'Resolutely Unsentimental, Ebulliently Grim'

Joseph Epstein once wrote that he relies on three writers to “lift one out of gloom, and away from the valley of small and large woes” – Montaigne, Justice Holmes (in his letters) and H.L. Mencken. I’ve tested his proposition and it works. What an odd trio, separated by three centuries. The Frenchman dispels gloom with his fortitude (kidney stones!) and his counterintuitive gift for being self-absorbed while not being egotistical. Holmes was able to draw humor and literary insights even out of that Leftist twit Harold Laski. And Mencken was a force of nature, crafting some of the finest American prose. 

But just when I’m falling for Mencken again he'll say something foolish, embarrassing or repellent. I read him for the same reason my sons consume energy drinks – that boost, that reminder that life is an unearned treat to be savored. And yet at one point, while praising the Hebrew Bible, Mencken will describe Jews as “the most unpleasant race ever heard of.” That’s blind, brain-damaged stupidity, unworthy of Mencken at his best. Though with him, of course, fairness is seldom the point. Harsh, cleansing humor is. I laugh when he describes Mississippi as part of the “Hookworm Belt” and North Carolina as situated in the “Malaria Belt.” The latter I tested on a native North Carolinian among our neighbors, and he hooted approvingly. One brandishes this as evidence that perhaps ours is not the most earnestly humorless of ages. William Hazlitt got it right in his introduction to Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819):

 

“You cannot force people to laugh: you cannot give a reason why they should laugh: they must laugh of themselves, or not at all. As we laugh from a spontaneous impulse, we laugh the more at any restraint upon this impulse. We laugh at a thing merely because we ought not.”

Mencken’s on my mind again because I’m rereading the late Terry Teachout’s The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (HarperCollins, 2002). Terry echoes my ambivalent reactions to Mencken’s prolific body of work, so much of which is wonderful – in particular the three volumes of memoir and The American Language. Terry praises the latter’s “quirkiness”:

 

“Rarely has a scholar, amateur or otherwise, succeeded in writing a book so revealing of his own habits of mind—and so blessedly free of pedantry—without compromising his essential seriousness.”

 

Terry puts Mencken in perspective by holding him up against Dr. Johnson, a writer he esteemed perhaps above all others. He concedes “a fundamental inadequacy in Mencken’s thought: a skepticism so extreme as to issue in philosophical incoherence.” Terry juxtaposes the two men:

 

“Like Johnson, Mencken was resolutely unsentimental, ebulliently grim, full of the sanity that comes from an unswerving commitment to common sense. But for Johnson ‘the mind can only repose on the stability of truth,’ while Mencken found nothing to be ‘wholly good, wholly desirable, wholly true.’ This unequivocal rejection of the possibility of ultimate truth, a position irreconcilable with his scientific rationalism, left him with nothing but a concept of ‘honor’ as shallow as the Victorian idea of progress in which he believed so firmly (and so paradoxically).”

 

People seem increasingly uncomfortable with our essentially contradictory nature. That’s no reason to deny yourself the pleasures of Mencken’s company and reject his enduring ability to “lift one out of gloom.”