no telling when, but i have been soaking in mencken (and bierce and twain). mencken is truly astounding. fantastically productive, even while flirting around continuously with hooch and movie starlets (aileen pringle, e.g.), traveling about here and there, and supervising a variety of periodicals.
the prose is almost unbelievably alive, vivid in its every sentence; it arouses my envy. he is an auto-didact of epic proportions, and behind each little declaration is the equivalent of a number of ph.d.s: in history, philosophy, literature. the american language is an immense work of scholarship: tantamount to writing the oxford english dictionary. and even there the prose fucking sparkles.
he is an extremely strong literary critic: frank, with an almost unerring judgment; he has a way of zeroing in on the writer's weaknesses, but is also capable of cherishing all sorts of surprising things. his assessment of bierce, for example, is harsh and loving and right. but this is entailed by his basically so-right reading of the whole american literary tradition.
throughout his life, people who encountered him professed themselves surprised to find the bitter cynic mencken to be the sweetest and most jovial person imaginable. this is not surprising at all; just beneath the terrible disaffection lurks a real love of human foibles, an inexhaustible curiosity about the human condition, which he fundamentally affirms as endlessly amusing.
the positions are beautifully and amusingly perverse: pitted quite consciously against his age. that his basic commitment in politics was to individual liberty - something he said of himself - is obvious. this is not to say that mencken is always right or in good taste. his germanophilia was sort of amusing on behalf of the kaiser during world war i; after that it got less charming. he had a pretty primitive darwinianism going, part of his reactionary realism, etc. but in a way those are quibbles. my sense is that mencken - a true celebrity in his own time - is comparatively neglected today.
what he got away with is almost unimaginable: screeching anti-religious atheism much more beautifully defended than in dawkins or even hitchens (treatise on the gods); pro-german tendencies; utter skepticism of the political and aesthetic consensi surrounding him; a systematic program to destroy every national myth, starting with democracy. what he has to say about such topics as women and marriage and sex is entirely unacceptably frank, brutal in its sardonic truth. and for all that he was a beloved piece of americana, a kind of norman rockwell character: the barber-shop skeptic. but here with insane chops, introducing nietzsche or ibsen to american audiences, for example. chicks dug him. writers groveled before him. he made baltimore into a kind of anti-romantic paradise, the anti-center of the anti-universe.
the book below tells the almost unbelievable story of mencken roaring through the twentieth century. for one theme, just three little girls, growing up best friends in montgomery alabama: sara haardt mencken, zelda sayre fitgerald, and tallulah bankhead, later depicted doing catastrophic drunken gymnastics at the algonquin, where mencken maintained a suite. admittedly their dads were supreme court justices and state senators. unimaginably sexy high-society fundamentally non-monogamous debs from the deep south on a party tear; oh and brilliant artists of various kinds. what if paris hilton was a genius?
"Zelda never learned the gentle art of 'policing' her husband's parties," writes sara mayfield. "Instead, she rode with him on the tops of cabs, drank toasts to him from her slipper, and flirted with his friends." zelda is depicted more or less ghost-writing scott's books, and as producing the immortal sentence "plagiarism begins at home."
i've got to say that zelda vid is charming; the youtube tribute is its own little democratic artform.