Confessions of a Closet Curmudgeon

In a life practically cobblestoned with regrets, it is yet another regret that I have never been able to develop a snarl.

I dream from time to time of being a fully accredited misanthrope, known far and wide for my scythe-like attacks on motherhood, pecan pie, children of all ages and similar targets that no one but a true misanthrope would touch.

From early days I realized that some of the writers I liked the most had powers of invective, scorn and ridicule that could make strong men weep.

I disagreed with virtually everything Westbrook Pegler wrote or believed and his continuous assault on Eleanor Roosevelt was an obsession that verged on sickness. But he was a master of thundering denunciation, in a class by himself as a misanthrope. Yet history is the great assigner of final grades. Pegler’s name is already largely forgotten and Mrs. Roosevelt’s won’t be.

Henry L. Mencken’s enthusiasms were few but devout and included Beethoven, Baltimore, good beer and fine cigars. But he will be remembered for his corrosive assaults on politicians, clergymen, tycoons and anyone else whose oratory Mencken found to be suffused with hypocrisy, avarice, ignorance and disinformation.

He was one of the century’s most literate snarlers, but he had a light side as well. If you would remember me, he wrote by way of making his own epitaph, forgive some sinner and wink at a homely girl. It is clear he was only a part-time misanthrope.

I’m not sure if anyone reads Philip Wylie’s “A Generation of Vipers” anymore, but in the early ‘40s he was a minor god among us collegians, a voice of righteous anger who even dared to attack Mom and what he called Momism. He thought nothing should be sacrosanct, and very little was.

What gave the late John D. MacDonald his wide following were not just the colorful adventures he designed for Travis McGee but McGee’s (and MacDonald’s) devastating mini-essays on the world around him--on the way we are fouling the air and the seas, the beaches and the cities, the stupidity of bureaucrats, the deviousness of politicians, the indifference of clerks, the harassment of minorities, the decline of quality and pleasure. Other crime writers have picked up on MacDonald’s tone of voice but none has yet come close to replacing him.

It’s not that I haven’t vented a little spleen once in a while, as for example on the malevolent social gospel on display in the original “Death Wish.” (The power of the critic is such that “Death Wish” was such a smash there have been three sequels and no end in sight. Give the paranoid customers what they want and away you go.)

I’ve also surrendered to those capsule criticisms from time to time, as in suggesting that “1776” was as American as the turkey, which it closely resembled. (Jack Warner wrote me sourly that the same connection had occurred to another critic as well.)

In low moments I think it would be terrific to swing for the fences all the time, to toss the critical whereases and reservations and exceptions to the wind and go for it--ignoring the good work lost amid the bad, dismissing the honorable intentions that didn’t quite come off.

But the grouse is always greener on the other side, and these are sour japes. The trouble is that when I’ve snarled on paper, as when I’ve lost my temper, the fleeting satisfaction is followed by a brackish and lingering aftertaste and a feeling that I’ve been not simply unkind but unfair.

It’s easier to snarl about politics foreign and domestic and about developers who destroy natural beauty to create tomorrow’s slums today, let’s say, than to take an ax to collaborative works like a film, unless its cynicism and exploitiveness carry the high aroma of sewage.

More often outrage, scorn and indignation read like postures rather than soul-deep critical responses. But they are readable.

I remember a story about Don Marquis of “archy and mehitabel” fame. He’d been warned that any more drinking would be his downfall. He kept to the doctor’s order for a few days, then presented himself at the bar of his club one afternoon.

“I’ve finally conquered that damned willpower of mine,” he said. “Give me a Scotch.”

I’m still fighting my willpower, and I tell myself in high moments to fight on. It’s not as if there were a shortage of misanthropes.