Notes
H. L. Mencken worth revisiting: For any resident of Maryland, getting to know Henry Louis Mencken should be an urgent priority.
That might seem a challenging objective, in that he died in 1956. But Mencken, a lifelong resident of Baltimore and an Evening Sun columnist who gained national fame, left behind an enormous body of writing so full of energy, humor and cynical wisdom that, to many modern readers, his gifts seem wasted on the simpler earlier age in which he lived.
"In the United States the business of getting a living is enormously easier than it is in any other Christian land - so easy, in fact, that a forehanded man who fails at it must almost make deliberate efforts to that end. Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head."
That bit was plucked at random from a Mencken essay called "The Commonwealth of Morons" included in a book called A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, representing roughly half of an omnibus collection of his work. The material was found among Mencken's papers at the Enoch Pratt Free Library and edited by Terry Teachout, a journalist and critic for The Wall Street Journal whose biography of Mencken, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, was published in 2002.
The chrestomathy (a collection of literary passages) includes writings about an array of subjects: politics, war, music, literature, male and female lawyers and the clergy. A paperback version was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2006.
Opinionated and controversial, Mencken is not always an easy man to like. He was a man of his era and shared at least one of its ugly prejudices, anti-Semitism, which was discovered after his private papers were opened by the Pratt beginning in 1981. But Mencken also stood courageously against the mob, demanding justice in the 1930s when blacks were lynched on Maryland's Eastern Shore. And he heaped scorn on a wide array of ignorant prejudices.
By the end of his remarkable life, Mencken was widely viewed as the premier American social critic of the 20th century. Have some fun getting to know him.
- Larry Williams
Calendar
Saturday, Feb. 9
Rosemary E. Reed Miller -- The author talks about the history of African-American designers and dressmakers featured in her book, The Threads of Time. 11 a.m. / Enoch Pratt Free Library, Southeast Anchor branch / 3601 Eastern Ave. Wednesday, Feb. 20
Esther Iverem -- The author discusses her book, We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006, a collection of reviews and commentary from seeingblack.com and various print venues that surveys African-Americans in film since Spike Lee's mid-1980s emergence. / 6:30 p.m. / Enoch Pratt Free Library, Central Library, Poe Room.