Next up on the essays shelf:
A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing
Now that I got some initial thoughts about Mencken out of the way, let’s get down to brass tacks. His writing! If you choose to write from a place of contempt, you really need to know what you are doing. The greatest satirists can do it. Mencken had contempt for most of mankind. That’s obvious. But his writing is so entertaining that you find yourself looped in, as a comrade, as a fellow traveler. (Or, at least, that’s how I feel. Even when he is making fun of me, essentially). If you approach editorial writing defensively, ready at any moment to fight back/defend/argue, you’ll find Mencken tough going. That is perhaps the point. Mencken did not shy away from a fight, and he would prefer that you get your shit together and fight back, rather than complacently ignore whatever it was that he was saying. But Mencken is such an intimidating opponent that you really do need to get your shit together to “take him on”. There’s a Hitchens-brand of brilliance here. These are Men of the Mind. These are Men of Letters, in the strictly old-fashioned sense. There are very few of these left, very few that are worth a damn.
In the Chrestomathy (which, again, was edited by Mencken himself), he breaks down the topics into different sub-headings. Some of the pieces included here are only a paragraph long, excerpted from longer pieces published elsewhere. It gives the collection a collage effect, perfect for dipping into, reading a bit, putting the book down, picking it up again. He’s one of those writers – like Joseph Heller, or Rebecca West – who is incapable of writing a boring sentence. It’s daunting. It’s hard to take in in one sitting.
There’s one whole section called “Types of Men”, and I’ll excerpt just a small bit of it. He breaks down all of men into different types, and he gives them names. The King, The Toiler, the Bachelor, the Good Man, etc. And he goes back destroying every single one of them. He destroys by ripping apart their illusions about themselves. Men who pride themselves on being “Good Men” will feel defensive reading Mencken’s description of what is really going on with such individuals, but Mencken is so skilled at decimation that you would be left spluttering in outrage, rather than actually able to counter-argue with the man. “But … but … how DARE he … ” Hmm, maybe your outrage comes from a place of recognition? Maybe you realize that the jig is up? Mencken sees through you and so does everybody else? Hmm?
Just as Yeats wrote of Jonathan Swift, “Imitate him if you dare”, I’d say the same thing of Mencken.
Here are just a few of the “Types” that Mencken covers.
And I’ll say it again, because I think it bears repeating: Agreement/disagreement is, of course, part of life. But maybe I’m more of a formalist than anything else. I don’t mean to suggest that content is irrelevant. Of course that’s not true. Mencken was a man of ideas. He puts forth his ideas, strongly, unforgettably. We are to engage with those ideas. I do. I love the level of engagement he requires. But it’s the STYLE that is the main attraction. Mencken is one of the greatest stylists to ever pick up a pen.
A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing
The Skeptic
No man quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt – a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve. This doubt, it must be obvious, is always more than justified, for no man is worthy of unlimited reliance – his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation. The trouble with the world is not that men are too suspicious in this direction, but that they tend to be too confiding – that they still trust themselves too far to other men, even after bitter experience. Women, I believe, are measurably less sentimental, in this as in other things. No married woman ever trusts her husband absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she did trust him. Her utmost confidence is as wary as an American pickpocket’s confidence that the policeman on the beat will stay bought.
The Believer
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. There is thus a flavor of the pathological in it; it goes beyond the normal intellectual process and passes into the murky domain of transcendental metaphysics. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable, for disappointment, being essentially an objective phenomenon, cannot permanently affect his subjective infirmity. His faith takes on the virulence of a chronic infection. What he says, in substance, is this: “Let us trust in God, Who has always fooled us in the past.”
The Toiler
All democratic theories, whether Socialist or bourgeois, necessarily take in some concept of the dignity of labor. If the have-not went deprived of this delusion that his sufferings on the assembly-line are somehow laudable and agreeable to God, there would be little left in his ego save a belly-ache. Nevertheless, a delusion is a delusion, and this is one of the worst. It arises out of confusing the pride of workmanship of the artist with the dogged painful docility of the machine. The difference is important and enormous. If he got no reward whatever, the artist would go on working just the same; his actual reward, in fact, is often so little that he almost starves. But suppose a garment-worker got nothing for his labor: would he go on working just the same? Can one imagine his submitting voluntarily to hardship and sore want that he might express his soul in 200 more pairs of ladies’ pants?
The Average Man
It is often urged against the Marxian brethren, with their materialistic conception of history, that they overlook certain spiritual qualities that are independent of wage scale and metabolism. These qualities, it is argued, color the aspirations and activities of civilized man quite as much as they are colored by his material condition, and so make it impossible to consider him simply as an economic machine. As examples, the anti-Marxians cite patriotism, pity, the esthetic sense and the yearning to know God. Unluckily, the examples are ill-chosen. Millions of men are quite devoid of patriotism, pity, and the esthetic sense, and have no very active desire to know God. Why don’t the anti-Marxians cite a spiritual quality that is genuinely universal? There is one readily at hand. I allude to cowardice. It is, in one form or another, visible in every human being; it almost serves to mark off the human race from all the other higher animals. Cowardice, I believe, is at the bottom of the whole caste system, the foundation of every organized society, including the most democratic. In order to escape going to war himself, the peasant was willing to give the warrior certain privileges – and out of those privileges has grown the whole structure of civilization. Go back still further. Property arose out of the fact that a few relatively courageous men were able to accumulate more possessions than whole hordes of cowardly men, and, what is more, to retain them after accumulating them.
The Bachelor
Around every bachelor of more than thirty-five legends tend to congregate, chiefly about the causes of his celibacy. If it is not whispered that he is damaged goods, and hence debarred from marriage by a lofty concept of Service to the unborn, it is told under the breath that he was insanely in love at the age of twenty-six with a beautiful creature who jilted him for an insurance underwriter and so broke his heart beyond repair. Such tales are nearly always moonshine. The reason why the average bachelor of thirty-five remains a bachelor is really very simple. It is, in brief, that no ordinarily attractive and intelligent woman has ever made a serious and undivided effort to marry him.
