Second Mencken Chrestomathy (3 page)

“As I grow older,” Mencken wrote in the preface to
Minority Report
, “I am unpleasantly impressed by the fact that giving each human being but one life is a bad scheme. He should have two at the lowest—one for observing and studying the world, and the other for formulating and settling down his conclusions about it. Forced, as he is by the present irrational arrangement, to undertake the second function before he has made any substantial progress with the first, he limps along like an athlete only half trained.” Much of the interest of the
Chrestomathys
lies in the way they show how H. L. Mencken viewed his life’s work from the vantage point of middle age (and, though he did not know it, at the very end of his career). These volumes contain the essays he most wanted to preserve, revised to his satisfaction; they are the closest thing to a literary testament he chose to leave behind. With the publication of
A Second Mencken Chrestomathy
, that testament is now available in its entirety.

A S
ECOND
M
ENCKEN
C
HRESTOMATHY
appears at a time when a great deal of journalistic attention has lately been devoted to H. L. Mencken. The opening of
My Life as Author and Editor
and
Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work
, the memoirs Mencken left to the Enoch Pratt Free Library on condition that they remain under seal for thirty-five years after his death, was treated not as a long-delayed footnote to his career but as a major news story in its own right. The publication of an abridged trade edition of the first of these memoirs—and, earlier, of Mencken’s diary—triggered a flood of criticism and commentary, some of it as hostile as anything written during his lifetime.

That critics are still quarreling over Mencken would have astonished many of his contemporaries. Edgar Kemler, his first postwar biographer, claimed as early as 1950 that “except for
The American Language
, the
Days
books, and a few selections” from his other books, Mencken wrote “no works likely to endure.” Mencken himself affected to believe that the shelf life of most of his work would be brief. “My happiest days,” he said in the preface to the original
Chrestomathy
, “have been spent in crowded press-stands, recording and belaboring events that were portentous in their day, but are now forgotten.… What the total of my published writings comes to I don’t know precisely, but certainly it must run well beyond 5,000,000 words. A good deal of it, of course, was journalism pure and simple—dead almost before the ink which printed it was dry.” Yet by 1948 Mencken must have suspected that he had already passed the test of time, and today there is no doubting it. He is the only American journalist of his generation whose work is still read—who is, indeed, a genuinely popular writer. The artificial respiration of tenure-hungry scholars has played no part in keeping his memory green; to the extent that he is remembered, it is because there is something about his writing that appeals to the common reader.

At first glance, the exact nature of this appeal is baffling. It’s temptingly easy to treat Mencken as a period piece, a controversialist whose battles were won long ago and whose work has survived simply because it is so well written. But wonderful as his prose style is (and no finer prose has been written by an American), this explanation will not do. If good writing were enough to keep polemics alive, Mencken’s Monday Articles on the ins and outs of Baltimore politics would be as widely read as “In Memoriam: W.J.B.” or “The Sahara of the Bozart.” In fact, Mencken’s best journalism was concerned less with battles than with wars. At the heart of his critique of American life, for example, is his hatred of “the whole Puritan scheme of things, with its gross and nauseating hypocrisies, its idiotic theologies, its moral obsessions, its pervasive Philistinism,” all of which he firmly believed to be intrinsic to the American national character. Theologies (and ideologies, their secular brethren) come and go, but the conceptions of human nature from which they spring are forever with us, and to leaf through the
Second Chrestomathy
is to be struck by how often Mencken, in the course of bashing away at long-forgotten manifestations of the “Puritan
Kultur
” of the ’20s, says things scarcely less applicable to the very different America of today:

Much of what Mencken has to say is, of course, entirely predictable. He is the apostle of common sense, and of a realism so hard as to be hopelessly ill suited to the prevailing softness of our own Age of Sensitivity. Whatever the disorder in question, man’s irremediable stupidity was Mencken’s universal diagnosis, the horse-laugh his preferred antidote. Those who take offense easily are, now as ever, unlikely to find him anything other than offensive. This is particularly true of earnest believers in what he liked to call “the uplift.” Anyone who spends his days grubbing for solutions to notoriously intractable social problems can have little in common with the cold-eyed skeptic who wrote in the first issue of the
American Mercury
: “The Editors have heard no Voice from the burning bush. They will not cry up and offer for sale any sovereign balm, whether political, economic or aesthetic, for all the sorrows of the world.… The world, as they see it, is down with at least a score of painful diseases, all of them chronic and incurable.”

Even those who find Mencken’s philosophy tonic are likely to shrink from some of its specific applications. His hardness too often shades into outright brutality; he is almost always simplistic, and very often demonstrably wrong on factual matters. Yet the substance
of his opinions has surprisingly little to do with the pleasure we take in his way of expressing them. He once called poetry “a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music,” a sentiment echoed elsewhere in this volume. (“Walt Whitman was the greatest of American poets, and for a plain reason: he got furthest from the obvious facts. What he had to say was almost never true.”) One might just as well speak of Mencken’s own poetic quality. Writing in great unbroken arcs of gusto, he briskly sweeps the reader along from one outrageous assertion to the next:

But to dismiss Mencken as a pure stylist, a Wodehouse-like juggler of shiny metaphors, is to ignore the fact that his attitude toward life is the point of his work. This attitude, as has often been remarked, is profoundly bleak: few American writers have had a stronger sense of the futility of man’s earthly existence. Yet there is nothing lugubrious about Mencken’s tragic sense of life. Perhaps the most revealing selection in
A Second Mencken Chrestomathy
is the Monday Article he wrote on the death of Albert Hildebrandt, one of his oldest friends: “The universe is run idiotically, and its only certain product is sorrow. But there are yet men who, by their generally pleasant spirits, by their extraordinary capacity for making and keeping friends, yet manage to cheat, in some measure, the common destiny of mankind, doomed like the beasts to perish.” What was true of Hildebrandt was doubly true of his distinguished
obituarist, whose habitual reply to the idiocies of the universe was a sardonic grin. “We live in a land of abounding quackeries,” he once said, “and if we do not learn how to laugh we succumb to the melancholy disease which afflicts the race of viewers-with-alarm.” This is the ultimate source of Mencken’s abiding appeal: “He achieves his effect,” Joseph Epstein has rightly and beautifully said, “through the magical transfer of
joie de vivre
.” The man who can look into the abyss and laugh is rare enough; when he can also make his readers laugh along with him, it matters little whether he was right or wrong about capital punishment or the novels of Henry James.

In the end. H. L. Mencken’s writing, like that of all the great essayists, is valuable not so much for what it has to say (undeniably compelling though that often is) as for what it tells us about the character of the man who said it. “The goods that a writer produces,” he wrote in
My Life as Author and Editor
, “can never be impersonal; his character gets into them as certainly as it gets into the work of any other creative artist, and he must be prepared to endure investigation of it, and speculation upon it, and even gossip about it.” Surely Mencken’s own character got into every word he wrote, and it is writ large on every page of this book: witty and abrasive, self-confident and self-contradictory, sometimes maddening, often engaging, always inimitable.

A S
ECOND
M
ENCKEN
C
HRESTOMATHY
is based on five letter files of manuscript material labeled “Material Collected by H.L.M. for a proposed second volume of A Mencken Chrestomathy” in the Mencken Collection of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. The first file contains approximately 250 edited typescripts (there are several duplicates and a few variant versions) of passages excerpted by Mencken from his uncollected newspaper and magazine articles and from ten of his books:
The American Credo, Damn! A Book of Calumny
, the revised version of
In Defense of Women, Notes on Democracy
and the six volumes of
Prejudices
. All of this material is in the typing of Mrs. Rosalind C. Lohrfinck, Mencken’s secretary, with interlinear corrections by Mencken. The second and third files contain mounted clippings of columns from the Baltimore
Sunpapers
and unsorted carbons of various other published articles. The fourth and fifth files contain loose, unsorted clippings from newspapers and magazines, some dating as far back as the early 1900s.

This book contains 219 of the 250-odd typescript passages edited by Mencken, plus nineteen unrevised articles drawn from the second and third files.
†
The remaining passages either dealt with matters of little interest to modern-day readers, overlapped substantially with other passages or were too fragmentary to publish in their existing state. I have supplied sixty-seven passage titles, as well as all chapter titles. (In some cases Mencken failed to supply a title of his own; in others, he simply carried over the title of the original article from which the passage was drawn, often with misleading results.) I have supplied source notes where Mencken did not.

All introductory notes were written by Mencken especially for the
Second Chrestomathy
, with the following exceptions, adapted by me from other works by Mencken: The notes to “The Pushful American,” “A Novel a Day,” “A Novel of the First Rank” and “An American Novel” (and the footnote in “Marginal Note”) are from
My Life as Author and Editor
. The note to “Interlude in the Socratic Manner” is from
Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work
. The note to “The Pulitzer Prize” is in part from
My Life as Author and Editor
and in part from
Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work
. The note to “The Metaphysic of Rotary” is from the prefaces to
Americana
1925 and
Americana
1926. The note to “Notice to Neglected Geniuses” is from Mencken’s Monday Article in the Baltimore
Evening Sun
for August 20, 1920. The note to “Criticism of Criticism of Criticism” is based on Mencken’s handwritten notations in the
Second Chrestomathy
typescript.

The arrangement of this book, though modeled on the original
Chrestomathy
, is entirely my own doing. (Mencken left only a few sketchy marginal notes suggesting possible chapter titles.) I have
done a limited amount of additional editing of the text, mostly to correct typographical errors and reconcile stylistic inconsistencies; I have retained Mencken’s customary usages, including his idiosyncratic approach to capitalization and his period spelling. Following Mencken’s example in the passages he revised most extensively, as well as in his editing of the original
Chrestomathy
, I have closed up line breaks and unnecessary paragraph breaks and excised superfluous exclamation points. I have also done a bit of topping and tailing on certain passages extracted from books or longer articles, and silently made a few cuts of my own in order to prune redundancies and now-obscure topical references. All ellipsis points are Mencken’s and, as in the original
Chrestomathy
, are
not
intended to indicate cuts (except in “A New Constitution for Maryland” and “Nietzsche on Christianity”). All footnotes are Mencken’s except for the one in “Robert Louis Stevenson,” which is mine.