H. L. Mencken
By D. W. BROGAN ARYLAND, my Maryland,' has lost its most famous M son and the chief city of the Free State its most devoted citizen. For above all else, Henry Louis Mencken was a Baltimore man and, Antaeus-like. he drew strength from the soil that bore him. His devotion brought its own reward, for it was his volumes of autobiography that brought him back from the past in which the quick oblivion of the American way of life had nearly buried him. And the title of the first volume, Happy Days, seems most appropriate. With far better reason than Hazlitt, Mencken could say that he had had a happy life. Yet his humorously Schopenhauerish view of life was tested harshly enough. He lost, after a few years of happiness, the wife he had married, to universal sur- prise, in his fifties and he was struck in his late sixties with a peculiarly distressing form of aphasia. He could not read; he could not now answer every letter the day it came; he could not comment on the American scene. It was a loss, for although in the present American temper Mencken's robust agnosticism would be regarded as a kind of treason, the new American religious salesmanship sometimes calls for his lively scorn as much as did the fanaticism of rural Tennessee in the Twenties. It may be that the young are right in disregarding everything that he wrote before The American Language (in- cluding that valuable work on Women whose fundamental soundness he showed when he at last succumbed to matri- mony), but that is partly because he had, in fact, made certain types of provincial smugness impossible. The new types of 100 per cent. American may not be any better, but they are different.
Despite his contempt for 'wowsers,"do-gooders,' zealots of all kinds, Mencken was a man with a 'concern.' He wanted people to be left alone, to pursue their own follies, their own sins. Out of such freedom came the rich and comic variety of American life that Mencken loved; for it is hard to believe that Mencken disliked any of his victims, even Bryan, even 'Lord Hoover.' There was something engagingly silly about the most popular and righteous of men, and American life provided the inevitable banana skin for the righteous to slide on. But since the pompous were able to badger the weak, the unpopular, it was not enough to wait for the banana skin; it was necessary to apply the paddle to the seat of their pants, to what Mencken would have called 'the glutaeus maximus.' For next to poetry and music Mencken cherished the art and science of medicine.
He had an unlimited appetite for 'clinical excerpts' and thought that doctors made the best company, even better than that of enlightened Catholic priests. What he liked about both was their professional attitude. Such and such a man had an incurable disease, bodily or spiritual, and that was that. The references to 'my physician,' my rector' were not merely a humorous trick; they were a protest against humbug and amateurish incompetence of all kinds. The theology of the Bible Belt annoyed him as much as did the claims of osteo- pathy. Because he fought the Bible Belt, as incarnated in that once eminent Methodist ecclesiastical statesman, Bishop Cannon, Mencken got the reputation of being a radical, earn- ing abuse in the Twenties that was renewed in the Thirties when the indignant 'Liberals' learned (as they might have noticed had they been brighter) that Mencken was no radical but a stout conservative whose ideal polity was pre-1914 Germany. Having such enemies got him credited with some friends that he did not cherish as much as he was thought to do. He did appreciate Dreiser's merits, but that intolerably blunt- pencilled prose was not really to his liking and the virtue or lack of it of the Dreiser heroines was a topic whose importance Mencken failed to see. Female virtue was not prized by him nor was his belief in its prevalence very widespread—if one may judge by the stories from his unpublished diary with which more than once he has shocked me. Despite his rough- house manner, Mencken was a highbrow. He admired Bach as much as did Frederick the Great. His favourite modern novel- ist was Joseph Conrad; he had a deep if critical admiration for Kipling and he was a secret poet. He owned the first Cezanne ever seen in Baltimore and he had a genuine admiration for real scholarship, even for impressive pedantry.
That came out in the great series on The American Language. He was no mere accumulator of vocabularies; he had .a deep interest in and as far as I can judge (which is not at all) a serious knowledge of theories of language. But his main interest was in language as a clue to the nature of American society. Of course, he began his studies as a protest against the colonial attitude of so many American professors and proof- readers, their belief in a 'standard English' against whose rules. American barbarians were in constant revolt. He stressed the autonomy of American speech and writing and continued to fight his battles long after the campaign was won. (He would have rejoiced in the recent correspondence in the Manchester Guardian about `to contact.') When I began to be in constant correspondence with him over such questions, he was curiously reluctant to admit that English and American were getting more alike as English was becoming a dialect of American. He would not take my word for it that the English for 'car battery' was 'battery,' not 'accumulator.' He didn't want the English to be smart enough to know when they were beaten. He was a delighted if pigheaded correspondent. Thus I am still credited, over my protests, with an excellent joke that is really a trouvaille of Mr. Elliot Nugent. He was fond of lavish displays of learning and there was some justice in the little poem printed in the pre-Luce Life: I sing of Mr. H. L. Mencken Who interlards his choice Gedenken With scraps of high-school German prose. To show the world how much he knows.
But when he liked, which was often, he could write 'straight.' His political reporting was admirable as long as the issues were purely formal. Even his great gaffe, his belief that FDR would be beaten in 1932, came from his innocent indifference to the breadline issues of the campaign. That led him to say that a Chinaman would beat Roosevelt, but, as someone retorted, the Republicans didn't run a Chinaman, they ran Mr. Hoover.
Mencken was an admirable host and talker. More than one obituary has commented on his startlingly blue eye. It not only looked candid. It was candid. He could rejoice in simple things; thus he was excessively grateful when I was able .to buy for him, in the Charing Cross Road, a book published by Harvard University Press whose title, innocent enough in America, can- not be quoted in this journal. QED. He loved Baltimore and was a devoted guide to its present and its past. No doubt, as Huck Finn said of Mark Twain, he put in a few stretchers but Dichtung is inseparable from Wahrheit, or so Mencken held in matters like these. It has been said, and rightly said, that we shall not look upon his like again. 'Tis true and pity 'tis 'tis true. We could do with the 'Americana' column of the old American Mercury. Time magazine is not an adequate substitute,
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