Well, Mencken was a sort of Jekyll and Hyde character, most people know.
In his writings, he was a scold and a shrew and a gentleman with a
meatax, the bad boy of Baltimore, and people pictured him as going
around and hitting people over the head with clubs, but he actually was a very mild-mannered individual with people
that he found congenial. He was pleasant and helpful and exactly the
opposite of what people pictured him to be. My first communications with
him were in connection with the American Mercury and I
managed to get an article on Virginia accepted by the Mercury. Before that, as I have noted, I wrote some pieces for
the Baltimore Evening Sun's editorial page to which
Mencken also contributed, and he apparently liked what I wrote. After I
appeared in the Mercury, I met him here at a dinner
that James Branch Cabell gave. There were about eight guests in Cabell's
home and I met Mencken there for the first time. When I met him, he
said, "Well, I declare, I thought that you were an old man." [Laughter] He had evidently confused me with
my grandfather of the same name. He had read something about my
grandfather, apparently, who was a newspaper editor in New York in the
1890s and was mentioned in one or two books about New York newspaper
editors. He was on the Commercial Advertiser.
After that, Mencken and I were friendly and he suggested to the
University of North Carolina Press, according to my understanding, that
I was the person to write a book for them in the 1920s on liberalism in
the South. William T. Couch, the director of the press, had consulted
Mencken for suggestions and Couch invited me to write this book, which I
agreed to do. I was even paid an advance of two hundred dollars, which
you wouldn't believe, since university presses now make you put up
several thousand dollars of your own almost always. Why they should have
elected to pay an advance to an unknown reporter on the Times-Dispatch when they weren't any too well-off themselves,
I can't figure out. I went ahead and wrote the book and it came out in
1932. I then began working on Bishop Cannon, who was a character of
great notoriety beginning in 1928 when he led the
fight in the South against Al Smith, who was running for President.
Cannon attacked him on religious grounds and also because of his
anti-prohibitionist views. I wanted to write a book about Cannon, and
Mencken was all for that. I tried to get several publishers to bring the
book out after I finished it, and none of them would do it because
Cannon was suing everybody right and left and he would certainly have
sued the publisher of such a book, since it would have been very
unfavorable to him. He would have tied it up in the bookstores and
stopped the sales. Financially, that was a big risk for any publisher to
take. So, I couldn't get the thing published, and I rewrote it in its
entirety and got it published by Knopf, with Mencken's very correct
help, in 1949, five years after Cannon died.