The Lives of H.L. Mencken

by R.W. Bradford

H.L. Mencken, 1880–1956, was the most influential American literary critic of the 20th century, one of America's most influential personalities, and arguably the most prominent and influential American libertarian. He has never lacked devoted readers, and there are now signs that he is coming back into his own with a wider audience of educated people.

On April 7, C-Span celebrated his life with a two-hour program in its American Writers series, featuring Mencken anthologist Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Baltimore Sun reporter Fred Rasmussen, and Vince Fitzpatrick, curator of the Mencken collection at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. The program, done live from the street outside Mencken's now-abandoned home in Baltimore, consisted primarily of call-ins, augmented by photographs of Mencken and selections from a 1948 interview recorded for the Library of Congress.

The program provided an introduction to Mencken, rather than a serious look at his life or work. The most provocative comment was offered in a brief excerpt of an interview with P.J. O'Rourke, who observed that Mencken was not an individualist in that he did not believe in the:

"sanctity of the individual, the primacy of the individual, the idea that society and political organization should be based on the individual and I don't think Mencken's opinion of the individual was quite that high. Mencken was a believer as many people in his era were, in the forces of culture. He may not have believed in politics. He may not even have been much of a nationalist, but he did believe in culture."

Despite O'Rourke's eccentric use of the term "individualism," this is a prescient observation. Of course, in a political context, individualism means that the state should keep its hand off the individual and allow him to bear the fruits of his successes and the costs of his failures — by which standard Mencken is one of the greatest individualists in American history. Happily, the American Writers program was followed by the full interview with O'Rourke.

Judging from the number and character of the calls to the program, there is certainly a renewed interest in Mencken. This may, then, be a good time to evaluate some of the major sources of information about his life — and, indeed, to say something about the many lives he led.

H.L. Mencken led five lives, two public and three private. His public lives were as newspaperman and literary figure; his private lives were as family man, friend, and lover. There was some overlap among these lives (for example, he encouraged his friends and lovers to write for the literary publications he edited), but as a general rule, he tried to keep them reasonably separate. He had two reasons: he valued his independence, which he knew he could maximize by having more than one successful career, and he sought different things from each of his different lives: comfort, camaraderie, and private pleasures from his private lives: fame, money, excitement and intellectual challenge from his public lives.

He sought to keep his love life private but was quite open about his life as family man and friend. And for a man who vituperatively eschewed public relations and denounced professional p.r. men, he did an awful lot of work to enhance the public perception and reputation of his public lives as newspaperman and (especially) literary figure.

Anyone who read "The Man Mencken," by Isaac Goldberg (1925) was bound to suspect that its subject had played a substantial role in writing it. For one thing, it contained a considerable amount of information that could have come only from Mencken; for another, it was written very much in Mencken's own style. But his style is contagious — those who read Mencken very often ape him — so Mencken's role in his first biography was therefore conjectural until Carl Bode revealed in "Mencken" (1969) that Mencken had provided Goldberg with a "thick autobiographical typescript," much of which Goldberg rewrote by changing it from the first person to the third. ("It was, of course, very friendly," Mencken commented in his memoir ["My Life as Author and Editor," p. 408], "and I doubt that it could be called penetrating.")

Mencken's publicity-hounding continued after his death. He sequestered personal papers, correspondence, detailed records, a diary, and two lengthy memoirs for release 25, 35, and 45 years after his death, thereby ensuring a steady stream of new information and, presumably, new interest in his life and work.

The past five years have seen publication of abridged versions of Mencken's diary and two lengthy memoirs, one on his life as a newspaperman and one on his life as a literary figure. Revelations from these, and other papers, made past biographies somewhat obsolescent, so in 1994 Fred Hobson published the newest, most definitive biography, "Mencken A Life." It is not surprising that an English professor like Hobson, already known to Menckenophiles as author of "Serpent in Eden: H. L. Mencken and the South," would produce a rather dull biography. There is a dramatic contrast between Hobson's prose and that of Mencken and Mencken's livelier correspondents. Thanks, however, to the fact that Mencken is Mencken and that the biography of a literary figure is bound to quote extensively from its subject, Hobson's biography is a pleasant read.

Hobson enjoys two advantages over previous biographers: the release of various of Mencken's papers, most notably two long memoirs, "Thirty-Fine Years of Newspaper Work" and "My Life as Editor and Author;" and the availability of various previously unavailable personal correspondence. This latter consists mostly of letters from Mencken to various women friends, all of whom promised Mencken that they would destroy every last piece of correspondence. Their failure to keep their word, and their eventual sale of these letters to libraries, has added considerable detail to our knowledge of the private life that Mencken very much wanted to keep very private.

Before Hobson, discussion of Mencken's love life was pretty limited. Bode (1969) did write a chapter about Mencken's longest-lasting relationship, an affair with Marion Bloom that lasted more than a decade, and hinted at a few others. Hobson had the advantage of playing the voyeur through hundreds of old love letters. Mencken was discreet both as lover and romantic correspondent, so there's nothing salacious revealed. Mostly, the letters allowed Hobson (and any other scholar who goes to the trouble of reading them) to get a better idea of the women who interested Mencken and the sorts of things he found appropriate to write to them about. For a Menckenophile like me, this is interesting, though I wonder whether my interest is any different from that which motivates 3 million housewives to pick up The National Enquirer at their grocery checkstand each week.

In general, however Hobson's biography covers quite familiar ground, and covers it in a pedestrian manner, the way a welfare mom covers her new sofa from Kmart with clear plastic. For the individual unfamiliar with Mencken's life, it is a decent enough book, though there are livelier alternatives. I overstate Hobson's dullness, I suppose, but there certainly is a dramatic contrast between Hobson's prose and the prose of Mencken or of his livelier biographers.

One other thing annoys me about Hobson's book. In its "Acknowledgements," Hobson thanks the National Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Arts for providing him financial support in 1991–1992. Why does anybody need a government subsidy for a book that is virtually certain to be a financial success? I know, writing a detailed scholarly biography takes a lot of work. But this is not a biography of an obscure figure of interest only to scholars. Mencken is a writer of enduring interest, whose fans are many. If you don't believe me, check the prices of Mencken's books in any decent used book store. Despite their large printings during his life and since, they continue to be scarce and to command very good prices, thanks to demand from fans and collectors of Menckeniana. I have corresponded with three different people who subscribe to Liberty only because, they say, we review new books on Mencken. Hobson's book was published by a major commercial publisher, extensively advertised and publicized. In short, its commercial success was virtually certain. So why does its author take a subsidy, let alone one forcibly extracted from his fellow citizens?

Mencken's two recently published memoirs, on the other hand, are much more fun to read, and reveal much more new and interesting information about their author.

The Private Lives of H. L. Mencken

Mencken sought to keep his love life private (hence public details were sparse until the publication of Bode and especially Hobson), but was quite open about his life as family man and friend. In all these lives he seems to have been very much a bourgeois but cosmopolitan Victorian. His father died when he was 18, leaving Mencken as head of his family, a responsibility he accepted without any evident hesitation or feeling of burden. His mother lived until he was 45, and during all those years he lived with her in the row house in Baltimore that his father had bought in 1883. His home life was a peaceful refuge from the tumult of his careers as literary critic and newspaperman, an environment in which he found both comfort and pleasure.

He cultivated a reputation as a confirmed bachelor and misogynist, though the truth of the former charge was doubtful and the latter negligible. He once wrote a new constitution for Maryland that included a provision for a tax on bachelors of $1.00 per day, on the ground that it was "worth a dollar a day to be free" and his book "In Defense of Women" (1918) was sufficiently delphic to allow many to read it as anti-women. Nevertheless, he plainly enjoyed the comforts of women. My own suspicion is that he avoided marriage as long as his mother lived, appreciating the stability and comfort of his mother's home, his freedom both to pursue his careers and to avail himself of the pleasures of a variety of women. He began to think seriously of marriage only when his mother died.

He met Sara Haardt in 1923, when he lectured at Goucher College, a rather genteel Baltimore woman's college at which she was an English instructor. He courted her as well as several other women intermittently during the next few years. Sara was the youngest, the most similar to Mencken in class, culture and style, and the woman most clearly likely to play a subordinate role in their relationship. She also was in poor health, partly the result of an unfortunate intervention in her medical care authorized by a well-intentioned Mencken in 1928.

In choosing Sara, it seems plain that Mencken sought a quiet, comfortable, and secure home life, one similar to the life he enjoyed as a bachelor. Mencken's and Sara's love was deep and abiding, and her early but not unexpected death in 1935 devastated him.

Mencken enjoyed the company of literary figures and newspapermen, but his closest friends came from disparate walks of life. They included a physician, a violin maker, a medical artist, and an electrician. He seems to have sought in his friendships the same sort of comfort and security he sought in his family. His friends were by no means stupid or unaccomplished men, but plainly he valued common prejudices, loyalties, and similarities of taste over intelligence and accomplishment. In this way, perhaps, he was more demotically American than he would have wanted to believe.

Mencken as Litterateur

Mencken never limited his criticism to literature; he also wrote about politics, culture, art, music . . . and virtually anything else that captured his fancy. But it is Mencken the literary figure that we know best. There is a good reason for this. For one thing, virtually all his biographers are professors of literature, who naturally focus on his literary criticism. More importantly, it was as a literary critic that he made his reputation.

In the early years of the 20th century, he established himself as the most intelligent, lively, and interesting critic in America. His first criticism was written for Baltimore newspapers, but he quickly sought out a wider stage. In 1908, he began writing criticism for The Smart Set, at the time a not particularly distinguished magazine of short stories, essays, and criticism. His acerbic wit, his skill at penetrating fundamental issues of style and taste, and his enormous appetite for work — in 15 years at Smart Set, he wrote more than a million words, reviewing an astonishing 2,000 books — gradually made him the nation's most influential literary critic.

As the 1910s ended, his interests gradually evolved away from literary matters toward cultural and political issues. He intransigently advocated civil liberties and general classical liberal values. Mencken often characterized himself as a "libertarian" and many contemporary libertarians see him as one of their own, though it is clear that he was not a libertarian in the sense the term is used today.* His open support for Germany in World War I made him an unpopular figure, leading him to turn away from political writing for a time and turn more to humor. This was when he wrote his fanciful history of the bathtub, a hoax that managed to take in a great many people, including not a few scholars. At the same time, he was establishing a reputation as a scholar himself, thanks to publication of "The American Language" in 1919.

Beginning in 1919, he gathered an anthology of his magazine writing, that he called "Prejudices." It proved so successful that, over the next eight years, he did five sequels. He continued to be more and more a critic-at-large than a literary critic, a development evident in each successive collection of "Prejudices." Even so, his influence on the literary world remained very substantial: In his memoir, for example, he twice mentions using his influence to get a Pulitzer prize for one or another individual.

In 1924, he launched The American Mercury, a monthly review that quickly became immensely popular with educated Americans and made him a celebrity on college campuses. But his success was not limited to highbrows. By now, his books were best-sellers and his newspaper column was syndicated nationally. In 1926, journalist Walter Lippman accurately described him as "the most powerful personal influence on a whole generation of educated people."

His popularity flagged during the so-called "Great Depression," but his literary output did not. He continued to write, to edit the Mercury (until 1933) and to play an important role in the management and editing of the Baltimore Sun, one of America's great newspapers. He wrote editorials, essays, memoirs and scholarly articles until 1948, when a stroke silenced him. He lived until 1956.

Rating Mencken's Biographies

Here are brief evaluations of Mencken biographies and memoirs, complete, I believe, through 1990. I rate them on a scale of one to four cigars, presumably "Uncle Willies," Mencken's favorite brand.

"The Man Mencken: A Biographical and Critical Study," by Isaac Goldberg, 1925. Lively and fun — no surprise, since much of it was ghosted by Mencken himself — but covers his life and career only through 1925. 3.5 stogies.

"Happy Days," by H. L. Mencken, 1940. A collection of brief memoirs about Mencken's childhood in Baltimore. Written for the New Yorker between 1936 and 1940, these sketches of boyhood are immensely readable, charming, nostalgic, and fun. They reveal a Mencken far different from the well-known critic and polemicist. It seems safe to say that the childhood of this upper middle class boy in the Gilded Age was not so idyllic as the adult recalls — we all remember the good things that happen to us better than the bad — but this in no way diminishes the charm of his recollections. Two decades since most recently reading "Happy Days," I can recall dozens of phrases and images from it ("the protein factory that was Chesapeake Bay"). 4 stogies.

"Newspaper Days," by H. L. Mencken, 1941. Another anthology from Mencken's New Yorker pieces, these concerning the exciting early days of his newspaper career. 4 stogies.

"Heathen Days," by H. L. Mencken, 1943. The final entry in his Days trilogy. Not quite the equal of the first two efforts — one has an impression that for "Heathen Days", he went over the same years refining the ore he rejected the first time through. Still, very good. 3.5 stogies.

"Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H. L. Mencken," William Manchester, 1950. Manchester met Mencken in 1947 while doing research for his master's thesis on Mencken's criticism in The Smart Set, and continued to be a frequent visitor at Mencken's home even after Mencken's debilitating stroke in November 1948. Manchester is a fine writer and an able researcher, and "Disturber of the Peace" remains the biography that I would recommend to anyone wanting to get to know Mencken, despite the fact that the subsequent release of Mencken's papers leaves it incomplete in some details. 4 stogies.

"The Irreverent Mr. Mencken," by Edgar Kemler, 1950. A credible biography, written, like Manchester's, when Mencken was still alive, and thus suffering from lack of access to a lot of material, but benefiting from the help and cooperation of Mencken himself. 3 stogies.

"H. L. Mencken: A Portrait from Memory," by Charles Angoff, 1956. A very bitter, highly personal portrait by a young man whom Mencken mentored, this book teems with anecdotes portraying Mencken as a vile and nasty low-life. Here is a picture that varies strongly from virtually every other account. It was the first Mencken book I ever read, and to this day it amazes me that I ever read another word by or about Mencken. Published shortly after Mencken's death, I suspect, because the law of libel does not allow a dead man (or an estate) to sue. 0 stogies.

"H. L. Mencken, Literary Critic," by William H. Nolte, 1966. A competent biography, focusing on Mencken's literary criticism. 3 stogies.

"The Constant Circle," by Sara Masefield, 1968. A literary memoir, written by a friend of Mencken's wife. It didn't do much for me. 2 stogies.

"Mencken," by Carl Bode, 1969. Researched before Mencken's papers were released, but when many of his friends and family were alive and voluble. Does the job very well. 3.5 stogies.

"Serpent in Eden: H. L. Mencken and the South," by Fred Hobson, 1974. I read this when it was published, and can only barely remember it now, despite its focus on one of the most colorful aspects of Mencken's writing and public career. So I guess it deserves a pretty low rating from me, though hardly an authoritative one. 1.5 stogies.

"Mencken, a Study of His Thought", by Charles Fecher, 1978. Inept. 1 stogie.

"The Diary of H. L. Mencken," edited by Charles Fecher, 1989, but written 1930–1948. To goose its sales at the time of publication, its publisher suggested rather absurdly that it revealed Mencken to be a closet anti-Semite. There are many lengthy gaps; it's too bad Mencken was not a more faithful diarist. And its editor cut about two-thirds from what Mencken did write. Still, this rates 4 stogies.

"My Life as Author and Editor," by H. L. Mencken, edited by Jonathan Yeardley, 1993, but written 1942–43. Uncompleted, substantially (and pointlessly) condensed, but still rates 4 stogies.

"Mencken: A Life," by Fred Hobson, 1994. Most thorough biography to date, but unduly dull. 2.5 stogies.

"Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work," by H. L. Mencken, edited by Fred Hobson, Vincent Fitzpatrick, and Bradford Jacobs, 1994, but written during the war. Editorially condensed, as are Mencken's posthumous memoir and diary. I can appreciate the need to condense these lengthy works to maximize sales in the popular market, but why in the world hasn't the Enoch Pratt Library, which owns rights to the works, published a complete edition for scholars? Surely doing so would be economically feasible: Every university library and a great many Menckenophiles would purchase copies. In any event, this is a great book, of special value to any journalist, but a pleasure to read for anyone. 4 stogies.

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