The Sage of Baltimore

Of late I’ve been revisiting the diamond-edged writings of H. L. Mencken, that celebrated journalist and writer of the early 20th century who left such an indelible stamp on American letters.


Or at any rate he left an indelible stamp on me. I began reading Mencken during my graduate student years; I had heard of him vaguely via a few English Lit teachers but clearly via Alistair Cooke on his PBS series "America". I was curious about this man of sharp opinions and opulent prose style, so when a used copy of A Mencken Chrestomathy showed up at my local used bookstore (Sunset Books out on Irving, and I will miss it forever) I grabbed it and wolfed it down.


 
Henry Louis Mencken: 1880 – 1956

Without question the man used the American language like a rapier. He was not a simplicity-first stylist on the order of an E.B. White; his was an operatic, big-boned, erudite and romantically musical style that entertained as much for the sheer pleasure of the prose as for its content. It’s hard to imagine him in today’s language-debased environment, corseted and muffled by the dictates of The New York Times or the nibbled-to-death mush of Newsweek or Forbes. He was a writer in an era when the written word prevailed.

Mencken’s editorial and journalistic positions were clear. In the 1920s as the Scopes Monkey Trial raged in Dayton, Tennessee, he spoke eloquently for rationality and common sense while hurling stilettos into the breast of William Jennings Bryan, counsel for the prosecution and a bible-thumping opportunist, the era’s Newt Gingrich who never hesitated to embrace whatever policies endeared him to the majority. Mencken railed against the "booboisie" of the general American public and the sunday-school superintendants with their ‘fire-proof legs." His targets were the stupid, the hypocritical, the pompous; naturally, he had plenty to write about. He was also capable of long discussions on almost any number of subjects, including the theater, literature (naturally), art, and especially music. He was an enthusiastic amateur violinist who got together regularly with a group of cronies to play through chamber music. One of those cronies, Louis Cheslock, was still around at Peabody back in my student days; I wasn’t onto Mencken back then, which is a pity: nowadays I would have loved to have some chat time with Cheslock about his renowned friend.

Mencken is renowned for sending his readers to the dictionary; from him I picked up such words as "lues" for syphilis, "antinomian" as one who stands against established (particularly churchly) dogma, "laparotomy" (surgical incision into the abdomen) as a closely-researched study. But he eschewed big words for their own sakes; he was no academic prose-mangler flailing about in a fog of his own Latinate gobbledegook. He never hesitated to use language of directness and simplicity, but he could also string long phrases together with breathtaking ease.

Simply glancing at a random page produces: "What finished the man was not his banal adultery with his suburban sweetie, but his swift and overwhelming conviction that it was a mortal sin." Wow.

Another random glance: "The preacher stopped at last, and there arose out of the darkness a woman with her hair pulled back into a little tight knot. She began so quietly that we couldn’t hear what she said, but soon her voice rose resonantly and we could follow her. She was denouncing the reading of books." Here we have a two-sentence character sketch worthy of Dickens.

Consider this passage from "The Archangel Woodrow", a skin-peeling blast against the former (and deceased) president:

"His [biographer Willian Bayard Hale’s] analysis of the whole Wilsonian buncombe, in fact, is appallingly cruel. He shows its ideational hollowness, its ludicrous strutting and bombast, its heavy dependence upon greasy and meaningless words, its frequent descents to mere sound and fury, signifying nothing. In particular, he devotes himself to a merciless study of what, after all, must remain the deceased Moses’s chief contribution to both history and beautiful letters, viz., his biography of Washington. This incredible work is an almost inexhaustible mine of bad writing, faulty generalizing, childish pussyfooting, ludicrous posturing, and naïve stupidity. To find a match for it one must try to imagine a biography of the Duke of Wellington, by his barber. Well, Hale spreads it out on his operating table, sharpens his snickersnee upon his bootleg, and proceeds to so harsh an anatomizing that it nearly makes me sympathize with the author. Not many of us—writers, and hence vain and artificial fellows—could undergo so relentless an examination without damage. But not many of us, I believe, would suffer quite so horribly as Woodrow. The book is a mass of puerile affectations, and as Hale unveils one after the other he performs a sound service for American scholarship and American letters."
 

Vintage Mencken both in style and sizzle. Note the sentence about Wilson’s prose: Mencken applies four descriptive combinations: "bad writing", "faulty generalizing", "childish pussyfooting", "ludicrous posturing", then ends by replacing the previous four gerunds (writing, generalizing, etc.) with a plainspoken everyday noun. The overall impact is of a right cross to the jaw, as the writing, generalizing, pussyfooting, and posturing are summed up as "stupidity."

There are other delights in the paragraph. Note the phrase "greasy and meaningless words", so perfectly contrasting a sensory ("greasy") adjective with a more cerebral one ("meaningless.") Also note the freedom with which Mencken draws from a mix of sources, blending Shakespeare ("sound and fury, signifying nothing") with William Schwenck Gilbert ("snickersnee", executioner Ko-Ko’s unused sword in The Mikado) with Hebrew mythology ("deceased Moses").

It also sounds well, a critical if sometimes overlooked component of good writing. Mencken was as aware of the acoustic properties of prose as any writer in history, and was quick to point out cacophony in other writers such as the notoriously tone-deaf Theodore Dreiser. In his own prose the music flowed flawlessly, the rhythm secure and varied, the sonic combinations a source of endless surprise and enjoyment.

So if I find myself writing this phrase: "…instrumental music, which for much of European history skulked about as a poor relation to its glamorous vocal cousins, often pressed into menial service accompanying dancers and boozers or accessorizing the pastimes of the upper crust" I can hear Mencken’s influence. I suppose I could have said: "instrumental music lacked vocal music’s status and was usually restricted to everyday occasions" but that’s boring. Or worse: "the ineffectualness of societal responsiveness to instrumental compositions, minimized in relation to works set for voices, can be ascertained in the surviving manuscripts which indicate largely a subordinate situational impact restricted largely to providing background accompaniment to public occasions."

That last is, as Mencken would say, ludicrous buncombe.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.