The way copyright law works, each year that goes by, ever more books of the past leave copyright and can be read and legally reprinted. As of this writing, anything printed before 1930 belongs to all, with no enforcement.
Mencken was a literary giant of his time, a leading voice followed by all intelligent people. It’s odd to me that today he is so unknown, and that is probably because our times are less tolerant of eccentricity and intellectual provocation than his. He never joined a partisan clique, preferring instead to carve out his own niche as an independent.
For anyone who loves ideas, Mencken is impossible to put down. As you read, you feel your internal constitution change. It is exhilarating and transforming. You sense that you are thinking hard for the first time in a long time. With him as your guide, you throw off conventions that surround us. You feel liberated, prepared for new things, renewed in spirit, defiant, courageous.
I recently downloaded a huge collection in digital form. In physical form, it would take up perhaps three feet of shelf space, maybe more. So there went my evening. I had a thousand other things to do, but instead, I couldn’t stop reading this material written 100 years ago. The writing is fresh and wonderfully reckless, like a banned document newly coming to light.
On culture, Mencken was a highbrow elitist who understood and celebrated lowbrow tastes like no one else. On politics, he was an anarchist in spirit who loathed the plutocracy and yet regarded democracy as the world’s most implausible political system even while he despised despotic government.
On organized religion, he considered the whole thing to be hokum designed to sustain myths we want to believe, yet he maintained deep and lasting friendships with high church officials who he satirized with deep respect. On life and politics in general, he loved liberty with a deep and burning passion, and it is this point that makes his work so inspiring.
Beginning with the Great War, he dealt with the problem of censorship so he embarked on a huge study of the American language which he distinguished from classical English. It remains brilliant and established him as a leading language scholar. It also underscored how he was not merely a popular provocateur but much more.
After the war, he went back to being himself. If you were not both delighted and outraged as you read anything he wrote, he would consider himself a failure. How did Mencken do it? How did he write so much dazzling prose that holds up so long after it was written? Where did he get his insight? How did he manage to write so well? One more telling question: In our times of hypersensitivity and opinion conformism, how does it come to be that it is still legal to read this material?
Three early works have grabbed my attention: “A Book of Prefaces” (1917), “Damn! A Book of Calumny” (1918) and “The American Credo” (1920). The first shows that he was a first-rate literary critic, probably the greatest ever. This man was a genius scholar, even though he never taught in a university. He was a journalist at a time when there were high standards attached to that word.
He writes about Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, James Huneker, and “Puritanism as a Literary Force,” which set the whole literary tone of the next decade. These are the works that caused a whole generation to fall down in awe.
He didn’t attract fans by saying what people wanted to hear. He never curried favor. He never bowed to convention. Quite the opposite. He is alarming, unsettling, unexpected, outrageous. In this way, he pioneered what came to be called literary criticism.
The next book is hilariously subtitled “A Book of Calumny.” A calumny is an unflattering comment that is false but passed on anyway. By calling these 49 essays in this book calumnies, he immediately evades the criticism that what he is saying is untrue and wicked. In truth, most of what he is saying is both true and wicked.
The essays are about a page long, sometimes only a paragraph. They are so rich and pithy that you nearly have to stop after reading each one—just to absorb his point, arguing with him in your mind, contemplating the implications of what he is saying.
Another great book is “The American Credo.” It consists of 488 small sentences that Americans believe about the world. There is no way to read even a few without laughing out loud. In fact, I disturbed a roomful of quiet lounge patrons in a very nice hotel by involuntarily emitting loud yelps of delight. After even the servers started glaring at me, I realized that if I was going to keep reading this, I was going to have to move to another venue.
- That if a dog is fond of a man it is an infallible sign that the man is a good sort, and one to be trusted.
- That the accumulation of great wealth always brings with it great unhappiness.
- That something mysterious goes on in the rooms back of chop suey restaurants.
- That the old ladies on summer hotel verandas devote themselves entirely to the discussion of scandals.
- That every circus clown’s heart is breaking for one reason or another.
- That a bullfighter always has so many women in love with him that he doesn’t know what to do.
- That the music of Richard Wagner is all played fortissimo, and by cornets.
- That the Masonic order goes back to the days of King Solomon.
From them, you get a great picture of the American mind as it stood in 1920. Mencken poked fun constantly and uproariously at Americans—while at the same time absolutely loving American culture. It is an interesting balance. He helps us understand ourselves and laugh at ourselves, while inspiring a discomforting level of internal criticism.
Readers should not skip the introduction to this third section. Here is a brilliant contribution to understanding the big picture. Read the following and remember that we are talking about 1920.
Please permit me to quote his observation on the core of the American spirit, a point that explains the total disorientation that has affected the young generation today. It also explains the means by which so many upright people have gone along with the most absurd policies simply because some mountebank has advised them. I detected this precise issue during the COVID lockdowns. In trying to figure out why so many people went along, I finally concluded that it was due to simply professional aspiration.
Here H.L. Mencken explains: “If he is not the exalted monopolist of liberty that he thinks he is nor the noble altruist and idealist he slaps upon the chest when he is full of rhetoric, nor the degraded dollar-chaser of European legend, then what is he?” He says that “the thing that sets off the American from all other men, and gives a peculiar color not only to the pattern of his daily life but also to the play of his inner ideas, is what, for want of a more exact term, may be called social aspiration. That is to say, his dominant passion is a passion to lift himself by at least a step or two in the society that he is a part of—a passion to improve his position, to break down some shadowy barrier of caste, to achieve the countenance of what, for all his talk of equality, he recognizes and accepts as his betters.”
Interesting but he goes on with wild generalization: “The American is a pusher. His eyes are ever fixed upon some round of the ladder that is just beyond his reach, and all his secret ambitions, all his extraordinary energies, group themselves about the yearning to grasp it. ... The American is violently eager to get on, and thoroughly convinced that his merits entitle him to try and to succeed, but by the same token, he is sickeningly fearful of slipping back.”
That strikes me as correct. “There is no American who cannot hope to lift himself another notch or two, if he is good; there is absolutely no hard and fast impediment to his progress. But neither is there any American who doesn’t have to keep on fighting for whatever position he has; no wall of caste is there to protect him if he slips.”
Do you see, then, and despite all his elitist poses of distance from its populist core, how much Mencken truly loved this country? He loved America, every part of it, and loathed its government, especially because he saw what the government was doing to American culture and to the core spirit of his times.
His times are our times. Mencken speaks as powerfully to us now as he did to his generation. That is why it is a good idea to read as much Mencken as possible—before doing so is made illegal. I’m always left wondering what he would say about our own times. No matter how much I read, I cannot make it out. I suspect he would write affectionate but painful lines about Donald Trump plus bitter attacks on his enemies. But I also like to imagine how his poison pen would attack the legacy media and new media too.
That’s the beauty of reading his works: it helps one rise above the daily silliness and seek bigger truth. He urges all of us, in our own psychological interest, to be better observers of our times. There is some therapeutic benefit to that sense of detachment but also keen observation he had. Above all else, his ability to smile along with his readers, finding hilarity even in momentous times, can help guide us all.
