Book Report/Literary Nonfiction

Mencken, H[enry] L[ouis].   A Mencken Chrestomathy.    1949.  Rpt. New York: Vintage, 1982.  627 pages.

Biographical sketch.  H. L. Mencken was born in Baltimore in 1880 and died there in 1956--a lifelong "Baltimoron," as he characterized himself.   In his early years, he was influenced by the philosophy of T. H. Huxley and Friedrich Nietzsche, the writing style of playwright G.B.Shaw, and the journalistic ethos of James Huneker.   He became a reporter for the Baltimore  Morning Herald   in 1899 and joined the staff of the Sun in 1906--an association that lasted until a few years before his death.  He was co-editor of The Smart Set magazine (1908-1923) and with George Jean Nathan founded The American Mercury and served as its editor from 1924-1933.  A well-known public figure in the early decades of the century (renowned for his beer fests during Prohibition as well as for his iconoclastic writings), Mencken's popularity faded during the Great Depression.  In 1930, he married Sara Powell Haardt, who died just five years later.  Author of more than twenty books (by his own calculation, more than 5,000,000 words) on subjects ranging from religion and women's rights to a three-volume study of The American Language, Mencken is considered by many to be the foremost essayist of his generation.  (Adapted from publishers' sketches of Mencken in both the Chrestomathy and H. L. Mencken: The American Scene [1982].  Extensive information about Mencken's life is contained in his three autobiographical volumes and in Fred Hobson's biography, Mencken: A Life [1994]).

Genre, summary, and structure.    Edited by Mencken himself shortly before he was silenced by a stroke in 1949, this "chrestomathy" (defined in the Preface as "a collection of choice passages from an author")  includes critical, cultural, and personal essays organized by topic (e.g., "Homo Sapiens," "Types of Men," "Pedagogy," "Quackery," "The Human Body," "Utopian Flights"--30 headings in all).  In this collection, Mencken, who describes his aim as "to present a selection from my out-of-print writings," eschews "journalism pure and simple--dead almost before the ink which printed it was dry" in favor of "material that continues to be of more or less current interest" (iv, vi).   The fact that the Chrestomathy has remained in print for the past fifty years testifies to the enduring interest of the material and the engaging "ribaldry" of Mencken's style. 
     The majority of the pieces were written during Mencken's heyday, between the end of World War I in 1918 and the start of the Great Depression in 1929, and first appeared as newspaper columns (predominantly in The Baltimore Sun, where he worked for over 40 years), articles (most commonly in the magazines that he edited--The Smart Set and The American Mercury), and chapters of books (including his six volumes of Prejudices, A Book of Burlesques, In Defense of Women, Notes on Democracy, and Treatise on Right and Wrong).   The thematic rather than chronological structure of the book underscores the fact that Mencken discovered his distinctive voice early on: essays composed in the late 1930s are stylistically indistinguishable from those written before World War I. 
     Although few of the essays are directly autobiographical, Mencken is never coy about announcing who he is and where he stands.  Rather than offer intimate details about his personal life, Mencken projects a blustery attitude--and it is this attitude (or voice or persona) that serves to unify the diverse works in the Chrestomathy.

The Mencken persona and style.  Consistent with his avowed aim to "stir up the animals," Mencken frequently poses as the fiercely anti-democratic aristocrat: "[This] incurable snob by nature declares that the things I esteem most in this world . . . to wit, truth, liberty, tolerance, and common decency, are kept alive, not by great masses of men, but by small groups of men, most of them very well fed" ("Rivals to Democracy," 166).   Nevertheless, while projecting himself as a spokesman for "the intelligent minority," Mencken also plays the wise-cracking, hard-boiled, heavy-drinking heathen journalist (indeed, he helped to create this popular stereotype).  His sketch of "The Iconoclast" may be read as a portrait of his textual self: "The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe--that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud.  One horse laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms" (17).  Mencken's dominant pose mingles a sense of superiority with comic vulgarity as he responds to the opposition (politicians, church leaders, "academic idiots," chiropractors, Klansmen, and various other species of "boobus Americanus") with explosive laughter and ridicule.
     Mencken's distinctive voice is habitually characterized by hyperbole--"an extravagant accentuation in degree," as he defines the trope.   He often pairs up adjectives alliteratively to heighten a response: "ignorant and ignominious," "succinct and savory," "faint and feeble," "seduced and soul-sick."  Likewise, he often amplifies epithets in thesaurus fashion: "In brief, the whole story is apocryphal, bogus, hollow and null, imbecile, devoid of substance" ("How Legends Are Made," 404).  His hybrid pose as the vulgar aristocrat is often dramatized linguistically by shifting levels of diction, current slang and neologisms keeping company with the exotic and arcane.   In an essay on James Huneker, for example, he writes that "Gloom hangs over [Huneker's New Cosmopolis] in opaque, cimmerian, mucilaginous clouds, like the fumes of sulpher, bromine, and molybdenum over Aetna, of selenium, tungsten, and praesdodidymium over Krakatos" (511).  A paragraph later, he deflates the pretension and copiousness of such a style by characterizing the "exotic" Huneker as "a sardine in the Sahara, a snow-bird in hell" (512).  Above all else, it is the larger-than-life Mencken persona--dramatized with gaudy stylistic flourishes--that causes his writings to endure and that marks these essays as works of literary nonfiction.

Mencken's readers.  Throughout the essays, Mencken implicitly invites the reader to side with the persona ("we") against the "herds" he excoriates.  His combative stance both presumes and establishes solidarity with his audience: the reader, in other words, is in on the joke.  In this fashion, Mencken's comic antagonism marks an effort to flatter the reader into accepting as valid his textual model of the world.  Not surprisingly, then, among Mencken's greatest admirers have been some of his favorite targets for ridicule--preachers and pedagogues, in particular.  Apparently suspending their disbelief in regard to Mencken's prejudices (or at least persuaded that they stand outside his circle of attack), readers have been titillated by his prose and flattered into adopting the iconoclastic role that he has fashioned for them. 

Overall evaluation and recommendation.  Though ample, the Chrestomathy is not exactly a "greatest hits" collection.  It contains no material from The American Language (his greatest single work--the first major study of American English) or from his three volumes of autobiography (far less combative in tone than Mencken's earlier work--and considered by some to be his finest writing).  Also missing are some of his most powerful and definitive essays, such as "The National Letters" and "On Being an American"--which do appear in The Vintage Mencken (1955), a slimmer and more focused volume.
     Nonetheless, A Mencken Chrestomathy serves as a coherent introduction not only to Mencken's writings (the inimitable prose style; the breadth of his intellectual, literary, and cultural interests) but also to American life (or at least Mencken's hyperbolic versions of that life) in the first three decades of the twentieth century: major writers (James, Conrad, Dreiser) and some minor ones (Bierce, Lardner); presidents (from "Roosevelt I" to "Roosevelt II") and pedagogues ("Professor Veblen") and prohibition ("The Perihelion of Prohibition") and once popular figures now largely forgotten  ("Valentino," "Sister Aimee," "In Memoriam: W. J. B.").  The collection includes such deservedly well-known essays as Mencken's comically ferocious attack on Southern culture ("The Sahara of the Bozart"), his argument favoring capital punishment ("The Penalty of Death"), his examination of the ugliness of American cities ("The Libido for the Ugly"), and his first-hand account of the Scopes trial ("The Hills of Zion").  Less well known but at least as interesting are countless other essays, including the brief character sketches in the section headed "Types of Men," his examination of "the superior intelligence of women" in "The Feminine Mind," and his refreshing analysis of "The Critical Process." 
     Unfortunately, to accommodate such a wide variety of writings, Mencken has edited several of the essays gathered here--in some cases (as in "The Sahara of the Bozart") cutting out some of the best bits.  Serious students of Mencken may be better served by the collections H. L. Mencken: The American Scene (Vintage 1982) and Prejudices: A Selection (Vintage 1958).  But as an ample Mencken sampler, the Chrestomathy effectively introduces new readers to a major American critic and satirist.  Those who enjoy the essays of Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion might well be interested in reading these ebullient cultural critiques from an earlier era.  Likewise, readers with an interest in American literature and government might find Mencken to be edifying as well as entertaining.   And finally, any one who takes pleasure in good writing will savor the stylistic richness of Mencken's exuberant prose. 

Link to Passages from Mencken

--Nordquist (25 November1999)