A MENCKENIAN WITH RESERVATIONS

By H. N. Burdett

As a reconstituted young bachelor I was once urged by a friend we'll call Bud to have dinner with his sister, we'll call her Bianca, which Bud foresaw as the launching of one of those proverbial matches conceived in Paradise.

The ink was not yet dry on Bianca's diploma certifying erudition with highest honors in comparative literature from one of the Three Sisters, though the identity of the specific sibling has slipped from memory.

In Bud's view, Bianca's chosen field of study had prepared her for naught other than perhaps a career in the teaching trade -- for which she had revealed nary a scintilla of inclination -- or wedded bliss with someone of my ilk.

As a newspaperman aspiring to evolve into a novelist, my ilk back then was highly in doubt. Thus Bud's matchmaking could be construed as either an abiding and touching faith in my potential, or an act of utter desperation; I have never been able to determine which, though if had to venture a guess...

At the time, I had recently emerged from a six-month hibernation, writing my first novel, which was not bad; that is to say, it was not merely bad, it was colossally atrocious.

There is little I can recall regarding that initial dinner with the alluring Bianca, other than what I will here relate.

My physical location and culinary preferences in those days suggest that the meal must have been consumed in my favorite restaurant in Baltimore's Little Italy. The most probable venue to which I was known to repair for the ritual preliminary bout to the evening's Main Event shifted between three eateries every two to three months, making it difficult to be precise even in this respect. Recently liberated from perhaps the most ill-matched marriage consummated on this planet, if not the entire galaxy, I was anxious to test S. J. Perelman's theory that the music of love is not the distant strains of a romantic violin but rather the triumphant twangs of a bedspring.

It may be conjectured with a degree of confidence that there was the involvement of a bottle or two of Chianti, which perhaps by city ordinance was a required staple of all meals partaken within that precinct. I further assume that I ordered veal, either marsala or Parmesan, for I was nothing if not a culinary eclectic, and as I place the episode in question it occurred well prior to my memorable though short-lived liaison with a pulchritudinous Washington animal rights lobbyist. The formidable persuasive powers of the latter clamped a tight lid on my voracious appetite for calf's flesh, though not too long after that fateful night we called it a day my guilt level faded with every swallow of each tender morsel of that ambrosial repast, relegating my career as a vegeterian to the cobwebbed cranial recesses where reminiscences of the unlikely and inexplicable reside.

What I do recollect with cinematic clarity about that garlic-scented evening of endless promise and heart-hammering anticipation was my Mensa short-listed's choice of a conversation starter delivered with wide-eyed innocence that Bambi himself might have envied, "I understand that you are a resolute Menckenian."

At Bianca's husky-throated words, there was the abrupt but unmistakable burst of the bubble of carnal certainty. An icicle formed at the root of my spine, shot upward and metastisized. The pervasive chill had less to do with Mencken, whose work I admired as much as I now appreciate, but rather with the suggestion that I might have been "resolute" about anyone or anything.

During that time, I was open for exploration of everything, declining to accept even the concept of face value. There were no indisputable facts, the very idea of which I equated with stagnation, with the waving of the white flag to the omnipresent forces of Ignorance. I could readily identify with E. B. White's internal struggle: awakening each morning conflicted between the desire to improve the world and the desire to enjoy the world, making it difficult to plan his day.

The notion that I was a committed devotee of Henry Louis Mencken was a not uncommon error among those aware that I was a friend of the journalist and historian Gerald White Johnson, whose crystalline insights, genuine cordiality, plain-spoken profundity and Job-like patience had a tranformative impact that I doubt could be learned even had I been more attentive from any religious or higher education institution through which I passed.

Johnson had many years before I met him indeed been lured by Mencken to depart his beloved native North Carolina and join the staff of the Sunpapers of Baltimore.
While Johnson remained a thoughtful and unreconstructed progressive throughout his life, Mencken could no more be pigeon-holed ideologically than he could be persuaded to sign a petition for the Temperance Union. His not infrequent tirades against the social experimentation of Roosevelt's liberal New Deal were no more robust than his puncturing of the pomposity of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover conservatism.

I have never considered mysef a Menckenian, either resolute or restrained. Though I have often enough been amused and entertained by HLM's irreverence and in awe of his industriousness and versatility, I am troubled by anyone who saw anything remotely positive in Adolf Hitler, even, as it was with Mencken, when the appeal lasted not much beyond the blink of an eye.

The Sage of Baltimore's misguided belief that Hitler might be the savior of the land of his ancestry had a short run. That it had legs to stand up at all, much less run, in the mind of such a world-class iconoclast, a mind that could penetrate the shrewdest of mountebanks and detail their poses and posturing with seeming ease, makes Mencken's attraction to Der Fuhrer all the more befuddling.

Even so, I found myself defending Mencken in print against allegations of anti-Semitism after the latter's diary was published some years after his death, as decreed in his will. I did so in a newspaper review of the diary and felt no necessity to apologize for it, nor do I to this very day.

In scribbling his daily thoughts, Mencken could not have used more intemperate language to characterize either Jews or African Americans. I find this especially disgraceful from a man who wrote with such masterful command, always finding the right word apparently even while writing on a newspaper's deadline. He simply cannot be excused for sinking to such subterranean depths, no matter that these were ostensibly his most private thoughts. In fact, he suspected full well that his diary would one day be published and made elaborate arrangements for this to happen, doubtless as assurance that he would not be forgotten well beyond his parting 'this earthly vale.'

Despite HLM's usage of some of the most inflammatory words extant to describe persons of certain religious beliefs and racial origins, I remain unconvinced that he was a bigot or a racist. I am well aware that his diary offers a wealth of evidence to the contrary, but my feeling was then and remains that Mencken judged people individually rather than by the color of their skin or what or whom they worshipped.

Not even Mencken's passing infatuation with Hitler categorizes the Sage as an anti-Semite. It was certainly a mistake and a terrible one for which Mencken does not deserve a pass. But I feel his praise for Hitler was rooted in his love for Germany rather than hatred of Jews. Mencken soon, though not soon enough, understood that Hitler was an abomination, a genocidal tyrant more likely to be remembered as a lightning rod to bring shame and humiliation on the land of his ancestors than as the Aryan Moses.

There were doubtless other dents in Mencken's armor, but none as deep and permanent as his brief attraction to Hitler and the Third Reich.

To this day, Mencken's more rabid detractors continue to use his fidelity to Germany and all things German, which silenced his iconoclastic voice through two world wars to present a prima facie case that he was not only anti-Semitic and racist but anti-American as well. Utter nonsense. In nine well-chosen sentences, HLM digs the grave and buries this misguided hogwash, to wit:

One man likes the republic because it pays better wages than Bulgaria. Another because it has laws to keep him sober, pious and faithful to his wife. Another because the Woolworth Building is higher than the Cathedral at Chartres. Another because Roosevelt could not leave his job to his son. Another because living here, he can read the New York Journal.* Another because there is a warrant for him somewhere else. Me, I like it because it amuses me. I never get tired of the show. It is worth every cent it costs.

Not only do I hold up these as the last words on charges that H. L. Mencken was un-American, but as an in-the-face response to those who would support the resistance by the super wealthy, who only too happily sign exorbitant checks for their country club dues, to raising their taxes. Taxes, after all, are dues for living in arguably the greatest country in the world. One can only imagine what Mencken might have written about the asininity of a nation slashing taxes for the extremely well-heeled while fighting preemptive wars financed by borrowed funds that our children and grandchildren will be forced to ante up long after the perpetrators of these unnecessary wars have gone to their just reward.

*Alas.

HUMOR IS SERIOUS BUSINESS

By H. N. Burdett

Insomnia in the wee, small hours of the morning is a personal affliction of relatively recent vintage. There are books at my bedside to ensure that, should they occur, such hours will be spent more productively than tossing and turning them away.

In preparation for slumber interruptus, volumes by E. B. White, S. J. Perelman and Joseph Epstein are within easy reach. Anything more challenging would have the effect of caffeine at a time when sleep is required, not stimulation.

At 4 a.m. on a recent morning, the old grey cells were up and running and annoying the hell out of the rest of my contentedly dormant self. I listlessly reached for one of my most beloved of all books: the one that shows the aforementioned Mr. White at his typewriter on the front cover, apparently taking dictation from a dachshund.

There's a dachshund who answers to the name of Tribbie in my family. She is owned by my daughter and grandson. In recent months I have been infused with inspiration not only by Tribbie, but also by a papillon who answers to the name of Penny, as well as by a veritable herd of felines who answer to no names, or anything else, but were nonetheless christened, respectively, Mowie, Conan, Cal and Ellen.

The aforementioned felines and canines do not so much get along as tolerate one another, that is for the most part. Their truce is an uneasy one. Tribbie and Penny not infrequently feel compelled to defend their downstairs territory against all enemies foreign and domestic, bewhiskered creatures all, with impressive ferocity. The barking ones, for reasons unknown to me, are not allowed upstairs in my daughter's house; it may have something to do with their voracious appetites and the need to protect the purring ones from near certain starvation.

Cal and Tribbie sometimes wrestle. When I first witnessed one of their contests, I was horrified to mistake it for a life and death struggle. But rather than blood, I observed a kind of camaraderie. I can never figure out who wins these matches, or even who may be the better wrestler. To the combatants, such calculations miss the point, which, I take it, is, mere exercise.

But I digress. Let's see, I believe I was expounding upon The Essays of E. B. White, which I selected in an effort not to waste three or four hours of insomnia. On the back dust cover of this particular volume, there is a quote from the author himself, his spot on characterization of the essayist as "a self-liberated man (I envision Joan Didion wincing), sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him is of general interest."

To double down on my assurance that should my reading ploy succeed I might return to much needed rest with a smile of contentment, I found White's wonderful piece titled, "Some Remarks on Humor" and was particularly taken with the following passage:

Practically everyone is a manic depressive of sorts, with his up moments and his down moments, and you certainly don't have to be a humorist to taste the sadness of a situation and mood. But there is often a rather fine line between laughing and crying, and if a humorous piece of writing brings a person to the point where his emotional responses are untrustworthy and seem likely to break over into the opposite realm, it is because humor, like poetry, has an extra content. It plays close to the big hot fire which is Truth, and sometimes the reader feels the heat.

Reflecting upon that dollop of wisdom, any chance of stealing a couple of more hours of overdue rest was totally negated. Whenever I re-read a few of White's pieces (as with peanuts, it's hard to stop at one), I invariably conclude that he has already written everything worth writing. But then I have virtually the same invariable conclusion whenever I read Shakespeare and Saul Bellow. In the intimidating shadows of those giants, I pick up my pen and audaciously scratch out my own take on the world and its foibles. The gods must be in stitches.