H.L. Mencken on American Literature
Edited by S. T. Joshi
Ohio University Press / 284 pages / $44.95
The life of a book reviewer circa 1910, must have been a dismal
existence indeed. Faced with the grim prospect of plunging into a
morass of best-selling moralistic melodramas by the likes of
Gertrude Atherton, Will Levington Comfort, and Marjorie Benton
Cooke, it is small wonder the post was doled out to “the virgins,”
elderly female Victorians of Puritan virtue. Few bright,
enterprising young men or women cared to subject themselves to such
pains.
It was into this bleak literary scene that H.L. Mencken,
wunderkind of the Baltimore Sunpapers, stormed like a bull into a
craft shop. In 1908, HLM accepted an invitation to review books for
the monthly Smart Set magazine, and later reprised the
role for his own magazine The American Mercury.
Mencken’s views on literature, like his views in general, were
shaped largely by his now familiar prejudices: a disdain for
puritans, Comstocks, uplifters, the bourgeoisie, and democracy. He
was the first great contrarian of American Letters, and for this he
willingly paid the price, steep though it may have been. Book
reviewing gave Mencken something to do during the Great War, which,
because of his German sympathies, left him virtually muzzled on the
political scene. Under the guise of literary criticism, he
continued the Holy War against what he saw as representative of the
evils of his day. “My method has been to tackle them with an axe,”
he wrote.
The mission of the reviewer as he saw it was to “clear the
ground of moldering rubbish, to chase away old ghosts, to help set
the artist free.” It was no less his duty to “give praise where it
is due and (call) names when they are deserved.” Ever on the look
out for an American literary savior to champion, Mencken found one
in 1910, in the form of the novelist Theodore Dreiser. Here at last
was a man of sense, who not only echoed Mencken’s sentiments, but
who drew men and women as they really were, not as the Sunday
School teachers would have them be. “Fully nine-tenths of the
notices of The Titan, without question the best American
novel of the year, were devoted chiefly to denunciations of the
morals of Frank Cowperwood, its principal personage…All they
could see in Cowperwood was an anti-Puritan.” By far the greatest
portion of the H.L. Mencken on American Literature (40
pages) is dedicated to Dreiser’s works; many of these same ideas
would be developed more fully in Mencken’s only book of literary
criticism published in his lifetime, A Book of Prefaces
(1917).
Had he lived, he no doubt he would have panned the late John
Gardner’s defense of moral fiction, for Mencken’s concept of a
writer remained one who refrained from vacuous moralizing, who
resisted loading his books with Freudianisms and other bogus
Greenwich Village imbecilities. Instead he urged writers to see
beauty as “distinct from and above all mere morality.” Life should
be depicted as it is, i.e., meaningless, with much emphasis on “the
eternal helplessness and donkeyishness of man.”
During his tenure as book reviewer (1908-1933), American
Belles Lettres aged and matured — and for this Mencken
again credits Dreiser (and to a lesser extent Willa Cather and
Sherwood Anderson) as well as those who followed their lead,
particularly Sinclair Lewis. Lewis, in fact, seemed in a sense
Mencken’s alter-ego. No writer earned the valuable praise of HLM as
did Lewis during the heady days of Main Street,
Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry.
Here were Mencken’s ideas of fiction as fiction ought to be done,
five-star novel-writing which would eventually carry Lewis to
Stockholm for the Nobel Prize. “For the third time Lewis knocks one
clear over the fence,” begins Mencken’s 1927 review of Elmer
Gantry.
Like all good reviewers, HLM could be his own best (or worst)
critic. He was first to admit that he dropped the ball on more than
one occasion, and he could be maddeningly wrong, as in his review
of The Great Gatsby, which is “certainly not to be put on
the same shelf, with, say, This Side of Paradise.” For
these irregular lapses he readily apologized: “The things I
remember chiefly, are not my occasional sound judgments, but my far
more frequent imbecilities — some of them, seen in retrospect,
quite astounding. I have often misunderstood grossly, and I have
misrepresented them when I understood them, sacrificing sense to
make a phrase.”
Or make us laugh. It is the Mencken humor, present throughout,
that makes a book of reviews of century-old novels still a joy to
read. Here is HLM on Dreiser’s 300,000-word literary behemoth,
The Genius: “Here is a novel so huge that a whole shift of
critics is needed to read it. Did I myself do it all alone? By no
means. I read only the first and last paragraphs of each chapter,
the rest I farmed out to my wife and children, to my cousin Ferd,
and to my pastor and my beer man.”
Reading these reviews and essays now, we get a surprising sense
of how little book publishing has changed since 1908. The New
York Times bestsellers, then as now, were mostly escapist
dreck: The Sheik, Fate Knocks at the Door,
Bambi. Nor has readership drastically changed.
“Nine-tenths of our readers of books are women and nine-tenths of
our women get their literary standards from the Ladies Home
Journal.” Insert Oprah for the Ladies Home Journal
and the sentence would stand today.
Only the most puritanical women’s-libber or backwoods Methodist
clergyman would see anything objectionable in these reviews. To
find similar prose that is as honest, straightforward and
unblemished by the stain of political correctness, one would have
to go back quite a ways, to Mencken’s Prejudices in fact.
Mencken put great store on the role of the critic in society to
protect the public against frauds and quackery. Sadly today that
duty has been largely abandoned, which perhaps explains the
proliferation of fraudulent ideas popular in contemporary society.
And those reviews that do appear in the incredible-shrinking book
review sections often resemble something more akin to PR copy than
honest critique. Fortunately for us, Mencken was never in the least
squeamish or regretful of his attacks. “The quacks and dolts who
have been mauled in these pages all deserved it; more, they all
deserved far worse than they got.”
Almost a hundred years later, Mencken’s reviews remain
accessible and eminently readable. Time has not yellowed his prose,
mellowed his criticism or, thank Allah, dulled his axe.
