Mencken, the American Iconoclast Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
H L Mencken was my second big literary discovery after Milton Friedman. It has been 30 years since I first found a copy of
the Vintage Mencken on the remainder table at the local community college bookstore, and his brilliant style still sparkles for me like a newly discovered agate in the gravel of a polluted stream. It shines all the brighter for all the dirt that surrounds it. I bought everything I could find by him, and I still am delighted by his prose every time I look through it.
Mencken, for me, made clear the fundamentals of what good writing should be. (not that I have ever done any.) First, clear thinking makes for clear prose. Second, what you say must be honest and expressed without reservation. It may not be absolutely true, but it must be the truth as you understand it. I still evaluate all that I read based on these criteria.
Ms Rodgers books is by far the best Mencken biography I have seen so far. It has moments of total stupidity that are actually worth the reading because they illuminate odd realities that have always made me wonder. Mencken's sex life got way too much attention, but it explained some of his odd friendships.
Ms Rodgers is too 21st century to understand some of the problematical areas of Mencken, such as his ideas on Race. For the time he lived in, Mencken was was one of the most civilized people on earth on this topic. Reading his material now, even though what is politically correct has turned 180* from the Klan infested goose stepping political correctness of his time, it is still out of phase with what is acceptable now.
For Mencken, there were essentially two races. There was the goose stepping, white sheeted, terrified of independent thought, superstitious, sexually incontinent, credit dependent
cannile and opposed to them was the hard working, courteous, open minded, civilized minority. Skin color and nationality were irrelevant, behavior determined your race. Even now, such clowns as Reverend Wright illustrate that Ku Kluxury is a stupidity that knows no color.
Mencken is still fun to read half a century after his death. Most of the issues, controversies, personalities of his day are remembered now, only because he wrote of them. Ideas that had the full support of the police are now forgotten. Leaders who commanded legions of adherents are now forgotten, known now only because Mencken chose to ridicule them.
The life of one such as Mencken, who worked hard, paid his bills, and did his very best to tell the truth is, as much as he would hate the concept, a comfort in difficult days. The one who did the write thing, told the truth no matter the cost, and was kind to those in need is remembered and discussed long after the controversies he engaged in are forgotten. The cruel, the vindictive, the haters, have achieved the oblivion they sought for him, that they most wanted to avoid.
