Capturing the Essence of Mencken

by Myra Cozad Unger, Emerita Professor of English,William Jewell College

“Speaking generally, I am of a sombre disposition and get very little happiness out of life, though I am often merry; but what little I have got has come mainly out of some form of combat. . . .Ideas are shot into the air and some of them keep on flying.” So wrote H.L. Mencken in the December 12, 1927 issue of the Baltimore Evening Sun, a column Terry Teachout reprinted in his first book on Mencken, A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, published in 1995. The combative Mencken was surely “the sharpest, cruelest, most selfassured wit in the history of American letters, the fearless scorn of puritanism in all its forms,”Teachout writes. Terry Teachout, WJC alumnus, is a distinguished New York arts critic and author of several books. In the Preface to his latest book, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, Teachout describes his book as “an attempt to portray H.L. Mencken sympathetically but honestly, and to suggest something of how he stood in relation to his turbulent times.” In doing so,Teachout has to deal with multiple aspects of Mencken, many of them contradictory and some of them downright ugly. These aspects include Mencken’s personal history, remarkable literary talent, output and influence, as well as many astonishingly wrong-headed and bigoted opinions. Mencken’s anti-semitism, racism, and hatred of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, require Teachout to examine the times in which Mencken lived for possible explanations of Mencken’s attitudes.

Who—or what—was this H.L. Mencken, the most famous and influential American newspaperman of his or any time? Teachout describes him as a conventional Victorian, born in 1880, who lived in his childhood home at 1554 Hollins Street, Baltimore, almost all his life. Mencken once said that if he could live his life over again, he would “choose the same parents, the same birthplace, the same education (with maybe a few improvements here, chiefly in the direction of foreign languages). . . .” Freed from his German father’s demand that he go into the family business, cigar-making, when his father died at the age of 42, Mencken promptly presented himself at the Baltimore Morning Herald as a cub reporter and never looked back. He was 18. At 25 he became editor-in-chief. He then moved to the Baltimore Sun, his newspaper home for most of the rest of his life.

Many critics have called Mencken “a writing machine” because his writing career and output were prodigious. Often writing twelve hours a day, Mencken “covered everything from the Scopes evolution trial to the 1948 presidential conventions,” says Teachout. Mencken wrote the first book ever published about George Bernard Shaw, as well as many other influential books; introduced novelists Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis to the American public; co-edited the Smart Set and co-founded the Mercury, two of the most important literary journals in American history, publishing new writers such as William Faulkner,Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald; wrote and revised The American Language, his encyclopedic, often funny, work about American vernacular speech; and regularly pounded out newspaper columns that amused, inflamed and provoked thought among Americans.

In his notes written for use in his obituary Mencken wrote, “It has never given me any satisfaction to encounter one who said my notions had pleased him. My preference has always been for people with notions of their own.” Never happier than when his combative ideas were fomenting controversy, he persuaded his publishers to bring out Menckeniana: A Shrimpflexicon, a collection described by Teachout as “an anthology devoted to scurrilous comments on his writing and person, all culled from his own bulging scrapbooks.” One of the entries in Menckeniana reads, “If Mencken only ran about on all fours, slavering his sort of hydrophobia, he would be shot by the first policeman as a public duty.”

Mencken’s favorite target was the boobus americanus, a derogatory name for the average American Mencken thought was ignorant, unread and wholly without independent ideas. Mencken wrote,“The general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head. . . .” Joan Acocella, reviewing Teachout’s book in the Dec. 9, 2002 issue of The New Yorker, said of Mencken’s writing, “Whatever you think of the sentiment, you have to love the prose.”

Teachout himself is a master of prose style, and the reader occasionally stops to savor his language, too. For example, Teachout calls Mencken’s overly enthusiastic response to novelist Theodore Dreiser, “a lifelong tendency to overegg the pudding” and says Dreiser “spent the last twenty years of his life snuffling out causes like a truffle-hunting pig.” This is a liberating book. In examining the contradictions, inconsistencies and little-minded prejudices of Mencken and his times,Teachout makes his readers examine their own willingness to jump to conclusions. Teachout’s balanced treatment of Mencken’s biases prods readers to analyze their own half-baked opinions. Teachout himself keeps Mencken’s ideas flying.