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Mencken: A Life (Maryland Paperback Bookshelf)

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As a fan of H.L. Mencken--and perhaps one of the few people under thirty who has read "The American Language," "Treatise on the Gods," "Heliogabalus" and all five volumes of "Prejudices"--I am shocked and appalled at the lack of respect paid the great author by his biographer. Mr. Hobson didn't seem to undertake the arduous task of writing a biography on his subject due to a sincere respect or enthusiasm; rather, he seems to have been moved by the less noble motivation of "One-ups-manship"; for as a Baltimorean scribe who happened to be at the right place, at the right time--he was granted access to some of Mencken's hitherto guarded (and now recently released) documents by the executors of Mencken's estate. As a result, Hobson is at times needlessly peevish with his subject, naively judgmental and historically hypocritical. The last remark is born of a nausea grounded in a Politically Correct self-righteousness that the biographer displays when he all but waves his finger at ghosts from the past when, say--for instance--he notices that in a much different world people in the 1910s and 1920s used such racially insensitive phrases for "haggling" as "jewing one down". (SHOULD this be considered offensive? --Certainly.) But for anyone in the modern era who has uttered the phrase "gyped," perhaps eighty years from now some pompous pedant will lodge the ludicrous claim that this shows your hatred of "gypsies" (where in fact the term "gyped" comes from). No, I might hazard the assertion that most people who have used the phrase do not hold an irrational grudge against the Romany people. Rather, they use such phrases unthinkingly--bereft of an racial connotations. My point? --Yes, there were insensitive things about the past. But no more so than in the Present. And to trot out situations and customs--verbal or otherwise--without the benefit of a cultural context betrays both ignorance and malice. Mr. Hobson is shameful in his betrayal of that lowest of critical temptations: To lash out at one's betters. Perhaps if Mr. Hobson thinks that using the term "African American," instead of "black" is a badge of tolerance over and above that of Mencken, maybe he can back up his words with actions: For it was Mencken--not Hobson--who distinguished himself by aiding and promoting writers of the Harlem Renaissance and for his outstanding support of civil rights for both blacks and Jews. Perhaps Mr. Hobson has given as much of himself to the causes of helping others? --If not, then he needs to moderate his disrespectful attitude; for Mencken's actions speak louder than Hobson's words.

A reverie of mine is to imagine that if I had been born a generation or two later, I'd have become a hacker. In temulence, this fantasy takes the specific form of intercepting a news feed, blocking the audio portion (which is on the FM spectrum -- see, I'm still plotting), and when the President or one of his opponents mounts the podium, instead of his voice being broadcast, I begin reading, in Mencken's voice (which, cured by years of liquor and tobacco, sounded not unlike a baritone W. C. Fields), passages from

On Being an American

The National Letters

The Husbandman

The Coolidge Buncombe

Witnessing such words apparently issuing from their leader's throat would cause pandemonium among patriotic citizens, and the effects might be as unpredictable as the collisions in a particle accelerator, but I believe that Mencken would approve of such a scheme, because Mencken was fun.

"The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by . . . learned dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe -- that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power, and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is more intelligent."

That quotation is from Prejudices: Fourth Series (pg. 139), and the first three of the above-mentioned essays are also from the Prejudices series, which is Mencken at his apex, but Fred Hobson instead focuses on Mencken at his nadir, when he stopped being fun and instead became a grouchy old invalid. This biography has much going for it, including the fact that Hobson (a member of The Fellowship of Southern Writers and Lineberger Professor in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina) is a member of the elite who have been admitted by gatekeeper Vincent Fitzpatrick to the Mencken catacombs. The result is the most excruciatingly detailed Mencken biography of them all. (When this book was issued, I remarked that we had reached a point when there were more books *about* Mencken than books written by Mencken himself. Most of the books about Mencken are of little worth.)

Since Hobson had access to Mencken's dirty linen (according to this book, Mencken saved and catalogued everything, then sent shipments of his personal effects not merely to the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, but to several libraries and universities -- every hoarder's dream) what startling new facts do we learn from this book? How many pages have I dog-eared, and how many passages have I underlined? The other day, it dawned on me that I hadn't opened this book since the last century, and I wondered why. The reason is that it is, without exception, the most boring book I own.

Hobson writes in perfect English, but he has a perverse talent for bleeding the fun out of everything. Take, for example, the Hatrack Incident when Mencken was arrested in Boston for selling obscene material. When I first read an account of this in William Manchester's superb Disturber of the Peace, it was like reading a suspense thriller. What a story! In her far superior biography of Mencken Marion Elizabeth Rodgers begins with the tale, but, incredibly, Hobson glosses over the controversy in less then three pages, and instead goes on to detail how much Mencken spent on his sister-in-law's tonsillectomy! Thirty-five pages are spent on the oh-so precise details of which doctors treated Mencken after his stroke and after his heart attack. It's as if Hobson, seated at a gourmet feast, chose instead to lick ashtrays. It's not simply poor judgment on Hobson's part, it's that he has a pathological bent for being boring. I also own his book Serpent in Eden: H. L. Mencken and the South, and that's just as ghastly. Why is this? Read the first sentence of the Mencken quotation above.

Who would want to read this book? I'd recommend it to those who've never read any Mencken, but who are looking for someone to hate and have heard what an evil man Mencken was -- sort of like Dick Cheney only more bigoted, stubborn and bellicose. But for us Mencken votaries, this book is . . . a . . . drag. If you admire Mencken, or if you are curious to know more about him, avoid this book like the gleet.

Despite some boring passages, Fred Hobson provides a generally interesting and thorough portrait of the original cynic, H.L.Mencken. The book addresses many issues of racism and anti semitism on Mencken's part fairly and openly. The novel is excellently written. I would have preferred more information on the Scope's Trial in relation to Mencken because my interest in Mencken was sparked when reading Inherit the Wind by Laurence and lee in which Mencken is satired as E.K.Hornbeck. Read this book- it is informative and excellent. My congratulations to Fred Hobson and Happy Reading