Marion Bloom
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Marion Bloom | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1891 |
| Died | March 10, 1975 (aged 83–84) |
| Occupations |
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| Known for | Relationship with H. L. Mencken |
Marion L. Bloom (1891 – March 10, 1975) was a writer, nurse, and H. L. Mencken's lover for about a decade. Bloom and Mencken first met in February 1914, when Bloom visited the offices of the Baltimore Sun.[1] Mencken and Bloom ended their relationship in the early 1920s though Bloom continued to admire Mencken. Their love letters were published in In Defense of Marion: The Love of Marion Bloom & H. L. Mencken in 1996.[2][3][4]
Leben
Bloom was born and raised in rural New Windsor, Maryland, and had five brothers and a sister. When Bloom was seven her father committed suicide, forcing the older children in the family to find work. As a teen she moved to Washington, DC to find work as a writer.[5] Bloom met H. L. Mencken there in February 1914 and the two quickly began a relationship, with Mencken traveling to Washington, DC to see her and she traveling to New York City.[6] Bloom spent six months as a United States army nurse in Europe during World War I, and returned to the U.S. as a convert to Christian Science.[3] Mencken, an atheist, suggested Bloom's faith caused him not to marry her.[7]
In 1923, in a shock to Mencken, Bloom began a short-lived marriage to Lou Maritzer, a Romanian historian,[8] likely because she believed Mencken would never marry her, and in anger, Mencken destroyed her letters to him.[3][2] Afterwards, Bloom moved to France, and by the time she returned to the United States, Mencken had married the terminally-ill Sara Haardt in 1930, who died four years later.[3]
According to Fred Hobson, Bloom is "an interesting character in her own right... a compelling figure not so much because she is unique as because, in many respects, she is representative... She was the prototypical small-town girl, emerging from hardship, poverty, and religious piety, who went to the city to pursue her own idea of the American dream. But Marion was never fully able to determine what version of that dream she wanted most — whether to succeed as a new woman, self-reliant professionally and emotionally, or whether to play a more traditional role and become the wife of a powerful man such as H. L. Mencken. She could not easily, in her time, have both, and she ended up having neither."[9] Edward A. Martin's book In Defense of Marion calls Bloom and Mencken's relationship "the most important love relationship in H. L. Mencken’s life, one that he tried to obscure and hoped would remain buried within the copious record of his achievements as author and editor." He noted that it "flourished during a period when he wrote frequently about women’s issues."[10]
While details about her later life are sparse, Bloom authored several books and wrote for American Mercury and The Washington Herald. She returned to the field of nursing again, working for the American Red Cross as assistant chief of the Resources Information unit, and may have served the army again as a nurse during World War II from 1944 until 1947. She worked for the Junior Red Cross, and in 1950, worked for the State Department, retiring ten years later. She died on March 10, 1975.[11]
The correspondences between Mencken, Bloom, and her sister Estelle are housed at the Enoch Pratt Free Library of Baltimore and the New York Public Library.[12]
References
- ^ H. L. Mencken Collection - Enoch Pratt Free Library
- ^ a b "H.L. Mencken, the lover? An unpretty story of exploitation amounting to cruelty".
- ^ a b c d Menckeniana, no. 138, Enoch Pratt Free Library, 1996, pp. 12–14, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26484324.
- ^ Martin, Edward A. (1996). In defense of Marion : the love of Marion Bloom & H.L. Mencken. Athens: University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0-8203-1767-0.
- ^ Hobson, Fred C. (1994). Mencken : a life. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-394-56329-9. pp. 126-7.
- ^ Hobson 1994, pp. 126, 128.
- ^ Hobson 1994, pp. 177-180.
- ^ Hart, D. G. (2016). Damning Words. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. p. 168. ISBN 978-0-8028-7344-6.
- ^ Hobson 1994, pp. 126, 127.
- ^ Martin 1996, jacket cover.
- ^ Martin 1996, pp. 367, 379.
- ^ Hobson 1994, p. 127.
