A Novel of the Berlin Ruins
WOLFE, ANN F.
Jottings by Mencken Minority Report: H. L. Mencken's Notebooks. By H. L. Mencken. Knopf. 293 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by John Lydenberg Professor of American Literature, Hobart and William Smith...
...Answer: He gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell...
...The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong...
...For all his invective against Protestants, he belongs in that great line of American protestants who could not be content with things as they were and would not be cowed into lowing peacefully with the herd...
...How refreshing it would be if in these moderate days we still had a raucous voice that could honestly boast: "So far as I can recall, I have never written a single commendatory word of any sitting President of the United States...
...What is his function...
...His greatness and his influence lay exactly in his stubborn refusal to be reasonable...
...Nor do they really interest or entertain us...
...The complacency of the Twenties brought out several, of whom Mencken was the most unrestrained and exuberant...
...The torch of civilization is carried by a small minority of restless and enterprising men...
...They are: (1) equality before the law...
...On the whole, I consider their publication a mistake...
...He cannot so much as think aloud without running a risk of having them fan his pantaloons...
...Now, recalling his great days in the Twenties, when he was "master of the revels" and agent provocateur of the "gay fellows tossing dead cats in sanctuaries," remembering how furiously stimulating he was, how great a liberating force, one hesitates to cast a cool critical eye upon his late production when he is no longer around to make a hot riposte...
...The moment he offends these vermin, he is done...
...For page after page here, we leaf through obvious, dreary stuff like "Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses...
...Most striking about them is the fact that, though they have the clarity and precision his writings usually possess, they lack almost entirely the pungency, gusto, bombast and preposterous invective of the Ur-Mencken...
...Consider him in his highest incarnation: the university professor...
...indeed, as we read item after item laboring the same simple points, the total effect is to make more apparent than ever the essential poverty and even puerility of his thought...
...But in this age of the new complacency we listen in vain for someone like him...
...his style was as flat as anyone else's until he had worked it over with his gloating, hating care...
...But when, as in this book, his essentially simple ideas are presented in a temporal vacuum and strung one after another without the adornment of his virtuoso style, they turn out to be singularly unexciting: "The thing I have tried to preach is simply homage to facts, clear and free thinking, intellectual decency...
...It is too bad that one can't respond with much enthusiasm to these "jottings," which, as he explains in his preface, he dug out of his "bin" of notes and arranged for publication in 1948, just before his first stroke...
...But none of that really matters...
...The Notebooks tell us nothing new about Mencken...
...Mencken started out as a late-nineteenth-century materialist, atheist and Nietzschean aristocrat, and so he remained...
...Presumably, these notes are first, unrevised drafts...
...I can't recall ever changing my mind about any capital matter," he says here...
...It is a business almost indistinguishable from that of a seller of snake-oil for rheumatism...
...As for a physician, he is one who spends his whole life trying to prolong the lives of persons whose deaths, in nine cases out of ten, would be a public benefit...
...Simply to pass on to fresh generations of numbskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant and, in large part, untrue...
...From this fixed vantage, he lambasted American democracy, especially in its idealistic, do-good, Protestant, intolerant aspects...
...Only one other item in this book even approximates this liveliness: "What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world...
...If he was as intolerant and as wont to stretch and twist the facts as were the politicians, reformers and Methodist ministers he abhorred, he was an invaluable antidote to the moral and mental complacency that seems endemic in Anglo-Saxon democracy...
...All the rest of the democratic dogma is, at best, dubious, and at worst palpable nonsense...
...It didn't just come naturally, then, that gorgeous rhetoric...
...If these jottings are fair evidence, writing came as hard to him as to ordinary mortals...
...Reviewed by John Lydenberg Professor of American Literature, Hobart and William Smith Colleges It is too bad that Mencken died before his old friend Alfred Knopf could bring out these Notebooks...
...Then, suddenly, we are awakened by an article written for the Baltimore Sun but never published, and we see how he made his ideas sparkle and boom when he wrote up his jottings for publication...
...Maybe our society stands in greater need of these irreverent, irrepressible iconoclasts than do other societies, and we have usually kept alive a few vocal ones...
...The truly civilized man is always skeptical...
...His whole professional activity is circumscribed by the prejudices, vanities and avarices of his university trustees, i.e., a committee of soap-boilers, nail-manufacturers, bank-directors and politicians...
...But this very lack of entertainment suggests an interesting hypothesis...
...3) free speech...
...No professional whooper-up of democracy, so far as I know, is in favor of the three things I have listed...
...His culture is based on 'I am not too sure.'" "The elements in democracy that are sound in logic and of genuine cultural value may be very briefly listed...
...Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority...
...As for a lawyer, he is simply, under our cash-register civilization, one who teaches scoundrels how to commit their swindles without too much risk...
...2) the limitation of government...
...Mencken wrote a lot of half-truths and some patent nonsense...
...The case of the pedagogue is even worse...
...What a wonderful time he would have had during the McCarthy madness...
Vol. 39 • June 1956 • No. 23
