Untouchable by Terry Teachout - The New Criterion
Twenty-one years ago, a time bomb blew up beneath the posthumous reputation of H. L. Mencken—one that he had constructed himself. With the publication of excerpts from his diary, which he had placed under time-seal prior to his death in 1956, a new generation of readers learned that the most celebrated American critic of the Roaring Twenties had harbored a wide variety of politically incorrect opinions, some of which could fairly be described as ugly. Those who were already familiar with Mencken’s work were far from surprised, for it had become apparent long before a stroke forced him into retirement in 1948 that he had complicated and equivocal feelings about Jews, just as he had never made any secret of his belief that blacks as a group were congenitally inferior to whites. But these sentiments shocked those who had admired him without reading him. Although the resulting hullabaloo got Mencken back into the newspapers after a long absence, it also made him radioactive in bien-pensant circles.
Today Mencken is an unperson in the academy, yet he continues to be both written about and read with avidity by a considerable number of his fellow countrymen. Not only are most of his books in print, but three full-length biographies (one of which is by me) have been published since The Diary of H. L. Mencken came out at the end of 1989. Now the Library of America has put its stamp of institutional approval on his oeuvre with a two-volume edition of Prejudices, the series of six essay collections originally published between 1919 and 1927 in which Mencken reprinted a selection of the essays, articles, and reviews that made him, in the oft-quoted words of Walter Lippmann, “the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people.”[1] Lippmann was writing in 1926, at a moment when Mencken was as admired by “educated people” as any American journalist has ever been, and to a great extent it was the six volumes of Prejudices that made him so.
A number of years ago the Library of America approached me about the possibility of editing a collection of Mencken’s writings. Back then the uproar over the diaries was still echoing, and my proposal sank without trace. Times have changed, as has the Library’s choice of editor: Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, whose Mencken: The American Iconoclast was published four years after my own Mencken biography, has written the chronology and notes for Prejudices: The Complete Series. I cannot imagine anyone, myself included, having done a better job. Mencken’s work is littered with period references, many of which will strike modern-day readers as impenetrably arcane, but Rodgers has explained them all, including some that stumped me back in the pre-Google era. If the names of Orison Swett Marden, One-Eye Feigenbaum, and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven ring no bells with you, rest assured that you will find them pinned down in her notes as neatly as butterflies in a display case.
That Rodgers had to work so hard to identify so many people does, however, point to a possible weakness in the Library of America’s decision to reprint the six original Prejudices. Mencken himself opted not to do so in his lifetime, preferring instead to edit A Mencken Chrestomathy, a self-anthology of his writings that drew not only on the Prejudices but also on a half-dozen other out-of-print books, plus a goodly number of previously uncollected pieces. Mencken’s reason for not exhuming the original Prejudices, as he explained in his preface to the Chrestomathy, was both straightforward and sensible:
They are so full of the discussion of matters now of only historical interest that I have hesitated to let them be reprinted in toto. It seemed to be much more rational to dig out of them the material that continues to be of more or less current interest.
The unsentimental bluntness with which he wrote off so much of his output as “journalism pure and simple—dead almost before the ink which printed it was dry” is impressively stoic, and those who wish to read only what he took to be the most durable of that journalism can always stick to the Chrestomathy, which has remained in print ever since it appeared in 1949.
In addition to choosing astutely from his collected and uncollected works, Mencken discreetly re-edited them, more often than not improving them in the process. To read the six original Prejudices is to come closer to the Mencken who once bestrode the republic of American letters like a destroying angel. Though more than a few of the pieces reprinted therein have proved, as he rightly thought, to be of ephemeral interest, it is gratifying to see how many of them hold up.
Generally speaking, it is Mencken’s literary criticism that has aged least well, partly because so much of it is about writers who are completely forgotten (who now reads Irvin S. Cobb?) and partly because his own sympathies were so narrow. Though he will always be remembered for having championed Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Willa Cather, it is startling to see how uncomprehending he could be whenever he grappled with major writers of a different sort: “Frost? A standard New England poet, with a few changes in phraseology, and the substitution of sour resignationism for sweet resignationism. Whittier without the whiskers.”
Much of Prejudices: First Series is devoted to the book reviews that first brought Mencken to the attention of American readers, and most of these pieces, if not exactly unreadable, are eminently skippable. By then he was already chafing at what he took to be the limitations of the littérateur’s art, and in the same year that Prejudices: First Series came out, he assured Louis Untermeyer that “you will escape from literary criticism, too, as I am trying to do. The wider field of ideas in general is too alluring.”
Mencken’s field of fire had widened considerably when he assembled Prejudices: Second Series in 1920, and, with the publication two years later of Prejudices: Third Series, it was plain to see that he had become, in the admiring words of one of his obituarists, a “critic of all.” The essays in the last four Prejudices cover everything from the music of Beethoven to the parlous state of American journalism and do so with vigor and panache.
It is, of course, customary to say at this point in any discussion of Mencken that the enduring interest of his writing has more to do with his style than his opinions. Indeed, Mencken was one of the great American prose stylists, and Prejudices: The Complete Series is full of choice examples of that style in full flower. None is more vivid than this showy sentence from “On Being an American,” the opening essay of Prejudices: Third Series:
And here, more than anywhere else that I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries, and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows.
But there is no such thing as a pure stylist: in Mencken’s case the enduring appeal of his best work is rooted no less firmly in what he had to say about American life, the American national character, and above all in the way in which Americans choose to govern themselves.
Mencken was an essentially political writer, albeit in a way that does not always make sense to those who think in terms of the pigeonholes of the twenty-first century. At first glance he appears to have been a proto-libertarian, a classical liberal who believed above all things in “free thought and free speech—up to and including the utmost limits of the endurable.” Yet the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II was the only state for which he ever expressed admiration, and he drew a bright line between those who could profit from liberty and lesser men who were only capable of misusing it. Out of this deep-seated contradiction arose his intense dislike of democracy, a theme to which he returns time and again in the Prejudices. To put it as plainly as possible, Mencken thought that most men were too stupid and cowardly to rule themselves, and that any system of government that allowed them to do so would inevitably degenerate into a tyranny of the majority. “All government, in its essence,” he wrote in Prejudices: Third Series, “is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to police him and cripple him.”
Not being a political philosopher—he never valued consistency enough to work out a true philosophy of anything—Mencken failed to get around to sketching the lineaments of an ideal society in which the superior man could prevail over his inferior fellows without resorting to equally tyrannical means. Instead he was content to tilt his lance at the myriad follies of democracy in America. Most of the best pieces collected in the Prejudices have to do in one way or another with democracy and its discontents. Part of Mencken’s strength as a writer lies in his ability to vary this theme so creatively, be it in a reminiscence of Rudolph Valentino (“Was he acclaimed by yelling multitudes? Then every time the multitudes yelled he felt himself blushing inside.”) or a meditation on how chiropractors improve the gene pool by killing off those idiotic enough to make use of their services:
I repeat that it eases and soothes me to see them so prosperous, for they counteract the evil work of the so-called science of public hygiene, which now seeks to make morons immortal. . . . To that end nothing operates more cheaply and effectively than the prosperity of quacks. Every time a bottle of cancer specific goes through the mails, Homo americanus is improved to that extent. And every time a chiropractor spits on his hands and proceeds to treat a gastric ulcer by stretching the backbone the same high end is achieved.
What made Mencken so individual a writer was that he usually criticized democracy not with outrage but with humor. (Whenever he forgot to be amusing, as he did with steadily increasing frequency in his later years, his style turned sour and acrid.) The slapstick vigor of his assaults on the Babbitts of his day thrilled those who thought him more like-minded than he really was. By the time Prejudices: Sixth Series came out, he was the toast of countless American intellectuals, both real and manqué, who had no use for the traditional comforts of the bourgeoisie—a class to which Mencken proudly belonged his whole life long—and longed above all things to shake from their feet the dust of middle-class life.
Six years after the publication of Prejudices: Sixth Series, Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House and embarked on an unprecedented expansion of the role of government in American life. Most of Mencken’s fans were also enthusiastic supporters of fdr, and were dismayed to discover that their hero failed to share their enthusiasm. (They didn’t know the half of it. “He had every quality that morons esteem in their heroes,” Mencken wrote in his diary when Roosevelt died.) Once they finally figured out that he was too much of a libertarian to approve of the New Deal, Mencken fell from cultural favor and never again recaptured it, though a residual nostalgia for the Babbitt-baiting of his salad days kept him in reasonably good odor.
Then the posthumous publication of The Diary of H. L. Mencken made him an untouchable. Might the statute of limitations finally have expired on the “revelations” of 1989? The publication of Prejudices: The Complete Series, which is being issued in a deluxe boxed set festooned with a stylish 1929 Art Deco caricature of the author by Eva Herrmann, suggests as much. But ours is an ideologically unforgiving age, and I find it hard to imagine that Mencken, even with the imprimatur of the Library of America, will ever again be seen on the left as anything other than a figure in the margins of American cultural history.
Should he be? I think so, though I also incline to think that his devoted admirers tend to rate him too high. When I last wrote about him in these pages, I said that he occupied “a slot in between the first and second tiers of American authors,” and in The Skeptic I called him “America’s greatest journalist.” I still stand by that: it establishes his enduring significance without exaggerating his rank in the pantheon, which I take to be somewhere in between, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson.” In the five years following the publication of that piece, however, I have never felt moved to read any of his writings, and, though such hiatuses are not unheard-of among biographers who have spent overlong stretches of time chipping away at their subjects, I began to wonder whether my loss of interest would be permanent. Was it possible that I had exhausted Mencken—that he lacked the staying power of a truly significant writer?
In the course of plowing through the Library of America’s Prejudices, it occurred to me that Mencken might possibly be a young person’s writer, one who excites the unfinished mind but has less to offer those who have seen more of life. Certainly those who look to literature for a portrait of the human animal that is rich in chiaroscuro will not find it in the Prejudices. Mencken’s imaginative world, divided as it is into heroic supermen and contemptible boobs, is simple to the point of cartoonishness.
Yet this simplification has its own virtue: Mencken was a satirist, not a systematic thinker, and it is as a satirist that he will be remembered, for the best of his verbal cartoons of American folly retain to this day the shock of recognition:
There are Congressmen, I have no doubt, who regret their lost honor, as women often do in the films. Tossing in their beds on hot, sticky Washington nights, their gizzards devoured by bad liquor, they may lament the ruin that the service of Demos has brought to their souls. . . . But the rules of the game run one way, and common honesty and common decency run another. There comes a time when the candidate must surrender either his ideals or his aspirations. If he is in Congress it is a sign that he has preserved the latter.
Profound that passage may not be, but it is both true and funny, and there are hundreds more like it in the pages of Prejudices: The Complete Series, all couched in a prose whose felicitous mixture of high elegance and knockabout vulgarity is as characteristically American as a trumpet solo by Louis Armstrong or a dance routine by Fred Astaire. If a great essayist is one who succeeds in getting his personality onto the page, then H. L. Mencken qualifies in spades. The problem is that his personality grows more predictable with closer acquaintance, just as the tricks of his prose style grow more familiar. Like most journalists, he is best consumed not in the bulk of a twelve-hundred-page boxed set but in small and carefully chosen doses. Read Mencken that way—the way his enthralled contemporaries read him, week by week and month by month—and you will find him as vital and amusing as ever.
Terry Teachout is the author, most recently, of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine (Harcourt)
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