The Enduring Mencken.

The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, by Terry Teachout, New York: HarperCollins, 2002. 432 pp.

WHILE THE STATURE OF MOST of the well-known American writers who gained fame in the 1920s was settled long ago, the debate on the lasting significance of H. L. Mencken's work goes on. It will not be settled by Terry Teachout's fine biography of Mencken (1880-1956), though Teachout succeeds admirably in describing Mencken with sympathetic understanding while not ignoring his flaws. (1) He manages to put the controversy over Mencken's anti-Semitism in perspective, concluding that Mencken indeed harbored prejudices about Jews but never tried to do harm nor approved of any attempt to injure Jews as a group. Mencken had no sympathy for Nazism, Teachout makes plain, but he rightly faults Mencken for failing to grasp that "Adolf Hitler was something more than a Ku Kluxer."

Successful in presenting Mencken's life, Teachout is less persuasive when he assesses Mencken's lasting significance as a writer and thinker. Recognizing that style is always related to substance, Teachout struggles to balance his admiration for Mencken's "triumph of style" with his criticism of Mencken's ideas. He concludes that Mencken, freed "from the clutches of the genteel tradition" by his immersion in the "discipline of daily journalism," was enabled to write prose that "continues to give pleasure to countless readers untroubled by its internal contradictions." Such lukewarm praise leaves the reader unsure what it is about Mencken that survives beyond a style that is enjoyable only if one does not pay attention too closely.

Oddly for a biographer writing "very broadly speaking, from his [Mencken's] point of view," Teachout has chosen a title--The Skeptic--highlighting an attitude that he presents as a key intellectual weakness. The "fundamental inadequacy in Mencken's thought," writes Teachout, was "a skepticism so extreme as to issue in philosophical incoherence." It is Mencken's "unequivocal rejection of the possibility of ultimate truth" that forces Teachout to concede regretfully that Mencken the thinker was no match for Mencken the stylist. And, indeed, if Mencken should be remembered most of all as "the skeptic," as Teachout's title suggests, there would be no need for a Mencken revival, since in these postmodernist times the campuses are full of "extreme" skeptics eager to ridicule any conception of "ultimate truth" as fervently as Mencken ridiculed the old-time religion. It is easy enough, fortunately, to refute the notion that Mencken was an early version of Stanley Fish or a precursor of Michel Foucault.

The only evidence Teachout cites in support of Mencken's allegedly extreme skepticism is a single phrase from an unpublished journal to the effect that Mencken could find nothing "wholly good, wholly desirable, wholly true." Certainly Mencken was skeptical about the ability of politicians, chiropractors, and other putative authorities to deliver on their promises, but he was never the sort of dogmatic skeptic that Teachout makes him out to be. Throughout Mencken's published works one can find clear and overwhelming evidence that Mencken considered "truth" no illusion but the thing in the world most worth seeking. Teachout rightly emphasizes that Mencken saw himself as a superior man able to regard the follies of his inferiors with comic detachment. He seems not to have noticed, however, that Mencken regarded a desire to seek out the often unpleasant truth as one of the defining traits of the intellectual aristocracy. This elite minority is naturally regarded with distrust by the majority, who are unwilling and afraid to face the truth, which, as Mencken argues in his "Hymn to the Truth," is "mainly uncomfortable, and never caressing." (2)

For Mencken the love of poetry among both ordinary people and academic critics can be explained as "the love of the agreeably not-so." (3) If college professors prefer Robert Browning while the kind of person who joins the Kiwanis prefers Edgar Guest, the difference in taste has little to do with differing aesthetic sensibilities and everything to do with the kind of reassurance each requires: "The strophes of Robert Browning elude the Kiwanian, but they are full of soothing for the young college professor, for they tell him that it is a marvelous and exhilarating thing to be as intellectual as he is. This, of course, is not true, which is the chief reason why it is pleasant." Mencken himself was a member of what he called a "small and aberrant minority of men" who tell the truth and because they do so, he claimed, "are hated for telling it while they live, and when they die are swiftly forgotten." (4)

If Teachout in commending Mencken's style while questioning his substance seems to damn with faint praise, Hilton Kramer's favorable review of Teachout's biography damns Mencken outright, partly for his failure to appreciate "the cultural achievements of the 1920s" but especially for Mencken's alleged "vicious anti-Semitism, the total identification with German superiority and moral authority even in the face of Hitler's criminality, and his unflagging contempt for democratic institutions in a period when fascism and communism loomed as the leading alternatives." (5) For Kramer these attitudes, along with Mencken's "cocksure confidence in his own virtue," can only be regarded as "finally unforgivable." (6)

Kramer finds it natural that "Mencken is so little read today," given Mencken's failure to provide any meaningful comment on "the two World Wars, the Leninist revolution and the spread of Communist totalitarianism, Hitler's rise to power and the Nazi conquest of Western Europe, the Holocaust, and virtually all of the principal currents of modern thought in literature, philosophy, and the arts." (7) Kramer concludes that a Mencken revival is both unlikely and undesirable; Mencken's work is unread because it is "no longer even readable." (8)

Now it is true that anyone seeking enlightenment on either the political events Kramer lists or the great works of modernist art and thought would be ill-advised to turn to Mencken for instruction. As Teachout makes clear, Mencken's ideas and attitudes were formed before World War I and they were largely unaffected by events or works after 1914. To go so far with Kramer, however, does not entail going further. Mencken remains worth reading for reasons that go beyond what Teachout's defense suggests, nor are the issues Mencken discusses as dated as Kramer assumes.

Mencken's critique of Puritanism, for example, is outdated only if one assumes that attempts to reshape human nature on behalf of a putatively higher morality ended with the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. Today in the United States the proponents of "political correctness," fortunately lacking the authority of a constitutional amendment, nevertheless attempt to impose a set of values that satisfies their esoteric moral standards by condemning as immoral the way most people live. Mencken's comments on the requirements facing those who sought acceptance in academia in his own time sound quite contemporary: the "aspirant ... must exhibit exactly the right social habits, appetites and prejudices, public and private. He must harbor exactly the right political enthusiasms and indignations.... He must read and like exactly the right books, pamphlets and public journals.... He must even embrace the right doctrines of religion." (9)

In the twentieth century both the Nazis and the Communists disdained as "bourgeois" the reluctance of most human beings to sacrifice the ordinary pleasures of life for the sake of a totalitarian revolution. In the twenty-first century radical Islamists demand that human nature be altered and happiness renounced to bring about a pseudo-religious utopia. In a world where progressive or revolutionary doctrines loudly assert their superiority to traditional morality, Mencken's protest on behalf of what he called "ordinary decency" (10) remains relevant, while Mencken remains unequaled in his unapologetic celebration of the way of life available to "the fat and complacent burgher." (11)

In "On Living in Baltimore" Mencken sums up what makes life tolerable. Simply living in one place in one house counts for a great deal, since, says Mencken, "A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in its permanence, in its capacity for accretion and solidification, in its quality of representing, in all its details, the personalities of the people who live in it." (12) Even more important than the permanence of the house is the stability of neighborhoods like those in Mencken's Baltimore. "Human relations, in such a place, tend to assume a solid permanence. A man's circle of friends becomes a sort of extension of his family circle. His contacts are with men and women who are rooted as he is. They are not moving all the time, and so they are not changing their friends all the time. Thus abiding relationships tend to be built up, and when fortune brings unexpected changes, they survive those changes." (13)

Mencken cherished the "tradition of sound and comfortable living" he found in Baltimore, but it was the permanence of human relationships that he valued most highly, since "It is our fellows who make life endurable to us, and give it a purpose and a meaning; if our contacts with them are light and frivolous there is something lacking, and it is something of the very first importance." (14) (This passage alone should have been enough to deter Teachout from charging Mencken with "blank nihilism.") Mencken remained all his life in his hometown because, he believed, "in Baltimore, under a slow-moving and cautious social organization, touched by the Southern sun, such contacts are more enduring than elsewhere, and that life in consequence is more agreeable." (15)

Mencken's writings, essays and autobiographies alike, communicate vividly his contentment with his own life through a display of verbal exuberance unequaled in American prose and untainted by any assertion of moral superiority or claim of victimhood. Like that other unique American writer, Walt Whitman, Mencken delighted in lists and enjoyed sprinkling his writing with foreign phrases and unusual words. The ebullience of Whitman's wordplay, is, however, vitiated by his mysticism of the average and the consequent merging of any individuality, including Whitman's own, in an undifferentiated whole. Mencken's contentedness with himself and with what the world has given him allows for an unpretentious worldly wisdom ultimately wiser than the pretentious mysticism of the inflated self that Whitman found necessary. Mencken's self-satisfaction, furthermore, saves him from the worst consequences of his flaws.

Thus, Hilton Kramer exaggerates when he describes Mencken's anti-Semitism as "vicious." It should go without saying that anti-Semitism of any kind cannot be condoned, but there is a difference between the truly "vicious" sort that approves or excuses the crimes of the Nazis and others against the Jews and the private prejudice of a Mencken; since Mencken did not feel injured by the Jews, he did not seek to injure them, nor did he take any pleasure in harm done to them. Mencken mocked his intellectual opponents, but he never demonized them. If Walter Bagehot was right in identifying conservatism with enjoyment, the ultimate impact of Mencken's work is surely conservative, since Mencken's writings convey powerfully and with gusto his rejection of envy and self-righteousness in favor of laughter and appreciation of the good things of life--including for him food, drink, music, friendship, and writing.

Kramer's review quotes from Teachout's biography a famous passage from Mencken's essay "On Being an American" which Kramer points out, accurately, typifies Mencken's eager willingness to "jeer at every aspect of the common life in postwar [World War I] America." (16) Teachout argues that "all of Mencken is in this passage" and Kramer agrees. Yet both Teachout and Kramer leave out an important part of the passage from the quotation. Missing from Teachout's quotation is the section in which Mencken distinguishes his criticism of American life from that of the "fugitive Young Intellectuals" (17) going into exile abroad--the so-called "Lost Generation"--by noting that the same aspects of American life that make life intolerable for them at home and drive them into self-pitying exile abroad not only fail to disturb him but also provide him with enjoyable entertainment.

Mencken himself, despite or perhaps because of his criticisms, remains "a loyal and devoted Americano," who recognizes that "there is no country on the face of the earth wherein a man roughly constituted as I am--a man of my general weaknesses, vanities, appetites, prejudices, and aversions--can be so happy, or even one-half so happy, as he can be in these free and independent states." (18) The famous passage, when considered in its entirety, is a triumph of substance as well as style, since the contentment it conveys dramatically rejects the hatred of human nature and of oneself that Mencken finds at the bottom of the puritanical social engineering exemplified for him by Prohibition and today much more egregiously by, for example, Afghanistan under the Taliban.

Mencken's most enduring political insight is his awareness of both the folly and the enduring appeal of what he called "the messianic delusion," the belief that the fundamental problems of human life can and should be solved by legislation. It was a "messianic delusion" that led the Prohibitionists to believe that a constitutional amendment could solve "the so-called drink problem," which for Mencken was really "a small subdivision of the larger problem of saving men from their inherent and incurable hoggishness." (19) Con men and fools, Mencken observes, claim to have a solution to the fundamental difficulties of the human lot, while the honest and the intelligent offer no such reassurance.

Mencken comments that solutions to "the sex problem" abound--it is just that none of them work:

  There is no half-baked ecclesiastic, bawling in his galvanized-iron
  temple on a suburban lot, who doesn't know precisely how it ought to
  be dealt with. There is no fantoddish old suffragette, sworn to get
  her revenge on man, who hasn't a sovereign remedy for it. There is not
  a shyster of a district attorney, ambitious for higher office, who
  doesn't offer to dispose of it in a few weeks, given only enough help
  from the city editors. And yet, by the same token, there is not a man
  who has honestly studied it and pondered it, bringing sound
  information to the business, and understanding of its inner
  difficulties and a clean and analytical mind, who doesn't believe and
  hasn't stated publicly that it is intrinsically and eternally
  insoluble. (20)

Mencken's insight is, if anything, more relevant today than when he wrote, though Mencken's specific targets seem comparatively harmless when compared to the dictators and fanatics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who have employed the "messianic delusion" to seduce their followers and excuse their crimes.

Any meaningful estimate of Mencken's importance must distinguish between the doctrines he endorsed and what Joseph Epstein calls the "point of view" communicated in his writings; as Epstein points out, "it is not their opinions but the possession of an interesting point of view that separates the great essayists from their fellow workers, making them, in their own fashion, artists in prose." (21) Mencken's materialism, atheism, and opposition to puritanism are far from unique and, indeed, have become the cliches of contemporary discourse. What makes Mencken worth reading is his refusal to move from these premises to the nihilism, despair, resentment, and self-pity that typify the response of so many later writers to the same assumptions. The most impressive accomplishment of Mencken's writing is his ability to communicate his sense that both the delights of everyday life and the obligations of "ordinary decency" remain, even if one assumes the indifference of the universe.

1. Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken (New York, 2002). 2. Mencken, H. L., "Hymn to the Truth," Prejudices: A Selection, ed. James T. Farrell (New York, 1958), 245. 3. Ibid., 246. 4. Ibid. 5. Kramer, Hilton, "Who Reads Mencken Now?" The New Criterion, Vol. 21, No. 5 (January 2003), 60. 6. Ibid., 62. 7. Ibid., 60. 8. Ibid. 9. Mencken, H. L., "The National Letters," Prejudices: Second Series (New York, 1920), 68. 10. Ibid. 11. Mencken, H. L., "Roosevelt: An Autopsy," Prejudices: A Selection, 69. 12. Mencken, H. L., "On Living in Balti-more," Prejudices: A Selection, 208. 13. Ibid., 209. 14. Ibid., 210. 15. Ibid. 16. Kramer, 61. 17. Mencken, H. L., "On Being an American," Prejudices: A Selection, 90. 18. Ibid., 90-91. 19. Mencken, H. L., "The Cult of Hope" Prejudices: A Selection, 86. 20. Ibid., 87. 21. Epstein, Joseph, "H. L. Mencken for Grownups," Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives (New York, 1989), 43.

JAMES SEATON is Professor of English at Michigan State University in East Lansing.