{"id":37935,"date":"2017-04-01T04:00:46","date_gmt":"2017-04-01T08:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=37935"},"modified":"2017-03-31T11:16:31","modified_gmt":"2017-03-31T15:16:31","slug":"repackaging-h-l-mencken-for-modern-day-conservative-tastes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/04\/01\/repackaging-h-l-mencken-for-modern-day-conservative-tastes\/","title":{"rendered":"Repackaging H.L. Mencken for modern-day conservative tastes"},"content":{"rendered":"

At The American Conservative<\/em>, D.G. Hart<\/a> attempts to rescue H.L. Mencken’s reputation from the progressives:<\/p>\n

H.L. Mencken has a conservative problem. The Baltimore journalist became the poster boy for literary modernism thanks to his literary criticism and nationally syndicated op-ed columns, in addition to his work as a magazine editor, most notably at American Mercury<\/em>. But he ranks well behind the modernist poets T.S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens as an acceptable literary figure for conservative consumption. The reason has much to do with Mencken\u2019s skepticism and irreverence. He mocked Puritanism famously as the cultural force that gave Americans a moralistic squint. Worse, he recommended the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as an antidote to Victorian morality and then promoted Theodore Dreiser, whose novels offended censors. Mencken proved his heretical ways at the Scopes Trial, where he mocked the prosecution led by William Jennings Bryan and the \u201csimian faithful\u201d who hung on the Great Commoner\u2019s every word. Everywhere Mencken turned, his mantra seemed to be \u201cjust say no\u201d to inherited moral, intellectual, and literary standards.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t help conservatives who have a soft spot for Mencken that Gore Vidal took inspiration from the Baltimorean. Vidal\u2019s own moralism could be as priggish as any fundamentalist\u2019s, but that did not stop him from recognizing Mencken as another writer who was too good for America. Vidal applauded Mencken\u2019s ridicule of Americans\u2019 intelligence: \u201cThe more one reads Mencken, the more one eyes suspiciously the knuckles of his countrymen,\u201d Vidal wrote, \u201clooking to see callouses from too constant a contact with the greensward.\u201d How grass produces callouses is anyone\u2019s guess, but that imagery\u2019s challenge did not stop Vidal from recommending Mencken\u2019s unbelief. Mencken viewed religion, Vidal contended, \u201cas a Great Wall of China designed to keep civilization out while barbarism might flourish within the gates.\u201d Vidal was convinced that only the few, the proud promoters of licentiousness like himself could recognize Mencken\u2019s charms.<\/p>\n

Of course, conservatives have saner writers like Joseph Epstein, longtime editor of The American Scholar<\/em>, to speak on Mencken\u2019s behalf. Epstein grew up at a time when reading Mencken was required by \u201cyoung men with intellectual interests.\u201d The reason was Mencken\u2019s iconoclasm \u2014 his constant deflating of politicians, reformers, moralists, preachers, and \u201call the habits and attitudes and hidebound views that for him marched under the flag of twentieth-century Puritanism.\u201d But Epstein noticed that as he became older, Mencken\u2019s appeal grew. For starters, \u201cfew American writers have been funnier.\u201d And Mencken\u2019s prose was \u201coriginal and unmistakable\u201d \u2014 \u201cstrong verbs, exotic nouns, outrageous adjectives, a confident cadence \u2026 and wide learning.\u201d Epstein also credited Mencken with an accessible and engaging point of view that relied on basic common sense. \u201cLike Nietzsche, Mencken could be wildly extravagant, but unlike Nietzsche he was always sane,\u201d Epstein wrote. \u201cLike [George Bernard] Shaw, Mencken made a living out of detesting hypocrisy; but unlike Shaw, he was without the pretensions of the pundit.\u201d<\/p>\n

One way of putting Epstein\u2019s point is that with Mencken there is more than meets the eye, a truism that registers as scientific fact when measuring Mencken\u2019s literary output. Over his career he authored approximately 10 million words. That works out roughly to 40,000 pages of manuscript. At roughly 350 pages per book manuscript, that leaves Mencken with the equivalent of 115 books. Much more than meets the eye, indeed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At The American Conservative, D.G. Hart attempts to rescue H.L. Mencken’s reputation from the progressives: H.L. Mencken has a conservative problem. The Baltimore journalist became the poster boy for literary modernism thanks to his literary criticism and nationally syndicated op-ed columns, in addition to his work as a magazine editor, most notably at American Mercury. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7,13],"tags":[447,431,86,591],"class_list":["post-37935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-usa","tag-atheism","tag-conservatism","tag-criticism","tag-hlmencken"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9RR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37935"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37936,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37935\/revisions\/37936"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}