Notes in the Margins: The Gadfly in the Tapestry, or a Review of Marion Elizabeth Rodgers' "Mencken: An American Iconoclast"
In this review, Roberts gives a review of Marion Elizabeth Rodgers' book 'Mencken: An American Iconoclast'.
"I am misanthropos, and hate mankind."
'Misanthrope' has slowly made its appearance onto the stage of social media and the platforms that have spawned to take over the domain of newspapers, emails, and television. Entering stage left, joining words like cynic, working class and gaslighting, its appearance in this virtual vaudeville has been a slow burn, like waiting for Melville's Captain Ahab to finally leave his cabin and confirm the whispers of his legend. The word, since Timon of Athens (either real or in the mind of Shakespeare) has been used as a pejorative, a dramatic flare--or flair--shot into the sky, warning the other members of our species about a grave danger; the danger that someone, somewhere, doesn't think well of humanity. And they fear, deep down, that they might be right.
As of recently, this term has been used by every random Twitterati between old fans of the Daria to Elon Musk attempting to smear Thomas Piketty. Many of those who identify with the 'Left' use it to denounce conservatives, who use it to denounce liberals, who use it to denounce…it has entered the funhouse of 'insults' that are lobbed without much thought, to defend ideas that are completely vacant of thought.
Whatever happens with the word itself as it is fisted by every member of every grouping that bicker on social media, I have come to be quite fond of the term. Misanthropy is a part of the literary tradition that runs through my writings. To me, misanthropy tends to produce the best writers; having thrown off conative illusions, they can reveal to the species who, exactly, we are. Some of the misanthropic writers I have come to enjoy, and who sit at my Writer's Table, are people like Gore Vidal (whose grandfather, T.P. Gore, famously said that if there were any race other than the human race, he would go join it), Karl Kraus, Moliere, John Marston, Voltaire, and Oscar Wilde's Lord Henry Wotton--sorry to disappoint, but all my influences can't be real. How boring would that be?
One of my favorite misanthropes, and probably the more influential than most of the others mentioned, is H.L. Mencken. You, dear reader, are probably more than faintly aware of the influence of Mencken in my work; I treat him with better reverence than some of my own, living, friends. H.L. Mencken's influence has been a lifelong affair. As a teenager, I first came across Mencken in the form of the well known 'perfected democracy' quote: that on one fine day, the plain folk would get what they desired, and the White House would be occupied by a downright moron--thus perfecting the American democracy.
I found this quote, curiously enough, adorning my father's office; like most conservatives of 2009, my father was big on appearing to stand in opposition to the presidency of Barack Obama, and a quote like Mencken's was a fine way to make the appearance. Of course, he now supports Donald Trump. As for that quote? Well, it is nowhere to be found; disappearing like the investments people made to Elizabeth Holmes.
At the time, I remember chuckling at the quote. Still a green eared conservative, I saw its potency against the dreaded liberals who ran the White House at the time. But I was also hit by a sense of janus bifrons; that is, I realized this was a quote that could be applied to any president. After all, it was a proud declaration of my father that he was a 'simple, plain, hard working man'. And whose desires was it that the downright moron fulfilled? Wait…I know this one…
From his Archimedean intrusion, lifting all of my beliefs for a moment to reveal the decay and pill bugs underneath it, Mencken has continued his influence on me. As I traveled the political roads, all paved with good intentions, from conservative to libertarian to socialist to le diable boîteux, Mencken maintained his relevance. At first, however, that influence was more vaudevillian than anything; with a funny quote here and there, Mencken hardly was included in what has eventually become my tendency to épater le bourgeois. As a matter of fact, it was not until much later, as a youthful and stupid 24 year old that I decided to find out more about Mencken. And with that curiosity, I decided to buy and read Terry Teachout's The Skeptic; a surprisingly small book, considering how big a mistake it was for me to read. But this came with hindsight: at the time, I read Teachout's book and I found myself disgusted with Mencken. He was, as far as I could conclude, a mere conservative pundit who wrote in a sometimes interesting fashion. The fact anyone would write about him was something I found fruitless and flabbergasting.
Some people say that, with the passage of time, one gains wisdom to better understand events from their past. Whatever comfort this idea gives, it is wrong; with the passage of time, we have a bout of forgetfulness, and try it again. Over time, I had a similar bout of forgetfulness: once again coming across this and that quote, this and that article, this and that mention. With Teachout's work a dull wound in my mind, I decided to read a different biography--after all, I had read that there were far better Mencken biographies from the likes of William Manchester (Disturber of the Peace), Sara Mayfield (The Constant Circle, which I ended up reviewing here), and other biographies, as well as his own autobiographical trilogy.
It was at this point that I came across Marion Elizabeth Rodgers' Mencken: The American Iconoclast, a book whose thickness is somewhere around that of Stephen King's Christine. 551 pages, not including all the helpful but tedious bits like the index and 'Notes to Page' (helpful to people like me), Rodgers' biography out paces Terry Teachout's The Skeptic by 200 pages and change. But, upon reading it, it felt like it passed up Teachout's work by a mileage that could carry you from Los Angeles to Berlin in record time.
Rodgers begins her work with a Prologue, where she recounts an exciting event in H.L. Mencken's life. On April 5, 1926, H.L. Mencken broke the law; he attempted to sell his magazine, American Mercury in Boston, where the New England Watch and Ward Society, headed by Reverend J. Franklin Chase had banned it from being sold. Rodgers uses this event to break the ground on illuminating Mencken's character--which, as she mentioned in a lecture given in Baltimore on November 16, 2005 about this biography, was what Mencken himself looked for in biographies he reviewed (4:11). She uses the event to make it clear that H.L. Mencken was on the side of liberty in the United States, to the point of risking jail for his ideals.
What one also notices in the beginning, upon a second read usually, is that it is in the prologue that Rodgers first employs her very interesting, very unique form of writing--what I call tactile prose. One first sees it employed when, after giving the background to the events that led to the meeting between Mencken and Rev. Chase in 1926, as well as inserting the news reports of the day from Boston Herald, Rodgers describes the crowd that makes its way to meet H.L. Mencken. She writes:
"By early afternoon on this spring day, the crowd had grown so large that some viewers climbed trees; others clung precariously to the sides of buildings for a closer look. Just before two o'clock, a taxicab drew up to the curb and Mencken sprang out, carrying under his arm several of the green-colored magazines. In an instant, he and [Arthur Garfield] Hays were surrounded by a swarm of men and women, waving dollar bills in their hands, bawling for copies of the banned publication. The throng pressed so close that the two men were literally swept off their feet. Police tried to break up the jam, and finally, by threats of wholesale arrests, induced the petitioners to move on. Laughing, spectators relocated across the street to the Common, where, in front of the subway entrance, thousands more waited." (p. 3-4)
This tactile prose does not engage one at an ideological level, a spiritual level, or as a manner of 'relatability'; it engages one's imagination through the senses. As she mentions in the aforementioned lecture, she 'walked the roads Mencken walked', reading his letters in their original and seeing the places he visited, attempting to 'recreate, by selection, the texture of a life' (7:02). Throughout the entire book, this tactile prose brings one into Mencken's world; in her lecture, Rodgers explains that her goal was not to recreate Mencken for our times. As she says:
"It is tempting to make parallels with [Mencken's] time and ours, but what I've tried to do in this book is to put Mencken in the context of his own times." (12:00-12:06)
One can see this in spades. After her prologue, Rodgers begins as all biographers do; at the beginning. In a couple sentences, she sums up the frame of Mencken's life brilliantly, writing:
"Henry Louis Mencken came into this world in the age of horses, before Buffalo Bill organized his Wild West Show and when settlers were still taking out territory in the West. He left it when military jets were crossing the breadth of the United States in three hours." (p. 13)
As beautiful as frames can be, of course, they do not make the pictures--and Rodgers takes this frame as a canvas; she introduces us to Mencken by writing about his first memory at the age of 3. She writes of Mencken sitting at the window of his father's cigar factory, watching the Summer Night's Carnival of the Order of the Orioles, a parade that once was celebrated in Baltimore, the city he would live and die in. She describes the parade, using the reports of the Baltimore Sun at the time, noting its '[y]ellow torches of flaring gas' that were 'as bright as day'. The parade included people dressed up in 'a costume of Lord Baltimore' who 'sat atop a float festooned with oysters, representing the riches of the Chesapeake Bay'. One finds themselves walking cobbled streets, startled by 'the loud clattering of the milk wagon' and walking past 'the oyster man making his rounds', while listening in on Anna Mencken, nee Abhau, telling a young Mencken the tale of Simple Simon. What experiences the textures of Mencken's life.
This tactile prose lends itself to the reader, as Rodgers uses it to integrate the facts of Mencken's life into the experiences of the man himself: she can tell you about the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 through Mencken's words, his private correspondence, the reporting of the newspapers themselves, his mother's reaction, and with more recently gathered information--all without breaking the flow and organization of the narrative. She paints pictures to their fullest, with words that would be mere hints to the world of Mencken, if given to any other writer.
At the very beginning of Chapter 1 of this brilliant biography, Rodgers' wrote the following:
"His own family called him Harry, newspapermen [called him] Hank, occasional friends Henry, and New Yorkers Menck. But his trademark was H.L. Mencken." (p. 13)
In her biography, we see these different Menckens arise: one learns from Rodgers in a way many biographies do not achieve, and one is never merely given the facts but the context too; Rodgers does very well at addressing contradictions in H.L. Mencken without attempting to defend or denounce these contradictions. It is this grasp of contradiction, stated clearly and without defense or condemnation, that makes Rodgers so good at writing about Mencken. As I mentioned early, Mencken is one of my favorite misanthropic writers, but to anyone who has ever read the biographies of misanthropic writers, one knows that it is almost a law of nature that the misanthrope on the page or in attitudinal affect will, privately and politically, contradict this attitude.
Consider Karl Kraus who, famously, wrote of his fellow Viennese citizens that they were 'the sorry consequences of uncommitted abortions'. And yet, as Edward Timms notes in his Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist, he was one of the foremost critics of the oppressive laws imposed on women and homosexuals, using Oscar Wilde (among others) to make his point. Or consider Gore Vidal who, a 'public patrician' in the words of Heather Nielsen in his book Political Animal: Gore Vidal on Power, was nevertheless an avid populist who thought the American public, ignorant as it is, was more worthy of freedom than the elites who crushed them. As Henry Wotton, in Will Self's Dorian, noted of his misanthropic mother, 'Like Schopenhauer, the more she loves mankind, the less she loves men.' This is a pattern Mencken falls into: he was critical of the species whose freedom he tried to defend.
In this beautifully written, well researched biography, Rodgers' does not let the contradiction of the man obscure the very real discussion of his legacy: unlike many more myopic biographers like Teachout, Rodgers is one of most detailed when it comes to discussing H.L. Mencken as a literary critic; it is from her work that I have come to the conclusion that Mencken gifted the United States a literary canon; from the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemmingway, and Thomas Wolfe to W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Edith Wharton, Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, Richard Wright and so many others, Mencken used his many magazines, from the Smart Set to American Mercury to give these writers a place to write and be promoted. His reach goes to our cinema; Anita Loos wrote the book Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) which became the now famous 1953 film with Marilyn Monroe and admitted it was inspired by her time with H.L. Mencken. Many of the writers mentioned above went ahead and wrote for the movies early on, like Dorothy Parker, Fitzgerald and Aldous Huxley. With a possible exception of the American critic Harold Bloom, no critic since H.L. Mencken has done so much work to promote literature in America.
H.L. Mencken is controversial, and not without reason; Rodgers makes this clear in this book, presenting every Mencken clearly; whether it is the Mencken who was so putrid in his humor and bigotry that Dorothy Parker walked out of a dinner with him or the Mencken who wrote "The Eastern Shore Kultur" decrying lynching, or the Mencken who was terribly heartbroken over the death of a squirrel that he, in old age, kept as a pet. Each version is a textured part of his life. His living textures are beautifully presented, even when they cover what is disappointing about Mencken.
H.L. Mencken's influence on me remains. He sits at my Writer's Table as one who is not always right, but has the right edge which can be used to cut through the density of American illusions. As Gore Vidal noted in his foreword to The Impossible H.L. Mencken:
"Like all good writers, Mencken is a dramatist, at his best when he shows us the ship of state in motion on high seas while his character studies of the crew of this ship of fools still give delight, though every last one now lies full of fathom five." (xxv)
His influence remains because I am his kin in purpose, even if our politics are different; I am on this ship of fools, Melvillian in its con games that appeal to our highest ideals. And I believe, bolstered by the work of Rodgers, that the textures of his misanthropy might be rough, but have nonetheless been weaved and been used to weave beautiful tapestries in American literature and American history. And I wish to continue this weave, stitched together, adding to the larger tapestry.
It is often trite, nowadays, to quote Friedrich Nietzsche. Like a pop song, his lyrics are hummed by empty headed teens and shallow adults, often out of tune and always with the wrong lyrics. Nonetheless, I find Nietzsche's description of the critic in Human, All Too Human fitting for H.L. Mencken:
"Insects sting, not in malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics: they desire our blood, not our pain."
Oh, what an insect he was; the gadfly in the tapestry.