In a career that spanned the first half of the 20th century, Henry Louis Mencken became not only one of America’s most memorable prose stylists, but also one of its most prolific ones.
Mencken (1880-1956) led many literary lives, often several at once. He began newspapering in his native Baltimore in 1899, quickly rising from a reporter to an editor and columnist. His bombastic commentaries for the Baltimore Sun gained attention far beyond his hometown, and his work for the Smart Set and the American Mercury affirmed his national profile as the dominant social critic of the 1920s. Mencken wrote about politics, music, drama, and literature, collecting his best essays in Prejudices, a series of six volumes that rests at the heart of his oeuvre. But there was so much more: memoirs, books on theology, ethics, the state of the American woman, and a mammoth philological study called The American Language. The thousands of letters he wrote to everyone from Theodore Dreiser to Ezra Pound to F. Scott Fitzgerald are their own monument to industry.
Mencken once estimated that he had published some 10 to 15 million words in various venues—a stream of production cut short by a 1948 stroke that deprived him of the ability to write. He lingered another eight years, though he casually suggested to British journalist Alistair Cooke that he traced the real time of his death to the year his typewriter fell silent.
But Mencken was much too prodigious a talent to let a small inconvenience like mortality get in the way of his literary legacy. In the more than six decades since his passing, a steady stream of Mencken material has continued to appear for the first time in book form, most of it drawn from his journalism.
No doubt the most ardent keeper of Mencken’s flame is anthologist S. T. Joshi, who has assembled and edited numerous collections from the Sage of Baltimore’s literary archive. They include Mencken’s America, which collected some lively Smart Set essays on national culture, and Mencken on Mencken, an assortment of autobiographical writings that deserved a new audience of readers. With A Saturnalia of Bunk, his latest project, Joshi brings together a selection of Mencken’s columns for the Sun during the years leading up to America’s involvement in World War I.
“The Free Lance,” Mencken’s first real newspaper column, was an early indicator of his herculean productivity. It ran six days a week, with each column averaging about 1,200 words. Most political columnists today write commentaries of no more than 700 words and usually file twice a week.
Mencken was obviously a champion of quantity at his keyboard, but was the quality of his “Free Lance” output equally impressive? The question is worth asking, since Joshi’s diligence in resurrecting the forgotten corners of Mencken’s canon naturally makes one wonder if, at this point, he’s reached the bottom of the literary barrel.
In his introduction, Joshi anticipates critics who might assume that the “Free Lance” columns are too provincial to inspire enduring interest—or too much of a freshman effort to reflect Mencken’s mature genius. Joshi argues otherwise, though he feels compelled to offer a glossary detailing the regional figures of Mencken’s day mentioned in these pieces. This list of names now largely lost to history recalls the charts that often appear in sweeping Russian novels, challenging the reader to navigate a network of characters as complex as the narrative itself.
But whether he was lambasting Coleman L. Blease, a now-forgotten South Carolina demagogue, or the ham-handed J. Harry Preston, then the mayor of Baltimore, Mencken’s takedowns of particular politicos affirmed his general principle—namely, that the political culture he witnessed was an “endless saturnalia of bunk, of bluff, of stupidity, of insincerity, of false virtue, of nonsense, of pretense, of sophistry, of paralogy, of bamboozlement, of actorial posturing, of strident wind music, of empty words—even, at times, of downright fraud.”
That passage from Mencken’s “Free Lance” essay of December 30, 1911, the year he began the column, is an early example of a signature technique: his passion for the extended sequence of unflattering examples that sounds like a prosecutor merrily larding up charges in an epic bill of indictment.
It anticipates a similar fusillade he’d publish a decade later in a legendary critique of Warren G. Harding’s rhetorical style:
The young Mencken’s choice of “saturnalia” to describe the excesses of elective office is, one supposes, something turn-of-the-century readers of the Sun probably weren’t used to. Exotic words flutter through A Saturnalia of Bunk like tropical birds, establishing another trademark feature of Mencken’s work. Joshi stays busy footnoting references such as Blattidae, the Latin scientific name for a family of cockroaches; chandala, the lowest caste in Indian society; and schnorrer, a Yiddish term meaning beggar.
Mencken delighted in lively verbal obscurities, famously calling a retrospective of his work A Mencken Chrestomathy, a title that referred to “a collection of choice passages from an author or authors.” He dismissed those unfamiliar with “chrestomathy” as “ignoramuses” and suggested that they “leave my vocabulary and me to my own customers, who have all been to school.”
That was just like Mencken—recruiting his readers in common cause against the rabble. His abiding theme, in A Saturnalia of Bunk and all his other work, is that America is defined by a majority of morons, which makes democracy untenable. After democracy has run its course, he argues in one of these “Free Lance” columns, “there will have to be a thorough overhauling of the whole scheme, and the natural leadership of the alert and intelligent minority will have to be restored. . . . All human progress, not only in the practical arts, but also in government, religion and virtue, originates in this minority and is promoted by it.”
How this republic of the enlightened elite would be established, Mencken doesn’t say. He was many things—humorist, raconteur, amateur philosopher and philologist—but a policy wonk Mencken was not.
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‘If I had been an American,” Alistair Cooke confessed a generation ago, “I would undoubtedly have worshiped H. L. Mencken in my college years and gone around the campus carrying the latest issue of The American Mercury as the Chinese, so we are told, carry The Thoughts of Chairman Mao.” Cooke’s comment underscores the special appeal of Mencken to those still touched by the adolescent joy of opposition, unburdened by the obligation to offer a coherent alternative.
Mencken could be a delightful devil’s advocate, as Saturnalia amply demonstrates. He offers an extended argument for women’s suffrage here, eloquently advancing a position not widely taken at the time. Mencken later switched sides and opposed suffrage as it gained support, perhaps because he was constitutionally incapable of embracing anything a majority of his fellow Americans endorsed.
That tendency could be morally problematic, as in the closing essays of Saturnalia in which Mencken questions why Americans should be joining their allies in opposing Germany during World War I. As Joshi points out, “Mencken’s assertions that Germany’s rapid augmentation of its military might in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was purely defensive are both largely false and to some degree disingenuous.”
“The fact is that logic is one of the youngest of the arts, and that relatively few men ever attain to any facility in its practice,” Mencken wrote in “The Free Lance.” Surely he knew that his own views were sometimes guided by passion rather than reason; he would, after all, name his most notable literary endeavor Prejudices.
His “Free Lance” column ended in 1915—possibly because the Sun no longer wanted to publish a pro-German commentator, possibly because he had better things to do, or maybe some combination of both.
If there was some loss for Mencken in all of this, he no doubt enjoyed it. As he told readers of “The Free Lance,” he rather liked being the odd man out. “Personally, I have always found it a great deal more exciting to lose than to win,” he wrote, “and what is more, a great deal more soothing to the soul.”
Danny Heitman, a columnist for the Baton Rouge Advocate, is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
