Prejudice

 Skewing Messianic Delusions

H L Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, has been celebrated as an enfant terrible of letters. The Times recently published a review of a republication of his collected articles and essays, Prejudices that has been edited by Marion Rogers. The review is by Michael Dirda.  The whole review is worth reading, but below are some memorable excerpts.

H. L. Mencken at full throttle

Honeyed and abrasive: the irrepressible journalism of the 'Sage of Baltimore'

Michael Dirda

H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) is often smilingly referred to as the Sage of Baltimore (especially in Baltimore), but during the first third of the twentieth century he was the most outspoken, irrepressibly contrarian literary and political journalist in the United States. As the scourge of the “booboisie” – his coinage – Mencken produced exuberant, gorgeous prose of such gusto that carnival barkers and fundamentalist preachers might have learnt from him. He could be loud and snide or silkily ironic – but never dull. When Mencken attacked, he left no survivors; when he praised, it felt like Christmas morning.

There can’t be many newspapermen whose work bears rereading after more than eighty years, let alone enshrinement in the Library of America, but Mencken is one. The six volumes of his collected Prejudices – essentially his best essays about American literature, culture and politics – are cocksure about everything, but whether they are right or boneheaded, one hardly cares. Mencken knew that writing had to be fun if you wanted it to be read. Today we turn to his best work as we turn to S. J. Perelman or P. G. Wodehouse – for the pleasure provided by one marvellous sentence after another.. . .

Throughout his Prejudices Mencken mingles literary appreciation with political broadside and occasional persiflage, but, in general, the early volumes tend to emphasize the man of letters. As a critic, Mencken preferred down-and-dirty social realism in his fiction. He championed Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and James T. Farrell, and he never failed to lambast the least sign of preachiness, “uplift” or didacticism. In the essay entitled “The Late Mr. Wells”, Mencken, an admirer of “the sheer radiance of ‘Tono-Bungay’”, lamented Wells’s decision to forgo art for civic-minded tendentiousness:

Call the roll of his books, and you will discern a progressive and unmistakable falling off. Into “The Passionate Friends” there crept the first downright dullness. By this time his readers had become familiar with his machinery and his materials – his elbowing suffragettes, his tea-swilling London uplifters, his smattering of quasi-science, his intellectualized adulteries, his Thackerayan asides, his text-book paragraphs, his journalist raciness – and all these things had begun to lose the blush of their first charm.

As that paragraph demonstrates, Mencken obviously relishes his own bel canto fireworks. Having warmed up, he immediately goes on to mock Wells’s latest novel, Joan and Peter:

I was at the job of reading it for days and days, endlessly daunted and halted by its laborious dullness, its flatulent fatuity, its almost fabulous inconsequentiality . . . . The book is a botch from end to end, and in that botch there is not even the palliation of an arduous enterprise gallantly attempted. No inherent difficulty is visible. The story is anything but complex, and surely anything but subtle. Its badness lies wholly in the fact that the author made a mess of the writing . . . .

Why has Wells failed so dramatically? Because, says Mencken, he has fallen victim to the “messianic delusion”:

What has slowly crippled him and perhaps disposed of him is his gradual acceptance of the theory, corrupting to the artist and scarcely less so to the man, that he is one of the Great Thinkers of his era, charged with a pregnant Message to the Younger Generation – that his ideas, rammed into enough skulls, will Save the Empire, not only from the satanic Nietzscheism of the Hindenburgs and post-Hindenburgs, but also from all those inner Weaknesses that taint and flabbergast its vitals, as the tapeworm with nineteen heads devoured Atharippus of Macedon. (So far as I can determine, Mencken made up the unfortunate Atharippus.) 

. . . . Though Mencken might look to be nothing but a cigar-chomping pug, his values were those of a noble and proudly independent gentleman. . . .

 All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to police him and cripple him.” Mencken insists that “the ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle to Herbert Spencer, is one which lets the individual alone – one which barely escapes being no government at all”. (Here he sounds like a proto-Ayn Rand.) American history, he notes, is sadly little more than “a history of minorities put down with clubs.

. . . . Education is another favourite bugaboo in Prejudices and many of the newspaperman’s other essays. Mencken fulminated that our “schools reek with . . . puerile nonsense. Their programmes of study sound like the fantastic inventions of comedians gone insane”. Long before Michel Foucault, he understood that the aim of the educational system was

To make good citizens. And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

. . . . Despite all his satirical bonhomie, Mencken can sound notes of sorrow, or even John Webster-like horror: “Women whom we place upon pedestals worthy of the holy saints come down at last with mastoid abscesses or die obscenely of hiccoughs”. (Mencken’s own beloved wife Sara died of meningitis in 1935 after only five years of marriage.) In the final volume of Prejudices the author confesses:

Once I ventured the guess that men worked in response to a vague inner urge for self-expression . . . . An hypothesis with rather more plausibility in it now suggests itself. It is that men work simply in order to escape the depressing agony of contemplating life – that their work, like their play, is a mumbo-jumbo that serves them by permitting them to escape from reality . . . . Man cannot sit still, contemplating his destiny in this world, without going frantic. So he invents ways to take his mind off the horror. He works. He plays. He accumulates the preposterous nothing called property. He strives for the coy eye-wink called fame. He founds a family and spreads his curse over others. All the while the thing that moves him is simply the yearning to lose himself, to forget himself, to escape the tragic-comedy that is himself. Life, fundamentally, is not worth living.

In 1948 Mencken suffered a debilitating stroke and thereafter never wrote again. By then, however, the old newspaperman’s reputation had long faded. Nonetheless, he had already published his high-spirited memoirs Happy Days and Newspaper Days – probably his best books – and brought out several editions of his scholarly The American Language. Since his death in 1956 Mencken’s reputation has been kept fitfully alive by a popular paperback, The Vintage Mencken, compiled by Alistair Cooke, and by the fat compendium – edited by the man himself – A Mencken Chrestomathy. This last includes numerous extracts from Prejudices, but hardly enough to give a sense of the range and sustained power of the original six volumes. Now, thanks to this splendid Library of America set, we can again enjoy H. L. Mencken at length and at full throttle.