The Curmudgeon

The sarcastic sage of Baltimore laughed at America's culture wars and recast its journalism.

MENCKEN

The American Iconoclast

By Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

Oxford Univ. 662 pp. $35

People whose opinions I respect have told me, usually with a certain amount of resignation, that culture war is the default state of American politics. The decades of New Deal liberalism, they explain, were not the epochal realignment they appeared to be at the time but merely a temporary armistice in the apparently endless and virtually pointless struggle over manners and morals. What's more, the resumption of cultural hostilities in recent years is just the country's inevitable return to doing what comes naturally. We have simply picked up where we left off in 1929, the theory goes, when other matters distracted us from our habitual preoccupation with the theory of evolution and the scandalous habits of the young.

Perhaps this is what explains the publication of the third comprehensive biography of H.L. Mencken in 11 years. If we are truly doomed to fight and refight the culture wars on into the future, then Mencken -- that scoffing, pugnacious enemy of the sacred -- is exactly the critic whose life and views we ought to be remembering. An unbelievably prolific journalist and magazine editor who lived in Baltimore his entire life, Mencken so mocked and punctured the genteel mentality of the Victorians during his heyday (roughly, 1919-30) that it might be said he single-handedly ushered American letters into the 20th century. In the American Mercury, the magazine he co-founded in 1924, Mencken blasted the hyper-patriots, he laughed at the evangelicals, he shamed the racists, he baited the Babbittry, and he did all of it in a swaggering, sarcastic and yet elegant prose style that remains -- or ought to remain, anyway -- the model for every columnist, critic and blog-militant in this famously polarized age.

The great man's contemporary relevance, however, is not a point raised by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, the author of this new Mencken biography (she also edited a 1991 collection of his newspaper stories). In fact, the only one of the recent biographers really to press the notion that Mencken is a figure whose time has come (or, more accurately, returned) is Terry Teachout, author of The Skeptic (2002), which asserted that Mencken was politically conservative and that conservatives are in the ascendancy today.

The particular species of conservatism that now holds the nation in its grasp, however, owes few debts to Mencken. The man was no fan of what we now call the "red states." On the contrary: He savagely derided the same backwoods civilization that so many conservative writers now embrace in order to establish their regular-guy bona fides. Mencken revered science and lambasted religion; his favorite put-downs, usually applied to the inhabitants of deepest Arkansas or Tennessee, were words like "moron," "idiot" and "yokel." His conservatism was that of Nietzsche, not George Wallace, and one can only speculate wistfully about the kind of destruction he would have visited on such excreta as the Left Behind novels or "The O'Reilly Factor."

The immediate problem facing the biographer of Mencken is, ironically, the same quality that makes Mencken such a worthwhile subject: his peerless prose. Any study of the author is bound to disappoint when his own words are cited and the reader suddenly feels the galvanic force of the great man's writing -- and, by comparison, the weakness of the biographer's own abilities. Biographies that focus on the development of Mencken's ideas suffer from this problem even when they are well-written. (They suffer also from the inevitable realization that Mencken's ideas, as opposed to his verbal style, simply do not stand up after 70 years.) Rodgers circumvents this difficulty altogether by giving us Mencken the man, in impressive and often fantastic detail, while keeping the author's writing and ideas largely in the background. Every lead is chased down: The reader learns about what Mencken drank while in Germany during World War I, the testimony he gave in a censorship case in the 1940s, how much affection this person or that felt for him, and, over and over again, the intimate details of his love life. It is a solid and well-researched work, built on dozens of interviews in addition to heroic feats of archival digging.

Mencken emerges here as a very different figure from the one we thought we knew from his cranky "Prejudices" books or the sarcastic items he wrote for the American Mercury in its golden age. Rodgers's Mencken is a decent fellow: lovable and almost always in the right. The author's thoroughgoing identification with her subject allows her to create a vivid portrait, but it also makes it difficult for her to show us how shattering Mencken's commentary could be in the early 1920s -- how alien and perverse it seemed to the "100 percent Americans" of those days -- and how monotonous, unfunny and irrelevant it became in the '30s.

Any biography of Mencken, though, is ultimately no more than a supplement to the man's own works. Let us hope that this comprehensive study of Mencken's life introduces a new generation of readers to this enemy of falsehood and destroyer of pretense, this man whose response to the absurdity of the culture wars was laughter. ·

Thomas Frank is the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America."