He ended another note: “As for me, I am enjoying my usual discrepitude. A new disease has developed, hitherto unknown to the faculty: a dermatitis caused by the plates I wear for my arches. No one knows how to cure it. I shall thus go limping to the crematory.” He was always having a tumor dug out of his foot, or entering St. Agnes Hospital to have a folded membrane in his rectum investigated, or, depressed, shipping out samples of his body wastes to all the Baltimore pathologists he knew, which meant all the pathologists in the city. (A note of desperation here: “I begin to believe that in the end, as the hearse approaches the cemetery, I shall rise up and give three cheers.”) Some weeks not a screed would go into the mailbox without some complaint, such as, “I have a sore mouth, can’t smoke, it is 90 degrees, and at least twenty pests are in town,” or, “My liver is swelled to a thickness of seven inches, and there are spiders in my urine.” Other times he would audit his agonies—“an onslaught of pimples, aches, razor cuts, arch pains, and asthma,” or, “asthma, piles, tongue trouble, hay fever, alcoholic liver, weak heels, dandruff, etc.” Once he wrote George Jean Nathan:
My ailments this morning come to the following:
a. A burn on the tongue (healing)
b. A pimple inside the jaw
c. A sour stomach
d. Pain in the prostate
e. Burning in the gospel pipe (always a preliminary of the hay fever season)
f. A cut finger
g. A small pimple inside the nose (going away)
h. A razor cut, smarting
i. Tired eyes
Nathan, feeling that this was too much, sent him a set of false teeth, a hairpiece, a cork leg, six bottles of liniment, and a copy of What Every Boy Should Know. In the return mail he received a querulous note asking why a bottle of asthma medicine had been omitted. “I am hacking and wheezing like Polonius.”
It seemed to me that his hay fever sufferings were no greater than those of other victims, though they may have been exacerbated by his willingness to try every nostrum on the market. (“My carcass is a battleground, and I am somewhat rocky. Hay fever pollen is pouring into my nose by the quart, but in my arteries it encounters the violent opposition of hay fever vaccine, and as a result there is a considerable boiling and bubbling.”) This tendency had increased with the years and the advent of other complaints. In his preface to Supplement Two, published in the spring of 1948, he wrote that his readers must not expect a third supplement, because “at my age a man encounters frequent reminders, some of them disconcerting, that his body is no more than a highly unstable congeries of the compounds of carbon.”
By that autumn he was convinced that the end was near—with some reason. His friends had long ago written him off as a hypochondriac, for he had been crying “Wolf!” as long as they, could remember, but a real wolf had been quietly stalking him for ten years. On April 12, 1938, he had suffered a slight stroke. Two years later his doctor had found evidence that his cerebral circulation had been impaired. Mencken immediately started a journal to document the stages in his disintegration. By the evening of November 23, 1948, when he called at the apartment of his secretary, Rosalind C. Lohrfinck, preparatory to taking her to dinner, his deathwatch on himself amounted to a thick sheaf of typescript, some fifty pages in all. There were to be no entries after that, for that was the night his preoccupation with afflictions stopped being funny.
He was having a cocktail with Mrs. Lohrfinck when, in the middle of a lucid sentence, he began to babble incoherently. Alarmed, she called his physician. When the doctor arrived, Mencken was pacing back and forth, ranting. At Johns Hopkins Hospital it was found that he had again been stricken by a cerebral thrombosis affecting his speech center and paralyzing his entire right side. He hovered for days at the threshold of death; then, slowly, he began to improve. The disability in his right side eased gradually and, after a month and a half of extensive treatment, left his arm and leg completely. But his speech center remained affected, and he could neither write nor read. Since boyhood his life had been built around the reading of the written word and the expression of his reflections. Now everything which had given meaning to his existence was gone.
The burden of caring for him—and it was to be a heavy one—fell on his unmarried younger brother August, a retired engineer who looked and sounded uncannily like him and with whom he shared the Hollins Street house. After Mencken’s fifth week of hospitalization August brought the old man home. His condition was appalling. In conversation he tried again and again to summon the right word, and failed. Sometimes he would resort to pantomime, raising an imaginary cup to his lips when he could not recall the word for drinking. Other times he would try circumlocutions, saying “the thing you cut with,” for example, when he meant “scissors.” And occasionally nonsense words came forth: “yarb” for “yard,” “ray” for “rain,” “scoot” for “coat,” etc.
It was a bitter blow for the author of The American Language, and the worst of it was that he was fully aware of what was happening, understood the extent of the brain damage, and knew that his aphasia was incurable. In the Hopkins he had threatened to kill himself, but for all his thundering prose he had never been, and was not now, capable of violence. What actually happened was that he sank into a dreadful depression. He would stand in his study window, looking across at Union Square, on the opposite side of Hollins Street, saying almost inaudibly, “I wish this hideous existence would stop,” saying, “How can anyone so stupid live,” saying, “That a man like me, able to produce something, with the drive I had…. It’s comic; it’s just comic.” In that first year of his disability he refused to allow anyone to read to him, refused to look at magazines with enlarged print, and wouldn’t even listen to phonograph records. In one of his few remaining flashes of humor he hoarsely told me, “When I get to heaven, I’m going to speak to God very sharply.”
Each time I called at his home I thought it was the last time, but he lingered and lingered. The 1940s became the 1950s; my biography, Disturber of the Peace was published—in an act of conspicuous gallantry, he had managed to initial his approval of every quotation from his correspondence—and still his agony continued undiminished. Late in 1951 he suffered a massive heart attack. Again the Hopkins put him on the critical list, but after five months in the hospital he was released once more. August asked me to lend a hand, and together we brought his brother back to Hollins Street.
During the next two years I rarely saw the Menckens, for I was moving up at the Sun, which meant assignments farther and farther from home. The ultimate outpost, for me, was New Delhi. After the better part of a year as the paper’s Indian correspondent, I returned to Baltimore, and I had just finished covering the Army-McCarthy hearings when August told me that his brother’s mood had changed slightly. He was now willing to be read to. Did I know anyone who could spend mornings as his companion? I hesitated for a moment. By then love had died between me and the Sun, and there was no hope of a reconciliation. So I answered August: “Yes. Me.”
***
In those twilight years Mencken’s day began at 8 A.M., when Renshaw, a hospital orderly, arrived at the house after an all-night shift in the Johns Hopkins accident room. “Rancho,” as the old man always called him, gave him a rubdown in his third-floor bedroom, helped him wash and dress, and entertained him with vivid stories of colorful cases he had seen during the night. Meanwhile August was preparing his brother’s breakfast downstairs—fruit juice, two soft-boiled eggs, and a slice of bread. Mencken ate this in his second-floor study, swiveling his chair around to the window so he could watch elementary school pupils trooping to school while he drank his coffee.
Children had become dear to him; unlike their parents they were natural in his presence, unembarrassed by his condition. He enjoyed trips to the barber because he could admire a kindergarten class playing across the street while his hair was cut, and two small boys who saw him almost every day were five-year-old Butch, who lived in the house next to his, and Alvin, a
six-year-old Negro from down the street. He would stroke Butch’s rather emaciated little dog—all pets look starved on Hollins Street; since Mencken’s own childhood the neighborhood had gone downhill and was, his own home apart, virtually a slum—and congratulated Alvin on the racing speed of his pet turtle. Emma, the Mencken cook, nearly always had cookies for the boys. And each Christmas the old man distributed huge sacks of candy to all the children who lived around Union Square.
After breakfast Mrs. Lohrfinck came in. Together the two of them went through the morning mail; painful though all communication had become for him, he insisted that everyone who wrote him receive some sort of answer. Then she would riffle through miscellaneous notes in his files, reading them to him, and he would make a simple editorial judgment over the suitability of each. (The resulting collection was published four months after his death as Minority Report.) At ten o’clock she left. Her employer accompanied her downstairs to the front door. Then, unless the weather was impossible for him, he turned, trudged through the house, took his cap from a peg in the dining room, and went outside.
For Mencken admirers, the geography of the backyard at 1524 Hollins Street is often clearer than scenes from their own childhood. To the left, as you came out the kitchen door, stood a high brick wall which he had begun building after the First World War. In it were set various tiles, with a concrete replica of Beethoven’s life mask and the first five bars of his Fifth Symphony at the far end. To the right of the back gate was a green-and-white shed which had sheltered Mencken’s pony when he was a boy, and which now housed August’s tools. In warm seasons morning glories blossomed over the shed, raising their lovely green fingers against the West Baltimore sky. Beside the shed, sloping toward the house, was a workbench and a woodpile splashed with outrageously bright colors. Nearby stood a child’s wagon; an unsuccessful thief had left it behind one night, and it, too, was splotched with purples, yellows, greens, and reds. Between these giddy hues and the kitchen was a brick terrace over which, on sunny mornings, the devoted August would hoist an awning. He would work at the bench, puffing a pipe and glancing up at the sky from time to time while his brother sat on a canvas chair, his hands lying in his lap like weapons put to rest.
When the noon whistle blew, they reentered the house and Emma prepared lunch. Afterward they sat in the yard again until the children returned from school. Mencken then napped, and after an early supper they drank two martinis and retired. Often friends joined them for the evening cocktails. August controlled the social calendar. He excluded those who he thought might upset the old man and everyone he regarded as trivial—which, August being a misogynist, included all women except Blanche Knopf. The most frequent visitors were Louis Cheslock, Dr. Arnold Rich, Hamilton Owens of the Sun, and me.
There were variations in this routine. On sultry mornings, for example, Mencken went through an elaborate stage business with the backyard thermometer, inspecting it and denouncing it. The brothers had no use for dry cleaning, and once I found them in the yard washing their suits and coats with a garden hose. Saturday afternoons Mencken listened to the Metropolitan broadcasts. Saturday evenings the brothers called on the Cheslocks. And at least once a week they went to a movie. This was a new medium for Mencken. Had he retained his ability to read, he would have finished life without having seen more than a half-dozen films, but now his disability left him with little choice. Despite his disability he retained his scorn for artistic dishonesty; he enjoyed Walt Disney full-length cartoon features, Alec Guinness comedies, Show Boat, and Lili, but he despised melodrama or mawkishness in any form, and positively loathed anything about sports.
Starting in June of 1954 I arrived each morning as Mrs. Lohrfinck was leaving. Usually Mencken was ready for me. If he wasn’t, and the sun was shining, I would wait in the yard. Balmy weather was a good sign; he would greet me cheerily, saying, “Well, it’s very nice out today; that should make us feel good,” or “It’s not too bad, we might be able to do a little work today.” Even if rain was falling, we could sit in the shed, provided the day wasn’t actually raw. When the weather was impossible—when it was sleeting, say—I would approach Hollins Street with dread, knowing that his mood would be grim. “Did you ever see anything like this? Isn’t it ghastly?” he would groan, or “I feel very wobbly this morning; I’m going to pieces.” At such times August would intervene, raising a hand like a traffic policeman and growling back at him, “Look, you don’t feel any worse than I do.” And his brother, instantly concerned, would say, “Is that right? Don’t you feel well, August?”
Our sessions always began with the Sun. If it was the hay fever season we always started with the report of the pollen count. Otherwise, as I leafed through the paper, he would ask, “Well, what’s been happening? Any good stuff there, anything rich? Any murders or rapes? Any robberies?” Complex events—Germany’s entry into NATO; McCarthyism—were beyond him now. He tried to grasp the tumultuous changes in China, but he couldn’t, so we settled for small calamities. Sometimes there were none, and I would tell him so. He would stare at me, his eyes wide with amazement. “What?” he would say. “It’s hard to believe. I don’t know what’s wrong with people nowadays. They’re not killing one another any more. August, did you hear that?” And his brother, usually in the midst of painting some object a ghastly orange, or repairing a model boat for Alvin, would lay down his brush to echo his astonishment.
One day the Sun carried a story about a husband who had killed his wife, her lover and himself. “You know,” Mencken said, “it’s probably the only decent thing he did in his life.” Another high point was Dr. Samuel Shepard’s trial for the murder of his wife. For Mencken it had everything: high theater, the physician who wasn’t really a physician, the pillar of the community exposed as a hypocrite. Of Mrs. Shepard, Mencken said with a deep sigh, “Well, she’s a goner now. She’s up there with the angels.” We sat for a moment in meditation, contemplating the sublime fate of the doctor’s victim. Then Mencken gestured impatiently at the paper. “Come on,” he rasped. “How the hell did he croak her?”
On less favored days we turned to serious reading, and in retrospect I marvel on how much we got through that year: all of Twain and most of Conrad. I was struck by his observation that Huckleberry Finn breaks down at the point where Huck is reunited with Tom; Hemingway had said the same thing. Apart from that, both felt, it was a perfect novel. The most moving book we read, however, was Conrad’s Youth. Conrad never mastered our idiom, Mencken said; he was translating Polish into English. Yet he admired the Pole more than any other writer of his time. The rich prose of Youth evoked memories of his own youth. I too was deeply affected. I had first read the book in college and hadn’t understood it at all. Now in my early thirties the torrent of energy with which I had written my first two books was beginning to slacken. I glimpsed what lay ahead—literally glimpsed it, for there was Mencken beside me—and deeply felt a profound sense of sadness for the irretrievable stamina of the receding past.
***
One morning I stumbled over a hi-fi set in the front vestibule. It had arrived the previous afternoon, a present from Alfred Knopf, and the thoughtful dealer had included the latest Liberace record. Both brothers were exasperated. They didn’t know how the thing worked. My own mechanical IQ is very low, but I can remove an appliance from a carton, stick a plug into the wall, lay a plastic disc on a turntable, and flip a switch—which was all that was necessary. We played perhaps thirty seconds of Liberace; then Mencken muttered something obscene and I switched it off. That evening I loaned him my Gilbert and Sullivan collection, however, and he was pathetically pleased by a new source of pleasure. Later, because The Mikado was his favorite, I bought him the album. I also introduced him to FM music. He had begun listening to AM stations before retiring and had been complaining sourly about their programing. August and I found the best FM stations for him, and that helped.
Apart from the reading, there was no fixed schedule for our mornings, but certain pat
terns recurred. Twice a week, after we had left the kitchen to Emma and settled in the yard beneath the gaudy awning, we would hear the distant clatter of garbage can lids. “Ah!” Mencken would breathe, brightening visibly; “here come the professors!” Watching the trash men empty his own cans—each of which was gaily painted “1524 Hollins Street” in red and yellow—he would remark, “You know, they do that very well. The professors are really very elegant men.” Now and then visitors came to the front door. They rarely saw him. He ordered William Randolph Hearst, Jr., turned away, and shook his head when I suggested that I ask John Dos Passos to come in from the York Road and visit him. He still had his pride; he didn’t want strangers or slight acquaintances to see him in this condition.
Often he was even uncomfortable with August and me. His aphasia came and went. When it was bad, he couldn’t remember simple words or terms. He always recalled his brother’s name, but there were times when he couldn’t think of Mrs. Lohrfinck’s, Emma’s, Rancho’s, Butch’s, Alvin’s, or mine; and he despaired. Those sessions were grim for all of us, most of all for him. At his best, however, he was very like his old self. He described with gusto his vasectomy at Johns Hopkins when he was younger, and the fecund woman in New York who had voluntarily tested the success of the operation from time to time over the next year. He also told me that he knew twenty men, none of them braggarts, who had told him in confidence that they had bedded a famous Baltimore beauty during what she herself had called her “fast” youth. To him all women were either ladies, to be treated with elaborate chivalry, or sex objects. There was no third category. He was particularly hard on female journalists. He would dismiss them with a snort or a few corrosive phrases. (“God, what an elephant,” he said of one. “She makes you want to burn every bed in the world.”)
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