A fresh life for Mencken

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2003 by Jeffers, Thomas L

I surely wasn't the only fourteen-year-old, back when, who had a one-part precocious, two-parts know-it-all enthusiasm for H. L. Mencken. I'd somehow found Prejudices: A Selection, which James T. Farrell had edited for Vintage Books, and I pored with delight over the sacrifice of a sacred cow on every page, garlanded with new words I could try in my school essays. Doubtless I misused a lot of them-the cerebral "usufruct," "debacle," or "mountebank"; the earthy (and often distinctly American) "hunkerousness," "dunderheaded," or "poppycock"-but I had good teachers, who pointed out the usage articles in dictionaries and generally encouraged me to have a writerly go at the "brummagem" stuff of school, suburb, or even church.

Mencken's unflaggingly witty and vicious ridicule of Christianity was the first occasion of my getting into trouble because of a book. A dear aunt flipped through my copy of Prejudices, found a passage roasting Methodist teetotaling or bibliolatry, and cautioned me against any writer capable of making fun of the church she and my uncle had been attending for umpteen years. Having my own be-a-good-boy pretensions to piety, I said the politely evasive thing. But the fact was I loved Mencken more-in part because he made me privy to notions not shared by family and neighbors, but mainly because all those words, tumbling in order, set off fireworks in my head. Which, as I later found out when reading Black Boy, is akin to what had happened to Richard Wright when he encountered Mencken's A Book of Prefaces: "I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences.... He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club.... I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it."

The courage, the content, the style: these are primary themes in Terry Teachout's superb new biography of Mencken,' which, along with S. T Joshi's recent gatherings of Mencken's writings on religion and on American literature,2 should do something to send readers back to the man who was "without question, since Poe, our greatest practicing literary journalist." That was Edmund Wilson's judgment in 1950, and in view of the half century since I see no reason, not excepting Wilson's own career, to alter it.

Teachout's treatment of the stages of Mencken's career-the father's tobacco business in Baltimore, young Henry's education at the polytechnic, his meteoric rise in the newspaper world, his partnership with George Jean Nathan at The Smart Set and their breakup at The American Mercury-is done with extraordinary competence, and ditto his treatment of the personal life-the relations with parents and siblings, with long-time lover Marion Bloom and short-time wife Sara Haardt (they'd been married only five years when she died of meningitis and tuberculosis in 1935). What most readers will treasure, though, are his succinct and discriminating accounts of Mencken's campaigns promoting Darwinism, attacking Puritanism, excoriating the New Deal, and advocating a line of American authors, from Mark Twain to Theodore Dreiser to Sinclair Lewis, whose realist, not to say naturalist, tales of ordinary people's lives were spun in the national vernacular.

Mencken's best opportunity to promote Darwinism occurred at the famous Scopes "Monkey" Trial in 1925, which pitted Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan and is too well-- remembered to need rehearsal here. Mencken connived with the ACLU to lure Bryan onto the witness stand, knowing that in articulating his creationist credo he'd come off as a rube and unwittingly strike a blow for evolutionary theory. And so it was. Yet Teachout is good at appreciating Bryan's anxiety about the social inferences many people were drawing from evolutionism, the eugenicists, for instance, wanting to speed natural selection along by sterilizing the physically and mentally deficient. Back in 1904 the Great Commoner had declared survival-of-the-fittest rhetoric to be anti-Christian, "represent[ing] man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate-the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak"-in clear contradiction to what Jesus represented, which was not the extermination but the curing of the halt and lame. Mencken believed that the human race would accomplish greater things if the halt and lame were left to themselves and the bright and swift took the bit between their teeth. Whatever: he was in Dayton, Tennessee to give an acidulous account of the speechifying ideologues by day and, mixing pity with scorn, of the ululating Holy-Roller "half wits" by night.

The ululators were strange to Mencken because they were from Dayton and were poor. He was a "self-sustaining and solvent" Baltimorean, whose view of the world descended from his father's: "All mankind," Mencken said of him, "was divided into two great races: those who paid their bills, and those who didn't." Accordingly, "There was never a time in my youth when I succumbed to the Socialist sentimentalities that so often fetch the young of the bourgeoisie.... It requires a conscious effort for me to pump up any genuine sympathy for the downtrodden, and in the end I usually conclude that they have their own follies and incapacities to thank for their troubles." Work hard, be smart, and you'll be able to pay your bills. True, the world isn't that simple, and when the Depression came Mencken was as unable as everyone else to explain its causes, and less able than the virtuous-but-insolvent class to appreciate its effects. Still, it's bracing to read his brief against the collectivist panaceas FDR hoped would bring the economy out of its black hole. Mencken's comment in the early phase of the Depression, which to many will seem uncaring, can, looked at dispassionately, seem in touch with fundamentals: