The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the Gadarene swine. Not the laws of the United States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons to surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation. But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the barber-surgeons laughed at Harvey—and how vainly! What clown ever brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Darwin?… They are laughing at Nietzsche yet.…
Behind the Mask
A hitherto unpublished note
Perhaps the most enviable form of command is that of a young city editor of a daily newspaper of some size, with a staff large enough to make him a real commander, not simply primus inter pares. The emergencies and exigencies of the place give him a kind of authority that is almost military, yet he does not exercise it over obvious inferiors, but over men who were but lately his colleagues and in many cases his seniors. I well remember how I was thrilled when I was made city editor of the old Baltimore Morning Herald in 1903. All save a few of the reporters put under me were as old as I was, and a few were old enough to be my father. This, of course, was very caressing to my ego, but it also filled me with concern, for I well knew that any error I made would be detected instantly. When all save one or two of the men began following me loyally I began to feel that I was genuinely somebody in that small world, though I knew very well that the dog-like obedience that is in most men was responsible more than professional respect in many cases.
A young city editor enjoys the great advantage of keeping nearly all his subordinates directly under his eye. He can thus judge them accurately, and is sensitive to their every reaction to his orders. The democracy common in newspaper offices helps here, for they are not slow to show it when they disapprove his orders. Thus he is doubly rewarded when they obey willingly, and especially when they show that they think he is right. By the time I became a magazine editor, a couple of years later, the satisfactions of command had begun to wear thin, and I was chiefly conscious of my responsibility. Moreover, a managing editor is in less intimate contact with his men, and some of them he hardly knows at all, for most of his orders are transmitted through lesser editors. By this time my taste for dignity and authority had pretty well vanished, and I had already begun, in fact, to esteem all such things very lightly, and was eager to avoid them in future. This feeling, I suppose, was at least partly responsible for my resolve to see authors as little as possible. I greatly disliked listening to their plans, and hearing their difficulties. I had too much business of my own in hand to be really interested in them. Also, I soon learned by experience that very few of them were persons of any charm, or worth knowing otherwise. Indeed, the only professional author I ever became genuinely intimate with was Joseph Hergesheimer, and I, in turn, was his only close friend. More than once, he told me sadly that he found other authors bores, and many of them downright obnoxious. Hergesheimer had many other friends, and so did I, but we avoided men of our own craft.
I sometimes wonder what satisfaction there can be for a man of mature age and experience, say a colonel in the Army, in commanding such youngsters as those who predominate in American wars, which have all been fought by boys. He can certainly have but little professional respect for them, for they can know, at best, much less than he has already forgotten, and even when they follow him gallantly and effectively their loyalty is always suggestive of that of schoolboys to their teacher. The same thing, of course, is true of the relations between a city editor and the recruits to his staff. As for me, I took but little interest in them, though I tried my best to guide them: my preference was always for the older journeymen, for they understood better what I had to say, and carried out my orders with much greater competence, even when they were third-raters. Perhaps a professional military officer is unaware of this difference, for he is at best a rather elemental sort of man, and closely resembles a pedagogue in many of his characters. His subordinates, for one thing, cannot answer back: they are required to obey his orders instantly, however unwise, and their dissent, if any, must be indicated very discreetly. The effect of all this on the man himself must be generally deleterious. An aging military bigwig, in fact, usually deteriorates into a pedant and a bully. Unless, like Sherman, he is a man of extraordinary intelligence, he must inevitably mistake his official consequence and authority for real superiority, forgetting that it may be only a product of the statistical fact that someone has to command.
The Popinjay
From MINORITY REPORT, 1956, p. 249.
First published in the Smart Set, Sept., 1922, p. 44
The vanity of man is quite illimitable. In every act of his life, however trivial, and particularly in every act which pertains to his profession, he takes all the pride of a baby learning to walk. It may seem incredible but it is nevertheless a fact that I myself get great delight out of writing such banal paragraphs as this one. The physical business of writing is extremely unpleasant to me, as it is to most other human beings, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English is enough to make me forget it entirely. I am almost as happy, writing, as a judge is on his bench, listening with one ear to the obscene wrangles of two scoundrelly attorneys, or a bishop in his cathedra, proving nonsensically that God loves the assembled idiots.
Note for an Honest Autobiography
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, June 12, 1922
On blue, hyperacid days the suspicion often seizes me that most of my favorite notions are nonsensical—worse, that some of them are probably downright insane. It is a sad pleasure to examine them thus at leisure, and pick out the flaws in them. What is left is little save a pile of platitudes—the apple-cores of meditation. Well, who is better off? I know of no one, though neither do I know of anyone who admits it. A few propositions, perhaps, are immutably true, e.g., that no man can hold his head under water half an hour and live, that the average Congressman is a moron, that Jonah swallowed the whale. The rest is mere illusion, folly, egomania.
Nevertheless, it comforts me to think that, in one respect at least, I am superior to my chief opponents. That is in the respect that, in the main, my ideas are unpopular, and hence not profitable. No one can reasonably allege that I emit them in order to gain political office, or to get an honorary degree from the Ohio Wesleyan University, or to acquire the Légion d’honneur. This may seem a small thing, but it is at least something, especially in an American. Practically all the other men that I know try to capitalize their doctrines in some way or other. Who ever heard of an uplifter who was not looking for a job? Or, at all events, some one to finance his crusade? No one finances mine, such as it is. No one ever will.
For the Defense
Written for the Associated Press, for use in my obituary, Nov. 20, 1940
Having lived all my life in a country swarming with messiahs, I have been mistaken, perhaps quite naturally, for one myself, especially by the others. It would be hard to imagine anything more preposterous. I am, in fact, the complete anti-Messiah, and detest converts almost as much as I detest missionaries. My writings, such as they are, have had only one purpose: to attain for H. L. Mencken that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk. Further than that, I have had no interest in the matter whatsoever. It has never given me any satisfaction to encounter one who said my notions had pleased him. My preference has always been for people with notions of their own. I have believed all my life in free thought and free speech—up to and including the utmost limits of the endurable.
Coda
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, June 12, 1922
When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don’t forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
Also by
H. L. MENCKEN
MY LIFE AS AUTHOR AND EDITOR
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edited by Jonathan Yardley
H. L. Mencken stipulated that this memoir remain sealed in a vault for thirty-five years after his death. For good reason: My Life as Author and Editor is so telling and uproariously opinionated that it might have provoked a storm of libel suits. As he recounts his career as critic, essayist, and editor of the ground-breaking magazine Smart Set, Mencken brings us face to face with the literary aristocracy of his day, the hacks and poseurs who flocked around them, and, most of all, Mencken himself.
Autobiography/Literature/0-679-74102-X
THE DIARY OF H. L. MENCKEN
edited by Charles A. Fecher
Written between 1930 and 1948 and published to great controversy, The Diary of H. L. Mencken displays its author in all his lights—as a newspaperman and an indefatigable analyst of the American language; as a literary bon vivant hobnobbing with—and wittily observing—colleagues from F. Scott Fitzgerald to William Faulkner; as an obsessive hypochondriac and indiscriminately bilious misanthrope; and as an appalled commentator on the foibles of his countrymen.
Autobiography/Diaries/0-679-73176-8
THE VINTAGE MENCKEN
collected by Alistair Cooke
A comic voice that blends the accents of the drawing room and the pool hall. A respect for the native wisdom of cops, bartenders, and ladies of the evening. A radarlike ear for the idiocies of priests, politicians, and the American “booboisie.” These are the hallmarks of Henry Louis Mencken, whose work delighted and scandalized readers during the first half of our century. As collected by Alistair Cooke in this marvelous volume, Mencken’s best essays are enduring masterpieces of cauterizing wit and charm.
Essays/0-679-72895-3
A MENCKEN CHRESTOMATHY
His Own Selection of His Choicest Writings
Edited and annotated by H. L. Mencken himself, this is a rare selection. Readers will find edification and amusement in his estimates of a variety of Americans—Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt I and Roosevelt II, Rudolph Valentino, Calvin Coolidge, Theodore Dreiser, and Walt Whitman. Those musically inclined will enjoy his pieces on Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner.
Essays/0-394-75209-0
Also available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order: 1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
Second Mencken Chrestomathy Page 57