Cover of The Vintage Mencken, published by Knopf in 1991 – one of the Mencken collections (along with A Mencken Chrestomathy) I own (fair use)

(7) H.L. MENCKEN –

“THE ANGLO-SAXON” (1923)

“No one in this world…has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby”

The “Sage of Baltimore” and the “American Nietzsche” – writer, journalist, essayist, critic, satirist, “acerbic critic of government, religion, and popular culture”, “one of the most influential American writers and stylists of the early 20th century as well as one of its leading cynics and sceptics”.

In other words, one of those great gadflies whom I like so much – and for whom sacred cows make the best hamburger.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

There’s a certain art to being a provocateur like Mencken – one has to be a consummate prose stylist. Prose style counts for a lot with me. I always admire a good prose stylist, even when I don’t agree with them – and Mencken was one of the best, famous for his “caustic wit and bitingly sardonic prose”, or in other words, mastery of snark.

“The term Menckenian has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of or pertaining to Mencken, including his combative rhetorical and prose styles”.

If that wasn’t enough to endear him to you, “Mencken viewed the freedom to drink as critical liberty and considered alcohol as one of humanity’s greatest inventions” – of which, I add, margarita is the pinnacle of human achievement.

“His humor and satire owed much to Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain”, with turns of phrase that “evoked the erudite cynicism and rapier sharpness of language displayed by Ambrose Bierce in his darkly satiric The Devil’s Dictionary”.

There’s much to choose from for Mencken but if anything was the peak of his provocations and prose stylings, it was his essay “The Anglo-Saxon” skewering the contemporary pretensions of the Anglophone nations, notably Britain and the United States. It takes a certain skill to take all three of Britain, the United States and the Confederate States of America in their various wars on opposing sides where at least one of them fought their way to victory – and still lambast them all for their cowardice and military inferiority.

2016 Penguin edition as tie-in with the film, featuring the titular short story and other works by Thurber

(6) JAMES THURBER –

THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY (1942)

“Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.”

James Thurber – “American cartoonist, writer, humorist, journalist and playwright”, as well as prolific contributor to The New York magazine.

Speaking of Thurber as cartoonist, as much as I love Thurber’s cartoons, I have to admit he wasn’t the best artist – as he himself admitted about his “lumpy” art style, joking to parents who submitted the art of children as better that indeed it was but they just hadn’t been through as much.

However, it was the dry absurdist humor of Thurber’s cartoons that shone through the art, as it did through his writing. “Many of Thurber’s fictions…deal with the fundamental conflict between men and women, and the romantic vs. practical mindset represented by each, respectively. His works are also colored by his liberal individualist views, in a time when creeping nationalism was threatening personal freedom in many parts of the world — some not entirely remote — and are also characterized by a deep sympathy for animals, particularly dogs.” Some of my favorite works by Thurber are the portraits he wrote for his family dogs.

If there’s one work by Thurber that stands above the rest, it’s his short story of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, which “recounts a day in the life of a man who daydreams about heroic adventures as he goes about his mundane existence”. It has been adapted as – or loosely inspired – two films, one in 1947 starring Danny Kaye, and the other in 2013 starring Ben Stiller. I haven’t seen either, but I’d lean towards the first given Kaye’s comedic performance in The Court Jester.

Art by George Herriman for archy and mehitabel (public domain)

(5) DON MARQUIS –

archy & mehitabel (1927)

*

“i look back on my life

and it seems to me

just one damned kitten

after another”

*

And now some light fantasy – and poetry – creeps into my stories and works of literature, literally in the form of cockroach protagonist archy. Yes, that lower case is intended.

In archy and mehitabel, archy is no ordinary cockroach, but a reincarnated (human) free verse or ‘vers libre’ poet, writing his verse-stories each night by laboriously hurling himself at the keys of a typewriter in the newspaper office. Since he is unable to also operate the shift key, all of his verse is written without capitalization or punctuation.

However, archy also finds himself the poet-chronicler of mehitabel, my favorite feline of fiction (with an archetypal feline personality) – alley cat, dancer and self-identified reincarnation of Cleopatra.

The Cask of Amontillado illustration by Arthur Rackham for Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination published in 1935 (public domain)

(4) EDGAR ALLAN POE –

“THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO” (1846)

This is why I don’t drink wine – because I don’t want to be chained up in some dank cellar, at least not without some kink involved.

On the other hand, I do have a cask of Amontillado or two waiting for some people. You know who you are. You’re on my list.

Edgar Allan Poe was one sick puppy in American literature and we love him for it.

“The inventor of the modern horror story and the modern detective story, as well as an early influence on the science fiction genre”.

He also believed that the perfect subject for poetry is the death of a beautiful young woman (because it married the “most poetical subject”— Beauty— with the “most poetical emotion”— Melancholy)

In this he was inspired by the deaths of numerous loved ones. The last including those by his own hand. Just kidding. Or am I? You read his stories and tell me. In fairness, some of those may have been when they came back from their graves to get their revenge. Poe’s like that.

And yes – this is my favorite Poe story, even if I can’t help but always remember it as The Cask of Armadillo. I can’t really tell you what I like about “The Cask of Amontillado”, but I can show you. It’s down this way, through these dank catacombs…

Cover art of the Faber & Faber editions in 1973 and 1986 – still my favorite because it features the iconic pig’s head on a stick

(3) WILLIAM GOLDING –

LORD OF THE FLIES (1954)

“Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you?” said the head…”You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you?”

I’m fond of quipping that I’m working on my own version, Lord of the Files, set in my office.

As per TV Tropes, “a plane full of British schoolboys crashes on a deserted island, and the darkness of humanity spills forth as they turn against each other.”

I don’t know why they had to crash on a deserted island for that. Frankly, I think my school could have just stayed put and we would have been hunting each other within a week with a little push. Which is no doubt why they teach it in school – “it is very popular for English literature assignments in high school…thanks to its themes about morality and authority, and its symbolism, which is extremely easy to spot, but open to many different interpretations.”

Those interpretations are usually proposed along the lines of protagonist Ralph representing reason, his sidekick “Piggy” representing science, Simon representing intuition, and antagonist Jack representing “savagery, violence, and power”. Needless to say, it doesn’t work out too well for the Ralph, Piggy, and Simon.

The most iconic element is the Beast, identified by Simon with the titular Lord of the Flies or Beelzebub, with its iconic representation as the pig’s head mounted on a stick that features on my favorite variations of cover art for the book – and with whom Simon has the imaginary dialogue I quoted at the start. Apart from Simon, the boys believe the beast to be an actual beast in the forest with the pig’s head as an offering to it, but the pig’s head tells Simon otherwise – that there is no beast except that within the boys themselves.

RATING: S-TIER (GOD TIER – OR IS THAT BEAST-TIER?)

Most cover art variants for 1984 involve a watching eye or gaze, as does this cover art by Shephard Fairey for the 2008 Penguin edition (fair use)

(2) GEORGE ORWELL –

ANIMAL FARM & 1984 (1945 & 1949)

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Big Brother is Watching, or if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

The influence of George Orwell in popular culture or imagination, encapsulated in the use of Orwellian as an adjective, is difficult to overstate – as is the extent to which these two books are etched into my psyche since reading them, hence the god-tier ranking.

Of the two books, 1984 has the far greater influence, both for me and for wider popular or political culture. Don’t get me wrong – Animal Farm is a ripping yarn but it lacks the sheer memetic impact of 1984. 1984 is essentially the entirety of the basis for the use of Orwellian as an adjective “describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices” – as well as the entirety of the source for Orwell’s neologisms that have become part of the English language – “Big Brother”, “Thought Police”, Room 101″, “Newspeak”, “memory hole”, “doublethink” and “thougtcrime”.

I can’t resist quoting Archer’s one line of summary of Animal Farm, although I disagree with his spoiler alert – “It’s an allegorical novella about Stalinism by George Orwell, and spoiler alert, it sucks! Although I was talking about an actual animal farm…”

That pretty much sums it up, except the allegory is by way of beast fable, with the partly anthropomorphic (in behaviour) farm animals standing in for various people or aspects of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Three of the pigs are the most obvious as representing people – Old Major as a conflation of Marx and Lenin, Snowball as Trotsky, Napoleon as Stalin. Beyond that, the allegories are more general – Boxer as the proletariat (but perhaps also Alexei Stakhanov), and so on.

Ironically the human characters are similar to the pigs in their straightforward allegory – Farmer Jones overthrown by the animals is of course the Tsar while Frederick and Pilkington are Germany and the United States (or Western democracies) respectively.

Animal Farm doesn’t have the memetic depth of 1984 – with people usually remembering most my featured quotation, the subversion of the original commandment among the animals.

TV Tropes sums up 1984 as “one of the most horrifying and depressing codified for the dystopian genre, ever, notwithstanding its now-outdated title”. Orwell selected the title as an inversion of the last two digits of the year he wrote it in 1948, but in fairness, whether 1984 is the actual year is something the protagonist simply doesn’t know. Only the Party knows, if even it does – “the Party rewriting history certainly does not help matters”.

Even much of the setting and world-building is iconic. The book is set in London, although the United Kingdom is now prosaically called Airstrip One, part of the superpower of Oceania – essentially the former Anglo-Saxon nations of the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australasia, South Africa, give or take the rest of the Americas and some other territory.

Oceania is ruled by the Party in the most totalitarian regime in fiction or history – essentially Stalinism turned all the way up or a state “in which every single thing has become monstrously overwhelming”, despite having originated from Ingsoc (or English socialism). The actual Stalinist Soviet Union has taken over most of Eurasia to become, well, the superpower of Eurasia, while east Asia centred on China has become Eurasia, each as totalitarian as Oceania.

Life in Oceania – and presumably the other superpowers – is as bad as you’d expect. Standards of living are low due to perpetual war (with Oceania constantly shifting between fighting Eurasia alongside Eastasia as ally, or fighting Eastasia alongside Eurasia as ally). State surveillance is omnipresent and everything, including language itself, is heavily controlled and censored. Perhaps worst of all, the Party bans s€x as much as possible outside procreation – “We shall abolish the 0rgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.”

The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, a member of the middle-class Outer Party, secretly thinks of rebellion before being coaxed into it by a relationship with another party member, Julia, and a chance discovery of an apparent opposition or resistance movement within the Party. with a resistance movement. Needless to say, that does not work out well for him (or Julia).

1984 is frequently compared to Brave New World, with the latter as a competing fictional model of dystopia where hedonism rather than state terror is used as a means of control. The latter seems more plausible in the contemporary world rather than the heyday of totalitarian states in the twentieth century – and contemporary political culture often conflates the two in predicting or warning about real life dystopian scenarios.

RATING: S-TIER (GOD TIER – OR IS THAT BIG BROTHER TIER?)