My Life as an Author and Editor.

• Author: Wicker, Tom

Mencken a racist? He could barely stand anybody

H.L. Mencken's vivid memoir recalls to me the best piece of advice I ever received. I had made, in my ignorant youth, a pretentious speech about literature and art, only to be confronted afterwards by one of my home state's literary and political lights, Jonathan Daniels.

"Young man," he said to me, in words that flashed and still bum, "never be a solemn ass."

That's one sin Mencken never committed. He was a dissenter--bellicose, unafraid, self-confident, irreverent, independent, and irascible. But, he asserts, he had no capacity for "moral indignation" and "a complete lack of messianic passion." He harbored no illusion that "human nature could be changed by passing statutes and preaching gospels." So he could not share Ezra Pound's or anyone's "yearning to improve the world." Mencken was quintessentially a critic, not a reformer, a no-sayer rather than a yes-sayer.

As a ferocious social critic and literary commentator, Mencken in his time--roughly the first third of this century--raised lots of hackles and evoked plenty of blistering responses. In this memoir, Mencken writes that it was his "fixed habit... to suffer without protest anything that was printed about me, however inaccurate and unfair."

This was in part tactical, because Mencken, a shrewd self-promoter, realized that attacks on him only expanded his reputation as a controversialist. For example, in writing his celebrated assault on Southern manners and mores, "The Sahara of the Bozart," he confesses, his "actual object was to outrage the professional Southerners" whom he considered "the bell-wether and archetype of all the worst varieties of American imbecile." As Mencken hoped, the article did not fail to provoke "their violent counterattack."

But H.L. Mencken was far more than a gadfly or a publicist. He so believed in free speech as a principle, he writes, that he was "seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow." Having had his say, he understood that others had, and he was willing to grant, an equal right of reply. And he knew, as too few realize, that free speech "is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even to be malicious."

That is the right answer to those Americans who, today as in Mencken's time, seek to link "free speech" to "responsibility"--as if the former should not exist without the latter, that free speech should only belong to those who espouse generally accepted ideas. Mencken tended, with much reason, to regard a generally accepted idea as likely to be "moronic."

"I was," he wrote in recollecting his blunt, energetic, and often unpopular writings, "in favor of the true long before I was in favor of either the good or the beautiful."

He also favored the humorous and the lusty, in life as on the printed page. His recitals of various rowdy episodes--for example, a drinking bout with Ethel Barrymore, one of "the champion lady boozers of Broadway," enliven the memoir. He seldom...