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Mencken Trouble

Terry Teachout's life of the bad boy of Baltimore.

Nov 4, 2002, Vol. 8, No. 08 • By GEORGE WEIGEL
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The Skeptic
A Life of H.L. Mencken
by Terry Teachout
HarperCollins, 432 pp., $29.95

IN THE FALL OF 1923, James M. Cain, a reporter then aspiring to a literary career, had lunch in Baltimore with H.L. Mencken, who was on the verge of launching a new journal, the American Mercury. Despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that Mencken did nearly all the talking during a four-hour meal, Cain left under the spell. He felt, he said later, "like a boy who had had his baseball autographed by Babe Ruth."

At the time, virtually every literate American would have instantly understood both ends of the analogy. Today, even the most avid young reader might be puzzled on stumbling across Cain's reminiscence--and not by the reference to the Sultan of Swat. Terry Teachout's long-awaited "The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken" thus comes at an opportune moment. It has been a decade or more since a bruising controversy over Mencken's character was precipitated by the release of the diary and literary reminiscences that Mencken had left to Baltimore's Pratt Library under a set of rolling time locks. Teachout has mined these materials in a calmer, more measured spirit. The result, if not a definitive study of the man and his work, is a reliable and enjoyable introduction to one of America's greatest writers, a book that will help post-Boomer generations meet, enjoy, be enraged, and ultimately be baffled by the Bad Boy of Baltimore.

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