'His Amazing Chord of Adjectives'

“An excellent book! Like Max Beerbohm, Mencken's work is inevitably distinguished.” 

A century ago, in the March 1921 issue of The Bookman, we witness a rare convergence of giants. The reviewer is F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had recently published his first novel, This Side of Paradise. The Mencken title under review is Prejudices, Second Series. Fitzgerald’s linkage of Mencken and Beerbohm is inspired. Both essayists are masters of divergently vivid and amusing prose styles. Mencken’s is flamboyant, virile, learned and occasionally savage; Beerbohm’s, quietly elegant and ironic. Fitzgerald even opens his review, “The Baltimore Anti-Christ,” with a refence to “the incomparable Mencken,” just as Shaw dubbed Beerbohm “the incomparable Max,” an epithet that stuck. Fitzgerald singles out an essay in Prejudices, “Roosevelt: An Autopsy,” for praise:

 

“In the hands of Mencken [Theodore] Roosevelt becomes almost a figure of Greek tragedy; more, he becomes alive and loses some of that stuffiness that of late has become attached to all 100% Americans. Not only is the essay most illuminating but its style is a return to Mencken’s best manner, the style of ‘Prefaces,’ with the soft pedal on his amazing chord of adjectives and a tendency to invent new similes instead of refurbishing his amusing but somewhat overworked old ones.”

 

We hear Fitzgerald flattering Mencken by imitating his style. Two years earlier, Fitzgerald sold his first short story, “Babes in the Woods,” to The Smart Set, a magazine edited by Mencken and George Jean Nathan, both of whom went on to champion Fitzgerald’s work. The reviewer, then just twenty-four, contemplates forty-year-old Mencken’s future:

 

“But now and then one wonders—granted that, solidly, book by book, he has built up a literary reputation most to be envied of any American, granted also that he has done more for the national letters than any man alive, one is yet inclined to regret a success so complete. What will he do now?”

 

Well, he went on to publish four more collections of Prejudices, revise and expand The American Language (1919) and publish two supplements to the original volume, and produce Notes on Democracy (1926) and his crowning work, The Days Trilogy: Happy Days, 1880-1892 (1940), Newspaper Days, 1899-1906 (1941) and Heathen Days, 1890-1936 (1943).