The Books: A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “Meditation on Meditation,” by H.L. Mencken

Next up on the essays shelf:

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, by H.L. Mencken

I haven’t written much on H.L. Mencken. This is the only piece I could find and I can tell I had fun writing it. Mencken is fun. One of the common things that occurs on the Internet (something that actually surprised me once I started my blog and started having comments, etc.) is that people seem to believe that mentioning something or bringing up a topic for discussion is seen as endorsement. I have gotten those responses when I want to talk about Stalin, or the Manson murders, or Conor Cruise O’Brien, and on and on and on. I am not “condemning” enough, or something. I don’t know. The people who had problems with me wanted me to be clearer: “I think Stalin was a bad guy”. Like: that needs to be said? How boring. They were uncomfortable with the level of discourse. They saw me wanting to talk about certain things as an endorsement of said things (which just goes to show you that many many people lack the critical facility to even engage in conversation on the most banal level.) I do not operate like that, and so it was kind of a shock to see how, like clockwork, I’d put up a link to something I found interesting, and 9 out of 10 people would respond with either, “I DO NOT AGREE WITH THE OPINIONS IN THAT LINK” or “I SO AGREE WITH THE OPINIONS IN THAT LINK.” Who cares if you agree or disagree? Who the hell are YOU? Anything else to say? Anything more interesting to add? Even agreement/disagreement can be interesting if you put some thought into it, if you engage with the opponents’ ideas on a deeper level than a knee-jerk rejection.

I think that sometimes people feel that they must defend themselves against opinions that they find dangerous/bad/misguided/whatever. That defensive quality, though, brings up red flags in me. What’s wrong with discussing it? Even just DISCUSSING it is dangerous? And if you do discuss it, then you had better make it damn clear that you “condemn” whatever it is.

What the hell does all of this have to do with H.L. Mencken, the “sage of Baltimore”, and one of the greatest writers (and most influential) of the 20th century? Well, people have a hard time discussing him without shouting beforehand: “I DO NOT AGREE WITH HIS ASSUMPTIONS” or “I TOTES AGREE WITH WHAT HE SAYS HERE”. And it’s tiresome, frankly. Because what interests me in Mencken is his writing. The quality of his writing. And, in a way, Mencken IS dangerous. Because he is such a good writer that you find yourself engaging with his ideas, however offensive, however obnoxious, and boy, we can’t have THAT, can we? Mencken isn’t even a persuasive guy. He’s not writing to persuade you. He doesn’t give a shit. If you already believe such-and-such a thing, then he has already written you off as a boob and a moron, not worth engaging with anyway (he has contempt for groupthink of all kinds, political, religious, social, etc.). But to those who still CAN reason, and think for themselves, Mencken present his ideas, on men, women, sex, politics, history, literature, and every other single damn topic under the sun.

What I love about Mencken (and I love him) is that I get the sense, unlike most other writers, of being in the presence of his actual brain. I can FEEL him thinking. He has contempt for most sacred cows, and so sentimental people will find him horrifying. Even worse (or better), they will take him personally. (Good, I think. You SHOULD take him personally.) I think that’s where a lot of the negative reaction to Mencken comes from – not from his opinions, but from how much his writing decimates sentimentality, earnestness, idealism. He is such a highly skilled adversary. I can see how you would want him to just go away, if you were a certain type of person: He’s bad, he’s wrong, he’s sexist, he’s out-of-date, he got this-and-that wrong about history, let’s toss him on the ash heap, let’s just ignore him, because he’s bad bad bad.

But it’s not just the opinions – it’s the SKILL with which he expresses them.

Even when I find him obnoxious, he still makes me laugh out loud in sheer delight at his wordsmithy brilliance. I also have a love for cranky people, especially those who can write. Plenty of cranky people can NOT write (witness most political blogs), but those who know how to put what they are cranky about into writing … hats off.

Also. I think Mencken is right about a lot of things. I appreciate his dash of cold water realism. He can write circles around everyone. He satisfies my white-hot elitist streak, but he also satisfies my liberal sensibilities (he wasn’t a prude about sex, he could be sexist for sure but at heart he thought women were the realists of our species and men the romantic dangerous Fools, he cared deeply about art). He engages with art. (But the way he expresses it would be a turnoff to some: for example, in one essay he says he wouldn’t trade the book Lord Jim for ten kids – or “brats” as he calls them. Basically, he has never met a child more valuable than Lord Jim. Got it? Turned off? Unwilling to read further? Ha.) Mencken is a political orphan at the moment. Nobody wants to inherit him. Which, to my mind, is just more evidence of his worth. He loves literature, he engages with it, he wanted Americans to engage more in the things that HE thinks are important, which is: intellectual rigor, skepticism, critical thinking, artistic appreciation, and living primarily in the gladiator-fight of IDEAS.

This volume, the “Mencken Chrestomathy”, was put together by H.L. Mencken himself, a selection of his writings over the years in The Smart Set and other places, on various topics. He groups his pieces together, sometimes written years apart, under headings like: “Democracy”, “Religion”, “Women”, etc. Some of the pieces are only a paragraph long. Others a couple of pages. The prose is rollicking. Again, I have a feeling that those who only respond to content (what the essays SAY) are the ones who resist him. I don’t respond to content as much as I do to style (HOW the essay says what it says). Mencken’s style hits the sweet spot for me, the sweet spot hit by very few writers. Mencken and Joseph Heller sit at the top of that list. P.J. O’Rourke is on that list (on occasion). There’s a delicious sense of the absurdity of most human endeavor that these writers understand. For example the first sentence of the excerpt below. Mencken sets us up in the first part of the sentence, flattering our vanity and our ideals about ourselves – and then DECIMATES said vanity/ideals in the second half of the sentence. Heller’s entire Catch-22, in sentence after sentence, does the same thing. Both writers satisfy my suspicion that the world is an insane and capricious place, that Man is not noble or good, and they do so in writing that often makes me HOWL with laughter. Not for amateurs!

So I’ll be doing a bunch of excerpts from the Chrestomathy. This should be fun.

Here’s an excerpt from “Meditation on Meditation”, first published in The Smart Set in 1920.

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “Meditation on Meditation,” by H.L. Mencken

Man’s capacity for abstract thought, which most other mammals seem to lack, has undoubtedly given him his present mastery of the land surface of the earth – a mastery disputed only by several hundred thousand species of insects and microscopic organisms. It is responsible for his feeling of superiority, and under that feeling that is undoubtedly a certain measure of reality, at least within narrow limits. But what is too often overlooked is that the capacity to perform an act is by no means synonymous with its salubrious exercise. The simple fact is that most of man’s thinking is stupid, pointless and injurious to him. Of all animals, indeed, he seems the least capable of arriving at accurate judgments in the matters that most desperately affect his welfare. Try to imagine a rat, in the realm of rat ideas, arriving at a notion as violently in contempt of plausibility as the notion, say, of Swedenborgianism, or that of homeopathy, or that of infant damnation, or that of mental telepathy. Man’s natural instinct, in fact, is never toward what is sound and true; it is toward what is specious and false. Let any great nation of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter. It is so in politics, which consists wholly of a succession of unintelligent crazes, many of them so idiotic that they exist only as battle-cries and shibboleths and are not reducible to logical statements at all. It is so in religion, which, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities. It is so in nearly every field of thought. The ideas that conquer the race most rapidly and arouse the wildest enthusiasm and are held most tenaciously are precisely the ideas that are most insane. This has been true since the first “advanced” gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his first lecture tour, and it will be so until the high gods, tired of the farce at last, obliterate the race with one great, final blast of fire, mustard gas and streptococci.