'He Drops the Lute For the Bayonet'

“Clean-shaved and conservatively dressed, with no oddities of posture or gait, he should have merged imperceptibly into a street crowd. But he didn’t. He stuck out, for reasons almost impossible to capture and fix in words. The best one can say is that he stood and walked and talked like other men, only more so. He was conspicuously normal.” 

There’s an ideal to covet. We’ve grown accustomed to men parading like peacocks in a courtship ritual. Too often the costume and accessories are worn to compensate for the  absence of genuine, less superficial accomplishments. Any dolt can strut and preen. H.L. Mencken confined his showmanship to his prose, where it belonged.

 

Mencken had died on January 29, 1956, more than seven years after suffering a stroke that left him unable to speak or write – the cruelest fate for so industriously articulate a man. The passage above is from an obituary/tribute for Mencken written by a former colleague, Gerald W. Johnson, and published in the February 11, 1956 issue of The Saturday Review. Johnson’s observation suggests that Mencken embodied the ideal formulated by Flaubert in an 1876 letter to Gertrude Tennant: “Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

 

Much of the best prose by Mencken is certainly “violent and original.” My favorite line can be found in “The New Poetry Movement,” collected in Prejudices, First Series (1919): “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” What’s forgotten is the context. Mencken is talking about Ezra Pound:

 

“The American in headlong flight from America – to England, to Italy, to the Middle Ages, to ancient Greece, to Cathay and points East. Pound, it seems to me, is the most picturesque man in the whole movement – a professor turned fantee, Abelard in grand opera. His knowledge is abysmal; he has it readily on tap; moreover, he has a fine ear, and has written many an excellent verse. But now all the glow and gusto of the bard have been transformed into the rage of the pamphleteer: he drops the lute for the bayonet. One sympathizes with him in his choler. The stupidity he combats is actually almost unbearable. Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. But this business, alas, is fatal to the placid moods and fine other-worldliness of the poet. Pound gives a thrilling show, but--.”

 

Johnson, the obituary writer, was a colleague of Mencken’s at the Baltimore Evening Sun from 1926 to 1939 and the Baltimore Sun from 1939 to 1943. He knew the man and the writer, and writes of him:

 

“Mencken would have disliked being compared to pietistic Samuel Johnson, but he played a very similar role in his own city. The difference was that Johnson always and Mencken never took himself too seriously; nevertheless, each was not only witty, ‘but the cause that wit is in other men’ [Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 2]. Nor did it stop with wit. They caused a zest for life to be renewed in other men, they touched the dull fabric of our days and gave it a silken sheen. Boswell, greatest of biographers, recognized but never could translate into words the quality that made contact with his hero a milestone in every man’s life; and if Boswell could not do it for Johnson, what hope is there that any lesser person can do it for Mencken? One may only record the fact and pass on.”