№ 5
America’s Skeptical Sage
—The Globe and Mail, Jan. 25, 2003
The Skeptic
A Life of H. L. Mencken
By Terry Teachout
HarperCollins, 410 pages, $44.95
Oddly enough, it’s often the great journalists who are the first to belittle their craft. In 1915, just months after launching the New Republic, Walter Lippmann described the newspaper commentator as “a puzzled man making notes … drawing sketches in the sand, which the sea will wash away.” Many years later, the New York Times’ James Reston would be even less charitable: “A newspaper column, like a fish, should be consumed when fresh; otherwise it is not only undigestible but unspeakable.”
With that, Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956) probably would have agreed.
Mencken, often called the Sage of Baltimore, whom Edmund Wilson called “without question, since Poe, our greatest practicing literary journalist,” could admit privately that he, too, was “just” a newspaperman. “I am at my best in articles, written in heat and printed at once,” he confessed in his mid-40s. “Unfortunately, they are dead in a few weeks, and so cannot be reprinted.”
History, I suspect, might be kinder to the man. Reading him now, nearly 50 years after his death, still gives you a pretty sharp jolt. Indeed, no one bites like H. L. Mencken. That blunt, barrelling prose fixed on its familiar targets: politicians (of every stripe), the Bible Belt (a phrase he coined), the endless mediocrities of Middle America (the “booboisie”). It was Mencken, of course, who said that no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. Once, he was even asked why, if he found the United States so second-rate, he still lived there.
“Why do men go to zoos?,” he replied.
With Mencken, however, contradictions come with the turf. He could be a rousing ally, to be sure, and as the editor of two national magazines, Smart Set and American Mercury, he was one of the first to champion now-classic American novelists Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis. When his influence hit its peak, in the 1920s, he was one of those outsized characters who then seemed to be everywhere. He was journalism’s Babe Ruth, its F. Scott Fitzgerald, its Louis Armstrong.
In The Skeptic,Terry Teachout’s excellent new biography, Mencken isn’t coddled; nothing’s been cleaned up. Teachout — regular contributor to Commentary, Time and the Washington Post — is a genuine Mencken fan. But he’s also determined to tackle all things unpalatable in Mencken’s past, especially the raft of racist remarks (his anti-Semitism, in particular) which now seem to dog him. So, Teachout throws Mencken’s flaws into the open and still shows why he matters: why this newspaperman who never left Baltimore, who lived with his mother in the same house until he was 45, was still “a tremendous liberating force in American culture.”
Certainly, Mencken’s story could have been lifted straight out of Horatio Alger. Born in 1880, at 19 he was a reporter at the Baltimore Herald, at 25 its editor-in chief. Soon, he’d cross town to the Sun, where he’d remain for 50 years. Entirely self-taught (he once tried to learn news writing from a mail-order company), and intensely bookish (he read, in his early 20s, a novel a day), Mencken’s energy for language and ideas seemed boundless. To him, Huckleberry Finn was the pre-eminent example of American prose.
He was also enamoured of German culture, a taste he developed well before the First World War. Nietzsche was a particular hero. (In 1908, Mencken would write The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche — a “young man’s book,” says Teachout — and later translate Nietzsche’s The Antichrist.) Indeed, as Teachout points out, Mencken wrote a goodly number of books, mostly in his spare time, including treatises on democracy, religion and ethics, as well as The American Language, a pioneering work that showed the divergence of British and American English.
In The Skeptic, however, Teachout is remarkably good at juxtaposing Mencken’s jarring inconsistencies. “Anyone reading Mencken for the first time,” Teachout observes, “is likely to be struck by the conflict between the truculent pessimism of his philosophy and the infectious gusto of his temperament.” Mencken was, indeed, a devoted skeptic and, in his own words, “constitutionally unable to believe in anything absolutely.” He did think that people were fundamentally unequal, and, as Teachout explains, “his reading of Nietzsche left him certain that the strong ones — among whom he numbered himself — would naturally prevail.”
Teachout isn’t one to flinch; he isn’t about to whitewash Mencken’s even more distasteful habits of mind. Certainly, Mencken was an anti-Semite. (Before the war, Teachout explains, Mencken thought the United States should open its doors to Jewish refugees — but only if they were “his kind of Jews.”) And he could routinely disparage blacks, as well. Yet, many of Mencken’s closest friends were Jewish (editor and critic George Jean Nathan and publisher Alfred Knopf), and he spoke out forcefully against lynching and for civil rights.
But in the end, Teachout accepts Mencken’s self-contradictions, his glaring imperfections. Despite his misanthropy and his extreme skepticism, he was simply the supreme observer of his times. “In Mencken,” Teachout concludes, “style and content are one, and the resulting alloy is more than merely individual. It is a matchlessly exact expression of the American temper.” Mencken might be maddening (or worse), but his commentaries on politics and culture can still seem terrifically precise.
Then again, The Skeptic is an extremely fine guide. After Teachout’s finished, you’re prone to pick up Mencken, warts and all, this character (this sage, perhaps) pulled with perfect clarity out of the fog of our not so distance past.