The Shocking Entertainer

By Stefan Kanfer

MENCKEN: A STUDY OF HIS THOUGHT by Charles A. Fecher Knopf; 391 pages; $15

When H.L. Mencken was asked, "Why, if you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, do you continue to live here?" he countered, "Why do people visit zoos?"

The implication was clear: the speaker resided on top of the evolutionary scale; what better way to spend a life than laughing at the lower orders? Such was Mencken's amusement during the '20s and early '30s. It was a resentful, mocking epoch; Americans, disillusioned by World War I, were anxious to smash icons and uncover clay feet. In newspapers, magazines --the Smart Set and the American Mercury--and some 40 books, Mencken merrily blasted Christianity in general and the Bible Belt in particular. He satirized professors, savaged politicians and labeled the majority of Americans--i.e., anyone who did not agree with the author's prejudices--as the booboisie.

Anxious to be on the right side of the bars, his readers joined the tirade. The newspaperman was elevated to social arbiter, literary critic and political savant. Even today, 22 years after his death, Mencken is remembered as the Sage of Baltimore, a pantheon figure in American letters. It is time for someone else to play the iconoclast. Charles Fecher, himself a Baltimore journalist, performs the task unwittingly in his amusing literary biography, Mencken: A Study of His Thought.

The descendant of cultured Germans, Henry Louis was raised in a complacent atmosphere. But he was born with sand under his skin, and the works of Nietzsche exerted an irresistible appeal. Mencken became a believer in the Uebermensch, a scoffer at the great unwashed. Like Oscar Wilde, he made a success by reversing traditions. To believers, he played the village atheist. To prohibitionists, he was a beery provocateur. To the U.S. at large, he was an intellectual who saw culture only in Europe. "The average citizen of a democracy," he announced, "is a goose-stepping ignoramus ... The average democratic politician, of whatever party, is a scoundrel and a swine."

A master of invective, Mencken never failed to beguile his audience. Even Southerners were amused when he labeled Dixie the Sahara of the Bozart. And his classic encyclopedia, The American Language, brilliantly traced the wellsprings of slang and ethnic argot. But in larger matters he was more naive than the booboisie. When real goose-steppers came along, Mencken failed to perceive the German danger and, as Fecher notes, "brushed off Nazi treatment of the Jews." His literary criticism was sometimes blind to contemporary talent: he thought Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was "full of pink hooey" and found no more sense in Faulkner than in "the wop boob, Dante." He never understood the scars of the Depression and compared the New Deal efforts of Franklin D. Roosevelt to those of "a snake-oil vendor at a village carnival."

These rough judgments cannot wholly condemn their maker. H.L. Mencken was above and below all an entertainer who liked to shock. In the process of making errors, he freed the language from cant and proved a tonic influence on writers from Sherwood Anderson to Norman Mailer. His tragedy was in staying too long at the zoo until his fellow visitors began to notice a want of sympathy and substance. Back in 1942, Critic Alfred Kazin observed that Mencken's "conception of the aesthetic life . . . was monstrous in its frivolity and ignorance." Others soon echoed the critique. Finally, even the subject obliquely acknowledged it. In Six Men, Alistair Cooke recalls a 1955 visit. The invalided Mencken wondered when Poet Edgar Lee Masters had passed on. In 1948, Cooke guessed. "That's right," said Mencken. "I believe he died the year I did . "

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