In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 H.L.Mencken’s Democratic Narrative In the sixth chapter of The Sun Also Rises (1926) Jake Barnes and Harvey Stone agree that Mencken is “through now.”There are differing explanations for this. Mencken’s biographers assert that his departure from the literary scene was voluntary: he had left The Smart Set in 1923 for the American Mercury to devote himself to the fabulous crankiness of our public mind. He preferred politics to literature, as did his magazine audience, so that the move was a good marketplace decision. I think that Hemingway implied his failure to persuade readers interested in both politics and literature .1 Mencken’s Notes on Democracy, which also appeared in 1926, was kindly but dismissively reviewed by Edmund Wilson, whose reasoning still holds true. Mencken’s view of “the inferior man” in America was intellectually liberating. He had the right enemies: spineless politicians and a middle class with a mental metabolism “exactly comparable to what goes on in a barrel of cider.”2 But he thought in terms of groups, classes, and the eternal mob while modernists were subjective, uninterested in public life. In a letter of 1923, Fitzgerald stated that Mencken and George Jean Nathan “had a most stupendous and far-reaching influence on the whole course of American writing.” However,“their influence was not so much on the very first-rate writers, though even there it was considerable , in many cases as on the cultural background.”3 As to that background, Wilson consistently found Mencken to be a better guide to language and to (some) literature than to politics. 48 Chapter 2 It would be fair to say that Mencken disliked both modernism and modernity. He evaded Eliot, respected Joyce from a distance, had a low opinion of Hemingway—hence, the shot across his bow. Mencken attracts biographers, and one of his most sympathetic, Terry Teachout, defends his editorial policies at the Mercury in 1924. It was the first general magazine to cover jazz seriously; it tried to review dance and the visual arts; and it maintained some interest in literature. However, “modernism mainly went unremarked in its pages.”4 Mencken still mattered as a literary critic—but he still judged art for its formal clarity and moral intelligibility, unsure that now medium mattered as much as subject. He had been, however, a first-rate patron. Fitzgerald had this to say in 1923: “the vogue of books like mine depends almost entirely on the stupendous critical power at present wielded by H. L. Mencken. And it is his influence at second hand that is particularly important. Such men as Weaver in The Brooklyn Eagle, Bishop in Vanity Fair, Boyd in the St.Paul News, and dozens of others show the liberal tendencies which Mencken has popularized.”5 In short, Fitzgerald respected Mencken’s editorial qualities, including those “liberal tendencies” for which he was then known; although today, given the positions he took on Franklin Roosevelt and the Second World War, the term “liberal” does not come easily to the lips. One of Mencken’s most admirable talents was encouraging writers on their own terms. He took risks like publishing Fitzgerald’s early work in The Smart Set.6 Looking backward, Scott wrote to Zelda in 1940 about editorial interference at the Post: “The man who runs the magazine now is an up and coming young Republican who gives not a damn about literature and who publishes almost nothing except escape stories about the brave frontiersmen, etc., or fishing, or football captains—nothing that would even faintly shock or disturb the reactionary bourgeois. Well, I simply can’t do it. . . . An explanation of their new attitude is that you no longer have a chance of selling a story with an unhappy ending (in the Mencken’s Democratic Narrative 49 old days many of mine did have unhappy endings—if you remember .)”7 Fitzgerald appreciated Mencken because he encouraged new authors and redefined the importance of contemporary fiction, replacing extinct species with writers such as Joseph Conrad. His discovery of Theodore Dreiser was part of a campaign to promote a writer’s curriculum featuring the late work of Mark Twain as well as Conrad and H. G. Wells. Before these figures appeared on Fitzgerald ’s reading lists they were on Mencken’s. Fitzgerald’s letters and interviews acknowledge Mencken’s effect on current writing, on his own writing, and on the rising tide of novelistic literacy he attributes to “the one man in America...

Share