More than 50 years ago, I purchased a modest paperback in an Oxford bookshop called The Vintage Mencken, with an introduction by Alistair Cooke, then is his heyday as a journalist for The Guardian and unmissable radio broadcaster of Letter from America. The book is an anthology of writings by Mencken and it has been my inseparable bedside companion ever since. Mencken was essentially American yet the sheer vivacity of his writing, his humour, his rhythms, his use of remarkable new words, all influenced me deeply and can teach valuable lessons to any user of the English language. I pay this grateful tribute to him.
 |
| HLM with his characteristic centre parting and cigar |
Henry Louis Mencken later always known as “HLM” (1880-1956) was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Apart from 5 years of marriage, he lived in the same house at 1524 Hollins Street all his life. His father August Mencken was of proud German extraction and owned a cigar factory. Henry loved Baltimore, its blowsy docks, the seafood bounty from Chesapeake Bay, its gentle civilisation and, as a newspaperman, its bibulous reporters, cops and judges. He discovered Twain’s Huckleberry Finn at the age of 9 and always described it as the best in American literature. Fearing his son would become a bookworm, his father sent Henry to the local YMCA which had a gym, but Henry came away with a hatred of sport and exercise. What finally drove him away were the activities of a pest in the Reading Room:
I became aware of the pimply one and presently saw him go to a bookcase and select a book [by a Methodist bishop]. “See here, fellows, let me have your ears for just a moment. ….” What it was he read I don’t recall precisely, but I remember some thumping and appalling platitude or other – something of the order of “Honesty is the best policy” or “It is never too late to mend”….The poor ass, it appeared, was actually enchanted and wanted to spread his joy. It was easy to recognise in him the anti-social animus of a born evangelist, but there was also something else - a kind of voluptuous delight in the shabby and preposterous, a perverted aestheticism like that of a latter-day movie or radio fan, a wild will to roll in and snuffle balderdash as a cat rolls in and snuffles catnip….. My father was immediately sympathetic when I told him about the bishop’s book, and the papuliferous exegete’s labouring of it. “You had better quit” he said, “before you hit him with a spittoon, or go crazy. There ought to be a law against such roosters.”
On leaving school, Henry was obliged to join the family cigar business where he did not shine. His father’s death in 1899 released him and he immediately joined The Baltimore Herald to learn the newspaperman’s trade; he worked and wrote hard, soon becoming the highest paid reporter. He also wrote short stories for other publications and in 1908 became a contributor to the monthly The Smart Set. Many of his best known pieces were published there and in its successor The American Mercury. HLM was the joint editor of The Smart Set from 1914 with his friend George Jean Nathan. He also moved to The Baltimore Sun, writing for it until 1941. He edited the Sunday then the Evening Sun and his various controversial columns, book reviews and drama criticisms, under the “HLM” bye-line, became widely read.
Mencken’s original literary heroes were Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad, but he fought against cultural colonialism, whereby London opinions were given undue weight in America. He championed American writers, notably uneven Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie), later F Scott Fitzgerald and many others. He admired and wrote a study of Friedrich Nietzsche, promoting the notion of the Superman.
Some of this was his pride on his German roots and ancestry. He hosted a music society in Baltimore comprising many German-American musicians, convivially refreshing themselves with Sauerkraut and seidels of Lowenbrau: he played the piano well and all his life he revelled in Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. He was particularly proud of his ancestor Johann Burkhard Menken from the University of Leipzig, who had employed Bach as a choirmaster. In the run-up to US entry to the Great War, Mencken was strongly pro-German, visiting Germany with a group of neutral US correspondents in 1917, deploring British propaganda and criticising Woodrow Wilson. His was a minority opinion before US entry and it became an unpopular and untenable one after entry.
A flavour of Mencken’s views can be garnered from his 1920 piece Star-Spangled Men, mocking the gaudy medals distributed to those serving the patriotic cause.
Imagine what (Sir) John Pershing would look like at a state banquet of his favourite American order, the Benevolent and Protective one of Elks, in all the Byzantine splendour of his casket of ribbons, badges, stars, garters, sunbursts and cockades – the lordly Bath of the grateful motherland, with its somewhat disconcerting “Ich Dien”; the gorgeous tricolor baldrics, sashes and festoons of the Legion d’Honneur………… Alas, Pershing was on the wrong side – that is, for one with a fancy for gauds of that sort. The most blinding of all known orders is the Medijie of Turkey, which not only entitles the holder to four wives, but also requires him to wear a red fez and a frozen star covering his whole façade. I was offered this order by Turkish spies during the war, and it wobbled me a good deal.
……………..If the nickel-plated eagle of the third class were given to every patriot who bored a hole through the floor of his flat to get evidence against his neighbours, the Krausmeyers, and to everyone who visited the Hofbrauhaus nightly, denounced the Kaiser in searing terms and demanded assent from Emil and Otto, the waiters,………..there would be no nickel left for our bathrooms…..Palmer [the oppressive Attorney-General] deserves to be rolled in malleable gold from head to foot and polished until he blinds the cosmos.
Mencken confidently entered the 1920s, doing battle with Puritanism, injustice and Prohibition which he defied and decried. He was interested in medical matters and railed sardonically against the “preposterous quackery” of Chiropractic:
Its pathology is grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are caused by the pressure of misplaced vertebrae upon the nerves which come out of the spinal cord – in other words, that every disease is the result of a pinch. This plainly enough, is buncombe. The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to a heroic pummelling by a retired piano-mover. This, obviously, is buncombe doubly damned.
He muses that the popularity of Chiropractic is some kind of natural selection reducing the population of the botched and the moronic:
If a man, being ill of a pus appendix, resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshoreman to have it disposed of, and submits willingly to a treatment involving balancing him on McBurney’s Spot and playing on his vertebrae as on a concertina, then I am willing, for one, to believe he is badly wanted in Heaven.
Mencken loved to clown but there was a serious issue to fight at Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 with a test case on the teaching, banned in that state, of Evolution. A schoolteacher Scopes was in the dock, defended by the famous civil rights lawyer, Clarence Darrow, volubly supported by Mencken. The prosecution was led by three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, a leading Fundamentalist. HLM’s despatches describing the trial and a Holy Roller outdoor service, The Hills of Zion, became classics. The court decided in favour of the state, but the $100 fine was derisory and Bryan had been badly mauled by Darrow. A fictionalised 1960 movie of the play Inherit the Wind tells the story with Fredric March, superb as Bryan, Spencer Tracy a fine Darrow and Gene Kelly a rather lightweight Mencken
 |
| Gene Kelly as Mencken |
 |
| Spencer Tracy (Darrow) and Fredric March (WJB) clash |
Bryan died 5 days after the trial and Mencken’s obituary pulled no punches:
One day he (Darrow) lured poor Bryan into….his astounding argument against the notion that man is a mammal. I am glad I heard it, for otherwise I’d never believe it. There stood the man who had been thrice a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic – there he stood in the glare of the world, uttering stuff that a boy of eight would laugh at. The artful Darrow led him on; he repeated it, ranted for it, bellowed it in his cracked voice. So he was prepared for the final slaughter. He came into life a hero, a Galahad, in bright and shining armour. He was passing out a poor mountebank.
Mencken was an avid reporter of US politics (he loved a free show) and attended every 4-yearly Democratic and Republican presidential nomination convention from 1904 to 1948. He admired Cleveland, was doubtful about Theodore Roosevelt and debunked Woodrow Wilson, in particular for his speeches:
He accomplished [better than editorial writers] the great task of reducing all the difficulties of the hour to a few sonorous and unintelligible phrases, often with theological overtones – that he knew better than they did how to arrest and enchant the boobery with words that were simply words, and nothing else. The vulgar like and respect that sort of balderdash…..He knew how to make them glow, and weep. He wasted no time upon the heads of his dupes, but aimed directly at their ears, diaphragms and hearts.
He remarked upon the good luck of Calvin Coolidge:
No other President ever slipped into the White House so easily, and none had a softer time while there. When in Rapid City SD on August 2 1927, he loosed the occult words, “I do not choose to run in 1928”, was it prescience or only luck? For one, I am inclined to put it down to luck. Surely there was no prescience in his utterances and manoeuvres otherwise. He showed not the slightest sign that he smelt black clouds ahead; on the contrary, he talked and lived only sunshine. There was a volcano boiling under him, but he did not know it, and was not singed. When it burst forth at last, it was Hoover who got the blast, and was fried, boiled, roasted and fricasseed.
Although Mencken wrote a classic account of the nomination of Franklin Roosevelt, from 1933 onwards, HLM lost his influence. His mocking of the New Deal played badly with 10m Americans unemployed. Mencken gave FDR credit for finally ending Prohibition but castigated him as craven for declining to make the “hallowed Southern tradition” of lynching blacks a Federal crime, so as not to offend his Southern Democrat supporters. Worse, Mencken’s love of Germany, made him blind to the institutionalised outrages against the Jews. He visited Berlin and toured Germany in 1938. He was silent, no doubt like many Americans, but much more was expected of Mencken.
 |
| Mencken celebrates the 1933 end of Prohibition |
Mencken ended his column in The Baltimore Sun in 1941 and devoted great labour to the revision of his remarkable tome The American Language recording with pride its distinctive words and idioms. First published in 1919 with major supplements in 1945 and 1948, this was a considerable achievement, as Mencken was a lover of words but not a trained philologist. Struck down by strokes in 1949, Mencken lingered on, sadly unable to read, write or properly communicate, with only his music and his garden at his beloved Hollins Street to console him, finally dying in 1956.
In this piece I have left Mencken to speak with his own voice. A man of many talents and many contradictions, he was always arresting; at his best Mencken was incomparable. He is my journalistic lodestone and I am immensely thankful for his influence.
SMD
10.06.13
Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment