About halfway through the first, the author of the review begins to share his deeply limited moral opinions with us.
In many respects, some of them important, [Mencken] was not a nice man. [He was] a "poseur" whose public utterances and persona were often calculated for effect rather than accurately representing the man's true character and convictions. On top of all that he was a hypochondriac, a workaholic, outwardly sociable yet inward, aloof, and a grouch.Now, Mencken would have considered some of these qualities--his showmanship rather than sincerity, industriousness, and self-sufficiency--virtues rather than vices. Other qualities--the hypochondriasis and grouchiness--are incidental personal qualities over which no one has any control.
The reviewer also calls HLM a racist and anti-Semite, despite acknowledging Mencken's friendships with many Jews and some blacks. How does that work, exactly? In fact, he did hate Negros and Jews as groups--but he also hated Christians, Southerners, the English, New Englanders, Americans, the middle classes, women and all humanity as groups--yet on a individual scale, he could appreciate people of whatever group. That's called misanthropy, not bigotry. You can't simultaneously praise an author for being 'provocative', then criticize him for provoking you!
And someone should inform the author of the second review that "Hottentot" is an old-fashioned geographical adjective, not an ethnic slur.
Also, two quotes I completely agree with:
In so far as my personal relations with it offer any evidence, the government I live under is devoted exclusively to extortion and oppression.
For Mencken, "work was the important thing, and everything else had to revolve around it and fit into it."
As it should.
The thing that annoys me about Mencken is his inexplicably bad literary taste. He is convinced that such mediocrities as Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and Theodore Dreiser are the greatest authors who ever lived. Mencken was a masculinist, and that I can accept--but among masculine authors, who would choose Conrad over Melville?? He hated Puritan New Englanders like Robert Frost and Louisa May Alcott who wrote in order to teach moral lessons, and said that the novel should "tell life as it is and never, ever preach"--but he loved the dull let-us-forgive-the-fallen-woman preachiness of self-consciously Modern authors like Dreiser and GB Shaw.
I think the solution to this mystery is that Mencken was basically too German and not French enough. He approved of authors whose atheism and Americanism (Twain) and anti-Puritan morals (Dreiser) and aristocratic leanings (Conrad) were similar to his own. He was too busy looking at their ideas to notice that none of them could write a decent sentence. (well, occasionally Conrad).
Finally, why is it that no one can be a Social Darwinist without being commonly accused of believing that all men ought to be clones of himself? A person can look down on others without idolizing himself. As Nietzsche himself knew, you can't escape your family--so the man who wanted to be a German aristocrat was in fact a middle-class American journalist. Mencken would have been the first to admit he had more in common with a beer-drinking German burgher than with the Ubermensch.
