Posted November 11, 2002
re: Mencken
News and rumor have it that the new biography of H.L. Mencken stands high above all previous efforts. Its author, Terry Teachout, honors Mencken by writing about him clearly and with good sense.
But, as I wait for my copy to reach my desk, I suffer from some unease. My trepidation began with a blurb, then grew stronger as I read the reviews.
First, there's George F. Will. This pundit — who owes his good repute to the luck of having written long after Mencken ceased two-fingered typing — provides the requisite puffery:
Who now reads Mencken? Not nearly as many people as Mencken's still-astonishing writing deserves. But many more people will discover the delights of Mencken's work thanks to Terry Teachout's judicious but lively assessment of the more-often-lively than judicious journalist and critic.
Note, however, that as he puffs up the poor, deflated Mencken, George sucks, too, attempting to draw away Mencken's style from the dross of Mencken's judgment.
But if any writer's style existed in glorious union with his substance — if any wrote in a lively manner because he judged in a lively manner — it was Mencken. We who read the sage of Baltimore
do so because said sage was savvy enough to judge independently, seeing what others could not see. He identified hot air while others spoke only of pure and noble gas.
Alas, most of today's reviewers seem to fix on the idea that Mencken somehow could never be trusted on a jury. One goes so far as to call Mencken a bigot, sealing the verdict with Teachout's final judgment: The problem was his own lack of curiosity.
It will take quite a lot of argument by Teachout to justify this. Mencken incurious? Hard to believe. As long as his flesh was willing, Mencken's spirit probed every nook and cranny of American culture and world civilization. He was a greater listener and reader as well as a great writer.
But, the intelligentsia keeps pressing, wasn't Mencken a bigot? As anyone who has read the Prejudices knows, Mencken was not prejudiced against individuals, he was prejudiced for high standards and against traditions and groups that worked against those standards. This is not bigotry as normally understood.
Now, according to another reviewer, I've just confessed to an addiction. After all, only an addict would think of poring through all six volumes of Prejudices, and even an addict might hesitate before Treatise on the Gods or Notes on Democracy.
Why? [E]verything about Mencken, from the industrial bulk of his prose, to the irresponsibility of his ideas, reveals a writer who did not take himself quite seriously enough.
This is seriously deranged. Mencken did not write Notes on Democracy and Treatise on the Gods because he was a flippant man. He wrote these incisive tomes because he believed most writers on politics and religion wrote utter bilge. And though Mencken erred on many particular judgments in these books, his judgment of the low level of political and religious discourse was surely on target.
Which is why each reviewer today takes special care to make at least one extravagant charge against Mencken. His ideas remain dangerous, for they are not... ours.
They must be dismissed.
The Economist's reviewer is a case in point. After saying some reasonable things, and taking up a few column inches, then comes the kicker:
In later life, Mencken's politics turned rancid. He began to sound unhinged as he denounced his enemies in general and President Franklin Roosevelt in particular as quacks and swindlers, fools and knaves. By the mid-1940s he began to resemble the narrow-minded provincials he so despised.
Here the reviewer reveals self and allegiance. Mencken did not change his tone; his critiques did not become rancid.
Instead, his audience changed. Mencken bestowed upon Roosevelt II every bit of the rigor and rancor he had directed toward Roosevelt I. Unfortunately, his audience of bright intellectuals had swallowed Roosevelt II's line down to the sinker — and so they gagged when Mencken flapped his fins, rose above the tide, and spat out the brummagem lure and barbed hook as he had countless times before. Mencken always remained a lone fish, and free. His readership, alas, had given up on freedom. For them, Roosevelt I or Calvin Coolidge were fair game but Roosevelt II was not. The spectacle of Mencken's revolt against standard American opinion (which had so delighted them during the jazz age) had become (during the Great Depression and after) indecent to them.
Teachout's title, The Skeptic, is a better sign than any of the reviews that he's gotten near the heart of Mencken's genius. Most people can't muster Mencken's consistency of skepticism. But no matter how entertaining or enlightening Teachout's book turns out to be, no one should read it instead of reading Mencken.
So, before judging the biography, I confidently advise readers to grab all the Mencken they can. Scour used bookstores for the Prejudice series, or such great rarities like Notes on Democracy. Read and reread the Chrestomathy, which contains some of his best essays and squibs. Carry The Vintage Mencken on travels. And shelve Mencken's A New Dictionary of Quotations near at hand, so it can be unshelved regularly.
The best readers of Mencken will not be lured into the usual condemnations, no matter how much they may disagree with any one thing Mencken wrote. Mencken's best readers will — following his example (if not his direction) — swim freely.
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