WASHINGTON — Can you believe it? In the public prints, I have
been called a “pipsqueak” and a “self-important pipsqueak” at
that. The scene of the crime is the current Forbes
magazine. The felon is Jonathan Yardley, an elderly book critic
at the Washington Post. Yardley was asked by
Forbes if any of the “current crop of right-wing
pundits” is comparable to H.L. Mencken, the editor and critic
best known for his work in the 1920s. I was referred to along
with Ann Coulter (who apparently told CNN in 2006 that she is
“the right-wing Mencken”), Mark Steyn, and P.J. O’Rourke. Yardley
went on to say, “I don’t respect a single one of them, much less
think that a single one of them deserves to be compared to
H.L.M.”
I have read Yardley for years, often finding him informative
though occasionally disingenuous. Certainly his disapproval of
“self-importance” is disingenuous. When he hands down his
judgments the organ music is rumbling in his head, the incense
filling the room — the holy man hath spoken. As for the
comparisons of me with Mencken, I would have thought that my
appraisal of him seven years back would have disqualified me for
further consideration. In The American Spectator I
reviewed a couple of convincing biographies of “the Sage” and
concluded that he was a very amusing, albeit wrong-headed, writer
of brilliant prose, who by the 1930s “had become an anti-Semite,
a racist, and a reactionary crank.” Yet, he was also a fine
philologist and editor. The American Mercury, which he
founded in 1924 with George Jean Nathan and Alfred A. Knopf, was
an exhilarating departure from the musty magazines that preceded
it, and the Mercury allowed him to become America’s
first celebrity intellectual.
He was pronounced by the likes of Walter Lippmann and the editors
of the New York Times as a powerful intellectual force.
“The most powerful private citizen in the United States,” is how
the Times put it. Still, after championing a wave of
novelists in the 1920s and celebrating the musical masters of the
18th and 19th centuries, he showed no taste for later literary
movements and almost no interest in any of the other arts. During
years when Eliot, Pound, and Yeats were at work, Mencken
dismissed poetry as “beautiful balderdash.”
Despite access to some of the finest minds of his time (he died
in 1956, age 75), he missed practically every important historic
current swirling around him. Though he claimed great interest in
science, there is little evidence that he recognized the wonders
on the horizon. He also missed the rise and fall of dictatorship,
and dismissed democracy’s challenge to the dictators as
demagoguery. Hitler struck him as “a shabby ass” and an Austrian
William Jennings Bryan. As he saw it, World War II was “a wholly
dishonorable and ignominious business. I believe that that will
be history’s verdict upon it.” On large matters he was almost
always wrong.
He was a very funny writer until his anti-democratic and
anti-religious jokes overwhelmed his other jokes and lost the
capacity to make readers laugh. That would be in the 1930s and
1940s. In those days he was largely out of the public eye. He
attended to his great study of the American language and to notes
and memoirs that did not come out until after his death, in some
cases not until the 1980s and 1990s. The writings reveal an
angry, often confused, bigot and crank. He did publish three
merry volumes of autobiography, but they were so marbled with
fictions as to suggest escapism. As was true through much of
Mencken’s life, the popular press misperceived him. Time
described him in 1943 as “[t]he nation’s comical, warm-spirited,
outstanding village atheist.” The following year, the
“warm-spirited” Sage publicly observed to the interviewer Bob
Considine that World War II is “a better state than peace.”
American soldiers enjoyed the war. President Roosevelt “will keep
this war running at least until the end of his fourth term. He
knows that if the war stops, he loses his war powers and his
jobs.” That Time writer may still be at the magazine
today.
As I say, on large matters Yardley’s Sage was almost always
wrong. I think the best explanation for the cruelty of Mencken’s
private thoughts, his bewilderment late in life, and his frequent
misperception of his times, is provided by Terry Teachout, the
author of a 2002 biography, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L.
Mencken. Mencken was incapable of perceiving the evil that
stalks the world. The Sage, writes Teachout, “had no feeling for
the darkness in the heart of man. He looked at evil and saw
ignorance. To him Hitler was Babbitt run amok….”
I agree with Yardley. I am no Mencken.
