Mencken: A Biography by Fred Hobson

...And, from the pen that had flayed and punctured the "booboisie," there came little or nothing...

...In the final reckoning, however, Mencken's politico-philosophical ambivalences do not cancel one another out...

...But any reductionist analysis of Mencken runs the risk of ignoring a fine mind that engaged itself in some high duties...

...I do not admire the general run of American Bible-searchers—Methodists, United Brethren, Baptists and such vermin...

...It also, and curiously, echoes a favorite observation of Evelyn Waugh, who used to ask his outraged friends to imagine how much nastier he would be if he were not a Catholic...

...He was even more delighted to discover a noble ancestor, Johann Burkhard Mencke (sic), who had in 1715 authored a satirical compendium entitled De Charletaneria Eruditorum (On the Charlatanry of the Learned), which one would pay a good price to see updated for this year's market...

...The special signifier of his independence was an unslackening scorn of the religious...

...It shows something of the feeling for the religious pulse that Marx evinced in his critique of Hegel, and it does so without making any concessions to illusion...

...And this is not the Germany of Goethe, Heine, or Marx...

...But try to imagine what the average low-browed Methodist would be if he were not a Methodist but an atheist...

...Indeed, not so much a bigot as an actual "scientific" or quasi-anthropological racist...

...But this bombast (ill-written, aside from any other consideration) was to give way to clearer and sweeter notes...

...If it had been said by a respectable German philosopher he could have adopted it entire as his own motto...

...It would have been a mess...

...It never seems to strike him, when he writes about warfare and the manly German virtues in 1914, that his first literary hero, Rudyard Kipling, was doing precisely the same thing on "the other side...

...That is when it most needs to be satirized...

...Whatever the foulness of some of his private and public thoughts (and the newly released Baltimore papers, in which he freely employs such low terms as "nigger" and "kike," add nothing essential to our existing stock of understanding), Mencken is fascinating because he often transcended what he freely called his "prejudices...

...By the mid-1930s, this strain in Mencken had ceased to be a mere quirk and was becoming a problem...

...Paine has assaulted them, Darwin and Huxley have assaulted them, and a multitude of other merchants of fact have assaulted them, but they still remember the Twenty-Third Psalm when the doctor begins to shake his head, they are still moved beyond compare (though not, alas, to acts...

...That might be condemnation enough...

...This is especially melancholy when one recalls that in 1917, in the course of his great philippic against the wretchedness of Georgia in The Sahara of the Bozart, Mencken had ridiculed the morality of segregation and concluded: But if you marvel at the absurdity, keep it dark...

...Without a personal knowledge of Mencken, I should not care to say for sure whether he was a bigot or just bigoted...

...He opposed the First World War because he thought Wilhelmine Germany to be the embodiment of Nietzschean strength and virtue...

...Mencken, though, survives as much more of a conundrum for enlightened and "progressive" Americans than does Waugh for their English counterparts...

...Between those who are hardily cynical about human nature and those who profess a belief in original sin, there is no necessary agreement...

...Mencken took his antiwar positions seriously, and ended up making common cause with despised underdogs: bullied German waiters and socialist agitators, to say nothing of contemptible bleeding-heart outfits like the infant American Civil Liberties Union...

...I thought of Mencken when I read that...

...He became fond of adding the prefix "Jewish" to the words "radical" or "Communist," just like any Roosevelt-baiting Rotarian...

...He was scrupulous and mannerly in his dealings with individual Jews and African Americans, while apparently harboring crass suspicions of them in the mass, so to speak...

...One was a self-caricaturing English type with a disdain for America and the other a snarling Anglophobe who believed that American English was a distinct language...

...He admired Joseph Conrad almost as much as he did Mark Twain, and won Conrad's respectful acknowledgment as a critic...

...And he was not so much an opponent of the New Deal, or of reformist and optimistic enterprises and utopias, as he was a foe to democracy itself...

...He opposed the Christian fundamentalists because they made it easier for him to attack religion itself—the source of all sickly and irrelevant feelings of charity...

...While Waugh was a self-proclaimed and classic reactionary, once famously excoriating the Conservative party for failing to turn back the clock by as much as a minute, Mencken comes down to us as an advocate of literary and scientific modernism...

...Having spent an admittedly rather bellowing career as a defender of the downtrodden, an advocate of female suffrage, and an opponent of capital punishment, he feared that "Social Darwinism" —a term not actually coined until later in the century—would resurrect ancient cruelties and unfairnesses and guise them as scientific findings or necessities...

...Imagine Sister Carrie written by a man without that capacity, say Nietzsche...

...But, as has been shown by writers as diverse as Murray Kempton and Gore Vidal, it is sometimes necessary for a radical critic to be contemptuous of "public opinion...

...Mencken was due to break bread with Evelyn Waugh...

...then as now America's most salient taboo...

...Is there, or is there not, a hint of vicarious satisfaction in that phrasing...

...He was interested in what people made, and how much they made for it, and did not despise the meat-and-potatoes aspect of existence...

...The unpleasant realization that this is true (I read it last on the day that President Clinton beat his chest at the National Prayer Breakfast) is an aspect of that "democrat's pornography" that I cited earlier...

...Napoleon Bonaparte, according to George Orwell, once remarked that, had he been hit by musketry on entering Moscow, he would have gone down to history as its greatest general...

...Later in life, Mencken became the representative of the Baltimore Sun group in its labor negotiations, and proved a tough nut as a boss's man Indeed, Hobson suggests that encounters with Jewish union leaders helped to fuel his animus...

...A casual word, and the united press of the South will be upon your trail, denouncing you bitterly as a scoundrelly damnyankee, a Bolshevik Jew...

...Thus we have Mencken, in his heroic period, defending Eugene Debs and Robert LaFollette not because they were tribunes of the plebs but because they were individuals of integrity who stood out against the yelling crowd as well as against the oligarchy...

...In my spare time, I collect significant encounters that never took place...

...On the day of the terrible stroke that pulled down his mental shutters for good, H.L...

...Vox populi, vox dei a treacherous saying that — has often been used to cement alliances between the plutocracy and the mob...

...Yet it is not...

...Dislike for the Anglophiles and WASPs was a natural corollary for a man who believed in Teutonism, while contempt for the states of the old Confederacy was a merely pleasurable corollary of that, because it offered up the Anglo-Saxon white trash at their trashiest and their Christianity in its most maudlin and twisted form...

...This very much materializes Mencken's point about the scriptures as a chiefly literary influence...

...by the Sermon on the Mount, and they still turn once a year from their sordid and degrading labors to immerse themselves unashamed in the story of the manger...

...And that, more or less, was that...

...I submit that, despite a few infelicities like "main" and "remain," this is very finely written...

...He knew that we do not "have" bodies but that we are bodies, and that the realm of illusion begins at the door of the Sabbath school, and if he over-used certain metaphors ("Chautauqua," "Bible searcher") it was partly because he would return to the fray again and again: The boobus Americanus is a bird that knows no closed season—and if he won't come down to Texas oil stock, or one-night cancer cures, or building lots in Swampshurst, he will always come down to Inspiration and Optimism, whether political, theological, pedagogical, literary or economic...

...In 1922, reporting from Munich, he wrote with alarming prescience about German resentment of Versailles and said that "Every intelligent man looks for a catastrophe...

...Interested in bloodlines—perhaps too much interested—this later foe of AngloSaxondom was pleased to find that his roots were in Saxony...

...The false note is usually the heavily affected Germanophilia...

...In his SUMMER • 1994 • 415 Books wonderful novel The Child In Time, Ian McEwan describes the experience of watching daytime television audiences as "the democrat's pornography...

...Yet he was a bigot...

...His good work is lost in a morass of bad and indifferent work . . . filled with epigrams against frauds long dead and forgotten, and echoes of old and puerile newspaper controversies...

...And he composed an extremely well-wrought essay in SUMMER • 1994 • 417 Books defense of Oscar Wilde, perhaps in part because he recognized another victim of the jeering, taunting mob...

...We can at least identify a contradiction between the defender of Richard Wright and lifelong friend of Alfred Knopf, and the man who gave way to racist vulgarity in private...

...Random House, 1994...

...The great thing about biographies, and about great troves of personal papers, is that they remind us how few years, in a real human life, are well spent...

...His wartime stuff is not really worth re-reading, and he became more and more interested in family folklore and the amassing of large clippings—files and anthologies concerning his own person and papers...

...With Mencken, the face grew to fit the mask, and the playful Prejudices became the drone of authentic prejudice...

...Steeped as a youth in the English declension of literature, he was avid for Kipling as soon as he could discriminate...

...The disclosures—reliably misogynistic 418 • DISSENT Books in tone, as well as surreptitiously nasty about former friends and openly mean about blacks and Jews—have ignited one of "those" rows, not dissimilar to the convulsion over Philip Larkin's letters in England...

...Both men had a surreptitious fancy for Fascism, but Fascists are by definition hard to internationalize, and it might be that their antagonisms would have outweighed their sympathies...

...He had very many grievous moral and intellectual shortcomings and even deformities...

...Fred Hobson's biography allows one to take a longer look at Mencken, and to savor his more obvious contradictions...

...Almost as soon as he was exiled to Switzerland, Alexander Solzhenitsyn made a date to have lunch with Vladimir Nabokov, but apparently lost his nerve and failed the feast...

...As he once wrote to Theodore Dreiser, with whom he had a lifelong if rather fraught comradeship: It seems plain to me that the most valuable baggage that you carry is your capacity for seeing the world from a proletarian standpoint...

...One may re-read much of this output today, skipping over or even forgiving the rough bits out of sheer relish...

...I know this is progress...

...He was, in general, a friend to the working stiff, and this sympathy, again, allowed him to take holidays from his other obsessions...

...Bertrand Russell, an elitist radical of a very much different provenance, once said that his life changed when his grandmother taught him the Biblical injunction: "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil...

...Ergo, Germany must, shall and will prevail...

...Mencken wrote this in his first serious book, a study of Nietzsche published in 1908...

...He did much to convince American readers to throw off nativism and "uplift" in their choice of fiction...

...As it turns out, Mencken's own obsequy for Ambrose Bierce will do duty here: SUMMER • 1994 • 419 Books I have a suspicion, indeed, that Bierce did a serious disservice to himself when he put those twelve volumes together...

...It really was uncanny...

...Far from being "the idol of all Morondom," in Mencken's lapidary phrase, William Jennings Bryan was a serious exponent of the "social gospel...

...Hobson tries his best to be fair, quoting Mencken on Hitler's "obscene monkeyshines" and a number of other disobliging asides, but the overall effect is of somebody going on record, covering a flank, cutting short an argument...

...He seems to have been "imprinted" early on, by a family of slightly oppressive respectability, which, while warm and nurturing in its way, also sought to indenture the young Henry to the equivalent of a Dickens blacking factory...

...Among some hypocrites of today, the paradox is more commonly met with the other way about...

...In one of the great confrontations between Reason and Reaction— the Scopes trial in Tennessee—Mencken was the impresario to Clarence Darrow and became, for all succeeding generations, the official historian and quote-meister of the episode...

...We could have been well spared the decline of many other authors and statesmen who only rose briefly above their frailties...

...It would have been good to have (even from Alistair Cooke, who had proposed the introduction) an account of this aborted conversation between two Tories, two snobs, two racists, two masters of prose and humor and invective, two literary products of the vulgar industry of journalism...

...the indecent thrill that you can get when you see the credulous filling the hat at rallies commanded by Oliver North and Pat Robertson and Louis Farrakhan...

...No wonder, then, that in his ill-tempered and misanthropic shape, he has been adopted as a premature foe of "PC" by the rancorous crowd of minor swells who put out the American Spectator, and who imagine themselves quite bold as they gulp down subsidies from Olin, Scaife, and the think tanks of post-Darwinist plutocracy...

...He was the first American editor to publish James Joyce...

...The tracking down of quacks of all sorts," as Mencken was to put it, had become so much his own raison d'être that the discovery of the book had an almost superstitious effect upon him: "All my stock in trade was there—loud assertions, heavy buffooneries, slashing attacks on the professors...

...It is responsible for all your talent for evoking feeling...

...One can overstate Bryan's decency and compassion (even Wills concedes that he was feeble about segregation because "few populists could afford to oppose their poor white constituents") but there is no question that Mencken did take the viewpoint of "natural selection" precisely because it validated his own views of Nietzsche and the pitiless battle for mastery: There must be a complete surrender to the law of natural selection—that invariable natural law which ordains that the fit shall survive and the unfit shall perish...

...Germain but gave up and slouched away...

...420 • DISSENT...

...Those who flirt with race theory should learn to beware their own dominant gene...

...He actually had a sincere concern with the political implications of Darwinism: "this doctrine of the strongest...

...But the itch to be at one with the wisdom of the majority was not one of them...

...About the rise of Fascism in general, Mencken was sanguine...

...Henry James," he wrote in The Smart Set, "would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs from the Chicago stockyards...

...Cynicism, which is most often the affectation of conservatives, can also be part of the armor of those who are prepared to go through life as a minority of one...

...it is unashamedly Junkerish, beery, and chauvinistic, laced with the sort of sentimentality that Mencken generally despised...

...more sanguine, let us say, than he was about FDR...

...Karl Marx and Charles Darwin were intended by a mutual friend to meet but the rendezvous did not occur...

...On the great confrontation of his time, the sage of Baltimore funked it...

...It helps, of course, in resisting the populi bit, if you are convinced that the dei part is nonsense also...

...Already an old man at the time, he permitted his nostalgia for his lost youth to get the better of his critical faculty .. . the result was a depressing assemblage of worn-out and fly-blown stuff, much of it quite unreadable...

...Some of his best prose dates from this period, when, as we like to forget, the American academy and the preponderance of the intelligentsia were consumed by the dingiest chauvinism and conformity, and when the Constitution was simply heaved overboard...

...That anyone should be preferred to Nietzsche is, as we have seen, quite a concession for Mencken to have made...

...If only all of his ironies had been so pleasing...

...Yet he wrote beautifully and with insight about the trials of American womanhood at the hands of the brutish male (said male's efforts in amour memorably likened to a gorilla's essays upon the violin...

...one was a preposterously dogmatic Roman Catholic and the other a man who described himself as "a materialist's materialist...

...Think of the incredible literary failure that is involved in Mencken's refusal to write a serious polemic against Hitler...

...Everybody has now heard of the tranche of Mencken papers released to researchers in 1989...

...Mencken also became an adoptive editorial parent to James T. Farrell, whose Studs Lonigan trilogy possessed the same proletarian integrity and whose Trotskyism Mencken affected not to mind about...

...Here, aside from the grotesque embodiment of all hatred and superstition, was the quack, charlatan, and crank to end all quacks, charlatans, and cranks Such a target...

...He could not bear to be unproductive, and looked with disdain upon those who did not labor, or those who wasted their talent (Scott Fitzgerald conspicuous here) or those who were slothful...

...It is thus possible to derive all of his finest and most memorable polemics—against the First World War, against Christian fundamentalism, against the Anglophile WASP aristocracy, and against the backwardness and misery of the Dixie states—from an essentially vile and infirm premise that he adopted from the outset...

...All growth must occur at the top...

...In 1948, the last four-party election in American history, he managed some fairly spirited abuse of the Henry Wallace ticket but ended up casting his own ballot for Strom Thurmond—whose "American Party" condensed all the Southern crackerdom, religiosity, and bellicose patriotism that he had spent a lifetime defaming...

...Nor was this a singular instance conditioned by friendship...

...Take the following extract from his Holy Writ, where he argues that the English translation of the Bible is imperishable: To this day it has enchanted the English-speaking peoples so effectively that, in the main, they 416 • DISSENT Books remain Christians, at least sentimentally...

...No sooner has one observed this than one looks for its contradiction or negation, and finds it without overmuch difficulty...

...In the decades between the wars, Mencken kept up his loathing of populist intolerance and small-time tyranny, and was always ready to empty the vials of his wrathful contempt over the KKK, over the provincial censors, and over all varieties of the Babbitt and the Rotarian...

...The great disadvantage of such disputes is that they are (a) posthumous and (b) require no intellectual equipment of the participants...

...The best attack on Mencken has been written in our own time by Garry Wills, who so to speak re-opened the Scopes trial in his Under God...

...And he would regularly refuse to meet any man whom he suspected of being homosexual...

...George Orwell waited for Albert Camus to keep an appointment in a café in St...

...It is not much, but it is something...

...Populism, which is in the last instance always an illiberal style, may come tricked out as folkish emancipation...

...Hobson also shows another attractive side to Mencken, which was his unstinting attitude to work...

...The caustic review that he wrote concerning the power-worshiping jurisprudence of that old coward and fraud Oliver Wendell Holmes is, among other things, a masterpiece of forensic legal analysis and would not disgrace the most meticulous civil libertarian...

...If it comes, there will be a colossal massacre of Jews...

...What I have said about his brilliance and verve can only be said of the period between about 1910 and the end of Prohibition—the years when he could be contra mundum, and the heroic decades of American hysteria and prudery...

...With Mencken, the lucid interval is the thing to look for...

...He could write for page upon page about how the "feminine" principle was one of feebleness and unreason, based on weakness and deceit...

...In his polemics against Woodrow Wilson and the First World War (clearly the root of his animus against Bryan, who had been bamboozled into serving as Wilson's secretary of state) Mencken may have been actuated by Nietzchean contempt for that "anaemic offspring of the slave-morality of the post-Exodus Jews" as against "the sturdy reassertion of the master morality of the Periclean Greeks . . . Germany is strong, and fearless, and ruthless, and resolute...

...We know at any rate that in 1933, reviewing Mein Kampf for the American Mercury, he was so even-handed as to draw a pained howl from Knopf himself...

...The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to lift up the weak...