, which he did not have to press me hard to sample. As I recall the first time, we discussed his book, The American Language, and I remember his view that the language was enriched by just a handful of people rather than the masses. I called his attention first to the late Dan Burley, who was then columnist on the New York Amsterdam
News, and a man full of new turns and twists to the language, who had written a small dictionary of jazz and jive terms. . . .
Mencken was affable and hospitable, the perfect host. . . . He had no illusions about either colored or whites. He had been surrounded all of his life by Negro neighbors, and knew them as individuals in a way that so many sentimentalists do not. I learned much from him about Negroes in Baltimore and the rest of Maryland. One of the things that struck me in visiting many Southern cities was that one found Negro and white families living side by side in the same block to a greater extent than in numerous Northern cities. I found many such blocks in Jackson, Mississippi. While the children did not attend school together, they played together, which is equally important.
Mencken did an enormous amount of reading and he even subscribed to, and read, the Pittsburgh Courier. One night he told me that Julia Bumbry Jones, the woman�s editor of the Courier, wrote the best column of the kind in
American journalism. At a time when very few Negroes were being accepted in the more outstanding magazines Mencken encouraged them and published more of their output than any others. He often used excerpts from my Courier column. In a letter to Harry Elmer Barnes dated December 6, 1945, referring to me, Mencken said : �I am more and more convinced that he is the most competent editorial writer in this great Free Republic.� It was a very fine compliment.
Black and Conservative; the autobiography of George S. Schuyler.
New Rochelle, New York : Arlington House 1966.
La Monte, Robert Rives.
Title Men versus the man; a correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, socialist, and H. L. Mencken, individualist.
Publisher New York, Arno Press, 1972 [c1910]
Series The Right wing [?] individualist tradition in America
{ I do not see any 'wing' out there, do you, the reader ? (WPT) ]
La Monte, Robert Rives.
Title Men versus the man : a correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, socialist, and H.L. Mencken, individualist.
Publisher New York : Holt, 1910.
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