Archives for May 26, 2015

From 2005:

I got a call yesterday from a fact checker at The New Yorker who wanted to know whether H.L. Mencken actually sent the following form letter to angry correspondents: Dear Sir or Madam: You may or may not be right. Would that he had–it’s a great story–but in the decade I spent researching and writing The Skeptic, I found not the slightest bit of evidence that he ever sent such a letter to anyone.

What tickled me about this call was that it made me feel like a Grand Old Man. The nice young fellow from The New Yorker asked, “Is this Terry Teachout, author of The Skeptic?” in tones that made me wonder whether I’d just heard a preview of my obituary….

Read the whole thing here.

“New York is a terrifying city but hectically beautiful in many ways. The kindness and welcome are overwhelming, but there is too much money, food and drink and too much respect for success, while endeavour and failure are just ignored, or swept away as if there wasn’t any time or place for them.”

John Gielgud, letter to Christopher Fry (November 1950)