Before we cast this quote into the cold, dark never-said, I think we should consider the source. It first appears, as far as I know, in Alistair Cookeās 1977 Six Men, in the chapter he devotes to Mencken (itās on pages 105-6 of the 1980 Berkeley paperback edition, which is the only one Iāve got). Only after Cookeās book came out did the quote escape into the wild and begin turning up in newspapers and such.
This is a complicating factor, for what we have here is what in Qurāanic scholarship would be called a hadith, a recollection of the words of the prophet by one who claims to have known him. The old Islamic scholars would focus on two things in corroborating these: the reliability of the reporter and the sense of the recollection.
The last is easily dispensed with: while Mencken was known for his love of beer and rye, he also had no problem with drinking Martinisāhe called himself āomnibibulous,ā and he was. Furthermore the phrasing of the commentāa pastiche, one should note, of Charles Lambās well-known comment to Samuel Taylor Coleridge that āa pun ā¦ is as perfect as a sonnetāāis entirely consistent with the sorts of things Mencken used to write and say.
As for the reliability of the witness: Cooke did indeed know Mencken, and well: he had been a correspondent of Menckenās on lexical matters since the early 1930s and visited him frequently in Baltimore. Unfortunately, his words relating the quote donāt give us much circumstantial detail: āhe did not ask for approval of his ideas, only a decent discussion and then a truce accompanied by the sacrament, preferably, of a dry martini, which he once called āthe only American invention as perfect as a sonnet.āā It is left open whether he wrote it or he uttered it in the course of his table talk; while Ericās article kills the first option, it leaves the second open. If Mencken did indeed say it, rather than write it, then Cooke would have been well positioned to hear it (and to appreciate the pastiche of Lamb, which would have helped him to remember it).
In other words, as long as weāre willing to take Alistair Cookeās word for it, thereās a good chance the quote is genuine. (I, for one, hope it is, since I included it, on Lowell Edmundsā authority, in my Martini entry for the Oxford Companion; it is Edmunds who pointed me, in his footnotes, to Cooke.)
Fascinating. Thanks, David. I personally hope the quote is true.
Thanks! Weāll never know for sure, I guess, but thereās no particular reason to discard Cookeās testimony. Itās a lovely quote and has the advantage of being true.