The Uncommon Scold

In Baltimore, soon after the general elections of 1948, Henry Louis Mencken suffered a severe stroke that damaged his power of speech and his ability to read and write. But it left his remarkable mind unimpaired and isolated. Two years later a massive coronary occlusion brought him once more to the verge of death. In the brick row house on Rollins Street where he had spent nearly all his life, Mencken sank, fighting, into the twilight of aphasia. It was a cruel fate for a man of Mencken's measure, and in his anguish he rebelled against it. This week death finally came to Mencken, at 75.

Act of God. His death will send a twinge of nostalgia to many a middle-aged American--a feeling which will be difficult to explain to his son or daughter. A generation ago, Mencken's passing would have caused wholesale sorrow in certain speakeasies and newspaper city rooms. College students would have cut classes for a day to mourn the loss of the stormiest figure on the U.S. conversational scene. And in many a parish house and political forum, his death would have been considered an act of God.

Mencken was an editor of surpassing skill, a journalist of scintillating brilliance, a rare humorist and a savage critic. For years he was the brightest star on the Baltimore Sunpapers. He was the forward lance in the march of American letters from John Fox Jr. (The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come) to Sinclair Lewis, helped kill off much of the trash in American writing. Many of the best U.S. writers of the century (Lewis, Dreiser, Cather, Pound. Fitzgerald) were discovered or trundled by Mencken in his happy days as co-editor (with George Jean Nathan) of the Smart Set (1914-23) and the old American Mercury (1924-33). He took out after U.S. criticism, which he said "smells of the pulpit, the chautauqua, the schoolroom."

For a generation of jazz-age iconoclasts, Mencken was a demigod who cut down false idols with a meatax. He fought the censors and prohibitors like an enraged impala, and destroyed shibboleths with a whimsical delight that has seldom been equaled. On his overheated typewriter he minted words and phrases that became part of the national currency: "booboisie," "bozart," "Comstockery," "Bible Belt." With roars of laughter, Mencken insulted at least half his countrymen as "morons" and "boobs" led by "medicine men." He enraged a lot of people, and capitalized on their anger by fielding their barbs into an anthology, Schimpflexikon.

He found grounds for scorn in virtually everything that crossed his irritable eye. He advocated death by artillery fire for Negroes and poor whites. A vociferous agnostic, he roared against the "whooping soul-savers." (One of his favorite letter endings: "I pray for you incessantly.") Religion, he maintained, was simply a "conditioned reflex."

Politicians were barbecued with relish. In 1938, during an unhappy interlude as editor of the Baltimore Evening Sun, he covered the editorial page with 1,000,075 dots, each representing "one person in the Federal Government's immense corps of jobholders." The New Deal was "simply an amorphous agglomeration of discordant hooeys." But Mencken was politically impartial, and attacked Hoover, Coolidge, Wilson and Lincoln with the same vicious delight. And he backed Roosevelt for a third term because, he said, "he ought to be made to bury his own dead horse."

Brothels & Bibles. His sense of humor was gargantuan and as unsubtle as a kick in the pants. On his one visit to Hollywood, he borrowed Actor Tom Mix's white, initialed and well-known car and parked it outside a notorious brothel. Inside with his drunken pals, he virtuously kept his hat on, jammed a cigar in his mouth and, seated at the piano, kept pounding out The Battle Hymn of the Republic. One of his essays was entitled: Theodore Roosevelt: An Autopsy. He delighted in autographing Gideon Bibles "with the compliments of the author," boasted that he liked to "swear in the presence of ladies and archdeacons."

To him, everything was a racket--God, education, radio, marriage, children, Communism, astronomy ("a lot of pishposh"), osteopathy, Hollywood. Mencken's own critical talent was also something of a racket. It was difficult to separate the whimsy from the whamsy. In 1930, after 50 years of rollicking bachelorhood and contempt for the institution of marriage, Mencken sheepishly announced his own engagement. It was a national sensation (only Charles Lindbergh's wedding to Anne Morrow, the year before, drew bigger headlines). Mencken took the hilarity in good grace. "Getting married," he said, "like getting hanged, is probably a lot less dreadful than it has been made out." The marriage was a gentle and happy one. It ended with Sara Mencken's death, in 1935, of meningitis.

A lot of Mencken's caterwauling was merely the caprice of a man who doted on the outrageous. Few believed that he actually deplored democracy. His remark that "the atomic bomb is the greatest of all American achievements and one of the imperishable glories of Christianity" was shocking. But its sole intention was to shock. "My writings, such as they are, have only one purpose," he once said "to attain for H. L. Mencken that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk."

But on many matters he was as earnest as a sword. It took real courage to risk jail and defy Boston's Watch & Ward society by selling his banned Mercury on Brimstone Corner. He was passionately sincere in his famed, acid dispatches to the Evening Sun on the Scopes "Monkey" trial of 1925. When old William Jennings Bryan, the advocate of the Bible, died in the exhausted aftermath of that trial, Mencken said, quite sincerely: "Well, we killed the son of a bitch."

Bicycle Rider. Mencken's day faded fast. First the Depression and then the repeal of Prohibition outdated both him and his straw men. He tried to laugh off the Depression. But the college men, now unemployed, who had always laughed with Mencken, failed to get the joke. The old Mercury lost its following, and less than five years later many a bright college boy did not know who Mencken was. At a political convention, when a photographer asked him his name and occupation, Mencken solemnly wrote: "Retired six-day bicycle rider." But in his sundown. Mencken found new activities that assured his reputation as a man of letters. His monumental American Language, his three-volume autobiography*and A New Dictionary of Quotations, all written just before and during World War II, will be read long after his yellowed news clips and acid essays are forgotten.

Under his hardboiled shell Mencken was a kindly man, with a dozen godchildren, and legions of good friends who disagreed with every one of his opinions and prejudices. He had a passion for great literature, classical music and for people (even preachers, politicians and boobs). He liked nothing better than a terrapin dinner, washed down with good beer (and a toast to Lydia E. Pinkham), followed by an Upmann cigar and an evening of sparkling conversation. In his robust way, he loved America, once said: "As an American I naturally spend most of my time laughing." He also loved his life, which he summed up in a famous epitaph for himself: "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thoughts to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."

* A final volume, covering Mencken's days as a magazine editor, will be published in 50 years.

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