{"id":2087,"date":"2010-09-25T11:07:52","date_gmt":"2010-09-25T16:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=2087"},"modified":"2010-09-25T11:12:18","modified_gmt":"2010-09-25T16:12:18","slug":"h-l-menckens-prejudices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2010\/09\/25\/literature\/h-l-menckens-prejudices\/","title":{"rendered":"H. L. Mencken’s Prejudices"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Sage of Baltimore<\/a> has been honored with a new edition of the complete set of his “Prejudices<\/a>.” The best review<\/a> I’ve found so far is by Damon Root at Reason. He must have looked beyond the pages of Prejudices, because he knows of Mencken the editor as well as Mencken the writer. It was in that role, primarily for his “American Mercury,” that he did the country a service he is little honored or remembered for today. As Root puts it,<\/p>\n

Similarly, at a time when most leading Progressives (including Wilson) supported racial segregation and turned a blind eye to the horrors of the Jim Crow South, Mencken attacked the lawlessness of \u201cKlu Kluxry\u201d and routinely praised (and published) the work of black writers, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, and George Schuyler. Indeed, White later said that Mencken pushed him to write his first novel, The Fire in the Flint, and then helped him secure a publisher. Zora Neale Hurston was a major Mencken fan. And according to the Harlem Renaissance giant James Weldon Johnson, \u201cMencken had made a sharper impression on my mind than any other American then writing.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, Mencken did more for social justice at that crucial time than any of his contemporaries, not because he pitied African Americans or because he loved to imagine himself as their noble savior, but because he admired the work of black writers and considered it worthy of being published. He gave them a much greater gift than condescending patronage. He gave them respect. The Mercury set the tone for many of the intellectuals of the day, and they, too, learned to recognize and respect the talent Mencken set before them. As Root points out, he hated the Klan and everything it stood for, and fought it with scorn and ridicule in every issue of his journal. In spite of all this, he has actually been called a “racist” because he spoke of blacks as he spoke of everyone else in his world, without the fine sense of political correctness expected of writers in the 21st century. No good deed goes unpunished.<\/p>\n

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is not so complimentary as Root in the review<\/a> he wrote for the Wall Street Journal.\u00a0 For example,<\/p>\n

But the vast majority of the pieces in “Prejudices” are tedious and ephemeral, even terrible at times.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anyone seeking the reasons for Mencken’s high reputation would do better by turning to Huntington Cairns’s “The American Scene” (1965), an anthology that judiciously selects from Mencken’s autobiographical works, his writings on the American language and his various superb efforts at reportage, including his famous account of the 1925 Scopes Trail, in which fundamentalist religion famously butted heads with evolutionary theory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are no dates included in the Library of America volumes and no contextual introductions to the pieces offered. Much of the time we have no idea what Mencken is shouting about. He comes off as a gasbag.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mencken continued such rewrites and regurgitations for an additional four “Prejudices.” He is at his worst when he writes on what he considers important topics: the South, farmers, the national letters, the American character.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I understand what Tyrrell is talking about.\u00a0 Mencken was scornful of his enemies, and he wrote about them in a style that was repetitive to the point that it could become tiresome.\u00a0 Perhaps he does come off as a gasbag in some of the worst of the Prejudices.\u00a0 However, if you’re interested in learning something about the human condition, the Prejudices are not ephemeral, nor is it difficult to gather what he is shouting about if you take the time to learn a little of the history of the time.\u00a0 I suspect the reviewer’s blanket judgment that\u00a0the sage\u00a0is “at his worst” when writing about the South, farmers, the national letters, the American character,” is more a reflection of his own opinions than of Mencken.\u00a0 He occasionally had strong praise for southerners and southern letters, and as far as the national letters are concerned, I owe the discovery of several authors I greatly admire to his reviews.\u00a0\u00a0He had a fine eye for literary\u00a0talent, and put it to good use in the Mercury.\u00a0 His first\u00a0encounter with Sinclair Lewis<\/a> is a case in point.\u00a0 He was put off by Lewis typical antics,\u00a0wonderfully described in Thomas Wolfe’s<\/a> “Of Time and the River.”\u00a0 However, when he got around to reading Lewis’ work, it didn’t matter.\u00a0 He knew he had found a first rate talent.\u00a0 He did not dislike farmers because they farmed, but because they were the source of political power for his bete noires such as William Jennings Bryan <\/a>and “dry boss” Wayne B. Wheeler<\/a>.\u00a0 Tyrrell comes closer to the truth when he writes,<\/p>\n

He flourished in the first quarter of the century, but I doubt there would be room in America for him now. His prose style aside, he was an independent mind. There are only two camps today, and he would be in neither.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s exactly what I admire about him, and why it’s well worth the effort to read his Prejudices, in spite of their blemishes.\u00a0 There have never been many like him in any age, and in our own, they are almost non-existent.\u00a0 Most of the stuff one reads today\u00a0is so predictable, so orthodox in its conformity to some ideological dogma, so processed like the food we eat, so often regurgitated in blogs and the “news,” that one despairs of finding anything original enough to be worth thinking about.\u00a0 Mencken is constantly holding little baubles of insights in front of your nose, turning them this way and that,\u00a0shoving your imagination out of familiar ruts, even if they are sometimes in the rough, just as he dug them up.<\/p>\n

Katherine Powers wrote another review<\/a> for Barnes and Noble.\u00a0 She bowdlerizes Mencken as an original “east coast intellectual:”<\/p>\n

H. L. Mencken’s Prejudices<\/em><\/a> is an extended Bronx cheer from the smarty-boots side of the culture war and the first full-bore expression of the animus of East coast intellectuals toward the South and fly-over country.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you prefer feeding your confirmation bias about east coast intellectuals over according Mencken the respect he deserves as an individual, you will certainly\u00a0find many tidbits that will serve the purpose\u00a0before reaching the end of Prejudices.\u00a0 \u00a0However, the main problem with this\u00a0pigeon-hole version of Mencken is that it isn’t true.\u00a0 Anyone who takes the time to read his work will notice that he found a great deal to admire and respect in “the South and fly-over country.”\u00a0 The rest of Powers’ review is more of the same wooden caricature.\u00a0 For example,<\/p>\n

In “The Cult of Hope” (Second Series<\/em>) he calls the idea that criticism should be constructive a “messianic delusion”; on the contrary, its object is destruction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If Powers’ object here is to give the reader an example of one of Mencken’s bombastic phrases, well and good.\u00a0 If, on the other hand, she sets any value on informing her readers who and what Mencken was as a critic, its a complete distortion.\u00a0 Mencken had a fine eye for separating the wheat from the chaff, and while he may not have been charitable to the chaff, he often had enthusiastic (and constructive)\u00a0praise for authors he liked, many times before their reputation had already been established elsewhere.\u00a0 Other than that, Powers can’t resist the urge to draw\u00a0our attention to the fact that her personal piety meets the most up-to-date standards by means of the politically correct peck-sniffery familiar to modern readers.\u00a0 This sort of thing may be forgivable as an inherited weakness in her case, as we learn that her “great-grandfather was an ardent supporter of William Jennings Bryan.”<\/p>\n

It’s hard to\u00a0capture a writer as original and thought-provoking as Mencken by trying to\u00a0mount him on a pin in a review\u00a0limited to a couple of webpages.\u00a0 The most you can hope to do is pique the readers interest enough to\u00a0get them to look for themselves.\u00a0 Mencken is worth the effort.<\/p>\n

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The Sage of Baltimore has been honored with a new edition of the complete set of his “Prejudices.” The best review I’ve found so far is by Damon Root at Reason. He must have looked beyond the pages of Prejudices, because he knows of Mencken the editor as well as Mencken the writer. It was … Continue reading “H. L. Mencken’s Prejudices”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[73,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-literature"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-xF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2087"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2089,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2087\/revisions\/2089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}