American Arts and Letters /Hung-Up Henry

...Instead, he chose to marry Alabama-born Sara Haardt, a teacher of English at Goucher College...

...But the majority were set down in all seriousness, and Hobson can't think of what to say about them other than to state the obviousMencken was "hypersensitive, if not hypochondriacal"—and to agree with the obscurantist comment of August Mencken that his brother "was always working at such a pitch that a slight discomfort or slight ailment that wouldn't disturb the normal person at all, to him was of enormous proportions...

...In 1922, Sumner finally agreed to the publication of The "Genius...

...But if he means by that that they were sexually intimate, he is pushing his evidence...

...Random House, 650 pages, $35...

...Implicit in his proclamation in the first chapter that "Mencken has never been adequately explained" is the fond belief that he, at long last, has done the job...

...Perhaps the truth lies somewhere between brother August's piety and the predictably dire view of Dr...

...As he confessed in his 2,000-page reminiscence of "My Life as Author and Editor" (which remained under lock and key in the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore until 1991, when Jonathan Yardley went to work on a shortened edition published last year by Knopf), Laurell's physical appearance "damped" his "natural fires" to such an extent that "more than once I have lain in a bed with her at her apartment without having the slightest impulse to use her carnally...

...Nor does Hobson have anything beyond the perfunctory to say about the depressions and despairs that plagued Mencken the man, or about the limits of his self-understanding, or about the possibility that he deliberately misled his confidantes about what was really bugging him...

...Yet while he expressed affection for Bloom, he always held something back, as Hobson trenchantly observes...

...1 The American Spectator September 1994 61...

...Sylvanus Stall in his great works on sex hygiene—lewdness most horrible...

...Some of these itemizations were surely recorded in a spirit of jest—which Hobson is too sober-sided to catch...

...What motivated him—particularly if life, as he so often maintained, was meaningless...

...Although Mencken was Dreiser's doughtiest champion, he heartily disliked the prolix story the novelist told in The "Genius" of a womanizing young artist named Eugene Witla...

...In the mid-1930s, he admitted in a letter to a distant relative that "I have had the blues steadily for thirty-five years...

...In the wake of her death, Mencken's renewed eligibility for a trip to the altar aroused thoughts of matrimony in the minds of more than a few of his women friends, including Aileen Pringle...

...From 1914 to 1919, he was sexually involved with perkily attractive Marion Bloom, who had grown up in desperate poverty in Carroll County, Maryland...

...And two years later, in the course of a long essay on Dreiser in A Book of Prefaces, he devoted a wickedly funny paragraph to 1Mencken: A Life, by Fred Hobson...

...You are infinitely charming even to think of it...

...In other letters he referred to "doldrums" and "depressions" and to being in "a bad state mentally," and in one of his late autobiographical volumes, Heathen Days (1943), he declared that he "suffered from recurrent depressions and despairs...

...After the kidney was removed, she was informed that she probably had no more than three years to live...

...Going through [Dreiser's] volume with the terrible industry of a Sunday-school boy dredging up pearls of smut from the Old Testament, they achieved a list of no less than 89 alleged floutings of the code-75 described as lewd and 14 as profane...

...But there is no need to proceed further...

...Hobson quite appropriately asks, "Why was he so driven to work...

...It looks easy now when I have (at least transiently) an audience, but getting that audience was a violent and exhausting business, and now I have no respect for it...

...But in this case Mencken was attracted not by the harlot's body, but by her fund of inside dope about New York scandals...

...On one particular morning, he was also aware of a pimple inside his jaw, a sour stomach, a pain in the prostate, burning in the "gospel pipe," a cut finger, a small pimple inside his nose, a smarting razor cut, and "tired eyes...

...Hobson points out that this anguished outburst was by no means an aberration, for Mencken had "always concealed" a deep reservoir of pessimism beneath his buoyant public persona...

...Following the death, in 1925, of his mother, with whom he had continued to live as a grown man, he told a friend that he found it very hard to "reorganize" his ways...

...During stays in New York when he was in his thirties, he came to know "a slim, not too young and far from beautiful woman," Kay Laurell, who had "all the arts of the really first rate harlot...

...In all likelihood it was in early 1940—the year Mencken turned 60—that she wrote him a pointed letter...

...Around 1910, for instance, he noted that he was currently suffering from hemorrhoids, hyperacidity, neuralgia, "flabbiness," hay fever, tonsillitis, sore throat, and "tongue trouble...

...They spent nights together in Washington and New York, and Mencken showered her with letters...

...On page 161, having got rid of mama, she yields "herself to him gladly, joyously" and he is greatly shocked when she argues that an artist (she is by way of being a singer) had better not marry—lewdness doubly damned...

...But when John S. Sumner, the infamous Anthony Comstock's successor as the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, was able to prevent the distribution and sale of the book by citing instances in the text that "proved" it to be in blasphemous and obscene violation of a long-established code of decency, Mencken persuaded scores of creative artists, ranging...

...All three of them are charming—and all of them are masks that offer few hints of his complexity...

...For decades, he worked brutally hard to acquire and hold a readership, only to lose his respect for it...

...You are still young, and beautiful, and still eager for life, and the best of it is ahead of you...

...He salted and peppered his conversation with racist references to "coons" and "blackamoors," at the same time that he opened his home to black writers and published their works in the magazines he edited...

...With her dazzling combination of breeding, brains, and beauty, she may very well have induced an anxiety in Mencken that caused him to shy away...

...In saying that, was Bloom moved by a premonition of how contemptuously she would be dealt with in Mencken's memoirs...

...On page 51, having become an art student, he is fired by "a great, warm-tinted Bouguereau"—lewd again...

...I kiss your hand with sentiments of the highest esteem," he would say, or "Need I say that your aspect yesterday was extremely pleasing to the eye...

...Although he hated the South with avengeance, he refused to move to New York when he had the chance, and he proclaimed himself a Southerner...

...When young Witla, fastening his best girl's skate, is so overcome by the carnality of youth that he hugs her, it is set down as lewd...

...Nevertheless, we come away from his book without having received any clarifying answers...

...The zestfulness of Mencken's writing has led generations of readers to believe that he was a supremely happy man...

...On page 70 he begins to draw from the figure, and his instructor cautions him that the female breast is round, not square—more lewdness...

...The most glamorous of the lot was a sophisticated and cultivated Hollywood beauty, Aileen Pringle, who came from a prominent San Francisco family and had attended schools in London and Paris before achieving success as a movie actress...

...He explained his "calculation," she continued, "on the ground that he was a high-born German and had it in him to desire his wife to make a fine showing before his world...

...But there always remains the uneasy feeling that you have deceived yourself—that the whole thing is simply an illusion...

...For her protestations that "I am the most love sick individual to whom you have ever written a line" and her exclamations of "how I adore and worship you" prove nothing about their physical relationship...

...Unfortunately, Hobson assumes that by marshaling these quotations he has largely fulfilled his biographical obligation to them...

...But if Hobson had thought harder about the findings of his research, he might have gone on to wonder whether Mencken was more at ease with complaisant women who were not his social equals than with those who were...

...Although My Life as Author and Editor covers the years of their romance, it refers to her only once, in a footnote to an appendix, as "a woman with whom [Willard Huntington] Wright, Claire Burke and I used to dine in the Italian restaurant in Lexington Avenue...

...I see a few more books (if, in fact, I can actually pump up the energy to write them), and then a long dullness...

...Furthermore, Mencken refused an invitation to spend his entire visit to Los Angeles under her roof in the fall of 1926, and in the course of the next two years he managed to keep a whole continent between them, even though Pringle was "always wondering when next we will meet...

...Otto Fenichel's omnium gatherum of psychopathological data, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, that the typical hypochondriac is a conspicuously narcissistic, monomaniacal creature whose dammed-up feelings—whether loving or angry—about other people become focused on the organs of his body...

...Mama may come in"—still more...

...Unquestionably, he was a vile-mouthed anti-Semite—but his latest biographer is right to emphasize that for a considerable period of years most of his closest friends and associates were Jewish...

...In the self-assessment he offered to Aileen Pringle at 60, the hypochondriacal author spoke of feeling empty and used up...

...In Baltimore, the young bachelor ventured into the night in search of whores, and from one of them he contracted gonorrhea, or so he later told a physician friend...

...Within months of their first meeting in the spring of 1923, a lesion was found on one of her lungs...

...Along with more than a dozen books, he had written thousands of essays and newspaper articles and more than a hundred thousand letters...

...That he rejoiced in his position of authority in her life is undeniable, even though her dependence was in large part based on the grim state of her health...

...Maybe there is something left and maybe there isn't...

...Additional analytical blanks turn other aspects of Hobson's chronicle intopuzzles...

...Every kiss, hug and tickle of the chin in the chronicle is laboriously snouted out, empaneled, exhibited...

...On page 151 he kisses a girl on mouth and neck and she cautions him: "Be careful...

...this most famous twentieth-century opponent of 'puritanism' was, in many respects, a puritan himself...

...H obson shows that a number of women entertained serious hopes of marrying Mencken...

...Yet in spite of the liberated character of her intelligence, she soon became all but totally dependent on Mencken...

...nothing could more cruelly expose the inner chambers of the moral mind...

...But we now can see that his adolescent longing for death was a prophecy of a psychologically troubled maturity...

...Yet the diarist ended this reflection by saying that "my only regret is that I didn't work even harder...

...In any event, he never proposed to her...

...What made his surrender inevitable was the fact that he and his fellow Comstockians had never recovered from the assault on them five years earlier by the most masterful polemicist in the history of American literary journalism: The Comstocks arose to the bait a bit slowly, but nonetheless surely...

...But I am beginning to crack, and in a few years I'll be a sad sight indeed...

...At which point Mencken vowed he would marry her and make her final years as happy as possible...

...The discrepancy between Mencken's burning desire to humiliate morally inhibited men like John Sumner and his entrapment within his own hang-ups was only one of the contradictions in his make-up that await explanation by future biographers...

...Following an idyllic afternoon," Bloom would 60 The American Spectator September 1994 recall, he "swatted me cold in Union Station [in Washington] with the statement that if I had a background, financial security, in brief, our affair might be different...

...from Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson to Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson, to join him in protesting the ban...

...I have practiced a trade that uses men up, and leaves them empty...

...Hobson asserts that "her letters make it clear that [she and Mencken] were surely lovers...

...But it would distress me horribly to see you sharing that chance...

...Yet he did so in order to let Pringle down easy...

...Every hint that Witla is no vestal, that he indulges his unchristian fleshliness, that he burns in the manner of I Corinthians, VII, 9, is uncovered to the moral inquisition...

...What is ahead for me...

...Subsequently, he dismissed the episode as nothThe American Spectator September 1994 59 ing more than a "green sickness of youth...

...Among the many superb examples of the Baltimore bad boy's risible power that go unrelished in Mencken: A Life is the ridicule he lavished upon the custodians of the genteel culture who set out to destroy Theodore Dreiser's The "Genius" (1915...

...While he jeered at businessmen as boobs, he took enormous pride in his service on the board of directors of the Baltimore Sun...

...An inspection of these specifications affords mirth of a rare and lofty variety...

...In regard to Mencken's sex life, Hobson repeats the commonplace of his biographical predecessors: "In his own period of greatest influence, in the early twentieth century, this archfoe of the Victorian Genteel Tradition was himself, particularly in sexual matters, often Victorian...

...His response to it makes poignant reading: I am too immensely fond of you to even think of hail and farewell...

...Hobson's command of recently released biographical materials as well as of previously known facts leads us to a darker figure...

...Six years later, doctors discovered a tubercular infection in her left kidney...

...An example is a diary entry written at the age of 64 in which Mencken paused to reflect on his literary accomplishments...

...n rich detail, Hobson illustrates Mencken's lifetime habit of making exhaustive lists of his physical problems...

...n 1927, he spoke of life in one of his Prejudices essays as a "progress .. . to the death house," as a "gray emptiness," as "fundamentally . . . not worth living...

...Merely writing famous books," she bitterly concluded, "doesn't make a gentleman in my definition of the word...

...On page 245 he and his bride, being ignorant, neglect the principles laid down by Dr...

...Ultimately, he cast her off...

...But the ironic truth is that his haunted-mind portrait renders the enigma of Mencken more enigmatic than ever...

...At the age of 17, Mencken had contemplated killing himself...

...At the same time, it is almost never equal to the challenge of its materials, even when the issue at hand is Menckenian humor...

...For although Mencken: A Life establishes a connection between a teenaged boy's suicidal impulses and the bitterness he felt about his father's insistence that he abandon his dreams of becoming a newspaperman and go to work instead in the family's cigar factory, it doesn't address the question of whether the boy's extreme reaction to his father's tyranny was rooted in earlier experiences of family life...

...For in a stunning act of self-renewal, he produced three best-selling volumes of autobiography between 1940 and 1943...

...Haardt shared many of the feisty ideas of the author of Prejudices about puritanism, thebooboisie, and the cultural achievements (i.e., the lack thereof) of the American South...

...Kenneth S. Lynn is at work on a book on the life and times of Charlie Chaplin...

...the Sumner organization's summation of the moral horrors of young Witla's adventures...

...and that, in addition, the complaints of the malehypochondriac are often expressive of a castration anxiety...