Customer Reviews

Mencken: The American Iconoclast

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Wherever two or three are gathered in HLM's name, talk invariably turns to what the Sage would have said about the moron politician of the hour, national pastimes, or the latest bestseller. Are you ready?

According to Marion Rodgers's excellent new biography, HLM considered the telephone "the greatest boon to bores ever invented," since it enabled them "to penetrate the last strongholds of privacy."

Oh, if the Sage could have foreseen the plague of cellphones.

Surely "The American Iconoclast" will take its place with the finer Mencken biographies. The risk in tackling a subject already so thoroughly covered is that few if any new discoveries remain to be unearthed. Perhaps because Theodore Dreiser's central and abiding role in Mencken's career has been established time and time again, Rodgers seems to shy away from allotting Dreiser the space he should occupy in any comprehensive Mencken treatment. Otherwise, Rodgers's monastic immersion in Mencken scholarship for the past quarter-century lays to rest any concern that there might be nothing new. She offers, for example, unprecedented details of Mencken's travels to Germany and how they shaped his worldview; previous biographers had ignored these. And Rodgers may have the last word on Mencken's controversial tendency to belabor racial stereotypes, because she has painstakingly placed these in the broadest possible context of Mencken's lifetime contributions and achievements.

Rodgers tells us Mencken's friends dubbed him "the German Casanova." Perhaps only John F. Kennedy's dance card elicits more speculation than Mencken's, and Mencken fans, enviously noting the recent outing of JFK paramours Mimi Beardsley and Helen Chavchavadze, hoped ardently that Rodgers would serve up comparable surprises. Despite advance publicity hinting at new caches of love letters, however, Mencken's fiercely guarded private life pretty much withstood Rodgers's crowbar. A paltry twenty-seven words from Mencken's letters to the newly-identified Dorothy Taylor is quoted, and beyond a census-like enumeration of her name, we learn nothing of Taylor's origins or presumed pulchritude.

Early on, Rodgers asides that readers mistakenly called our hero "Macon" before he was famous. How fraught with peril such chuckles can be. Further on in Rodgers's own pages, Carr Van Anda, the N.Y. Times editor famous for masterminding his paper's Titanic coverage, is rendered as "Carl Van Atta"; the 1924 Democratic candidate for president is given as John W. "David" rather than Davis; rabble-rouser Gerald L. K. Smith is inexplicably truncated to "Gerald K. Smith," an economization Smith himself never utilized. William C. Abhau is identified twice as Mencken's "nephew." Mencken had no nephew. Interestingly, Mencken himself was one of the rare notables never to lament, "Say what you want; just spell my name right." He merely laughed.

Mencken said of himself, "As he got older, he got worse." Rodgers's strong final chapters show us that if anything, Mencken's laser-like insight into the national character only increased. At sixty-six, he declared, "I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic." As we chafe under the worst White House in history, we wish more than ever that he were still among us to stir up the animals.

In this meticulous, sumptuous biography, destined to be the definitive study, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers resurrects H.L. Mencken, the journalist, observer, critic, enemy of cant, champion of freedom, with an authority that marks this work as a classic. With equal measure of intellect and sympathy, Ms. Rodgers brings this complex, brilliant, almost elemental figure to vivid life on the page. As her portrait suggests, the public Mencken was constitutionally unable to let charlatans and hypocrites have the last word. His visceral loathing of fools, rare in his day, more rare perhaps, in ours, kept Mencken at his desk for more than fifty years, in the face of Prohibition, the Scopes Monkey Trial, two world wars, not to mention the relentless drone of censors that seems to be a staple of mass culture.

Much to her credit, Ms. Rodgers does not neglect the paradoxical qualities of her subject in the service of his legend. The contradictions that often bedevil expansive, complicated minds emerge here in significant detail. It is fascinating to witness this astute observer of political life, a connoisseur of knaves and tyrants, let his sentimental attachment to his German ancestry blind him to the early menace of Hitler. The fact that Mencken, who deplored bigotry, harbored a distasteful prejudice against Jews, emerges in Ms. Rodgers portrait in unvarnished form. Similarly, the romantic Mencken who found a fulfilling marriage in his later years with an accomplished woman, often behaved less than honorably in his numerous romantic entanglements. Curiously, the famous man of letters, the sophisticated participant on the world stage, lived in one house virtually all his life. That he cleaved to Baltimore, a city vibrantly alive in these pages, tells us something about his imperishable attachments.

One can argue that it was Mencken's good fortune to live in a time when the collective stupidites that were his natural material flowed in abundance. Today, almost fifty years after his death, his luck continues. Mencken has attracted the sustained attention of a biographer who seems to know her subject better than Mencken knew himself. Ms. Rodgers narrative is by turns lively, poignant, always riveting. It catches, by indirection, the strivings, idealism, corruption, and spectacle of America at the first half of the twentieth century. Always in the background one hears the cacophany of shrill voices engaged in the running arguments that abound in a democracy. At the center of it all, apoplectic but still cheering, was Mencken, a defender of freedom above all else. To rediscover him in these pages, railing against conformists and their craven leaders is to desperately want him back, now, in these treacherous times, to once again raise his voice against demogogues in high places. In this volume, he is with us, as he was, - flawed, indomitable, witty, magnetic. It is no small matter that Ms. Rodgers returns him to us with an elegance that is notably absent from other recent Mencken biographies. This is an astonishing work.

Mencken has long been one of my favorite persons to quote. Ever since I got my first quote book when I was about 11, and have been attracted to those who are able to say so much in such superb, yet small ways...Mencken has always been up there with Twain, Ambrose Bierce, my scientists Einstein and Feynman, Will Rodgers. Notice something about this group? They all lived within the same time period: around the time my parents were growing up. Yet, I am sure if I had been alive then with my family's upbringing, I may never have been introduced to the writings of these men, especially Mencken who wrote for magazines, journals and the newspapers.

I didn't know very much about him, but grabbed this book as soon as I could. Yeah, he was a greatly flawed individual, especially in his relationships with women, and with friends. Show me a 'great' man who wasn't flawed in significant ways. But here was a man who knew how to draw attention to the important problems of the time. There were a great many similarities between WWI and this time period with the Iraquian War. The wars were not the same, except in being run by those far from the front, and being paid for by the young men of our country. A lot of the other stuff has not changed. Stupid men in places of political power, such as the ambassador to Germany at that time, stated things that were totally untrue, but helped to draw our country into that war. Not that we didn't need to be involved in that war...but like Mencken, I have the absolute need to hear the absolute truth from my politicians, and from the media (which often doesn't happen now). Many of the civil rights that we take for granted, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear in our own homes are again at risk. Mencken did what he was in the power to do; reach the minds of Americans through print and put into plain and poignant words the facts regarding our freedoms.

Mencken stood up for the rights of African-Americans during a very dangerous time period, when lynching was an accepted form of justice in the U.S. and when the KKK had way too much power. This from a white man who lived well in Baltimore. Not only that, but he helped to bring to the fore the writings of important African-American literature, and made possible the future writings of those today such as August Wilson and Maya Angelou (probably spelling this wrong).

Mencken was like so many at the time, existing with blinders on his eyes concerning Hitler and his ability to control mobs. Like so many, including most Jews in Europe, Mencken thought Hitler was such a crackpot that no one could possibly take him seriously, but he didn't allow for the fact that the Allies devastated Germany, leaving her in a position where mob leadership was accepted.

This is one of the most exquisitely written biographies I have ever read. Definitely up there with our local Pittsburgh favorite, David McCullough. I will wait with curiousity for the next biography from this fine writer. And I wait for someone within the media who has the ability that Mencken, Bierce, Twain, and Rodgers had to qualify our time with their journalistic bent and literature...

Karen Sadler

I have read most of the Mencken biographies. This is excellent, bringing a lot of new material to the party. She assumes you've read the memoirs (Happy Days, et al), so if this were the first HLM biography you've read, it might seem a bit patchy. The book is 662 pages. Had she recapitulated well-known material (well-known to Menckenophiles), it would have been intolerably long and expensive.

HLM's ideas go in and out of fashion, depending on how Americans feel about themselves, but his clear,forceful and eloquent style is timeless. Among other things, this book traces his development as a writer, from newspaper hack to "voice of a generation".+on+

Staring at the black and white photos which showed his jug ears, outdated hairstyle, that manure-eating grin and the ever-present, silly cigar, I couldn't help thinking that he looked like a doofus. Appearances can be deceiving, because Mr. Mencken was certainly NOT wading in the shallow end of the intellectual pool. Besides a grueling work schedule as a reporter, he also read a novel a day and reviewed over 2000 books. His output of written material, with much of it never needing to be edited, is simply astounding. Like many notable American legends, work took precedent over marriage or anything else. Mr. Mencken had many admirable qualities, but like all of us, other aspects of him were nothing worth celebrating. Examples such as his turning a blind eye to the atrocities of Nazi Germany as well as his narcissistic attitude when it came to women's affection for him were downright sad and infuriating to this reader. But what makes this colorful, extremely influential iconoclast such an interesting subject is that trying to pigeonhole him into a certain type of person would be like trying to nail Jello to a wall. Ms. Rodgers biography is flawless in its execution. She has done what all good historians do and given you the full measure of the man; warts and all. The overwhelming majority of people who asked me what I was reading had never even heard of H.L. Mencken. That's just sad. The man's impact on news, literature and human rights is still being felt today. An extremely entertaining and informative book.

A few weeks before graduating from Goucher College, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers stumbled across the papers of H.L. Mencken's wife. One thing led to another, and the eventual result was this long, meticulously researched, and very enjoyable biography of one of the most interesting Americans to live in the last century.

My purpose is not to regurgitate H.L. Mencken's prodigious and fascinating life and works, from being the first lexicographer of the American language to his phenomenal career as a thinker and wit, etc., etc. which Marion Rodgers so ably covers. Suffice it to write that Mencken's cogitations have greatly enriched my life.

The one quibble that I have with this book is that she clearly is captivated by Mencken's charm - few aren't - perhaps to the point that she elides a few probing questions about the less happy aspects of Mencken's Werke. Mencken lived to write invective and provoke; many of the targets of his acidic pen, such as creationists, cult leaders, quack healers, racists, warmongers and more deserved all the sarcasm he sent their way. Mencken even established a commission to determine which state of the union was the most backward and least hospitable; the conclusion was for Arkansas, perhaps not coincidentally, the Arkansas legislature passed a motion urging Mencken's deportation. (Mencken was an American citizen, which raised the question of just how this was to be done.) People, after all, decide what they do, and in what they believe; and many people are quicker to learn when humor is used to reinforce an idea. I am sure that his harangues did a lot of good.

Mencken, however, went further, and though he was far more racially tolerant than many of his contemporaries, wrote tracts of invective against different races, which used stereotypes that are not accepted in polite society today. Rather than insinuate that Mencken either disproved his ideas by his laudable deeds (Mencken was one of the most vociferous voices against lynching in the nation, which made him many enemies, and cost his employers many customers,) or that these ideas were the general norm in his time, I think this book would have been a lot more engaging and enlightening had it asked whether it was fair for Mencken to turn his caustic pen loose on people attacking them for things which they could not change, and for which they were not responsible. Even in his day, I would imagine, some would have seen this was punching below the belt.

If you want a great, but mildly adulatory, biography of the Sage of Baltimore, look no further.

Mencken was such a brilliant political, social, cultural and literary commentator that just reading this excellent biography left me exhausted and jealous. Has this country ever had another literary figure like this? Perhaps, in a few ways, Mark Twain had attained H.L.'s public stature, though I confess I have yet to read a biography of Samuel Clemons. But Twain was low-brow, while Mencken was high-brow. Will it ever again see someone like him? Highly unlikely, in the New Media environment of mimeographed sound bites, shrill blogs, shrinking newspapers, and vanishing magazines.

I'm equally jealous of Marion Elizabeth Rodgers. Her research is very impressive, and though several Mencken aficionados critique parts of her work in other reviews on this site, I, as a fellow writer, am humbled by her ability to weave her massive research into a coherent, well-organized, enjoyable narrative of a very complex, conflicted man.

Mencken, deservedly so, appears to have a following of scholars and others who have made him their "hobby," some of whom have written very helpful reviews on this site. What a fascinating entertainment! But Mencken and his times, as revealed in this book, are well worth an investment of time by the rest of us, the "amateurs," if only for a few weeks. The prose is very accessible, the story of his life flows steadily through a narrative arc, and it prompted me to reflect on my own life and the life of our country from the turn of the century through WWII. Aren't we all, both individually and collectively, somewhat conflicted and complicated, like H.L.?

In short, we "amateurs" ought to set out to know Mencken better and Ms. Rodgers has made that task a pleasant one.

An excellent, insightful book, covering the "Sage of Baltimore" from cradle to grave. What keeps my review at four stars is that Ms. Rodgers could have included more passages from Mencken himself. Of course, much of his work remains in print, but in a biography of this length more selections from the man himself would be been welcomed. Still a fine effort.

Marion Rodgers has written a thorough biography of H. L. Mencken. He was a man of many facets, and they were all turned on. He was a champion of individual rights, and one wonders what he might have to say with the present political climate in this country. Although he often projected a blustry disposition, he also demonstrated a tender side as well. He appeared to be a confirmed bachelor, but he did finally marry while enjoying the company of numerous women who tried to make him their "catch". He also showed that he was quick with a quip with such examples as "golf and idiocy are the same word." There is also his well known definition of puritanism as "The haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy." I found it interesting that although Mencken stated he was an agnostic, he would refer to God and heaven at various times. During his old age he lamented the fact that there was so much more writing he would have wanted to do and couldn't now that his health had deserted him. I rate the book four stars based on my interest level. I had first heard about H. L. Mencken through his definition of puritanism, and felt it would be interesting to know more about the man. The book was a long read, but it was worth the while.

Just three things. First, the writing is excellent and the material is well organized. Second, the story of H.L. Mencken's life is fascinating. Third, it is terribly sad that there are no straight shooters in today's media like Henry Mencken.