Occasionally he would talk of two books he had planned to write, which would now remain unwritten; the first on the human condition, for which he had completed two chapters, and the second on American politics. And sometimes he spoke of other writers: of James T. Farrell, who was a good friend to the end; of Scott Fitzgerald, whose alcoholism had disgusted him; of Nathan, whose late marriage he regarded as highly comic; and of Sinclair Lewis’s dermatological problems—“The only thing to do with Red,” he reflected one morning, “was to skin him.”
After reading and talking we would sit a while watching August wield his bright paintbrush, dabbing it dry from time to time on the outside of the woodpile. “Isn’t that gorgeous work my brother’s doing?” the old man would say from time to time. But he rarely sat idle through an entire session. He had to be doing something; even make-work was preferable to no work at all. Heaving up from his canvas chair, he would drop to his knees among the shrubs, stripping leaves from fallen branches for his compost heap and binding the twigs into fagots for the fireplace. On hot days he would periodically mutter, “Here, I’d better quit this or I’ll fall to pieces, this is knocking me out.” But after an interval he would start groping among the bushes again.
Our most strenuous activity—I shared in it—was adding to the woodpile. On bitter days his fireplace was his chief solace. Cutting wood for it, and burning the wood, gave him extraordinary pleasure; it appealed, he said, to the boyhood love of vandalism which lingered in every man. The gathering of the fuel was as important to him as feeding it to the flames. His friends ordered seasoned cords over the telephone. In his view it was far nobler to scavenge neighborhood alleys and then saw up the loot.
Rising from his chair he would say to me, “Let’s see what we can find outside. You can’t tell—we might turn up something really superb.” Strolling down the narrow lanes with the child’s wagon and poking among the trash cans, we would uncover a variety of burnable junk—piano stools, fence posts, broom handles, discarded chairs, hatracks, broken coffee tables, ancient lounge chairs. If I spotted a particularly hideous specimen of Grand Rapids golden oak, he would gape and say, “Wow! Look at that, will you!” As we returned from patrol, he would call ahead, “August, I found something really rich. Isn’t that beautiful? It’s simply exquisite.” Then a shade of comic doubt would cross his ruddy face. He would ask us gravely, “But don’t you think it’s a shame to burn a lovely piece like that?” After deliberation his brother would say, “It’s a shame, all right, Harry, but we’ve got a long winter ahead.” “It seems hard,” the old man would say worriedly, and August would make a great show of winning him over by promising to save it for a very special occasion. This was the quintessential Mencken, clothing the preposterous in the robes of high seriousness. A passing stranger would have taken him literally, and he would have been in good company; Mencken had misled humorless critics thus for a half-century.
He himself wasn’t well enough to do much sawing, so he sat by the end of the workbench, making outrageous comments while August and I took turns sinking the blade deep. We had a ritual; the length of each piece cut was determined by a measuring stick which was the exact width of the fireplace within. A certain percentage of our output had to be backlogs, and if our alley loot didn’t include lengths of the proper thickness, we would nail odds and ends together—two mop handles, say, affixed to a broken crucifix, the base of a peach basket, and the wooden remains of a dilapidated plumber’s helper. The more absurd the result, the uneasier Mencken grew over the propriety of feeding it to the flames. When its turn came at the hearth, he would wrestle audibly with his conscience before flinging it on the grate.
Eventually everything combustible went up in smoke, with one memorable exception. One morning we were prowling in an alley, furtively lifting galvanized lids and looking, I’m sure, like refugees in postwar Europe searching for a scrap of meat, when he saw, standing against a fence, a shabby chest of drawers. The rats had been at it; we were far from Mencken’s back gate; whether it was worth dragging all that way was questionable. As we were debating, a third figure joined us—a short, swart man in seedy khaki. He asked us whether we wanted the dresser. We told him we didn’t know. He explained: his little daughter needed a place to store her clothes. If we weren’t going to take it, he would.
Disconcerted, and beset this time by genuine pangs, Mencken stammered that we were merely hunting for firewood; by all means the child should have it. The young man brightened with gratitude. He would be back shortly, he said. His car was parked across the street; he would fetch it and whisk the dresser home. As he dashed off we reexamined the rat holes. They were really enormous. It was a marvel that the thing stood. It had seemed worthless; it still did.
“Poor fellow,” Mencken said.
In the long silence that followed we contemplated the plight of a father reduced to scrounging among castoffs for his children’s furniture.
Then the hush was broken by the deep-throated roar of a finely tuned engine, and into the lane backed the longest, fattest, shiniest pink Cadillac I had ever seen. The man leaped out, the chest of drawers disappeared into its cavernous trunk, and then the Cadillac vanished, too, gone in a cloud of exhaust.
Mencken’s mouth fell open in amazement. “Jesus Christ!” he gasped. “Did you see that?” I told him I could hardly have missed it. “Think of it,” he mused. “Imagine that man raising a family, sending his children off to learn the principles of Americanism, keeping his mother off the poor farm, raising money to cure his wife of gallstones—and driving around in a rose-colored hearse! August!” he hoarsed as we neared home. “We just saw the god-damndest animal in Baltimore!”
***
As the noon whistle sounded he would methodically measure the wood sawed. “Say, we got a lot of work done today,” he would say, standing back and admiring the stack. “Look how high that pile is now.” As winter deepened it shrank again, for unless there was a thaw the brothers laid a fire every night. Evenings when I dropped in to listen to their growing collection of LP classics, the three of us would stare into the vivid coals. Like everything else about Mencken, his fires were unique. Their colors ranged all over the spectrum, for he cherished a hoard of chemically treated wood which, when ignited, matched the rainbow. I never learned to share his taste for after-dinner martinis, but I was tremendously impressed by those spectacular flames, and I said so.
When warm weather returned in the spring of 1955, Gertrude Mencken arrived from her farm and joined us for two nerve-wracking hours. I had never met the brothers’ sister before, and I think I came to understand something of their attitude toward women that evening. She was pleasant enough, but she couldn’t seem to stop talking. The monologue went on and on, while August stared gloomily into the purple and orange fire and Mencken swelled with frustration. When she had departed the old man turned to his brother. In a slurred, gritty voice he demanded, “Where’s the thing that makes music?” August replied, “You mean the gramophone, Harry?” Mencken nodded grimly. He said, “I want the ghastly one. Lib—Lib—” “Liberace,” I supplied, and August brought it from across the room. Mencken ordered, “Throw it on the fire.” For once August hesitated. “It will make a terrible stink,” he said. “Baloney,” said Mencken. “It will be elegant. We need it to finish off this classy occasion.” Into the flames it went. The stench was dreadful; after a while the old man stalked wordlessly off to bed and August removed the record with tongs. Even so, the odor was evident the next morning, and Emma had to air the house all day.
When summer arrived I said my last good-bye at Hollins Street. I was leaving Baltimore for New England and had found a Hopkins graduate student who would come in mornings and read the paper to Mencken. It was a wrench for me; he obviously didn’t want me to go, and at first he said so vehemently. That evening August reminded him that I had my own writing to do, and the next morning the old man had swung around completely; he offered his congratulations and said he expected me to write some sw
ell books. His generosity, and his pretense that he had changed his mind, were typical of him. I have never known a public figure who was so different from his reputation. His readers thought of him as bigoted, cantankerous, wrathful, and rude, and he was none of those things. He was the elderly friend of Butch and Alvin. He was the cripple who was always solicitous about his brother’s health. He was the stricken man who forced himself to initial the pages of my first manuscript, who always asked me in the shed whether I was properly clad; who, when he was in the depth of his worst depressions, would excuse himself and retire to his bedroom because he didn’t want to burden me with his troubles.
We both knew we would never meet again, for all our talk of reunions. He was failing rapidly now. Yet he rallied gallantly that last afternoon, and as I turned to leave through the vestibule he struck a pose, one foot in front of the other, one hand on the banister and the other, fisted, on his hip. “You know, I had a superb time while it lasted,” he said in that inimitable voice. “Very soon it will stop, and I will go straight to heaven. Won’t that be exquisite? It will be very high-toned.”
We shook hands; he trudged up the stairs into shadow, and I departed carrying two farewell gifts, an Uncle Willie stogie and a piece of the treated firewood. Seven months later an Associated Press reporter called me in Connecticut to tell me that Mencken had died in his sleep. His ashes were deposited in Baltimore’s Loudon Park Cemetery. Long afterward I read of his brother’s death, and later word reached me that the Hollins Street house—“as much a part of me as my two hands,” Mencken had once said of it—was now occupied by the University of Maryland’s School of Social Work. That evening I carefully laid the piece of treated firewood in my own fireplace. I didn’t expect much; after all that time, I thought, the chemicals would have lost their potency. But I was wrong. Instantly a bright blue flame sprang up. Blue changed to crimson, and after a few minutes there was another change. It was eerie. From end to end the wood blazed up in a deep green which would have been familiar to anyone who had ever held a copy of The American Mercury.
Fleetingly I thought: If only the Mercury were still being published! And: If only he were still alive! I remembered him lamenting the fact that there was no decent memorial service for nonbelievers. This little fire, I realized, was the closest I would ever come to one for him. Now his home had become a headquarters for a profession he had ridiculed. Miller Brothers’ eating house, where we had drained steins of pilsener, was being torn down; the name of the restaurant lived on ignominiously in a sterile new Hilton Hotel. The Baltimore which delighted Mencken as a young reporter, when, he wrote, “the days chased one another like kittens chasing their tails,” was swiftly vanishing, as the flames on my andirons were vanishing; soon the Baltimore I had known would disappear, too. Briefly I was near tears. And then I checked myself. I realized what Mencken’s reaction to the maudlin fireside scene would have been. He would have split it into sentimental flinders with one vast gravelly chuckle.
Endnotes
Controversy
1 From his point of view, however, it was a substantial concession. He never received a word of thanks.
2 Though my relationships with other members of the Kennedy family were unimpaired. Two admirers of the book were Edward M. Kennedy and Eunice Kennedy Shriver.
3 Canfield was quoted at about this time as saying that “Manchester must make the changes, or be without a book.” How he proposed to accomplish this is unclear. By then—early December 1966—the text had been set, or was about to be set, in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Greek, Arabic, Japanese, Portuguese, Rumanian, Yugoslavian, Chinese, Russian, Icelandic, Belgian, Turkish, Swahili, Malayalam, Tagalog, Hindi, Urdu, Braille, and, in London and throughout the Commonwealth, English.
4 It is true that she had withheld nothing during our interviews. It is also true that none of that sensitive material found its way into any draft of the book. She was unaware of that then because she hadn’t read it yet.
5 If Jackie’s lawyer had consulted his client, she could have provided him with useful background for this caper. Mrs. D’Oench had been a classmate of Jackie’s, both in boarding school and later at Vassar, and they remained good friends.
6 The apex—or nadir—of all this came some time later, when Bayer Aspirin offered me $35,000 to endorse its product on radio and television.
Walter Reuther
1 The Students for a Democratic Society was organized at the Port Huron camp in June 1962, but Walter had nothing to do with that.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 46