The law of diminishing returns is at work when one reads multiple biographies of the same subject. As I read each of the biographies of H. L. Mencken over the years, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reading the same book over and over again. Each one promised to reveal some new and previously unobtainable information, but by-and-large it was the same version of the same story accompanied by the same quotations. Soon, it seemed, there would be more histories of Mencken than books actually written by him, and I vowed never to purchase another Mencken biography.
This conclusion was reinforced once the reviews of Terry Teachout’s new biography, The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, began appearing in various journals and it became apparent that this would be yet another condemnation of Mencken as not a serious thinker but a narrow-minded bigot.
Not to purchase such a book was one thing, but when a friend lent me his copy my latent gullibility kicked in and I succumbed to the bait of the “new information” it allegedly contained. Alas, once into the book it was like the second week of owning a bargain used car; not only were my worst suspicions confirmed, but it turned out to be more hopeless than anything I could have imagined.
The Skeptic turns out to be a book of limited scope. About 20% of it is devoted to Mencken’s sex life, and that is the only portion in which I learned anything new. I now know that Mencken had a vasectomy late in life, that it was done in the hope of rejuvenation, and that “he did not have a particularly strong sex drive.” As I am not interested in H. L. Mencken for purposes of titillation, I found this topic to be dull, but at least it is not infuriating as is the book’s main focus.
About 75% of the book is devoted to proving that Mencken was an anti-Semite of the most virulent and churlish genus. If you think that this estimate is exaggerated or that I am emulating Mencken by employing dramatic overstatement, I invite you to pick a copy of The Skeptic up off the library shelf or retail display. (Please don’t purchase a copy.) Turn to the index (about the only good thing that can be said of the book is that it has a superb index) and look under “Jews.” Then look under “anti-Semitism.” Now add the total number of entries under those topics together, and you will see that there are more pages devoted to that combination than anything else except “American Mercury.”
Certainly any competent biography of Mencken must address the subject of his frequent grumbling about “prehensile kikes” and other unpleasant epithets. But not only does Teachout not offer a balanced discussion of the issue, he is the voice of the prosecution who drags out every piece of damning evidence to wave in our faces; he demolishes the exhibits of the defense – the 1938 column “Help for the Jews” is not exculpatory because Mencken advocated only that German Jews be allowed to immigrate to the US; scant mention of Mencken’s actual efforts to get Jews out of Germany is relegated to a tiny footnote on page 290.
Teachout’s book is thus a boon to those who disapproved of Mencken all along. William Jennings Bryan was right and so was Mencken’s foe Stewart Pratt Sherman – in fact, both men are treated sympathetically in the book. What all this means, of course, is that Teachout has done the job on Mencken and succeeded where the censors and patriots and evangelists had failed. He has killed Mencken, as no one who had previously been ignorant of Mencken would now ever consider reading him – a possible exception being the type of person who would want to hijack a plane or blow up a building in New York. The numerous reviews have been unanimous in their condemnation of this warped and bitter old man (old – apparently Mencken was always old), and from this day hence anyone who sees the name Mencken in print will automatically think, Oh yes, he’s the guy who hated Jews; or, I know who that is, he wanted the Nazis to win so they could kill the rest of the Jews.
And how does this reflect of us deluded fools who actually profess to admire Mencken? Do we love him and read his books over and over because we too are consumed with a burning hatred for Jews? Do we have choice passages underlined and pages dog-eared and handwritten scraps of paper stuck in books because we know choice bigotry when we see it and that’s what inspires us to burn our crosses?
Apparently so, as in the remaining fraction of The Skeptic there is no clue as to what Mencken’s redeeming qualities were. In the millions of words he had published during his lifetime, all mention of Jews, whether good, bad, or indifferent, amounts to less than the total of impurities in a cake of Ivory soap, so what about the fundamental themes he expressed over and over? Is there any mention here of Mencken’s analysis of why politicians behave as they do? Sorry. Does it discuss the significant relationship between Christianity and democracy that Mencken held was central to our society? Not here. Does it give an example of his shrewdness such as the deft condensation of three pages by Thorstein Veblen down to one banal paragraph? Not at all, as the name Veblen does not appear. Does it even acknowledge Mencken’s contribution in changing the national literature from being based on moralism to a basis in realism? Nope.
Ah, but I must confess at once that this last negative is not quite true, as there is some discussion of Mencken as an editor and literary critic. According to Mr. Teachout, Mencken was a terrible editor whose constant meddling with manuscripts kept successful and competent authors from submitting anything to the American Mercury. Mencken was obviously a very poor literary critic because he didn’t like Hemingway and instead championed a ghastly author named Theodore Dreiser who is deservedly forgotten today. The American Mercury itself was of no significance, as it was merely a short-lived fad that featured the works of unknowns who couldn’t have been worth reading.
It has always escaped me exactly why Mr. Teachout is held in high esteem as an author. It defies the imagination that anyone who writes for a living could be so utterly bereft of any gift for storytelling that he could ruin the marvelous tale of how Mencken discovered the novel Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, or suck all the adventure out of the Hatrack prosecution in Boston, or spoil the spectacle of the Scopes Monkey Trial, yet in each case Teachout’s account reads like the Cliff’s Notes version of William Manchester’s Disturber of the Peace.
And consider this choice passage from page 79 of The Skeptic:
Had Harry Mencken been more deeply scarred by his father’s early death than he realized – or cared to admit? Did the relief that swept through him when August died, and the shame that surely followed it, make him cleave too closely to his mother out of a sense of guilt? Or was there some other trauma in his young life that he succeeded in hiding from the eyes of prying biographers? . . . All we have to go on are the facts.
Well, at least “eyes of prying biographers” is a fraction less trite than “prying eyes of biographers” would be, but the Redbook pop psychology, the purple passion, the melodramatic final sentence straight from Jack Webb. Add the vasectomy details and the damning evidence, and this reads more like the Kitty Kelly biography of Mencken.
One can easily understand the motivation of Charles Angoff for trying desperately to damage Mencken’s reputation, but what is Terry Teachout’s impetus? Does he wish to be known to posterity as the investigator who exposed the sham of The Sage? Is he eager for regicide so that he will now assume the title of The Great Debunker? Did he suddenly get religion and decide that Mencken was no longer to his taste? Is he that desperate for a buck?
Or what?
January 16, 2003
