Next up on the essays shelf:
A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, by H.L. Mencken
Mencken spent the entirety of his life in Baltimore. He lived in the same house. He worked certain jobs for decades. He founded magazines, edited them, and worked as a reporter/columnist for major newspapers. There is a sense of great stability in his life (which certainly sets him apart from most writers, especially in those years of crazy worldwide upheaval). I have not read Terry Teachout’s biography of Mencken (and it has always been on my list, I like Teachout sometimes). Everything I know about Mencken I know from the Chrestomathy, which means I know what he thinks about things. It’s actually kind of fun that way. You piece together a man merely from what he left behind in his words. So you know what he thinks of God, of government, of literature, of social ills like prostitution (which he didn’t think was a social ill at all), of evolution. He reported on the “Monkey Trial”, but we’ll get to that. He was not always on the “right” side of history, but in those years very few people were. If you hated the Germans, then you missed the menace of Stalin. Or vice versa. Seeing the whole picture as the entire WORLD explodes is a rare thing indeed. What I am trying to say is that H.L. Mencken lived the widest life possible, in his mind. He was not a world-traveler. He did not travel through Europe with Allied soldiers, reporting from bunkers. He didn’t spend time in Paris, London. He hunkered down in his childhood home and wrote and wrote and wrote. I find that fascinating. What I also find fascinating is that he was a confirmed old bachelor (see his opinion of such creatures as himself here), and his columns on marriage and monogamy are scathing! Scathing, I tell you! He makes fun of the entire thing. He understands that people need the institution – both men and women – but he seems to think that that situation could change if certain underlying circumstances changed. Men are enslaved by marriage, and yet they need it more than women do. Women need it but only because men have put them in such a bad position. He looks at his married friends and sees misery and absurdity. He was open about that fact. So when he – H.L. Mencken – married, at the age of 50, it made national headlines. What?? So the institution got him at last? Mencken married a fascinating woman much younger than himself who was a Professor of English, as well as a writer. She was from Alabama, which was even more shocking, because Mencken was brutal about the American South in his writing (but we’ll get to that). But she was a heavy-hitting thinker and activist, an ambitious woman, head of the National Woman’s Party in Alabama, and it was through her work with them that the 19th Amendment was ratified in Alabama. So Mencken married well. And he married a suffragette, even though he made fun of suffragettes. So for Mencken to marry
1. at all and
2. a suffragette from the Deep South
… was a Through-the-Looking-Glass kind of event.
Unfortunately, she died 5 years after they got married from TB, and Mencken was devastated. Poor guy. It took a lot for him to submit to marriage. You know he meant it.
The next couple of excerpts will be from his essays on women, which are outrageous, obnoxious, and hilarious. Here, he takes on “the feminine mind”. It comes from a larger piece called “In Defense of Women”, written in 1918, when women were in the news all over the damn place. This piece is interesting because what he is actually describing is what we now would call “male privilege” (or I would). He clocks it. He is inside that perception, for sure, he’s a part of it – but he can sense that it is there and that women have had to operate within that construct. Hence, the sorry state of affairs.
A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “The Feminine Mind,” by H.L. Mencken
In brief, women rebel – often unconsciously, sometimes even submitting all the while – against the dull, mechanical tricks of the trade that the present organization of society compels so many of them to practice for a living, and that rebellion testifies to their intelligence. If they enjoyed and took pride in these tricks, and showed it by diligence and skill, they would be on all fours with such men as are head waiters, accountants, schoolmasters or carpetbeaters, and proud of it. The inherent tendency of any woman above the most stupid is to evade the whole obligation, and, if she cannot actually evade it, to reduce its demands to the minimum. And when some accident purges her, either temporarily or permanently, of the inclination to marriage, and she enters into competition with men in the general business of the world, the sort of career that she commonly carves out offers additional evidence of her mental superiority. In whatever calls for no more than an invariable technique and a feeble chicanery she usually fails; in whatever calls for independent thought and resourcefulness she usually succeeds. Thus she is almost always a failure as a lawyer, for the law requires only an armament of hollow phrases and stereotyped formulae, and a mental habit which puts these phantasms above sense, truth and justice; and she is almost always a failure in business, for business, in the main, is so foul a compound of trivialities and rogueries that her sense of intellectual integrity revolts against it. But she is usually a success as a sick-nurse, for that profession requires ingenuity, quick comprehension, courage in the face of novel and disconcerting situations, and above all, a capacity for penetrating and dominating characters and whenever she comes into competition with men in the arts, particularly on those secondary planes where simple nimbleness of mind is unaided by the master strokes of genius, she holds her own invariably. In the demimonde one will find enough acumen and daring, and enough resilience in the face of special difficulties, to put the equipment of any exclusively male profession to shame. If the work of the average man required half the mental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average brothel-keeper, the average man would be constantly on the verge of starvation.
Men, as everyone knows, are disposed to question this superior intelligence of women; their egoism demands the denial, and they are seldom reflective enough to dispose of it by logical and evidential analysis. Moreover, there is a certain specious appearance of soundness in their position; they have forced upon women an artificial character which well conceals their real character, and women have found it profitable to encourage the deception. But though every normal man thus cherishes the soothing unction that he is the intellectual superior of all women, and particularly of his wife, he constantly gives the lie to his pretension by consulting and deferring to what he calls her intuition. That is to say, he knows by experience that her judgment in many matters of capital concern is more subtle and searching than his own, and, being disinclined to accredit this greater sagacity to a more competent intelligence, he takes refuge behind the doctrine that it is due to some impenetrable and intangible talent for guessing correctly, some half mystical super sense, some vague (and, in essence, infra-human) instinct.
The true nature of this alleged instinct, however, is revealed by an examination of the situations which inspire a man to call it to his aid. These situations do not arise out of the purely technical problems that are his daily concern, but out of the rarer and more fundamental, and hence enormously more difficult problems which beset him only at long and irregular intervals, and so offer a test, not of his mere capacity for being skilled, but of his capacity for genuine ratiocination. No man, I take it, save one consciously inferior and hen-pecked, would consult his wife about hiring a clerk, or about extending credit to some paltry custom, or about some routine piece of tawdry swindling; but not even the most egoistic man would fail to sound the sentiment of his wife about taking a partner into his business, or about standing for public office, or about marrying off their daughter. Such things are of massive importance; they lie at the foundation of well-being; they call for the best thought that the man confronted by them can muster; the perils hidden in a wrong decision overcome even the clamors of vanity. It is in such situations that the superior mental grasp of women is of obvious utility, and has to be admitted. It is here that they rise above the insignificant sentimentalities, superstitions and formulae of men, and apply to the business their singular talent for separating the appearance from the substance, and so exercise what is called their intuition.
Intuition? Bosh! Women, in fact, are the supreme realists of the race. Apparently illogical, they are the possessors of a rare and subtle super-logic. Apparently whimsical, they hang to the truth with a tenacity which carries them through every phase of its incessant, jelly-like shifting of form. Apparently unobservant and easily deceived, they see with bright and horrible eyes…. In men, too, the same merciless perspicacity sometimes shows itself – men recognized to be more aloof and uninflammable than the general – men of special talent for the logical – sardonic men, cynics. Men, too, sometimes have brains. But that is a rare, rare man, I venture, who is as steadily intelligent, as constantly sound in judgment, as little put off by appearances, as the average multipara of forty-eight.