Dark Sage: Reconsidering H. L. Mencken

...I knew an arts critic for the International Herald Tribune who promised one, but he lived a floor or two beneath the Tour D'Argent in Paris and seems to have died, presumably a casualty of the restaurant's high-cholesterol menu on which his name appeared as an entree, "Oeufs Tom Curtiss"—R.I.P...

...Frederick Lewis Allen set the achievement in stone in his 1931 book, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, writing that Mencken led "the intellectuals" from the "defensive" to the offensive...

...A heterodox character such as Mencken could become, as Hobson notes, "the most widely discussed of American intellectuals" because 1920s liberals were still liberal and because "intellectuals saw in him what they wanted to see, and no more," as Teachout says...

...I believe that that will be history's verdict upon it...

...Waugh was a superb novelist and provocative, if unreliable, journalist...

...He appeared before Congress to testify on behalf of an anti-lynching bill...

...I think the best explanation for the cruelty of his private thoughts and his frequent misperception of his times is provided by Teachout...

...The Kultursmog is brain deadening...

...At the end of his essay, he imagines Mencken winging Heavenwards into the clouds, where the Sage is greeted by "the twelve apostles" who "invited him in for a beer...

...At that time, the consensus among their biographers was mellow...

...Whatever their politics, that swaggering sophisticated tradition appealed to me at the christening of the SPECTATOR...

...His health deteriorated...

...As for blacks, though he wrote at times that they were biologically inferior, he was probably their most famous literary champion, publishing fifty-four articles by blacks and about them in the Mercury...

...Consequently by the late 1920s Mencken's name was everywhere...

...They refer to "professional kikes" and "blackamoors" and include Mencken's crank views of history...

...The evidence, there's just not the evidence...

...Consider The Skeptic: The Life of H. L. Mencken by Terry Teachout HARPERCOLLINS 432 pagesl$29.95 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 51 their tender sentiments for the North Vietnamese and more recently the trust they extend to Saddam Hussein over an American president...

...He was a knowledgeable music critic and fine amateur pianist who revered the masters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but he had neither enthusiasm for later composers nor much interest in the wider world of art...

...It is understandable that liberals such as Kempton iden52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 tify with the Master, but when pious Christians fall for the fantasy it is worth comment...

...Liberalism had given him a star role in their melodrama of Reform's endless struggle against Reaction...

...He wrote for the NAACP quarterly, the Crisis...

...Sidney once told me with his characteristic cheer-fulness that he had tried to believe in God...

...The liberals' fondness for him endured even beyond the 1940s, long after his reactionary tirades against Franklin Roosevelt...

...He twitted them further with such facetiae as "life is quite meaningless—a spectacle without purpose or moral" or variations on the asseveration that he never found anything "wholly good, wholly desirable, wholly true...

...Though he claimed great interest in science, I detect no sign he recognized the wonders on the horizon...

...anxieties, and exhaustions, suffered even in his great days, worsened...

...In the indexes of his posthumously published books I could not find the word Stalin...

...In the end Mencken returned to his much-abused friend, to renew the hilarious friendship that they had shared in the 1910s and 1920s...

...He began suffering mild strokes in 1936, developed heart disease, and the lesser maladies that troubled him all his life got worse...

...Though he was an uncommonly intelligent celebrity, Mencken, as with the more common celebrity, created a mirage: there was actually less to him than met the eye...

...Communism he viewed as but a more virulent strain of trade unionism...

...Still it is disturbing to think of Mencken's rancorous last years, and he did not have to follow Nathan into religion to mollify his angers...

...The new consensus has jelled in biographies by two fine revisionists, a North Carolina University literature professor, Fred Hobson, whose Mencken: A Life was published in 1994...

...Six decades later, after Mencken's posthumous writings were arousing charges of anti-Semitism and racism, liberal stalwarts such as Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith signed a letter in the New York Review of Books reminding the doubters that Mencken was a "liberating force" in their version of American history...

...Much earlier he advocated a homeland for the Jews (in British East Africa) and was somewhat the goy Zionist...

...and though called the "greatest journalist of his day...

...For years, every superficial mind with a tingle of mischief in his soul has imagined himself to be somehow just like Mencken...

...Edmund Wilson recognized Mencken's contempt when he apprised readers of the New Republic in 1921 that "Mencken is the civilized consciousness of America . . . realizing the grossness of its manners and mind and crying out in horror and chagrin...

...A much more complex and ambiguous man, a darker figure than we had previously known," writes Hobson...

...Was it Noel Coward who said, "There is nothing so dangerous as an intelligent man who will laugh at any-thing...

...Doubtless, were the Sage alive today his anti-Semitism and racial views would remain private, but I can see him joining the harangues against "In God We Trust" and the Ten Commandments in public places...

...Being amused by Mencken's laughter and his independence is one thing, but I have always wanted to record the history of my time accurately...

...By the early 1940s the peeves remained unrelieved by laughter...

...In his posthumously published writings Mencken kept coming back to "the Jews" too often and too invidiously to be absolved of anti-Semitism...

...That is the unwavering moral, political, and aesthetic principle of liberalism...

...He publicly boasted of being a "sinner," but aside from bon viveuring, he was repulsed by hard drinking, carnality, even the dissipation of untidiness...

...The 1930s was grimmer with the Depression, the rising isms, armies on the march, and in America the scramble to social justice...

...From an editorial eminence that gave him wide reach throughout American society and access to the finest minds, he still missed practically every important historic current swirling around him...

...By the late 1980s, when Sydney wrote his memoirs, there were not a lot of atheists and agnostics around either...

...Mencken's nihilistic put-ons (nothing "wholly good, wholly desirable, wholly true") left him as oblivious to the drama of evil's rise and fall in his lifetime as he was to the irenic force of American democracy...

...As Tom Wolfe has noted, Mencken—along with Evelyn Waugh and Malcolm Muggeridge—was one of the three great stylists of the modern English language...

...His shackles were his own jokes...

...Would he be so humorless as to abet the seasonal hunts for Nativity scenes and Santa Claus...

...is editor in chief of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR...

...The dramatic rise of democracy to challenge these moral monsters and starring such heroic figures as Churchill was depicted by Mencken as just another burlesque, irrelevant to his happiness and security...

...The tradition has not changed, only the consensus on Mencken...

...His star ascended rapidly...

...He looked at evil and saw ignorance...

...The Master reversed these values, which explains why a man of such high intelligence was so often wrong about the great events he chronicled...

...and ever since, the magazine has identified with it and sought that tradition's preservation...

...The result was that the Sage was made out to be one of the most attractive figures in twentieth-century America...

...We at the SPECTATOR have known and published another agnostic who lived out a pleasant life and never missed history's dark warnings, Sidney Hook...

...Such stuff always drew a crowd in his early years, but by the 1930s—when tragic times required an explanation rather than a horselaugh—Mencken kept riding a few pet peeves and laughing...

...While reviewing the new Mencken consensus I stumbled upon an essay on him by Pope John Paul II's biographer, George Weigel, wherein the cheerless drudge labored to prove that the virulently anti-religious Mencken was somehow just like George...

...Given his narrowness and politically incorrect ideas, those of us who live in the present Kultursmog, polluted as it is by the politics of the politically correct, have reason to ask how the Sage became so famous among the forebears of the politically correct...

...That decade had been a wonderful time, vividly captured in Edmund Wilson's recollection of "drinks, animated conversation, gaiety, brilliant writing, uninhibited exchange of ideas...

...What is almost uniformly noticeable about those who identify with the Master is that they lack the one thing that he exuberantly possessed until his unhappy last decade, a sense of fun...

...I hope not, but readers of his last writings cannot be certain...

...What we see going on here is the liberals doing what they While Mencken was laughing on the outside, almost nothing was going on on the inside...

...He remained the insouciant bon vivant in public and when pressured he became irritable, at least in his private writings...

...Mencken can only be ranked a great stylist, a great character, and a fine philologist...

...Muggeridge was a great journalist, at least on the great issues of his day, never missing Stalin and Hitler and the historic forces that whipped them...

...His protests have gone unacknowledged...

...Mencken had a gift for misreading history, and his fond hope for late-twentieth-century public opinion is another example...

...There was not much to cheer him up...

...He also missed the rise and fall of dictatorship...

...He performed in the early stages of our present and apparently never-ending Age of Celebrity, when its essential apparatus—mass communications—was just being put in place...

...I hasten to add that he never acted on these prejudices...

...From them biographers can construct a complex man or an ambiguous man or a genius...

...Mencken merely likened it to American demagoguery...

...Well, to begin with, in the 1920s liberals were more hospitable to diversity than are today's polluters of the Kultursmog...

...After the end of his painful 1930s, Time repeated the liberals' propensity for getting Mencken wrong, describing him as "[t]he nation's comical, warm-spirited, out-standing village atheist...

...Liberals have always been attracted to this hauteur, and in recent years the purists among them have actually come to hate America...

...The "intellectuals" were choosing sides: communism, social-ism, liberalism, and lesser commitments...

...He looked at evil and saw ignorance...

...The indisputable result is that when he endeavored to pronounce authoritatively on great events he usually spoke from ignorance...

...T bus we come to the cause of the revisionists' new consensus, Mencken's posthumously published stinkpot of ideas...

...While Mencken was laughing on the outside, almost nothing was going on on the inside...

...He had even harrumphed World War II as "a wholly dishonorable and ignominious business...

...We can continue to admire both for their literary style, and that one element that the liberals spotted in them, perhaps unconsciously, their gemutlichkeit...

...Yet in 1935 he offered a fellow Nietzschean, Oscar Levy, help in rescuing Jews from Germany and, says Hobson, "assumed great financial risk in helping Jews to flee that country, Germany, that he professed to admire above all others...

...Allen had even fantasized that Mencken's American Mercury was "addressed to the intellectual left wing" when launched in 1924, despite Mencken's public announcement that the Mercury was aimed at the "civilized Tory...

...Prosit, Paul...

...My judgment is simpler...

...The two as writers and editors had contributed to a literary trai dition of amused skepticism, erudition, intelligence, and cheerful autonomy from the intellectual herd...

...Mencken would not be bullied into any commitment or into revamping his persona...

...His co-conspirator, Nathan, did not "laugh at anything...

...In the 1920s the New York Times acclaimed him "the most powerful private citizen in the United States...

...His last piece before a stroke silenced his typing forever excoriated segregated Baltimore parks...

...To him Hitler was Babbitt run amok...

...The Sage of Baltimore, owing to his exquisite prose and to a personality perfectly pitched to the amused tastes of the 1920s, was America's first celebrity intellectual...

...I think THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR has been right to adopt the Mencken-Nathan tradition...

...I knew better...

...Seeing him laughing on the outside, the Freudianly inclined naturally proffer the diagnosis that he is crying on the inside...

...Mencken became imprisoned by an immensely famous public persona, the persona of the joshing skeptic...

...All these contradictions bring to mind that other failure in this exemplar of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR'S favorite literary tradition, to wit, Mencken's ideas lacked coherence, save for one: Mencken always advocated free expression...

...It is as much a part of the American literary heritage as the Southern Agrarians, the Angry Young Men, the Feminists Suffering Yeast Infection, and that very promising literary movement now being pioneered by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Bellesiles—the New Charlatans...

...Unsurprisingly these humorless poseurs are given to hissing at the writer who does have fun...

...The Sage, says Teachout, "had no feeling for the darkness in the heart of man...

...he missed completely the major historical eruptions of the century...

...50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 to beloved curmudgeon in the 1940s and 1950s...

...He was proud of never having read The Brothers Karamazov, and he did not read Moby Dick until his mid-fifties...

...Nathan has yet to receive full biographical treatment, though at least a brief one is long overdue...

...I remember the late sentimentalist Murray Kempton, after serving on a panel discussion with me, confiding his belief that we both were "disciples of the Master...

...Calling himself a "critic of ideas," he deserted literature in middle age and focused his writing on philology, politics, religion, and philosophical topics...

...Now the acidulous contents of his embargoed reflections have caused another revised estimate, and so it is timely that THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR review its early association with the Mencken-Nathan tradition...

...and a generalist, Terry Teachout, whose work has appeared in these pages and whose biography of Mencken, The Skeptic, is just out and recommended...

...Mencken's life had followed an arc, from awe-inspiring enfant terrible in the 1920s, to shunned misanthrope in the 1930s, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...Remember his 1936 pre-diction that the incumbent FDR could be defeated by "a Chinaman...

...His generosity as a friend stands out...

...the laughs are secondary...

...As for Mencken, the merry homme de lettres, upon his death he left a stinkpot of private notes and poisonous autobiographical reminiscences, which he placed under lock and key until the 1980s and early 1990s, thinking that the late twentieth century would see the wisdom of his bleak view of American progress, in a way the 1930s and 1940s did not...

...Twitting the ardent strivers, he declaimed that from an early age his "fixed ideas" never changed...

...He remained in contact with his celebrated friends and associates but the world was changing, and, as in the 1920s, his curiosity was nil...

...Mencken was incapable of perceiving the evil that stalks the world...

...Even Christians succumb...

...The Dark Sage RECONSIDERING H. L. MENCKEN B Y R . E M M E T T T Y R R E L L, J R. L. Mencken, along with his urbane colleague George Jean Nathan, has long been an influence on THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, though both died in the 1950s without showing any interest in the post-World War II conservative movement that a decade later was to incite this magazine's launch...

...His main intellectual inspirations were Germany—mainly the Kaiser's Germany—Nietzsche, and Social Darwinism...

...Had Mencken shared Sidney's belief in democracy he might have made greater contributions to the life of the mind...

...and while they revere its benefits, we ruffians remind them that their venerated principle remains, in most criminal codes, a misdemeanor...

...Mencken disturbed the peace...

...His pedestal was somewhere between that of Woodrow Wilson and that of Betty Friedan, though unlike them Mencken had protested even in the 1920s that he "was credited with a leadership in dissent that I did not want...

...in his last years he contributed frequently to these pages...

...Indulgent readers have explained these indelicacies as coming well within the parlance of the time...

...Mencken was a casualty of his addiction to laughter...

...Secondly, Mencken was contemptuous of America...

...Incidentally, Muggeridge was a great friend of mine, and surely as much an influence on me as Mencken...

...Walter Lippmann echoed the judgment in 1926, calling him "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people...

...The abrupt departure in the early 1930s of celebrity must have startled Mencken...

...Some intellectuals viewed dictatorship positively...

...Smitten by his apparent distaste for America and in awe of his capacity to disturb the conventionally minded, the liberals memorialized "the Sage" in their history books...

...have done for decades, to wit, falsifying history to suit their ideological needs...

...He was abominated in the Puritan wards of the Northeast and in the Bible Belt, which is to say among the castaways of celebrity...

...He published three merry volumes of auto-biography so marbled with fictions as to suggest escapism...

...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 53...

...He missed every art movement of his time save American fiction's realists...

...The harm Mencken did was mostly to himself...

...The two constants of his life, at least into middle age, were laughter and confused ideas that he never paused to sort out...

...Nathan, the life-long theater critic and superior bon vivant, welcomed Mencken back, and about the time he died in 1956 Nathan took Pascal's wager and turned to religion...

...The four writers he turned to for dust-jacket blurbs were Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, William McGurn, Jean-Francois Revel, and R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.—all of whom have the two consolations Mencken denied himself, religion and democracy...

...He was acknowledged the dominant literary critic of the 1920s, but aside from discomfiting the Genteel Tradition and championing realism and naturalism, he had no taste for other literary waves, nor much curiosity...

...I suppose that I should have expected to see Weigel depart from his reverie to snarl gratuitously at me for a prose style that does not match Mencken's...

...A man of contradictions," writes Teachout...

...That, too, was fiction...

...During the years when Eliot, Pound, and Yeats were at work, he dismissed poetry as "beautiful balderdash...

...The Sage of Baltimore was incapable of perceiving the evil that stalks the world...

...Yet laughter is also the best therapy...

...What they saw were two traits that have remained their moral constants for six decades...

...Three decades later, the consensus among biographers has soured, at least on Mencken...

...Perhaps that discourtesy is what provoked the playful Paul Greenberg—a genuine representative of the Mencken-Nathan tradition—to write a few months after Weigel that, "Bob Tyrrell remains the closest that 1995 America can come to its own H. L. Mencken...

...He was celebrated on campus, in Hollywood, and among urban sophisticates, which is to say among the midwives of celebrity...

...his anti-lynching articles in the Sun papers provoked violence against their distribution in rural Maryland...

...Yet he had few large ideas beyond opposition to religion and democracy...

...He astonished friends by inviting blacks into his Baltimore home...

...Hobson and Teachout note that Mencken was not given to looking very deeply into things...

...My explanation is that he was having too good a time pulling the legs of the earnest...

...Yet, taken in their totality, I think it is fair to say that by the 1930s the Sage had become an anti-Semite, a racist, and a reactionary crank...

...He did not like the way the world was going, and he had neither the hope of humanism nor the consolation of biblical scripture to revive him...

...Hitler appears, but usually as a Menckenian joke: "a shabby ass," an Austrian William Jennings Bryan...

...The uproar that greeted his posthumous publications included the sandblasting of his name from the National Press Club library...

...Incidentally, it tells us a lot about the selective indignation of the politically correct that his angry anti-religious denunciations have been deemed comic...

...Casting his eyes upward, he lamented: "But I can't...

...Finally, the peculiar "depressions...

...This is the hazard that Mencken, the jocular iconoclast, ran...

...Composed from the 1930s on they contain cruel reference to friends—even the devoted Nathan...