Two Legendary Iconoclasts Converge

Abstract

Fields’s fame in Poppy provided an entrée into a social circle that included the nation’s leading literati. During the play’s run Bill occasionally visited Goodman’s Manhattan apartment for an evening of conversation and poker. At the apartment he met prominent authors such as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and H.L. Mencken.

The meeting of Mencken and Fields was an historic encounter between two legendary US iconoclasts. Mencken, co-edited the famous Smart Set magazine (1908–24) and in 1923 co-founded the American Mercury, a prominent literary magazine. To edit the journals, Mencken went to New York every month for a week and during this time he met Fields at Goodman’s apartment.

Mencken admired Fields’s depth of self-knowledge developed as an avid reader and the two talked about literature, especially their mutual fondness for Mark Twain, Henrik Ibsen, and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Mencken attacked sacrosanct US pieties and a host of other sacred cows through acerbic essays and books. An intellectual highbrow, he castigated the US bourgeois—calling them booboisie and Boobus Americanus. Both Mencken and Fields were cigar-smoking libertarians and curmudgeons who attacked institutions that suppressed individualism and freedom; organized religion; Prohibition; bloated government; censorship; and prudishness, among others. Only their methods varied. Mencken brandished his acerbic pen in essays and books. Fields occasionally published prickly prose but mainly used comic satire and parody on the stage and screen. Mencken praised Fields’s work as an irreverent comedian unafraid to lampoon the USA’s sacrosanct ideals. Fields “is one of the few artists I really admire,” wrote Goodman.

Unafraid to confront hypocrisy and pretense, the two iconoclasts exposed the foibles of US society—the way false mores chained people to a life of conventionality. The iconoclast’s role was to liberate humankind by unlocking the chains that confined free thought. Mencken used his poison pen; Fields used his talent to make people laugh. The chapter depicts their similar thoughts by highlighting their sayings on various subjects: religion, liberty, censorship, government, marriage, prohibition, chiropractors, physicians, nihilism, income tax, Philadelphia, and epitaphs. The Mencken and Fields encounter produced an extraordinary event—the convergence of two legendary iconoclasts. Although they later corresponded, they never met again.