Smashing Round in the China Shop

...His influence had meanwhile entered a decline...

...American literature before Mark Twain was a closed book to him," Teachout writes, "European modernism a joke...

...Yet whatever his flaws as a person, Mencken remains a model social critic, not only for his wonderful style but for his stalwart refusal to bow down before the icons of American life...

...The young Edmund Wilson called him "the civilized consciousness of America...

...He was basically a cold fellow...

...Teachout justly sees "a fundamental inadequacy in Mencken's thought: a skepticism so extreme as to issue in philosophical incoherence...

...In my teens he had an effect on my outlook as well as my style...

...With irresistible wit and a contagious sense of fun, Mencken ridiculed the selfsatisfied smugness and pomposity of the era in which the chief business of America was business...

...While Gilbert Seldes was applauding the seven lively arts, Mencken had little interest in popular culture, rarely saw a movie and, in the Jazz Age, found jazz "crude and childish...

...It was partly that people began tiring of Mencken's act...

...He found in Shaw and Nietzsche kindred spirits, and published books about them in his 20s...

...He discovered Sinclair Lewis, championed Theodore Dreiser and Willa Cather, admired Scott Fitzgerald (though for some reason not The Great Gatsby), and also admired forgotten novelists like James Branch Cabell and Joseph Hergesheimer...

...I fell upon the volume and devoured it, dazzled to the point of imitation by the exuberant iconoclasm, the rollicking satirical wit, the liberated and liberating tone...

...HOW DOES Mencken's oeuvre stand up after nearly three-quarters of a century...

...More fundamentally, the Great Depression and soon Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal were changing national preoccupations...

...The 1920s were Mencken's decade...

...The publication of his diaries in 1989 raised the question of whether Mencken was an anti-Semite...

...But his Notes on Democracy (1926) and Treatise on the Gods (1930) show him to be rather out of his depth...

...Most seductive of all was the air of worldliness and cosmopolitanism, the casual invocations of Nietzsche and Shaw, of Bach and Ibsen, of James G. Huneker and Thorstein Veblen, along with the disdain for the booboisie that made one feel part of a wonderfully sophisticated club...

...With what malevolent joy," said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., "do I see him smash round in the china shop...

...When I was 15 years old, my mother gave me a copy of the first volume of his Prejudices, originally published in 1919 and reissued in 193 2 by Alfred A. Knopf as a Borzoi Pocket Book...

...His passing cracks about Jews and also about blacks were nothing compared to his joyous loathing of those purest of Anglo-Saxons, the hillbillies of the South, for whom he reserved his deepest contempt and his most unbridled invective...

...We exchange notes now and then and are officially on good terms, but he knows very well that I am no longer interested in him...

...He was a libertarian, not a democrat, and in his obsessive opposition to FDR he began to come across as one of the cranks he used to ridicule...

...He was equally scornful of "puritanism"-defined as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy"-targeting its fundamentalist preachers and its self-righteous censorship...

...Inspired by Mark Twain, young Mencken developed his own distinctive literary style and began an extended love affair with the American language...

...In an age when both Right and Left are committed to versions of political correctness, with what malevolent joy would H.L...

...For one thing this book makes clear, and that is that the man is bigger than his ideas...

...He had a long in-and-out affair with Marion Bloom, a short but intense affair with the movie actress Aileen Pringle, who later married James M Cain, and in 1930, nearly 50 years old, he married a 32-year-old Southern writer, Sara Haardt, who died in 1935 after giving him five years of immense happiness...

...As coeditor with drama critic George Jean Nathan of the New York magazines the Smart Set and later the American Mercury, he became in the gaudy 1920s the dominant cultural figure portrayed by Lippmann...

...Of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman...

...When he broke with his longtime collaborator, George Jean Nathan, he wrote: "One of my convenient habits has been that of dropping completely people who begin to bore me...

...He did aspire for a time to higher things...

...In Treatise on the Gods, he had written that the Jews could be "very plausibly" described as "the most unpleasant race ever heard of," and his diaries contained anti-Jewish remarks...

...Still, he was an undaunted combatant in the cultural wars of American history and deserves to be celebrated...

...The author of In Defense of Women (1918) jealously guarded his privacy, but he was not notably averse to feminine charms...

...For American intellectuals he was the great liberator from a stifling national culture...

...The cultural heretic of the 1920s was abruptly confronted by the fierce political antagonisms of the 1930s...

...I don't suppose that even "educated people" read Mencken now...

...Despite Mencken's having many Jewish friends, Teachout finds him guilty as charged, though he concedes that "if anything Mencken's opinions were moderate, at least by comparison with the vicious Jew-baiting so widely accepted in the '30s...

...Of Vice President Dick Cheney...

...Mencken emerges from this new biography as not a particularly nice man...

...Of William Bennett...

...Born in Baltimore in 1880, he never went to college but took avidly to journalism, forming a long alliance with the Baltimore Sun...

...Teachout quotes Time magazine: "The angry crusading against provincialism, the Bible Belt, Rotarians, evangelists, puritanism, Prohibition and Babbittry in general became sufficiently successful to seem a little antiquated and unnecessary...

...His first major impact was as a literary critic...

...But his work on The American Language and his trilogy of memoirs-Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days-in time reclaimed his reputation and regained his audience...

...I was among those who felt Mencken's influence...

...Newly available documents enable Terry Teachout to tell us more about Mencken's personal life than we had known before...

...He regarded Robert Frost as "Whittier without the whiskers" and dismissed Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner...

...Lippmann observed of Notes on Democracy: "To discuss it as one might discuss the ideas of first-rate thinkers like Russell, Dewey, Whitehead, or Santayana, would be to destroy the book and to miss its importance...

...What pleasure he would have gotten from the phenomenon of Attorney General John Ashcroft...

...In fact, Mencken was an equalopportunity ethnic calumniator...

...Mencken be smashing round the china shop...

...Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities Emeritus, City University of New York Graduate Center The Skeptic is a judicious, lucidly written, sympathetically critical, and generally persuasive biography of the man Walter Lippmann described in 1926 as "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people...

...Eventually he lost his interest in literature in favor of social and political criticism...