The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  A man of his word, Neilson translated the last line of this address for those cultivated listeners who had not mastered Latin: “living still and more beautiful because of our desire.”

  Chapter 4

  H. L. Mencken descended from a distinguished line of German academics, but he had little use for the measured tones or intellectual hedging of scholarship. The Baltimorean son of a cigar maker understood that moderation is usually the enemy of a well-wrought argument. Skeptical but curious, he was fully alive to the ideas of his own time, though comically at odds with polite opinion. Everything the moralists and the improvers were for—prohibition, censorship, creationism, and Great Britain—Mencken was against.

  He thought Americans were being duped into supporting Britain in World War I,1 and, when it came to language, the Anglophile prejudices of American highbrows seemed to him yet another example of our national dim-wittedness. Mencken’s own use of English was brassy and joyful, drunk with neologisms and seemingly free of inhibition.

  He was an all-around champion of the scientific and secular point of view. In the Scopes trial, Mencken pressured Clarence Darrow to use the case to prosecute the beliefs of William Jennings Bryan, counsel for the creationists, and when Bryan died shortly after the trial, Mencken liked to think that he and his allies had hectored him into the grave. Religion was an interesting and sometimes beautiful fraud, Mencken thought. Similarly hollow were the linguistic pretensions of American educators.

  In his book on the subject, The American Language—first published in 1919, but much augmented in later editions—Mencken began to distinguish our country’s idiom from what one learned in school. In those days the National Council of Teachers of English still observed Good Grammar Week, when children were called on to go seven full days without splitting an infinitive. As a reward they were treated to entertaining skits in which Mr. Dictionary vanquished the villain Ain’t.2 At home, however, as radios in the 1920s went from being a rare possession to a basic appliance, children might hear “Ain’t We Got Fun,” a popular foxtrot, “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” a Fats Waller song, or perhaps even “Ain’t She Sweet,” another hit song of the time.

  American speech was still taught according to “British Received Pronunciation.” Few scholars or laymen had ever believed American speech worth defending. In 1905, Henry James, after years of living in England, had lectured at Bryn Mawr on “The Question of Our Speech,” saying Americans lacked “good breeding.”

  Our speech, the novelist said, was utterly lacking in a “tone-standard.” It was flat, monotonous, and crude. Instead of yes, we said “yeh-eh” and “yeh-ep.” Even teachers added warrantless r sounds to words like idea (idea-r), vanilla (vanilla-r), and Cuba (Cuba-r). And we mumbled, neglecting to distinguish “the innumerable differentiated, discriminated units of sound and sense that lend themselves to audible production, to enunciation, to intonation.” The National Speech League agreed, and implored children to “say a good American ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in place of an Indian grunt ‘um-hum’ and ‘nup-um’ or a foreign ‘ya’ or ‘yeh’ and ‘nope.’ ”3

  James said he hardly had time to go beyond pronunciation and tone to discuss the “uncontrolled assault” that American circumstances had imposed on the mother tongue in general, but he assured his audience that its treatment was as barbaric in every other respect. Mark Twain, the other great American writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, took the opposite view. The heir of a populist tradition of American dialectal humor, this literatus wrote with an ear to American speech, inventing characters who said hain’t and never not minded the double negative.

  Of the two tendencies in American—the Twainian and the Jamesian—Mencken was one hundred percent Twainian. He credited the humorist with going further than anyone to Americanize the literary language. Twain’s had been a great era for linguistic invention. Boom (in the business sense), crook, cussword (an actual Twainism), freeze-out, grubstake, holdup, hoodlum, light out, spellbinder, to strike oil, all came out of the late nineteenth century, Mencken noted. “Racy” was the word he and others settled on when they looked to summarize what was so American about the American language.

  In the argument of his book, Mencken roughly sketched a linguistic history of the United States, pitting the shamelessly American against those who still looked to Britain for guidance on how to speak and write. One could certainly see this division in the time of Noah Webster. In the election of 1828, the year Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language was published, Andrew Jackson, that great frontier spirit whose poorly spelt letters crackled with unpredictable native eloquence, defeated the European-educated John Quincy Adams, former president of the American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres, a short-lived organization that sought to protect “the purity and uniformity of the English language” from American “corruptions.”4

  From the Civil War era, Mencken dragged out the example of Richard Grant White, at the time America’s most widely read commentator on language, a man so eastern and Anglophile in his tastes that he objected to the Americanism presidential. One could only wonder if White preferred the slightly older colonial, coined in reference to American subservience to Britain, or maybe the much older and even more established kingly.

  The presidency of Abraham Lincoln was a historical watershed for plain, unaffected American speech, Mencken noted, while Lincoln himself was often accused of shabbiness, not least when he visited New York City and attended the opera wearing black gloves. Mr. Lincoln (as he was known to many, including his wife) was criticized by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the ex-president John Tyler for his grammar. The New York diarist George Templeton Strong had called him “a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla,” but the big-city snob also kinda liked the guy.5

  Americans often found good sense and even eloquence in low idiom. A well-known speech of the period, attributed to Sojourner Truth, voiced the complaint of the female slave: “I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear de lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen chilern, and seen ’em mos’ all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”6

  Of course this was not the language of polite American usage, which one sought in a good dictionary. Said the New York Times, “There are thousands of words used colloquially or in newspapers, or belonging to the depository of slang, whose incorporations in work claiming to be an arbiter elegantiarum of speech would be either needless or positively objectionable.”7

  The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw more than one hundred books on usage and grammar published in the United States.8 The cult of elegance was in full swing. Refined Americans used old-fashioned grammar, wrote in a fancy Spencerian hand, and preferred forks to eat ice cream because spoons were considered vulgar.9 American pretensions were aristocratic, while the reality was a culture of profound change, shaped by waves of immigration and new urban centers like the fast-growing, multiethnic city of Chicago.

  By the time Mencken was writing about the American language, the tide had begun to shift. Among those he credited with undermining the genteel tradition were Theodore Dreiser, Van Wyck Brooks, and Sinclair Lewis. Mencken was morally and culturally as one with these writers, but another factor helped distinguish his linguistic comments in the 1920s: his simple collecting of words.

  Delcevare King, a prohibitionist in Massachusetts, helped coin the decade’s most telling neologism by offering a prize of two hundred dollars for the word that best captured the “lawless drinker.” Mencken recorded this famous innovation and many others. Amazingly, the winning word, scofflaw, formed by the simple addition of scoff to law, was offered in two separate entries, so the prize was split.

  Other favorite words of Mencken’s from these years
include debunk and debunking from William E. Woodward’s 1923 book, Bunk. Mencken noted that bunk derived from Buncombe, coined a century earlier (the story went) when a North Carolina representative slowly preparing to address Congress deflected his colleagues’ calls to get on with it by saying, essentially, Wait, he had things to say to the people of Buncombe County. After this bunkum referred to any political speech lacking a point except to flatter voters.

  No single writer, in Mencken’s opinion, was working over the language as much as Walter Winchell, the Broadway critic and gossip columnist whose syndicated slanguage taught Americans, among other things, new phrases for the rise and decline of romance. In love was on fire, that way, and uh-huh; on the merge meant engaged; welded and sealed equaled married; phfft could be defined as separated; and melted said “divorced” more or less.

  More argot from this time can be found in the memoir A House Is Not a Home, by Polly Adler, the straight-talking madam who became something of a household name in the 1920s and ’30s. The era’s motto, according to her, was “anything which is economically right is morally right.”10

  A Polish immigrant who came to the United States as a teenager and worked in garment factories to earn her bread, Adler was taken up by a Broadway actress who asked her to move in with her. The wide-eyed seamstress became acculturated to the fast living of guys and dolls, chorus girls, song-pluggers, gangsters, and hopheads. Rods were guns, a fireman was a big-deal businessman, an iron man was a dollar, and a yard was a hundred bucks. Her boyfriend, a bandleader in town, could sometimes be heard performing on the radio. After she made her wad, Adler listened from inside the luxury of her new penthouse. The interior design was inspired by the recent King Tut exhibition. Another great word from this time of “wonderful nonsense”: screwball.

  Etiquette books in the twenties licensed the use of slang in polite company for adding “piquancy to our talk,” modestly admitting that “even ‘swell’ and ‘sweetie pie’ are correct in certain moods.” In the conduct of business, however, formality was still preferred: O.K. and all righty were not to be used when talking to customers.11

  AT&T hired English instructors during the summer to help improve the literary quality of its correspondence with stockholders. Philip Gove, later editor of Webster’s Third, who taught composition at New York University, was one such instructor. He thus met Grace Edna Potter, a secretary. Family lore made their meeting sound ever so proper, like a post-Victorian set piece: Philip counseled Grace not to expose her ankles as she bent over the filing cabinet “that way.”12

  For a rejoinder to the gay excitement of the twenties (gay, of course, in the old sense: “excited with merriment,” according to Webster’s Second), one could look to the other side of the Atlantic, to the simple declarative sentences and expatriate stoicism in Ernest Hemingway’s prose, or to the foreboding poetry of T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats. The lingering astonishment at World War I can be recalled in the title of a Ford Madox Ford novel of 1925: No More Parades.

  But there were happier, more American modes, too. The Harlem Renaissance—of which Mencken was an important champion—was in full swing. Adult education was on the rise, and the economy was growing. The novelist Willa Cather, whose reputation Mencken thought not equal to her merit, was a great admirer of the American character forged in the frontier experience. Though still in the prime of her career, Cather lamented that hers was a middle-aged philosophy in a time of youthful frivolity. She later said, “The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.”13

  In the United States, it was the year of an important and controversial novel of the American everyman, Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis, a close-in portrait of a bumbling, money-loving, self-admiring philistine. And between business and the oppositional culture of literature stood the young popular sensation F. Scott Fitzgerald, unburdening an infatuation with success but finding poetry in the experience of failure and unrequited love.

  “Today,” Mencken wrote in 1919, “it is no longer necessary for an American writer to apologize for writing American.” But where Mencken suggested the passage of time had made such liberty possible, others credited Mencken himself. “American writers were finally able to take flight from the old tree and to trust for the first time their own dialect,” his friend Edmund Wilson, the great literary critic, later said. “Mencken showed the positive value of our own vulgar heritage.”14

  Chapter 5

  Photos of Dwight Macdonald often show him smoking, usually a cigarette. In one picture from 1924, however, extending from the corner of his mouth and supported by his right hand is a pipe. He wears a morning coat, a waistcoat or vest, adorned by the chain of a pocket watch, and formal sponge-bag trousers. Depending on your whim, the image is thoughtful or pretentious. Young Master Dwight with his glistening, combed-back hair and thin, striking nose appears, deliberately, as the kind of young man who at any moment may be moved to say what rilly separates early Henry James from late Henry James.

  He sits across from another young gentleman, this one wearing a pince-nez and holding in his lap a volume, surely of some rather fine verse. A somewhat bolder-looking young man appears behind them both, sitting on the edge of a table, in his fingers a cigarette, unlit.

  It is the era of flappers and jazz, of silent movies and Prohibition, half a decade before the stock market crash, but these fellows seem premodern. Their look suggests a highly self-conscious conservatism as one might find in old London clubs or, in America, among the so-called Brahmins of Boston, which is close enough. They are, in fact, New England aristocrats, upperclassmen at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, the only members of a student group called the Hedonists Club. And Dwight Macdonald, dressed like a man of the year, has yet to graduate from prep school.

  The trio have their own stationery made with a letterhead reading out their articles of faith: “Cynicism, Estheticism, Criticism, Pessimism.” Their motto, in French, is that of the artist who seeks to startle the complacent, middle class, and mediocre: “Pour épater les bourgeois.”1

  His father thinks Dwight precocious and mentions to Henry Seidel Canby, editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, that the boy is ready to review books for the paper. Even Dwight thinks this is a bit “thick,” but he proudly mentions that his friends also consider him quite the “lion” for the essays he publishes in the school monthly.

  His mother is concerned that he is either not socializing enough or not with the right people. Dwight takes up with younger boys at Exeter but is disappointed when they do not value literature as he does. In letters home he mentions giving up the distraction of reading Jonathan Swift so he can begin laying a foundation in Greek. One of the boys he is cultivating is coming over Saturday morning. “I am trying to get him interested in reading.”

  Very earnest and very bright, he keeps himself busy, works hard at his studies, and yet is no lonely introvert. He has been “talking, talking, talking,” he says to his parents. “I should be a more brilliant conversationalist by this time if practice means anything.”

  Like many born writers, Macdonald was an incorrigible pronouncer, an unself-conscious and prolific maker of statements. This verbosity came with a great appetite for learning and culture. But pronouncing was also a matter of personal inclination. Like the Bloomsbury set in England at the time, he responded to the cultured person’s calling to the fullest possible self-expression, the articulation of one’s whole personality, done so unreservedly.

  He wrote an amazing number of letters, to his parents and especially his old school chum Dinsmore Wheeler (pictured right, holding pince-nez), which together form a running commentary on life and the world at large, and contain more than a few nuggets that later appear burnished in well-known essays written for much, much larger audiences.

  Macdonald got his start working for Henry R. Luce, the publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, and to whom, after quitting, he became a regular gadfly. And he developed into
one of the cast of writers called New York intellectuals. His particular faction was known for its anti-Stalinist politics and its modernist enthusiasms.

  He did not go to war, nor end up in Hollywood or Washington, where American popular culture and government were growing explosively, in both size and influence. But in New York City he found himself right smack in the middle of the great intellectual commotions of his era, from the Great Depression through World War II and into the 1960s.

  He was an important soloist among America’s increasingly noisy chorus of newspapers, magazines, and journals, an essayist about as good as anyone working at the time. He was also an operator, able to help organize and arrange funding for two key journals of the 1930s and ’40s, Partisan Review, which he wrote for and helped edit, and Politics, which he founded and edited alone. Among his friends and correspondents were several of the most important writers and thinkers of his time. Early on, Sherwood Anderson paid him a visit. Mary McCarthy became a close friend. George Orwell and Albert Camus wrote to him from abroad. Hannah Arendt stood up for him.

  From Exeter he went on to Yale, where he worked hard, wrote a lot, and continued pursuing a “P. of L.,” his own shorthand for “philosophy of life,” though he also used it in referring to James’s Portrait of a Lady. When Dinsmore remarked on his fine work ethic, he took offense. “I admit I do work, but so did Dickens, so did Carlyle, so did quite a lot of other old boyos that make your tea-for-a-penny Chicago literati look like so many orangutans.”

  Other traits one notes in the critic as a young man are a lighthearted belligerence and the will to caricature. “I saw the great Henry Seidel Canby in the library,” Dwight related once to Dinsmore. The editor Canby, who was also a professor at Yale, was, he said, “very small and insignificant, half bald and half scraggly hair . . . utterly commonplace.” He noted the man’s “faded, greenish brown suit” and his “funny shirt.” Then he drew out a character story to fit: “He looks like the sort of man who would take a pedantic pleasure in collecting pre-revolutionary political pamphlets and in talking about them at great length.” Evidence, then verdict: “Another idol shattered!”