My Role Model

I suspect the single most underrated author in American history is H. L. Mencken.  Indeed, I am having a hard time coming up with another candidate for that title.  I run into people periodically who have read him, and they always talk about him with that same glow of appreciation I have.  I read a lot of Mencken years ago and was rarely not entirely pleased with his mastery of prose.  His autobiographical trilogy is easily one of the finest such things ever.  Moreover, he is the perfect cheerful curmudgeon, and in that respect he has been a role model for me since I discovered him.  I have a picture of Mencken in my office, right over my desk, and he constantly reminds me never to abandon either my inner cheer or my inner curmudgeon.  Witty, erudite and writes remarkable prose.  What’s not to love?

So, why is it that only now, The Library of America has published Mencken?  Better late than never, to be sure, but this sure was a long time coming.  They published his Prejudice Series (6 books, which LOA has collected into two volumes).  Presumably the autobiography and his three volume treatise on the American Language are in the works. 

I recently read my new LOA copy of Prejudices: Second Series.  That one which contained two masterpieces: “The Sahara of the Bozart,” his hit-piece on the dearth of Art in the South (which led pretty directly to the Southern Renaissance in the mid-20^th century), and “Roosevelt: An Autopsy,” his amazing dissection of Teddy Roosevelt, after which it is really hard to take TR seriously (“Aspiring to be the leader of third-rate men, he had to stoop to the common level”).

For those who have never read him, here is the flavor of Mencken.  “The Sahara of the Bozart” is so named because the South, “that gargantuan paradise of the fourth-rate,” “for all its size and all its wealth and all the ‘progress’ it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac; there are probably single square miles in America. If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave tomorrow, the effect upon the civilized minority of men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood on the Yang-tse-kiang. It would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of a civilization.” And, later on in the essay: “As for the cause of this unanimous torpor and doltishness, this curious and almost pathological estrangement from everything that makes for a civilized culture, I have hinted at it already and now state it again. The South has simply been drained of all its best blood. The vast hemorrhage of the Civil War half exterminated and wholly paralyzed the old aristocracy, and so left the land to the harsh mercies of the poor white trash, now its masters. The war, of course, was not a complete massacre. It spared a decent number of first-rate Southerners—perhaps even some of the very best. Moreover, other countries, notably France and Germany, have survived far more staggering butcheries, and even showed marked progress thereafter. But the war not only cost a great many valuable lives; it also brought bankruptcy, demoralization and despair in its train—and so the majority of the first-rate Southerners that were left, broken in spirit and unable to live under the new dispensation, cleared out.”

Now not only are things like that fun to read, but they are terribly perceptive in that way that makes you want to argue with the author, but realize it is hard to do so.  Surely, Mencken exaggerates, right?  And yet, name a Southern artist from the era between the Civil War and the 1920s.  Twain, you say?  He left the South in the early 1860s before he wrote his first piece. 

And, that’s the way it is with Mencken—often annoyingly correct, unfailingly witty in the midst of cultural catastrophe, and more than anything, an amusing curmudgeon.  Author of such gems as “There is no underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” and “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard,” and “Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence on the United States, then why do you live here?  A: Why do men go to zoos?” 

That last one is the genesis of my constant mantra:  Q: How can I stand working at a college? A: It amuses me.