The eminent misanthrope of Baltimore

It’s a small but engaging literary form, deserving of its own modest library shelf: the biographies of curmudgeons. As a genre, it has its own peculiar challenges and evaluative criteria. Its very creation is likely to be haunted by a sense of self-generated menace, as the biographer inevitably begins to wonder how the emerging portrait might have stirred its subject’s formidable wrath. If you undertake to write the biography of, say, Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh or Kingsley Amis, you will be daily attended by a bilious ghost who stands ready to dismiss all your painstaking efforts as the laborings of a fool.

H.L. Mencken, the subject of Terry Teachout’s biography, was quick to brand those who offended him fools but perhaps quicker still to call them morons or idiots. Connoisseur of vituperation that he was, Mencken was partial to condemnations that had an air of the rational or scientific; words like “moron” or “idiot,” with their whiff of IQ-testing and lab assessments, carried a special appeal for him. Mencken wanted his readers to understand that his denunciations were not merely thoroughgoing and unqualified, they were also dispassionate and verifiable.

What would Mencken have made of Teachout’s book? He would have had to acknowledge, my guess is, that the writing is fluent and the judgments fair-minded. Teachout’s own career in many ways happily reflects his subject’s. Although Mencken, the literary man, accomplished much (he wrote books about politics, religion, philosophy and language) and aspired to far more (early on, he wished to be a poet and a novelist), at heart he was a newspaperman, an abiding loyalty understandable to Teachout, who worked for years on the Kansas City Star and the New York Daily News and who is now affiliated with Time, Commentary and the Washington Post. Mencken has found an experienced and affinitive biographer.

Henry Louis Mencken was born in 1880 in Baltimore, the son of a prosperous cigar manufacturer who was himself born in Baltimore. The family’s ancestry was German, a fact that loomed large in Mencken’s mind from the onset of his career (he was a great one for generalizing about national character traits) and that led him, in his 50s, into deep journalistic follies and a stubborn purblindness as Germany succumbed to the pandemic of Nazism. But however much Europe may have preoccupied Mencken’s thoughts, neither Berlin nor Paris nor London rivaled the reality of Baltimore. Nor, for that matter, could New York or Washington compete with his hometown. As an adult, Mencken continued to reside in his childhood house; he spent 67 of his 75 years sheltered under its roof.

Teachout refers to Mencken as “America’s greatest journalist,” a plausible claim that ultimately acknowledges a spirited, indefatigable triumph over numerous emotional and intellectual shortcomings. An aura of improbability surrounds Mencken’s whole career. His limitations, as Teachout evenhandedly points out, were multiple and severe. An autodidact whose formal schooling ended at 15, Mencken was a man of patchy education and broad but hardly catholic interests. The entire modernist explosion in the arts, which unfolded while he was still in mid-career, left him unmoved and untouched. His views, political and aesthetic, were arrived at early in his professional life, after which he remained largely impermeable to new evidence or new persuasions. Although he coined the term Bible Belt, he was ignorant of the South he habitually belittled, as he was of most of the country lying beyond the Baltimore-New York axis of his publishing efforts. He was -- a seemingly insuperable handicap for a journalist -- mostly unobservant and incurious about the hardships and deprivations and painfully postponed aspirations of the working-class people who made up the bulk of his beloved Baltimore, as they made up the bulk of that larger nation whose wayward passage from isolationism to active participation in World War I, from Prohibition to its repeal, from the paralysis of the Depression to the frenzy of World War II so regularly incensed him.

Yet from these very handicaps came some of his greatest strengths, for Mencken more than most people embodied the idea of possessing the virtues of one’s vices. His deadened sympathy to the plight of the poor was but one aspect of an otherwise frequently stimulating misanthropy. If you believe, as Mencken did, that the human race is “incurably idiotic,” that “most people live and die as anonymously and as nearly useless as so many bullfrogs or houseflies,” it naturally follows that their collective organizations -- their political parties, their churches, their social clubs -- are all guilty until proved innocent. There was little room in Mencken’s universe for respect rooted in tradition, consensus, custom or law, with the overall result that his writings time and again pose a tonic challenge to complacency. His favorite target was “the whole Puritan scheme of things, with its gross and nauseating hypocrisies, its idiotic theologies, its moral obsessions.”

And if most men are fools, it follows that in their disappointments they are less deserving of commiseration than of castigation: “It requires a conscious effort for me to pump up any genuine sympathy for the downtrodden, and in the end I usually conclude that they have their own follies and incapacities to thank for their troubles.” Yet hardhearted (to say nothing of wrongheaded) as this viewpoint sounds, it was personally emancipating, insofar as it allowed him to brandish his criticisms in the name of justice. Mencken was perhaps a rarity among misanthropes in his profound investment: in principles of fairness. It was of enormous importance to him that his battles -- against numskulls, nincompoops and boneheads -- not be exercises in mean-spiritedness. Always prone to overstatement, Mencken exaggerated when he often boasted that he adhered to no public code (“I am my own party”). The task of the crusading writer was established and clear: not to be degraded or corrupted by the foolishness around you. It was a point of honor to avoid taking cheap shots, and Mencken longed, as much as he longed for anything in the world, to be accounted an honorable man.

The hopeless -- the irredeemable -- misanthrope might be defined as somebody who can declare, “I was right, things have turned out disastrously,” and feel more pleasure in the first half of the sentence than regret about the second. Mencken as he aged seemed to slip further and further into this role. Certainly something went awry for him in his final decades. His hatreds, especially of Franklin D. Roosevelt, became hobbyhorses, and his later life seems painfully illustrative of the notion that those who ride hobbyhorses rarely get anywhere.

Some light was cast on the darkness of Mencken’s later years with the publication of “The Diary of H.L. Mencken” in 1989. (He had arranged to have various private papers sealed until 33 years after his death, which fell in 1956.) The diary disinterred various uglinesses, particularly in his attitudes about Jews and blacks. These were treated as revelations in the media and were roundly condemned.

But as Teachout points out, these were “revelations” only for the uninformed or the amnesiac, since most had already been broadcast, repeatedly, in Mencken’s previously published work. Perhaps too much has been written on the question of whether Mencken was a racist or an anti-Semite; certainly too much has been written, by both defenders and adversaries, seeking to prove him, in some absolute way, either guilty or innocent. Better to suggest, as Teachout does, that Mencken held a cluster of ill-thought-out attitudes, all too common in their era, ranging from the disreputable to the despicable -- and that he managed, even so, to find his closest friends among Jews and to go out of his way, as an editor, to promote black writers.

The many outraged responses to the diary prompted a number of notable authors, including Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Arthur Miller and John Hersey, to publish a collective letter in the New York Review of Books protesting this critical “overreaction” and reminding readers that Mencken was “a tremendous liberating force in American culture.” Theirs was a salutary gesture, and the hope is that Teachout’s book, in its lucid attempt to look both into and beyond Mencken’s personal failings, will also help refocus our critical energies on Mencken, the “liberating force.”

I do wish -- my chief reservation about the biography -- that Teachout had given equal attention to Mencken’s writerly virtues. He more than once makes the point that Mencken’s significance is often stylistic: a matter not of what he said but of how he said it. Yet Mencken’s achievement as a stylist is presented more or less as a given. There isn’t enough in “The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken” about how all of Mencken’s little linguistic felicities -- the playful alliterations (“The artist must be allowed his impish impulse”), the jarring metaphors (“to gild his lily until it shines like a set of false teeth”) -- combined to make Mencken’s voice, whatever his subject, so distinctive.

Mencken’s chief stylistic influence -- arguably, the chief extra-familial influence on his life itself -- was Mark Twain. Mencken’s boyhood reading of “Huckleberry Finn” was a conversionary experience. Its loving clash of dialects -- those rich, contending American voices afloat on the great American river -- led in time to Mencken’s multi-volume magnum opus, “The American Language,” and to a prose style that injected into American belles-lettres the punch and pungency of slang.

What is perhaps most striking about Mencken’s prose is that he, unlike so many writers who espouse “everyday speech,” did not simplify his vocabulary or pare his clause-laden constructions: the use of “low” language wasn’t coupled with any talking down to his audience. The result is that in Mencken’s prose you’re likely to meet, cheek by jowl, constructions like “benign asses” and “brummagem millenniums,” “acerbitous” and “flubdub.” (In choosing to pepper an essentially rococo prose with colloquialisms, Mencken was a forerunner to various later writers with whom he had little else in common, including J.D. Salinger, Jean Stafford and John Cheever.)

There’s a lovely, even a redemptive, irony in Mencken’s fondness for slang. While he may have dismissed the “instinct of inferior men to herd themselves in large masses” and railed away at the “middling, dollar-grubbing, lodge joining, quack-ridden folk,” he treasured the fruits of their creativity, as expressed in the mostly anonymous developments of their ever-evolving argot. To the man in the factory, to the woman in the sweatshop, the literature to which Mencken devoted his life was frequently off-limits. It wasn’t for them -- the creating of such books. No, often the only “literature” their necessitous lives allowed was the coining of new expressions for old laments -- the minting of all those ingenious, piquant, wry slang terms that Mencken the stylist so eagerly pounced upon and incorporated into his work. Hence, even while he was fulminating against them, damning the morons and the idiots, Mencken was paying them homage.