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Posted December 19, 2004

Mencken's Method

H.L. Mencken is now judged almost entirely along partisan lines. Libertarians and certain individualistic conservatives tend to admire his work; liberals and moderates and the pushers of modern piety tend to hate the man, if not his prose. Once upon a time a vast horde of intelligent readers read his writings and enjoyed them, even when in disagreement; today that ability seems to have fallen out of fashion.

I just stumbled upon a review of Terry Teachout's The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken that emphasizes this both overtly and inadvertently. Yes, another review, after the binge of reading such things when the book first came out. This one — entitled The Sophomore and written by Jackson Lears — made many of the same points I'd read earlier on, though better than most, and at greater length. Lears rightly points out the claddish readership of Mencken, today: If Foucault is the favorite Nietzschean of the postmodern left, Mencken plays the same role on the postmodern right. This seems almost spot on. And if I find myself uncomfortably lumped in with the Jonah Goldbergs of this world, I can mollify my hurt feelings with the thought that at least among the members of my group, we chose the Nietzschean with a talent for writing. The leftists have made fools of themselves by selecting the far worse writer.

Now, I've a confession to make. Though I'm pretty sure I have a copy of Teachout's biography around my office somewhere — buried in one of my haphazard stacks of newly acquired books, no doubt — I've not read it yet. I had intended to read it, yes. After the barrage of book reviews, and after reading a few of Teachout's own lackluster reviews of other books and movies, I no longer had the heart. And Teachout's own status as a post-modern rightist was also dispiriting; he strikes me as far too conservative to understand Mencken's free spirit. And those reviews, they all suggested the same thing: Teachout likes to read Mencken, but doesn't really respect him. Now, reading one writer write about a disrespected other is fun in the short run — that was Mencken's own genius, and it was a genius best expressed in the short form — but reading such writing at length takes more of a sense of duty than a sense of joy.

There. I've said it. I've not read Teachout's tome. So the chief criticism that Teachout levelled against HLM, that he was incurious, is still something I cannot quite come to terms with. I know that Mencken gleefully professed to never having changed an opinion since his youth, and that strikes me as a rather damning admission. But, when I think about it, I hazard that most writers and readers are in pretty much the same boat, and Mencken alone simply honest enough to admit the fact.

Of course, another individualist writer, Ayn Rand — from a younger generation than HLM — made a similar confession. But out of her mouth it seemed more a boast, a part of her self-mythologizing persona as a goddess born from her own brow.

In neither Rand's case nor Mencken's do I find this congenial. But I'm still not sure if it's the sure sign of Mencken's alleged lack of curiosity. He was a voluminous reader, and he did accumulate a great deal of knowledge. But to Teachout and Lears, it appears that it is Mencken's aesthetic dismissal of modernism that constitutes his lack of curiosity:

Teachout admits that modernist art and literature were simply lost on Mencken, and that his failure to see anything of value in such writers as Henry James or James Joyce revealed a self-assurance recalling the philistinism of his father, the bourgeois burgher from Southwest Baltimore who knew what he liked and liked what he knew. When Mencken turned his attention from reviewing literature (he wrote amusingly about books of no importance) to reviewing ideas, Teachout admits, the deeper waters in which he had started to swim were over his head.

Well, I have always read Mencken's aesthetic criticism with a grain of salt. As I do all such criticism. After all, one of his favorite writers, Theodore Dreiser, appeared to both Mencken and to me as such a shoddy stylist. I take that as a reason not to read Dreiser; Mencken found a lot to admire in him, despite the horrible prose.

The novelist Mencken thought the greatest amongst the English language writers of his day, Joseph Conrad, has always struck me as boring and almost congenitally unable to tell a story coherently; Heart of Darkness, is one of the most overpraised works in the English language. (And I've tried Conrad quite a few times. A professor of English Literature once offered me an inspiring interpretation of The Secret Agent, describing it as a subtle critique of a fanciful, irrealist metaphysics, but the book had not one whit of this element — I chalked it off to professorial imputation, a not uncommon error of the world's illustrious professors.)

Mencken loved some of Arnold Bennett's novels; hated others. Me too, though not always the same books. I agree with Mencken that the best of Bennett did indeed limn English society to an extraordinary degree; Riceyman Steps is one of the greatest novels I've ever read. But the goodness in a lark, such as Buried Alive, should not be dismissed (as Mencken did) simply because it was a light diversion rather than a work stamped as stark serioso. Indeed, Mencken generally preferred involved fiction of the Sociological School, the kind that attempted to pin down humanity in some instantiation or another. He was utterly uninterested in entertainment, or in myth. He had no use for fantasy, unless the author was extremely witty and possessed a prose stylist of the first order. And so Mencken made a place for James Branch Cabell in his canon, but dismissed H.G. Wells's science fiction.

I, on the other hand, have always thought that the first business of literature was to entertain, and that profundity and sociology and morals and all the rest are tricky to aim for and often disastrous to insist upon. Critics enmired in some species of Science or Uplift often cut themselves off from some truly exquisite pleasures. I'm afraid Mencken often comes off as one of them. Still, he often make a good case for authors I'm uninterested in.

I suppose I could rewrite the above to make Mencken look the fool, to show that though he scorned Uplift, his sociological preference in literature was really of a similar order, a false god snuck into criticism, and that this idolatry was necessarily corrupting. But really, I haven't the heart to condemn a good writer for one flaw among so many virtues. Besides, intelligent writing about books is a justification in and of itself. Lears enjoyed Teachout's put-down about Mencken writing wittily about insignificant books. But Prejudices is filled with witty writing about significant books. To miss this is to miss one great reason to read Mencken.

The indecency to which Mencken's critics will go in their ideologically prompted effort is nicely epitomized by Lears:

[S]uppleness of thought was not in his line. Year in and year out, he dusted off the same Victorian mental furniture — positivism, naturalism, laissez-faire economics — and displayed it as if it were a bold departure from conventional norms. In the end he fell victim to the cruelties of fate. Debilitated by a series of strokes, he sank into a truly pitiable senescence — surrounded by books he could no longer read, grumbling about the morons on the radio. But his mind had ceased developing decades earlier. It's a little sad, really.

Can you imagine what left-wing critics would say were a right-winger, pomo or otherwise, to write off Iris Murdoch's last days as if they were somehow a fit ending to her intellectual career? A little sad, really.

And besides, on the face of it, positivism, naturalism, and laissez-faire have always been at odds with the bulk of opinion. That's simply the case. Of course, after a few years, and after a horde of intellectuals abandoned first one and then another of these isms, they would no longer seem at all new, but old-fashioned. But this makes the issue a question of fashion, not philosophical merit. What if — and this is something worth rethinking every now and then — positivism and naturalism and laissez-faire are just about right? What if it is the case that they were abandoned lock, stock and crackpot by the intelligentsia in the 20th century largely because these isms put too many limits on their will to believe?

Here we get to the heart of the question of skepticism:

Concluding that Mencken was something more than a memorable stylist, and something less than a wise man, he traces this absence of wisdom to a fundamental inadequacy in Mencken's thought: a skepticism so extreme as to issue in philosophical incoherence. Yet Teachout's own account suggests a different conclusion: that Mencken's chief shortcoming was not his disbelief in received opinions, but his inability to question his own opinions; not incoherence, but rigidity. His skepticism was highly selective, and often little more than a pose.

Well, I've listened to Teachout on C-SPAN, and I heard him utter philosophical bilge of the standard Conservative School: that Truth and Beauty and Such Really Exist, as conservatives like to put it, abandoning every shred of nominalism for a Realism so Absolute that . . . it's philosophically unsustainable. This is relevant to the quoted bit about incoherence. When your standards are skewed . . . how can you judge? Now, while I may disagree with most strains of positivism, I understand how it and naturalism and laissez-faire tended to mesh in Mencken's philosophy. They were not prizes eyed for Size and Eminence and Uplift, but were anti-puffery devices. And I hazard that Mencken's newest biographer is one of the kinds of people who needs some of the anti-puffery. Lears certainly is.

People want to believe all sorts of impossible, fanciful things. It's approaching Christmas now as I write, and this evening I could go off to the movies and get another dose of you gotta believe nonsense both low-brow (The Polar Express) and middle-brow (Finding Neverland). This element of pop mysticism is an ever-present residue of Christianity, with its peculiar insistence on believing and faith and resolute lack on insistence on public testing and doubt. Mencken, throughout his career, preached against the Old Religion as well as all the new Cults, and did so with the gospel of incredulity. Mencken was aware of the costs of his philosophy. Positivism denied the intellectual the cheap but flamboyant recourse to airy metaphysics, the kind of flourish that lets tenured professors cite Hegel and tea-time ladies cite Blavatsky. Naturalism further undermined this tendency, and demands one look closer at things present at hand rather than invest all one's eggs in an Unseen Basket.

And what can we say of Laissez Faire?

Well, first (just as a reminder), that Mencken was no consistent advocate of it. But he did think that the general idea was far better than anything conjured up by the socialists and self-styled Progressives of his age.

And you know what? He was right.

His sticking to the older ideas of political economy always let him see the nonsense spouting from the lips of politicians on the make, while most other intellectuals — unbound by any relevant down-to-earth science, by any real limit on their imaginations — kept falling for panaceas, lapping forever from Hope Springs, eternally disappointed but forever shifting to come up with crackpot scheme after scheme, even as each scheme proved foolish in hindsight. Fortunately, myth, ever dominant and ever-aborning in politics, usually protected them behind the Veil of Good Intentions, so they never really had to confront the enormity of their persistent folly. Even to this day reviewers of Mencken pretend that Roosevelt II saved civilization from capitalism, rather than finally admitting what has long been evident, that Roosevelt, following Hoover's lead with greater enthusiasm and daring, extended the Great Depression and basically corrupted the capitalism that remained.

But I doubt if Lears has even studied this carefully mined area of research. Could he be incurious?

So, Mencken's skepticism was not thoroughgoing. He did not take Nietzsche's self-destructive maxim to heart: A very popular error, having the courage of one's convictions. The point is, rather, to have the courage to attack one's convictions. Mencken never aimed to be a sage in the savagely nihilistic sense of Forever Questioning. He needled, instead. He poked fun, and poked holes in the bombast of his day. That was enough for him. He had embraced, early on, a number of notions and isms that let him see through much of what was presented to him as Wisdom, and he easily demolished the brummagem wisdoms.

And perhaps he was too self-satisfied in that. I'm not the judger of his soul. Or, at any rate, when it comes to Mencken I never feel the need to judge him, as a person. I merely note that his writing was often on-target, while his critics today shoot many barbs, few to stick. Most importantly, his on-targetedness, together with clarity and wit, made his writings a pleasure to read.

That, then, is his method, I think, and his point. I've not dealt with his outrageous generalities about groups of people, generalities that offend most people today. He didn't like the poor white trash of the Appalachians, he didn't like Methodists, he didn't think much of Jews. And yet he had friends in most of these categories, and when it came to opening up America's borders to European Jewry, he was for it, and the Democratic and Republican establishment of his day was against. We now suffer from their error, not his.

That last point is crucial to understanding his convictions. Though by no means consistent, he really did promote and advance liberty, to a degree that must have shocked his contemporaries; it certainly discomforts his critics today. For they have trouble understanding how a person who thought so little of most groups of people could still stand up for their rights and liberties.

Well, I suspect the idea of the individual worth of every human being which is nowadays asserted with such piety by every precint organizer of nearly every political party, was treated with more seriousness by him, even if Mencken may have believed it as at base something of a fiction. It was a necessary fiction, though. You just can't trust the betters if they can tyrannize the lesssers. And from that simple — and elitist and liberal — conviction, many good ideas follow.

But today's Mencken critics haven't got a clue. Take Lears at his most slippery:

But a closer look at the conflict between Mencken and Bryan reveals a struggle more subtle than a war between light and darkness. It was a clash between two dogmas, and Mencken's social Darwinism was the less humane of the two. His belief that the ideal of the survival of the fittest could be implemented in human affairs amounted to a warrant for eugenics and might well have sanctioned the systematic extermination of the unfit.

A lot rides on that could! This passage is par for the course with today's Mencken haters. It is dishonest in the extreme. Mencken did not draw the moral Lears insinuates from Darwinism; others may have, but Mencken didn't. Indeed, most of the Social Darwinists did not, and few if any of the pro-laissez-faire liberals did. Herbert Spencer, for example, is often criticized for making this error, and yet he was 99 and 44/100th percent free of it, too. But we hear the charges again and again because critics of Spencer and Mencken are unwilling to try to understand any complexity in their enemies' thoughts. They latch onto a slogan, and then they draw the conclusions that they want to. Why should they care what Spencer and Mencken actually wrote and thought? Too much trouble.

In most instances, Mencken came on the side of liberty for all. He understood this more or less rigorously, as Spencer or Sumner did. He saw it as a source of progress. He understood that people tend to react to what we now call feedback, and that if you keep giving good feedback for bad behavior, then you'll get more bad behavior. Laissez faire was a policy that discouraged some bad behavior — leechcraft as a way of life, jockeying for special favors as a way of politics — and encouraged some good behavior — industry, honesty, savings, etc. It was far from a perfect system, and Mencken never pretended it to be anything like perfect. In fact, he thought it ugly enough to carry none of the patina of Promise and Hope that the Dreamers he scorned concocted on such a regular basis.

Which brings me back to his needling method. Utopians ever defy reality in their inflated programs for improvement. Mencken saw through their standard brands of nonsense, and pricked the hot-air balloons of Socialism and Progressivism and New Dealism with a consistency to be admired, not scorned. That was the function of his skepticism. It was not incoherent. But neither was it super-sophisticated. It was a middle-ground effort, not to be sneezed at, though perhaps not to be trumpeted as the be-all and end-all of intellectual achievement.

And it did bear no small resemblance to the common horse-sense of many a common man and Main Street businessman. Lears of course makes much of this:

Mencken's politics were virtually indistinguishable from those of a small businessman who felt beleaguered by malingering workers and welfare frauds — and a cold-hearted one at that. He remained indifferent to the suffering caused by the Great Depression, convinced that the only original idea in the New Deal was the notion that whatever A earns really belongs to B. A is any honest and industrious man or woman. B is any drone or jackass. To be fair, his libertarianism was at least consistent: unlike the contemporary breed of conservatives, he opposed the government's attempt to police what people chose to put into their bodies. (His assaults on Prohibition should be required reading for William Bennett and the other virtuous advocates of our disastrous war on drugs.) But like many libertarians, he was spooked by the specter of majority tyranny. His desultory reading of Nietzsche reinforced his faith that mob rule was at hand and left him unable to see the anti-democratic trends in twentieth-century American politics — the tendency of managerial elites to remove more and more of the machinery of government from popular influence or even awareness. Contemptuous of the common herd even as he shared many of its convictions, Mencken remained convinced that he was a member of the civilized minority.

Lears is probably right to chide Mencken for not seeing some of the dangers to democracy from the managerial revolution — a revolution, by the way, that Progressivism and New Dealism entirely embraced. I'm not sure though; I'll have to dig up a copy of Notes on Democracy, to find out. But I do know that Mencken was not fond of the rulers of American government, so some of Lears's chiding seems suspect. But I'll reserve my final judgment on this criticism.

The fact is, however, that Mencken was in a minority. Most groups of people in America of his day got caught up in the Game of Sanctimonious Thievery that Bastiat had called Legal Plunder. Stealing from A to give to B, but sanctified by government. Social Security was perhaps the great achievement of the age, because it hid so much of the redistribution in generational politics that only now comes to the surface in looming insolvency.

And contra to Lears subtle suggestions, noting that the small businessmen of Mencken's day who opposed Big Government shared some of his ideas does not mean that these ideas are thus to be despised or dismissed. There is always a lingering ad hominem when a leftist brings in the word bourgeois, as Lears did in the previous paragraph to the one just quoted, and which is latent in his indentifying small businessman as if this identification accounted against Mencken, somehow. Ha! Mencken the Elitist had much in common with fairly common men! Oh, what Irony!

Mencken, I think, would have been unshocked by this charge. I could probably find a passage somewhere from Mencken's vast writings that dealt with this, but I'm afraid there's some limit to my dedication to Menckeniana. (I do remember many praises of hard work by unpretentious men. I think Mencken felt a great deal in common with many common men. They were boobs to him only when they wanted a free lunch, or when they took their risible religious doctrines as an excuse to bully their neighbors. That Lears seems unable to see a real difference here shows a lingering Marxism that makes easy-to-define economic class more important than real behaviors.)

I should conclude that I am in no sense committed to defending every one of Mencken's notions or prejudices or what-have-yous. I've enjoyed reading HLM for years, but have never felt it necessary to treat him as a god, flawless, perfect in every way. Indeed, the attitude that Ayn Rand encouraged in her followers — that of slavish and idolatrous devotion — never came up. For all of Mencken's criticisms of this group or that, I never felt compelled to think, then, that he felt himself a paragon among men. He obviously thought himself pretty independent, and took some pride in this. But pretense to Moral Rectitude never seemed to fit.

And so the flavor of so much of contemporary Mencken bashing, of listing error after error as if it should amount to a condemnation before God — all this seems a tad overdone. And the fact that much of it now focuses relentlessly on his private journals seems an unfair way to judge his work as critic, journalist, or even original thinker.

Still, I'll end on one of my major disagreements with Mencken, his pro-German nationalism. This prejudice is often jarring to come across, and it was obviously a moral failing in the man. Further, it didn't help the standing of his social criticism. Beside this, his other traits — including his anti-this and anti-thatisms, such as his under-rating of Jewish-American culture — pale. For it was his nationalism that blinded him from seeing Hitler as a dangerous tyrant.

Of course, Mencken's still-too-much-admired enemies, such as Roosevelt II, did a very similar thing with Stalin, not seeing the danger of allying America with the USSR in World War II. Though it is held a great moral failure of Mencken merely to have belittled Hitler, and not outright condemned him as a great threat to civilization and liberty and humanity, etc., how often do today's critics of Mencken apply the same logic to all the Stalin Excusers before and during (and even after) World War II? Many of these encomiasts not only did not belittle Stalin, they praised the mass-murdering tyrant.

And these included some of the great lights of literature in the epoch that followed Mencken's age. Indeed, these men and women, who often yammered on and on about the greatness of the giants of literature that Mencken thought mostly unreadable (James Joyce, William Faulkner, and the like), were often the most confident supporters of the age's other great tyranny, Communism.

In that context, where belittling Hitler is somehow worse than praising Stalin, well, I feel fine at remaining an outsider. Like Mencken? Well, not entirely like Mencken. But closer to Mencken than to his critics.

So, must I now read Teachout?

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