Next up on the essays shelf:
A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing
Again and again, H.L. Mencken comes back to his pet themes, one being that America is a nation of prudes and morons, which is why art here lags behind the Europeans. He doesn’t believe that any good art has ever come from a “moral man”. Mencken hates a lot of things (he is a great hater), but the thing he hates most is small-mindedness and prudery. He hates do-gooders, he hates those who worry about the rest of us so much that they become professional do-gooders and “uplifters”, he despises religious cranks, and he despises those who try to impose rigid moralism onto his good time. Maybe his most famous quote is the one about Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Mencken was not kind to those Puritans who first settled this country, he found them to be a terrifying cultish sort who were religious fanatics, cranks, and bores. And, worst of all: anti-art to an extreme degree. No wonder art didn’t flourish here until Puritanism started to die out in the 19th century, with American giants (and heathens, really) such as Whitman, Mark Twain, and others, who helped give America its distinctive voice. Now I’m on board with some of this, and think Mencken is too hard in other cases, but he is certainly entertaining about all of it. It’s kind of fun to hear him haranguing the Puritans three centuries after the fact.
Mencken is on the side of the artist. He maintains that the artist is different from regular folks. They feel things deeper, they take things harder, and if the artist has talent (we presume that he does), then it is that deeper sensitivity to the small pains/joys of life that makes him the Artist that he is. The artist who tries to fit into the mainstream, or get approval from the petty bourgeois or whatever you want to call them, the grace-less nouveau riche set, is not an artist at all. The artist is supposed to be an outcast, an outlaw, a pervert, a weirdo.
AND – in this essay from 1924, Mencken takes up this topic again and says that artists are usually un-patriotic to the point of treason. They hate the country in which they live, because they hate the status quo, and the country in which they live hates them in return. It is only when the pesky artist has reached the Pantheon of Legend that said country rushes to CLAIM said artist. Ireland very nearly ran James Joyce out of town on a rail (well: he fled its “priest-ridden” confines, so same difference), and now of course he is their greatest star, he was on their currency before the EU came along, he is as much everywhere in Dublin as Elvis is everywhere in Graceland. (Let’s also not forget that James Joyce, with all of his interests and passions, had one topic, and that was Ireland. It takes an exile to see things with clarity.) But, you know, Ireland wanted to be RID of him and his lascivious voice, and they did their best to ban him, censor him, shut him the fuck UP. When America finally ruled, in 1934, that Ulysses was “not obscene” and therefore allowed into the United States (12 years after its original publication in 1922), Joyce’s response was:
Thus one half of the English speaking world surrenders. The other half will follow … And Ireland 1,000 years hence.
Ireland does not have a good track record with its artists, but then, no nation does. Russia has an ever-changing gallery of stars, and those who were in yesterday are air-brushed out today.
So here’s Mencken on the role of artist as regards to his country. I am racking my brains to think of what Mencken had to say about Kipling, who, obviously, disproved all of these theories here. I should do some digging, it would be interesting. Still: he makes some interesting points.
A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing
It is almost safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist. The special quality which makes an artist of him might almost be defined, indeed, as an extraordinary capacity for irritation, a pathological sensitiveness to environmental pricks and stings. He differs from the rest of us mainly because he reacts sharply and in an uncommon manner to phenomena which leave the rest of us unmoved, or, at most, merely annoy us vaguely. He is, in brief, a more delicate fellow than we are, and hence less fitted to prosper and enjoy himself under the conditions of life which he and we must face alike. Therefore, he takes to artistic endeavor, which is at once a criticism of life and an attempt to escape from life.
So much for the theory of it. The more the facts are studied, the more they bear it out. In those fields of art, at all events, which concern themselves with ideas as well as with sensations it is almost impossible to find any trace of an artist who was not actively hostile to his environment, and thus an indifferent patriot. From Dante to Tolstoy and from Shakespeare to Mark Twain the story is ever the same. Names suggest themselves instantly: Goethe, Heine, Shelley, Byron, Thackeray, Balzac, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Dostoevsky, Carlyle, Moliere, Pope – all bitter critics of their time and nation, most of them piously hated by the contemporary 100 per centers, some of them actually fugitives from rage and reprisal.
Dante put all of the patriotic Italians of his day into Hell, and showed them boiling, roasting and writhing on hooks. Cervantes drew such a devastating picture of the Spain that he lived in that it ruined the Spaniards. Shakespeare made his heroes foreigners and his clowns Englishmen. Goethe was in favor of Napoleon. Rabelais, a citizen of Christendom rather than of France, raised a cackle against it that Christendom is still trying in vain to suppress. Swift, having finished the Irish and then the English, proceeded to finish the whole human race. The exceptions are few and far between, and not many of them will bear examination.
