The Books: A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “The Man Within” 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 thought The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was one of the greatest books ever written. And you know when Mencken praises something, he means it, because he did it so rarely. Mark Twain was a giant to him, and the vision put forth in Huck Finn was redemptive and transcendent. I have not read all of Mencken’s stuff, there is so much out there. He has written more on Mark Twain, lengthier essays, and it would be interesting to read them all put together to get a fuller picture of his thoughts on the man. Similar to Orwell’s brilliant essay on Charles Dickens, Mencken admires the writing of the man so much that he takes it seriously. He is not just a fanboy. He could never turn off his critical mind. If you are a “critic”, then few things are perfect because what would be interesting about perfection? You would never have anything to write about.

If a writer has made enough of an impression on a culture (which Mark Twain obviously did, he helped create our culture), then he can take some critical digging. Mencken sensed something in Twain, something “timorous”, an almost unwillingness to take his thought processes to their logical conclusion. Mencken makes a convincing case! He goes into why he feels that way in the following essay, published in “The Smart Set” in October, 1919. It is difficult to excerpt, and should be read in its entirety. But here’s the opening.

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

The bitter, of course, goes with the sweet. To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, the grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God’s green footstool. Often, in the black abysm of the night, the thought that I am one awakens me with a blast of trumpets, and I am thrown into a cold sweat by contemplation of the fact. I shall cherish it on the scaffold; it will console me in Hell. But there is no perfection under Heaven, so even an American has his blemishes, his scarcely discernible weaknesses, his minute traces of vice and depravity. Mark, alas, had them: he was as thoroughly American as a Knight of Pythias, a Wheeling stogie, or Prohibition. One might almost exhibit his effigy in a museum as the archetype of the Homo americanus. And what were these stigmata that betrayed him? In chief, they were two in number, and both lay at the very foundation of his character. On the one hand, there was his immovable moral certainty, his firm belief that he knew what was right from what was wrong, and that all who differed from him were, in some obscure way, men of an inferior and sinister order. And on the other hand, there was his profound intellectual timorousness, his abiding fear of his own ideas, his incurable cowardice in the face of public disapproval. These two characteristics colored his whole thinking; they showed themselves in his every attitude and gesture. They were the visible signs of his limitation as an Emersonian Man Thinking, and they were the bright symbols of his nationality. He was great in every way that an American could be great, but when he came to the border of his Americanism he came to the end of his greatness.

The true Mark Twain is only partly on view in his actual books – that is, in his printed books. The real Mensch was not the somewhat heavy-handed satirist of “A Tramp Abroad” and “Tom Sawyer.” He was not even the extraordinarily fine and delicate artist of “Joan of Arc” and “Huckleberry Finn.” Nay, he was a different bird altogether – an intensely serious and even lugubrious man, an iconoclast of the most relentless sort, a man not so much amused by the spectacle of life as appalled by it, a pessimist to the last degree. Nothing could be more unsound than the Mark legend – the legend of the lighthearted and kindly old clown. The real Mark was a man haunted to the point of distraction by the endless and meaningless tragedy of existence – a man whose thoughts turned to it constantly, in season and out of season. And to think, with him, was to write; he was, for all his laziness, the most assiduous of scribblers; he piled up notes, sketches of books and articles, even whole books, about it, almost mountain high.

Well, why did these notes, sketches, articles and books get no further? Why do most of them remain unprinted, even today? You will find the answer in a prefatory note that Mark appended to “What Is Man?” published privately in 1905. I quote it in full:

The studies for these papers were begun twenty-five or twenty-seven years ago. The papers were written seven years ago. I have examined them once or twice per year since and found them satisfactory. I have just examined them again, and am still satisfied that they speak the truth. Every thought in them has been thought (and accepted as unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men – and concealed, kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (and could not bear) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have I not published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no other.

Imagine a man writing so honest and excellent a book, imagine him examining it and re-examining it and always finding it good – and yet holding off the printing of it for twenty-five years, and then issuing it timorously and behind the door, in an edition of 250 copies, none of them for sale. Even his death did not quench his fear. His executors, taking it over as part of his goods, withheld the book for five years more – and then printed it very discreetly, with the betraying preface omitted. Surely it would be impossible in the literature of any other civilized country since the Middle Ages to find anything to match that long hesitation. Here was a man of the highest dignity in the national letters, and here was a book into which he had put the earnest convictions of his lifetime, a book carefully and deliberately written, a book representing him more accurately than any other, both as artist and as man – and yet it had to wait thirty-five years before it saw the light of day. An astounding affair, in all conscience – but thoroughly American, Messieurs, thoroughly American. Mark knew his countrymen. He knew their intense suspicion of ideas, their blind hatred of heterodoxy, their bitter way of dealing with dissenters. He knew how, their pruderies outraged, they would turn upon even the gaudiest hero and roll him in the mud. And knowing, he was afraid. He “dreaded the disapproval of the people around him.” But part of that dread, I suspect, was peculiarly internal. In brief, Mark himself was also an American, and he shared the national horror of the unorthodox. His own speculations always half appalled him. He was not only afraid to utter what he believed; he was even a bit timorous about believing what he believed.