Mencken’s World of Words

When moved to scorn--and he was often scornful--H. L. Mencken was never at a loss for words. He lampooned “quacks” and “dolts” and “clodpolls,” “snuffling publishers” and “jitney messiahs.” He railed against the writers of “tosh” and “balderdash,” “flubdub” and “buncombe” and “brummagem.” He took aim at “skullduggery” and “numskullery” and “humbuggery.” He tore into “piffle” and “blather.”

Even if you knew nothing of Mencken, coming to him by way of this fresh new collection, “H.L. Mencken on American Literature,” you would hardly be surprised to learn that in mid-career he published an enormous linguistic study, “The American Language,” whose ever-expanding revisions and compendious supplements preoccupied him nearly to the end of his long life. (Mencken was born in 1880, in Baltimore, and died there in 1956.)

He was especially fond of “gingery” words--the pungency of slang, the rankness of a homespun vulgarity. The language of vitriol--the righteous indignation of the affronted literary critic--came to him naturally.

Mencken, with his love of the vernacular, spoke of giving a book a “mauling” or a “slating.” These days, we’re more likely to call it a “trashing.” Either way, the critic who has a flair for deft dismissals is in possession of a highly prized, but ultimately trivial, talent. Certainly, we don’t now read Mencken to see him send smartly on its way some long-forgotten book by some long-forgotten author. Droll though he could be, Mencken didn’t have that gift, so vividly possessed by a successor of his like Randall Jarrell, for converting a straw book into a golden denunciation.

No, Mencken’s critical talent--which was considerable--lay in an ability to address full-bloodedly, with very little posing or throat-clearing, an impressive range of material, much of it assembled in “H.L. Mencken on American Literature.” He cultivated an invitingly lucid manner that often supported complicated thought.

Mencken had an unusual knack for holding in his head, in dynamic equilibrium, wholly contrary notions. Though critics customarily make a show of presenting balanced views--ever ready to leap forward, ambidextrously, with one more “on the other hand”--Mencken’s example reminds us of how rare is a critical capacity for regarding virtues and vices simultaneously, without allowing one to cancel out the other.

Have the stylistic shortcomings of Theodore Dreiser ever been pointed out more tellingly than by Mencken, who wrote of him, “You may say that he writes with a hand of five thumbs, and that he has no more humor than a hangman, and that he loves assiduity so much that he often forgets inspiration altogether”?

Mencken later added: “I often wonder if he gets anything properly describable as pleasure out of his writing--that is, out of the actual act of composition.” And yet he also called Dreiser’s “Jenny Gerhardt” the “best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ ” When he says of Dreiser, “He must do his work in his own manner, and his oafish clumsiness and crudeness are just as much a part of it as his amazing steadiness of vision, his easy management of gigantic operations, his superb sense of character,” it’s clear that Mencken has done far more than arrive at a critical apercu: He has grappled in a large-souled way with a large-souled writer.

A couple of sentences in Mencken’s review of Dreiser’s “A Hoosier Holiday” illuminate the peculiar verve and brilliance of both men: “I know of no book which better describes the American hinterland .... It is, in more than one way, the heart of America, and yet it has gone undescribed. Dreiser remedies that lack with all his characteristic laboriousness and painstaking.”

Better than the other critics of his time, and better than most of the novelists he examined, Mencken understood how much of the authentic American experience was going unharvested in its literature. As a critic who initially aspired to become a poet, and later longed to be a novelist, before eventually surmising that his creative talents were not up to either task, Mencken keenly perceived the poignancy of opportunities untapped or squandered.

Hence his almost feverish embrace of early Sinclair Lewis, particularly “Main Street” and “Babbitt.” In the former, Mencken found “the typical story of the typical American family”; in the latter, “the average American of the ruling minority.” In both, he detected a clearheaded dissection of an ascendant national phenomenon, a rising middle class whose conformity and unreflective boosterism located it somewhere between tragedy and farce. Mencken reveled in the observant, faithful-to-life ironies of Lewis, all the more so because here was a reality which, although ubiquitous, most writers failed to see.

Although S.T. Joshi, editor of “H.L. Mencken on American Literature,” does a fine job with annotation and explication, he makes a mistake in emphasizing Mencken’s critical clairvoyance. Joshi concludes his introduction with the observation that Mencken “played his part--and it was a significant part--in establishing the American literary canon, and all that remained was to confirm his judgments. In large part, posterity has done exactly that.”

Yet, if Mencken was clear-sighted in one eye, he was surely purblind in the other. He was someone who valued James Branch Cabell over Henry James; who believed that “The Great Gatsby” was “not to be put on the same shelf” with “This Side of Paradise”; who remained oblivious while modern American theater underwent its bloody and glorious birth; who scarcely noticed the burgeoning of American modernism and the greatest flowering of poetry our country had ever known.

Nor--I’m sorry to say--does a lot of Mencken’s humor hold up. He might well have been talking about himself when, speaking presciently of Ring Lardner, he predicted that much of his humor would be “puzzling and soporific” by 2000. Mencken adored Lardner (“no other contemporary American, sober or gay, writes better”), yet adoration did not blind him to the notion that even the punchiest humor has a way of turning into--a fine phrase--”archaic jocosities.”

One of Mencken’s many biographers noted that “it is often difficult to read him without tears of laughter streaming down one’s face”--but this is a difficulty that I, making my way through various stretches of Mencken over the years, have always managed to surmount. Although Mencken on occasion could be wittily quotable (as in his classic characterization of the American puritan as someone beset by “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”), he was far too much of a phrase-mill (some 2 million words of collected reviews) to play the epigrammatist for long.

Reservations about Mencken--as his example so splendidly reminds us--can and probably should coexist with an unbudgeable affection and admiration. While I was reading “H.L. Mencken on American Literature,” there were certainly times, especially during his spirited discussions of tertiary figures (Percival Pollard? Paul Elmer More? Will Levington Comfort?), when my patience thinned. But this same spiritedness was what inspired him to remark, wonderfully, of Sherwood Anderson, that “the fatuous omniscience of the average novelist is not in him.” Or of Howells: “He is never content to let well enough alone: he is always impatient to put in everything he can think of, to gild his lily until it shines like a set of false teeth.” Or of himself, after reviewing at a frenetic pace year after year: He was a man with a heart “as bulged and battered as a gladiator’s ear.”

Dynamo that he was, Mencken savored the vitality of seemingly irreconcilable viewpoints. I’d like to think he would have sympathized with both of the voices in my head as I made my way through this book. The one voice said, “This is not one of those American critics, like T.S. Eliot or Randall Jarrell, to whom I must return again and again.” The other voice said, “Even when he’s at his most wrongheaded, there’s something enlivening and irresistible about Mencken. Praise him.”

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H.L. Mencken on Reviewing

As for me, my literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one main idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. ... Here the astute reader may file a caveat: if I am so hot for freedom, then why do I belabor fellows whose sole crime, at bottom, is that they express their honest ideas in a banal and oleaginous manner? The answer is simple: it is not their sole crime. I do not belabor them for expressing their own ideas; I belabor them for trying to prevent other men expressing theirs--that is, for trying to set up standards and taboos that hinder the free play of the creative impulse. This effort seems to me to be intrinsically immoral, however exalted the purpose behind it. The essence of sound art is freedom.