MENCKEN'S DIARY
After my bout of crankiness about diaries earlier today, I got to
thinking about those I really have enjoyed. One jumped to
the front of the mental queue almost immediately.
The Diary of H. L. Mencken as edited by
Charles Fecher was first published in 1989, thirty-three years after
he died from the complications of a stroke in 1956.
Mencken's will ordered that the diary remain sealed until 25 years after
his death. He assumed that everyone mentioned therein would be
dead by then, although a fair number survived the passage of the
quarter century. It wasn't first published until 8 years after that for
other reasons, one involving the label Mencken had put on each of
the five sealed wooden boxes:
This diary is to be deposited by my Executors on the understanding
that it is not to be put at the disposal of readers until twenty-five years
after my death, and is then to be open only to students engaged in
critical or historical investigation, approved after propery inquiry by the
Chief Librarian [of the Pratt library to which it had been bequeathed].
A lengthy debate ensued as to whether he intended the diary to
be published at all. It was resolved mostly via a legal nicety. The labels
on the boxes had the status of memoranda, and were not specifically
mentioned in his will. The Pratt trustees therefore decided that "there is no
ground on which it may be concluded that Mencken's memorandum
is legally effective to prevent publication of his diaries." Lucky us.
Even after this decision some were reticent to publish for other reasons,
which caused quite a stir at the time (1989) of its first publication.
To be blunt, there's no way around the fact that Mencken believed
that black people were inferior to whites, hated Franklin Roosevelt
maniacally (much more so than most other politicians whom he
merely despised), and was an anti-Semite.
One can variously rationalize these things by bringing up temporal
chauvinism, pointing out that he regularly published black authors
in the "American Mercury" in the 1920s and evinced an egalitarian
attitude in print, and was a good friend to as many Jews as not,
but the words remain.
And when the words are written by one the most powerful
prose stylists of the 20th century - a man whose laundry lists read
more powerfully than jeremiads by most others - it's not easy to ignore
them. Quite simply, the man who avoided so many of the common
prejudices of his time was unable to avoid them all.
I agree with Fecher on the issue, i.e. there's no need to excuse
or forgive but simply accept the fact and pass on.
That being said, let's get on with a most
entertaining excerpt from April 25, 1931:
We had lunch with
Harlow Shapley, the astronomer, at the Faculty Club.
He turned out to be an inconspicuous and somewhat rustic looking
man, apparently in the late forties. But the more he talked, the more
his rusticity vanished. He said that the new 200-inch reflector, now
being made, will be of very small value to astronomers save as an
advertisement to their profession He said that practically everything it
may be expected to accomplish could be accomplished by the
existing telescopes. The latter have already revealed millions of
stars, and studying them will occupy astronomers for the better part of
a century. Shapley said that the Harvard Observatory needed no more
than two or three really competent astronomers. The rest of the work
is done satisfactorily by persons with relatively meager equipment.
Some of them are girls from the women's colleges. Shapley said that
he was opposed to training astronomers in any number. He said that
the number of places open for really competent men is small, and
that it would be very easy to over-crowd the profession. He expressed
strong disapproval of
Robert A. Millikan, and especially of Millikan's efforts to reconcile
science and religion. I gathered from his talk that he himself is a
thorough-going skeptic. He told us of a devastating saying, at Millikan's
expense, by
Sir Ernest Rutherford, the English astronomer. Rutherford said
that publicity grabbing has become one of the learned sciences and a
great force in modern life, and that it has become necessary to set up
a unit to measure it. This unit, he said, is the "kan." It is, however, so
large that is has become necessary to resort to a workable fraction
of it. This fraction is the "millikan."
An entry that shows us that politicians haven't much changed comes
from April 21, 1939, after Mencken had delivered the last speech at
a meeting of the Society of American Newspaper Editors in
Washington:
As I came into the hall I saw
Josephus Daniels sitting in the front row. Daniels was a member
of the Cabinet during the last war, and is an Ambassador under the
present administration. In order to avoid embarassing him, I toned down
my speech in a few details. After the meeting I had a palaver with
him, and he surprised me by saying that during the World War he had
protested bitterly to
Albert S. Burleson, Postmaster General, against Burleson's almost
insane efforts to censor the press.
We did not discuss
[Harold] Ickes directly, but I gathered from what Daniels said
that he shared my fears [about Ickes attempting to repeat the
insanities of Burleson in the next war, which Mencken clearly saw
coming]. Altogether, the old boy rather surprised me. He is, to
be sure, a hypocrite, but I believe that he was more or less sincere.
I asked him if he was drinking any tequila in Mexico [what with the
Volstead Act still in effect], where he is American Ambassador.
He confessed that he had tasted it. He is, of course, a lifelong
prohibitionist.
A July 30, 1947 personal entry is fraught with foreshadowing:
I awoke this morning in a considerable state of confusion. It was
impossible for me to write a line on the typewriter without striking
wrong keys and making blunders in spelling, and for [a] while I could
scarcely write by hand or sign my name. In talking, too, I found it
necessary to grope for words. This has been gradually passing off,
but I still find typewriting difficult. It is a warm, humid day.
It's obvious he had a stroke the previous night, with Fecher adding
that "the typing of this and the succeeding entries is strewn with
errors."
That he regained his considerable aplomb is well-evidenced by
an entry nearly a year later on July 17, written immediately after
attending the Democratic National Convention:
The convention was a show of almost incredible obscenity. Truman,
when he arrived to accept his nomination, looked scared, despite
his truculence. I sat only twenty feet from him with a clear view of
him. Despite his braggadocio, it was plain that he was not sure
of himself.
A few months later Mencken made his final entry on November 23,
suffering a massive cerebral thrombosis eight days later that left
him physically stable but completely deprived of the ability to read
or write.
He lived for another seven years before dying.
If he deserved any punishment for the shortcomings outlined
earlier, he certainly received it.
This was a man who'd written for at least 8 hours a day for most
of his life, whether it be regular newspaper or magazine pieces or
any of dozens of books, including his massive and monumental
The American Language.
He'd also prided himself on answering every letter he ever received.
They
numbered in the thousands, especially his correspondence concerning
American Language, which included hundreds
of correspondents regularly supplying him with words and examples
of their use.
In other words, writing wasn't a hobby in which to indulge at the
terminal with a few beers in the evening. He lived to write, and his
eventual physical death must have come as a tremendous relief
after waking each morning for seven years to mentally die all over
again upon realizing that what he lived for was gone.
Read some
Mencken, eh? You should be able to find something appropriate
amongst the 2433 volumes currently held at
ABE.
posted by Steven Baum
6/27/2000 09:35:34 PM |
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