'Too Darn Critical'

Only vitriol with a nanoparticle of truth really stings. The rest we brush away like mosquitos. The internet is a Hobbesian jungle and you had better be prepared to be mauled if you intend to spend time in its environs. Anonymity and distance encourage all those nasty human impulses. I wish I had H.L. Mencken’s proudly brazen sense of defiance. In 1928, Knopf published Menckeniana: A Schimpflexikon, a 132-page selection of invective aimed at him and gleaned from magazine articles, newspaper columns and even pamphlets. Mencken saved such things and pasted them in scrapbooks. In The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (2002), Terry Teachout refers to the collection as “an anthology devoted to scurrilous comments on his writing and person.” Here’s a sampler: 

From the chapter “As a Critic”: “Too flippant, too egotistical, too bizarre, too shocking, too altogether immoral, too prejudiced, too darn critical.” (from The Albany Knickerbocker-Press. I worked for its descendent, The Knickerbocker News, until Hearst euthanized it in 1988 --  one of three newspapers where I worked as a reporter that no longer exist.)

 

“As an Intellectual”: “Every mother who cooks a good meal for her children and darns her husband’s socks is more intelligent than Mencken.” (Prof. Frederick Woellner in the Los Angeles Times.)

 

“Zoological”: “Mencken, discussing any subject, reminds one of a dog killing a snake. He is foaming, frenzied, furious.” (Thomas Lomax Hunter in the Petersburg, Va., Index.)

 

“As an Artist”: “Mencken’s style at its best approaches the splendor of a Yiddish janitor denouncing a truckman.” (William Salisbury in the Salt Lake City Tribune. That sounds like a compliment to me.)

 

If the last one hints at anti-Semitism, consider the chapter titled “Kosher or Terefah?” The latter word is more often spelled tref. G.K. Chesterton, who dabbled in anti-Semitism, is quoted. Thanks to Dave Lull, we know the source: “Mr. Mencken is a clever and bitter Jew, in which a very real love of letters is everlastingly exasperated by the American love of cheap pathos and platitude. His philosophy is the sort of nihilistic pride which belongs to a man with a sensitive race and a dead religion.”

 

And another in a similar vein: “A Jewish expert screws in the microscope into his jaundiced eye, and shaking his head over all the jewels proffered in America by Americans.” (The Montana American, Butte.)

 

Let’s remember that Mencken in his Diary, not published until 1989, more than thirty years after his death, referred to two businessmen as “dreadful kikes” and associated Hollywood with “the Jews.”