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The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken

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Terry Teachout's new biography is largely a rehash of Fred Hobson's biography of Mencken and to complete the feeling of déjà vu, the same controversies that greeted Hobson's book swirl around this one as well. Unlike Lord Byron or de Sade, Mencken led a life that was fairly bourgeois and apparently book reviewers resent it, thus playing up his alleged anti-Semitism. It is something of a fad these days to unmask literary anti-Semites and those who do it sometimes make themselves look foolish. One dunce who reviewed this book for the Seattle Times and compared Mencken unfavorably to Voltaire was apparently unaware of a large body of criticism condemning Voltaire for his anti-Semitism. Teachout himself is apologetic about Mencken's attitudes to the Jews, but doesn't go far enough in pardoning him.

Part of the demonizing of Mencken these days might be attributed to the fact that American society is still intolerant of a critical attitude to religion. Mencken was indeed critical of Judaism. However, as readers of "Treatise on Gods" know, Mencken was also critical of Christianity and Islam. A rationalist to the core, Mencken had little time for people who believed in the supernatural. He detested the religious impulse in Christians, Jews and Muslims alike.

As for those who claim that Mencken is racially prejudice against the Jews, they will have to explain away the fact that, as Teachout shows, Mencken had many close Jewish friends and that he used harsh language toward everyone (the English, the Irish, African-Americans, Italians), not just against the Jews.

As so often with the genteel, the critics of Mencken have focused almost entirely on his manner of writing than rather than the substance of his writing. He argued quite forcefully for a humane foreign policy. Unlike the timid Walter Lippman, Mencken urged the US government to take in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. For a man who is so often characterized as nasty, he was surprisingly pacific in some of his politics: he was against participation in both world wars.

Much has been made about Teachout's use of Mencken's unpublished writings for this biography and many reviewers have implied that these writings reveal his dark side. Actually, these unpublished writings appear to reveal some new facts, not new prejudices. If Mencken said nasty things in the diaries, a look at his published writings will show that he was nasty there as well. By the way, he could also be nice sometimes too. Again it's just that Mencken's style is far more biting than anything allowed in today's journalism, which is apparently stocked with aspiring political consultants and public relations people.

The best account of the events of Mencken's life is still his Days books (Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days). The collection of his newspaper columns, The Impossible Mencken, is better reading than this biography and a good record of Mencken's opinions on the issues of the day.

The title does not begin to suggest (nor could any title) the nature and extent of Mencken's intellectual and emotional complexity. Regrettably, for whatever reasons, he has received very little attention in recent years. My hope is that Teachout's biography will attract the attention it richly deserves and thereby direct attention to someone who was at one time a major figure in America's intellectual community. In Teachout's opinion, perhaps a "sage....not calm and reflective but as noisy as a tornado: witty and abrasive, self-confident and self-contradictory, sometimes maddening, often engaging, always inimitable." Of special interest to me is Teachout's analysis of Mencken's association with the city of Baltimore in which he lived and worked throughout most of his life (1880-1956).

He left school after his father's death (1899) to become a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald, later serving as drama critic, city editor, and then managing editor of the Baltimore Evening Herald. Soon after the Herald folded in 1906, he joined the Baltimore Sun and continued with the Sun as editor, columnist, or contributor for most of his career. He published studies of George Bernard Shaw (1905) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), both of whom he admired. From 1914 to 1923, with George Jean Nathan he co-edited a satirical magazine, The Smart Set; in 1924 he and Nathan co-founded the American Mercury, a cultural magazine for "a civilized minority," which he co-edited for nine years. Mencken has been generally viewed (if viewed at all) as a crusty curmudgeon, never fully appreciated for the quality of his contributions to academic scholarship as well as to journalism during the first third of the 20th century.

To Teachout's great credit, he resurrects rather than revises an abundance of relevant biographical, social, and cultural material which he examines with both precision and circumspection. My guess (only a guess) is that those who read this biography will view Mencken through the filters of their own values. Some will find him "delightful" and "colorful"; others will be offended by his (to put it mildly) political incorrectness; still others will conclude (as Teachout seems to) that Mencken was the archetypical skeptic of almost everyone and everything...except his own opinions. For better or worse, "he was to the first part of the twentieth century what Mark Twain was to the last part of the nineteenth." Until reading this biography, I tended to view Mencken as a reasonably well-educated variation of Archie Bunker. Edmund Wilson once suggested that Mencken's public persona was a "comic mask" which concealed an "all-too-human face." In this context, Teachout has succeeded brilliantly in revealing that face.

When I first picked up "The Skeptic" I was a bit, errr, skeptical: barely 400 pages to cover the 40-odd working years of America's greatest 20th century journalist? It didn't seem enough, especially when long-forgotten literary figures often get biographies twice as thick. But it didn't take many pages to convince me. Teachout has delivered a model of concise but enthralling biography. He gives all the essentials of Mencken's life, and a good flavor of his times, without wallowing in matters only tangentially related to the main story line. Besides telling the story of Mencken's life better than it's ever been told before, Teachout delivers the most balanced and convincing critique of Mencken's thinking that I have ever seen. He doesn't slight Mencken's anti-semitism but doesn't exaggerate its importance either. He shows why Mencken's arguments often weren't very convincing, but also why Mencken continues to attract readers a half-century after his demise. He may not have been the Sage of Baltimore, but Mencken was a peerless prose stylist who deserves to remembered as one of the finest writers America has ever produced. Although Teachout modestly bills his book as "a life" it will go down as the definitive biography of Mencken.

This is not exactly a biography as about 75% of The Skeptic is devoted to an indictment of H. L. Mencken as an anti-Semitic bigot. It is far from being a balanced discussion, as only material for the prosecution is presented, and there is no mention of how Mencken aided and supported Jews and other minority writers. (The second most frequently published author in Mencken's magazine, The American Mercury, was George Schuyler, an African-American.) There is scant notice of how Mencken chose young Alfred Knopf, a Jew, as his publisher, nothing said about Mencken's crusade against the then-common practice of lynching or his war against the KKK (all this at a time when many state governments --e.g., Indiana-- were controlled by the Klan), and reference to Mencken's actual efforts to get Jews out of Germany is relegated to a tiny footnote on page 290. Mencken's 1938 column, "Help for the Jews" is dismissed because he advocated free immigration into the U.S. only for German Jews. (This was, of course, nearly a year before World War II began.)

In addition to the charges of bigotry, another 20% of this book is devoted to Mencken's sex life, as if this were somehow significant, and one gets the impression that this is actually the Kitty Kelley expose of Mencken rather than a serious biography.

In general, "The Skeptic" is remarkable for what it lacks. Anyone unfamiliar with the writing of H. L. Mencken could set this book down and be puzzled as to why there are so many readers who delight in Mencken's wit and insight, as there is no clue provided as to what Mencken's redeeming qualities were. Is there any mention of Mencken's analysis of why politicians behave as they do? Nada. Does it discuss the significant relationship between Christianity and democracy that Mencken held was central to our society? Not here. Does it give an example of his shrewdness such as the deft condensation of three pages by Thorstein Veblen down to one banal paragraph? Not at all, as the name Veblen does not appear in this book. Does it even acknowledge Mencken's contribution in changing the national literature from being based on moralism to a basis in realism? Nope.

Ah, but I must confess at once that this last negative is not quite true, as there is some discussion of Mencken as an editor and literary critic. According to Dr. Teachout, Mencken was obviously a very poor literary critic because he didn't like Hemingway and instead championed a ghastly author named Theodore Dreiser who is deservedly forgotten today. The American Mercury itself was of no significance, Mr. Teachout maintains, as it was merely a short-lived fad that featured the works of unknowns who couldn't have been worth reading.

Not only is this not a balanced account, it's a dull read. It has always escaped me exactly why Mr. Teachout is held in high esteem as an author. It defies the imagination that anyone who writes for a living could be so utterly bereft of any gift for storytelling that he could ruin the marvelous tale of how Mencken discovered the novel Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, or suck all the adventure out of the Hatrack prosecution in Boston, or spoil the spectacle of the Scopes Monkey Trial, yet in each case Teachout's account reads like the Cliff's Notes version of previous biographies.

Those who'd like an entertaining and informative account of H. L. Mencken and his times would do well to obtain "Disturber of the Peace" by one of America's greatest historians, William Manchester. Those who merely want to read about an author's sex life would do better with "My Life and Loves" by Frank Harris. Those who expect no pleasure whatsoever from reading may settle for this book.

It's now been almost half a century since H.L. Mencken's death, but the debate over his life and works only seems to grow more passionate. Much of this was undoubtedly the design of the Sage of Baltimore himself. He took great care in preserving and ordering his papers, and wrote two volumes of memoir and a diary designed to be opened only long after his departure. The publication of these works--the diary, "My Life as Author and Editor," and "Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work," helped spark a new round of debate about Mencken, and also helped pave the way for Terry Teachout's fine biography.

Teachout has mined the rich Mencken trove to produce a life story that's vivid, engaging and a pleasure to read. He confronts the Big Questions about Mencken--especially his anti-Semitism--quite directly. He celebrates the man's achievements, points out his faults and blind spots, but does so through the perspective of a life-long interest in the man. As he explains in the introduction, his eighth-grade social studies teacher gave him his first book on Mencken.

In a relatively brief 349 pages, Teachout manages to cover the sweep of the Mencken story...from the boy reporter who first made his mark at the end of the 19th century, to the literary critic who made such a splash in the teens and twenties ("discovering" the likes of Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis); to the memorable battles he waged against the "booboisie," the great unknowing masses who he saw as the scourge of society; to the self-trained scholar who performed pioneering work in the field of the American language. It's a great introduction to the man for anyone who isn't familiar with him, and can be read with pleasure by those who do know him. A first-rate biography in every sense.--William C. Hall

I found Terry Teachout's bio of Mencken to contain a lot of information available elsewhere. It was interesting, but I must take issue with some of Teachout's analysis. He claims that Mencken was an anti-Semite. No more so than he was anti-Irish; anti-Negro; anti-Italian American, etc. In other words, it is quite obvious that Mencken was an equal opportunity offender. The alleged proof of his anti-Semtism: that he disliked Jews who called attention to their Jewishness. This was no worse than Mencken's belief that others shouldn't call attention to their ethnicity, either. Then, too, there was his isolationism during WWII, and belief that the Jews brought anti-Semitism on themselves. While I do find such a viewpoint debatable (and no excuse in any way for the holocaust, which Mencken didn't support), I don't think that made Mencken an anti-Semite (he did call Hitler a fool). Rather, such a viewpoint made Mencken what he was: a very opinionated believer in how people, no matter what their color or ethnicity, should conduct themselves. Of course, he also castigated African Americans, and, collectively speaking, considered them to be inferior. Yet he also recognized the brilliance of such African American individuals as James Weldon Johnson and Claude McKay. And to be honest, I found one choice quote of his about African Americans as a whole unwilling to improve themselves, riding on the shoulders of those who genuinely deserve praise for their accomplishments, to be right on the mark (though I don't agree with his opinion of Jazz, which I think is a brilliant contribution to American culture). And I'm African American. In sum, Mencken, in many ways, was a product of his times. What set him apart and what I appreciate in his writing was his HONESTY. It was rare in his day, and certainly remains so today. Yet, as some have said, while Teachout's book is informative, it's not absolutely essential for anyone seeking to understand the essence of Mencken.

Terry Teachout, who writes for the New York Times, the National Review, and others has written a very short but enjoyable biography of H.L. Mencken. It was only when I read another Mencken biography that puts some episodes of Mencken's life into a very different light that I radically reconsidered my assessment of this biography.

One problem is that this book gets facts wrong. In his later years Mencken claimed that he came by his first job as a journalist by applying for it every day until he got it. In earlier years, his story was completely different he got it at the first try; it "improved with time," without Teachout catching on. In another example, Teachout writes that "Mencken did not pay well enough to consistently attract established talent... Forced to search for new faces...necessity also inspired him to look in places where others feared to tread. He reveled, for example, in printing the work of black writers." Another biography reveals that Mencken had long been extremely keen to promote African-American writers, to the extent that he tried to establish up a magazine devoted *solely* to African-American writers and culture, but couldn't raise the funds. This was a few short years after an American president joined the KKK and watched unabashedly racist movies in the White House, and almost certainly two decades before the armed services were integrated. He also was vociferous in speaking out against lynching at a time when this made him many enemies, and cost his employers significant amounts of money. Teachout and other biographers describe entirely different people. Mencken's exact views could be hard to pin down; on some issues he said one thing, and did something entirely different and much nobler. Rather regrettably, Teachout doesn't reflect on this ambiguity.

A strong point of this biography is that Teachout correctly describes how Mencken had a legendarily acidulous and satirical pen, and how many of the frauds he took on - quacks, cult leaders, faith healers, politicians against evolution, superpatriots, Prohibitionists, and more - deserved every diatribe he sent their way. As Teachout mentions, Mencken unfortunately he didn't only lampoon fashions people adopted and careers people chose, but also ethnic groups, in tracts that do not make for too pleasant reading.

Another trifle I have with this book is Teachout's version of Mencken's romance with Marion Bloom. In his account, the relationship foundered because Mencken was too conceited to marry a woman born into poverty. Another biography, however, describes how Mencken viscerally loathed Christian Science, which he hated as complete - and dangerous - quackery. When his girlfriend would try to convert him to Christian Science, to which she had converted after their relationship began, he would go into purple rages, and yet she couldn't stop. Having known people with persistent and idiosyncratic religious beliefs, this story strikes me as all too painfully plausible. In Teachout's book, however, Christian Science is alleged to have been the fig leaf Mencken used to avoid admitting that the relationship foundered over her humble origins. Mencken eventually married an ailing woman only expected to live for three years and unable to have children; this is not the mark of a complete egoist and snob. In other words, Teachout's book can be classified as historical fiction.

Biographers are free to - even expected to - add their interpretations to the facts of their subject's life. But readers really shouldn't come to realize that the facts and insinuations in different biographies of the same person cannot be reconciled.

First of all, I picked up this book because I have seen and enjoyed numerous quotes attributed to Mencken and I wanted to learn about the man behind the quotes. In this respect, the book was a very good intro to an extraordinary individual and it whetted my appetite to read Mencken's thoughts and views written by his own hand. He certainly appeals to reasoned, free thinkers.

That said, I was dismayed by many of the reviews here after reading the book. Much negativism regarding the book portraying Mencken in an unflattering light is unjustified I think, for I found him to be anything but a real bigot after reading the book, although he certainly was not P.C. (nothing wrong with that, per se). Menkcen defenders need to back off a bit and realize that reasoned readers can accept Menkcen despite some human frailties, to include his domineering editorial style.

In addition, some so-called libertarians have posted about whether he was or wasn't a libertarian and whether the author explores this enough, etc. As a libertarian myself, I disagree with this reasoning. The book is about Mencken the man and his outlook on life, and I think is political views are fairly treated and rather plain to readers. As the title suggests, he was a skeptic of government and easy answers to human problems -- so I'm inclined to believe he'd be skeptical of any libertarian panacea to solve all the world's problems. He is able to be critical of both the right and left, both autocracy and democracy, both elitism and populism.

I really recommend this book as a back drop to begin a more thorough investigation of Mencken's views and writings.

Looking at some of the other reviews, it just amazes me how easily folks buy into the "anti-semite" smear of Mencken.

Charles Fecher is taken as the authority who proved Mencken to be an "anti-Semite." But the evidence that Fecher claimed could not be found even in the very book he edited (_The Diary of H.L. Mencken_) in spite of his claims to this effect in his introduction.

Scholars like Joseph Epstein and Sheldon Richman rebutted these charges, though Epstein later recanted upon peer pressure from his ideological colleagues.

Teachout does Mencken the same disservice, passing on the silly anti-semite charges while trying to maintain that he was still a worthy guy. This hysterical fault-finding to concur with the politically correct crowd is juvenile; "outing" anti-semites has become the Popular Move of the Day in mainstream media circles, and it doesn't belong in a supposedly scholarly book.

Otherwise, the book is just not as all-encompassing as it needs to be. Teachout had the wealth of the entire Mencken archives to work with, and he just doesn't cut it as a biographer. There is still a far better book to be written on this fantastic man.

Why read Mencken, indeed? Or meanies like Alexander Pope, Voltaire, Swift, Ambrose Bierce or Edward Gibbon, whose insensitive remark on the "fanaticism of the Druids" has done incalculable damage to the British people? Unlike a previous reviewer, I don't think the public is fascinated with Mencken; they just love an opportunity to parade their newly discovered sensitivity in negative book reviews. Yes, Mencken was not Anna Quindlen, who caresses her readers with platitudes; he could be cutting. Then so could Mark Twain, whose "Huckleberry Finn," is also remembered almost solely for a few insensitive words. I wonder if the previous reviewer has actually read Mencken's books and not just the comments on a Mencken biography. Try reading Mencken's books.

By the way, Mencken the "mean-spirited" was against US participation in both world wars. Like George Bernard Shaw, he probably could have said "I never wrote a line to start a war." How many of today's newly sensitive columnists were ready to drop bombs on Iraq? And what would today's columnists want as their epitaph? Probably "I never wrote a line to hurt anyone's self-esteem."