Second Mencken Chrestomathy Read online

  That no sequel to A Mencken Chrestomathy has previously been attempted makes perfect sense. “Anthologies are, ideally, an essential species of criticism,” Randall Jarrell has said. “Nothing expresses and exposes your taste so completely.” This is especially true of self-anthologies like the Chrestomathy. No other editor, however skilled or sympathetic, could possibly assemble a collection of Mencken’s writings equal in interest. The book you hold in your hands, however, is not a secondhand imitation of its celebrated predecessor but the real thing: a Second Chrestomathy based on manuscript material selected and edited by Mencken himself.

  Mencken hinted at the existence of this material in a poststroke interview in which he spoke of his frustration at not being able to publish a sequel to the Chrestomathy: “I never got to read it in book form. I had enough material for maybe two more volumes like the Chrestomathy.” His remark was more significant than anyone knew at the time, or for long afterward. By the time of his death in 1956, Mencken had transferred most of his private papers to the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. Among them were five boxes of unsorted manuscript material intended for use in a second Chrestomathy. Much of it consisted of typescript passages edited by Mencken; some appear to have been part of the first draft of the original Chrestomathy, while the rest were presumably intended from the outset as a sequel. Mencken’s diary entries imply that he revised the Chrestomathy passages as he selected them. This made it possible for him to assemble the first draft from edited typescript, at least some of which was re-edited before being cut from the final draft in September of 1948. (The introductory note to the reminiscence of the Baltimore Sunpapers included in this volume contains interlinear changes in Mencken’s handwriting that could not have been made prior to the summer of 1948.) This explains why he had expected to be able to produce a second volume so easily: the hard work was already done.

  In 1963 Betty Adler, then in charge of the Mencken Collection, proposed to Alfred Knopf that he publish a new anthology based partly on Mencken’s notebooks and partly on the Second Chrestomathy material. It is not clear whether Knopf already knew that Mencken had culled enough material for a second full-length Chrestomathy. Whatever the case, he rejected Adler’s proposal, and the five boxes of typescripts, carbons and newspaper clippings eventually found their way to the top shelf of the closet in the Pratt’s Mencken Room, where they gathered dust for twenty-nine years. No one other than Betty Adler appears to have examined this material closely until the spring of 1992, when I looked through it in the course of my research for a forthcoming biography of Mencken and realized that he had done far more work on a sequel to the Chrestomathy than had previously been thought. Even though Mencken did not prepare a chapter outline or organize his material in any way, it was clear that it would be possible to shape the surviving manuscript material into a Second Chrestomathy that did justice to his intentions. This book is the result.

  A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, like its companion volume, is more than just a selection from Mencken’s best-known work. Some 147 of the 238 passages reprinted here are, to the best of my knowledge, appearing in book form for the first time. Of the remaining passages, sixty-two come from books that are no longer in print. Another twenty-nine are currently in print in various Mencken anthologies; of these, twenty-one appear in previously unpublished versions prepared by Mencken specifically for the Second Chrestomathy. A case in point is “The Commonwealth of Morons,” an abridged version of the essay “On Being an American,” first published in Prejudices: Third Series and reprinted in two of the standard Mencken anthologies, James Farrell’s Prejudices: A Selection (1958) and Huntingdon Cairns’s The American Scene (1965). The Second Chrestomathy version comprises about one-third of the original essay, with a freshly written closing paragraph and dozens of other textual changes.

  The uncollected material reprinted in this book says much about the breadth of Mencken’s interests, as well as the essential unity of the philosophy underlying them. It includes excerpts from his vivid 1920 translation of Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist, and from the “New Constitution for Maryland” he drew up in 1937 for the amusement and edification of readers of the Baltimore Sun: “No person shall be eligible [to serve in the state legislature] who is or has ever been a minister of the gospel, or who has ever been under guardianship as a lunatic.” (It isn’t hard to imagine the look on Mencken’s face as he rapped out that sentence on his Underwood noiseless typewriter.) His formidable skills as a journeyman book reviewer are also on display, along with a witty apologia for the tastes of an omnivorous reader who chose to write—and did it well—not only about the novels of Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis but about such unlikely-sounding books as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s My Musical Life and Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World: “I do not review upon any systematic, symmetrical plan, with its roots in logic and the jus gentium, but haphazard and without a conscience, and so it may occur that a fourth-rate novel gets a page, or even two pages, while a work of high merit goes inequitably to my ash-barrel and is hauled away in the night, unwept, unhonored and unsung, along with my archaic lingerie and my vacant beer bottles.” One might easily put together an extremely readable anthology out of Mencken’s book reviews alone, which take up 105 pages of small print in Betty Adler’s bibliography and of which the two Chrestomathys contain only a small sample.

  “As I grow older,” Mencken wrote in the preface to Minority Report, “I am unpleasantly impressed by the fact that giving each human being but one life is a bad scheme. He should have two at the lowest—one for observing and studying the world, and the other for formulating and settling down his conclusions about it. Forced, as he is by the present irrational arrangement, to undertake the second function before he has made any substantial progress with the first, he limps along like an athlete only half trained.” Much of the interest of the Chrestomathys lies in the way they show how H. L. Mencken viewed his life’s work from the vantage point of middle age (and, though he did not know it, at the very end of his career). These volumes contain the essays he most wanted to preserve, revised to his satisfaction; they are the closest thing to a literary testament he chose to leave behind. With the publication of A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, that testament is now available in its entirety.

  A SECOND MENCKEN CHRESTOMATHY appears at a time when a great deal of journalistic attention has lately been devoted to H. L. Mencken. The opening of My Life as Author and Editor and Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, the memoirs Mencken left to the Enoch Pratt Free Library on condition that they remain under seal for thirty-five years after his death, was treated not as a long-delayed footnote to his career but as a major news story in its own right. The publication of an abridged trade edition of the first of these memoirs—and, earlier, of Mencken’s diary—triggered a flood of criticism and commentary, some of it as hostile as anything written during his lifetime.

  That critics are still quarreling over Mencken would have astonished many of his contemporaries. Edgar Kemler, his first postwar biographer, claimed as early as 1950 that “except for The American Language, the Days books, and a few selections” from his other books, Mencken wrote “no works likely to endure.” Mencken himself affected to believe that the shelf life of most of his work would be brief. “My happiest days,” he said in the preface to the original Chrestomathy, “have been spent in crowded press-stands, recording and belaboring events that were portentous in their day, but are now forgotten.… What the total of my published writings comes to I don’t know precisely, but certainly it must run well beyond 5,000,000 words. A good deal of it, of course, was journalism pure and simple—dead almost before the ink which printed it was dry.” Yet by 1948 Mencken must have suspected that he had already passed the test of time, and today there is no doubting it. He is the only American journalist of his generation whose work is still read—who is, indeed, a genuinely popular writer. The artificial respiration of tenure-hungry scholars has played no part in keeping his memor
y green; to the extent that he is remembered, it is because there is something about his writing that appeals to the common reader.

  At first glance, the exact nature of this appeal is baffling. It’s temptingly easy to treat Mencken as a period piece, a controversialist whose battles were won long ago and whose work has survived simply because it is so well written. But wonderful as his prose style is (and no finer prose has been written by an American), this explanation will not do. If good writing were enough to keep polemics alive, Mencken’s Monday Articles on the ins and outs of Baltimore politics would be as widely read as “In Memoriam: W.J.B.” or “The Sahara of the Bozart.” In fact, Mencken’s best journalism was concerned less with battles than with wars. At the heart of his critique of American life, for example, is his hatred of “the whole Puritan scheme of things, with its gross and nauseating hypocrisies, its idiotic theologies, its moral obsessions, its pervasive Philistinism,” all of which he firmly believed to be intrinsic to the American national character. Theologies (and ideologies, their secular brethren) come and go, but the conceptions of human nature from which they spring are forever with us, and to leaf through the Second Chrestomathy is to be struck by how often Mencken, in the course of bashing away at long-forgotten manifestations of the “Puritan Kultur” of the ’20s, says things scarcely less applicable to the very different America of today:

  In the United States there is a right way to think and a wrong way to think in everything—not only in theology, or politics, or economics, but in the most trivial matters of everyday life. Thus, in the average American city the citizen who, in the face of an organized public clamor (usually fomented by parties with something to sell) for the erection of an equestrian statue of Susan B. Anthony in front of the chief railway station, or the purchase of a dozen leopards for the municipal zoo, or the dispatch of an invitation to the Structural Iron Workers’ Union to hold its next annual convention in the town Symphony Hall—the citizen who, for any logical reason, opposes such a proposal—on the ground, say, that Miss Anthony never rode a horse in her life, or that a dozen leopards would be less useful than a gallows to hang the City Council, or that the Structural Iron Workers would spit all over the floor of Symphony Hall and knock down the busts of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms—this citizen is commonly denounced as an anarchist and a public enemy. It is not only erroneous to think thus; it has come to be immoral.

  Much of what Mencken has to say is, of course, entirely predictable. He is the apostle of common sense, and of a realism so hard as to be hopelessly ill suited to the prevailing softness of our own Age of Sensitivity. Whatever the disorder in question, man’s irremediable stupidity was Mencken’s universal diagnosis, the horse-laugh his preferred antidote. Those who take offense easily are, now as ever, unlikely to find him anything other than offensive. This is particularly true of earnest believers in what he liked to call “the uplift.” Anyone who spends his days grubbing for solutions to notoriously intractable social problems can have little in common with the cold-eyed skeptic who wrote in the first issue of the American Mercury: “The Editors have heard no Voice from the burning bush. They will not cry up and offer for sale any sovereign balm, whether political, economic or aesthetic, for all the sorrows of the world.… The world, as they see it, is down with at least a score of painful diseases, all of them chronic and incurable.”

  Even those who find Mencken’s philosophy tonic are likely to shrink from some of its specific applications. His hardness too often shades into outright brutality; he is almost always simplistic, and very often demonstrably wrong on factual matters. Yet the substance of his opinions has surprisingly little to do with the pleasure we take in his way of expressing them. He once called poetry “a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music,” a sentiment echoed elsewhere in this volume. (“Walt Whitman was the greatest of American poets, and for a plain reason: he got furthest from the obvious facts. What he had to say was almost never true.”) One might just as well speak of Mencken’s own poetic quality. Writing in great unbroken arcs of gusto, he briskly sweeps the reader along from one outrageous assertion to the next:

  A dog is a standing proof that most so-called human rights, at bottom, are worth nothing. A dog is proverbially devoid of any such rights, and yet it lives well and is happy. For one dog that is starved and mistreated there are 10,000 that are coddled and overfed.… Yet a dog has none of the great rights that men esteem, glory in and die for. It cannot vote. It cannot get converted by Dr. Billy Sunday. It cannot go to jail for some great and lofty principle—say, equal suffrage or birth control. It is barred from the Elks, the Harvard Club and Congress. It cannot serve its country by dying of septicaemia or acute gastro-enteritis. It cannot read the Nation. It cannot subscribe to the Y.M.C.A. It cannot swear at waiters. It cannot eat in Pullman dining-cars. It cannot be a Presbyterian.

  But to dismiss Mencken as a pure stylist, a Wodehouse-like juggler of shiny metaphors, is to ignore the fact that his attitude toward life is the point of his work. This attitude, as has often been remarked, is profoundly bleak: few American writers have had a stronger sense of the futility of man’s earthly existence. Yet there is nothing lugubrious about Mencken’s tragic sense of life. Perhaps the most revealing selection in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy is the Monday Article he wrote on the death of Albert Hildebrandt, one of his oldest friends: “The universe is run idiotically, and its only certain product is sorrow. But there are yet men who, by their generally pleasant spirits, by their extraordinary capacity for making and keeping friends, yet manage to cheat, in some measure, the common destiny of mankind, doomed like the beasts to perish.” What was true of Hildebrandt was doubly true of his distinguished obituarist, whose habitual reply to the idiocies of the universe was a sardonic grin. “We live in a land of abounding quackeries,” he once said, “and if we do not learn how to laugh we succumb to the melancholy disease which afflicts the race of viewers-with-alarm.” This is the ultimate source of Mencken’s abiding appeal: “He achieves his effect,” Joseph Epstein has rightly and beautifully said, “through the magical transfer of joie de vivre.” The man who can look into the abyss and laugh is rare enough; when he can also make his readers laugh along with him, it matters little whether he was right or wrong about capital punishment or the novels of Henry James.

  In the end. H. L. Mencken’s writing, like that of all the great essayists, is valuable not so much for what it has to say (undeniably compelling though that often is) as for what it tells us about the character of the man who said it. “The goods that a writer produces,” he wrote in My Life as Author and Editor, “can never be impersonal; his character gets into them as certainly as it gets into the work of any other creative artist, and he must be prepared to endure investigation of it, and speculation upon it, and even gossip about it.” Surely Mencken’s own character got into every word he wrote, and it is writ large on every page of this book: witty and abrasive, self-confident and self-contradictory, sometimes maddening, often engaging, always inimitable.

  A SECOND MENCKEN CHRESTOMATHY is based on five letter files of manuscript material labeled “Material Collected by H.L.M. for a proposed second volume of A Mencken Chrestomathy” in the Mencken Collection of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. The first file contains approximately 250 edited typescripts (there are several duplicates and a few variant versions) of passages excerpted by Mencken from his uncollected newspaper and magazine articles and from ten of his books: The American Credo, Damn! A Book of Calumny, the revised version of In Defense of Women, Notes on Democracy and the six volumes of Prejudices. All of this material is in the typing of Mrs. Rosalind C. Lohrfinck, Mencken’s secretary, with interlinear corrections by Mencken. The second and third files contain mounted clippings of columns from the Baltimore Sunpapers and unsorted carbons of various other published articles. The fourth and fifth files contain loose, unsorted clippings from newspapers and magazines, some dating as far back as the early 1900s.

  This book contains 21
9 of the 250-odd typescript passages edited by Mencken, plus nineteen unrevised articles drawn from the second and third files.† The remaining passages either dealt with matters of little interest to modern-day readers, overlapped substantially with other passages or were too fragmentary to publish in their existing state. I have supplied sixty-seven passage titles, as well as all chapter titles. (In some cases Mencken failed to supply a title of his own; in others, he simply carried over the title of the original article from which the passage was drawn, often with misleading results.) I have supplied source notes where Mencken did not.

  All introductory notes were written by Mencken especially for the Second Chrestomathy, with the following exceptions, adapted by me from other works by Mencken: The notes to “The Pushful American,” “A Novel a Day,” “A Novel of the First Rank” and “An American Novel” (and the footnote in “Marginal Note”) are from My Life as Author and Editor. The note to “Interlude in the Socratic Manner” is from Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work. The note to “The Pulitzer Prize” is in part from My Life as Author and Editor and in part from Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work. The note to “The Metaphysic of Rotary” is from the prefaces to Americana 1925 and Americana 1926. The note to “Notice to Neglected Geniuses” is from Mencken’s Monday Article in the Baltimore Evening Sun for August 20, 1920. The note to “Criticism of Criticism of Criticism” is based on Mencken’s handwritten notations in the Second Chrestomathy typescript.

  The arrangement of this book, though modeled on the original Chrestomathy, is entirely my own doing. (Mencken left only a few sketchy marginal notes suggesting possible chapter titles.) I have done a limited amount of additional editing of the text, mostly to correct typographical errors and reconcile stylistic inconsistencies; I have retained Mencken’s customary usages, including his idiosyncratic approach to capitalization and his period spelling. Following Mencken’s example in the passages he revised most extensively, as well as in his editing of the original Chrestomathy, I have closed up line breaks and unnecessary paragraph breaks and excised superfluous exclamation points. I have also done a bit of topping and tailing on certain passages extracted from books or longer articles, and silently made a few cuts of my own in order to prune redundancies and now-obscure topical references. All ellipsis points are Mencken’s and, as in the original Chrestomathy, are not intended to indicate cuts (except in “A New Constitution for Maryland” and “Nietzsche on Christianity”). All footnotes are Mencken’s except for the one in “Robert Louis Stevenson,” which is mine.