Why we all should read the unlikeable H.L. Mencken
/His unbeatable American prose can hone your style to a cutting edge.
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Whenever I find my writing boring even me—when I find myself contemplating “civil discourse” and “the human condition” and other such buncombe*—I read Mencken. He sharpens me. I’ll never approach his witty, dead-aim style; but when I absorb enough of his prose, I find it puts an edge on my writing the way you might hone a knife before dismembering a turkey.
And boy, was he good at dismembering.
On Warren Harding:
“…a tin-horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor.”
On Calvin Coolidge:
“He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.”
His take on the populist William Jennings Bryan sounds creepily familiar:
“What moved him, at bottom, was simply hatred of the city men who had laughed at him for so long, and brought him at last to so tatterdemalion an estate. He lusted for revenge upon them. He yearned to lead the anthropoid rabble against them, to punish them for their execution upon him by attacking the very vitals of their civilization.”
On the “plutocracy” (he wrote presciently in 1920):
“Imagine a horde of peasants incredibly enriched and with almost infinite power thrust into their hands, and you will have a fair picture of its habitual state of mind. It shows all the stigmata of inferiority—moral certainty, cruelty, suspicion of ideas, fear.”
And on exercise:
“…I still begrudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.”
Not that you should feel obligated to like the man himself. A snob who hated democracy, he scorned the “booboisie.” Mencken opposed Roosevelt and the New Deal, objected to America’s entry into the two world wars, and believed the North’s pursuit of the Civil War to have been a mistake. Many readers conclude that he was a racist and antisemite, their proof being his use of the common slurs of his day. What’s more, he admired Friedrich Nietzsche, which is reason enough to dislike him. And he helped Ayn Rand get published—an even greater reason to dislike him. (Though he adored Huckleberry Finn, a reason to forgive him.)
His plump round face, punctuated by a permanent cigar, made him the twin of Méliès’ Moon.
He was, in short, a curmudgeon.
Of course we don’t have to like the man. Why should we feel obligated to read only “good” people? I’ve met a number of notable authors in the flesh and disliked more than half of them. But that doesn’t make me abandon their works—or those of any dead scribe who held a wrong opinion or did bad things. After all, who gets punished from our ignorance of works by personally unlikeable humans? Should education limit itself to moral instruction?
I despise Richard Nixon but love the work of his enabling speechwriter, William Safire, who maintained a marvelous language column in the New York Times and crafted Spiro Agnew’s immortal “nattering nabobs of negativism.” William F. Buckley, who stirred up America’s dislike of humanism, wielded his brobdingnagian vocabulary like a broadaxe.
If only conservatives hadn’t left the snobbery to liberals, we’d all be reading better political prose today.
Of course, in order to learn from our literary forebears, we actually have to read them. In books. A writing class with nonreaders is like an obedience school for cats. Each may make some small progress, but you’ll find little enthusiasm; or, in the human version, much thinking.
Mencken himself was an incomparable reader, despite a higher education consisting of a single correspondence course. To this day he reigns as America’s best philologist; I love his The American Language almost as much as I revere the Oxford English Dictionary.
More than a work of brilliant scholarship, Language is a hoot to read. Despite Mencken’s native snobbery and conservatism, the book offers an unbeatable argument against the myth of a stable “proper” American grammar. He reports that John Adams unsuccessfully wrote the president of the Continental Congress to suggest an academy for “correcting, improving and ascertaining the English language.” Benjamin Franklin later asked Noah “dictionary” Webster for help in putting down such vile Americanist verbs as to advocate, to notice, to progress, and to oppose.
Yet the corruption persisted. Early in the last century, Mencken noticed that the subjunctive mood was already becoming extinct: “One never hears ‘if I were you,’ but always ‘if I was you.’” Even in Shakespeare’s time, nominative pronouns (“he,” “she”) were sliding toward the objective (“him,” “her”). Christopher Marlowe wrote, “It is him you seek?” Shakespeare himself used “That’s me.”
Shakespeare’s contemporary, the English playwright John Webster, committed “What difference is between the duke and I?” This flipflop of subject and object sets my teeth on edge, but it has become standard among millennials and other youngsters. Mencken blamed “between you and I” on “the pedagogical war upon ‘It is me.’” The objective me sounds downscale, unclassy, wrong; but in terms of traditional grammar (pace John Webster), “between you and me” is correct. “She offered him and I some wine” is wrong...unless your audience believes it’s right.
This grammatical conundrum lies at the heart of decorum, the art of fitting in. We must know the King’s (or Mencken’s) English if we care to converse with highly educated elites. But it’s equally important to speak what Mencken called the “American vulgate.”
The pyrrhic battle over purity continues unabated. “For many years,” he wrote, “the indefatigable schoolmarm has been trying to put down the American vulgate, but with very little success.” He added:
The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it. Their lives would be more comfortable if they ceased to repine over it, and instead gave it some hard study. It is very amusing, and not a little instructive.
Mencken understood that grammar is a matter of decorum, not morals. “Proper” language conforms to the audience. If that audience happens to be the booboisie…well, he hated the booboisie but studied its language like a philological Jane Goodall. When asked why he continued to live in the America he scorned so much, he replied, “Why do men go to Zoos?”
I don’t like Mencken, nor must you. But I love him. He hones me.
Share this with your favorite philologist.
Tidbits I couldn’t fit in this already buncombe*-length post:
Mencken was a new journalist decades before Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and Norman Mailer. His coverage of the Scopes trial remains a journalistic classic, and it helped inspire the film Inherit the Wind. Gene Kelly played a fictional version of Mencken in that movie.
He called Black people “blackamoors” and worse but supported Black writers and read Black newspapers. Richard Wright was an admirer.
Mencken’s wife was an English professor who campaigned for the 19th amendment. Before they married, Mencken wrote In Defense of Women. Anachronists consider the work terribly sexist. I found much of it charming, which makes me a troglodyte.
I bought a used 1945 fourth edition of The American Language many years ago for a bargain $10. I hadn’t read him before. Second-hand sales are like wildlife sanctuaries where you can take home an endangered species as a pet. It almost seems illegal.
Like Mencken, I smoked cigars. I quit for my health, but Mencken persevered. His father was a cigar maker; H.L.’s own miserable three years in the family factory helped inspire him to pursue journalism. My summer jobs in retail sparked a similar ambition. H.L.’s career began in the nineteenth century. He died aged 75, five months after I was born. None of this really connects him and me (he and I?), but it does connect the centuries.
*Buncombe, aka bunkum or bunk: During the congressional debate over the Missouri Compromise, Representative Felix Walker, whose district included Buncombe County in western North Carolina, made what one historian called “an untimely and irrelevant oration.” When other members begged him to stop, Walker replied that his constituents expected him to make a speech “for Buncombe.” The word became a favorite of Mencken’s. Today we use the more pungent “bullshit,” a term that apparently first entered print around 1910, in the T.S. Eliot poem “Inventions of the March Hare.”
