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

Next up on the essays shelf:

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

Mencken was a great admirer of Poe (who had died in Baltimore, Mencken’s home town), and references him often in his other essays. In another essay about critics in America, he discussed the critical reception (or lack thereof) to Poe’s works during his lifetime and how it created an atmosphere of “strife” that was ridiculous and unfair but also probably spurred Poe on. In other words, Poe could not have existed without a baffled and sometimes angry public who didn’t understand what he was doing, or thought his stories were too grotesque to be taken seriously. But Poe was one of the first, one of the first true genuine American voices (with, of course, a love for all things Gothic, which came from elsewhere, as so much that is great in our culture does). And yet he was not lionized during his lifetime, he died horribly, and broke, and it took some time for his reputation to be established. This is often the case with great writers, unfortunately.

Mencken praises Poe’s work, placing it in its proper context (something a good critic can do), and discussing the sad fact that it took so long for Poe to rise into the pantheon where he belonged. You can still see some of that nonsense going on today (and always, I suppose), when “genre writers” are relegated to second-class status. You know, what they’re doing isn’t as “important” or something, as “real” literature. All of those quotation marks are necessary! I’m not a huge genre reader myself although I do read far and wide, but I know there are horror writers out there, and sci-fi writers, and romance writers, who are dealing with the Big Topics with just as much seriousness as, say, Mr. Important Novelist Don DeLillo (and perhaps even more effectively). No, not perhaps. DEFINITELY more effectively. And yet those books are lumped under their genre headings and never the twain shall meet. I understand why genre fans get pissed off about this. Now listen, I’m not saying Don DeLillo is bad, but nothing he has ever written comes even CLOSE to what Stephen King accomplished in 11/22/63. Not even in the same ballpark. And he strains to get there (wrote about that here, and elsewhere), he strains for the level of profundity that King reaches EASILY, and DeLillo is worst when you can feel that strain.

Mencken isn’t so much concerned with genre. He is concerned with larger questions of culture and intelligent life in this Republic. More often than not, the geniuses are not recognized when they first appear. That’s just the way it goes. It is no surprise that Mencken thinks most people are idiots. In these essays about literary greats of the American variety, he takes an almost evangelical tone. He wants people to put down the shopping catalog and pick up their Poe. He wants them to understand that there has been great work done in this country – that you shouldn’t just look to the Europeans and you shouldn’t feel inferior. He also wants you to get that the great American writers were influenced by the Europeans and, in many cases, saved by them. How often have the French bailed out our cultural asses? How often have the French recognized something great in our culture, something we pooh-pooh, and saved it for us until we’re ready to catch up? (I’m thinking of the French New Wave, of course, and their love of all things American, all the things we were embarrassed by: B Movies, gangster movies, gun molls, flashy cars). The same has been true in literature, which Mencken gets into here. The French loved Poe.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt.

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

It would certainly seem reasonable for a man of so forceful a habit of mind as Poe, and of such prodigal and arresting originality, to have founded a school in his own country, but a glance at the record shows that he did nothing of the sort. Immediately he was dead, the shadows of the genteel Irving tradition closed around his tomb, and for nearly thirty years thereafter all his chief ideas went disregarded. If, as the literature books argue, Poe was the father of the American short story, then it was a posthumous child and had step-fathers who did their best to conceal its true parentage. When it actually entered upon the vigorous life that we know today Poe had been dead for a generation. Its father, at the time of its belated adolescence, seemed to be Bret Harte – and Harte’s debt to Dickens was vastly more apparent than his debt to Poe. What he got from Poe was probably essential, but he himself seems to have been unaware of it. It remained for foreign criticism, and particularly for French criticism, to lift Poe to the present place that he now holds.

It is true enough that he enjoyed, during his lifetime, a certain popular reputation, and that he was praised by such men as N.P. Willis and James Russell Lowell, but that reputation was considerably less than the fame of men who were much his inferiors, and that praise, especially in Lowell’s case, was much corrupted by reservations. Not many native critics of respectable position, during the 50s and 60s, would have ranked him clearly above, say, Irving or Cooper, or even above Longfellow, his old enemy. A few partisans argued for him, but in the main, as Saintsbury once said, he was the victim of “extreme and almost incomprehensible injustice” at the hands of his countrymen. It is surely not without significance that it took ten years of effort to raise money enough to put a cheap and hideous tombstone upon his neglected grave in Baltimore, that it was not actually set up until he had been dead twenty-six years, that no contemporary American writer took any part in furthering the project, and that the only one who attended the final ceremony was Whitman.

It was Baudelaire’s French translation of the prose tales and Mallarmé’s translation of the poems that brought Poe to Valhalla. The former, first printed in 1856, founded the Poe cult in France, and during the two decades following it flourished amazingly. It was one of the well-springs, in fact, of the whole so-called decadent movement. If Baudelaire, the father of that movement, “cultivated hysteria with delight and terror,” he was simply doing what Poe had done before him. Both, reacting against the false concept of beauty as a mere handmaiden of logical ideas, sought its springs in those deep feelings and inner experiences which lie beyond the range of ideas and are to be interpreted only as intuitions. Emerson started upon the same quest, but was turned off into mazes of contradictions and unintelligibility by his ethical obsession – the unescapable burden of his Puritan heritage. But Poe never wandered from the path. You will find in “The Poetic Principle” what is perhaps the clearest statement of this new and sounder concept of beauty that has ever been made – certainly it is clearer than any even made by a Frenchman. But it was not until Frenchmen had watered the seed out of grotesque and vary-colored pots that it began to sprout. The tide of Poe’s ideas, set in motion in France in the second half of the century, did not wash England until the last decade, and in America, save for a few dashes of spray, it has yet to show itself. There is no American writer who displays the influence of this most potent and original of Americans so clearly as whole groups of Frenchmen display it, and whole groups of Germans, and even a good many Englishmen.