H. L. Mencken
A SECOND
MENCKEN
CHRESTOMATHY
Henry Louis Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1880 and died there in 1956. A son of August and Anna (Abhau) Mencken, he was educated privately and at Baltimore Polytechnic. In 1930 he married Sara Powell Haardt, who died in 1935. Mencken began his long career as journalist, critic, and philologist as a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald in 1899. In 1906 he joined the staff of the Baltimore Sun, thus initiating an association with the Sunpapers that would last until a few years before his death. He was coeditor of the Smart Set with George Jean Nathan from 1914 to 1923, and with Nathan he founded the American Mercury, of which he was sole editor from 1925 to 1933.
ALSO BY H. L. MENCKEN
The American Language
The American Language: Supplement I
The American Language: Supplement II
In Defense of Women
Prejudices
Notes on Democracy
Treatise on the Gods
Treatise on Right and Wrong
Happy Days
Newspaper Days
Heathen Days
A New Dictionary of Quotations
Christmas Story
A Mencken Chrestomathy
Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks
The Bathtub Hoax
Letters of H. L. Mencken
H. L. Mencken on Music
The American Language: The Fourth Edition and the Two Supplements, Abridged
The American Scene
The Diary of H. L. Mencken
My Life as Author and Editor
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 1995
Copyright © 1994 by Enoch Pratt Free Library
Editing and annotations copyright © by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 1994 by Terry Teachout
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1995.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis), 1880–1956.
A second Mencken chrestomathy / by H. L. Mencken; selected,
revised, and annotated by the author; edited and with an
introduction by Terry Teachout.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-83111-8
I. Teachout, Terry. II. Title.
PS3525.E43A6 1994
818′.5209—dc20
94-12087
v3.1
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Editor’s Introduction
I. Americana
The Commonwealth of Morons
The Pushful American
The Metaphysic of Rotary
The Yokel
Varieties of Envy
The Immigration Problem
Utopia in Little
Bring On the Clowns
II. Politics
The Politician Under Democracy
The Joboisie
The Men Who Rule Us
Liberty and Democracy
Leaves from a Note-book
The True Immortal
The Same Old Gang
Reflections on Government
The End of an Era
The Suicide of Democracy
The Last Ditch
Liberalism
III. War
The War Against War
Summary Judgment
The Next Round
The Art of Selling War
Onward, Christian Soldiers!
War Without Art
Memorials of Dishonor
IV. Criminology
The Nature of Liberty
The Beloved Turnkey
Cops and Their Art
Jack Ketch as Eugenist
The Humanitarian Fallacy
One Size Fits All
More and Better Psychopaths
The Arbuckle Case
V. Law and Lawyers
Stewards of Nonsense
Over the Side
The Judge
VI. First Things
The Genesis of a Deity
Christian Origins
The Root of Religion
The Mask
The Eternal Mob
The IQ of Holy Church
Literary Theologians
The Believing Mind
The Road of Doubt
Veritas Odium Parit
VII. Brethren of the Cloth
Playing with Fire
Shock Troops
Story Without a Moral
Divine Virtuosity
VIII. Man and Superman
The Great Illusion
Ethical Origins
The Flesh Is Weak
The Supreme Curse
Thrift
The Genealogy of Etiquette
At the Mercy of the Mob
The Goal
The Superman
Heredity
Happiness
The Horns of the Dilemma
IX. Men and Women
The Curse of Man
Le Vice Anglais
Sex on the Stage
Women as Spectacles
Venus at the Domestic Hearth
Clubs
Efficiency as Charm
Woman and the Artist
Martyrs
Issue
The Burnt Child
On Connubial Bliss
Divorce
Cast a Cold Eye
X. Progress
Aubade
Thomas Henry Huxley
The Eternal Riddle
Two Benefactors of Mankind
Elegy
Sketch Maritime
Penguin’s Eggs
XI. Making a Living
The Professions
Dazzling the Public
The Puppet’s Pretension
The Emancipated Housewife
Honest Toil
The Rewards of Virtue
XII. Places to Live
Totentanz
Metropolis
The Devil’s Deal
The Utopia of Tolerance
Closed Shop
Washington
Interlude in the Socratic Manner
San Francisco: A Memory
Boston
Philadelphia
XIII. The Writer in America
The National Letters
The Emperor of Wowsers
Transcendentalism
The Man of Letters
They Also Serve
Once More, with Feeling
XIV. The Novel
The Novel Defined
Second Chorus
On Realism
The Ultimate Realists
The Face Is Familiar
The Hero Problem
New England Twilight
XV. European Novelists
Jane Austen
Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson Again
The Father of Them All
Freudian Autopsy upon a Genius
H. G. Wells
Arnold Bennett
Somerset Maugham
Scherzo for the Bassoon
D. H. Lawrence
XVI. American Novelists
The Puritan Abroad
George Ade
James Branch Cabell
Not in French
> Jack London
Dreiser as Philosopher
Dreiser as Stylist
Abraham Cahan
Mrs. Wharton
Disaster in Moronia
XVII. Playwrights and Poets
George Bernard Shaw
Ibsen the Trimmer
Edgar Lee Masters
Dichtung und Wahrheit
Walt Whitman
XVIII. The Critic’s Trade
The Pursuit of Ideas
The Cult of Hope
Cassandra’s Lament
Criticism of Criticism of Criticism
A Novel a Day
Meditation at Vespers
XIX. Present at the Creation
A Novel of the First Rank
Marginal Note
An American Novel
XX. Constructive Criticism
The Uplift as a Trade
A New Constitution for Maryland
Hooch for the Artist
Notice to Neglected Geniuses
XXI. Unfinished Business
Another Long-Awaited Book
Advice to Young Men
XXII. The Public Prints
The End of the Line
The Professional Man
Reflections on Journalism
The New York Sun
The Baltimore Sunpaper
The Pulitzer Prizes
The Muck-Rakers
Acres of Babble
XXIII. Professors
The Public-School
The War upon Intelligence
Katzenjammer
The Golden Age of Pedagogy
A Liberal Education
The Lower Depths
Pedagogues A-flutter
Prima Facie
The Philosopher
The Saving Grace
XXIV. Music
The Tone Art
The Joyless Master
De Profundis
Dvořák
Tschaikowsky
Russian Music
The Bryan of Bayreuth
Debussy and Wagner
XXV. The Pursuit of Happiness
Alcohol
The Great American Art
Night Club
The Peaceable Kingdom
The Home of the Crab
Hot Dogs
Reminiscence in the Present Tense
XXVI. Lesser Eminentoes
Portrait of an Immortal Soul
A Texas Schoolma’am
For Rotary and God
Flamingo in Blue Stockings
The Incomparable Bok
Dr. Townsend and His Plan
One Who Will Be Missed
The End of a Happy Life
XXVII. Ironies
Wild Shots
Between the Lines
The Fat Man
Sunday Afternoon
Interlude Sentimentale
Elegy in C Minor
The Jocose Gods
XXVIII. Nietzsche
The Bugaboo
Nietzsche on Christianity
XXIX. Credos
H. L. Mencken, by Himself
Salutatory
Further Exposition
An American Mercury Circular
Starting Point
Petition
XXX. Self-Portrait
The Man and His Shadow
Personal Record
The Tight-Rope
Categorical Imperatives
Behind the Mask
The Popinjay
Note for an Honest Autobiography
For the Defense
Coda
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
“I HAVE discovered something,” Alfred Knopf said to H. L. Mencken one day in 1920. “It is that H. L. Mencken has become a good property.” Knopf was talking about the unexpected popular success of Prejudices: First Series, the first of six collections of Mencken’s essays, articles and reviews to appear under the Borzoi imprint between 1919 and 1927. In 1919 Mencken was still known outside Baltimore—his lifelong home and base of operations—mainly as coeditor of and book reviewer for the Smart Set, a shabby-looking magazine of modest circulation and raffish reputation. Prejudices: First Series was intended to bring his writing, and his personality, to the notice of a wider audience: “I made a deliberate effort to lay as many quacks as possible, and chose my targets, not only from the great names of the past, but also from the current company of favorites.” The effort, like most of Mencken’s exercises in self-promotion, paid off. Prejudices: First Series and its successors were all reviewed widely and, to the initial surprise of author and publisher alike, even sold well. It was through these neat little crown octavo volumes as much as through the Smart Set (and, later, the American Mercury) that American readers of the ’20s came to know the man whom Walter Lippmann, writing in 1926, called “the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people.”
In the ’30s, Mencken fell from grace with Depression-era intellectuals, who found his literary tastes bourgeois and his politics neanderthal. (“Nearly all poverty is caused by idealism. The normal poor man is simply a semi-idiot whose dreams have run away with his capacities.”) Prejudices: First Series sold only three-hundred-odd copies between 1931, when the plates were melted down, and 1942, when the last printing was exhausted. But he became a good property again with the publication in 1940 of Happy Days, his best-selling childhood memoir, and it was doubtless no coincidence that around this time he began thinking of putting together a comprehensive anthology of his own writings. As early as 1943, Mencken discussed with Knopf the possibility of bringing out “a sort of Mencken Encyclopedia, made up of extracts from my writings over many years, arranged by subject and probably with additions.” According to his diary, he went to work in earnest four years later: “Unable to do any writing, I have put in my time selecting and editing material for the ‘Mencken Omnibus’ that Knopf proposes to get out.… I am not reading all my old stuff, but I am trying to look through it.”
The book that emerged from this lengthy period of gestation was a kind of super-Prejudices, a jumbo volume containing Mencken’s thoughts on everything from the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (good) to the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (bad). Like the six Prejudices, it was assembled with loving care:
I have got out a lot of stuff from the first four “Prejudices” books, and some from my early “Smart Set” book reviews.… I have also dug out a lot from magazine and newspaper files, never before printed in books. Some of it, not read for years, strikes me as pretty fair.… Most of it has needed a good deal of revision. It was full of references to the affairs of the time, some of them now almost unintelligible. But after cleaning them out, I find myself with [a] good deal of printable stuff. I shall pile it up without plan, and then make my selections.… Mrs. Lohrfinck [Rosalind Lohrfinck, Mencken’s secretary] has already copied 300,000 or 400,000 words, and I’ll probably have 1,000,000 before I settle down to make my selections.
By mid-September of 1948, Mencken had blue-penciled this mountain of typescript down to a 265,000-word draft. Knopf hated the proposed title, A Mencken Chrestomathy (according to Mencken, the word means “a collection of choice passages from an author or authors”), but Mencken insisted on it, going so far as to discreetly twit his old friend in the preface: “Nor do I see why I should be deterred by the fact that, when this book was announced, a few newspaper smarties protested that the word would be unfamiliar to many readers, as it was to them. Thousands of excellent nouns, verbs and adjectives that have stood in every decent dictionary for years are still unfamiliar to such ignoramuses, and I do not solicit their patronage. Let them continue to recreate themselves with whodunits, and leave my vocabulary and me to my own customers, who have all been to school.” Not surprisingly, the ever-practical Mencken was more responsive to Knopf’s concerns about the length of the first draft: “I myself feel that there are things in the present text that had better come out, so we should be able to reach an agreeme
nt without difficulty. There is an excess of copied material about equal in bulk to the matter now in the book. Thus, if the ‘Chrestomathy’ has an encouraging sale I’ll be ready to produce a second volume.”
Mencken delivered a 185,000-word revised draft on September 24, 1948, and approved the copyedited manuscript on November 8. Fifteen days later, a massive stroke left him unable to read or write for the rest of his life. A Mencken Chrestomathy was published the following July, two months before Mencken’s sixty-ninth birthday. It turned up on the New York Times best-seller list almost immediately, appearing alongside Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Seven Storey Mountain, The Fountainhead, Cheaper by the Dozen, John P. Marquand’s Point of No Return and Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate. (They don’t make best-seller lists like that anymore.) The Chrestomathy has sold slowly but steadily ever since: 27,000 copies in hardcover, 22,000 in paperback. Moreover, the book’s influence has been completely out of proportion to its sales. With the exception of Malcolm Cowley’s Portable Faulkner, no anthology of a modern American writer’s work has done more to shape the reputation of its subject.
What makes this first Mencken Chrestomathy so compelling? To begin with, it is not a conventional anthology. Most single-author anthologies, including some very artful ones, are purely functional: they are meant to introduce the reader to an oeuvre, not to serve as ends in themselves. The Chrestomathy is different. Mencken claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that his purpose in editing the Chrestomathy was “simply to present a selection from my out-of-print writings, many of them now almost unobtainable.” In fact, the text was the climax of a process of serial revision that in some cases lasted as long as three decades. Typically, Mencken took a Monday Article written for the Baltimore Evening Sun, recycled it into a Smart Set essay or an American Mercury editorial, polished that version for inclusion in one of the Prejudices and, finally, created a “definitive” version for the Chrestomathy.* This editorial process is of particular relevance because Mencken’s output consisted mainly of essays; comparatively few of his books were, to coin a Menckenism, durchkomponiert. By selecting the best of these essays, revising them extensively and collecting them in one carefully arranged volume, he produced a book that is at once an anthology and a deliberate act of literary and intellectual self-definition. A Mencken Chrestomathy is not quite as comprehensive as it looks: much of Mencken’s work was still in print in 1948 and is therefore not included. But despite the absence of any material from A Book of Prefaces, Treatise on the Gods, Treatise on Right and Wrong or the three Days books, it nonetheless contains a broadly representative cross section of his writings, one from which subsequent generations of readers have acquired a total sense of H. L. Mencken as man and artist.
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