The rehabilitation of H.L. Mencken

Mencken’s America

H. L. Mencken, edited by S. T. Joshi

Ohio University Press: 244 pp; $49.95 cloth, $22.95 paper

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This little book, if read, could revive H.L. Mencken’s reputation.

It has suffered a lot in recent years. The writer inappropriately nicknamed “the sage of Baltimore” -- avuncular he never was -- routinely made insulting remarks about Jews, African Americans, Italians and other immigrants. His tirades against Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal have come to look petty and dated. His fulminations against American culture have an aspect of crankiness in place of wit. In short, why read Mencken any more?

Selections assembled by editor S.T. Joshi in this new collection, “Mencken’s America,” demonstrate conclusively why we should. They show the journalist, editor and essayist to be an ardent defender of the best of American arts and letters. Even as he targeted academic pomposity and middlebrow insularity in the United States in the early 20th century, he vigorously promoted progressive writers and an expansive attitude toward imaginative culture.

He celebrates Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, Walt Whitman and, most of all, Mark Twain. Although Twain was famous before his death in 1910, Mencken suspected it was due more to his public readings in his famous white suit and the endless repetitions of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” than to his writing. Mencken regarded him as “the incomparable literary artist” with “instinctive gifts that lifted him, in ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ to kinship with Cervantes and Aristophanes” -- yet said even Twain was hindered by being born “in a Puritan village in the American hinterland.”

The heart of “Mencken’s America” is a group of six essays printed in the magazine Smart Set in 1913 and 1914 that Joshi has grouped in a section called “The American: A Treatise.” Mencken was in his early 30s then, reaching the peak of his powers, sure of himself.

What later came to be regarded as the cantankerous complaints of a fogy out of touch with his times here appear as assertive claims for a truly American literature reflecting a vigorous, uncowed culture. Its enemies -- and Mencken’s -- were a pervasive baleful Puritanism and the timidity of a poorly educated middle class so unsure of itself that it deferred to the pinched prescriptions of schoolmarms and stuffy professors.

Mencken wrote fast-moving prose that swirled and flashed as it pulsed over its subjects like water cascading over boulders in a mountain stream. Here he is on the perennial object of his satire, Puritanism in American life:

“Make the most cursory review of American history that you will, and you must surely be impressed by the persistence of the Puritan outlook upon the world, the Puritan conviction of the pervasiveness of sin, the Puritan lust to make a sinner sweat and yell. If there is one mental vice, indeed, which sets off the American people from all other folks who walk the earth, not excepting the devil-fearing Scotch, it is that of assuming that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that ninety-nine percent of them are wrong. This is the one great American contribution to the science of ethics, and the cornerstone of the American philosophy.”

Mencken liked to eat well, drink plenty, talk much, play Schubert with his friends and admire pretty girls. The America he longed for would too. He regarded Prohibition with horror and disliked places that embraced it. San Francisco was his favorite U.S. city, because it was so un-American. After Prohibition ended, he wrote: “San Francisco has returned to its more spacious and urban life. It is agreeably wet, sinful and happy. A civilized traveler may visit it today without any risk of being thrown into jail or ducked in a baptismal tank.”

Los Angeles, however, was a different story. “In Los Angeles,” Mencken wrote in the 1930s, “the hell question is always to the fore, and so the yokels find the place more to their taste. There are more than 10,000 evangelists in the town, all of them in constant eruption. They preach every brand of theology ever heard of in the world, and many that are quite unknown elsewhere.... There are Iowans in Los Angeles who go to church three times a day, and to a different basilica every time. It is a paradise of Bible-searchers.”

For Mencken, America provided a paradise of targets to be assaulted, skewered, pummeled and laughed at. No less American than the follies at which he took aim, Mencken -- we read here -- had a personal mission: the improvement, if possible, of Boobus Americanus.