Mencken’s Afterlife

"So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises. Go ahead. Go to your nearest campus and find a single English major who’s heard of the Sage of Baltimore. You will sooner find a virgin who hates vampires. They might even be the same person.

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Records are made to be broken, but the variety of reputations achieved by H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) in the century since he first hit the presses is truly out of reach. His outdated status as a youth sport is only one example. Who else will ever manage to be blacklisted three times by three vastly different administrations of thought police so many decades apart? The first, for ethnic reasons, came during World War I. The second, for political reasons, came during World War II—by which time the man whose journalism had been the jazz of American letters became a little too purist for the smart set. They were lining up at the bakery of half-baked ideas; Mencken wouldn’t touch those ideas if he had to live on capitalism the rest of his life. Resented for his isolationism and fierce opposition to the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt, Mencken resigned from the Baltimore Sun in 1939, forced to finish his life as a relic—good for a morning chuckle, perhaps, but not much else.

And then, 33 years after his death, came crown number three. It followed the 1989 publication of Mencken’s diary. According to some very good people, these diaries proved two things: one, that their author was a racist and anti-Semite; and two, so was anyone who continued to read him. Far from sanitary, way short of okay, Mencken swiftly joined the fraternity of forbidden minds, where he (along with recent inductee Philip Larkin) could be kept from corrupting the young. Even at his most popular, however, Mencken wore multiple masks.

“He was using words as a weapon,” reflected Richard Wright in Black Boy.