H. L. Mencken on American Literature, edited by S. T. Joshi. Ohio University Press. 233 pages. $44.95.
Early in the 20th century, when America was giving birth to its own literature, H.L. Mencken was the midwife. As the nation's preeminent book critic, he railed against empty-headed and hidebound novels while championing writing that was gritty and authentic.
His reviews, the fierce and the fawning, helped American literature find a distinctive voice by proclaiming that it was Mark Twain who showed the way and rallying behind writers who carried his torch forward -- from Theodore Dreiser to F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Given the scores of books by and about Mencken, who made his fame as a caustic columnist for Baltimore's Evening Sun, it is curious that so few of his literary reviews have found their way into print.
S. T. Joshi remedies that with this fascinating collection of criticism Mencken wrote between 1908 and 1933 primarily for the Smart Set and American Mercury, then among the nation's most highly regarded magazines.
In essence, Joshi's collection shows us a brilliant mind at work in real time, as Mencken decides what to make of an explosion of creativity perhaps unmatched in the history of American letters. It is must reading for any serious student of the nation's literature.
Mencken's work begins with his assessment of Twain, undertaken in reviewing a major biography of the writer released in 1912 -- more than a quarter century after the publication of the author's epochal Huckleberry Finn.
In an era when writers in the United States remained under the spell of their English forefathers, Mencken denounced the timid response to Twain's authentically American novel. He boldly declared it "one of the great masterpieces of the world" and anointed Twain as "the true father of our national literature, the first genuinely American artist of the blood royal."
Over the next two decades, Mencken would see it as his mission to "clear the ground of mouldering rubbish" -- by which he meant freeing American literature from restrictions on form and ridding it of the Puritan morality that had dominated since the birth of the republic.
Joshi breaks the work down sensibly, dividing Mencken's reviews into three key categories -- those whose work Mencken viewed as establishing the American canon, those of "worthy second-raters" and those he dismissed as "trade goods."
History suggests Mencken was right more often than he was wrong. The work of most authors he placed in the canon has withstood the test of time -- among them Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
Those he demoted to second-rate status seem, in retrospect, to belong there -- among them Ambrose Bierce (excepting, of course, The Devil's Dictionary) and the once highly esteemed William Dean Howells.
But, as was true in his political columns, Mencken was often spectacularly wrong -- as he himself admitted in reflecting on his work. What he remembered were "not my occasional sound judgments, but my far more frequent imbecilities -- some of them, seen in retrospect, quite astounding."
Such as missing the point of Fitzgerald's one masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, and dismissing it as inferior to This Side of Paradise. Such as celebrating only the literary criticism of Edgar Allan Poe and declaring his stories "tedious" and his poetry "hollow jingling." Such as falling in love with Southern novelist James Branch Cabell, whose work has long since faded from view.
The only sin Mencken never commits is being boring.
His work is uproariously funny and enormously insightful, offering not only pointed literary analysis but also incisive social criticism. Both hold up remarkably well even though the better part of a century has passed since these reviews were written.
This collection would be delectable enough if it included only his book reviews, but Joshi ices the cake by adding an introductory section featuring pieces Mencken wrote about the art of literary criticism. No book critic who takes his work seriously can miss reading these essays, not only for the sheer joy of Mencken's wit and writing, but also for his penetrating insight into the craft.
General readers may find the reviews of long-forgotten authors too obscure to be worth their time, but there is more than enough in the rest of the book to compensate -- as evidenced by the rollicking sample of Mencken moments accompanying this review.
Stephen R. Proctor, The Sun's deputy managing editor for sports and features, began his enthusiasm for the works of Mencken when he was a teen-ager. He studied literature on a yearlong John S. Knight fellowship at Stanford University three years ago.
From the book:
On reviewing: "I have overpraised books, and I have applauded authors incautiously and too soon. But, as the Lord God Jahveh is my judge, and I hope in all humility to be summoned to sit upon His right hand upon the dreadful and inevitable Day of Judgment, when all hearts are bared and virtue gets its long-delayed reward, I most solemnly take my oath that ... I can't remember a time when I ever printed a slating that was excessive or unjust. The quacks and dolts who have been mauled on these pages all deserved it; more, they all deserved far worse than they got. If I lost them customers by my performances I am glad of it. If I annoyed and humiliated them I am glad of it again. If I shamed any of them into abandoning their quackery -- but here I begin to pass beyond the borders of probability, and become a quack myself."
On Edgar Allan Poe: "Poe's tales, with a few exceptions, seem tedious to me, and much of his poetry strikes me as hollow jingling, but his criticism is my delight."
On Mark Twain: "I believe that Huckleberry Finn is one of the great masterpieces of the world, that it is the full equal of Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, that it is vastly better than Gil Blas and Tristam Shandy, Nicholas Nickleby or Tom Jones. I believe that it will be read by human beings of all ages, not as a solemn duty but for the honest love of it, over and over again, long after every book written in America between the years 1800 and 1860, with perhaps three exceptions, has disappeared entirely save as a classroom fossil. I believe that Mark Twain had a clearer vision of life, that he came nearer to its elementals and was less deceived by its false appearances, than any other American who has ever presumed to manufacture generalizations, not excepting Emerson. I believe that, admitting all his defects, he wrote better English, in the sense of cleaner, straighter, vivider, saner English, than either Irving or Hawthorne. I believe that four of his books -- Huck, Life on the Mississippi, Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven and A Connecticut Yankee -- are alone worth more, as works of art and as criticisms of life, than the whole output of Cooper, Irving, Holmes, Mitchell, Stedman, Whittier and Bryant. I believe that he ranks well above Whitman and certainly not below Poe. I believe that he was the true father of our national literature, the first genuinely American artist of the blood royal."
On F. Scott's Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: "The story is obviously unimportant and, though, as I shall show, it has a place in the Fitzgerald canon, it is certainly not to be put on the same shelf with, say, This Side of Paradise."
On Ralph Waldo Emerson: "It is one of the mysteries of American life that Rotary has never discovered Emerson. His so-called philosophy seems to be made precisely for the luncheon-table idealist. There is in it an almost incomparable sweep of soothing generalities, a vast marshaling of sugary and not too specific words, a wholesale assurance of soaring optimism. I can imagine nothing better suited to the spiritual needs of used-car dealers, insurance underwriters, trust company vice presidents, bath-fixture magnates, and the like gathered together in the sight of God to take cheer from one another and hoist the Republic along its rocky road."
On popular fiction: "The essence of this literature is sentiment, and the essence of that sentiment is hope. The aim is to fill the breast with soothing and optimistic emotions -- to make the fat woman forget that she is fat, to purge the tired businessman of his bile, to convince the flapper that Douglas Fairbanks may yet learn to love her, to prove that this dreary old world, as botched and bad as it is, might yet be a darn sight worse."
On Theodore Dreiser: "If you miss reading Jennie Gerhardt you will miss the best American novel, all things considered, that has reached the book counters in a dozen years. On second thought, change 'a dozen' into 'twenty-five.' On third thought, strike out everything after counters. On fourth thought, strike out everything after 'novel.' Why back and fill? Why evade and qualify? Hot from it, I am firmly convinced that Jennie Gerhardt is the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome and Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn, and so I may as well say it aloud and at once and have done with it."
On Willa Cather: "And now comes My Antonia, a work in which improvement takes a sudden leap -- a novel, indeed, that is not only the best done by Miss Cather herself, but also one of the best that any American has ever done, East or West, early or late. It is simple; it is honest; it is intelligent; it is moving It has form, grace, good literary manners. In a word, it is a capital piece of writing, and it will be heard of long after the baroque balderdash now touted on the 'book pages' is forgotten."
On Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt: "As an old professor of Babbittry I welcome him as an almost perfect specimen -- a genuine museum piece. Every American city swarms with his brothers. They run things in the Republic, East, West, North, South. They are the originators and propagators of the national delusions -- all, that is, save those which spring from the farms. They are the palladiums of 100% Americanism; the apostles of the Harding politics; the guardians of the Only True Christianity."