Mencken: Stud

Every so often, I plunge headlong into a Mencken spree, a vice I’ve nursed since the early 1990s when I first stumbled into Ann Arbor’s Dawn Treader Bookstore and smelled those old books (that odd but pleasing scent, I’m told, comes from vanilla releasing from the aging paper). I fished out three tattered paperback collections of Mencken’s essays. They were cheap but held a king’s ransom in wit.

Lately, I’ve been slogging through the six-volume brick of Prejudices, that glorious heap of essays, articles, and reviews Mencken repackaged with a sneer, plus the Second Mencken Chrestomathy, cobbled together by Terry Teachout back in the early ’90s when the world still had a pulse.

The Sage of Baltimore towered over the 1920s, that fleeting zenith of “peak literary culture” before the radio’s syrupy glow started our metamorphosis into a nation of passive receptor sedentaries.

Print was the game then. And Mencken? He was the barker, the juggler, the lion-tamer all in one, dazzling readers with his pen. Few could match his relentless, cackling gusto. By his own tally, he had spewed out over five million words before the reaper called.

He figured his stuff would wither fast, tied as it was to the “portentous” claptrap of his day. He wrote period pieces, so he figured they were destined for the future dustbin. But no, they’ve stuck around, stubborn as crabgrass.

Why?

Teachout calls it “baffling,” and I’ll drink to that.

Maybe part of Mencken’s enduring appeal is how he swung his axe at that sanctimonious Puritan Progressivism, the same bilge that oozed from Plymouth Rock in 1620 and still fouls our air today. It’s a perennial American problem so a writer like Mencken who attacked it will have perennial appeal.

Or maybe it’s because he roasted the freaks and charlatans of his time with the gusto we should always bring to public discourse (especially today, as we emerge from those bizarre “Biden administration” days when freaks and charlatans were celebrated and writers like Mencken were de-platformed).

Or maybe his enduring popularity comes from something much simpler: common sense. His prose brims with it, so much so that Teachout crowned him “the Apostle of common sense” in 1994, a title EWTN pinned on G.K. Chesterton for their 2000 TV series. Who, Mencken or GKC, got that title first? I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter. I just know we desperately need ten more to fill out the twelve.

But I’ll tell you why I read Mencken: he’s a riot. His outrageousness lands like a sledgehammer to the skull, and I’m flat on the floor, grinning. It’s the same reason I devoured P.J. O’Rourke in the ’80s and ’90s, even (especially?) after he dubbed the motley tribes of the Asian Steppes the “urine-colored people.” These scribblers might be bastards, but their venom cracks me up, often against my better judgment.

Mencken is a fusillade of scorn. Pejoratives rain down like hailstones. Anyone beneath him or just plain different gets a rung on his ladder of contempt: “moron,” “imbecile,” “idiot.” Politicians, if they claw above that mire, still rank as “third-rate men.” Lousy novels? “The veriest twaddle.”

Mencken’s prose is a carnival of bile, and I buy tickets by the roll.

His prose is also beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that Teachout thinks it’s one of the reasons Mencken endures. “No finer prose,” Teachout says, “has been written by an American.”

Every Mencken sentence, every paragraph, is a masterwork of grammar and flourish, even if it’s draped in the rough burlap of 1920s lingo that’d make my woke neighbors clutch their pearls. I’m sure I’m a “moron, imbecile, and idiot” myself, chuckling guiltily every time he drops “blackamoor” like a live grenade. But there’s comfort in knowing his craft is flawless, a bulwark against the sloppy prose splattered all over the Internet by online creators.

For them, the English language is a tool to be wielded on scrollers. For Mencken, it was a chalice full of blessings to be poured on readers.