|
COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
From 1948, H. L. Mencken on Theodore Dreiser
Many preeminent writers of the early twentieth century held views that now seem to us deplorable. But what Edith Wharton thought about Jews, or Hemingway about women, was enfolded in acts of imagination. They were novelists. H. L. Mencken, on the other hand, was a journalist, and so his opinions stand naked before us: his condemnation of democracy, his admiration for Germany (he opposed American entry into both world wars), his loathing of all idealists and reformers, including those "professional kikes" who in the thirties went around complaining that Adolf Hitler wasn't being nice to the Jews. Mencken grew up at the end of the nineteenth century, the days of social Darwinism. As he saw it, the poor deserved to be poor; the hanged had it coming. If they had been superior people, they would have had a superior fate. They might, for example, have been born into a prosperous bourgeois family, found immediately the work they were made for, pursued it joyfully for half a century, and kicked off each night at ten o'clock to go have a drink with the boys. That's what he did. What was the matter with them?
A man of such complacency (his word), not to speak of such "fatal want of generosity" (Alfred Kazin's words), might well, in our day, be picked up with tongs, if he were picked up at all. But Mencken deserves to be discussed, for he was the most influential journalist that America ever produced. So it is good to have a new biography, "The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken" (HarperCollins; $29.95), and good, too, that the job was done by Terry Teachout, an arts writer (Commentary, the Times, the Washington Post) who, apart from having a nice style, is conservative enough not to be shocked by Mencken, and therefore does not waste our time, in the manner of recent literary biographers, with his moral superiority to his subject.
Henry Louis Mencken was born in 1880, in Baltimore, of German stock. As he told it, he had a serene childhood, digging in the back yard and reading great stacks of nineteenth-century literature. Like other bookish boys of the period, he dreamed of going into journalism, a world that, with its tough guys banging out their thoughts in spittoon-lined city rooms, suited his roistering temperament. At the age of eighteen, he presented himself at the Baltimore Morning Herald; by the age of twenty-five, he was the editor-in-chief of that paper. Then he went to the Baltimore Sun, where, with a few interruptions, he remained to the end of his writing...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
