“You know what H.L. Mencken said one time about religious people? He said he’d been greatly misunderstood. He said he didn’t hate them. He simply found them comical.” – Kurt Vonnegut
Today is the birthday of one of the greatest cranks in American letters – and the best writer of them all – the sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken.
He’s probably most famous for the quote in the title line, but also for his righteous enraged dispatches from the Scopes trial, collected into a book with the non-inflammatory title A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter’s Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial
I read Terry Teachout’s excellent biography (The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken
He was a snob. He didn’t try to keep up with the culture. He could not care less. He barely gave the movies any thought at all. He was highly suspicious of consensus. Maybe this is why I love him so much. He helps keep you sharp, he helps you interrogate your own responses to things, and you also interrogate your response to HIM. He’s fun to argue with. I read his In Defense of Women
I really love his unexpectedly tender essay on Rudolph Valentino, which – weirdly – is an unofficial obituary for Valentino, a sex symbol who died shortly after his bizarre meeting with Mencken. Valentino had reached out to Mencken for advice – this blows me away. The two men did not know each other. Mencken did not think the movies were a worthwhile subject. Two more unlikely people you could not imagine. Mencken dismissed most popular culture, he despised the new, any “fad,” anything the majority of people flipped over he thought was probably useless. And yet here he was, summoned to a meeting with a man who was famous in a field Mencken thought vulgar, a man whose movies he never saw. (I wrote about this beautiful essay here, with an excerpt.)
The Valentino essay stands out in its affection and baffled tenderness. But in general, why I treasure Mencken is his vinegar-y contempt and outrage at stupidity, ignorance, anti-science bullshit, credulous people, etc. Yes, some of his sentiments wouldn’t fly today, but that’s not the measure of something’s worth. When he goes after the anti-science attitudes behind the Scopes trial, he takes no prisoners. Think of the anti-vaxxers today. Think of Marianne Williamson’s disgusting comments on illness, AIDS, hurricane trajectories. This kind of stuff will always be with us, and Mencken destroyed those who hold such views. His contempt rollicks forth in non-stop hilarious broadsides.
There is a small pantheon of mean obituaries. The top 3 mean obituaries are, in chronological order:
1. Mencken’s obituary for William Jennings Bryan (“He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity.”)
2. Hunter Thompson’s obituary for Richard Nixon
3. Christopher Hitchens’ obituary for Mother Teresa.
When Mencken is NOT contemptuous, i.e. his essays on Schubert, Beethoven, Ring Lardner, Poe, Mark Twain, his tone of unqualified celebration and admiration is intense.
Here’s an excerpt from his essay on the “artist” in society, and how all great artists are – in many ways – AGAINST the society from which they sprung.
“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.”
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
All you say is true, Sheila….One bit of Mencken’s career that doesn’t get enough love is his reporting from the political conventions of both parties (1912 to 1948 if memory serves), which, among other things, will disabuse any modern reader of the notion that, regarding Politics, anything is new under the sun.
His cynicism is refreshing … and definitely a bulwark for me against idealization of any political candidate. It’s just anathema to me, loving any politician the way I see many people – including my friends – do. I have never “believed” in a politician. I wish I could sometimes. It seems fun. But I look at them as flawed public servants, never worthy of “benefit of the doubt,” their actions always need to be looked at with a little bit of a side-eye. In this way, our republic can actually continue. No sacred cows.
Mencken was often dead wrong on things but that’s going to happen when you write as much as he did. His output is breathtaking.
I just read this piece yesterday – linked on Twitter – and it’s fantastic. His “journey” with Mencken is similar to my own.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/04/20/the-h-l-mencken-show/
I came here because I was looking for the exact wording of Mencken’s definition of Puritanism. I’m staying because, well, Mencken. I’m looking forward to perusing your work.
Patrick – thanks! Mencken’s a fun subject.
Someone could write a good two-hander play about the meeting between Mencken and Valentino. Just by cribbing Mencken’s own words – much of it now being in the public domain, that would be easy and free – at least half the dialogue would be terrific!
I’ve always thought one of his wiser observations was that the notion of the starving artist is bunk; nearly all good art, in his opinion, was created on a full stomach.
Bill – interestingly, someone DID write a script about that meeting. It was turned into a short film. I’ve seen it. It’s lovely. I’ll track it down – I think it was streaming on its IMDB page.
// nearly all good art, in his opinion, was created on a full stomach. //
amazing.
“something I have felt and sensed my whole life: that men are more romantic than women, that men are more sentimental than women, that women are practical, because they have to be”
That’s also Kipling’s thesis in The Female Of The Species and The Vampyre, although I think in the end both sexes fall in love with the image in their head, not necessarily the actual person. Happy are those whose mental image roughly corresponds to reality!
The fool was stripped to his foolish hide
(Even as you and I!)
Which she might have seen when she threw him aside
(But it isn’t on record the lady tried)
So some of him lived but the most of him died
(Even as you and I!)
// Happy are those whose mental image roughly corresponds to reality! //
hahaha ain’t that the truth.
What a great write up! It’s true that some people are kept up at night by the completely unrelated and fully consensual acts of others. The same philistines who anti-sex tend to be against any sort of avant garde artistry too. To be a true artist, one must stand against the society they spring from. Bravo!
Lee – thanks so much for reading and commenting! I agree – I find this kind of puritanism so weird it’s hard for me to even enter into the mindset and see where people might be coming from. why are you so BOTHERED by what other people do – behind closed doors – or not behind closed doors? Mind your business, jerks.
Hello,
Excellent commentary on HL Mencken, who was a controversial figure, no doubt, and today would have been “canceled.” forthwith… Or the national psychologists would have determined that he was on some DSM spectrum and dismissed his views as those of a crazy man. His great gift to the nation was being a keen observer and a thorn in the eye of any group thinkers. Even to this day you can read his stuff and, in certain passages, feel queasy (The Husbandman, Chiropractic, Sahara of the Bozart, and the remarkable reports from the Scopes Trial)… As a European (born a New Yorker, raised a European), I have the occasional duty to explain the weirdness of American politics and attitudes. The fact that we have a two-party presidential system is one side, but the deep impact of puritanism is often forgotten here (and I live in one of its great nurseries), the 100-percentism generated by centuries of moral superiority… So I always come back to Mencken and others from that period… His friendship with Sinclair Lewis by the way was telling, Lewis, a grand writer, who busted some of the myths that Americans hold high: Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, and, of course, the much ballyhooed guardrails we hear about so often that get run over in It Can’t Happen Here…
Anyway:
I subscribed to your Substack, but, alas, my pension does not allow any monthly subsidies to anyone (family first and one or two newspapers for the fact gathering second), but if I manage to earn enough in my dotage, I will. Best wishes.
His “chiropractic” is so funny. He was so ANGRY at chiropractors and it makes me laugh. Like, chill!!
I also love his pieces on the classical composers he loved.
// the deep impact of puritanism is often forgotten here (and I live in one of its great nurseries), the 100-percentism generated by centuries of moral superiority //
Yes, he really did go after this, didn’t he. It’s the mix of puritanism AND credulous superstition that creates the witches brew of the Scopes trial – and is still with us today. It’s extraordinary and annoying. I have a friend who teaches non-fiction writing to undergraduates at NYU and he always assigns Religious Orgy in Tennessee.
(side note: I don’t believe in cancel culture – at least not with famous people. Louis CK sold out Madison Square Garden. Shane Gillis came back and hosted SNL after being fired. Being criticized is not being canceled!) I feel like Mencken caught the spirit of the age in the 20s – while also not being really PART of the age. that to me is so interesting. He wasn’t a Jazz Age kid, he was older, he didn’t live some wild bohemian life of partying. He was suspicous of fads and the new. and yet …
The 30s left him in the dust. He just couldn’t keep up. it happens to a lot of columnists – maybe hard to keep your perspective when the winds of change blow. like, you were so IN fashion just a couple years before and now you’re “out”. I see that with some columnists today! they’re just not “getting it”. and they don’t know they don’t “get it”.
Oh and thank you so much for subscribing and of course I completely understand! I appreciate the support in whatever form it takes.
I appreciate your comment and the knowledge you bring to this subject. I love talking about Mencken with people who know his work.