words as a weapon

"His war against puritans is what his liberal admirers have in mind when they argue that he should be 'celebrated and remembered' as 'a tremendous liberating force in American culture.' Nowhere has this belief been explained more dramatically (or, in light of the charges of racism so often leveled at him, more relevantly) than in Richard Wright's Black Boy, a copy of which can be found on the shelves of the Mencken Room. Mencken himself marked this passage from the final chapter:

'A block away from the library I opened one of [Mencken's] books and read a title: A Book of Prefaces. I was nearing my nineteenth birthday and I did not know how to pronounce the word "preface." I thumbed the pages and saw strange words and strange names. I shook my head disappointed. I looked at the other book; it was called Prejudices. I knew what that word meant; I had heard it all my life. And right off I was on guard. . . . That night in my rented room, while letting the hot water run over my can of pork and beans in the sink, I opened A Book of Prefaces and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? . . . He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. Could words be weapons? Well, yes, for here they were. Then, maybe, perhaps, I could use them as weapon? No. It frightened me. I read and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.'"

~~ from The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout

immediate attention to your manuscript, pays spot cash

 

~~ from The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout

Mencken's Joyce

"[H.L. Mencken's] the Smart Set published two stories by James Joyce, 'A Little Cloud' and 'The Boarding-House,' in the May issue, the first time that any of any of Joyce's work had appeared in an American publication. (It would also be the last time he appeared in the Smart Set, since Mencken had no use for his later work, dismissing Ulysses as 'deliberately mystifying and mainly puerile. . . . I have never been able to get over a suspicion that Joyce concocted it as a kind of vengeful hoax.)"

~~ from The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout

Mencken's Nietzsche

"[H.L.] Mencken was too commonsensical, too solidly grounded in the reporter's world of things as they are, to readily grasp the essence of so tortured a soul. His Nietzsche is an all-American type, a world-improving, can-do go-getter delighted to have through the fraud of Christianity and gone beyond good and evil: 'He applied the acid of critical analysis to a hundred and one specific ideas, and his general conclusion, to put it briefly, was that no human being had a right, in any way or form, to judge or direct the actions of any other being. Herein we have, in a few words, that gospel of individualism which all our sages preach today.'"

~~ from The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout

anything other than indigestible

"[H.L.] Mencken, who at no time in his life found [Henry] James's prose to be anything other than indigestible, fired back with the brassy self-confidence of a self-made man whose style owed nothing to The Wings of the Dove and everything to Huckleberry Finn: 'The average newspaper reporter writes better English than Henry, if good English means clear, comprehensible English. . . . Take any considerable sentence from any of his novels and examine its architecture. Isn't it wobbly with qualifying clauses and subassistant phrases? Doesn't it wriggle and stumble and stagger and flounder? Isn't it "crude, untidy, careless," bedraggled, loose, frowsy, disorderly, unkempt, uncombed, uncurried, unbrushed, unscrubbed? Doesn't it begin in the middle and work away from both ends? Doesn't it often bounce along for a while and then, of a sudden, roll up its eyes and go out of business entirely?'"

~~ from The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout

#AWP2026

As AWP in Baltimore approaches, it is only by coincidence, but I seem to be reading Terry Teachout's biography of one of city's most famous literary sons: Henry Louis Mencken. So far, it's good.