The name H.L. Mencken is instantly recognizable to the citizens of Baltimore and perhaps, though not as it once was, to the citizens of the United States in general. His pungent, funny, unforgiving, and almost totally unsentimental prose was a fixture in the American consciousness for a half-century. He relentlessly and mercilessly skewered any and all pieties that he saw as obscuring the true state of things, rarely indulging himself in the smugness or self-righteousness so common to American social critics. His critical and editorial styles defined, for many, the teens and twenties, and his magazine, the American Mercury, remains to this day as much a symbol of early twentieth century American cultural life as the work of Edmund Wilson or F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also achieved that rare position to which modern journalists so often pretend: a kind of permanent and autocratic opposition to reigning political and social mores.
Terry Teachout’s The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken is an admirable portrait of one of the most prodigious figures in American letters. Mencken’s fierceness and his courage, his insistent assertion of the value of certain habits of thought and the worthlessness of others, and the breadth of his scope ought to serve much more than they currently do as a model for journalists, book reviewers, and “culture critics.” This is not to say that Teachout is in any way blind to the numerous faults of his subject and his subject’s works. Mencken’s deep admiration for German militarism, his isolationism, his racism and anti-Semitism, and the fact that Mencken, through his “permanent opposition” and his “extreme skepticism,” often failed to acknowledge genuine cultural progress and to appreciate its value and utility all appear in their proper context in this book. This is not hero-worship, as perversely heroic a figure as Mencken might have been; this is an even-handed and unfailingly objective biography.
Hencken began life in 1880, comfortably ensconced in a middle-class household. He displayed an early aptitude for and enjoyment of literary efforts. His only secondary education took place at the rather grim-sounding Baltimore Polytechnic School, and soon after, hard on the heels of his father’s death, he began what can only be described as a meteoric career: After starting in the city room of Baltimore’s Morning Herald at 18, he rose to the position of editor-in-chief by the time he was 25, “in command of men twice his age.” He staged his first coup as a journalist when a fire ravaged Baltimore in 1904, destroying the Herald’s offices. Deprived of an office and a press, Mencken rushed from Washington to Philadelphia to get the Herald out and to keep the citizens of his hometown informed. His energy won him a profile in the magazine of the newspaper and magazine trade, Editor & Publisher. In 1908 he published a book on Nietzsche. This was a momentous event for him — as Teachout shows us, he found in Nietzsche’s philosophy a completion and refinement of his own theories on natural superiority (not the least his own) and the right of the superior to rule.
By this time, sadly, the Herald was defunct, and in 1909 he began publishing a monthly column in the Smart Set. This marked the beginning of his fruitful collaboration and friendship with George Jean Nathan, a dandified New Yorker and the Smart Set’s drama critic. By 1910, Mencken was a prominent part of the Baltimore press, appearing four days a week in a column for the Sun. By 1915, he and Nathan had taken charge of the rapidly declining Smart Set, and here he developed his intensely autocratic managerial style. Despite this large and early success, his reputation was about to suffer a serious blow. He had begun, a few years earlier, to run into trouble with his readers and editors for his endorsement of German militarism, and with the entry of America into World War i, he found his unequivocal manner under political and social scrutiny (at one point burning some of his papers) and his reputation in the daily press damaged. He also began, with his vocal, after-the-fact criticisms of Woodrow Wilson, the tradition of “opposition” that he would extend through the presidencies of Coolidge, Hoover, and fdr.
In 1919, he published The American Language, which would turn out to be one of his most durable books, and the first volume of the Prejudices, the series of books with which his name today is perhaps most associated. The former is a long, serious, and amateur (in the word’s truest sense) study of the peculiar language called American English. The latter is a collection of his attacks on the current pantheon of American literary gods and demigods. In 1924, he founded the American Mercury and achieved a readership and notoriety unprecedented even in his astonishingly successful career. After nine years, brought low by his refusal to denounce Hitler, the departure of Nathan from the Mercury, and the increasing disenchantment of the American public with his particular brand of crankiness, he handed the magazine over to Alfred Knopf. He had been married in 1932, and the early death of his wife, tragically, coincided with his stepping down as editor of the Mercury. He published in the New Yorker, came out with Happy Days, and returned to the Sun for a brief stint as head of the editorial page from 1938 to 1941. From 1942-48, he absorbed himself almost entirely in writing Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, My Life as Author and Editor, supplemental volumes to his The American Language, and A Mencken Chrestomathy. His presence in the press had all but vanished, and he had begun to feel the effects of the cardiovascular problems that would eventually kill him.
He resumed working for the Sun in 1945 and continued to write for the paper until he suffered a serious stroke in 1948. After this, his output was reduced to nothing. He remained in contact with his literary and journalist friends, celebrated in biography and otherwise. William Manchester came four times a week to read to him; a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins, a later companion, wrote a brief personal account of the end of Mencken’s life, recording phrases that would serve admirably as anyone’s epitaph, and especially well as Mencken’s: “You know, I always enjoyed life in all its forms. . . . I had a good time while it lasted.” Mencken died on January 28, 1956.
All in all, an astounding career. Teachout has his work cut out for him. He quotes amply but not excessively, showing Mencken at his best and worst with remarkable economy. Mencken the man and Mencken the author exist in a harmonious balance here: One does not eclipse the other, and because of this our sympathies, ultimately, are with Mencken, despite his ideological quirks. Particularly effective are the sections dealing with the three women most important to Mencken: his mother, his ex-lover Marion Bloom, and Sara Haardt, eventually his wife. Mencken’s emotional difficulties (some might say inadequacies) with women serve as an interesting counterpoint to his “omnicompetence,” to use Teachout’s word, in his professional life. They serve — particularly the story of Sara Haardt’s early death — better than anything else to remind us that Mencken, despite his machine-like energy and the unrelenting hardness of his judgments, had a very human side. Teachout judiciously excerpts Mencken’s correspondence with Bloom and Haardt, letting the man’s words show the great tenderness of which he was capable.
We see the uncharitable side of his personality as well: Teachout shows us his diary entries, and his rather unfortunate comment on William Jennings Bryan that “[Darrow and I] killed the son-of-a-bitch.” Mencken’s harsh judgments of ideas and public personalities were not restricted to those spheres: He refers to his fellow Sun employee and close associate (one hesitates to say friend) Hamilton Owens as having “no more principle in him than a privy rat.” Moments like these are the most interesting in the book.
The sections of the book dealing with the problem of Mencken’s rather peculiar views about Jews are just as successful as Teachout’s illustrations of his more humane qualities. Bigotry is one of the most difficult subjects to write about, especially in our hypersensitive modern age, and despite recent trends in the opposite direction, most Americans retain a special horror of anti-Semitism. Teachout, speaking of Mencken’s own naïve brand of anti-Semitism, is honest without being accusatory. He quotes from Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods and a subsequent interview in a Jewish newspaper: The Jews are “plausibly . . . the most unpleasant race ever heard of,” lacking “many of the qualities that mark the civilized man.” Teachout makes the telling point that this was not exactly an uncommon position, even among certain assimilated sections of American Jewry. He does not offer this up as mitigation. Rather, as he did in rendering Mencken’s relations with the important women in his life, he lets Mencken speak for himself.
Teachout also points out what for him is the biggest sticking point in Mencken’s thought: his extreme skepticism. This renders Mencken’s thought finally “incoherent” as a corpus, according to Teachout, and he devotes serious effort to understanding the nature of this skepticism. Teachout conceives of it as a rejection of the Christianity of the Puritans for its alleged “spiritual narrowness.” The rejection is rooted in Mencken’s discovery, and perhaps too-literal interpretation, of Nietzsche. With this rejection, quite naturally, comes a wholehearted, baby-with-the-bathwater rejection of the mores of American politics, literature, and social life, which were (and in some way still are) deeply rooted in Puritanism. It is odd to use that word in its non-pejorative sense here; Mencken perhaps contributed more than any other to its gradual growth into a term of opprobrium.
The important part of Mencken’s career spanned four presidential administrations: Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover, and that of his archnemesis, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His response to each of them says a great deal about him, and also about the climate of his times. Wilson, as Teachout pithily puts it, “wielded power with the certitude of a college president turned reform politician.” His administration was responsible for Prohibition, the Espionage and Sedition Acts, and the pie-eyed internationalism of the Fourteen Points. It is difficult to imagine anything more repellent to a man like Mencken, who loved to drink and criticize the government and had an autographed photo of Wilhelm II hanging in his back bedroom, sent by the Kaiser himself in appreciation of Mencken’s “The Mailed Fist and Its Prophet.” And though, because of the aforementioned acts, he could not express himself in print, he did not hold back when finally afforded the chance: “Between Wilson and his brigades of informers
. . . and the Prohibitionists and their messianic delusion, the liberty of the citizen has pretty well vanished in America.” Wilson’s administration, and later Roosevelt’s, came to embody for Mencken what he saw as the deepest defect of democracy: the “conspiracy” against the “superior man” animating its heart. The intervention of the executive branch in the life of the citizen was for Mencken the consummate expression of this plot, and fdr, another firm believer in executive activism, would receive his lashes in turn:
He is directly responsible for every dollar that has been wasted, every piece of highfalutin rubbish that has been put upon the statute books, and for the operations of every mountebank on the public payroll, from the highest to the lowest.
Mencken, by unhappy accident, was born, lived, and died an autocrat in an age most conspicuous for its hostility to autocracy (save perhaps the autocracy of the president). The increasingly large role of the federal government in private life, its concern with the morality of the citizenry, its unrelenting social “uplift” — and all the other trappings of an overly and unhealthily engaged executive branch that have plagued us since — all had their beginnings here. And Mencken struggled against them until he literally could not struggle any more. One can only salivate at the thought of how, had he lived, he would have taken on the modern United Nations, the Great Society, school redistricting, and every other ill-imagined scheme devised by the arrogant and starry-eyed modern left (although, to be fair, it is difficult to imagine him treating nato or Ronald Reagan with any great delicacy either). Despite his crankiness and extreme skepticism, we who live in the aftermath of the sixties (and fifties, forties, thirties, twenties, and teens) still perhaps can learn from him. Teachout offers us a remarkable opportunity to do just that.
Teachout’s thoughtful epilogue goes a long way to explaining the peculiar position that Mencken occupies in American letters. He is accepted by neither the conservative nor the liberal establishment, though he has strong affinities with both, as Teachout sees it. This is appropriate for someone of Mencken’s temperament — it is difficult to imagine him allowing either side to claim him. Indeed, what Mencken’s success consisted of, in Teachout’s words, was a “triumph of style.” Form and content are “inseparable” in Mencken’s work, and what that marriage ultimately expresses are fundamental characteristics of the “American temperament” — that “witty and abrasive, self-confident and self-contradictory . . . always inimitable” something. The chapters preceding the epilogue, however, depict a success not merely of style or of temperament, but of a kind far more tangible and immediate. Even if we cannot forgive Mencken for his anti-Semitism or understand his skepticism, we have to admire his energy and his capacity for tireless labor, as well as the size of his output, its range, and its consistently high level of quality.
The quality of Teachout’s work does justice to the quality of Mencken’s. The Skeptic is remarkable both for its own smaller-scale “triumph of style” and for its honesty and objectivity. But it is perhaps most remarkable for the access it grants the modern reader to the life and mind of a man in many ways sadly alien to our modern temperament — but a man from whom we can still learn how to banish credulity, trust our own sensibilities, enjoy the hell out of life, and labor ceaselessly for what is important.
