The Vintage Mencken Book

Not being American, I was not been brought up hearing the name of H L Mencken. My first awareness of him came from epigrammatic gobbets that got into books of quotations. For example, there is the epitaph which (I discover) he wrote for himself in 1921, long before he died in 1956: "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have a thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl". Or, "Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking." Many of these gems are found in the pages of Alistair Cooke's eclectic collection of his essays, but they do not, in truth, encapsulate the man.

Mencken's essays convey an aroma of whisky and cigars. One imagines him, when not actually writing, regaling friends with acid anecdotes. He is wildly opinionated, able to hold forth on any topic.

He has, for example, a disdain for adultery, condemning one Theodore Dreisden who believed that a "strong, successful man" would ordinarily have several women in tow. Menken gives, in refutation, a list of "strong, successful men" who were monogamous.

Menken writes with approval of George Washington who was a "land-grabber, a promoter of stock companies, and exploiter of mine and timber'. Washington was also a lover of whisky who today "would be ineligible for any office of honor or profit".

Menken praises the police, from whom he has learned "that sharp wits can lurk in unpolished skulls". "Their one salient failing, taking them as a class, was their belief that any person who had been arrested, even on mere suspicion was unquestionably and ipso facto guilty."

Permeating everything is his florid language. For example, his essay, "Star-Spangled Men" considers the chests of military men that bear glittering medals of "every hue in the rainbow, the spectroscope, the kaleidoscope - imperial purples, sforzando reds, wild Irish greens, romantic blues, loud yellows and oranges, rich maroons, sentimental pinks, all the half-tones from ultra-violet to infrared, all the vibrations from the impalpable to the unendurable". The medals, he speculates, "tell of butcheries in foreign and domestic parts - mountains of dead Filipinos, Mexicans, Haitians, Dominicans, West Virginian miners, perhaps even Prussians". As with the military, so with civilians. "Rank by rank, (Americans) became Knights of Phthias, Odd Fellows, Red Men, Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, Knights Templar, Patriarchs Militant, Elks, Moose, Woodmen of the World, Foresters, Hoo-hoos, Ku Kluxers - and in every new order there were thirty-two degrees, and for every degree there was a badge, and for every badge there was a yard of ribbon." Thus the words pour out.

Though he had his causes, Menken marched to his own drum. Cooke's selection does little to steer the reader to discover what might be his overarching views. One does not find here the same single-minded coherence that permeates the writing of his contemporary, George Orwell. Nevertheless, it seems appropriate that Menken's final essay, written just before he fell sick, should oppose a "relic of Ku Kluxery", an attempt to stop the black citizens of Maryland playing tennis with the white ones. "A free citizen in a free state," he wrote, "has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will." If a theme does emerge, therefore, it is Menken's preference for tolerance and personal freedom, and his dislike of humbug.

This collection of essays was compiled by Alistair Cooke as a tribute by one great writer to another. It is worth a look.