America’s Best-Hated Man of Letters

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 560, 12 January 1929, Page 22

America’s Best-Hated Man of Letters

ICONOCLASTIC MR. MENCKEN

(Written for THE SIX bn L. W. r. REEVES.} Bou:, bow, i/c Yankee Middle Classes! Crawl, ye Prophets! bow, yc Masses! Blow the trumpets, bang The brasses! Tantantara! T.zing ! Boom! (Blue fire. Enter Mr. Mencken, garbed as Mephisto. Prophets grovel. Masses and Middle Classes bow. Mr. Mencken turns his back. Prophets rise up and denounce.) • r pi-lAT, I am sure, is a fair picture of how Mr. H. L. Mencken, ‘'the best-hated man *in America,” is regarded in his own country. “Grovel,” say the-prophets, “while he is looking at you, but get up and hit him when he turns away. He's a Socialist. Perhaps he’s a Bolshevist.” To outsiders, of course, he is merely a human being gifted with marvellous powers of vituperation —the granddenouncer, the supreme iconoclast — but to American intellectualism he is ! Sathanus ipse. Has any other author in the last hundred years written such a collection of diatribe and denunciation as ; has Mr. Mencken in his six volumes j of “Prejudices.” and his dozen books 1 of miscellaneous criticism? How he blasts and withers the “innocent” writer (and the “innocent” reader no less)! How he slaughters the college ! professors, the professional Good Citi- j zens and the temporary prophets! j Then, when he has finished slaughter- j ing, how frantically he capers on their ; graves! How he abhors loose think- j ing and euphemism. Does he enjoy this feast of blood? ; Of course he does. Who could write j such a sentence as this without enjoy- ! ing it?: “The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, snivelling, pooltroonisli, ignominious mob of serfs and goosesteppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages, and they grow more timorous, more snivelling, more poltroonish, more ignominious every day.” It may be argued that out of this sort of writing ho only gets the negative pleasure of the preacher who is able, without any shadow of doubt, to assure his flock that they are all going straight to damnation, blit when he leaves it behind and sets to work on serious criticism his pleasure in his work becomes plain. In most of his essays in pure criticism he moderates his flamboyant style and settles down to honest argu- j ment. Mencken can be quite as generous with his praise as with his blame. His essay on Joseph Conrad in “A Book of Prefaces” is almost one of the finest and most carefully considered judgments in modern literature and his essays on two of his own countrymen. Theodore Dreiser and James Huneker, show a skill in appreciation that should be as famous as his skill in denunciation. For, in his contemporaries’ eagerness to find fault with him and to defend themselves and their class from his attacks, they generally overlook his skill purely as a critic. Mencken detests the suggestion that art is only a medium for education or “uplift.” In his essay entitled “Huneker; a Memory,” he says, “Art is no longer, even by implication. a device for improving the mind. It is wholly a magnificent adventure.” Perhaps that is partly the explanation of his hatred of the philistine and the college professor. They would attempt to educate the people by means of art —in brief, “the Messianic delusion” —all Mencken wishes to do is to educate the people to an appreciation of art so that they may enjoy it. Mencken makes great parade of his anti-democratic and reactionist principles. He writes: “ . . . democracy, that arch murrain of Christendom,” and makes play sneering at “Socialism, the single-tax, birth-control, Communism. the League of Nations, the conscription of wealth.” etc. But one is compelled sooner or later to the belief that he has been forced into this position. In his essay on “The American Magazine” he writes: “All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced upon them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.” That would seem to be Mencken’p doctrine. What of Mencken’s literary style? It is doubtful if he writes English—certainly he writes beautiful American. There is never the slightest doubt of his meaning or intentions; he writes deliberately and clearly, even his most insulting strings of epithet fall on the ear with a certain measured and definite regularity. And he has a pretty fancy when he likes to use it. Here is an account of a meeting with Frank Harris, the friend and biographer of Oscar Wilde: “That afternoon, in fact, we had a sneering match and before it was over most of the great names in the letters and politics of the time, circa 1914, had been reduced to faint hisses and haha’s. . . . Well, a sneerer has his good days and his bad days. There are times when his gift gives him such comfort that it can be matched only by God’s grace, and there are times when it launches upon him such showers of darts that he is bound to feel a few stings.” Again, see how kindly and withal how just he can be in his criticisms. This is the final paragraph of his essay: “The Late Mr. Wells,” in which he pulls the unfortunate philosopher to pieces and scatters the fragments to the winds. “What remains of Wells? There remains a little shelf of very excellent books, beginning with “TonoBungay” and ending with “Marriage.” It is flanked on the one side by a long row of extravagant romances in the manner of Jules Verne, and on the other by an even longer row of puerile tracts. But let us not underestimate it, because it is in such uninviting company. There is on it some of the liveliest, most amusing, and withal most respectable fiction that England has produced in our time. In that fiction there is a sufficient memorial to a man who, between two debauches of claptrap, had his day as an artist.” Mencken, in fine, is a one-man band. He plays a never-ending fugue, the theme of which is constantly recurring to the sound of clashing cymbals and thudding drums. But if you can leave the concert hall when the theme recurs and listen only to the bridge passages, you can be sure of hearing some excellent music.