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

Next up on the essays shelf:

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

The Chrestomathy has so much in it that the cliche “embarrassment of riches” applies. There’s a great cantankerous essay on zoos and how horrible they are (a sentiment with which I am in total agreement. I love animals so much that I sometimes brainwash myself into believing that going to visit them in zoos would be an okay thing to do. I always regret it.) There’s a funny essay on how he thinks the entire American experiment would be better served if everyone in this country was just “slightly stewed” at all times. Not wasted, mind you, just a bit tipply. He takes on Prohibition’s failure. He celebrates the end of Prohibition. He makes fun of the New Deal. He writes about Henry Cabot Lodge and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (such a hilarious essay, basically saying to liberals: “Really? You want to claim him? Have you taken a really good look at what he has to say?”) He addresses professional do-gooders, especially in the realm of what was then called “sex hygiene”. He writes about Holy Rollers and Christian Science. He writes about how screw every other invention – the thermostat is the only one that has changed his life in a way to make it markedly unrecognizable from before. He writes about the telephone and what a terrible invention it is. This collection marks only a tiny selection of all of his work, and many of these essays are excerpted from much larger pieces. Did the man sleep? Many of these essays are only a page and a half long. He takes his topic, flogs it, turns it inside out, comes up with an ending, and then moves on to the next topic. His mind was vastly curious, and nothing escaped his notice. He was a curmudgeon, but that didn’t mean he was un-interested in the world. Just the opposite, in fact. He has his pet topics, which show up throughout, his pet peeves, but the sheer scope of his interests is breath-taking. A true intellectual. Who thought Mark Twain was up there with Dostoevsky, and maybe even surpassed him. But we’ll get to Mark Twain!

I mention all of this just to say that what I have been excerpting here represents just a tiny glimpse into what the whole collection offers. I love it, too, because it’s one of those books I dip into all the time. Just for fun, or sometimes for research purposes. But I’ll think, “I’m feeling in the mood to hear Mencken rail about chiropractors again …” and there it is right before me.

Having addressed politics, American history (social, economic, religious, political), as well as the varying brands of Quackery that keep our great nation enslaved to ridiculous ideas in the first third of the book, the final third he devotes to criticism (and you can see a whole different Mencken emerge). First he talks about the act of criticism and what the role of the critic is. This takes up a couple of different essays, and that’s what I’ll be excerpting from next. After that, he goes into specifics. He turns his spotlight onto authors as diverse as Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, Mark Twain, and others. He lovingly highlights the classical composers he adores. Whereas in other essays, he criticizes everything – who else would spent two pages railing about the telephone – in the composer essays he lavishes praise on his heroes. And while you still feel his teeth, what you actually feel is his conscious effort to withdraw them, in order to tell the doubting/cynical populace why the hell Beethoven was such a Giant.

He praises as well as he damns.

But this essay! Indispensable! It’s quite lengthy, and already it’s excerpted from what is a much larger piece, printed in a book elsewhere. He talks about critics. Now: what is the role of the critic? This is a conversation that continues to this day. I see it at the ground-level in film criticism, where you get fanboys saying either “It’s just a movie, don’t take it so seriously” OR “The Dark Knight is the greatest deepest darkest movie ever made and why are you raining on my parade?” Fanboys, get your stories straight: Either these are “just” movies and we are idiotic to take them seriously and devote any words to them at all, OR, movies demand to be “taken seriously” as an important art form and therefore demand to be handled with some critical seriousness, which also means that The Dark Knight can, actually, be criticized. If you don’t like something, you’re an elitist. If you do like something, you’ve been snowed. People play “Gotcha” with critics: “How can you NOT like such-and-such a movie when you DID like that other movie – which I despise?” As though consistency is what matters. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, never forget. There can be too much angst around all of this. What is the role of the critic in today’s society?? Oh, I don’t know, but there’s some genocide going on in some godforsaken country and maybe that’s a bit more important? HOWEVER. That way madness lies. What we are talking about here, and what Mencken is talking about, is American culture and how it is discussed. We still need intelligent voices, clear thinkers. We still need people who remain independent of the promotional arm of the studios (or book publishers, as the case may be), who understand the difference between a press release and a review. “Raining on someone’s parade” should be irrelevant to a good critic. I also think it’s adorable when commenters complain that a review is “biased”. I am not sure what they were expecting. A Wikipedia article? Of course it’s biased. It’s an opinion piece written by a human being. What are they teaching in school nowadays? Get off my lawn!

In this lengthy essay, Mencken says that any great critic is a great artist himself. The critics who come down to us through the ages, those who wrote literary reviews in the 18th century, 19th century, the Carlyles, the Goethes, are great critics because they were first-rate men and artists themselves. And that should still be the case, Mencken argues. You read criticism (ideally) to revel in the way somebody else puts forth their ideas. You may think, “What a load of bunk”, you may think, “I totally disagree, and here is why” – but that’s also the role of good criticism: it starts a conversation, a conversation that (ideally, again) never ends. Too many people respond to criticism in a way that seeks to END the conversation. Look out for those who over-use the words “‘Nuff said” and “Period”, as in “This is the best movie ever made, period.” Or “It has such-and-such rating on Rotten Tomatoes. ‘Nuff said.” No, it’s not NUFF SAID. I don’t want to stop talking about art, I want to keep talking. Your “‘Nuff said” seeks to end discourse, and I have zero interest in you trying to shut down conversation. And I guess there are some critics, too, who want their word to be the final word, and are uninterested in hearing opposing sides. Fine, let culture die, or do your part in it, but I’ll continue to want to ENGAGE with writers who engage me (even if it’s just in my own mind). Good critics challenge assumptions. Good critics can make things seem fresh and new, things you considered dead or uninteresting. Good critics can make you take a second look at things you had dismissed or somehow missed. I have Christopher Hitchens to thank for making me finally pick up Evelyn Waugh, an author I had just somehow missed, for no particular reason. He was the one, with his essays about Waugh, that made me put down everything and go read Waugh immediately. Go critic!

So that’s part of Mencken’s point: a good critic is an artist himself. (Of course, he only includes men in all of this, but you just have to accept that sexism as part of the deal and move on, thankful that we have progress.) Critics who are not great artists are irrelevant and will be forgotten by tomorrow. A controversial point, but one worth pondering.

The essay then moves on to the various brands of criticism. There are those who proselytize for their pet authors, making you re-evaluate, or at least re-consider. Then there are the ones who feel that their criticism is actually ADVICE to artists, and if said artist doesn’t follow the critic’s precious advice, well then you will be treated with the spectacle of a disappointed critic, scolding you in print. We all know the kind. Those who have never made a movie themselves but who think their advice to Woody Allen, of all people, should be heeded, because they know what’s best. These folks know nothing about the industry – which is fascinating to me, because – wow – you spend all your time writing about an industry and you don’t understand how it actually works? I think the word I am looking for is: BALLS!

In this excerpt, Mencken takes on the idea of “constructive criticism”. Not surprisingly, he destroys it and nails it to the wall in triumph. Mencken writes a lot about Edgar Allan Poe, and the cruel dismissal Poe received from critics during his lifetime, and how it was that very dismissal that helped fuel Poe’s fire. Constructive criticism wouldn’t have helped. Mencken believes that great literature often arises out of a landscape of strife, which is, of course, uncomfortable to artists, but never mind. Being coddled by those who are blowing smoke up your ass does nobody any good. And “constructive criticism” is offered up by those Mencken devastatingly refers to as “wet-nurse[s] of letters”. But I’ll let Mencken explain why he feels that way.

It makes me think of a fascinating comment from Anjelica Huston when she came and spoke at my school. She related a particularly cruel thing her father had said to her, something along the lines of, “Aren’t you a little bit old to start trying to be an actress?” She was in her mid-20s. You could feel the reaction in the room to that comment, a sort of fluttering of outrage and protection. She heard it and felt it, and said, with a smile, “I have never learned all that much from people who were kind to me.” It was those who were cruel who helped form her. Nerves of steel, that one.

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “The Critical Process,” by H.L. Mencken

Upon the low practical value of “constructive” criticism I can offer testimony out of my own experience. My books have been commonly reviewed at length, and many critics have devoted themselves to pointing out what they conceive to be my errors, both of fact and of taste. Well, I cannot recall a case in which any suggestion offered by a “constructive” critic has helped me in the slightest, or even actively interested me. Every such wet-nurse of letters has sought fatuously to make me write in a way differing from that in which the Lord God Almighty, in His infinite wisdom, impels me to write – that is, to make me write stuff which, coming from me, would be as false as an appearance of decency in a Congressman. All the benefits I have ever got from the critics of my work have come from the destructive variety. A hearty slating always does me good, particularly if it be well written. It begins by enlisting my professional respect; it ends by making me examine my ideas coldly in the privacy of my chamber. Not, of course, that I usually revise them, but I at least examine them. If I decide to hold fast to them, they are all the dearer to me thereafter, and I expound them with a new passion and plausibility. If, on the contrary, I discern holes in them, I shelve them in a pianissimo manner, and set about hatching new ones to take their place. But “constructive” criticism irritates me. I do not object to being denounced, but I can’t abide being schoolmastered, especially by men I regard as imbeciles.

I find, as a practising critic, that very few men who write books are even as tolerant as I am – that most of them, soon or late, show signs of extreme discomfort under criticism, however polite its terms. Perhaps that is why enduring friendships between authors and critics are so rare. All artists, of course, dislike one another more or less, but that dislike seldom rises to implacable enmity, save between opera singer and opera singer, and creative author and critic. Even when the latter two keep up an outward show of good-will, there is always bitter antagonism under the surface. Part of it, I daresay, arises out of the impossible demands of the critic, particularly if he be tinged with the constructive madness. Having favored an author with his good opinion, he expects the poor fellow to live up to that good opinion without the slights compromise or faltering, and this is commonly beyond human power. He feels that any letdown compromises him – that his hero is stabbing him in the back, and making him ridiculous – and this feeling rasps his vanity. The most bitter of all literary quarrels are those between critics and creative artists, and most of them arise in just this way. As for the creative artist, he on his part naturally resents the critic’s air of pedagogical superiority and he resents it especially when he has an uneasy feeling that he has fallen short of his best work, and that the discontent of the critic is thus justified. Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

Under it all, of course, lurks the fact that I began with: the fact that the critic is himself an artist, and that his creative impulse, soon or late, is bound to make him neglect the punctilio. When he sits down to compose his criticism, his artist ceases to be a friend and becomes mere raw material for his work of art. It is my experience that artists invariably resent this cavalier use of them. They are pleased so long as the critic confines himself to the modest business of interpreting them – preferably in terms of their own estimation of themselves – but the moment he proceeds to adorn their theme with variations of his own, the moment he brings new ideas to the enterprise and begins contrasting them with their ideas, that moment they grow restive. It is precisely at this point, of course, that criticism becomes genuine criticism; before that it was mere reviewing. When a critic passes it he loses his friends. By becoming an artist, he becomes the foe of all other artists.

But the transformation, I believe, has good effects upon him: it makes him a better critic. Too much Gemütlichkeit is as fatal to criticism as it would be to surgery or politics. When it rages unimpeded it leads inevitably either to a dull professorial sticking on of meaningless labels or to log-rolling, and often it leads to both. One of the most hopeful signs in the Republic is the revival of acrimony in criticism – the renaissance of the doctrine that esthetic matters are important, and that it is worth the while of a healthy male to take them seriously, as he takes business, sport and amour. In the days when American literature was showing its first vigorous growth, the native criticism was extraordinarily violent and even vicious; in the days when American literature swooned upon the tomb of the Puritan Kultur it became flaccid and childish. The typical critic of the first era was Poe, as the typical critic of the second was Howells. Poe carried on his critical jehads with such ferocity that he sometimes got into law-suits, and now again ran no little risk of having his head cracked. He regarded literary questions as exigent and momentous. The lofty aloofness of the don was simply not in him. When he encountered a book that seemed to him to be bad, he attacked it almost as sharply as an archbishop would attack Jesus. His opponents replied in the same Berserker manner. Much of Poe’s surviving ill-fame, as a drunkard and dead-beat, is due to their inordinate denunciation of him. They were not content to refute him; they constantly tried to dispose of him altogether. The very ferocity of that ancient row shows that the native literature, in those days, was in a healthy state. Books of genuine value were produced.

Literature always thrives best, in fact, in an atmosphere of hearty strife. Poe, surrounded by admiring professors, never challenged, never aroused to the emotions of revolt, would probably have written poetry indistinguishable from the hollow stuff of, say, George E. Woodberry. It took the persistent (and often grossly unfair and dishonorable) opposition of Griswold et al. to stimulate him to his highest endeavors. He needed friends, true enough, but he also needed enemies.