Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millennial South

Mencken and Me: Indiscreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie

i n d i s c r e e t c h a r m s o f t h e b o u r g e o i s i e According to legend, Alexander the Great slept every night of his short life with two things under his pillow—his knife and his copy of The Iliad. As a boy of fourteen, already identified as a troubled adolescent , I slept with a baseball under my pillow—a ball autographed by major league slugger Del Ennis (which I imagined was much coveted )—and beside my pillow, or never farther than my bedside table, a copy of the yellow Vintage Mencken published in 1955, edited by Alistair Cooke. Our respective choices explain in part why Alexander conquered Asia and I became an English major and an essayist. God knows H. L. Mencken was belligerent, even warlike in his popular persona, but there are those of us who know, almost from infancy, that our anger will be expressed with the pen, not the sword; we sense also that there is something appalling about bloody Achilles, the irresistible prima donna, sulking in his tent. What is it that brings a boy—or a man or, more rarely, a woman— to find comfort in the verbal extravagance and exuberant prejudice of Henry Mencken? In this age of political correctness and elaborate, infuriating systems of rhetorical taboos, it’s amusing to see each wave of protest against Mencken’s defenseless bones, as women, blacks, Mencken and Me 147 Jews, Muslims, most ethnic groups rediscover that at some point he disparaged them and called them names that have long since become capital crimes in the media and in the academy. Yet it was my own tribe, the rural Anglo-Saxon, that he despised most venomously and to whom, in his most spirited moments, he scarcely granted full membership in the human race. There’s a classic passage in Happy Days, classic for the way it unites the redneck and the African American , cringing together under Mencken’s lash: a great many anthropoid blacks from the South have come to town since the city dole began to rise above what they could hope to earn at home, and soon or late some e≠ort may be made to chase them back. But if that time ever comes the uprising will probably be led, not by native Baltimoreans, but by the Anglo-Saxon baboons from the West Virginia mountains who have flocked in for the same reason, and are now competing with the blacks for the poorer sort of jobs. Isn’t that refreshing? My people, the mountain baboons. The truth is that Mencken, in his beleaguered German American chauvinism, so loathed the Anglo-Saxons on both sides of the Atlantic that he might have exulted to see our Motherland overrun by the Kaiser—or conceivably, at one point, by the Führer—and Buckingham Palace converted to a biergarten and hofbrauhaus. But somehow this bigotry didn’t trouble me, even though my grandfather’s dining room was decorated with portraits of the six queens of England, with Victoria in the place of honor over the sideboard and Bloody Mary scowling in the darkest corner. Apparently it didn’t trouble my grandfather either, because he was the one who presented me with my Vintage Mencken. Middle-class Anglo-Saxons, notoriously smug, aren’t so quick to take o≠ense at mere verbal assaults and impertinences. There was a time—Mencken’s time, which may have ended with the Great Depression —when outrageous exchanges between clever people were considered good sport, not grounds for public demonstrations and emergency legislation. 148 Objections Sustained If there’s one pejorative that might describe my kind and excellent grandfather, that word is complacent. Like Mencken, who was eight years older, he was the pampered first son of a successful businessman , a son of whom much was expected as long as it ended in the family business. The more I read about Mencken, the less di≠erence I see between the German and English legacies, or between urban and rural—my family was as dyed-in-the-wool small town as the Menckens were urban—and the more I sense an almost identical class heritage . The American bourgeoisie that developed between the Civil War and the First World War, as opposed to the plutocracy of robber barons, was characterized by...