H L Mencken On American Literature

by H.L. Mencken, S.T. Joshi (Editor)

H. L. Mencken was one of the leading literary, social, and cultural critics of the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s. However, very few of his literary reviews have been reprinted in any form prior to their appearance in this volume. H. L. Mencken on American Literature presents a comprehensive selection of Mencken’s reviews of the leading American writers of his time. Manifestly interested in establishing a canon of American literature, he took great pains to vaunt writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and James Branch Cabell as the most accomplished authors of the day. At the same time, he found deficiencies in the work of such highly regarded figures as Edith Wharton, W. D. Howells, and Ambrose Bierce, placing them only in the second rank of American writers. Mencken also considered it his function to demolish the popular work of now-forgotten best-selling writers, demonstrating in his inimitably scathing manner the degree to which their catering to a mass audience rendered their work hollow and subliterary. Mencken’s reviews are a vast and untapped source for his provocative analyses of the best and the worst in American literature. They are presented here in a scrupulously edited and annotated edition.

296 pages, Hardcover

First published July 15, 2002

About the author

Henry Louis "H.L." Mencken became one of the most influential and prolific journalists in America in the 1920s and '30s, writing about all the shams and con artists in the world. He attacked chiropractors and the Ku Klux Klan, politicians and other journalists. Most of all, he attacked Puritan morality. He called Puritanism, "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

At the height of his career, he edited and wrote for The American Mercury magazine and the Baltimore Sun newspaper, wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column for the Chicago Tribune, and published two or three books every year. His masterpiece was one of the few books he wrote about something he loved, a book called The American Language (1919), a history and collection of American vernacular speech. It included a translation of the Declaration of Independence into American English that began, "When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody."

When asked what he would like for an epitaph, Mencken wrote, "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."

(from American Public Media)

Reviews

[Captain Curmudgeon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is weird writing a book review within a book review. I am kind of creeped out right now, but here goes:

Dang, I'm on a Mencken kick...Mencken is obsessed with Mark Twain. He can't write a few lines about any other author or any other literature reference without immediately reverting back to twangin' Twain. Who knew Mark Twain was that good? "What is man?" sounds like a great book that is rarely read. My guess for this is because it lacks an abundance of annoying creatures like hobbits, ewoks, children wizards, or children murdering each other which is the current obsession for blood thirsty infantile retarded adults who share the same taste in "literature" with their equally blood thirsty infantile retarded kids...

I will check out "What is Man?" and you can all look forward to the grandiose shit storm review that follows...Wait, Mencken has stopped blabbing about Twain...Wait, now he is obsessed with this other author Theodore Dreiser (who the fuck is that?)... Seems I got to read Dreiser because he is super obscure, which feeds into my elitist complex and false superiority to others around me...

In addition, Mencken's got some great things to say; though a bit on the wordy side sometimes. The deliberately large words I have to look up is getting tiring and tedious (though can be fun when I got the patience); just speak colloquially, asshole. Anyways, the book is decent. Anyways, better in the beginning, but kind of getting boring now. I will drudge through it, I am not sure why...Maybe cause only 8 people have read the book and it makes me feel superior to those 8 people by completing the only review for this book... Wait...hold on...It's getting better...He expresses some in depth analysis of some of the books he reads, of course bringing to the forefront his personal opinions and his brutal honesty about shit. He's starting to go on rants about women and politics and how everything sucks; which is pretty awesome and hilarious. He is also giving some good tips on what a writer should be and how art should be done proper without false pretense and gross sentimentality. Who the fuck does he think he is criticizing writers?? What a dick...

Quotes and pompous pointers on writers (though insightful):


On Mark Twain: "Through all his later years the riddle of existence was ever before him. He thought about it constantly; he discussed it with everyone he knew; he made copious notes of his speculations. But he never came to any soothing custom made conclusion. The more he examined life, the more it appeared to him to be without meaning, and even without direction; the more he pondered upon the idea of God, the more a definite idea of God eluded him. In the end, as Mr. Paine tells us, he verged toward a hopeless pessimism. Death seemed to him a glad release, an inestimable boon. When his daughter Jean died, suddenly, tragically, he wrote to her sister: "I am so glad she is out of it and safe- safe!"


** "Regarding false art, cheap cant, pious skullduggery, dishonest pretense- regarding all these things in my position is this: that their practitioners have absolutely no rights that anyone is bound to respect. To be polite to them is not to be tolerant; it is simply to be silly. If a critic has any duty at all, save the primary duty to be true to himself, it is the public duty of protecting the fine arts against the invasion of such frauds. They are insidious in their approach; they know how to cajole and deceive; unchallenged, they are apt to bag many victims. Once they are permitted to get a foothold, however insecure, it becomes doubly hard to combat them. My method, therefore, has been to tackle them at first sight and with an axe. It has led to some boisterous engagements, and, I sincerely hope, to a few useful unmaskings. So engaged, I do not hesitate to admit that I have been led by my private tastes quite as much as by any sense of professional duty..."- what an elitist prick...

"...(a) that it is the business of a novelist to describe human beings as they actually are, unemotionally, objectively and relentlessly, and not as they might be, or would like to be, or ought to be; and (b) that his business is completed when he has so described them, and he is under no obligation to read copybook morals into their lives, or to estimate their virtue (or their lack of it) in terms of an ideal goodness."- Awesome

"...he makes no attempt whatever to provide that pious glow, that mellow sentimentality, that soothing escape from reality, which Americans are accustomed to seek and find in prose fiction."

"Its inner drama presents a conflict between the two Witlas- the artist who is trying to create something, however meretricious, however undeserving his effort, and the sentimentalist whose longing is to be loved, coddled, kept at ease. This conflict, of course, is at the bottom of the misery of all men above the grade of car conductor, barber, waiter, or Sunday-school superintendent. On the one hand there is the desire to exert power, to do something that has not been done before, to bend reluctant material to one's own will, and on the other hand there is the desire for comfort, for well being, for an easy life. This latter desire, nine times out of ten, perhaps actually always, is visualized by women (HAHA). Women are the conservatives and conservators, the enemies of hazard and innovation, the compromisers and temporizers. That very capacity of mothering which is their supreme gift is the greatest of all foes to masculine enterprise. Most men, alas, yield to it. In the common phrase, they marry and settle down- i.e., they give up all notion of making the world over. This resignationism usually passes for happiness, but to the genuine artist it is quite impossible. He must go on sacrificing ease to aspiration and aspiration to ease, thus vacillating abominably and forever between his two irreconcilable desires. No such man is ever happy, not even in the moment of his highest achievement. Life, to him, must always be muddled and a tragic business. The best he can hope for is a makeshift and false sort of contentment. This is what Eugene Tennyson Witla comes to in the end. Women have been the curse of his life, from the days of his nonage onward. Forced into their arms constantly by an irresistible impulse, an unquenchable yearning for their facile caresses, he has been turned aside as constantly from his higher goals and led into smoother and broader paths. Good, bad and indifferent, they have all done him harm. His own wife, clinging to him pathetically through good and evil report, always ready to take him back after one of his innumerable runnings amuck, is perhaps his greatest enemy among. She is always ten yards behind him, hanging on to his coat-tails, trying to drag him back. She is fearful when he needs daring, stupid when he needs stimulation, virtuously wifely when the thing he craves is wild adventure. But the rest all fail him, too. Seeking for joy he finds only bitterness. It is the gradual slowing down of the machine, mental and physical, that finally brings him release. Slipping into the middle forties he begins to turn, almost imperceptibly at first, from the follies of his early manhood..."- HAHA, the shit he says about women is pretty funny...

"...it is formally demanded that all literature be made with the girl of sixteen in mind, and that she be assumed to be quite ignorant of sex."- BAHAHAHA! Genius!

"Beethoven did not write his music by a logical process; he wrote it by a process comparable to the fine, free, nonsensical jumping of a grasshopper."

**"Having struck the bull's-eye once, he (the author) is too proud to learn new tricks. Above all, he is too proud to tackle hard work. The result is a gradual degeneration of whatever talent he had at the beginning. He begins to imitate himself. He peters out."


"The man who uses them and esteems them most, the man of noticeably aesthetic inclinations, is simply the man who is most out of conceit with the life of his race and time. It is not without reason that the artist, at all times and everywhere, has been regarded as malcontent and anti-social by the average respectable citizen. And it is not without reason that the respectable citizen, placidly content with the existing order, has been regarded as a numskull by the artist."

"What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? By what attributes do we estimate and esteem him? The first it, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story. And the third is that he should say something about the people he deals with, either explicitly or implicitly, that is apposite and revelatory- in brief, that he should play upon them with the hose of a plausible and sufficiently novel and amusing metaphysic. All of these kinds of skill you will find in every really first-rate novelist. They are what make him what he is."

"Freedom. Each was chosen, consciously and deliberately, to help rescue the people from the old oligarchy; each wars at his belt the scalp of one of the old oligarchs. But what is the bunch worth? Not a continental damn. The people, having their free choice of gentlemen sworn to their service, picked out in almost every case the one least fitted to serve them prudently, faithfully, and effectively. Called to discharge their supreme duty as citizens, they yielded, as always, to their immemorial hatred of the superior man, and so selected petty men to do their work for them. This immemorial hatred turns the whole theory of service into something hollow and vain. Such a man...could not accomplish anything for the people, save he stooped to a pretense of accepting their own delusions. They would distrust him more, being on their side, than ever they distrusted him when he was against them. Pitted against a rival rescuer to their taste- i.e., one spouting imbecilities and pledged to impossibilities- he would be exposed inevitably to humiliation and defeat...The common people, even in the worst times of their exploitation, were probably quite as well off as they are to-day, with their fate largely in their own hands and a horde of mountebanks preying upon their credulity, their lack of sound vision and their easy emotionalism...

And doubting it, I arrive at a low, sniffish opinion of the whole rumble-bumble of the Uplift. It has failed in all directions. It has failed no less in its dealing with such vexations social problems as prostitution than in its dealing with such capital political problems as taxation. No business is so badly run as the public business. No other "experts" are judged and selected, not by their actual competency in the minds of the people- in other words, by their capacity for convincing persons who are admittedly incompetent to judge. In this enterprise, it goes without saying, the quack has all the advantages, for so long as he makes his doctrine charming it is immaterial whether he also makes it true. The honest man cannot hope to compete with him. On the one hand, this honest man can never promise half so much, for the more he actually knows of problems he discuss, the more he must be impressed by the limitations set upon all human knowledge. And on the other hand, he cannot hope to offer his hearers much enchantment, for the truth is seldom, if ever, charming. Thus the quack prospers like a hog in a cornfield, and the grunt of his satisfaction is heard in the land. And thus we shall be quack-ridden and folly-ridden until mobocracy comes to its unescapable debacle, and the common people are relieved of their present oppressive duty of deciding what is wrong with their tummies, and what doctor is safest for them to consult, and which of his pills is most apt to cure them." p. 188-189

"Moral ideas completely engulf and obliterate aesthetic ideas. A novel or a poem is judged among us, not by its dignity of conception, its artistic honesty, its perfection of workmanship, but almost wholly by its orthodoxy of content, its platitudinousness, its value for pointing moral."

[Illiterate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Critic seeks reader. Likes: satire, realism. Dislikes: sentiment, moralism. Let’s meet over short reviews.

[JerryDeanHalleck · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mencken was a great reviewer because he wrote in a clear, strong style. He had strong opinions and expressed them with satire, humor, and verve. Some namby-pambies don't like that. They shrink from conflict, and don't want to argue. Mencken, to give him credit, never minded a counter-attack, and relished intellectual combat.

The biggest criticism I can make of Mencken is he favored realistic, natural writing that was relevent to current society. That sounds great, but this kind of writing dates badly. Society changes, and once the great issues of the CURRENT YEAR, go away, the writing suffers. That's a big problem with Drieser and Lewis. Now, their characters/stories are only of historical interest.

I'd give the book a higher rating, except most of the selections are from stuff that has already been published in other mencken books. I don't know if Mencken did any reviews from the 1930s, but there isn't much from that decade.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Mencken is a learning experience, his way with words is immediately apparent. In fact, I had to pause frequently to look up the meaning of some of his verbiage before moving forward. Researching further, I discovered that Mencken wrote the book The American Language, which explains his familiarity with a plethora of English terminology not widely used by us common folk. He is absolutely harsh and sometimes brutal in his criticism and being an equal opportunity basher, exempts no writer, including Europeans. Even the greatest writers of the times are debased by him, at least in some small way.

I would hate to have had to subsist on writing for a living while he was in his editor's chair.