Prejudices

The epiphanies that accompany certain acts of reading are often diverting but always suspect, for the diurnal mind values novelty and diversion above all. If you await revelation, it will arrive but a week later you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about. Only rarely does enlightenment prove lasting.

I remember sitting in my car in the parking lot of the library at Earlham College, in Richmond, Ind., reading Prejudices: Third Series, published in 1922 by H.L. Mencken. This was in the fall of 1984, and I was the court reporter for the city’s newspaper, the Palladium-Item. Mencken would have savored the pretentiousness of the name and the statue of Pallas Athena in the lobby.

I had already read much of Mencken but now I was reading him systematically, as a form of career counseling. I had been a reporter for five years and was for the first time feeling confidence in my abilities, accompanied by dissatisfaction. I had covered a capital murder trial gavel to gavel and was feeling feisty, but I also hated Indiana and its oppressive blandness. Mencken, of course, was a ready ally but I was reading him more as a stylist than a pundit. I had been trying out in the newspaper some of the experiments in prose I admired in not just Mencken but in Liebling, Mitchell and Kempton. I was after humor, raffishness and revelations of personality, and my editors wanted speed, accuracy and quantity. It’s an old story.

The enlightenment came when I read Mencken’s final piece in the volume – “Suite Americane.” The French, of course, in Mencken’s hands, makes the title an oxymoron. It’s an uncharacteristically impressionistic piece for Mencken: Three sections (“Aspiration,” “Virtue,” “Eminence”) of sentence fragments, each a snapshot from American life, connected only by ellipses. Here’s a sample from “Virtue”:

“Pale druggists in remote towns of the Epworth League and flannel nightgown belts, endlessly wrapping up bottles of Peruna….Women hidden away in the damp kitchens of unpainted houses along railroad tracks, frying tough beefsteaks….Lime and cement dealers being initiated into the Knights of Pythias, the Red Men or the Woodmen of the World….Watchmen at lonely railroad crossings in Iowa, hoping that they’ll be able to get off to hear the United Brethren evangelist preach….Ticket-choppers in the subway, breathing sweat in its gaseous form….Family doctors in poor neighborhoods, faithfully relying upon the therapeutics taught in their Eclectic Medical College in 1884….Farmers plowing sterile fields behind sad meditative horses, both suffering from insect bites….”

Mencken here is walking a tightrope of tone. He is satiric but not savagely so, as he certainly is elsewhere. Along with the satire I hear empathy, an understanding of the human lot, especially when it comes to women. I think of Edward Hopper’s enigmatic paintings (Reread “Women hidden away…” and then go here) and the fiction of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis – all contemporaries of Mencken. “Suite Americane” embodies Mencken’s conflicted feelings about America and Americans, his mingling of fondness and revulsion. For those who pigeonhole Mencken strictly as a critic of American cretinism, read “On Being an American,” also collected in Prejudices: Third Series. For instance:

“It is my contention that….there is no country on the face of the earth wherein a man roughly constituted as I am – a man of my general weaknesses, vanities, appetites, prejudices, and aversions – can be so happy, or even one-half so happy, as he can be in these free and independent states. Going further, I lay down the proposition that it is a sheer physical impossibility for such a man to live in These States and not be happy – that it is as impossible to him as it would be to a schoolboy to weep over the burning down of his school-house.”

The disgust at provinciality is there, but so is the gusto and gratitude. The big revelation for me as a writer, sitting in my car on the campus of a Quaker college in Indiana, was that prose could wield ambiguity, that humor and pathos, laughter and sentiment, could coexist. Mencken was being snotty, but not merely snotty. Writing, even in newspapers, need not be cartoonish. The job was to mirror contradictions – in our shared reality, in the writer’s own sensibility -- without making a confusing hash of it, and to do it using the details of American life. Read this from “Eminence,” the third section of “Suite Americane”:

“….The old lady in Wahoo, Neb., who has read the Bible 38 times….The boss who controls the Italian, Czecho-Slovak and Polish votes in Youngstown, O….The professor of chemistry, Greek, rhetoric and piano at the Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Tex….The boy who sells 225 copies of the Saturday Evening Post every week in Cheyenne, Wyo….The youngest murderer awaiting hanging in Chicago….The leading dramatic critic of Pittsburgh….The night watchman in Penn Yan, N.Y., who once shook hands with Chester A. Arthur…The Lithuanian woman in Bluefield, W.Va., who has had five sets of triplets….”