'Unceasingly Amused According to My Taste'

Certain writers inspire profound ambivalence. We admire them for something – often style – and they let us down by writing something stupid, dull or otherwise offensive. It’s easier dealing strictly with good guys (Chekhov, for instance) and bad guys (like Louis-Ferdinand Céline). Among the bothersome I think first of Thoreau, whose prose is frequently superb until his snobbery and general contempt for his fellow humans get the better of him. 

Another is H.L. Mencken. For some of us, he is a prose phase we live through. His style can be addictive, particularly when you’re young and impressionable. As a rookie newspaper reporter, I remember aping his prose almost to the point of plagiarism. Still, his anti-Semitism rankles. Such a foolish prejudice for so intelligent a man. And his repeated denunciation of his fellow Americans for their purported idiocy grows quickly tiresome. Yet 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 Mencken.

 

In 1941, the marvelous, doomed critic Otis Ferguson reviewed Newspaper Days, the second of Mencken’s three memoirs. He wrote in The New Republic: “I would call Mencken a peculiarly American article, not only for his labors in establishing the language and the mildly ribald history of the press; but for the place he stands in, as a force for a certain liberation when we were only beginning to wake up, as a healthy explosion on the whole field of letters, as an exact and original writer and a man whose intolerant courage was at the service of others at a time when it did much good in clearing the air.”

 

In prose, Mencken is pure energy. Reading him at his best – the memoirs, The American Language (1919), a hundred or more essays – is a rejuvenating experience. In “On Being an American” (Prejudice: Third Series, 1922), Mencken concedes his agreement with many critics of the United States and asks:

 

“Well, then, why am I still here? Why am I so complacent (perhaps even to the point of offensiveness), so free from bile, so little fretting and indignant, so curiously happy? Why did I answer only with a few academic 'Hear, Hears' when Henry James, Ezra Pound, Harold Stearns and the emigrés of Greenwich Village issued their successive calls to the corn-fed intelligentsia to flee the shambles, escape to fairer lands, throw off the curse forever? The answer, of course, is to be sought in the nature of happiness, which tempts to metaphysics. But let me keep upon the ground. To me, at least (and I can only follow my own nose) happiness presents itself in an aspect that is tripartite. To be happy (reducing the thing to its elementals) I must be:

 

“a. Well-fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion.

 

“b. Full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of my fellow-men.

 

“c. Delicately and unceasingly amused according to my taste.”

 

This is classic Mencken, effortlessly muting the outrageous by making it sound so reasonable. Among the cruelest of ironies are his final years. Never stricken with writer’s block, always a reliable geyser of prose, Mencken suffered a stroke on the evening of November 23, 1948 at his stenographer’s house in Baltimore.  He was sixty-eight and would live for another eight years, severely impaired. “All he could do now,” Terry Teachout tells us in his biography of Mencken, “was sign his name, scrawl an occasional one-sentence note full of misspelled words, and recognize the names of people he knew when he saw them in the paper, though he had trouble remembering them otherwise.” This most facile of writers, almost pathologically prolific, was silenced. Mencken died in his sleep on January 29, 1956.

 

[The Ferguson review is collected in The Otis Ferguson Reader (December Press, 1982). Terry’s biography is The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (HarperCollins, 2002).]