Remembering the Sage of Baltimore

Michael C. Spencer, Chairman of the French Department at the University of Queensland, Australia, once wrote about Charles Fourier that “the autodidact had ideas on everything; the major difficulty facing even the most casual reader is whether or when to take them seriously.” The same could easily be said about H.L. Mencken, given both his propensity for truculent polemic and the sheer amount of topics he covered—so many topics, in fact, that he has a whole room named after him at the Enoch Pratt Library—during a near 60-year career writing for the Baltimore Sun, the Smart Set, the Mercury, and other publications.

The journalist, essayist, editor, and all-around contrarian wrote in 1922 that “a cosmos infected by Socialists, Scotsmen and stockbrokers must suffer damnably,” and in 1949 that “I am perfectly willing to admit that [democracy] provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.” Where to begin?

Yet before one accuses Mencken with charges of maliciousness, obliviousness, or garrulity, one should note, if nothing else, his integrity. “The plain truth is—and how could it be plainer?—,” hewrote in The Nation in 1923, “that I practise criticism for precisely the same reason that every other critic practises it: because I am a vain fellow, and have a great many ideas on all sorts of subjects, and like to put them into words and harass the human race with them.”

Mencken asserted such lest he be confused for a German spy, an admirer of Coolidge sub rosa, or a fanatical American chauvinist. Apparently the last was the most offensive accusation, since he readily admitted in the same article that while “all these notions are nonsense; only the first has even the slightest possibility.” At least a German spy would retain her cynicism.

And speaking of misunderstood German cynics, Mencken offers a telling defense of Nietzsche in the Smart Set in 1920, rebutting the prevalent criticism that “most of his books are no more than strings of apothegms, with the subject changing on every second page” by writing that “professors are not used to that sort of writing. Nietzsche employed too few words for them—and he had too many ideas.” Perhaps Mencken felt a kinship not just ethnically or nationally but vocationally; he predicted that his work, often written in a similar, punctuated style, would suffer the same undue
barrage from established academia as, say, Human All-Too-Human.

One, then, must wonder to which audience Mencken ultimately wanted to connect, since he was at the same time an elitist and a recalcitrant populist, writing in “Meditation on Meditation” from the Smart Set in 1920: “The ideas that conquer the [human] race most rapidly and arouse the wildest enthusiasm and are held most tenaciously are precisely the ideas that are most insane. This has been true since the first ‘advanced’ gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown, and began his first
lecture tour....”

So if not for the academics, and not for “the mob,” and not for compatriots, for whom? To lambaste professors, philosophers, priests, and dish-washers (not to mention Anglo-Saxons), while writing a chrestomathy with thirty chapters, each with sub-chapters—indeed, while using the word “chrestomathy” in the first place—seems contradictory at best and duplicitous at worst.

Yet, perhaps it mattered little to Mencken if his ideas achieved unifying comprehensiveness. Or, perhaps, he understood even before television the dwindling attention spans of the average citizen. Either way, what can be said about him is that he at least never buried the lead, and at least expanded our vocabulary without using phrases like “critically important” or “most unique.” A
simultaneous attention to brevity and detail is rare, and if for nothing else we should appreciate Mencken for never wasting our time.

And if we’d like to take it further, we might also appreciate Mencken for paving the way for future iconoclastic journalists and essayists, the most notable being Christopher Hitchens, about whom the opening quote might also be readily applied. Doesn’t “Why Women Aren’t Funny” sound like the title to something Mencken might write? Or, for that matter, “God Is Not Great”; Mencken, remember, coined the term “Monkey Trial,” and argued fervently against religion at a time when it wasn’t nearly as trendy or as easy to do so as it is now.

“Darrow has lost this case. It was lost long before he came to Dayton,” Mencken wrote of the trial, “But it seems to me that he has nevertheless performed a great public service by fighting it to a finish and in a perfectly serious way. Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.”

Could you imagine a person who wrote this passionately and eloquently still writing for The Sun in 2011? These days we’re resigned to the fustian of Leonard Pitts for our “liberal” “op-ed” column, if we’re lucky. And if we’re unlucky we get cover stories about the unorthodox head-gear people are presently wearing to Ravens games (Funny, yes. News? No. News worthy of the cover? Maybe it’s more uplifting than the homicide rate?) or what irrelevant commentary John Waters has uttered about the latest development, regardless of the number of pertaining flamingos or offensively glorified prostitutes. I don’t think a mere sense of nostalgia can explain my longing for contemporary writers to write like Mencken. The exigent state of critical (actually critical) print
media begs for it.