I observe a tendency since his death to estimate him in terms of the content of his books. . . . Nothing could do him worse justice
—H. L. Mencken, on Huneker, in Prejudices: Third Series
The passage of time has not been kind to the reputation of H. L. Mencken. While the writer who was famously described by Walter Lippmann in the 1920s as “the most powerful influence on this whole generation of educated people” is still a legend in the folklore of American life and letters, it is my impression that he is now very little read. Only the pioneering, often entertaining studies in his multi-volume, much-revised The American Language (1919–1936) seem to have survived the oblivion to which posterity has consigned the bulk of his enormous output. Yet even this, his magnum opus, is now mainly consulted by other specialists in the study of American speech. Almost everything else—the books on Shaw and Nietzsche, his Notes on Democracy and In Defense of Women, the six volumes of Prejudices, the literary criticism and much more—gathers dust on the shelves of our libraries and used book shops.
This is not, in my view, a case of unjust neglect. Rereading Mencken in the first decade of the twenty-first century can be a disheartening experience, as I have lately discovered. Even the political reporting that once gave me a chuckle now strikes me as more dispiriting than amusing. The facile rhetoric of remorseless, uproarious ridicule that made Mencken a culture hero in the 1920s turns out, in retrospect, to have been exactly what Irving Babbitt said it was in 1928—“intellectual vaudeville,” full of bluster and farce aimed at what now seem easy targets, but thin in intellectual substance and woefully lacking in a sense of history.
That in its heyday this intellectual vaudeville was found to be vastly entertaining, and indeed liberating, by a great many intelligent people is not to be doubted. But not to be doubted, either, is that ours was a very different country and a very different culture in the early years of the twentieth century. It was a far more provincial country with a far more philistine culture than comparable readers would find tolerable today. In many respects, especially in his response to radical politics and the modernist avant-garde, Mencken shared this philistine outlook. It was only on the subject of religion that he departed from it, and even in that respect the role in which he cast himself—that of the village atheist—was already an established feature of provincial America. One of the keys to Mencken’s popularity with the young was his success in stripping the whole subject of its solemnity, treating religion not as a weighty matter, but as farce.
Unfortunately, he treated a great many other serious subjects in the same way. What really separates us now from Mencken’s eager acolytes in the 1920s—and, for that matter, from Mencken himself—are precisely the horrors as well as the achievements of the twentieth century that he missed or dismissed or otherwise chose to regard as beneath serious notice. Among them, alas, were the two World Wars, the Leninist revolution and the spread of Communist totalitarianism, Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazi conquest of Western Europe, the Holocaust, and virtually all of the principal currents of modern thought in literature, philosophy, and the arts. While he busied himself demolishing the pretensions of yahoo preachers, rotarians, prohibitionists, and sundry writers and public figures with little claim on the attention of posterity, Mencken remained cheerfully oblivious to the political and cultural earthquakes that were irreversibly altering the very civilization he claimed to represent. That, I believe, is the fundamental reason why Mencken is so little read today.
Mencken remained oblivious to the political and cultural earthquakes of his time.
Still, if Mencken is no longer much read—and, for some of us, no longer even readable—what remains of the Mencken legend has proved to be sufficiently durable to assure him a place in that class of secondary historical personages whom many people are interested in reading about. In this respect, at least, Mencken has had the luck, more than a century after his debut as a journalist and critic, to engage the attention of a gifted biographer who is himself a journalist and critic, and the good news is that Terry Teachout’s The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken1 is one of the best of the many biographies that have been devoted to the subject since the 1920s. It is certainly the best introduction to the subject that is now available, and unlike some of the others I have read it neither hesitates to give us the lowdown on Mencken’s many deficiencies as a writer nor goes overboard in exonerating him from the many charges that continue to be brought against him—including my own. About the character flaws of the man himself, which in retrospect are fairly numerous and sometimes grave, Mr. Teachout is remarkably candid, too.
This is not to say that The Skeptic is a debunking or deconstructive study. Mr. Teachout writes with a good deal of affection and respect for his subject and, as a seasoned journalist himself, with a certain envy as well, but without minimizing the serious fault to be found in both the life and the work. The Skeptic is, in this respect, a distinctly un-Menckenesque book, and for that we can be grateful. For it was rarely Mencken’s own practice as a writer to give us an even-handed account of anything—in literature or in life—that won his admiration or, what was more often the case, provoked his scorn. As a consequence of this disabused approach to his subject, Mr. Teachout is able to give us vivid accounts of both Mencken’s phenomenal stardom in the 1920s and the collapse of his influence once that heady decade had run its course. For like the failed investments that caused the 1929 Wall Street Crash, Mencken’s stock, too, proved in the dark days of the 1930s Depression to have been wildly overrated. What Mr. Teachout has thus given us in this biography is a history of a fallen idol.
But what sort of idol was Mencken in the period of his prime? Three-quarters of a century after the curtain came down on Mencken’s virtuosic performance as master of the revels, it requires a certain leap of the imagination to comprehend not only the nature of his success but also the character of the public that responded so enthusiastically to the sweeping indictment of American democracy and the American people that was so central to his journalistic mission. The louder he barked about the stupidity, the ignorance, the cowardice, and the backwardness of American society and its institutions, the more avidly was he embraced as a touchstone of wisdom and a guide to life. And although Mencken was said to be “the god of the undergraduates” in the 1920s, it wasn’t only the young who responded to his appeal. Intellectual eminences on the order of Edmund Wilson and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes were no less eager to join in cheering Mencken on.
My own view is that Mencken’s ascendancy in the 1920s cannot be understood in isolation from the single stupidest legislative act ever perpetrated upon the American people: the passing into law in 1919 of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited the manufacture, transportation, sale, and possession of alcoholic beverages. This had the immediate effect of criminalizing the tastes and habits of a massive, law-abiding segment of American society. It had the additional effect of making the Government and its elected representatives objects of widespread derision and disrespect.
Minus the consequences of Prohibition, Mencken would no doubt have continued to enjoy a highly successful career as an anti-establishment journalist with a flair for comic ridicule, just as he had in the years preceding the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment. It took Prohibition to make him an idol. When the law itself was seen to be both ridiculous and easily flouted, Mencken was given a much larger public stage on which to perform his railing, irreverent vaudeville. The Government had itself created an enormous scofflaw public, as it may be called, ready to respond with enthusiasm to the free-wheeling assaults on the probity and authority of American institutions that Mencken produced as serial entertainment.
It took Prohibition to make him an idol.
In the early 1920s, stirred on by the inanities of Prohibition, Mencken discovered that what really interested him as a critic was neither literature nor politics but something else—the manners and mores of American life, of what nowadays we call lifestyle. “This shift of focus,” writes Mr. Teachout, “is mirrored in the changing contents of the Prejudices collections. Where Prejudices: Second Series (1920) had led off with ‘The National Letters,’ Prejudices: Third Series (1922) opens with a similarly extended essay called ‘On Being an American’ in which Mencken … hands down a comprehensive indictment of American culture.” This is the key passage cited by Mr. Teachout:
Well, you can see why Mencken’s vaudeville was such a resounding success in the boom years of the 1920s. Mr. Teachout is surely correct in observing that “All of Mencken is in this passage,” and correct, too, in pointing out that “On Being an American” could have served “as a prospectus for the American Mercury, in which Mencken would turn away from the world of art to jeer at every aspect of the common life in postwar America, secure in the knowledge that his subscribers would laugh with him.” Yet, while Mencken was jeering at everything he took to be the “common life” in America, and delighting the many fans who were even more ignorant than he was, he managed to overlook just about everything of artistic, intellectual, and historical distinction in American cultural life—never mind what was happening in Europe in the 1920s. You could learn more about the cultural achievements of the 1920s on both sides of the Atlantic from a single issue of the monthly Dial than from the entire run of the American Mercury. Later on, in the later 1920s and the 1930s, the same could be said about any single issue of The Hound and Horn and Partisan Review. Mencken never understood any of the period’s achievements at that level of cultural life.
There were other American writers who did, however—two of whom, James Gibbons Huneker and Willa Cather, Mencken professed to admire but from whom he appears to have learned little or nothing. Here, for example, is Willa Cather reviewing George Bernard Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite for the Pittsburgh Courier in 1899:
About the great events in music and opera, in the theater and in literature at the turn of the twentieth century, Cather wrote with a critical understanding that was far beyond anything Mencken ever comprehended, and she produced a body of critical work that should be better known than it is. In Cather’s writings on the arts we hear a highly cultivated voice of the civilization that was either mocked or merely ignored in Mencken’s vaudeville. Which is why Willa Cather’s criticism can still be read with pleasure and profit, while many of Mencken’s tirades are now bound to make us wince.2
In The Skeptic, Mr. Teachout has given us a fine portrait of the man and his work and his period, but I doubt if it will win Mencken many new readers. He is now too much of a period piece to be revivable. And the really ugly aspects of Mencken’s mentality—the vicious anti-Semitism, the total identification with German superiority and moral authority even in the face of Hitler’s criminality, and his unflagging contempt for democratic institutions in a period when fascism and communism loomed as the leading alternatives—all of this, combined with a cocksure confidence in his own virtue, is finally unforgivable.
1The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, by Terry Teachout; HarperCollins, 432 pages, $29.95.
2 See The World and the Parish: Willa Cather’s Articles and Reviews, 1893–1902, selected and edited with a commentary by William M. Curtin; University of Nebraska Press, 1970. Two volumes. Nearly a thousand pages.
