Second Mencken Chrestomathy Read online

  H. L. Mencken

  A SECOND

  MENCKEN

  CHRESTOMATHY

  Henry Louis Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1880 and died there in 1956. A son of August and Anna (Abhau) Mencken, he was educated privately and at Baltimore Polytechnic. In 1930 he married Sara Powell Haardt, who died in 1935. Mencken began his long career as journalist, critic, and philologist as a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald in 1899. In 1906 he joined the staff of the Baltimore Sun, thus initiating an association with the Sunpapers that would last until a few years before his death. He was coeditor of the Smart Set with George Jean Nathan from 1914 to 1923, and with Nathan he founded the American Mercury, of which he was sole editor from 1925 to 1933.

  ALSO BY H. L. MENCKEN

  The American Language

  The American Language: Supplement I

  The American Language: Supplement II

  In Defense of Women

  Prejudices

  Notes on Democracy

  Treatise on the Gods

  Treatise on Right and Wrong

  Happy Days

  Newspaper Days

  Heathen Days

  A New Dictionary of Quotations

  Christmas Story

  A Mencken Chrestomathy

  Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks

  The Bathtub Hoax

  Letters of H. L. Mencken

  H. L. Mencken on Music

  The American Language: The Fourth Edition and the Two Supplements, Abridged

  The American Scene

  The Diary of H. L. Mencken

  My Life as Author and Editor

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 1995

  Copyright © 1994 by Enoch Pratt Free Library

  Editing and annotations copyright © by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Introduction copyright © 1994 by Terry Teachout

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1995.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis), 1880–1956.

  A second Mencken chrestomathy / by H. L. Mencken; selected,

  revised, and annotated by the author; edited and with an

  introduction by Terry Teachout.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83111-8

  I. Teachout, Terry. II. Title.

  PS3525.E43A6 1994

  818′.5209—dc20

  94-12087

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Editor’s Introduction

  I. Americana

  The Commonwealth of Morons

  The Pushful American

  The Metaphysic of Rotary

  The Yokel

  Varieties of Envy

  The Immigration Problem

  Utopia in Little

  Bring On the Clowns

  II. Politics

  The Politician Under Democracy

  The Joboisie

  The Men Who Rule Us

  Liberty and Democracy

  Leaves from a Note-book

  The True Immortal

  The Same Old Gang

  Reflections on Government

  The End of an Era

  The Suicide of Democracy

  The Last Ditch

  Liberalism

  III. War

  The War Against War

  Summary Judgment

  The Next Round

  The Art of Selling War

  Onward, Christian Soldiers!

  War Without Art

  Memorials of Dishonor

  IV. Criminology

  The Nature of Liberty

  The Beloved Turnkey

  Cops and Their Art

  Jack Ketch as Eugenist

  The Humanitarian Fallacy

  One Size Fits All

  More and Better Psychopaths

  The Arbuckle Case

  V. Law and Lawyers

  Stewards of Nonsense

  Over the Side

  The Judge

  VI. First Things

  The Genesis of a Deity

  Christian Origins

  The Root of Religion

  The Mask

  The Eternal Mob

  The IQ of Holy Church

  Literary Theologians

  The Believing Mind

  The Road of Doubt

  Veritas Odium Parit

  VII. Brethren of the Cloth

  Playing with Fire

  Shock Troops

  Story Without a Moral

  Divine Virtuosity

  VIII. Man and Superman

  The Great Illusion

  Ethical Origins

  The Flesh Is Weak

  The Supreme Curse

  Thrift

  The Genealogy of Etiquette

  At the Mercy of the Mob

  The Goal

  The Superman

  Heredity

  Happiness

  The Horns of the Dilemma

  IX. Men and Women

  The Curse of Man

  Le Vice Anglais

  Sex on the Stage

  Women as Spectacles

  Venus at the Domestic Hearth

  Clubs

  Efficiency as Charm

  Woman and the Artist

  Martyrs

  Issue

  The Burnt Child

  On Connubial Bliss

  Divorce

  Cast a Cold Eye

  X. Progress

  Aubade

  Thomas Henry Huxley

  The Eternal Riddle

  Two Benefactors of Mankind

  Elegy

  Sketch Maritime

  Penguin’s Eggs

  XI. Making a Living

  The Professions

  Dazzling the Public

  The Puppet’s Pretension

  The Emancipated Housewife

  Honest Toil

  The Rewards of Virtue

  XII. Places to Live

  Totentanz

  Metropolis

  The Devil’s Deal

  The Utopia of Tolerance

  Closed Shop

  Washington

  Interlude in the Socratic Manner

  San Francisco: A Memory

  Boston

  Philadelphia

  XIII. The Writer in America

  The National Letters

  The Emperor of Wowsers

  Transcendentalism

  The Man of Letters

  They Also Serve

  Once More, with Feeling

  XIV. The Novel

  The Novel Defined

  Second Chorus

  On Realism

  The Ultimate Realists

  The Face Is Familiar

  The Hero Problem

  New England Twilight

  XV. European Novelists

  Jane Austen

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Stevenson Again

  The Father of Them All

  Freudian Autopsy upon a Genius

  H. G. Wells

  Arnold Bennett

  Somerset Maugham

  Scherzo for the Bassoon

  D. H. Lawrence

  XVI. American Novelists

  The Puritan Abroad

  George Ade

  James Branch Cabell

  Not in French

>   Jack London

  Dreiser as Philosopher

  Dreiser as Stylist

  Abraham Cahan

  Mrs. Wharton

  Disaster in Moronia

  XVII. Playwrights and Poets

  George Bernard Shaw

  Ibsen the Trimmer

  Edgar Lee Masters

  Dichtung und Wahrheit

  Walt Whitman

  XVIII. The Critic’s Trade

  The Pursuit of Ideas

  The Cult of Hope

  Cassandra’s Lament

  Criticism of Criticism of Criticism

  A Novel a Day

  Meditation at Vespers

  XIX. Present at the Creation

  A Novel of the First Rank

  Marginal Note

  An American Novel

  XX. Constructive Criticism

  The Uplift as a Trade

  A New Constitution for Maryland

  Hooch for the Artist

  Notice to Neglected Geniuses

  XXI. Unfinished Business

  Another Long-Awaited Book

  Advice to Young Men

  XXII. The Public Prints

  The End of the Line

  The Professional Man

  Reflections on Journalism

  The New York Sun

  The Baltimore Sunpaper

  The Pulitzer Prizes

  The Muck-Rakers

  Acres of Babble

  XXIII. Professors

  The Public-School

  The War upon Intelligence

  Katzenjammer

  The Golden Age of Pedagogy

  A Liberal Education

  The Lower Depths

  Pedagogues A-flutter

  Prima Facie

  The Philosopher

  The Saving Grace

  XXIV. Music

  The Tone Art

  The Joyless Master

  De Profundis

  Dvořák

  Tschaikowsky

  Russian Music

  The Bryan of Bayreuth

  Debussy and Wagner

  XXV. The Pursuit of Happiness

  Alcohol

  The Great American Art

  Night Club

  The Peaceable Kingdom

  The Home of the Crab

  Hot Dogs

  Reminiscence in the Present Tense

  XXVI. Lesser Eminentoes

  Portrait of an Immortal Soul

  A Texas Schoolma’am

  For Rotary and God

  Flamingo in Blue Stockings

  The Incomparable Bok

  Dr. Townsend and His Plan

  One Who Will Be Missed

  The End of a Happy Life

  XXVII. Ironies

  Wild Shots

  Between the Lines

  The Fat Man

  Sunday Afternoon

  Interlude Sentimentale

  Elegy in C Minor

  The Jocose Gods

  XXVIII. Nietzsche

  The Bugaboo

  Nietzsche on Christianity

  XXIX. Credos

  H. L. Mencken, by Himself

  Salutatory

  Further Exposition

  An American Mercury Circular

  Starting Point

  Petition

  XXX. Self-Portrait

  The Man and His Shadow

  Personal Record

  The Tight-Rope

  Categorical Imperatives

  Behind the Mask

  The Popinjay

  Note for an Honest Autobiography

  For the Defense

  Coda

  EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  “I HAVE discovered something,” Alfred Knopf said to H. L. Mencken one day in 1920. “It is that H. L. Mencken has become a good property.” Knopf was talking about the unexpected popular success of Prejudices: First Series, the first of six collections of Mencken’s essays, articles and reviews to appear under the Borzoi imprint between 1919 and 1927. In 1919 Mencken was still known outside Baltimore—his lifelong home and base of operations—mainly as coeditor of and book reviewer for the Smart Set, a shabby-looking magazine of modest circulation and raffish reputation. Prejudices: First Series was intended to bring his writing, and his personality, to the notice of a wider audience: “I made a deliberate effort to lay as many quacks as possible, and chose my targets, not only from the great names of the past, but also from the current company of favorites.” The effort, like most of Mencken’s exercises in self-promotion, paid off. Prejudices: First Series and its successors were all reviewed widely and, to the initial surprise of author and publisher alike, even sold well. It was through these neat little crown octavo volumes as much as through the Smart Set (and, later, the American Mercury) that American readers of the ’20s came to know the man whom Walter Lippmann, writing in 1926, called “the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people.”

  In the ’30s, Mencken fell from grace with Depression-era intellectuals, who found his literary tastes bourgeois and his politics neanderthal. (“Nearly all poverty is caused by idealism. The normal poor man is simply a semi-idiot whose dreams have run away with his capacities.”) Prejudices: First Series sold only three-hundred-odd copies between 1931, when the plates were melted down, and 1942, when the last printing was exhausted. But he became a good property again with the publication in 1940 of Happy Days, his best-selling childhood memoir, and it was doubtless no coincidence that around this time he began thinking of putting together a comprehensive anthology of his own writings. As early as 1943, Mencken discussed with Knopf the possibility of bringing out “a sort of Mencken Encyclopedia, made up of extracts from my writings over many years, arranged by subject and probably with additions.” According to his diary, he went to work in earnest four years later: “Unable to do any writing, I have put in my time selecting and editing material for the ‘Mencken Omnibus’ that Knopf proposes to get out.… I am not reading all my old stuff, but I am trying to look through it.”

  The book that emerged from this lengthy period of gestation was a kind of super-Prejudices, a jumbo volume containing Mencken’s thoughts on everything from the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (good) to the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (bad). Like the six Prejudices, it was assembled with loving care:

  I have got out a lot of stuff from the first four “Prejudices” books, and some from my early “Smart Set” book reviews.… I have also dug out a lot from magazine and newspaper files, never before printed in books. Some of it, not read for years, strikes me as pretty fair.… Most of it has needed a good deal of revision. It was full of references to the affairs of the time, some of them now almost unintelligible. But after cleaning them out, I find myself with [a] good deal of printable stuff. I shall pile it up without plan, and then make my selections.… Mrs. Lohrfinck [Rosalind Lohrfinck, Mencken’s secretary] has already copied 300,000 or 400,000 words, and I’ll probably have 1,000,000 before I settle down to make my selections.

  By mid-September of 1948, Mencken had blue-penciled this mountain of typescript down to a 265,000-word draft. Knopf hated the proposed title, A Mencken Chrestomathy (according to Mencken, the word means “a collection of choice passages from an author or authors”), but Mencken insisted on it, going so far as to discreetly twit his old friend in the preface: “Nor do I see why I should be deterred by the fact that, when this book was announced, a few newspaper smarties protested that the word would be unfamiliar to many readers, as it was to them. Thousands of excellent nouns, verbs and adjectives that have stood in every decent dictionary for years are still unfamiliar to such ignoramuses, and I do not solicit their patronage. Let them continue to recreate themselves with whodunits, and leave my vocabulary and me to my own customers, who have all been to school.” Not surprisingly, the ever-practical Mencken was more responsive to Knopf’s concerns about the length of the first draft: “I myself feel that there are things in the present text that had better come out, so we should be able to reach an agreeme
nt without difficulty. There is an excess of copied material about equal in bulk to the matter now in the book. Thus, if the ‘Chrestomathy’ has an encouraging sale I’ll be ready to produce a second volume.”

  Mencken delivered a 185,000-word revised draft on September 24, 1948, and approved the copyedited manuscript on November 8. Fifteen days later, a massive stroke left him unable to read or write for the rest of his life. A Mencken Chrestomathy was published the following July, two months before Mencken’s sixty-ninth birthday. It turned up on the New York Times best-seller list almost immediately, appearing alongside Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Seven Storey Mountain, The Fountainhead, Cheaper by the Dozen, John P. Marquand’s Point of No Return and Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate. (They don’t make best-seller lists like that anymore.) The Chrestomathy has sold slowly but steadily ever since: 27,000 copies in hardcover, 22,000 in paperback. Moreover, the book’s influence has been completely out of proportion to its sales. With the exception of Malcolm Cowley’s Portable Faulkner, no anthology of a modern American writer’s work has done more to shape the reputation of its subject.

  What makes this first Mencken Chrestomathy so compelling? To begin with, it is not a conventional anthology. Most single-author anthologies, including some very artful ones, are purely functional: they are meant to introduce the reader to an oeuvre, not to serve as ends in themselves. The Chrestomathy is different. Mencken claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that his purpose in editing the Chrestomathy was “simply to present a selection from my out-of-print writings, many of them now almost unobtainable.” In fact, the text was the climax of a process of serial revision that in some cases lasted as long as three decades. Typically, Mencken took a Monday Article written for the Baltimore Evening Sun, recycled it into a Smart Set essay or an American Mercury editorial, polished that version for inclusion in one of the Prejudices and, finally, created a “definitive” version for the Chrestomathy.* This editorial process is of particular relevance because Mencken’s output consisted mainly of essays; comparatively few of his books were, to coin a Menckenism, durchkomponiert. By selecting the best of these essays, revising them extensively and collecting them in one carefully arranged volume, he produced a book that is at once an anthology and a deliberate act of literary and intellectual self-definition. A Mencken Chrestomathy is not quite as comprehensive as it looks: much of Mencken’s work was still in print in 1948 and is therefore not included. But despite the absence of any material from A Book of Prefaces, Treatise on the Gods, Treatise on Right and Wrong or the three Days books, it nonetheless contains a broadly representative cross section of his writings, one from which subsequent generations of readers have acquired a total sense of H. L. Mencken as man and artist.