Book Report/Literary Nonfiction

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

Selected Passages

From "The Comedian." This short essay contains Mencken's famous definition of "democracy," which serves to homogenize the U.S. into one great satirical target ("the booboise") through a comically extravagant analogy.
"Democracy is that system of government under which the people, having 60,000,000 native-born adult whites to choose from, including thousands who are handsome and many who are wise, pick out a Coolidge to be head of state.  It is as if a hungry man, set before a banquet prepared by master cooks and covering a table an acre in area, should turn his back upon the feast and stay his stomach by catching and eating flies" (623).

From "The Man Within." In his literary criticism (this volume includes essays on Emerson, Poe, Whitman, Twain, Conrad, and Dreiser, among others), Mencken often locates in the works of his fellow authors certain traits and intentions that characterize his own writing.  Consider the hyperbolic opening to this essay on Mark Twain:
"The bitter, of course, goes with the sweet.  To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, the grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God's green footstool.  Often, in the black abysm of the night, the thought that I am one awakens me with a blast of trumpets, and I am thrown into a cold sweat by contemplation of the fact.  I shall cherish it on the scaffold; it will console me in hell.  But there is no perfection under Heaven, so even an American has his small blemishes, his scarecely discernible weaknesses, his minute traces of vice and depravity.  Mark, alas, had them: he was as thoroughly American as a Knight of Pythias, a Wheeling stogie, or Prohibition. . . .  Nothing could be more unsound than the Mark legend--the legend of the lighthearted and kindly old clown.  The real Mark was a man haunted to the pointof distraction by the endless and meaningless tragedy of existence--a man whose thoughts turned to it constantly, in season and out of season" (486-87).
Toward the end of this essay, where he identifies Huckleberry Finn as "a truly stupendous piece of work--perhaps the greatest novel ever written in English," Mencken persists in his implicit identification with Twain:
"Mark knew his countrymen.  He knew their intense suspicion ofideas. their blind hatred of heterodoxy, their bitter way of dealing with dissenters.  He knew how, their pruderies outraged, they  would turn upon even the gaudiest hero and roll him in the mud" (487-88).

From "The Archangel Woodrow."  Mencken's skill at manipulating language is matched by an awareness of how others, with perhaps more insidious intentions, do the same.  In his evaluation of the oratory of President Wilson ("a pedagogue gone mashugga"), Mencken mingles scorn with a certain awe:
"[Wilson] knew 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.   . . .  Woodrow knew how to conjure up such words.  He know 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 heard words giving threee cheers; he saw them race across a blackboard like Marxians pursued by the Polizei; he felt them rush up and kiss him" (250).

From "The Educational Process." At times Mencken used words like a club, as in this direct attack on school teachers.  Notice how his presumption to speak "the truth" rhetorically augments the persona's sense of authority.
"The truth is that the average schoolmaster, on all lower levels, is and always must be essentially and next door to an idiot, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation?  And the truth is that it is precisely his inherent idiocy, and not his technical equipment as a pedagogue, that is responsible for whatever modest success he now shows.  I here attempt no heavy jocosity, but mean exactly what I say" (304).
The final sentence illustrates how Mencken's penchant for humor ("jocosity") frequently threatens to undermine the seriousness of his observations and the authority of his persona.  Outrage coupled with amusement inevitably produces a degree of ambiguity.

From "Diligence." Some of Mencken's most disconcerting writings are the montages that he collected under the heading of "Suite Americaine."  Bearing such titles as "Aspiration," "Diligence," and "Eminence," each short piece depicts the sort of people (or character types) that,  in other contexts, Mencken ridicules.  As demonstrated in the following excerpt from "Diligence" (the ellipses are Mencken's), the ironic voice of the familiar Mencken persona is almost wholly absent:
"Pale druggists in remote towns of the Epworth League and flannel nightgown belts, endlessly wrapping up bottles of Peruna. . . . Women hidden away in the damp kitchens of unpainted houses along the railroad tracks, frying tough beefsteaks. . . .   Lime and cement dealers being initiated into the Knights of Pythias, the Red Men or the Woodmen of the World. . . .  Watchmen at lonely railroad crossings in Iowa, hoping that they'll be able to get off to hear the United Brethren evangelist preach. . . .  Ticket-sellers in the subway, breathing sweat in its gaseous form. . . . Farmers plowing sterile fields behind sad meditative horses, both suffering from the bites of insects. . . .  Grocery-clerks trying to make assignations with soapy servant girls. . . . Women confined for the ninth or tenth time, wondering helplessly what it is all about. . . . Methodist preachers retired after forty years of service in the trenches of God, upon pensions of $600 a year (611).
The characters identified in this evocation of America are no more profoundly drawn than the comic caricatures in Mencken's satirically acerbic essays, but the reader's perception of them is radically altered: rather than stand in opposition to the impudent Sage of Baltimore (the conventional Mencken persona), they are simply juxtaposed without contextual narrative comment.   In one sense, the piece offers a parody of the politician's standard invocation of American abundance and diversity, with emblems of poverty and ignorance and isolation substituted for more conventional symbols ofwealth.   And yet the sense of parody is dampened by the general mood of despair.

From "Exeunt Omnes."  In this essay on human mortality, Mencken begins rather whimsically ("I . . . think of death as a sort of deleterious fermentation, like that which goes on in a bottle of Chateau Margaux when it becomes corked") but eventually offers a painfully prescient vision of his own final years.  (Mencken could neither speak nor write during the seven years between his stroke and his death in 1955.) 
"Death [is] the last and worst of all the practical jokes played upon poor mortals by the gods. . . .  The hardest thing about death is not that men die tragically, but that most of them die ridiculously. If it were possible for all of us to make our exits at great moments, swiftly, cleanly, decorously, and in fine attitudes, then the experience would be something to face heroically and with high and beautiful words.  But we commonly go off in no such gorgeous, poetical way.   Instead, we die in raucous prose--of arteriosclerosis, of diabetes, of toxemia, of a noisome perforation in the ileocaecal region, of carcinoma of the liver.  . . . Thus the ontogenetic process is recapituklated in reverse order, and we pass into the mental obscurity of infancy, and then into the blank unconsciousness of the prenatal state, and finally into the condition of undifferentiated protoplasm.  . . .  The cosmic process is not only incurably idiotic; it is also indecently unjust" (136-37).
This passage illustrates Mencken's reliance on parallel structures to emphasize antithetical ideas: "tragically" vs "ridiculously," "poetry" vs "prose."

Link to Review of Mencken's Chrestomathy

--Nordquist (25 November 1999)