[Part I of III]

On one of my used bookstore forays I chanced upon a copy of A Carnival of Buncombe, a collection of essays by H.L. Mencken, edited by Malcolm Moos.  I hadn't intended on reading it immediately, but after taking a quick dip into it I was hooked.  I read nothing else outside of work until I had gotten to the end.  

Soon after, I was cruising the "Books-a-Million" store in Olney (MD).  They had a lot of cookbooks, kids' books and fiction.  Not much in the way of non-fiction besides a bit of history and biography.  I did happen upon Terry Teachout's Mencken biography.  Brand new, $6.  Why not.

The Teachout book is equally engrossing.  What emerges is well-supported.  Teachout immersed himself for years in the Mencken archives in Baltimore's Pratt Library, and all I've read is a few things.  Let's see what I can add.

Teachout lays open Mencken's positively loony, privately-held social philosophy, a kind of racialist, cracker-barrel social Darwinism, overlaid with a gloss on the philosophy of Nietzsche.  Mencken was very smart and talented, but his disdain for the academy -- he never completed college -- was not compensated for by a talent for training his own mind.  He was self-taught, and he could be shallow and uninformed.  He had a respect for learning, but he failed to absorb much on the topics he wrote about.  He wrote superficially about things he didn't understand.  He wrote a lot of stupid things, often lacking even in internal consistency.  

He dwelled on public affairs, but he was not up to figuring out why Hitler was very bad, or why the Great Depression was very important.  He thought Hitler was a goon, rather than a monster.  His limited learning could not prevent him from committing intellectual atrocities when grappling with world-historic issues.

So why bother?  Mencken's integrity and enthusiasm on some huge issues makes his public political commentary highly entertaining.  It's a little bit like watching an articulate right-winger tee off on Bush's nation-building, or more rarely, the abuses of the encroaching national security state.

For HLM, one big issue was the first world war and the associated diplomatic machinations of Woodrow Wilson.  The other was Prohibition, rooted in a politics that was Southern, rural, and Christian.

Fortunately for Mencken, his near-escape from state repression for pro-German sympathies during the first world war taught him to keep his more subversive crypto-fascist thoughts to his private journals, which his will dictated be sealed from public view for decades after his death.  The writing that brought him celebrity was of a different sort, and the part that interests me most.  I'd like to think of it as Mencken's better self emerging, the one made necessary by, or reveling in, an accommodation to the pedestrian decency of American culture.

The better, libertarian Mencken comes roaring out of the Moos collection.  Remarkable to me is the extent to which it anticipates the current right-wing populist narrative, down to literal theft of some phraseology.  An interesting angle is the manner in which current right-wing rhetoric has corrupted Mencken for its own execrable purposes.

One phrase that jumped out at me was Mencken's attack on the 'Puritans' of his day:  "they can't stand the possibility that somebody, somewhere, is happy."  Where had I heard that before?  I'm quite certain it was at one of the Republican national conventions, from Reagan or H.W. Bush.  Their target was over-regulatin' PC liberals who want to deprive you of the fun of shooting off your guns or your mouth.  Pity poor Joe Biden, I have no doubt an exhaustive concordance of HLM and modern conservative rhetoric would turn up a lot of duplication.

Mencken's target in Teachout's rendition was the genteel tradition in culture.  This tradition was Anglophile, patrician, snobbish, and bound to stilted forms of literary expression.  Mencken's ideal models were the Mark Twain of Huckleberry Finn and the prose of Theodore Dreiser.  After going through the 'Carnival,' I find it hard to believe that HLM was not also thinking of one of his incessant targets:  the small-town, prohibitionist Bible-thumpers of the Anti-Saloon League.  HLM also ran afoul of state censorship on the question of WWI.  

Jingoists and Christian fanatics are of course the same constituencies that today form a crucial part of the mass constituencies of the Right.  Mencken thought that cities were the stronghold of sensible, cosmopolitan voters, in contrast to today's conservative nostrums of "the real America" between the East and West Coasts.  In his rants against the "booboisie," he echoed the elitist posture condemned by today's faux right-wing populists.

[Continued tomorrow.]