Homelife of a Satirist

...L. Mencken," I said, "is a self-made eccentric, as some people are self-made auto mechanics or movie writers...

...Although his son later transposed these eminently bourgeois categories into Nietzsche's scale of serf and superman, the moral rectitude he had received at the parental fount remained essentially the same...

...It seems that Fitzgerald used Zelda outrageously, copping her best cracks for his books and living parasitically off her brilliance...

...I mean the sort of satire that makes its victims uncomfortable and ludicrous, that achieves what Mencken so certainly achieved—a pervasive self-consciousness instead of the blissful unconsciousness that preceded his eruption onto the scene...

...Miss Mayfield took the duties of a chaperone very seriously, it seems, and for years she stood guard over the Hardt-Mencken romance, helping her girl friend repulse the invasions of alien females...

...He even compiled a book of the worst of it for his own and his readers' amusement...

...Zelda has been committed to an aslyum once again...

...A lot we already knew, a lot we imagined but were not quite sure of, and then, surprisingly, a lot that has never gotten into print before...

...What struck me most forcibly was the way F. Scott Fitzgerald's life and career has been intertwined with Mencken's—in the book's only evidence of artfulness, I should add...

...Who writes satire today...

...Fitzgerald is in debt and drinking...

...Here, one feels, is a man of the most eminent common sense who has decided, for professional reasons, to act the crackpot...

...Most of us know the rest of that long, gruelling, sad story...

...Mencken and His Friends (Dela-corte, 307 pp., $6.50), I looked it up, not so much to check on my youthful extravagances as to see whether what I said then squares with what I know now about the artful rhetorician from Baltimore...

...Miss Mayfield's book is a perfect example of the virtues and defects of the backfence approach to literature...

...In far-off Baltimore, meanwhile, Mencken was publishing Fitzgerald's first story in his magazine, the Smart Set...

...Mencken's father, we are told, divided humanity into two great races: those who paid their bills and those who didn't...

...and the tangle of stag-lines, Zelda as "the first flapper," Fitzgerald's battle with Southern priggishness, the beginnings of his literary career—all this had for me the poignance of a first-class novel...

...The decline of satiric art in American letters goes hand in hand with the decline, or withering away, of certitude in all the various departments of life and letters...

...We all know that Mencken was the great critic of the '20s and early '30s, that his literary judgments have an assurance and skill matched, at that time, only by T. S. Eliot...

...Sara Hardt seemed to meet Mencken's exigent demands as to what a proper female companion should be—along with Eileen Pringle, the movie star, Frances Newman, the novelist, and Emily Clark, the local patroness of the arts (just to tick off a few of the culture-hungry "gals"—again I use Miss Mayfield's vocabulary—who consoled our cynic in his maturer years...

...Mencken, the cautious householder and even more cautious bohemian amorist, was hemmed in, if one takes Miss Mayfield's account at face value, by hordes of drunks, dead-beats, malicious back-biters and hoodlums—in other words, the leading writers and thinkers of the recent American literary renaissance...

...and the imbroglios she details are so remote that the whole book takes on a period flavor, like an old movie seen on television...

...and what his mind is made up about can range from the nature and value of democracy to the noxiousness of adultery and the absurdity of efforts to improve the human race—to mention a few of the notions that gave luster and the ring of assurance to Mencken's prose...

...but Miss Mayfield, also a Southern belle, comes up with a new element...

...With this messy tragedy as background, here is Miss Mayfield's estimate of one of the great modern American novels: "In view of these things [possible divorce proceedings between Zelda and Scott, and a custody fight for their daughter], it is impossible to know whether Fitzgerald deliberately wrote certain portions of Tender is the Night in retaliation for parts of Zelda's Save Me the Waltz, which he and Perkins forced her to cut, whether he was unconsciously preparing a psychological defense against a court fight, or whether equally unconsciously, he was simply skipping into one of the paranoid projections to which he was increasingly given as he approached a crackup...

...In America, the women, especially if they are doughty Southern women, always win out in the end...

...The darkest moments in this curious love story came when Mencken visited Hollywood and the papers were full of his affair with Eileen Pringle...

...Yet gossip must mean something, as one of our best modern poets has declared, and I shall try to extract the gist of the material so lavishly provided us here...

...She has set out to recreate the homelife of the most virulent satirist American letters has known, perhaps the last true satirist, and in her verbose, rambling, gushing way she has managed this quite adequately...

...Whatever charm he has is due to this air of purposive crankiness...

...I rubbed my eyes, though I also know how often crazy wit feeds the artist...

...Scratch a satirist and you will usually discover an un-harried middle class existence that accounts for his freedom from the compulsions and conformities vexing our more line-toeing writers...

...While I am in a reminiscent mood, let me be utterly shameless and quote myself...

...All this may sound like gossip but that, after all, is what makes Miss Mayfield's book worth reading, at least for me...

...Miss Mayfield could just as well accuse Joyce of plagarizing his father, or a hundred other lesser novelists of using the materials offered them by life and the people they came to know...

...but time and the dispersion of his writings have led us to forget the very close relationship, both personal and cultural, that existed between Fitzgerald and Mencken...

...A writer has to have his mind made up, so to speak, to write good satire...

...It also gets in some of the last words on that boisterous, zestful period of the '20s which Mencken and Fitzgerald between them so fully symbolized...

...After reading Sara Mayfield's curious biography, The Constant Circles: H.L...

...It even contained a few cracks the old boy himself might have relished for their aggressive impertinence...

...since he dished it out, he expected to get it back in spades—and he did...

...But what do we learn about Mencken from Miss Mayfield's gushy book...

...Of course most of the protagonists, such as Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and his wife Dorothy Thompson, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, Joseph Hergesheimer, and James Branch Cabell are no longer with us to file suit...

...Mencken was the sort of critic who wasn't floored by criticism of himself...

...Well, the review wasn't too bad...

...The head of the English department, who seemed to understand Mencken better than many of his critics, felt that these two shapely, lively young ladies would be the best companions for him at a luncheon planned to celebrate the occasion...

...Whether satire is moral or, as some claim, supra-moral, is too difficult a problem to be broached in a short review, but one thing is clear: either way, satire demands a firm set of ideas in its practitioner...

...The climax of her story comes with the publication of Tender is the Night...

...That started it...

...Miss Mayfield was a student at Goucher College in 1923 when the bad-boy of American letters—I am using her terminology—came to give a lecture...

...In our day of unmitigated publicity, I can't imagine the reigning critics doing anything that would even slightly mar their "images...

...Mencken which, if age is supposed to add to our wisdom, should make me properly contrite...

...Zelda was the real creator...

...Miss Mayfield reminds us, and in doing so performs a most valuable bit of cultural archaeology...

...The so-called black humorists surely do not fit this bill...

...at that point the gals almost gave him up as damned forever...

...Fitzgerald's future wife, Zelda, went to school with Sara Hardt in Montgomery, Alabama and so Sara was on hand when young Lieutenant Fitzgerald tried to rescue Zelda from the clutches of a stag-line...

...But she has other axes to grind, especially the axe of moralism that she wants to plant in poor Scott Fitzgerald's neck...

...Together with her acidulous accounts of the predatory females who surrounded the Baltimore Sage, Miss Mayfield peps up the narrative with some of the most ferocious literary gossip that ever got past a publisher's battery of libel lawyers...

...Mencken addressed the "two hundred and fifty virgins"—the good old days!—enrolled in the English department, then took the two girls to lunch...

...One of her lady teachers was a charming and witty Southern belle named Sara Hardt...

...I have always contended that they should be called mauve humorists, since their view of human nature is not sufficiently tragic to deserve the hopeless hue which the critics eager for labels have foisted upon them...

...The taint of sympathy for their victims and the underlying sentimentality that suffuses their books—the inability to be cold, objective and surgical in dealings with their creations—deprive them of any standing as satirists...

...Even a self-made eccentric, indeed precisely a self-made eccentric, requires some ease and spiritual elbow-room to develop, and H. L. Mencken had both these valuable goods by right of his birth into a comfortably fixed cigar manufacturer's family...

...Naturally such was not her intention, and revealing criticism of the man she continually refers to as the "Sage" would hardly occur to her...

...But seven years after that first luncheon Mencken married Sara Hardt, and one gets the queasy feeling that Miss Mayfield's eagle-eyed attendance had more to do with the wedding bells than Mencken's philosophy of gentlemanly behavior or Miss Hardt's patient maneuvers...

...In a country where the great writers are all great natural eccentrics and village queers—Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, the names prove the point—the writer who comes by his solitary strangeness through resolution and training must fall almost automatically into a lesser category . . . ." Miss Mayfield's book does little to disturb that diagnosis...