The Life and Riotous Times of H.L. Mencken

326 Pages·2013·4.98 MB·English

by  William Manchester

The Life and Riotous Times of H.L. Mencken
William Manchester
Portrait by Nikol Schattenstein
LION OF THE TWENTIES
Copyright The Life and Riotous Times of H.L. Mencken
Copyright © 1950, 1951, 1975, 1976, 1983, 2013 by William Manchester
Cover art, special contents, and Electronic Edition © 2013 by RosettaBooks
LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form
or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and
retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a
reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cover jacket design by Alexia Garaventa
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795335648
To
Julie Manchester
with love and pride
The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by… dunderheads;
it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and
then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that
doubt, after all, was safe—that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power,
and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not
only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.
—Prejudices, Fourth Series
Any questioning of the moral ideas that prevail—the principal business, it
must be plain, of the novelist, the serious dramatist, the professed inquirer into
human motives and acts—is received with the utmost hostility. To attempt such
an enterprise is to disturb the peace—and the disturber of the peace, in the
national view, quickly passes over into the downright criminal.
—A Book of Prefaces
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction to the 1986 Edition
CHAPTER I: PRECEDE
CHAPTER II: COPY!
CHAPTER III: THE FREE LANCE
CHAPTER IV: MENCKEN, NATHAN, UND GOTT
CHAPTER V: HOISTING THE BLACK FLAG
CHAPTER VI: THE INFIDEL SCOPES
CHAPTER VII: BANNED IN BOSTON
CHAPTER VIII: AT A GALLOP, MUD-SPATTERED, HIGH IN OATH
CHAPTER IX: SARA
CHAPTER X: ALAS AND GODDAM
ENVOI: MY OLD MAN
Bibliographical Note
Acknowledgments
For their help in the gathering of the information here presented, the author
wishes to thank Charles Angoff, Dr. Benjamin M. Baker, Mr. and Mrs. Harry C.
Black, Julian P. Boyd, Huntington Cairns, Alfred Cohn, H. Lowrey Cooling,
Paul de Kruif, John Dos Passos, R. P. Harriss, Arthur Garfield Hays, Theodor
Hemberger, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Hergesheimer, Mr. and Mrs. Gerald W.
Johnson, Frank R. Kent, Alfred A. Knopf, Rosalind C. Lohrfinck, Hans Marx,
August Mencken, Arthur Mizener, W. Edwin Moffett, George Jean Nathan,
Hamilton Owens, John W. Owens, Paul Palmer, MacLean Patterson, Paul
Patterson, Burton Rascoe, Dorothy Tillett, Edmund Wilson, and William W.
Woollcott.
August Mencken and George Jean Nathan must be thanked twice, each for
reading the final manuscript through carefully, suggesting additions here,
omissions there, and corrections everywhere.
For the subject of this book, who answered all questions, however absurd, as
long as he was able; who read the early chapters and had sections from the later
chapters read to him; without whose co-operation no page that follows would
have been possible—for him, mere thanks will not do. Like the A. Mitchell
Palmer of his “Star-Spangled Men,” he should be “rolled in malleable gold from
head to foot, and polished until he blinds the cosmos.”
Introduction to the 1986 Edition
“The cooks here do a swell job with soft-shell crabs,” Mencken said in a
gravelly voice, peering at me over his spectacles. Beneath the old-fashioned
center part of his white hair his pot-blue eyes gleamed like twin gas jets. “They
fry them in the altogether,” he rasped. “Then they add a small jock-strap of
bacon.”
It was June 2, 1947. We were in the dining room of the Maryland Club, the
bastion of Baltimore power. The meeting was our first—I had just flown in from
a Midwestern graduate school, where I was writing my dissertation on his early
literary criticism—and it was the beginning of a seven-year friendship, an April-
December relationship which I cherished and cherish still.
“This is a very high-toned club,” he said over the crabs. “Nothing but men.
Any member who suffers a heart attack must be carried outside to the front steps
before a nurse can attend him.”
He was in fine form that Monday noon. At sixty-six he was still at the height
of his remarkable powers and had, in fact, just completed the most productive
period in his career. Since 1940 he had been feuding with Baltimore’s Sunpapers
—the Sun, a morning paper, and the livelier Evening Sun. Disgusted with the
publishers’ support for what he called “Roosevelt’s War,” he had refused to
write for either. Instead, holed up in his study at 1524 Hollins Street, he had
written his three Days books, A New Dictionary of Quotations, A Christmas
Story, and two supplements to The American Language, and when we met he
was at work on A Mencken Chrestomathy. His machete was still long and sharp
and heavy, and he had never swung it with greater gusto.
Face-to-face with the man himself, I was enormously impressed. He had once
said there would be no point in erecting a statue to him, because it would merely
look like a monument for a defeated alderman. Actually he was a man of great
physical presence. To be sure, his torso was ovoid, his ruddy face homely, and
his legs not only stubby but also thin and bowed. Nevertheless there was a sense
of dignity and purpose about all his movements, and when you were with him it
was impossible to forget that you were watching a great original. Nobody else
could stuff Uncle Willie stogies into a seersucker jacket with the flourish of
Mencken, or wipe a blue bandanna across his brow so dramatically. His friends