On the essays shelf:
Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays
Oh, Mencken. Along with Alexander Hamilton, I have been known to refer to him as “my dead boyfriend”. I have not read all of his stuff (that would be difficult to do, the man was unbelievably prolific), and it’s rare to be in love with someone’s prose. In love with the way they turn a phrase. I am in love with Christopher Hitchens’ writing in that way. I am in love with Joan Didion’s writing in that way. I am in love with Ryszard Kapuściński’s writing in that way. I am in love with Jessa Crispin’s writing in that way. I am in love with Kim Morgan’s writing in that way. There are others. The writing style is so distinct that you would recognize it in a dark alley, you would recognize it even if there wasn’t a byline.
It is a pleasure to read these people, regardless of what they are writing about. The prose itself provides pleasure. This is almost a lost art, although I suppose such an art was always a rare one.
H.L. Mencken, the “sage of Baltimore”, was one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century. Even those who despised his opinions had to bow before his power as a writer. He elevated the art of the editorial to something unique, he made all other writers seem pale and flimsy in comparison (he still does). He used his position as a journalist as a bully pulpit, which can be annoying, but is also one of the ways that he was influential. He abhorred prudishness and ignorance. He wanted Americans to engage with ideas, with literature, with art. He was opinionated (I won’t say “contrarian”), and sometimes I read his stuff and think, “Wow, I SO DO NOT AGREE WITH THAT.” It is a pleasure to disagree with H.L. Mencken. Because he puts his case out there so forcefully, so obnoxiously in some cases, that there are times when you feel like, “I am not sure I have my thoughts together enough to argue with this.” That’s the fun of it. He DEMANDS that you “get your thoughts together” and meet him on his level. I love writers who demand that of me. I still know I can make up my own mind, but boy, I love engagement. None of this works, by the way, if your prose is wooden or propagandistic. You left-wing screeds and right-wing shriekers can try to influence me all you want, but if your writing is poor (and it always is), then you are not engaging me on a level that I find challenging. You bring out the snob in me. I think: “If you want me to consider your ideas, then you need to work on your writing and rhetoric skills. You need to do better.”
H.L. Mencken made other writers want to do better.
His opinions are often fascinating because he wrote so much, in real-time, as a journalist and essayist, that he often missed the boat, historically. He thought Hitler was just an annoying thug, for example. He didn’t see the writing on the wall. Many people were wrong about Hitler, and Mencken was one of them. I love his essays on American culture. The man almost spits his opinions at you. His contempt (he was filled with contempt) is a sight to behold, and often hilarious. He wanted Americans to read more and think more. He didn’t want them to be bound by what was “appropriate”. His essays on women and men are outrageous but often right on the money; it would be difficult to dismiss them out of hand. He thought men were lazy disgusting pigs, and women were canny manipulators. He felt sorry for women, not because of their second-class social status, but because they had to be bound to men, who were, by and large, useless. Never once did he think that women weren’t in charge, at least in the domestic realm of relationships. He is hysterical about human relationships. He wrote an essay about prostitution (he was all for it) that is still shocking to read, not only in its forceful clear-sighted acceptance of the need any society has for women who do such work, but his compassion for those women, not because of the work they had to do, but because they had to deal with disgusting men all day, and he thought there must be nothing worse. He knew of a couple of such women who had “married up” by marrying their clients (judges, businessmen), and got out. He had no problem with that. He thought it was great. He wanted Americans to get wider and deeper in their curiosities. He wanted to wake them up.
He always seems to be irritated. That can be a terrible quality (go read any political blog to see the terrible-ness in action), but if you have a facility with language, and if you have ideas, and targets that you want to demolish, it can be quite effective. Mencken is a formidable opponent. He’s so good at stating his case that he forces you to state yours.
In many ways, he was a political orphan, which is one of the other ways that I relate to him. Leftists find him horrifying and boorish, insensitive and “inappropriate”. (Yawn.) And conservatives WANT to like him, but in today’s political landscape, where “conservative” has come to mean “prudish moralistic white guys telling women about their own biology and using religion as a battering ram”, Mencken would have no place. He despised religion. He thought religious people were idiots. He did not mince words. He also hated people who were anti-culture, censors, prudes. There are certainly still thoughtful conservatives out there, but hoo boy, they are not dominating the conversation. They have been shoved to the fringe. And so conservatives don’t feel comfortable saying, “Mencken was one of us” – which is moronic on their part. Because he certainly makes their case for them better than THEY do.
He lived a long life. He rarely left Baltimore. He lived a life of the mind. His prose is dauntingly excellent. One of my favorite writers.
You can see why I love this book by Joan Acocella. Its scope is enormous. We have Baryshnikov, we have Lucia Joyce, we have Simone de Beauvoir, and we have Mencken. All in one book. She’s so marvelous.
This essay about Mencken is a review of The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken
We need more of him.
Here is an excerpt.
Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays
Why was he so valued? For his campaign against provincialism to start with. Mencken was not the first person that Americans of his time were divided between a vast majority who hadn’t read much more than their Bible and a small, Brahmin minority who, in disassociating themselves from that hairy horde, had become equally narrow, producing a literature that seemed to be primarily about people in Boston, having tea. In the 1910s, various critics were calling on American writers to deal with common life, in common language. Of these agitators, the most effective was Mencken. He was the reviewer who first brought Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis to national attention. (It is to the school of Dreiser and Lewis – the “revolt from the village” writers – that Mencken actually belongs, more than to the Jazz Age. He hated jazz.) But literature, to him, was a secondary concern. All his life, he had in his mind one dominating image: Boobus americanus as he called it – the average American, ignorant, righteous, credulous, ready to follow any rabble-rouser who came along and yelled at him loud enough. In the United States, he wrote:
The general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head … Here, more than anywhere else that I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly – the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries, and extravagances – is so inordinately gross and preposterous … so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectations of a Sunday-school superintendence touring the Paris peep-shows.
However disciplined his habits, Mencken, as this passage demonstrates, was a man of the 1920s in his love of naughty fun. He denounced puritanism, which he defined as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” He hated religion for the same reason: it wanted to make him feel bad. Once, addressing the question of whether the state should intervene in cases where Christian Scientists refused medical help for their sick children, he said that we should probably let those youngsters die, since, with parents stupid enough to believe in Christian Science, their survival to reproductive age would lower the national IQ: “Being intelligent would become a criminal offense everywhere, as it already is in Mississippi and Tennessee.” To revile was Mencken’s delight, and when the reviled shot back he loved that, too. He saved every scrap of newsprint in which he was denounced as a public menace. In 1928, fearing that these materials would be lost to posterity, he got his publisher to bring out an anthology of them.
But the key to Mencken’s popularity was his prose. His writing crackled with “blue sparks”, as Joseph Conrad put it. His diction was something fantastic, a combination of American slang and a high, Latinate vocabulary that sounds as if it came from Dr. Johnson. That mix, of course, was part of his polemic, his belief that Americans should get smarter and dirtier, go high, go low. Often, he pushed the formula too hard. In my opinion, the long passage quoted above is overwrought. It is from one of Mencken’s many volumes of collected essays, in which he habitually jacked up what he had put more plainly in his daily writing. I like his daily writing better. Here is a sample, from a 1933 article on the death of Calvin Coolidge:
We suffer most when the White House bursts with ideas. With a World Saver preceding him (I count out Harding as a mere hallucination) and a Wonder Boy following him, [Coolidge] begins to seem, in retrospect, an extremely comfortable and even praiseworthy citizen. His failings are forgotten; the country remembers only the grateful fact that he let it alone. Well, there are worse epitaphs for a statesman. If the day ever comes when Jefferson’s warnings are heeded at last, and we reduce government to its simplest terms, it may very well happen that Cal’s bones, now resting inconspicuously in the Vermont granite, will come to be revered as those of a man who really did the nation some service.
Whatever you think of the sentiment, you have to love the prose, with its easy, conversational manner. Before Mencken, we didn’t often have such writing in the newspapers. He brought it in, and journalists have been using it ever since. In a way, Mencken did for American journalism what Mark Twain did for American fiction – gave it a native language, not pseudo-European but homegrown.
