BOOKS
Party Of One
The Continuing Relevance of the Ultimate Outsider
| The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken By Terry Teachout HarperCollins. 410 pp. $29.95 |
At a rare soft moment in his life, H. L. Mencken was fetched by a novel penned by a madcap Englishman. Evelyn Waugh's satiric The Loved One had wormed its way into the heart of the Baltimore critic who made no secret of his disdain for all things British, including writers. Set in Los Angeles, the 1948 novel lampooned Hollywood's unique Forest Lawn manner of putting away its dead. It so impressed Mencken that he shelved his Anglophobia and agreed to have lunch with the Oxford-trained Waugh during his stopover in Baltimore.
These two quite different literary lions and gonzo journalists were to be brought together by a cub reporter at Mencken's paper, the Baltimore Sun. The delicate arrangements fell through when Mencken was struck down by a massive stroke that incapacitated him for the rest of his life.
The cub reporter was William Manchester, who, in addition to his duties at the Sun, was writing his very first book, a biography of Mencken called Disturber of the Peace.
The larva effort was blasted by critics as little more than a Mencken echo piped by a wannabe. "Hero worship" is how George Jean Nathan, writing in The New York Times Book Review, put down the biographer of his close friend. Another Mencken cohort, Charles Angoff, wrote in the Saturday Review that Manchester was "so Menckenian in style that it is sometimes embarrassing; carbon-copy menckenese is not easy to take."
Like all great writers, Manchester soon escaped the shadows of his imitative stage and scaled the summit as a prodigious award-winning biographer with his own captivating, though not dissimilar, lyrical style. "All artists steal," the poet John Ciardi once reminded. "The trick is to case the right joints." In Mencken, the young Manchester had found the right joint for developing the verve, depth, and clarity that preserve in hardcover such titans as JFK, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Rockefeller family, and, most especially, Winston Churchill.
While The Skeptic, by Terry Teachout, is by no means imitative of Mencken's style, the biographer makes it clear that he comes not to bury the Sage of Baltimore but to praise him. Teachout, a conservative journalist, portrays his subject "sympathetically," even, he acknowledges, "from his point of view." To him, the gargantuan writer, critic, and newspaperman is the "quintessential voice of American letters," a nearly twentieth-century equivalent to the role that Mark Twain played in the last part of the nineteenth century. Indeed, young Mencken was heavily influenced by Twain, who painted the reporter's life as an adventure quite as romantic as that of a Wild West cowboy.
Despite his high praise, Teachout impressively marshals the vast resources available to him and puts on a good show. What keeps him off the cliffs is his intermittent criticisms, blasting Mencken at one point as "constrictingly narrow," and as intellectually inconsistent. The biographer also begs to differ at interesting, though usually not significant, points along the way. At one point, for example, Mencken claimed that the owner of The American Mercury magazine begged him to stay on as editor two years longer than he thought wise. Sifting through other sources, the biographer raises doubt. "That was [Mencken's] version," Teachout writes, "written a decade after the fact, and it may have been true, though there is no suggestion in his diary entries" to support it.
This evenhandedness contrasts sharply with the style of his combative, cocksure subject, who spent a lifetime battling Puritanism, dismissing democracy, and snickering at the commoners he dubbed "boobus Americanus," while skewering their U.S. presidents for everything from cowardly wars and bad syntax to scandals and attention deficit.
Although the book tallies less than the sum of its parts, Teachout's "partial portrait" is worth the effort. It covers the requisite ground and is engagingly fresh in the less well-lit quadrants of Mencken's life. A bachelor for nearly half a century, he lived with his mother and was notoriously secretive about his private life. Plowing through passels of private papers, night musings sealed postmortem, and shared personal letters, Teachout presents the sharpest account yet of Mencken's private life and social involvement during his salad days.
More significant fruit is available throughout Teachout's exploration of the journalist whom Walter Lippmann praised for his profound influence on this "whole generation of educated people." Early on, Mencken established himself as a literary critic of the first chop at Smart Set magazine and the wildly influential American Mercury. Though he missed the mark with many of the young writers he whooped along, he scored with several key survivors, including James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Theodore Dreiser, the fellow German-American he shamelessly promoted.
As an editor and author, as a seminal critic of literature, ideas, and society as a whole, the cigar-chewing American original was also a crazy-quilt of contradictions. He craved individual liberty but rejected democracy. For all his treatises on the big issues, Mencken remained at bottom a provincial man, nearly bereft of curiosity, who settled on his hardcore ideas early in life and never wavered. As Teachout points out, this pioneer, born ten months before Billy The Kid was shot, saw his first movie at age forty-one, hated telephones, avoided television, wouldn't drive a car, and never flew on a plane.
What then makes Mencken — who typed the last words of his newspaper column in 1948 — relevant today?
"Mencken's social and political views, long thought irreversibly outdated, have become a resurgent strain in American thought," Teachout writes. "Like it or not, the Mencken Weltanschauung is once again a force to be reckoned with, and written about."
Much is made of Mencken as critic, literary man, and thinker,
but if he is to take on currency now, the legs upon which he stands
are those of the newspaperman. In this genre, it is not so much
his ideas, and certainly not last century's subject matter,
that counts, but rather his unique approach, perspective, and
writing style that pull Mencken to our times.
"There is something delightful about getting an idea on paper while it is hot and charming, and seeing it in print before it begins to pale and stale," Mencken wrote near the end of his life. His newspaper days overlapped with his twenty-five years of writing and editing two separate magazines that printed ideas not altogether "hot."
Before their bitter break, Mencken shared the magazine work with his close friend George Jean Nathan. After his death, Nathan said that Mencken's commitment to journalism necessitated his abandonment of the literary world. "The newspaperman in Mencken [had] superseded the literary man," Nathan said. "A much more serious attitude infected him. His relative sobriety took the alarming form of a consuming editorial interest in politics and a dismissal of his previous interest in belle-lettres." Mencken's brother August concurred: "I don't know of anything that really interested him more than that newspaper."
Curiously, Mencken, an autodidact, was more often wrong on the big issues than he was right — wrong about FDR, about Calvin Coolidge, about the Great Depression, about Hitler's Germany. What then makes his journalism so special even today? Teachout concludes, along with other witnesses he brings to the stand, that it is his unique "style full of slapstick vigor."
Lippmann said, "The man is bigger than his ideas. It is no crime not to be a philosopher. What Mr. Mencken has created is a personal force in American life which has an extraordinary cleansing and vitalizing effect."
To Conrad as well, Mencken's vigor was "astonishing. It is like an electric current. In all he writes there is a crackle of blue sparks like those one sees in a dynamo house amongst revolving masses of metal that give you a sense of enormous hidden power. For that is what he has . . . ."
In addition to his style, the thing that makes Mencken useful today is his approach. "He was primarily interested not in individual politicians," Teachout writes, "or even in politics as such, but in the American national character." Though his subject matter may have grown stale there is an evergreen quality about that approach and that zestful style. Today's young journalist need only contemplate the fun Mencken would have had with the 2000 presidential election results, the priests' sex scandal, the Christian Right, so-called. Or ponder the relish with which the Baltimore sage would have taken on the Clintons of Little Rock, Donald Trump, and the Reverends Falwell, Jackson, and Robertson — to say nothing of the forty-third occupant of the White House.
Mencken's sustaining influence is evident in those writers, like William Manchester, whose writing continued to bear Mencken's mark. In journalism, though they are thinning now, there were young newspapermen growing up in Baltimore, and scattered elsewhere, who swooned under the influence of Mencken's 1,600-word, iconoclastic, Monday column in The Sun. "[He] left a permanent mark on the columnist's craft" writes Teachout. Chief among the beneficiaries was Murray Kempton, though he said that another Baltimore newspaperman, Russell Baker, more closely approximated the sage's style.
"He had great clarity," Kempton, who died in 1997, said several years ago. "None of his sentences was difficult. That is the gift of an ear. He also had that gift of laughter. He could be petty and timid in his diaries, but there was none of that when he wrote [for publication]. The curious thing is that the America Mencken was writing about, when he was writing about politics in the 1920s, is very much like America of today. Mencken is totally relevant."
In addition to his style, Mencken maintained a somewhat alienated view of society. He was an outsider, which, in some sense, is not a bad quality for a journalist to secure, at least for his working hours.
Mencken could go overboard, as when he skewered William Jennings Bryan in a Sun obituary, hours after the popular icon died. A polished version, "In Memoriam: W.J.B." — "among the great ‘masterpieces of invective'" — is one of the most frequently reprinted of his essays. Mencken's opening salvo had blue sparks flying: "Has it been duly noted by historians that William Jennings Bryan's last secular act on this globe of sin was to catch flies? A curious detail, and not one without its sardonic overtones. He was the most sedulous fly-catcher in American history, and in many ways the most successful. His quarry, of course, was not musca domestica but homo neandertalensis. For forty years he tracked it with coo and bellow and up and down the backways of the republic . . . ."
Bryan reached his apogee as a target in the Scopes trial, which Mencken helped arrange and covered, and where, from Dayton, Tennessee, he filed another signature piece, "The Hills of Zion." This dispatch, along with "The Sahara of the Bozart," set Mencken squarely against the South and what passed for the Christian right of the 1920s.
Though some mistakenly considered Mencken a Tory, it seems clear that he was neither left nor right. He opposed Prohibition and censorship, and had a fixed view of the working man, but he certainly was no believer in democracy. All sides could claim parts of him. "I belong to no party," he once proclaimed. "I am my own party."
That salient trait as an outsider, perhaps, most endears Mencken to journalists. It appears to have stemmed from his having endured World Wars I and II as one with devout and unapologetic sympathies for his ancestral homeland. He was barred from some journals and was harassed by the U.S. government as a spy. "Tipped off that 1524 Hollins Street might be searched," Teachout writes, "he placed ‘all my more embarrassing papers' in a strongbox, buried it in the backyard, laid a stretch of brick pavement over the freshly dug hole, and settled in to face the wrath of his countrymen."
This perspective as a rebellious outlaw enlivened his prose and caught the eye of the young college crowd of his day. As editor and voice of The American Mercury, Mencken was a darling of the best and the brightest not only at the Ivy League schools of the 1920s and '30s, but also at Tuskegee Institute. Along with his fearless iconoclasm, this sworn enemy of Anglo-American culture vigorously opposed lynching in the South as well as the Ku Klux Klan. These campaigns brought Mencken, warts and all, together with key elements of the black intelligentsia, including W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, and Walter White of the NAACP. While granting that Mencken gladly published the works of such black writers, Teachout loosely collars Mencken as a racist.
While putting the chokehold on Mencken as "an anti-Semite," the biographer splits hairs along the way. "Mencken's prejudices against men in the mass were always open to revision in the particular," he writes. This variation on the some-of-my best-friends rationale is tempered by the fact that almost all of Mencken's close friends were Jews. One of them, Charles Angoff, a top editor at the Mercury, was convinced that Mencken was anti-Semitic and said so in his autobiography, Portrait from Memory. With his deep "loyalty to the principles of civil liberties," he wrote, Mencken's anti-Semitism was deep-seated, nonviolent, "intellectual . . . and one might even say more dangerous."
Some of this was in the open while much of it was loosed with the publication of his diaries three decades after his death. But long before that, readers knew well of his recorded notion that blacks were hopelessly inferior. He also declared the inferiority of the white masses of the ‘wops,' the ‘frogs,' and such others of the human species that marked him as an equal-opportunity slur-monger. The notorious exaggerator, in fact, put down just about everyone who was not German blue blood or to the manor born.
Despite his misanthropy, as Teachout points out, Mencken's
generosity and personal force rendered him an unrelenting liberating
power. He was, for his time, extraordinarily supportive of black
writers, urging them to strike out for their own territory. America's
first best-selling black novelist, Richard Wright, was singularly
inspired by Mencken's "clear, clean, sweeping sentences
. . . . He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would
use a club."
A dramatic detailing of Wright encountering Mencken between hardcover is laid out in Black Boy. That book, by the author of Native Son, is displayed in the Enoch Pratt Library, with references to Mencken marked prominently in the mentor's handwriting.
Upon his death, obit writers reprinted Mencken's considerate epitaph about winking at some homely girl that appeared at the end of his book Chrestomathy. Remarks later prepared for the AP stated that he wrote for himself, and not to make the world a better place, deriving from his efforts the same "feeling of tension relieved and function achieved" that a cow enjoys upon giving milk. At any rate, the Sage of Baltimore did achieve what he took to be one of the principal desires of man:
"I have delivered myself from anonymity."
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