For the first half of the 20th century, an ordinary row house in a quiet Baltimore neighborhood was the castle of American intellectual culture. From its book-lined second-story office, the man on the throne canonized F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce, paralyzed perceptions of Franklin D. Roosevelt, swayed Clarence Darrow to the defense of a young biology teacher, and clanged out more than 10 million of the juiciest words to pass through an American typewriter.
At 1524 Hollins Street, H.L. Mencken commanded the thunder and lightning of his era.
Overlooking placid Union Square, the three-story Italianate house is not exactly distinctive. Unlike the lairs of many literary types, the Mencken family home is identical to its neighbors left and right, and blends casually into the brick-lined tradition of its block. Though he dined and dueled with the finest, the Holy Terror was most at peace in this modest habitat of intellect and family, where he spent the great majority of his life. Yet to the outsider, the Hollins Street home has neither charm nor magic to speak of; these are values secreted only by recollections of the citizen-king who reigned inside.
On the ground floor of home, as of personality, a small parlor with a grand piano hosted Mencken’s Saturday Night Club, a regular event that attracted a set of bachelors with personal devotion to classical music and public enthusiasm for beer and brotherhood. At the office on the second story, the social creature morphed into an intellectual and polemicist; with a flair for freedom and stampeding prose, he governed the tides of influence of American political and literary culture. And in his bedroom at the top, Mencken retired to sleep. It was in this bedroom, too, that he surrendered his angel, with this famous valediction as his final mischief: “If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.”
Yet it was not the house, but rather its green and roomy garden that accommodated the laboratory for young Mencken’s childhood experiments. In that “strange, wild land of endless discoveries and enchantments,” Henry’s imagination pursued new refinements in the troublemaking and rogueries of boyhood. Years later, as an adult, Mencken built a sundial, a pergola, and the beginnings of a brick wall. Set into the wall, and still surviving, are tiles chiseled from the creator’s personality, like the death mask of Beethoven and the founding notes of the Fifth Symphony. In his final season of life, Mencken frequently withdrew to that very same garden with his nostalgia and cigar: “It is as much a part of me,” he wrote, “as my two hands.”
When H.L. Mencken died in 1956, he left house and garden to his brother August who, upon his own death, bequeathed it to the University of Maryland. Thoroughly delighted by its new acquisition, Maryland used this national landmark to lodge students of sociology–which Mencken considered “the outhouse in the grove of academe”–then upgraded it into a storage facility, and finally decided to swap it with the City of Baltimore for an old police station. Under the auspices of a project called City Life Museums, Baltimore refurbished and opened the house to the public for 13 years, from 1984 until 1997, when the City Life Museums series was shut down.
Today, the Mencken House is another plot of “surplus property” owned by the city, condemned to termites and, perhaps, oblivion. The Friends of the H.L. Mencken House and the Society to Preserve Mencken’s Legacy have been granted “right of entry”–which they extend, by appointment, to the general public–but for whatever reason, the city has blocked requests to revamp and reopen the house as a nonprofit museum. Even with celebrity support from the likes of Gore Vidal and Susan Sarandon–whose bonds with Mencken subsist, I suspect, largely because Mencken does not–the city has made no decision on the Mencken House. Eighty boxes of books and furnishings have been deposited at the Maryland Historical Society, leaving Hollins Street naked and charmless.
I discovered this recent history during a tour of the Mencken House, which was really a workshop on home improvement. Oleg Panczenko, secretary both of The Friends and The Society, guided me along the trails of its prominent leaks, the cracks in its ceilings, and the dilapidations of its floors, which brought me to a patch of paneling turned feast for termites. In the battle between Mencken and the termites, Baltimore cheered on the pests; it took city administrators nine months to authorize an extermination.
Bureaucratic incompetence explains a lot of things, but it does not quite explain Baltimore’s indifference to its most famous man of letters. Aside from the Mencken Room at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, which is open only to researchers, Baltimore has no tribute to H.L. Mencken: no monument, no school, no entry in official guidebooks.
One stream of suspicion leads me to the posthumous publication of The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989), which seems to have offended certain racial sensitivities. The man who published Langston Hughes, exhorted Richard Wright to produce novels, and collected death threats for condemning lynchings and segregation in Baltimore was cast as a racist not by deed or action but because, in his contemptuous remarks about Methodists, Jews, Germans, southerners, popes, peasants, the masses in general, and the full catalogue of earthly and divine creatures, he was shown to have spoken contemptuously of blacks as well.
It is a pity that Mencken should be disowned by the city to which he gave his sincere and unconditional love; there is some question whether Baltimore deserved it. Aesthetically, Baltimore was not exactly a writer’s delight; in philosophy, it embarrassed the higher sophistications. And enough ghouls and gargoyles seem to have haunted it to inspire Edgar Allan Poe’s first horror story, “Berenice.” Yet Mencken was conscious of its defects:
The charm of Hollins Street and Baltimore is real for me, but it is real only because Mencken–with his sympathetic, contagious imagination–created it and championed it from the dust.
Granted, it’s of no great use to seek in Mencken’s house and hometown the patterns and habits of his soul. We can save such exercises for Twain’s Hartford, Hemingway’s Key West, Faulkner’s Mississippi, and Johnson’s London. These gentlemen harbored real affections for, and relationships with, their homes–in part, because they selected them. For Mencken, the house was a home he didn’t choose–but would have chosen, given the chance. His was not the pleasure of personal design, but the comfort of heritage, a fulfillment in what was his own, a pride in a private kingdom, even as he enjoyed a kingdom of larger realms.
From childhood through old age, H.L. Mencken stored his soul at 1524 Hollins Street: “This is my home, my stomping ground, my roost,” he wrote. “Here I can stretch my legs and feel at ease.” It was in this modest urban dwelling that the Sage of Baltimore could be himself and reconcile the various compartments of his personality: the garden romantic, the social dragonfly, the master of letters, and, in the end, the bedridden man who must have been satisfied, after an extraordinary life, to die in the home he loved.
Garin Hovannisian is an intern at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
